The Philosophy of Personal Finances - 1 - video Dailymotion

Stefan Molyneux

Stefan Molyneux digs into the philosophy of money, weaving in his own path from a tough financial start to building a business. He looks back on his first jobs, which built his drive to work hard and formed his take on finances, showing how background shapes those ideas. He pushes for a mix of spending and saving, getting people to think about how their habits affect their sense of freedom and contentment. Molyneux offers tips on putting money into things like investments or looking sharp, and points out ways that connections with others can add value without costing much. He also ties in how steady commitments, like marriage, link up with financial security. Overall, he prompts a fresh look at handling money, suggesting more talks about it and focusing on choices that lead to satisfaction.  SUBSCRIBE TO ME ON X! https://x.com/StefanMolyneux  Follow me on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@freedomain1  GET MY NEW BOOK 'PEACEFUL PARENTING', THE INTERACTIVE PEACEFUL PARENTING AI, AND THE FULL AUDIOBOOK! https://peacefulparenting.com/  Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!  Subscribers get 12 HOURS on the "Truth About the French Revolution," multiple interactive multi-lingual philosophy AIs trained on thousands of hours of my material - as well as AIs for Real-Time Relationships, Bitcoin, Peaceful Parenting, and Call-In Shows!  You also receive private livestreams, HUNDREDS of exclusive premium shows, early release podcasts, the 22 Part History of Philosophers series and much more!  See you soon! https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2025

Transcript

00:00Well, good evening, my friends. Hope you're doing well. Stephen Molyneux from Freedomain.com,

00:05and I'm going to say, of course, Freedomain.com slash donate, because this is gold, baby.

00:13Literal, digital gold, if I can get myself an oxymoron going. So, money, money, money,

00:24money, money, money. This is, you know, just a couple of caveats. Of course,

00:29this is not financial advice. I'm not telling you to do anything or don't do anything. Don't buy

00:32or sell anything based on what I'm doing here. I'm not an expert. But I have thought for many,

00:37many, many decades, decades, about the philosophy of money. I became aware of money pretty early on,

00:45because we didn't have any in my family. I was raised, my parents divorced when I was very little,

00:52and I was raised in a single-mothered household with a brother, and we had no car. It wasn't so

00:59bad in England. We had a pretty rent-controlled apartment and so on. But shortly after we came

01:05to Canada when I was 11, my brother went back to England. I stayed with my mother. She lost her

01:12mind. And I got my first job at the age of 10 in England, painting plaques for the Silver Jubilee

01:19of Queen Elizabeth II, the monarch, not the ship. And from the age of 11 onwards, I had a, in Canada,

01:27I had a paper route. I worked in a bookstore. I cleaned people's houses. I washed cars. I did just

01:35about anything under the sun. And had two jobs, sometimes three jobs. I cleaned offices at night,

01:42a travel agent and a dentist and a doctor's. And made money. And I've been sort of paying my own

01:50bills since I was about the age of 15, when my brother and I got roommates because my mother had

01:55left to go to Vancouver. Well, we'd sort of encouraged her to leave. And then I spent a year

02:01and a half working up north. After high school, gold panning prospecting. And then I spent two

02:07years at the Glendon campus of York University. And I definitely got some grants and some loans,

02:15but also worked my way through university as well. And I emerged with about $10,000 in debt,

02:20even after I got my graduate degree. I did two years at the Glendon campus of York University in

02:27English literature. I did almost two years at the National Theatre School in Montreal. Then I did

02:33two years finishing up. I switched from English to history and finished up there. Then I spent a year

02:39working and then I did a master's. And then I spent another year working in my sort of first gig as a

02:45computer programmer because I did a lot of computer programming as a hobby in my teens. And then I

02:51co-founded a business and grew it. So I kind of got from, I wouldn't say that we were quite at the

02:58bottom of society because almost no matter how far down you are, there are people lower than you.

03:05But boy, we sure weren't far from the bottom. We had eviction notices and I spent, you know,

03:14some not insignificant portions of my childhood, like short of food. When I first got a job in a

03:20restaurant, I was thrilled because I could get regular meals. I would hang around my friends'

03:25places, hoping to get invited for dinner and so on. Occasionally, I would not exactly steal food,

03:32but I would sort of sneak food from friends' places, like go into the fridge and grab something

03:36before leaving. And I knew all of the places in the woods where you could get water. And yeah,

03:43it was a rough, hard scrabble existence. Oh, it taught me good lessons. Yeah, I mean, it did.

03:48It did, but it's not really stuff that you want to go through as a whole. And I lived real close to

03:56the bone, real close to the bone until maybe 20, 26, 27. And then I was making 40k a year as a computer

04:08programmer. And then when I started the business, I went to 60k a year. And then within about six

04:16months, I went to 120k a year, all before 30. And it grew the business. I worked there for about seven

04:24years. I had a team of about 30 people and did a lot of travel throughout. I went to almost every

04:32state in America. I felt like it one time or another and did business in China and Europe and

04:38did conferences in Hawaii and all of that. So that's not part of America, but it's not sort of a brag

04:45thing. But what I sort of want to point out is I went from very, very poor, very poor and

04:53like poor, poor enough to sometimes you really just had to eat food that was really questionable,

05:00like a little scrape the fur off kind of stuff. And you couldn't, if you burnt the toast,

05:05you just had to scrape the black carbon off the toast. You couldn't afford to make more toast.

05:10And I was able to get into the middle class. And I did this, you know, necessity, obviously,

05:20some ability, talent, some opportunities and some grace from people and some help from people. And

05:28I did it, of course, a lot by thinking a lot about money, thinking a lot about money. And

05:36I wanted to share with you some of the thoughts that I've had about money and how I think I have

05:43made good decisions about money. And then, of course, I want to get your thoughts,

05:50your advice as well. And we can make this a roundtable. So I'll tell you some of the major

05:55lessons that I've learned about money. And hopefully these can be of help to you.

06:00Now, when I started making money, I had people in my life who also started making money, not

06:06involved in the business and things like that. And one of the things about, I just call him Bob,

06:12it's not his real name, it's a guy named Bob, that I worked with made some money. What drove me crazy

06:16was that I went from making, you know, 3k and change a month to 6k to 10k. And I also got a car

06:28allowance. So it's about 10,700. And as income went up, I did not have much of an urge to spend a lot of

06:39money. I mean, I did out a little bit more. And I always like to keep myself in good tech. So I got a

06:45nice computer, but I also did some work from home. So but anyway, I got more money, but I didn't spend

06:52more. I certainly don't mind spending on necessities. I don't have any very expensive

06:57hobbies at all. My car is eight years old. I mean, it's fine. It gets me from A to B,

07:06and is reliable and safe. So I'm fine with that. I've bought a secondhand car in the past because

07:13it works. I will lavish money on tech. But that seems like a good investment. I think that's been a

07:20good investment for me. So when I was 11 or 12 years old, my step grandmother died. No, my grandmother

07:28died. Sorry, my grandmother died. And I got $800. And my mother very kindly chipped in, I think

07:38another $300. And I bought an Atari 800 with, wouldn't you believe it, 8k of RAM. I remember much

07:48later buying a 32k of RAM from a really sketchy guy in a parking lot. I think it was actually

07:53smoking hot. I got it up to 40k of RAM. And I really wanted the computer. I was happy to have

08:00the computer. I really didn't want to spend my money on anything else. And it turned out that that

08:04$800 plus my mother's $300, the $1,100 investment was one of the greatest investments of my life,

08:13because I learned how to program computers, which then became a very well-paying career for me for

08:18quite some time. So as far as the philosophy of money goes, I noticed that the people around me

08:26who were the least happy tended to spend the most, if they could. Some people were unhappy because they

08:33couldn't spend because they didn't have any money. But the purpose of life, of course, is not money.

08:38The purpose of life is happiness. I mean, the purpose of, yeah, I mean, the end state that you

08:43want to be in is happiness, because that's the one thing you don't get in order for someone to do

08:51something else. Like, why do you go to work? Oh, to get money. Why do you get money? To pay bills.

08:54Why do you pay bills? So that you have a place to live, right? Because if I didn't have a place to

08:59live, I'd be unhappy, or it's cold, or rainy, or wet, or whatever, right? So if the purpose of life

09:05is happiness, and if the ideal of philosophy is you organize your thoughts and actions in a rational

09:14manner according to reason and evidence, reason leads you to consistency in morality, because reason

09:22is consistency, and reproducibility. So reason leads you to consistency in morality. Consistency

09:30immorality is your greatest chance for long-term happiness. It doesn't guarantee it, of course.

09:38If you eat well and exercise, you eat in a healthy manner, you maintain a healthy weight, and you

09:42exercise, this does not guarantee that you'll never get sick. But it is your greatest chance

09:47of staying healthy. Things can happen outside of philosophy that can make you unhappy, right? You can

09:54get t-boned in a horrible car crash and end up in a wheelchair, and that's going to interfere with

09:59your happiness, at least for a time, significantly. Although sometimes disabled people rank highest

10:05on happiness that probably has a lot to do with gratitude. So the idea and the goal for me behind

10:12finances in this talk of finances is to make this case for you, and then hear if this works for you,

10:18or if you've tried another approach. So if you are rational and empirical, then you can be

10:25consistently moral. If you are consistently moral, this gives you your greatest chance for happiness,

10:30and, and, this is really, really important. This is really important. The opposite of money

10:36is bad relationships. If you act rationally and virtuously, it gives you your greatest chance

10:44of sustainable happiness, not like cocaine high or won the lottery high, but sustainable happiness.

10:50But if you are virtuous and have integrity, then you will have good relationships, or no relationships,

10:58but at least you won't have bad relationships, which is kind of the key. Now, if you have good

11:04relationships, then what do you enjoy the most? If you have good relationships, what you enjoy the most

11:13is conversation, and conversation is free. See, reason equals virtue, leads to happiness, leads to

11:25saving money. So in relationships where there's not a lot of happiness, there tends to be a lot of

11:32spending to make up for that happiness. The people who ostentatiously spend the most tend to be the least

11:39happy. People who are happy with themselves, comfortable in their own skin, have good quality

11:47relationships, need to spend less money. Investing in philosophy invests you in happiness, and when you

11:56have happiness, you don't need to buy happiness. Now, I do believe that there's an Aristotelian mean.

12:06If you're too stingy, it's kind of missing the point, and I'll get to that in a bit. If you're

12:11too extravagant, if you're a spendthrift, then, well, you end up kind of stressed because you're

12:17out of money, you're short on money, right? So if you spend too little, you're kind of stressed

12:20because buying everything is stressful. Buying anything is stressful, even if you can afford it.

12:24If you spend too much, then your life is stressed because you're constantly running out of resources

12:28or worrying about how to pay bills or things like that. So money equals choice. Money equals free

12:37will, to a large degree. If you want to buy a car, if you want to have the choice to buy a car

12:44or a condo or a candy bar, if you want to have the choice to buy something, then you have to have

12:53the money to buy it. Now, of course, to get the money to buy it, you have to give up other freedoms,

13:00which is the freedom to do whatever you want during the day and go fishing instead of go,

13:05as in my case, to go program computers on a tandem operating system in COBOL 74.

13:10That's actually the name. We went from 74 to 85 when I was there. Ooh, big step forward.

13:14So money is choice. If you spend too little money, then you have restricted your choice.

13:24So let's say you don't really feel like cooking. You can't afford to eat out, but you say,

13:30oh, but that's frivolous, right? And then you say, well, I can't eat out because that's frivolous.

13:34Well, what have you done? You've simply removed eating out as a choice. So you have removed your

13:41choice because you can't. Not that you've decided not to, but you can't. It's too frivolous. It's too

13:48wasteful in your mind. So that reduces your choice. So if you spend too little, your choice is removed.

13:56If you spend too much, your choice is temporarily increased in the here and now. I could buy these

14:0410 things on my credit card. So your choice is increased in the here and now, but your choices

14:11are diminished in the future because you have to work extra hard to pay off all of that debt plus

14:17the great demon of the modern world or the ancient world too, interest. So in the Aristotelian mean,

14:24in the middle of the road, you have the choice to spend and that your choice to spend money should be

14:31to maximize freedom, to maximize free will, to maximize freedom. That's really the purpose,

14:39philosophically speaking, of looking at your money and thinking about your money. Am I free to spend

14:46it? If not, you're not very free. This is the Howard Hughes thing, you know, the guy who

14:52had like 14 foot long fingernails and shuffled around with his bare feet in Kleenex boxes,

14:57who was a multi-billionaire and spent almost nothing. Or these, you know, these stories of

15:04the people who die in mangy old apartments and have millions of dollars to their name that they

15:09never spent. Well, they're not free to spend it if they're not going to spend it. Money represents

15:14choice. And you want to maximize your choices in this life because the more choices you have,

15:20the more capable of virtue you are. Nobody says that an agoraphobic is making a brave choice by

15:28staying inside, right? Because that's their default position. That's what their messed up mind and body

15:34is telling them to do. So you want to, in thinking about money, you want it to be little pieces of

15:41paper that represent additions or subtractions to your free will. And you want to invest, of course,

15:50into things that appreciate, not things that depreciate. Like, that's so obvious, like,

15:54but I'll tell you sort of philosophically why that means a lot more than what most people think,

16:00right? So a lot of people want to throw money into depreciating assets, right? Depreciating assets,

16:06cars, computers, clothing, things that wear and tear and lose value over time. I mean, houses wear

16:16and tear, but because of mass immigration and boomer coffin clinging, they go up in value as a whole.

16:24Well, whether they go up in price or value, right? Price is the denomination in currency and value is what

16:32that currency actually means, right? I mean, as we all know, minimum wage is a lot higher now than it

16:39was in 1960 in absolute dollar terms, but it's worth much less in real purchasing power. So you want

16:49to invest in things that go up in value. And of course, it's worth going into debt, even for that,

16:57which is why people buy a house with a mortgage, right? I bought a house with a mortgage.

17:01My wife had bought a house with a mortgage because the house value increases more than the interest

17:08rate. And you need a place to live. So you either rent or you buy. And if you rent, of course,

17:14it's in perpetuity. If you buy, the cost didn't go down once you've paid off your mortgage,

17:20assuming you didn't buy so old a house that it just needs a bunch of repair stuff after that.

17:24So, of course, it's a truism to say and makes sense to say, you should buy things that go up

17:31in value. Bitcoin, not Tezos. Inside joke. So you want to buy things that go up in value

17:37and you want to maximize your purchases into things that go up in value because that's future freedom,

17:43that's future choice. And you want to minimize your spending on things that go down in value.

17:50That's understood. That's pretty clear. I'm sure everybody knows that. The little twist I'll put

17:55in it, and again, love to hear your thoughts on all of this, but the little twist I'll put on that

17:59is mating displays are an investment in value, right? So let's say you're going out on the town

18:09and you spend a couple of hundred bucks on a nice outfit. You got a nice watch, maybe more than a

18:17time. You got a nice watch, you got nice chinos, a nice shirt, you get a nice haircut. Now, is that

18:25investing in something whose value goes up or investing in something whose value goes down?

18:31Well, I would argue, and data really backs me up on this, I would argue that investing in personal

18:40grooming, in a gym membership and looking good, in skincare products, in hair gel, investing in that

18:48which makes you more attractive, I just speak to the men here, investing in things that make you more

18:53attractive is an investment in an appreciating value, not depreciating. I say, oh yeah, but you throw out

19:02the hair gel and the gym membership is ephemeral, right? It doesn't leave you with anything substantial

19:08other than some muscles and some hopefully unclogged arteries or whatever, but I would say no.

19:13For men, investment in personal grooming, and for women too, but again, women understand all of

19:20this, I'm just speaking to the bros here. Invest in personal grooming, go to the dentist, get your

19:28teeth cleaned, maybe get some whitening if they got yellow from coffee or something. You say, oh, but

19:33that's so shallow, that's so frivolous. No, not at all. Not at all. Nice shirt, nice pants, nice watch,

19:40nice haircut, clean glowing skin, maybe a little cologne, certainly some, I don't use antiperspirant

19:48because I don't like the idea of clogging my pores, but I certainly use deodorant. And, you know,

19:52as a man, it's important. I don't know what happens. It's like things die in our armpits every

19:58single day. I don't know why. I don't know why. I put deodorant on in the morning, done some sort of

20:04work around the house, and then if I'm going out to exercise, I have to put it on again because,

20:10you know, I don't want people to pass out around me. So that's just, you know, maybe that's just me,

20:15but that's just man, man, man oog. So why is investing in personal grooming investing in an

20:22depreciating asset? Well, because there's two times when a man's income jumps the most over

20:28the course of his life. The first is when he gets married, of course, and the second is when he has

20:31children. The more attractive you are, the higher quality mate you can attract.

20:39Now, why do we find features attractive? Because they are markers for IQ. Even features,

20:46good hip-to-waist ratio, reasonably low body mass index. These are all signs of IQ, intelligence,

20:56and emotional intelligence. I know it's a bit of a fruity metric, but just bear with me for a second.

21:04So the more attractive the man, the more attractive the woman, in general, the higher IQ. Now, the higher

21:12IQ, the less likely you are to divorce. Higher IQ people tend to be more reasonable. They tend to

21:21be better at negotiating. They tend to have a higher capacity for empathy. They have a higher capacity

21:27to hold self and other in the mind. Like, you know, how you can hold like nine things in your mind,

21:33directly visualizing them in your mind. So they can hold self and other in the mind. And what that

21:37means, of course, is that they can say, well, if I were in your shoes, how would I want things to go?

21:44They don't like selfish people, of which they could be very high IQ. Selfish people and people

21:48who aren't so smart, who are good at negotiating. But in general, right, the trend occurs. You've got

21:53to cast your odds, right? I mean, it's true that the guy living in the trailer park might win the

22:00lottery, but you probably should try and date a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or entrepreneur. Well,

22:05maybe not entrepreneur, depending, right? If you want some sort of stable income. And this goes back

22:10to something I talked about, my friend in junior high school, when the Adidas bags, Adidas bags were

22:19big. A-D-I-D-A-S. Adidas. All day I dream about sex. That was the joke acronym. So the Adidas bags

22:28are very big. Bare naked ladies sang. I got an Adidas bag and a humongous binder. These giant

22:35binders with flaps and enough vertical storage units for an entire Library of Congress worth

22:40of big pens. But so carrying around your stuff in an Adidas bag, having a big binder and so on

22:46was a high value. And my friend's mother worked in an accounting office. This is back in the days

22:53of dot matrix printers where you had the, you had the printers with the tear, the paper with the

22:58tear away sheets on the side with the holes in them so they could be fed through the dot matrix printer

23:02printing. And he would get used paper from his mother's office and he would carry the

23:10school stuff that he needed around in plastic grocery bags. And I was not very well schooled

23:18in the subtle arts of personal attractiveness. But even I, yay, yay, verily, even I could see that

23:23this was an unwise move. And I remember saying to him, like, I, why, why are you carrying your

23:31stuff around in plastic bags? And he said, Adidas bags cost like 20 bucks. Like my mother's an

23:36accountant. Adidas bags cost like 20 bucks. Paper is like expensive, but the printer paper

23:44is free. So it's throwing it out from my mom's office and the plastic bags are free. Now this is

23:52before I got into Austria economics. So I couldn't really tell him there's no such thing as free and

23:57everything. A lot of things that seem free come at a pretty awful cost. And I haven't talked to that

24:05guy in quite a while, but I did track him into my thirties and he never got married. I'm not sure he

24:12ever dated. I don't think he ever did. So saving a couple of bucks on an Adidas bag and some Duotang

24:20paper does not seem like a very wise investment. Investing in personal attractiveness is investing

24:28in higher income because particularly for men, we have to have something to work for. Why are there

24:36houses in the suburbs? Well, to get away from the inner city, of course, but there are houses in the

24:42suburbs because women want them. I have somewhere in my files from many, many years ago, a comedic script

24:50for a movie raised by bachelors, which was going to be sort of blackface interviews to people talking

24:54about how they were raised by bachelors that would make them rub Febreze on their armpits

24:58before going to school. I was raised by a bachelor. But men will, you know, the sort of typical example

25:06that men will have a place, they'll have a futon or just a mattress on the floor and they'll put

25:13their giant screen TV on top of the box that came in and consider it fine. It's great. And then women

25:21come along and make everything nice and lovely and pretty and they need stuff for that, right? They

25:27need houses, the paintings, paintings, pictures, right? Things like that. You can't just, as I found

25:33out, you can't just have a bunch of two-by-fours with bricks you found from an old construction site

25:41holding up your bookshelf. And my wife, in beautifying the place, is entirely right. It's much

25:49more civilized, much more pleasant, and it's good for the mind, heart, and soul. So, an investment as a

25:55man in beauty products, I mean, for women, I understand this, right? I mean, I have a photo

26:00somewhere in my photo album that I took when I was younger in a store, which was selling makeup,

26:07and the sign said, tools of the trade. The more attractive the woman is, the higher earning

26:13man she can get. And the more attractive a man is these days, the higher quality wife he can get.

26:21And so, for the low, low price of $1,000 or $2,000 worth of product and clothing, you can

26:30get a wife who won't divorce you because she's smart and verbal and good at negotiating and

26:38all of that. And of course, if you've ever been through or seen a divorce, it is one of the most

26:43brutal economic disembowelings that a family, and in particular, if there are children involved,

26:50a man can experience. If you have friends with whom you have good conversations, you can save

27:01hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your life, both in direct costs and in opportunity

27:06costs. One of the things that saved my bacon, not from a dating standpoint, but from a money

27:13standpoint, was being introduced to Dungeons & Dragons when I was maybe 12 or 13. Because me

27:21and my broke friends, well, they weren't all broke, but we all enjoyed the game, would get

27:27together once a week, maybe twice a week, and we would play Dungeons & Dragons, which was largely

27:35free. A couple of rule books, a couple of dice, some graph paper. I think my friend was still

27:43bringing the paper in from his mom's office at this point. Sorry, we used it for that. But

27:49it saved me a huge amount of money. You say, ah, yes, well, dating is expensive. Yes, dating is

27:55expensive, but it pays off. Because if dating leads to engagement, leads to marriage, leads to

28:01children, then your income and your ambition as a man is going to go through the roof. And

28:07for the price of a couple of thousand dollars of grooming and dating and things like that,

28:12like let's say you spend $5,000 or $10,000 of grooming and dating, but a man's income often

28:19doubles with marriage and kids. So you go from $50,000 to $100,000, $60,000 to $120,000, $75,000 to $150,000,

28:26$40,000 to $80,000, whatever it's going to be, you've paid off your $5,000 or even $10,000

28:30investing in dating in months, months, not years. And you get to stay married. And couples who stay

28:39married and couples who have children generally have the highest income. And it's not, I'm not

28:45mixing up cause and effect because it's not like people just make a bunch of more money and then

28:49they can have a bunch of kids. No, no. You have kids, you lock in, as my daughter would say, you

28:55lock in and you work hard and you're focused and you don't waste time. You don't dilly-dally. As some

29:02people say, you don't do any of that. You lock in. So it works really well. If you're happy with your

29:09friendships, you know, this afternoon I was chatting with my wife all afternoon, two or three hours, really

29:15nice. We didn't need to go anywhere. I mean, our anniversary is coming up, 20, 24 years. Our

29:22anniversary is coming up and, you know, we'll go out for a nice dinner. But if for some reason we

29:28didn't, it would be fine. We just sit and chat about our life, about our marriage, about our friends,

29:34our families, and opportunities, thoughts, memories, just beautiful, wonderful stuff. If you have a happy

29:41marriage, you don't have to spend much money. If you have good friendships, you don't need to spend

29:46much money because you can say to people, come on over, you know, we'll order a pizza, we'll just sit

29:54and chat, we'll play some cards, some Catan, we'll enjoy each other. We don't need to go out. I mean,

30:01we can, it happens, but we don't need to. If you are happy with yourself, then you don't need an excess

30:09of showiness, right? Again, when it comes to dressing up, when it comes to grooming, right,

30:16you want to be presentable and attractive, but not some highly oiled P. Diddy metrosexual.

30:22What's that? Two guys in prison, Maduro and P. Diddy in the same cell, and P. Diddy says,

30:28hey man, they took my oil too. You don't want to be deficient in grooming. You also don't want to be

30:34excessive in grooming. You don't want to show up to pick up your date on a bus. You don't necessarily

30:43want to show up in a Bugatti, with all due respect to Mr. A. Tate. There's undercompensating and then

30:51there's overcompensating. In the same way, you want a woman who's, you know, trim, fit, healthy,

30:56slender, mildly athletic maybe, but not a woman with BBLs and plastic boobs that she could use to

31:05rescue half an ocean liner that found us in the sea. Were you in a car accident earlier today?

31:12Because I think your airbags are still deployed. So, philosophy could really help you with finances.

31:20Philosophy teaches you to be rigorous in your thinking, which is very helpful in business.

31:24philosophy teaches you to surrender your ego to objective principles. And in business,

31:31of course, that's, you know, things like profit and loss and signed contracts, satisfied clients,

31:36happy employees, so things that are pretty objective. And you have to subsume your ego to

31:40something larger than yourself in order to succeed in business. Narcissists will have some short-term

31:46success, I guess, as in the Menendez father's situation, but then you end up being blown away with

31:51your wife in a basement. So, philosophy teaches you rigor. It fosters a sense of happiness and

31:59self-satisfaction in your life. And if you are happy and self-satisfied in your life, you don't

32:05need to chase the dopamine of buying, of purchasing. Shopping therapy, retail therapy, I think they call it.

32:12You don't need to do that. When you have philosophical virtues and clear and consistent thinking,

32:17you tend to attract and retain the best people in your life with whom you can have a lot of fun.

32:25My daughter and some friends of ours and I are playing through a game called Solasta,

32:32Crown of the Magister. My daughter was a big fan of Bald Escape. We did a whole review of it, actually.

32:37And the game cost us $12 each. GOG.com. It's a great game. You should play. It's a lot of fun.

32:47And so, for a grand total of $48, you know, we're going to have, like, 70 hours of fun. Well,

32:55maybe 69 hours of fun and 70 hours of maybe occasionally crapping at each other for making

33:01the wrong move or doing the wrong thing in a high-tension battle. You know, it's funny because,

33:06of course, games, you have to kind of take them seriously in order to make them more fun. But

33:10if you take them too seriously, that's the Aristotelian mean. Again, if you take them too

33:14seriously, you get too punchy. It's like sports. You've got to win, but you don't want to scream

33:18at anyone on your team who makes a mistake, right? So, we don't need to spend $400 on Rolling

33:25Stones tickets. We can spend $12 on a game. And because we have a lot of fun,

33:31or, like, we used to live stream these things when my daughter was younger or record them and play

33:36them, which was Among Us. Or there's another game that's like it called Goose Goose Duck,

33:40which was free. Among Us was free. You could pay for some extras. And if you have good quality

33:47conversations, I mean, if you have great friends, you can pick up a $4 pack of cards and have years

33:53of fun, if you want. Or you can just sit and chat. If you have friends who are funny, or at least

33:59roll with comedy, do you need to go to a comedy club? Yeah, I mean, you can. I've gone to comedy

34:05clubs with friends, but generally, it's funnier at home. Philosophy will give you the happiness so

34:12you don't need to buy it. Philosophy will deliver unto you the quality relationships so that you can

34:17not, you don't have to spend money to have a good time. Philosophy will deliver unto you quality

34:24relationships that increase what you make and decrease your chances of acid mitosis through

34:32divorce. And, of course, philosophy, because you don't have to spend money to have fun, because you

34:39have good relationships, because you're happy with yourself. Philosophy will deliver you into old age

34:45with good savings, with quality relationships, and really, what else can you ask for from old age

34:55than have enough money to live on comfortably and to have good people to spend your twilight years,

35:02your sunset years in. So, the amount of value that philosophy can provide in terms of money

35:08is enormous. It's absolutely enormous, freedomain.com slash donate. See? Philosophy has even delivered

35:16unto me donations. But I really wanted to make it about how philosophy can help you to not overspend,

35:26to not underspend, to aim at the happy middle, the happy medium, and to give you as much peace of mind

35:34and as much free choice as humanly possible, to have the choice to spend in the now, if that's what

35:39you want, and it will add to your choices, or to not spend. To not spend so much that you have no

35:46choice in the future, to not spend so little that you have no choice in the present. To maximize

35:50flexibility of free will. And the more free will you have, the more choices you make,

35:56the more certain you can be of your virtues, and the less money you have to spend.

36:01So, I hope that makes sense. I'm certainly happy to, if you have any questions or comments or things

36:07you want to share, or massive, wild, and deadly opposition to everything that I have said,

36:15I would be thrilled to hear. Or maybe you have invested time and you wish to get the payoff

36:21of rumination, of rumination going forward. So, I'll just give a pause for a sec here,

36:28and I'm going to continue this conversation for donors, but I wanted sort of the first one,

36:33because, you know, listen, I really, really want you guys to do well in the world.

36:36I really want you to do well in the world. And we are often raised with very distorted senses of money.

36:43And, of course, we have all of this, you know, marketing and advertising and,

36:47you know, industrial propaganda scales that go on, that really all have to do with getting us to

36:54consume, consume, consume. Society, of course, wants to transfer money from men who tend to be

36:59savers to women who tend to be spenders. And, you know, both are good, but because it's coerced

37:03transfer of money through debt, welfare state, pretty fraudulent, in my view, student loans and

37:12things like that. Getting money from the hands of men into the hands of women, I mean, just go to

37:17the mall, right? How many stores are there just for men? None. The answer is none. None stores.

37:24I mean, there used to be, once I get down to College and Queen in Toronto, probably is still the case,

37:29but I haven't been back then forever. There used to be a whole string of computer stores. You could

37:32say, okay, that street, that's for the boys. When you got to assemble your computers sometimes

37:37yourself. But you go to malls, it's all women. And the fact that women spend and men save is great.

37:42You need, again, the balance of both, but the government has dipped the scales far too much

37:45towards women. And the economy is fairly frivolous and fairly shallow and materialistic as a result,

37:52because it's not for the home. It's for mating displays that don't consummate in actual marriages.

37:57So, all right, going once, going twice. I think I will stop here if I just want to sort of drop in

38:03and give you some thoughts about money. I'm fascinated by money. I have had the good fortune of being able

38:10able to ask, you know, hundreds of people about their finances over the course of my show.

38:14Like that, was it Caleb? Caleb? Caleb Hammer? The guy with the Michael Jackson mosquito voice.

38:20And he gets to ask people too. David, David Ramsey? Yes, he also gets to ask. So, I think if you,

38:27if you have friends, it's okay to talk about money. When I grew up in England, it was absolutely forbidden.

38:33You couldn't talk about money. But it is a very important topic. And life runs on productivity.

38:39The present runs on consumption. The future runs on savings. And the balance is where the sweet spot

38:45is. But it's hard to find and it changes over the course of your life. So, I wanted to do the first

38:49one of these series out here in La Publique. And I'd love to get your feedback. If you're listening to

38:55this later, you can just email me. Host, H-O-S-T, at freedomain.com. If you find what I'm saying to

39:01be a value, I would be thrilled to get your thoughts and your donations at freedomain.com

39:08slash nateshop.freedomain.com. And don't forget your peacefulparenting.com for the book.

39:13Thanks, everybody. Have yourself a glorious day. I will talk to you Wednesday. And I appreciate you

39:18dropping by tonight. Bye.

The Philosophy of Personal Finances - 1

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