Philosopher Stefan Molyneux explores the dynamics between wealth creation, economic education, and societal perceptions of billionaires, particularly in the context of public schooling and cultural influences. He begins by critiquing the educational system, suggesting that government schools operate on principles that may hinder true economic understanding, leading to a populace that does not fully grasp the value of wealth creation. He argues that the narrative around billionaires, often skewed by popular culture, fails to acknowledge the extensive economic value these individuals generate through their ventures.
Stefan emphasizes that wealth is not merely a numeric figure but a reflection of the economic value produced. For instance, he highlights figures like Jeff Bezos, presenting him as an example of an entrepreneur who has significantly lowered consumer costs and created extensive job opportunities, thus benefiting lower-income individuals by broadening their access to goods and services. Stefan challenges the notion that billionaires simply hoard wealth, as true wealth comes from providing goods and services that people need and want, thereby fostering economic well-being.
Stefan recounts his experiences in entrepreneurship, illustrating how initial investments in a business can lead directly to job creation and economic development. He explains the economic principle that for every person hired, there are ripple effects that can cause wage increases in the broader job market due to reduced competition for labor. He makes an analogy of a shadow cast by a statue to denote that the perception of immense wealth does not adequately represent the processes and efforts required to generate it.
Stefan further delves into the drawbacks of impulsively distributing wealth without considering the broader economic implications. He warns that the act of wealthy individuals giving away their wealth can lead to detrimental effects on their businesses and the economy at large, using hypothetical scenarios to forecast outcomes where market perception drives down company valuations. This, in turn, impacts not just company owners but also employees whose livelihoods may depend on the health of their employers.
Addressing consumption versus investment, Stefab outlines the distinction between goods that generate economic value and those that do not. He points out that consumer spending, while necessary for daily life, often fails to contribute to long-term economic growth. Instead, the focus should be on investing in businesses and systems that can produce sustainable value. The ramifications of directing funds away from productive enterprises into consumption are framed as likely contributors to economic decline rather than growth.
Stefan concludes that a fundamental misunderstanding of economics pervades public attitudes towards wealth and poverty. He advocates for a comprehensive reformation of educational systems to prioritize true economic skills and knowledge that prepare individuals for participation in a complex economic landscape. Stefan instills a philosophy of individual responsibility and the importance of fostering environments where the economically productive can thrive, ultimately benefiting society as a whole.
0:07 - The Illusion of Education
1:24 - Billionaires and Economic Value
3:56 - Misunderstanding Wealth Distribution
8:51 - The Impact of Selling Shares
14:01 - The Dangers of Economic Decisions
16:39 - Capital Goods vs. Consumption Goods
20:35 - Understanding Investment Value
23:59 - The Role of Capitalism
28:57 - Consumption vs. Economic Growth
31:57 - The Consequences of Redistribution
36:18 - The Failure of the Education System
37:44 - The Brick Wall Analogy
[0:00] So, of course, the government isn't going to teach you anything that is going
[0:04] to make it possible for you to succeed.
[0:08] And universities are going to constantly rail against any improvements in regular school, public school, because they need public schools to suck so they have something to offer. Um but the level of economic education like you know i mean billy eilish right i mean what are you gonna say good singer and all that but kind of demonic in her tastes but uh she's like oh just give away give away uh your billions uh if you're a billionaire why are you a billionaire give your money away blah blah i'm gonna make some bird hands here and of course she wouldn't have learned anything intelligent about any of this stuff in government schools. Government schools are run on communistic principles, which is why communism continually spreads the moment you hand over your children to the state. You know, it's the old argument that don't be shocked, don't be shocked if you send your kids to be educated by Caesar and they come back as Romans. So I just wanted to lay out to you why it's a generally bad idea. Now, of course, there are those who become wealthy because of the government
[1:20] and money printing and central banking and war.
[1:24] So all of that, that's fine. But you don't put billionaires in the same category. And yes, everybody has to make their compromises with the system that is. But I'm talking about the billionaires who have earned their money in the general free market. So you can only earn billions by creating trillions and value.
[1:50] Trillions of dollars worth of goods and services, efficiency, and jobs. It'd be nice if I could say the word efficiently, efficiently. So if you're worth billions, it's because you've created trillions in economic value. How have you done that? By serving people's needs and preferences and saving them money. So look at Jeff Bezos. He has helped countless people because they can get goods cheaper. So he's already saving them money. He's already giving them extra income or giving them access to goods and services they may not otherwise get if they happen to be disabled or can't easily get to stores, they can have everything delivered. If they're shut-ins, agoraphobic, whatever you want to call it, right? So he's already created trillions of dollars worth of value. He's already helped the poor enormously. And of course, Amazon, for example, has hired hundreds of thousands of people over the course of its history, thus giving them good wages. And of course, when you hire people, you help the wages, not only of course, of the people that you're hiring, but you help the wages of everyone else because you've taken hundreds of thousands of workers off the market, which will drive up the wages for everyone else who's still in the market because there's less supply. It's been sort of soaked up.
[3:06] So it's not the having the billions that matters, right? If you look at a statue, when you look at its shadow, the primary cause of the shadow, the sole cause of the shadow, I guess, is the combination of the statue and the sunlight, like Cassie and the shadow. So the shadow is the billion dollars. The sunlight and the statue is the creating of trillions of dollars worth of economic value. That's, I'm sure, pretty clear. And you've already helped the poor enormously, particularly companies like Amazon. You've already helped the poor enormously because you have saved the money in
[3:53] thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars worth of purchases.
[3:57] They've saved money because they go to Amazon, which has created a much more worldwide competition for the provision of goods.
[4:07] Now it takes a slow-eyed singer to imagine that if you're a billionaire you have uh your furniture is made out of hundred dollar bills and you know your your house is is is constructed of gold coins you know like you just you have all of this money so when people talk about billionaires of course they're not talking about people who got billions of dollars in the bank because if you have billions of dollars, the last place you'd want to put it is some kind of government bank or government, controlled and regulated bank, because you're not going to get anything really in terms of interest, right? So why do people have billions of dollars? Well, they don't have billions of dollars. They have billions of dollars in assets, right? That's a very different thing. So let's talk about Bob. Bob found a company that's created trillions of dollars of economic value, and Bob is a billionaire. So Bob is a billionaire because he has a lot of money in his company. Let's call it ABC, right? Bob has created the key, founded the company ABC as a CEO. He's got billions of dollars worth of stock in company ABC, and company ABC has hired 10,000 people. There's probably more, but let's just say 10,000 people. Okay.
[5:35] So he's a billionaire on paper. he's a billionaire on paper now of course if he sells those shares he has to pay capital gains taxes and so on so he doesn't actually have that money it's only on paper if you have an asset and you sell it and you have to pay um i think for businesses here in canada it's a 66 capital gains tax well then you don't actually end up with your billion dollars and and so it's not a real real at it that way. The other thing is that by founding ABC company, Bob has produced trillions of dollars worth of value and he has a billion dollars worth of shares. If he tries to sell those shares, if he goes to sell those shares, people will assume that either he's ill, he's quitting, the company has big problems, it's going to be investigated, it's got some fraud, like they're going to assume the worst and they're going to sell the shares along with him and the price is not going to end up being a billion dollars. He certainly doesn't get to sell the shares and take home a billion dollars because of capital gains taxes. But even if he tries to sell, unless he sells it really subtly staggered through third parties over many years, people are going to be saying, oh, Bob is selling his ABC shares. Therefore, there's got to be something wrong with the company. Therefore, I'm going to sell my shares too. And then the share price will go from $100 to $50 to $25 to $10. I mean, we've all seen this kind of stuff happen before in the market it in various ways.
[7:01] So he doesn't actually have that. He doesn't actually have that money. It's just paper stuff. It's not something that he can give to the poor. He doesn't have a billion dollars that he can just go out to Alistair Simpsile and hand all of this money to the poor. I mean, it's crazy. um now if uh bob let's say listens to smoky voice billy eilish and says well i'm gonna i'm gonna say i'm gonna sell these shares and i'm just gonna give the money to the poor well.
[7:40] Investments are when you give a company money with the goal or intention of that company investing that money to create value in the free market. When I co-founded a software company a long time ago now, post-DOS, but Windows 3.1 had just come out, I think it was a while ago. But so we went around hat in hand. My co-founder and I went around hat in hand to all the people we knew. And we managed to scrounge together $80,000 that we used to start the company. And the initial investors got crazy returns, man. It was great. So, they gave us $80,000 and then we turned that into a company that was worth, more, obviously, than $80,000. So, yeah.
[8:36] What we did was we turned those $80,000 into jobs for, I think, at the peak point, it was over 30 people.
[8:48] So a decent success. Obviously, not huge, but a decent success.
[8:52] And so we turned that $80,000 into a payroll of several million dollars a year over time.
[9:02] And that hired people that gave them an income that again raised everyone else's income a tiny bit because we were taking people out of circulation. I would go down to the university and I would interview students and we would give them internships and I would sort of train and coach them and on business and so that they were more than just code jockeys. And it was a very productive and positive environment and I loved my business career until the boomers swooped in and corrupted everything, but that's a story for another time. But.
[9:36] What happens if you sell your shares, right? Bob sells his shares in ABC company. What happens is fewer people want to give ABC company the money to expand and fewer people want to work there because the stock price is going down. So you lose access to a lot of talent, right? And talent is the entire difference between success and failure. Talent is the entire difference between success and failure. Right queen loses freddie mercury they never write any really good songs or decent songs again i mean the rest of the band is spectacularly talented but that cohesion when freddie mercury was gone if the movie has brad pitt in it it's going to get investment if it has a bunch of unknowns it's probably not going to get certainly wouldn't get the same level of investment because brad pitt opens and runs and sustains a movie and because people are interested in brad pitt you get some sort of free automatic marketing and he can do the interview tour all that kind of stuff So, if Bob sells his shares in ABC Company and...
[10:48] The share price goes down, which means the company is in trouble, which means it has a bad reputation, which means people don't want to work there. Some people may get laid off and so on. And what's Bob's incentive to go to work and work 16 hours a day as he has to build a multi-billion dollar company if he's just going to sell all his shares?
[11:12] People will assume that his motivation has gone down. His motivation has reduced. So they will assume that his magic Midas touch of economic productivity is going to be less. And so the belief is that the company is not going to do well. And a company does as well and badly in the long run as people perceive it's going to be. I mean, there's the consumers, of course, and so buying stuff and so on. But in terms of investment and talent, if the share price is going down, people don't want to work there. And you don't get those magic Pareto principle people that just produce between 25. Just a few dozen people produced between 25 and 50 percent of the value of the entire company and if you don't have those people and you can't get those people if the share price is going down or if there's a perception that the company is in trouble you can't get those people which means that the company is uh is going going to fail so if the company does badly or fails or is sold or something like that there's a hostile takeover then people get laid off and the survival level of the company comes into question.
[12:16] I mean, you can coast for a long time on momentum, of course, right? I mean, Apple has produced very little other than phones and tablets for the last decade, decade and a half. The innovation has kind of gone, but they can go along and coast along on talent, that's all right, sorry, not on talent, on reputation, right? They can do all of that.
[12:44] So, if Bob were to take all of his shares and sell them and convert them into some sort of cash that he could hand out to the poor, then Bob, his company would lose many multiples of the value of the share price he was selling. Because if you're the founder and you're selling, people think the company's in trouble, so more people sell. So the market cap of the company goes down enormously. Bob also, by the way, might get sued because you have a fiduciary responsibility as a CEO. If you knowingly take actions that harm the share price, you are harming all the shareholders. And the value of their shares goes down enormously, right? So, I mean, if Bob has, let's just say 50% or 51% of the shares, he wants to keep control. Well, there's 49% of shares that are out there held by tens of thousands of people or more institutions. People rely upon that for their retirement. They rely upon that for their kids' education. They rely upon that for their emergency funds and so on. And so by selling his shares, Bob then causes a cratering of the share price as a whole.
[13:57] The continuity of the company starts to come into question. They can't get any more talent.
[14:01] They're susceptible to a hostile takeover because Bob no longer controls the company, which means lots of people are going to get laid off there's going to be a whole restructuring you know the whole the whole thing the whole mess.
[14:13] So the net-net, of course, of Bob listening to sultry-eyed Billie Eilish is that thousands and thousands of people are going to lose their job. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people are going to lose significant portions of their life savings. And ironically, Bob is going to create a lot of poor people. So I don't mean to laugh, but it's like, why we listen to people about things they don't understand. And, I mean, she knows how to what? Wear baggy clothes, put up makeup, and sing the songs her brother wrote. Why would we listen to her about anything? I don't know. It's a mystery.
[14:55] But, you know, pretty women can say a bunch of nonsense. That's why there's astrology. Because men just get disarmed by their attractiveness and don't tell them the basic truth. But, hey, I'm a happily married guy. And way out of Billie Eilish's league.
[15:11] Listen to me. Anyway, so by trying to... Help the poor by giving away his bill. You say, ah, yes, well, he can just give away the shares. Okay, but then he's just giving it to other people. And the fact that he's transferring shares still causes the cascade effect of the shares losing value and people taking a massive hit to their life savings. They can't retire. They can't fund their kids' education. They don't have their nest egg. They've lost a lot of their money. And ironically, of course, if people put, six-month salary into ABC shares company at the company the shares of ABC company they put six months salary in and it goes down by 50 percent they've just lost three year three months worth of labor they've worked three months for nothing which makes them poorer because then their actual salary instead of being over their actual salary for three months is now covering six months which means they've made half their salary in the time they used to buy the shares have gone down 50 percent in value. So instead of making $40 an hour for that time period, they now only made $20 an hour instead of $30, $15. You get it, right? So they've actually become poorer in hindsight.
[16:26] So the other big thing that happens if Bob sells his shares to give money to the poor, let's say that somehow all of these cascade effects can be bypassed.
[16:40] Doesn't doesn't really matter it's still catastrophic to the economy and it's catastrophic to poor people for bob to sell his shares even if nothing else happens even if you just magically snap his fingers and have a bunch of um a bunch of money uh which you can just then go and give to the poor he just walks up and down the street and gives poor people a thousand dollars 2003 whatever it is he goes and does what uh billy eilish thinks that she should do he should do um because she gets up early and goes on howard stern and tries to hit notes all right, So, what happens? Okay. So, capital versus consumption goods, right? There's capital goods versus consumption goods. Consumption goods are things that you buy that don't, that can't add economic value in the long run. And...
[17:40] That those are consumption goods. And I'm like, I'm not an economist, so I'm just using these words colloquially. So there's consumption goods, which you buy, that do not add economic value. So you're hungry, you buy a sandwich. And it's fine. I mean, we got to eat, right? It's nothing wrong. There's no big moral thing one way or the other. I'm just talking about the division, right?
[18:02] So let's say the people who gave my partner and i eighty thousand dollars back in the day to start a company let's say that those people had instead uh taken that eighty thousand dollars and used it for a uh to to tour europe right they each one they all got together on a big bus or a bit more than a van but they went and they toured europe right okay and that's again There's nothing wrong with that. Travel is fun. You know, life is not just about maximizing economic opportunities, but also enjoying, you know, the fruits of your labor. So let's say that that had happened. Well, they would have taken all of their money and they would have given it to tour guides and they would have given it to hotels and restaurants and coffee shops and souvenir shops and bus charter companies and all of that. And that's fine. And it would have been consumed. consumed in the production of, you know, fun and memories. And again, I'm not a Protestant, you know, Calvinist work ethic guy. That's fine. You go and enjoy your trips to Europe. But it would not have created the kind of economic value that investing in a company that grows and hires a lot of people. Now, of course, you're saying, and you're right to say, yes, but they're going and they're causing jobs to, they're causing jobs in Europe and so on. And that certainly is true. They're transferring. But it's a transfer of money. It is not an increase in money.
[19:28] It's a transfer of money, not an increase in money. By investing in the company, we created a company that was worth quite a bit of money, certainly more than $80,000. I think it was $80,004 and change, but inflation. Anyway, but by taking the $80,000 and investing in a company, they caused, you know, 20, 30 jobs to be created. The company sustained itself for decades, and there was a net increase in economic value.
[19:58] When they take their money and they take it over and they pay a tour guide, then nobody's investing in any capital improvement. And again, nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with it. Assuming that the tour guide is not taking the money and investing it in companies. Let's say there's a tour guide. Let's say Konstantin, Konstantin the tour guide. He is throwing them Europe in many ways with an unidentifiable accent. So they go over and they give $1,000 to Konstantin, and Constantine buys his lunch and he pays rent and all of that is great. You've got to live, you've got to have a shelter, but it doesn't increase economic value. It's consumption.
[20:35] If you go out to a bar and you have your crystal bottle service and you pay $1,000 in some soprano-style way, you pay $1,000 to drink and listen to music and so on, You've not added to the economic value of society. You've had fun, and fun is a value. So again, I'm not being puritanical that way, but it's not an increase in value. If you take that $1,000 and you invest in a company that then goes up in value 20 times, then you have a net increase in value, right? So there's consumption, and then there's capital.
[21:25] Capital goods. So capital goods is when you invest in something that adds economic value. So if you have a big lawn, right? Let's say that you make $100 an hour or whatever, a good, well-paid guy. And you have a big lawn and you have a push mower. And it takes you like five hours to cut your lawn with a push mower.
[21:54] And that's $500 of lost economic opportunity, right? Again, if you enjoy cutting the lawn, whatever. But let's say that you then go out and you spend some money to get a seated mower that allows you to cut your lawn in half an hour instead of five hours. Well, you're $450 up minus the cost, of course, assuming that you work the other times, right? So your time is up. You have more time to do other things because you've invested in something that saves you four and a half hours once every week or two. So that would be an investment in something that saves time, adds value, and you're better off because of it, right?
[22:37] So, you know, to take an easy example, it takes you from five hours down to half an hour, so you're saving $450 worth of economic value. Let's say that the city-seated lawnmower is $4,500, well, it pays for itself in 10 mowings of the lawn, so to speak, right? So that's adding economic value. And if you invest in the lawn mowing company, and then they invest in equipment, robotics, whatever it is, that cuts the price of the lawn mower in half, then... People get a lawnmower, instead of $4,500, it is $2,250. Yeah, $2,250, $4,500. Yes, it's morning, but I can do it. I can do it. I feel I can.
[23:26] So that liberates them to spend money on other things because of the investment. They have cut the price of the lawnmower in half. So you understand how this happens with TVs and computers and all this kind of funky stuff all the time. So that is an example of investment that produces economic growth and value. That's why it's called capitalism, because you need people to save money and invest it in labor-saving devices. Capitalism is when you invest in labor to improve. The only metric that really
[23:57] works is worker productivity per hour, right?
[23:59] If you invest in a bunch of machines, that means your workers produce $200 an hour rather than $100 an hour worth of value, then that's good. I mean, I remember this when I got my first professional job and I came up with something that saved some money. My boss was like, well, that's great, but come up with stuff that saves me this money every month. That's real value, right? It's got to save money on a continual basis. So I was continually working. I wrote code to validate the upgrade of code from COBOL 74 to COBOL 85 because it automatically added the end if statements that were absent from COBOL 74 that were available in COBOL 85, making it much more readable. And it worked really well. It saved hundreds and hundreds of hours to run this script rather than have to review all the code by hand.
[24:46] And so that was, and I made that case. And right, so that was, I spent a day or two working on that script and it saved hundreds and hundreds of hours. That is a net positive, right? And it saved, I was a low level programmer at the time. That was my first coding job, and it saved hundreds of thousands of dollars because it was the more expensive coders who would have to have reviewed all that code. So that's a net plus. And it actually, by the by, gave me the confidence to go and be an entrepreneur.
[25:20] So there's things, if you take money from people like Bob from ABC Company, who Bob is a genius at creating businesses, adding value, investing, he knows how to make the right decisions, like Jack Welsh, he's just one of these people who has a fantastic instinct, for creating value in the business world. It's fantastic and good for him. So if you take money from Bob, or Bob takes money from his own business genius, Pareto principle, economic multiplier brain, and gives it to the poor, then the poor will use it. I mean, if you've been to poor neighborhoods, and I grew up in a poor neighborhood, if you've been to poor neighborhoods, What do you see? Well, you see porn shops, you see nail salons, you see hairstyling places, you see liquor stores, you see convenience stores, maybe a couple of drab grocery stores without the best stuff in them. Again, understandable. But the poor generally, generally, the poor spend their money on drugs.
[26:30] Consumer goods. They spend their money on things that they consume. And of course, if you see how obese the poor are, you can certainly see that they're overspending, right? So if they're eating 4,500 calories a day instead of what they should be eating, which is 2,000 calories a day, there's 2,500 calories worth of food that they could have saved up or invested in or something like that, right? Especially online, you can do it fairly easily now, and then they would find ways to get themselves out of poverty, right? So they tend to focus on consumer goods, right? Nails, haircuts for the women in particular, liquor, cigarettes, drugs, right? All things that you consume without adding economic value, right? If you overeat, it's a transfer of money from you to the grocery store, to the supply chain, to the farmer, and so on. But it is not an addition of value in the same way that investing is.
[27:27] And investment is there so that companies don't have to charge too much to get the capital they need to improve. That's what investment is there for.
[27:35] So the fact that other people are investing in companies means that the companies can charge less for their goods because they're getting investment, which they use for capital improvements rather than having to charge the customer a lot to take care of capital improvements. Half of business is selling and half of it is thinking about how you can improve your processes. I mean, I wrote something called the database builder when I was in the software field that you would send out a spreadsheet of everything that the customer wanted changed, and they would check it all off and add things and so on. And then it would hoover in that spreadsheet and change the entire database, the forms, the queries, the data structure, the queries, the forms, the reports, and it would even automatically build and update the web interface and so on, saving at least 1,000 hours of labor per customized software job. So that's, you know, took me weeks to write it and it saved us months of work, six, six, eight months of work every year. So that's sort of an example of making things more efficient and so on. So if you're taking money from billionaires and you're giving money to the poor, you are taking money from economic improvements and you are handing money to.
[28:57] It is kind of economic decay, but you're taking money from people who create new money and you're giving it to people who simply consume money.
[29:13] If you take your money from a really brilliant investor and you give it to a gambler or somebody who's an overeater, then you are taking money from people who multiply money and you're giving it to people who diminish money, who consume money. It is, in a sense, like taking money from people who know how to invest and grow it and giving it to people who use it in a bonfire to create heat in the short term, right? It is a net negative.
[29:44] So, taking money from the productive and the brilliant at economic productivity and giving it to the poor will harm your economy. I mean, it just is because you're taking it from people who spend money to create worker efficiency and you're giving it to people who simply consume money with no future productivity growth. Like if a woman gets a hundred dollars and goes and gets her nails done that does not add to the economic value of the society as a whole i mean she likes getting her nails done and i mean i think that the nails can be a little poisonous but what the hell she enjoys uh the girly stuff she gets her nails done and so on, It's not necessary. Like a haircut is a little bit more necessary because especially if you have a job, but she goes, gets her nails done. It's fine. She gets her nails done, whatever, right? But it doesn't add to the economic growth of the society as a whole.
[30:44] So you have taken it from someone who could create five jobs with that money over time, and you've given it to someone who pays a couple of nail salon workers to do her nails.
[30:59] So instead of creating five jobs you are sustaining two jobs and the five jobs that could have been created aren't created the two jobs that you are sustaining without any further economic growth because the nail salon workers just go and spend their money on consumables rather than investment and growth so you are harming the economy you are reducing the number of jobs available to people you are decaying the economy in particular because if you have a system, where you are taking a lot of money from the economically productive and creative and giving it to the economic consumption factor. And again, consumption is fine. We don't want people to starve. I get all of that. But we just have to look at the reality of the situation. So let's say all of the billionaires in America listen to Billie Eilish, sell a bunch of their shares. You get these huge, terrible effects, tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of people will lose their jobs. People will lose their life savings. They will lose their retirement packages.
[31:53] They will lose their money for their kids' education. They will lose everything.
[31:57] But let's say to satisfy Billie Eilish people do all of that. Well, you are in the world, of course, given that we have an international economy. In the world, what you're doing is you are wrecking your own economy, and you are in competition with every other economy around the world. So if you are destroying.
[32:25] Your economy by moving resources from those best able to improve those resources and giving it to people who simply consume those resources, then you're in competition with other countries that aren't doing that. So if China's not doing that, then Chinese productivity will continue to grow, Chinese efficiency will continue to grow, the value of the Chinese economy will continue to grow, So the quality will improve and the cost will go down because that's the purpose of automation is to reduce costs and improve quality consistency, the Six Sigma stuff. So China will be producing better goods for cheaper prices, which means people will buy from China rather than from your domestic manufacturing. And it is just a massive cascade destruction of your economy.
[33:16] Some people if you haven't known people that got the green thumb they're fantastic at gardening they just have a real instinct and affinity for plants whatever it is they were a triffid in their past life i don't know but if you take all the money from people who are fantastic at growing food and give it to people who are eating food then everybody ends up starving, you have to leave I mean imagine if Billie Eilish sold a concert it's going to be a Billie Eilish concert and then she picks a random person from the audience to come up and sing her songs.
[33:56] It's the Billie Eilish tour, and Billie Eilish will pick a random person from the audience to sing her songs. Then how many people are going to go to the Billie Eilish concert? I mean, maybe once in a blue moon, you'd get some Michael Bublé wannabe in the audience who can sing like an angel, and maybe not Michael Bublé, but I don't know, Christina Aguilera, whoever's considered a good singer these days.
[34:23] I'm thinking of the song Vampire, a really good song. By the name escapes me anyway she's a really good singer um olivia rodriguez olivia rodriguez i think it is about a singer holy crap listen to her do that on piano uh the song is vampire really good but so if billy eilish is doing the billy eilish tour and then just picks a random person from the audience to sing her songs the billy eilish tour would not last nobody would go to the next one and she'd probably get sued for false advertising it's like hey it doesn't specifically say in the ad that I'll be singing. It's just the Billie Eilish tour. I'm just sitting in an armchair, which I bring an armchair on stage. I didn't say I'd be singing. But the tour would collapse because you're taking from someone who has great musical ability and talent and popularity, and you're giving the microphone to a random person in the audience. Well, that is like the billionaire selling his shares and giving the money to a random person in the world. It will simply decay and destroy the economy. What you want to do, of course, is if you care about the poor, you've got to fix the educational system. The fact that I can't even, like I'll scream at the top of my lungs and still not be done for three days. But the fact that governments have control over children for...
[35:43] 13 fucking years, and then kick them out at the end with almost no economic skills. They don't know how to negotiate. They don't know about taxation. They don't know about entrepreneurship. They don't know about the law. They don't know about economics. They don't know about the provision of value. They don't know how to navigate a job. They don't know how to be interviewed. They don't know how to deal with bosses. Nothing, nothing, no skills whatsoever. however, after 13 fucking years, it's absolute carnage.
[36:13] It is napalm coating an endless school row of the minds of the young.
[36:19] It is absolutely beyond appalling. The real destruction of the poor occurs in government schools and almost nowhere else, almost nowhere else. Everything that I learned that was of value to me as an entrepreneur, I had to study for myself. I got nothing, oh, mitosis, meiosis, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh. I got nothing from government schools that any economic value whatsoever, not even the softest. I'm talking hard skills like, you know, chemistry or computer programming or something. I get nothing. You know, I mean, I took one computer course when I was in junior high school. We had punch cards, we had punch cards, and it was really badly taught. Anyway, so.
[37:04] Taking money from the productive and giving it to the unproductive destroys your economy. Now, again, I get that we need to help people and that there are people who fall on hard times and so on. But the problem is not the billionaires. You know, if you and I are building a wall, we've got bricks, we're building a wall with the mortar and all, and you have some more bricks than I do, I can say, hey, man, give me some bricks. But what if I demanded you give me bricks from the bottom row? It's already hardened, right? And I said, you got to give me bricks, but I want the bricks from the bottom row.
[37:45] Well, that's like taking money from the productive. Taking bricks from the bottom row just destroys the whole wall. And, you know, it's really, really sad, of course, that people, it's not that hard to, what has it been, like 37 or 38 minutes? It's not that hard to explain. This would be like 0.0000001% of your education to just learn these things. But that would mean the teachers would have to learn them, which means that you'd have to get smarter teachers or something like that. But it's really not that it's not that hard to understand. Right. It's not that complicated. So.
[38:20] It's sad that people don't, and there really isn't a word for the average person's fear, loathe, and greed, and hatred of the successful, but there really does need to be a word other than communism, which is just the net effect. But yeah, the fact that people don't think these things through, and they just think that billionaires are just Scrooge McDuck hoarding a bunch of gold that they could give to the poor, and the poor would be happy. I mean, the only people who think it's easy to help the poor financially are people who've never helped the poor financially or tried to and i have spent a huge amount of money over the years trying to help the poor and it's really tough it's really tough because the poor are often poor because they just make really bad decisions and giving them lots of money means that they have, more money with which to make their bad decisions right otherwise everybody who won the lottery we would be happy and successful. So anyway, I hope that helps. Freedomain.com/donate if you find these conversations helpful and useful. I really do appreciate that. I hope you have a wonderful day. Take care. Bye-bye.
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