 Tom is really one of those unique individuals who's able to study and master different disciplines. He's an economist, he's a historian, he's a great writer, he's an academic who holds degrees from Ivy League universities, but more importantly, he's that rarest of rarities in the academic world. He's market-facing, which is a fancy business speak way of saying he makes a living by himself, getting people to pay him for his work. And there's an academic with a university position, a tenured university position, who is affiliated with the Mises Institute, who recently wrote a book that is about 100 pages in paperback, a tiny introductory book to Austrian economics. He published this through an academic publishing house. This introduction, this cursory treatment of Austrian economics is available to you via Amazon for $104 in paperback form. The amount of readers of this book are low. They're less than 10. That's my suspicion with that $104 price tag. Tom, on the other hand, produces excellent, free, downloadable e-books that anyone can have. And he does so because he wants people to read what he writes. He wants people to hear what he has to say. And really, I don't want to make him blush. But like Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises, Tom never did what was easy, which is a few little tweaks and a few little times across his career in college, obtaining his PhD, seeking a tenure track position, whatever it might have been. If he had just been willing to smooth over a couple of rough edges, he could have been a conservative darling. He could have been a right-wing darling. He could have been a media darling. But instead he chose to go with the truth and with Austrian economics and with libertarianism. So please warm welcome for Tom Woods. All right, I've got a little bit of a cough. I'm going to do my best to cope with it. But I've got some water. Let's put it here. Just want to warn you. You can't tell on the podcast, because I can suppress it. I have a little button when I need to cough. It's beautiful, technology, just beautiful. All right, Jeff told you a little earlier today about the genesis of my talk today, which has to do with the great Harry Brown, who wrote a great book called How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. And as Jeff says, if you look through that book, it's not, of course, just political freedom he's talking about. There are all kinds of areas of your life where you're put upon by things and people you hate. And the message of Harry Brown was, you are putting yourself in a prison of your own making half the time. And you're sitting there in that prison holding the key, which is the worst of it. So I'm gonna help you get out of these situations. So it is a wonderful book. And Jeff asked me, could I try and do this kind of thing very briefly today in my own life? Because I've had kind of, as Jeff says, an unconventional life in terms of career. Normally you get a PhD in history, you go off and become a university professor, or you work in a think tank. Now I did teach as a professor for about seven years, and I was in residence at the Mises Institute for four years, but the Mises Institute is not a think tank. Let's not denigrate the institute by calling it that. It doesn't produce policy reports that people pretend to be influenced by, but instead throw into the garbage. Ain't none of that going on. There's none of this, some industry wants some favorable report, and so they pay some place to write, nothing like that happens at the Mises Institute. So it definitely is no think tank. It's vastly better and more important than that. So I've had this unusual approach, but another unusual thing is just being a libertarian of itself is unusual, because when I was growing up, you had two choices, right? We all know this, you had two choices. You can either be Walter Mondale or George Bush. Those are your choices. You could be Bob Dole or Bill Clinton. Those were the options. And so you pick one, right? What else are you gonna do? You pick one, unless you're an extremely independent thinker and you say, dog, God, there must be a third option here. Well, by default, you wind up in one of those categories. And dog, God and I wound up in one of those categories growing up in the 1980s. And by 1990, when I went off to college, I knew darn well who I was. I was a Republican dog on it. I was a moderate Republican, which is the worst thing you can possibly be, because then you're not good on anything. You're bad on everything, bad on everything. You're not good on spending, you know? Whatever it is, you're not good on it. You're not reliable on it. I just, one thing I knew for darn sure, I just, I ain't no leftist, that I know. And so I thought, well, therefore, by process of elimination, I must be this other thing. So I did that for a little while. Now, thankfully, I was rescued from leftism. I got freedom from that, thanks to my dad. My father was a, who died 21 years ago now, but he was a forklift operator in a food warehouse. He was a blue collar worker his whole life. So he apparently had false consciousness because he was also a free market guy. And he taught me that. He didn't finish high school. He got his GED when he was in his 40s. But that made him very self-conscious. He was constantly reading and learning. I've never seen anybody wanting to absorb knowledge more than my father did. And some of you have heard me tell the story. There was a day when I found him reading Candide by Voltaire, and I said, Dad, look, enough's enough here. You don't have anything else to prove. No one in his right mind wants to read Candide by Voltaire. Please stop already. But he knew something about everything. He amazed me. And he told me about communism and the crimes of communism and the jerks who would make excuses for them. And I thought, I am not gonna be one of those terrible people. USA, baby, right? So he rescued me from the default position. Cause I think the default position is leftism. Because in American society, it's sort of assumed that you hold the fashionable leftist view on everything. Because when I hear, well, present company accepted, but when I hear a lot of CEOs of American corporations speak, I know what their opinions are on everything. They're exquisitely predictable. I know what the university professors believe about everything. It's boring. I don't even have to listen to them. I know what they believe. So that is kind of the default position. And you do have to make an effort not to fall into that. And thankfully I had a good dad who rescued me from that. But I also found freedom eventually from neo-conservatism, which I did not even know I belonged to. I just knew I belonged to the non-leftist group of people. And then I came across Murray Rothbard and I came across some other folks who were telling me that these people are imposters. These aren't real conservatives. These people are fakes. What do they want to spread human rights and democracy around the world? What is this, the French Jackabins? And I'm supporting that? What in the world is conservative about this? What's the matter with you? This is crazy left-wing utopianism. You don't support that. You're supposed to believe that this is a fallen world with finite possibilities and not say, well, we could bring feminism to Afghanistan just at the point of a gun. That can't happen. That's not happening. There is not one conservative aspect of any of that. And little by little I came to this conclusion. I came to the conclusion that if they're lying to me about milk subsidies, they may also be lying to me about the foreign policy. I came to that conclusion. And I remember gradually coming to feel like there's a lot of death associated with the U.S. Empire and I'm pretty sure as a conservative who believes in absolute moral standards, I'm supposed to speak out about that. And I'm not supposed to be a moral relativist who says, well, look, if it's the U.S. doing it, they must have a good reason. There's no manual of moral theology that includes that principle. And so I began thinking and rethinking and I was exposed to good people, thank goodness, once again. I just knew something was wrong. And I just came to the conclusion that the state is the locus of sociopathic behavior in the world, both domestically and foreign. In fact, one of my favorite memories of all time was shared with this guy right here, Michael Bolden, back in 2011. You remember what I'm talking about? It was at one of his conferences. It was in Los Angeles. And it was a group, a very diverse group of people in the audience. And some of them were military veterans, even of as recently as the Operation Desert Storm from 1990. I saw people wearing hats, 1991, wearing hats from that. And I was giving a talk about what's wrong with government and all that. And so I talked about Obamacare and a lot of different things and I had everybody with me. But I had to say something about foreign policy and I knew I was gonna lose some of them. But I thought, what would Rothbard do in this situation? Would he say, well, I'm in a group of people where some people aren't gonna like what I say, so I'll just find a lowest common denominator speech and deliver that one. And because I'm not Rothbard, I was briefly tempted to do that. I'll be honest with you. But then I said, you know, what's the point of building up capital with people if you don't then blow it? So what I did, well, you can find this, it's nullify now Los Angeles woods. If you type that in those terms on YouTube, you'll find it. But in those last moments, I said, look, in the 1990s, a lot of innocent people died. And you can say, oh, it was all an accident, we didn't intend that. But they died through totally inhumane sanctions that no conservative worth his salt could possibly have supported. And the figures are just mind boggling. Now I've been told, oh, well, you can't trust the UN figure that 500,000 Iraqi children died of malnourishment or you can't trust the UN. But whether I can trust the UN or not, Madeleine Albright trusted the UN because when she was asked, what do you think about half a million dead children? She said, we believe the price is worth it. She didn't say, oh, that's a phony baloney figure. So in other words, even if that had been the absolute undisputed figure, she was just, well, you know, it's okay. No, that's deranged. Normal people don't talk or think that way. Now if those kids had died in an earthquake or some other kind of natural disaster, everybody would be all tears and pity about it. But they were among the subjects of the two minute hate. We weren't supposed to like that country because we didn't like the guy running it. So therefore we don't like any of the people either. Total leftist view, by the way, that the people in the government are indistinguishable. Why are conservatives going for that? I don't know. It's a disease, neo-conservatism. And so I said to that group, look, you people are better than this. How could you let yourselves get caught up in propaganda like this? If you saw somebody in the Soviet Union making excuses for the Kremlin like this on the basis of no evidence, on the basis of total ridiculous war propaganda, you'd laugh at them. Well, the whole world is laughing at you right now because you've been had by some of the worst people in the world. And you are the same people who lecture the rest of the world about moral relativism, shame on you. Wake up. So I did that. Freedom from neo-conservatism. That's all you have to do, read a few books. You're free, you're out. You've escaped. Now here's another area where I managed to declare a little freedom. Now again, Jeff wanted me to talk about this. So I'm just telling you, Jeff asked me to talk about this. I don't work for a university and I don't work for a big think tank somewhere. And yet, here I am, apparently reasonably well fed, as you can see. Somehow I've managed to make this work. How did I do that? Well, I had to figure it out at some point. I had to figure out, how am I gonna support myself here? I could go into the university system, but I don't want that. I remember when I used to do that and my department chairman correctly broke down the different types of student we had. He said one third of them are gonna be pretty decent and they'll do okay wherever they go. They would have done okay anywhere. Another third, if they really, really, really apply themselves, they can barely scrape by. And the final third are kids we are simply keeping entertained as they march toward oblivion. I thought that's not the best use of my time, right? I can reach a whole heck of a lot more people doing other things. So one thing I did, as Jeff said, first of all, I wrote books, people buy books, but you know, you can't really make a living selling books. Everybody thinks you sell millions of copies when you release a book. You don't, okay? Especially in nonfiction, you don't. You do not sell that many. Whatever number you think I've sold, drop a zero off the end. Nobody reads, even though I've been on the New York Times bestseller list, nobody reads nonfiction. That's just a fact. And you're gonna sit there and say, but all my friends read nonfiction because we all have weird friends, okay? This is not some general principle applicable to the whole world. So what was I gonna do? So I created a product. I thought, well look, people seem to like hearing me talk and they like my whole shtick about, look, you learned a lot of nonsense about US history in your classroom and you were a victim of what I call educational malpractice, I'm gonna cure you of that through my books. Well now I also teach courses. Why not, right? People like books, maybe they'll like courses. Turns out they do. Man, do they ever like them? This, I'm coming up upon five years of my libertyclassroom.com that I created along with other people I trust who will teach real stuff, real economics, real history that you can learn in your car while you're driving along and you can be cured of educational malpractice. So I created that product. Now it's true, you have to pay for this product. Ooh, isn't that terrible? It's behind a paywall. But you know, one of my favorite parts of Atlas Shrugged is that in Gault's Gulch you have to pay to attend somebody's lecture. Good, because somebody works at something you should pay that person. So I'm the guy who when I download freeware I do donate to that, because I say thank you for doing that. I appreciate that. You're not my slave, I'm glad that you're doing what you're doing. But of course when you compare what you would pay for one credit hour at a college and you compare it to the 18 courses I've got and counting, there ain't no comparison, all right? But the thing is I do give tons of stuff away and here's the thing, in the age of the internet you've got to figure out how can you prosper while giving things away? It seems like a contradiction. How could you prosper with a price of zero? And for a price of zero, I've so far given away 857 podcast episodes, not counting the other podcast I do with Bob Murphy, Contra Krugman which is another 75 episodes. The 75th is coming out in case you're wondering where is my episode this week? It's coming out in a couple of hours. I've given away hundreds of videos and articles. I've given away five free e-books, mostly on libertarian topics. I give all these things away for nothing. How do I prosper by giving things away? Answer, they point back to my paid product. I don't need 100% of those people to buy that paid product. I don't need 10%, I don't even need 3%. I can be doing very well if one or 2% of people say if this guy's show is this good, maybe his courses are real good, that's all I need. And it works, it works. I give away free e-books on libertarians, like I have one called 14 Hard Questions for Libertarians Answered. These are all, I have a little page for this, thomsfreebooks.com, thomsfreebooks.com. And you download it and you say wow, this is just super duper. But there is a cost. Yes, it seems like zero, there's a small cost. What's the price? Your email address. That's what I want. Now it's true, you can hop off my email list anytime you want to, but there'd have to be something mentally wrong with you because I have the best email list in the world. Thank you, thank you. See, these people know. I email a lot, I email every day. And I build a relationship with that list and eventually your resistance weakens. Eventually you just join Liberty Classroom. You just can't take it anymore because every day I'm mailing you about some current event and I say now look, you know, if this boob had been a member of Liberty Classroom he wouldn't have made all these errors, right? So I have a little bit of a pitch at the end just like at the end of any TV show. You don't say I'm not watching that show anymore, there was a commercial at the end. Nobody says that. Nobody begrudges you an ad at the end so I have a little pitch at the end. But I do this every day. Now by the way, all the gurus of email marketing tell you do not email every day. That's too much. They all tell you that, okay? I am enjoying laughing at those people from my beautiful balcony on a luxurious cruise ship passage on which I paid for with all the money I've earned by emailing every day, all right? Do not listen to those people. They have no idea what they're talking about. The more you email, the better, happier your life is. So I do that and I learned how to do that by studying what the experts are doing. I learned things. I've also become free. I do not have to be a povertarian. I can do this without being a povertarian. And here I wanna point out, if Harry Brown had been around today writing about freedom in an unfree world, I mean, his mind would be blown at the opportunities. Blown at the opportunities. And most people just sitting there going, yeah, that's kinda neat that we got these opportunities. Now let me go dig ditches for a living. No, no, what's the matter with you? You are surrounded by opportunities thanks to the internet. Forget about being a libertarian for a minute. A musician has a fighting chance. An independent musician has a fighting chance now being heard. I had Leah McHenry on my show. She's an expert at this. She makes a living from her music even though she's just an independent musician. Now most independent musicians to say that they make a living with their music, it's not really true, right? There's no way you can do it. But she's become an expert at it. She lives off selling her music. She teaches other musicians how to do it. And the answer, it comes from leveraging the tools of the internet, most of which are free. The average person can learn how to go make a documentary and market it to the public. Authors can publish books even if a big house doesn't wanna publish them. An author can publish a book on his own and market it on his own and build up a reputation on the basis of that book. This is unbelievable. We've never, ever in the history of the world seen anything like this, what individuals can do. It's a miracle. You can make a YouTube video that in theory can be viewed by practically everybody on earth. And this happens every day and so we just kind of don't think about it. We should think about it, that's amazing. That's amazing. And I use these tools to support my five kids. And I see so many libertarian academics out there who are following the customary path and they're teaching universities and that's great because we want normal people teaching at the universities. I'm not saying they shouldn't. But they're almost all unknown because they have no idea how to promote themselves. They have no idea how to use any of these tools and it's like the word marketing has become toxic among libertarians. Walter Block wrote a great book called Defending the Undefendable then he had a sequel and he would go through all these people everybody hates like the slumlord and he would say, look, the slumlord is providing low cost housing. You're not. So maybe we cut him some slack, you know? Well likewise, marketing. Most people libertarians included, they don't want to hear about, marketing's a scam. You're manipulating people and marketing's all a scam. I don't want to hear about it. All right, well you know what? I'm using marketing really well to promote myself so I want to learn about it. And as a matter of fact, think about something like the arthritis pain remedy, Icy Hot. This product has helped an enormous number of people. People write in to the Icy Hot company to tell them my life is totally transformed now. I can actually go out with my grandchildren again. I can do things. I can be mobile again thanks to this product. That's how good that product is. But if they hadn't heard about it, if nobody had figured out how to market it to them, it may as well not even exist. So if libertarians aren't gonna stand up for marketers and marketing, who the heck is? It is a highly honorable thing to do and it's a fascinating thing to learn about. Or think about this, think about that. Again, you don't even have to be a libertarian for this. Think about the difference between 1957 and today. Oh, the 1950s are really where it's at, we're told. That's when the economy was super great. Whereas today, the individual gets crushed by free trade and big organizations. All right, I've heard all that. Every bit of that is nonsense. That is absolutely insane to say that. I'll give you a great example, because I've been talking about this on one of my email lists. Think about the difference between opening a brick and mortar store, as you would have had to do in 1957, because there's no other kind, and opening an e-commerce online store. You open a brick and mortar store, wait, gotta go to the bank, borrow a million bucks, then you gotta fill your shelves with products you gotta crush, your fingers are gonna sell, otherwise you gotta ship them back and you don't know what to do. You gotta hope the right people come into your store and you gotta hope it becomes profitable by like week 10 or your overhead and your utilities and your wages are gonna crush you. Oh, that sounds like a wonderful life. Yeah, gee, yeah. Oh, bring back 1957, I wish I could have that. Okay, how about an e-commerce store? You open an online store, you go to the bank and borrow zero because you have no physical location. You don't have to stuff your shelves with things you're crossing your fingers about because you have no shelves. So what do you do instead? You identify products through various means that different demographics are buying and you just experiment with the products. You see what's selling, you see what groups are most responsive and you sell more of that to more of those people. It takes practice, but it ain't brain surgery and you don't have to worry, well, if I'm not profitable by the 12th week, the whole thing comes crashing down. No, it doesn't. You have almost no overhead. You can take your time on this. You can take three months off, go on vacation, it'll still be waiting for you. The opportunities are unbelievable, but unfortunately Woods's Law comes into play. Woods's Law is nobody ever does anything. They hear all these amazing opportunities that are all around them that are practically bashing them over their head with a hammer and they don't do it and they say, oh yeah, that's really nice. Let me get back to digging ditches. All right, if you want to dig ditches, don't say I didn't try to talk you out of it. All right, so how about what I do personally? Well, I got the Ron Paul home school curriculum that I've worked for. I created 400 videos for that on history and government and it almost killed me and I'm not joking. It was an unbelievable amount of work to research and create all those. It was unbelievable. But I love the Ron Paul home school curriculum. I love it because for one thing, it teaches kids stuff, they're not gonna learn anywhere else. So yeah, it teaches them history and math and science and all that. But it teaches them stuff nobody's gonna teach them at high school. Teach them how to open your own small business. Teach them how to write effective advertising copy. Now I know we also don't like advertising as evil. Nope, advertising is noble. I will not for a minute accept advertising as evil. It is not. It is a very important service. And if you know how to write effective advertising copy, you will not be poor. You will not be poor. And you are gonna learn that in the Ron Paul home school curriculum. They teach you how to start your own YouTube channel, how to start a blog, how to be an effective public speaker. Who's teaching that in high school? He asks rhetorically, right? Or the science courses, by middle school, the kids are building their own radios and their own robots. And so the kids are flying through the science courses because they're just dying to learn all this stuff. So I promote this. I'm a credible promoter of this program because I created 400 of the videos. So you can trust me when I say I know a little something about this program. So I've created my own site dedicated to that program, RonPaulHomeschool.com. And on my site, if you join the curriculum through me, I throw in Liberty Classroom for free. I throw in one of my autograph books for free. I created a whole extra course for you for free if you just joined through RonPaulHomeschool.com. I earn a commission from this. You earn $160 worth of free bonuses and the RonPaul curriculum gets a new member. There's no loser here. Actually, no, I'll tell you who the loser is. The loser is the envious person who never gets off his lazy ass and who hates seeing other people earn money. That's the only loser. So I do that. Or I do wanna, again, promoting stuff as an affiliate. This is the easiest way to earn money in the history of the world. I mean, talk about liberating yourself, becoming free. This is the easiest thing in the history of the world. So for instance, a lot of people who listen to my podcast are thinking about starting websites, all right? Well, you wanna get your web hosting through my link, I get a commission. But I'm gonna give you bonuses that are worth more than my commission. I'll mention your website on my show, which has a lot of listeners. That will give you a good response out of the gate. I'll link to your website on the show notes page for that episode. And the way Google works, if a link rich website like mine that Google loves is linking to you, Google takes that to mean you must have a good site. And so you'll show up in the search engines a bit higher. I throw in that for free. I give you 24 video tutorials showing you how to start blogging. And I let you into my private Facebook group for bloggers who used my link. I have two private Facebook groups, one of them's for that. Now, these are all worth many times the little commission I earn, but they all cost me nothing. They cost me nothing, and I earn a commission from them, and people get these awesome, but we have hundreds of people now in my private Facebook group where we plot, we're bloggers and we plot together. How can we be an empire, a libertarian empire if you can accept that phrase, okay? So all these, now I've actually, I explain all this. I actually, I wrote a whole e-book explaining everything I do. And here's one of my little methods here. You got one of these phones and usually you're at these events and people say, take out your phone. They treat you like you're seven. Take out your phone and turn it off or put it on silent. You know, like you're some idiot. I'm gonna assume you guys are awesome because what I'm gonna tell you to do is take your phone out and use it right now because I will send you this e-book. Just shows you everything I do. Everything I do is how I'm doing it. And all you gotta do is you gotta text a word to the number 44222. You text the word prosper to the number 44222, you will automatically get my book. Cost you nothing. There it is. You will be added to my email list that is related to this subject. But again, unless there's something wrong with you, you will enjoy being on that list. All right, let me tell you something. You better believe I'm teaching my kids this. They are not gonna waste their time flipping burgers. That's mind-numbing. They're not doing that. I'm gonna teach them the opportunities that are around them. I show them already. This is how I make a living. They say, well, wait a minute. All you're doing is giving things away and we're going on a vacation based on the money from giving things away. And I said, yeah, how about that? Isn't that insane? And so I'm gonna teach them this because I want them to go out in the world, even if they wanna have a traditional career, that's great. I want them to have a fallback. I want them to know in a pinch, I can do this. And so in other words, I don't wanna just write about how awesome capitalism is. I've written a lot about that. I wanna be an example of it. I wanna actually do it, not just talk about it, not just theorize about it, I wanna do it. And let's get back to Harry Brown for a minute because he didn't just write how I found freedom in an unfree world. He also wrote the secret of selling anything. See, he wasn't embarrassed about sales and marketing and any of that stuff. He didn't think that was something to be ashamed of. He was proud of it and that is a tremendous skill and that's a tremendous book. That is how you find freedom in an unfree world. So politics, in other words, as Jeff said, politics is not everything. You have a wide scope in many areas of your life to create for yourself the life you want. And if you don't, then the terrorists have won. Thank you.