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April 14, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:17
Expert vs Podcasters: What Do They Do?
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So when experts faced with growing competition of alternative media, which is, I'm going to say experts versus podcasters, just because I just need a common phrase for the two.
experts are those generally with credentials and
support for their perspectives.
And the podcasters are, you know, the Wild West, the Freeformists, the Freeballers, and so on, right?
So. Thank you.
When experts are faced with growing competition, what do they do?
I mean, I remember many years ago, showing my daughter, like, I do a tweet, and here's how many people like and read and share it.
And then we went to CNN, we went to the New York Times, and so on, and here's their tweets, and, you know, it was night and day, right?
So, when experts are faced with growing competition, what do they do?
What do they do?
Now, two things that heavily influenced me in my life, the business world and the sports world.
I was very big into sports, played a lot of team sports when I was younger.
I bought a polo team, swimming team, cross-country running team, although that's more solo.
I was both singles and doubles.
Tennis, volleyball, soccer, a lot of team sports.
And I would play several times a week.
I'm not a morning person.
I would get up and...
Practice swimming, right?
So I did a fairly massive amount of sports when I was younger.
Now, sports are really important because you don't sabotage, right?
I mean, I remember seeing there was a couple of episodes of the show Glee where I think the cheerleaders were sabotaging another cheerleader by telling her she had to stop eating or couldn't eat and then she had no energy to, right?
To compete with them.
So when you're on a sports team and somebody comes along who's really good, it tends to up your game.
They've done studies on this that runners run faster when somebody's running slightly faster than them.
You get better with competition.
So I learned a lot about competition from doing huge amounts of sports.
And they still do fairly, fairly significant amounts of sports.
So. So...
You don't sabotage, right?
You certainly don't sabotage on your own team, and you don't sabotage the other team, right?
So, in the business world, there's competition, and competition drives innovation, right?
So, I mean, because our customers always wanted to change the system, I wrote code that allowed the program to change itself.
So they'd just hand over the program, let the customers change the system as they saw fit, right?
This gave us a huge competitive advantage.
And I learned a lot about, because I did a lot of sales and marketing, so I learned a lot about how you deal with competition when you're talking to clients, potential clients, RFPs, requests for proposals, you go down and give a presentation.
So you don't badmouth your competitors.
You position your strengths against their weaknesses.
You admit where their weaknesses are stronger, where their strengths are better than yours.
And you would learn from them.
You would try to, you'd go to their website, you'd look at their demos, you wouldn't cheat and pretend to be a customer, but you would try and figure out what they were doing.
And so on, right?
So, you don't badmouth your competitors.
You say, here's where our strength is.
They do have these strengths, to be fair, so that you sound objective.
And you learn from them, right?
And it actually is...
It's fierce, but friendly, if that makes sense.
Fierce, but good-natured.
Like sports.
Sports are fierce, but good-natured, right?
You try to win, and then you shake hands afterwards, right?
Now, and because I came from the sports world, and I came from the business world, entering into the world of media and politics was fucking foul.
It was fucking foul!
I don't think I've ever, like, other than coming home from a rational universe to my family of origin, I don't think I've experienced anything fouler.
It's one of the reasons why I eventually just had to, Busted out of politics and this sort of media stuff.
It's foul.
It's foul.
I don't think, I didn't find it foul among the podcasters, but it's fucking foul.
It really is.
So, when I was in competition with other businesses to try and sell environmental management information systems, health and safety information systems, all the stuff that I had programmed and worked on, I mean, we fought hard.
And I remember calling people up, congratulating them.
They called me up to congratulate me.
But we fought hard against each other, but we shook hands, right?
And we needed each other because, you know, if you've got five competitors, they're all advertising.
And that saves you money on your average.
If you're the only person, then you have to do all the advertising.
So it's fierce but friendly.
Now, what I couldn't imagine was Going up against a fierce competitor or a series of fierce competitors, losing to them, and then trying to get them debanked by lying and saying they were money laundering or they were fraudulent.
I couldn't conceive of that.
I mean, that would be like your concern that you're going to lose a running race to some guy.
So what you do is you spike his drink.
With some performance-enhancing drug and then you make an anonymous call to get him tested.
That's fucking foul.
That's incomprehensible.
I've never heard of anything like that, honestly.
Never heard of anything like that in the business world.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, mis, dis, mal.
Yeah, misinformation, disinformation, mal information is all they do.
Yeah. Yeah, they run to the government, and that happens in the business world as well.
Joe Rogan was pretty foul to you, as far as I recall.
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
Yeah, you're right, James.
You don't go Nancy Kerrigan, right?
Well, actually, Tonya Harding was the one who, I think she hired her boyfriend to take a pipe wrench to Nancy Kerrigan's knee or something like that, right?
I mean, I used to, back in the day in another life, I've always been – well, I was an introvert, pretty shy as a kid, but I really worked hard to sort of overcome that.
And I used to go down to Vegas, and you set up this whole – I'm sure you've been to conferences properly at one time or another.
So we would go down, you'd set up your booth, and I would chat with people and make jokes and show them our software, and you'd offer them an iPod if they'd give you a business card, and then you'd go and call them later and so on, right?
And, of course, we would go over to our competitors' booths.
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