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Chapter 1: Who is Stefan Molyneux and what is his background?
Steven is the first one again. All right.
We're going to give people a minute to come in, and we are going to get going with a very exciting guest professor today. Yep, there he is. Some of you might know him. Some of you may not, but you're all going to be lucky today to be here with him. So you know how it is. Before we can do anything on this show, we need to do something first. Okay, here we go. Are you guys ready?
let's do it it's gonna be another amazing day today i don't know if you're ready for it are you ready for all the amazingness i'm all crooked it's gonna be coming at you
good morning everybody and welcome hey shut up to me every now and then my second feed comes alive i don't know why well welcome to coffee with scott adams the best time you've ever had in your life if you'd like to take it up to a new level a level that nobody can even understand with their tiny shiny human brains all you need for that is a cup of mug or a glass of tanker chelsea stein again teething jugger of last
a liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day. The thing that makes everything better is called the 17-minute sip. It happens now.
Go.
Meanwhile, all of the lazy podcasters taking the morning off. My goodness. My goodness.
Do you feel sorry for them? So that was our Scott. That was on 10, 2024. Um, yes, I feel sorry for anyone who's not joining us today, especially. Um, I just want to quickly remind everyone that this is the Scott Adams school. This is streaming from Scott's platforms and channels. Thanks to Shelly, who's letting this go on with us, as Scott wished. My name is Erica.
I am joined today by Owen Gregorian. and Marcella and our- Good morning, you guys. Good morning. And our very special guests, I am so happy and honored that you're here with us. Before I fully introduce you, you guys, Stefan is amazing, okay? This is what I wanna say about Stefan Molyneux.
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Chapter 2: How does mob cancellation affect public figures?
And I pointed out that I actually had a Dilbert calendar in my office. I had Dilbert pictures on the wall and that actually got me a great degree of credibility as a manager. Like I was on their side. I was one of them. And of course I rose up through the programming ranks. And I actually at one point was going to grow my hair out a little and toughed it up because I was still dark back then.
And I found that Scott's, takedown of corporate fluff and language was a beautiful and philosophical thing. I always found it to be deeply philosophical. Like a lot of absurdist thinkers, and Scott very much pointed out the absurdity of office life, the pomposity, the verbiage, the catchphrases, the fear of HR,
You know, Catbert being the sort of the id, the conscience that could speak its mind because it was safe being a cat. In other words, as long as you're a pet that's not domesticated, you can speak your mind. And all of the various characters really burned themselves into my brain.
I remember being on a flight, and Scott as well, because he was a hilarious cartoonist, like one of the best that ever was. And underappreciated, of course, as a comic writer, because most people know him from the comic strip, but his books were staggeringly good. As a bit of a writer myself, I just admired just about every sentence.
when you write yourself like if you if you're a weightlifter and you see somebody lifting a great weight you feel it like you know because you've tried to do that same thing and seeing the leanness economy precision and focus of his prose and knowing as a writer that he probably sweated blood you know there's an old saying about writing it's easy you just
you just stare at a blank piece of paper until beads of blood form on your forehead knowing how much scott sweated over every sentence maybe it came easier to him but i think he talked about how he worked very hard to make it precise and hilarious i remember being on a business
trip with my brother um oh gosh this would have been 35 years ago and we were reading about individuals and uh it was uh hilarious and we we saw a reflection of all that we criticized in authority coming out from scott in such a benevolent way i mean even the pointy head boss has his own
charms and scott's obvious affection for the characters was was really a beautiful thing that we can love people and also love the absurdity that is within them means that we don't have this sort of ayn rand perfectionist mentality of who we have affection for um and i just found him to be a wonderful creative thinker and kind of a loki based chaos agent and sort of let me explain what that means that i i hope i won't monologue too long but
I came from sort of a strict boarding school, Anglo-Saxon, precision, semi-military, got to bounce a quarter off your bed, everything has to be perfect, which, you know, from a software standpoint, from a business process and coding standpoint, you need that kind of strictness.
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Chapter 3: What role does reframing play in overcoming challenges?
This is all the way back to Socrates, of course, the Holy Trinity of the foundation of Western philosophy. Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato were all persecuted by the state. Early scientists, Galileo, and so on, are tortured. And so... And Oscar Wilde said it very memorably, if you're going to tell people the truth, you have to figure out how to make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
Now, I was not blessed quite with Scott Adams' sense of humor. So I make a joke and it's a fantastic way to bring pin drop silence to the room. It's a gift. It's a gift. So I knew that there was this line that you have to walk in telling the truth. And I suppose it's something like therapy where
If you have some real selfish monster as a therapist, I'm sure you have to tell them that truth slowly over time, because if you tell them too much, they'll just rage quit and so on.
So you kind of have to slowly need the truth into people through their epidermis or something like that, because very few people can look at sort of bald truth straight up without losing their minds or being hyperreactive. And people are programmed that way, of course, to react to certain words and phrases in a hostile manner.
You know, the rage of the mob is something that we all have to surf when you're trying to bring some truths to the shore. And one of the things that I thought about when I was cancelled, which, as you say, was pretty brutal and extensive, but one of the things that I thought about was... how can this be beneficial to me and to the world? And also how might it have been worse if I was not?
In other words, if you are walking, let's say you've got your headphones on and you're rocking out to some classic beats and you're about to walk in front of a bus and someone violently tackles you and throws you to the ground, oh no, I've been assaulted. And then the bus swings by and you're like, I've been saved. I've been saved. Lord above, thank you.
I'm going to name five children after you and three of my pets and a goldfish.
So what worse luck and of course this was brought home pretty pretty vividly last September of course when Charlie Kirk another person that I worked with to some degree was gunned down because in my speaking tours I've had to face the same death threats and bomb threats and had to have security and so on and then there was another fellow who was beaten to death in France and so
what worse luck has my bad luck saved me from so i chose to view the de-platforming in in two ways number one and and this was an effort of will because part of you is just like oh no my life you know my life's work off youtube which i had um i don't know i think you had almost a million followers at that point well they've never let me get to a million because they didn't have to send me a plaque apparently they would have to produce by selling their children's kidneys because they just did not want to give me that plaque which i understand of course
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Chapter 4: How did Ayn Rand influence modern philosophical thought?
I mean, Plato, the philosopher, ran for office in Syracuse and ended up being sold into slavery because that's what happens when philosophers get into politics. He was going to be a slave for the rest of his life, except one of the people out there buying slaves happened to be one of his former students who paid 400 drachma
to liberate him and then returned him back to his life of philosophy so politics is a bit of a bit of a filthy game and well i'm just snow white and pure you see but anyway so so i was liberated from that got to do more core philosophy that was number one and number two was um you know i was i was knocked out of the way of an oncoming bus because a lot of people have hit pretty ugly ends uh who've been involved in politics throughout history
And of course, we've seen that much more. So I think the deplatforming liberated me to do the jazz I love, which has a greater effect in the future. And also, it got me out of the way of oncoming bullets and other social and political and legal repercussions or whatever has been happening to people. So I... I really do. I know this sounds odd.
I absolutely kiss the hem of the garment of the people who canceled me. It was a liberation and a reminder. Almost if the gods of the future were reaching back in time, they'd say, Steph, lots of people can do politics. Not so many people can do metaphysics and epistemology. Do your thing.
Do the thing that's going to help us the most in the future, not the thing that changes people the most in the present. Because of course, interfering with power 50 years after I'm dead, they're not going to bury me. They're not going to dig me up and do it again, right? But if you interfere with the... you know, come not between the dragon and his wrath is that line from King Lear.
If you come between political people and their goals, they have a lot more power to affect you than you have to affect them. But if you really work on core philosophy and morality, that really changes the future. So it was a big plus and I'm enormously thankful for it.
Scott, same way, I believe. He felt liberated and he felt he had the creativity shackles taken off of him. He didn't have to answer to the publishers of the papers anymore. And I think he had like a breath of fresh air once he realized, wait a minute. I mean, it was, I think it was... who came to his house that day?
They, they went, Oh, it was Joel Pollack went to Scott's house the same day Scott got canceled and was hesitant. Should I go? Like, is he going to be upset? You know, what do I do? And he's like, no, we're going, we're his friend. We're going to show up. And Scott just said to him, like, I'm good. I'm okay. Like, this is all good.
Um, I will say your cancellation Stefan came when canceling became like the new thing. And it was like trying to
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the Overton Window on political discourse?
I mean, morally speaking, I couldn't fully accept the religious training that I got quite intensively growing up because I could very much see that religion, Christianity, was not in the position to stop the evils that were accumulating in the world. And so I had to look for something else. And then a friend of mine was really into the band Rush.
The drummer from the band Rush was really into Ayn Rand. And he's like, hey, man,
should read this book and i just had this vague sense of like some sort of science fiction you know woman a woman who wrote science fiction so that was sort of unusual because he handed me atlas shrugged uh but uh i thought well that's that's a bit of a doorstop maybe i'll maybe i'll try ordering a slightly smaller meal first and yeah i i read um i read the fountainhead and it just i mean it just hit me like an absolute ton of bricks then of course i plowed into
Atlas Shrugged, We the Living, 9th of January, 16th, and Anthem and all of her nonfiction work. And I was just like voracious, voracious. And the world came into focus. My mind, which had been spinning in a void, hit the ground and had traction because connecting the mind to reality
is foundational for productivity your mind is there to change things in the world it is not there to amuse itself it is not there to preen itself or to show off to itself or to languish in its own inner sensations those are fine in emergencies but you've gotta actually get out there and do things in the world but you have to know that what you're doing in the world is good
not exactly right seems right uh it has approval heaven help you if you have approval these days right but the purpose is to actually do things in the world but in order to have confidence and not be a psychopath psychopaths have constant kind of confidence so that's confidence because they're narcissists and nobody else exists for them, so there's nobody to oppose them.
But if you have a conscience, you don't want it to tell you after the fact that you've done wrong. You need to know ahead of time with reasonable assurances that what you're going to do is going to be good in the world and through objectivism and then, you know, to some degree spiced up with Aristotelianism because Ayn Rand, of course, was a huge fan of Aristotle.
She named the three books in Atlas Shrugged after the three laws of logic. So it gave me attraction in the world. It gave me a clarifying way to organize my thoughts and to look for contradictions and inconsistencies. And it gave me reasonable assurances.
It can never be 100%, but reasonable assurances that what I was saying, what I was doing in the world would actually be good rather than blindfoldly throwing a ball and hoping you hit a target.
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Chapter 6: What solutions exist for the declining birth rate?
So in watching Scott, of course, emotional persuasion, analogies and also you know you kind of have to be a reasonable and happy person in order to sell uh you know the the classical socratic formula now reason equals virtue equals happiness i think that comes out of ayn rand as well and so Yeah, he bugged me because I'm like, oh, who cares about hypnotism? I'm right.
Who cares about convincing people? I don't have to do anything but be right. And it's like, you kind of do, though. You kind of do. Because I was in marketing as well. So I originally built software products, and then I ended up out in the world selling them. And it took me an embarrassingly large amount of time to say, Huh? Great software products, no marketing. What happens to those? Exactly.
Right. So yes, he was very, very keen in his analysis. Sorry, keen. I mean, sort of razor sharp in his analysis of persuasion. And I came, you know, he predicted Trump's win as did I, but he came from it from a persuasion standpoint and I came from it from another direction.
And of course, without the persuasion, without the ability to engagingly and enjoyably communicate to people, it's like you can write the greatest song, but if you only play it in your own toilet, it ain't getting to number one.
What direction did you come from with Trump?
Oh, I mean, I just knew that the American population was desperate to have borders and to have less immigration. And that when you are in academia and you're in the media, you are in a tidal wave that feels like it's not moving because it's moving so rapidly. You're in it. Like, you know, you think of a little plankton in the tidal wave.
Do they even really know that there's a tidal wave until it hits, right? A tsunami. And so because Scott and I didn't come out of academia, I mean, I did a graduate degree, but I didn't stay in academia. We could see from the outside the tsunami of the woke stuff, the left-wing stuff, the really centralized planning stuff, the anti-white stuff and all of that.
We could see all of that being outside.
and the view from inside was like you know it's like the fish you know the old thing well water what water you know this lukewarm you can't feel it and so we could see a momentum and a direction and a fear in the general population that we shared i think uh because we were outside the the sort of bubble and but we were seeing the direction of momentum so we could see that the trump was standing before that saying you know like gandalf on the bridge like
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Chapter 7: How is AI impacting the job market and human creativity?
So some of the people I talked about very early on, their children are now adults. My daughter is going to be 18 this year. So To raise children in a peaceful, negotiated and rational fashion, it makes them completely immune to political temptations. Because politics is about forcing people to do stuff. And if you raise children with reason, with evidence and with negotiation,
then they don't have the urge to force people to do stuff. And they are kind of immune to other people forcing them to try to do stuff as a whole. So there's a whole mindset thing that you can do about that. I do understand it's perhaps a little late in the game. Plant a tree because you're looking for some shade that afternoon is not necessarily the best approach.
But I would certainly keep focusing on that. And even people who have teenage children can change their parenting approaches. So the philosophy of parenting is one of the things that I've really worked hard to add
as value as a thinker because philosophers have talked about everything under the sun except you know the most moral mission that every human being is ever involved in which is raising children that's the most moral thing and i think philosophers have been well a lot of them are But a lot of them were not overly blessed with the ability to charm women and so on.
And so they ended up a lot of them single, a lot of them isolated. So they didn't really talk that much about parenting, which I think was a real shame because that could have changed the world quite a bit.
So you, to me, brought to life in your personal relationships, which means if people are, you know, super pro-political and once you're thrown in prison for like they, well, we should hate speech laws. Okay, well then you want to throw people in prison for legal speech or for speech that is not incitement to violence or, you know, that kind of stuff. It's not direct threats.
And so recognize that when people want to use the power of the state against you, they're kind of enemies. Now, you can take some time to alert them to this, to wake them up to this, because, you know, it's like you don't want to wake someone up by going, you want to wake someone up a little gently, you know, stroke their arm a little, wake them up.
But at some point they do have a responsibility to wake up. And people who are addicted to using the power of the state to get their way will tear apart the world and you're going to end up in a gulag. So if they get their way. So you have to really have that line after a certain amount of communication and moral instruction, you have to have that line where you say, no, no, no, this is not real.
This is not virtuous. This is not good. I call it the against me argument. Like you support the use of violence against me, against me. And you got to wake people up to that. Now, if they're like, oh my gosh, I'm against violence. I'm so sorry. You're right. You're right. You're right. But if they're like, well, yes, I do. And I'm happy about it. It's like, okay.
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Chapter 8: What practical steps can individuals take to navigate societal changes?
no i'm a man i don't need to know this 23 years something like that so if you have that then you reduce your worry and also your values have a purpose and reward because one of the things that scott was was talking about was you know it's difficult to be honest it's difficult but there's rewards on the other side of it as a good conscience and better relationships and so on
and so we as individuals we can't just go out there and and and change the world in the way that we want uh which is good because if we could do that evil people could do it and they have often a higher incentive so it's good that we can't do that but we can influence people as much as humanly possible in the most positive direction that's the best chance we have of saving the world you know like if you don't want to get lung cancer don't smoke you know and
You won't get lung cancer. Well, no, but it means that you have a much lower chance. And the more that we enforce and spread virtue in our personal lives, the more we challenge people's anti-rationality and bigotry, the better. And that's really all we can do. And I will say this, sorry, just to close off.
Because I was kind of out in the wilderness for like a half decade, when I came back, my ex-account got reinstated. When I came back to social media, holy crapola, it was a completely different planet. Stuff was absolutely appalling, shocking. People's heads would explode. It's like, it's common discourse now.
mean it's it's wild it's what see all i had to do was leave and everything i just had to step out of the room and everybody knows how to cha-cha-cha and so the the if you see this change slowly you don't notice it as much you know like if your friend has lost 50 pounds they lost it over time and it's a little bit but then if you haven't seen them for a while and you see them it's like oh my god
it's crazy different and discourse that is going on now i mean people are routinely chatting about topics that i would have been like shaky hand typing you know six years ago and like you said the rubio speeches are anti-white racism like iq uh voluntary family relations even with parents like all of this stuff is is is talked about like it ain't no thing and it's like It kind of was, I think.
Yes, it was. You know, this is like Galileo coming forward 400 years and like, oh, everyone, I should do a bad Italian. Oh, everybody does say that the earth goes around the sun. Everybody knows that. And it's like, yeah, everybody accepts that. It's like, I got the torture. You know, like, this is wild.
what has changed and that level of progress has never before been achieved in human history where the overton window is like a bullet train these days and that's incredible because you know this isn't all marx is saying like there are there are decades when nothing happens and then there are weeks when decades happen and that these last couple of years have just been
face meltingly, like you feel like one of these astronauts going through gravity by being whipped around like your skin is peeling back from your eyeballs. And it's like, how could things have changed so much? All I had to do was leave and everyone becomes perfect at truth. It's incredible.
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