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March 22, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:44
If You've Never Run a Business...
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So, tell me how I know you've never run a business.
You've never run a business.
I don't care to listen to people, but no, I've run businesses.
I've been an entrepreneur for like, gosh, 30 years.
More over 30 years, I've been an entrepreneur.
So, if you never run a business, I really don't care what you have to say about this stuff.
You're just a reactionary ideologue who's got no experience in the field.
If you run a business, you have to please your customers.
You have to have empathy for what they need and what they want.
So when I was running a software business, I was chief technical officer.
I had to figure out what the customers wanted.
So I had to go and talk to them and ask them and understand their business and understand how our software served that need, served that business.
And I had to build at a relatively cost-efficient way, in a relatively cost-efficient manner.
I had to build what customers wanted so that they would be willing to part with their hard-earned money voluntarily to me.
Thank you.
So, you've just never run a business.
Every decision's based on money.
What does that mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
How do you get the money from people?
You have to provide what they want, which is why I do a lot of live streams and some solo shows.
I do the live streams because I get a sense of what questions people have and how I can help them and where the thoughts are in people.
So, if you run a business, freedomain.com slash donate to help out.
But yeah, if you run a business, you have to serve people's needs, right?
You have to serve people's needs.
And to do that, you have to ask them questions and provide value, right?
So they don't just get money because they think about money.
Lots of people think about money, they don't become billionaires, right?
should not talk about things that you have neither practical nor even theoretical understanding of, right?
you.
There's a word for business owners who ignore customers.
Bankrupt. Yeah.
So, like, the important thing is you have to know how you look to people.
Who know what they're talking about.
I've spent far more time working as an entrepreneur than I ever did working for people.
So it's just important.
And obviously, I'm no business genius, blah, blah, blah, right?
But I've certainly walked the walk for 30 plus years.
So if you have no experience and you're talking to someone with over 40 years experience in philosophy and over 30 years experience as an entrepreneur, You might want to hold your tongue and listen and learn.
It's just a possibility.
It's just a possibility.
Like if I was new on a movie set and Marlon Brando was there and was willing to give me advice on how to be a good actor in movies, I would listen.
There's a story that Tom Cruise says about Paul Newman.
They were in a movie called The Color of Money.
And they shot in Chicago in the winter and Tom Cruise was freezing to death and Paul Newman showed up in a...
Big old coat and all of that.
And he's like, yeah, you did your wardrobe without asking where you were going to be filming and when, right?
So, it's a rookie mistake, kid.
And he learned all about that, right?
So, I have over 40 years experience in philosophy.
I have over 30 years experience as an entrepreneur.
So, when I'm talking about what it takes and means to build a good company, you might want to listen.
You might.
Saying a rich guy is good at getting money is like saying the murderer is good at getting money.
Yes, that's right.
Yes, that's right.
A guy who opens a fro-yo shop that has really good frozen yogurt is exactly the same as a serial killer.
Oh, my God.
I assume you played a lot of hockey when you were young.
Sure, like taking investing advice from a guy who's constantly begging for donations.
Yes, asking is begging.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Asking is just begging.
Laughing. Ha, ha, ha.
You
That's very funny.
That's very funny.
You know, vanity is one of the worst things.
Really, honestly.
Vanity is one of the worst things when you think you know something.
So, when you think about enough of that phone troll, and I appreciate that, I really do.
It gives me some giggles.
And we'll go to Donor in just a sec, but the one thing that's very funny to me, or really interesting, is you ask people to think, okay, so if you've, you know, worked your 80 hours a week for many, many, many years, and you've built up these big companies that hire thousands or tens of thousands of people,
but when all you see is people raging at you, and they're attacking you, and they're, you know, Throwing paint on your products or whatever it is, and they're demanding that you get taxed more and so on.
The problem is, do the billionaires like the people?
Of course, I can't speak for billionaires and whether they do or don't like the people, but I could tell you that if I were in their shoes, I might be building bunkers and not working to fix things.
Because when you Attack, insult, and degrade those people who have significant power, they will, sooner or later, stop using that power in your defense.
And they will become indifferent to your suffering.
I mean, we can see this in a lot of ways with the sort of doge cats and people crying, oh, but I'm getting fired and now I have to get...
Child care for my child and all these terrible things are happening.
And people are like, well, first of all, you're a government worker, which means you've kind of been hanging off my paycheck for the last couple of decades.
And secondly, you all seem pretty thrilled and keen to have society shut down for the sake of a vax, right?
I mean, it's the people that I, if I ever have debates with people, it's kind of rare now about socialized medicine.
And they say medicine is a human right.
I'm like, well, but they shut down massive swaths of medicine for a year or two over the course of the pandemic.
Did you protest that?
All right.
So let us...
Why would the billionaires like us?
Most vote for government to take what they earned.
Yeah. Do the billionaires like you?
So it's kind of like you can have every villain for the past 30 years has been Russian, Russian, right?
I mean, so you can villainize the Russians and all that happens is that the Russians don't particularly like or care about the West anymore and won't really listen to you.
Like, be careful who you insult.
Insults have blowbacks.
Attacks have blowbacks.
And very competent, brilliant people who hire millions of people around the world, like a cluster of the super-rich, if society just wants to prey on them and tear them down and pull them down and tax them and control them and bully them and threaten their employees and torch their products and so on,
like, at some point, the billionaires are going to be like, I really don't care what happens to you all anymore.
Like, I just don't.
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