 Hello, and welcome to Wrecked, the Michael Wrecked and Walden podcast. In honor of today's guests, I'll begin by quoting a passage I wrote a couple weeks ago. Let the NPCs live in prison in 15-minute cities under constant surveillance, wearing masks and submitting to endless useless vaccines or worse. Let them survive on UBI issued in CBDC with digital IDs that track their every move from cradle to grave. Let them forgo real meat and eat synthetic meat, toxic vegetables and bugs. Let them submit to smart city technologies that track their carbon footprints and issue their social credit scores so they feel like good, compliant citizens. Let them have their Marxism, critical race theory, transgenderism and servility to the ever-burgeoning state. Let them think that they are radicals while they served as the foot soldiers and accomplices of the globalist elite. It's time to separate from these people. No reconciliation is possible. The only question is whether the totalitarians they serve will let us out. My guest today is Tom Woods. Tom is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute and the author of a dozen books including The New York Times bestseller, The Politically Incorrect Guide to History and Meltdown on the Financial Crisis. His book The Church and the Market, a Catholic defense of the free economy, won the $50,000 prize in the Templeton Enterprise Awards. Tom's articles have appeared in dozens of popular and scholarly periodicals and his books have been translated into dozens of languages. Tom hosts the Tom Woods show, a Liberty podcast that releases a new episode every weekday. Hello and welcome to Rectom. Glad to be here, Michael. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for coming on. I'm an avid reader. I'm glad you have a show and I'm glad it's called Rect. Was that your idea? Yes, it was. Yes. That's great. I had a little bit of pushback on that name, not from the Mises Institute, but from my son who thought it was too much, but I went with it anyway. No, never. I think it's brilliant. Thanks. So I'm an avid reader of your newsletter. I read it every day and I just want to make one comment about it and that is something you probably don't hear very often. For example, you're an excellent writer. Your newsletters and other writing are consistently excellent. You take complex ideas and make them crystal clear. I don't think a lot of people really understand how hard that is to do. Anyway, that's something I just wanted to say. That is high praise coming from an author like you, Michael. So thank you. My pleasure. I enjoy doing it. I love it. And in a way, it's kind of like what I used to do in high school when I used to be a math tutor. I was the math tutor. They sent all the athletes who were in danger of academic disqualification to do because they figured if Woods can't fix this student, then forget it. And all I did was I just explained the math the way I wish somebody had explained it to me. And I would consistently get people saying, well, if they had explained it like this, I would have gotten it. And so I've taken that and just applied it, you know, wherever. I mean, because obviously there are a lot of complicated issues out there like in economics and beyond. And so I just think, OK, well, I would have found it a lot clearer if people had said X. So I just say X from the start. Absolutely. I had the same sort of experience teaching writing in the university. Basically, I was not the smartest, you know, most brilliant professor in the world. And so it helped me actually teach people because I can see where they might not understand something because I struggled to understand things. So that helps, I think, a great deal in teaching. And in writing, it helps to know where people are coming from to make sense of things for them because, as you said, there's a lot of complex issues, especially in connection with libertarianism. So you boil it down so well. And for that, I really appreciate that. Thank you. So I want to note a common theme in some of your recent newsletters, which I find fascinating and something that I think about myself quite a bit. And that is, you've highlighted the possibility that rather than mirroring competence in terms of these elites, of these so-called elites, this regime, we may be dealing with something else. Perhaps we're dealing with malevolence and nefarious intent. These state actors, for example, and their accomplices locked us down, wrecked the economy, shred the social fabric, caused increased suicide rates, forced vaccinations on people, and precipitated inflation. Are they just incompetent or are they evil? That seems to be something you've grappled with in recent writing. Could you talk about that a little bit? I'm moving away from, I guess, the maybe naive view I used to have, which I look back on now with a bit of a smirk. Because I used to think this was a matter of, well, these people just don't understand economics. But it can only go so long without picking up some economics by osmosis or something, or not noticing that everything you do makes things worse. And I think back to what some of my friends have told me over the years, which was if we were dealing just with honest mistakes by good faith actors, then you would think by accident they would occasionally do the right thing. But yet, especially in recent years, it's consistently one wicked thing after another. One thing after another that would make your life worse over and over and over again. And I think that the key to this insight is remembering that very rarely does an evil regime announce, we're doing the following things to make you miserable because we're an evil regime. They're never going to say that. What are they going to say? We're doing these things for your health. We're doing these things for your well-being. We're doing these things because the earth will be destroyed if we don't do them. I mean, come on, of course, that's how they're going to talk. And then you think, well, if I were designing a system that was intended to entrench the elites and really grind the average person's nose in it, what kinds of things would I do? And it's pretty much exactly what they're doing. And so I think at this point, especially after what they did for several years with lockdowns, restrictions, mandates of various kinds, I don't think these people deserve the benefit of the doubt. I think my natural inclination is to assume malevolence now until proven otherwise. And that's not my fault. That's because of their track record of acting like this. Yeah, I mean, they're going to call us conspiracy theorists for this. And this is their typical epithet to throw at everybody that reposes this. Right. And not too much. They're all doing the same thing. I mean, OK, we had the exception of Sweden, Belarus, I suppose. I mean, here and there you found some exceptions. But they were all pretty much doing exactly the same thing. And what this was all just a coincidence that they all just did exactly the same thing. Maybe it is a coincidence. Sometimes people do the exact exactly the same thing and it's just a coincidence. But I think about the example of Lori Lightfoot, who was a former mayor of Chicago. Now she's got a position as a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. And think about what is it that she's got the fellowship in? Leadership and health. Now, health, forget about it, because all she did was repeat all the stuff that hurt people. But leadership, her quote leadership consisted of doing exactly what every other blue state mayor did. And that was leadership. No, the real leadership would be those dissident governors who said, I think there's something wrong with Fauci and we're going to do something different. That's leadership. Her leadership was doing exactly what everybody else did. And in this crazy world, that's supposed to be leadership. I'm sorry, but I smell a rat there. Yeah, these people seem to fail upwards. I mean, this happens that no matter what they do, in fact, the worst they do, the more they get promoted. You know, look at Pete Buttigieg and Laurie Lightfoot, as you said, and others. But speaking of leaders, recently, and you're not alone in this amongst libertarians, I think, you've expressed some agreement with and support. I'm not saying you're going to vote for them, but you've you've expressed some support for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. What do you like about them? Well, there are some things I don't like about them and that have also actually emerged in recent days and weeks. But the thing is, given the things he's good on, it's I can I don't know if I want to say I can overlook other things. But yeah, maybe I can overlook other things because he's so good on so many things that matter. Like I sometimes think about somebody like Bill Weld, you know, former governor of Massachusetts, libertarian party, vice presidential candidate. I mean, this guy is a stuffed shirt if you ever saw one. And maybe he's good on some wonkish policy thing or whatever. But but I think about issues that have affected me very, very dramatically, having to do with health, so-called public health, which I can't utter the expression of the term public health any longer without having contemptuous quotation marks around around those words. But matters like that, the military industrial complex. Can you imagine Bill Weld talking about the military industrial complex? Not possible. Would never, ever, ever happen. The surveillance state. He he as far as I can see wants to pardon. You know, he's he says he's looking into the matter of Ross Ulbricht. So he's not as good as Vivek Ramaswamy, who says he would give clemency to all of them. But Snowden and Assange, there's no justification for what's been done to them. These are the kinds of people who are unfashionable in media circles and unfashionable in mainstream politics. But they have a champion in this guy who also I think it's great to hear a voice on the Democratic left saying, you know, maybe shutting down society might have hurt the most vulnerable people we have, which should be obvious to the world. But we spent three years pretending it wasn't to have that kind of a voice out there. I mean, I don't know if any sane people are still in the Democratic Party, but I bet some people are just by inertia. And I bet some of them do have the kind of instincts of an RFK, but they don't dare say anything because they've been told that that's wrong and their grandma killers and whatever. So to have somebody like that in that kind of position, I think is is is very helpful and important. I think the the worst things that that I associate with him, which is some of the worst environmentalism, well, he would need a compliant Congress for most of that. But most of the things that he would want to do that I agree with are things that can be done on the president's own say so. So I, you know, again, I don't know if I'm, you know, where my vote would go or all that. But to hear a voice like this, yes, yes, I'm all too aware of his of his problems. But he could activate some some dormant voices in his party that might help bring some sanity back. I don't have much long term hope for the Democrats, but I feel like they're at war with everything I cherish. So anybody throwing a monkey wrench into the works of that is to be encouraged. Oh, and by the way, when they told him they being the Democratic Party of New Hampshire, don't you speak at the event that the Free State Project is holding at Porkfest? Don't you speak there? Because those are terrible, crazy extremists, they would say. You should do X, Y and Z. Some people would have buckled and would have said, OK, I'm sorry, what a big mistake. Please accept my apology. Instead, he told them to go stick it. He said, I am sick and tired of the kind of people who run the New York, the New Hampshire Republican Party, the Democratic Party. I am sick and tired of these people and they're telling me what I can and can't do and people I can and can't talk to. I'm not going to be told who I can and can't talk to. I don't talk to anybody I don't. Well, please, that's a breath of fresh air. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, what do you think about the the recent reason slashing of him, their trashing of him and their podcast in a podcast and then I think in an article as well on, you know, for effectively saying, look, I think the the people that are running things are wicked. I mean, what they're doing is wicked. And he just, you know, and then for that, they said that he was garbage, that he's crazy, that he's some kind of a conspiracy theorist. Right. Now, they did do an interview with him and I heard some people saying they didn't like the way the interview went. But then I went and saw it and I thought it wasn't actually so bad and that they gave him time to defend himself. And incidentally, I'll say in parentheses, that's another notable thing about him. Is that when you give him a while to give him time to explain himself, he can give you long explanations with citations and names of journal articles and the year they were published and whatever. And, you know, look, if we had somebody on our side who was that prominent in public life, who could debate like that and who could who had the facts and figures at the ready, this would be a very different country. I'm convinced. So so he's very, very good with stuff like that. So you mentioned my newsletter. Well, my newsletter is where I actually did write a little something about this. And you can get it. Tom Woods.com is where you can get it right at the top of the page. You also get a free ebook because who would I be if I weren't giving away a free ebook along with the subscription of the newsletter? But it's newsletter is free. The ebook is free. But I did write a little something about an editorial video made by now. I can't remember her name. I'm sorry. I'm drawing a blank. But some some writer there. And when I read what some of the criticisms are, I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing. That one of the criticisms was he says the establishment is corrupt at best and evil at worst. And I thought, yeah, OK, so I mean, what what would the establishment need to do more than it has done already to demonstrate that it does not have your best interests at heart and that it is evil at the very, very least corrupt, but at worst evil. And I just thought, who in the libertarian world? Why are you in the libertarian world? If you think we have a basically OK establishment staffed by pretty good well-meaning people, they just need a few economics lessons. I don't think I would bother. I think I would just be happy that I live in a in a, you know, a just society with sensible and smart people running it. I don't think I would care as much. Yeah, absolutely. It's just astounding that they that they would pick them up on such a thing and that they would suggest that he is dangerous just because he he finds problems with corruption, which is endemic to the whole structure. You know, he is a standard welfare state liberal, you might say. And he's also, you know, what we might call a climate change conspiracy theorist to throw one of their epithets back in their faces. Is there anything else you find terribly, truly terribly, truly terrible about his views? Well, the other day, the New York Post misquoted him or or or gave people a false impression about one of his opinions. And in response to that, he's gone way overboard talking about his devotion to Israel and his dedication to the state of Israel. And this goes to show I'm not an anti-Semite. And it was a really pathetic display that you and you would think he would be above that. But it goes to show as as outspoken and tough as he can be, there's only one Ron Paul in this world. Right, absolutely. Um, let's move on to something else. Recently, year Yaren Brooke, the chairman of the Einrand Institute, condemned you, Tom Woods, in a podcast calling you anti-American and morally relativist. I don't know how he could call you the latter, unless that is American foreign policy is considered absolutely correct, no matter what. And any opposition must be deemed morally relativist. It seems that the ARI has taken the worst views of Rand, particularly her conflating of the Liberty Movement with US militarism and magnified them. Do you have any additional thoughts on this condemnation and this institute? Yeah, I'm not I'm I have zero concern about it. I wrote about it because, you know, I write a daily newsletter and this was like red meat, this was like a this was like a big old meatball right over the plate, you know, for me to hit. Yeah. So I so I did it. But but it seems like at least with with them, the institutionalization of objectivism has not led to good results. And it has led to I mean, I I don't know how I don't know how to characterize it really. But I realized when this happened that it was 15 years ago that I wrote a blog entry at lurockwell.com criticizing these exact people for their views on foreign policy and in particular for their views on arguing that it should that that countries that that like like the US that stand for, quote, individual rights should not feel constrained in their in the way they conduct warfare when it comes to innocent civilian populations, they are to blame those people in those countries. They are to blame because and they live in, quote, terrorist countries, which is a complete these are supposed to be anti-collectivist thinkers. That's a collectivist concept, the idea of a, quote, terrorist country. And so we can do we can do what we want because our regime is enforcing individual rights. And it seems to me that's moral relativism. You know, we can we can carry out all sorts of moral enormities, but because we're doing it in the in the name of this, that or the other thing. And half the time we are doing it in the name of imperial ambition or enriching fat cats. And, you know, it's very quaint to see the the the sweet naive people at the Iran Institute think that when the US government explains why it's doing something, it's always giving you the true explanation. It's to fight for democracy and this, that and the other thing. And individual rights and they just jump right on board for that. Absolute. That is what it is all about. And you think, geez, how much clearer could these people make it? This is not what drives them, especially when you look at the regimes they choose to wrangle with and the regimes they, you know, they coddle doesn't seem to leave a very distinct pattern, you know. But so to hear this, to hear them taking this all at face value and then having taken it all at face value, never once talking about the military industrial complex, the problems there, the incentives. They're not once, but but then it's suggesting that we could just absolutely lay waste. We could use nuclear weapons if we wanted to against a foe. Again, to me, that looks like that's moral relativism that well, if as long as the US government says it's OK than incinerating all those people is fine. Now, you as a private individual probably shouldn't go incinerate people. But if the US regime is doing it, we know they have good intentions because go look at read the Constitution for yourself. I mean, it's like I think one article is all I need for this. Yeah, I guess they also support the proxy war in Ukraine. Well, of course. I mean, if the establishment tells them jump, they say how high? Yeah. Well, it does throw the Mises Institute into relief with that. I mean, in fact, it shows the difference between objectivism as practiced at least today and libertarianism as upheld by the Mises Institute that we don't the Mises Institute in particular doesn't fall for this kind of militarism and it doesn't fall for this kind of defense of the regime at all costs and at the cost of all principles. And by the way, I say this as somebody who rather likes I ran. Obviously, as with anybody, I have some disagreement, some major, some minor. But some of the things she did were very, very impressive. Her nonfiction, which most people overlook, is really, really biting and devastating. But in her fiction, she's got in Atlas shrugged the passage about the 20th century motor company. And at this company, they were going to implement actually in the function of their company, the principle from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. And that sounds like a very noble principle. But as you watch it unfold as somebody, she's she's telling us this story through the voice of a worker who worked at the 20th century motor company. And you watch it unfold and you realize every stage of this unfolding horror is completely plausible. This is exactly how it would go. And I find it to be such a convincing passage that I suppose it's it's my next daughter's turn now, I realize. But I have been reading this passage to each daughter of mine as they get old enough to understand it. Because I believe this one story alone is enough to inoculate you against this kind of stuff. This one it is so compellingly written. So now Amy Woods, it's your turn for dad to read you the 20th century motor company passage from the shrug. It's absolutely great. So I don't go in. It's not that I'm going into this. I don't like I'm Rand. I think I think I think she was a very, very impressive woman. Yeah, absolutely. And very prescient as well, because the we're seeing this being implemented this kind of this kind of philosophy within companies now with the stakeholder capitalism and the ESG index. This is actually happening as we speak. And she in some ways indirectly anticipated the kind of question you open this conversation up with, which is, are we dealing with stupid or evil? Because she would say, given that we know that market economies have lifted more people out of poverty than any force anywhere in the world, if we have people who claim they want to help the poor, but they don't support the free market, I don't see why we automatically assume these are people of goodwill. Because the solution to your problem is staring you in the face and you can't even be bothered to look for it, then maybe there's something else motivating you. It could be envy. It could be a lust for destruction. It could be a desire to rule to rule over people, whatever it is, it ain't your pure desire to uplift them from poverty. At least willful ignorance is evil, and we might say that they may willfully resist the facts, resist history, resist what we can see as clearly the case, and effectively institute these things anyway, because it's a kind of willful willful ignorance, at least at the best. And on the other hand, it might be something else at worst. Now, I know you didn't want to talk about your forthcoming book, but I just thought I'd ask one question about it. It's entitled Diary of a Psychosis, How Public Health Disgrates Itself During COVID Mania. Can you give any preview as to what this might be about? Yeah, I mean, there are already books on COVID, so I initially thought I'm not going to do one. And my last book came out nine years ago, and I kind of thought I was retired from this, because it's hard work writing a book. You know that, Michael Recton-Wald. It's hard work, and being in promotional mode all the time is rough. You know, I mean, you don't make a lot of money on each particular book. You know, you're talking like a few dollars, and yet you've got to be promoting it at every possible opportunity. I'm just exhausted from this. I don't want to do it. So I decided I don't want to do it. It's a lot of work. I don't want to do it. But then I realized, wait a minute, I've read a lot of good books on COVID. The one thing they're missing is one thing that I actually have. And that comes from the fact that, as you say, I've written this weekday newsletter, and I wrote it. Of course, I continued writing it all through the COVID times. And that meant that the manuscript I have has a diary kind of vibe to it, because instead of making generalities, I'm walking you through this day they did this, and then they did this, and then they did this. So kind of building the dystopia day by day. Now, not every single day, the book would be unwieldy, but the key entries, in effect, like diary entries, I've brought together into this manuscript. And the idea is that even those of us like you and me who followed this pretty carefully, I can tell you, I forgot 75% of the crazy stuff they did until I went back and looked at what I wrote. I thought, oh my gosh, I forgot they said this, and they said that. And so this captures some of the madness that has kind of fallen between our fingers, captures it in perpetuity, for posterity. It captures it in a book forever, some of the madness. But more than that, every day, or let's say a lot of the days, I would look at a chart or two charts, and it would compare a place that was doing X to a place that was not doing X. And it would compare places that were demographically identical. So you can't say, oh, well, this one is less sickly than this one. Or whatever it is, whatever the excuse is, you can't do that because these people are identical. The only difference between them is one of them has a mask mandate and one doesn't, or one of them has a vaccine mandate and one doesn't. So let's compare them and just see what the results were. And you can see that there is no connection whatsoever between anything they did and any of the results. And that surprised even me because I was initially thinking the way I'd have to argue this is, well, yeah, they may have had some good consequences, but there were some terrible side effects too. I don't even have to argue it like that. There were no good consequences. And you think I'm exaggerating. The presentation of this book is absolutely relentless. It is relentless. By the end of it, if you are a person with an open mind, a person of good will, there's no way you can accept, for a minute, any of the standard narrative. Now, I realize that when I talk to this audience or related audiences, that some people listening will say, look, this was never about a, quote, virus. This was never about health. It was always about control. So it doesn't matter for you to bother pointing out that this policy didn't work. It isn't even the point. Whether it worked or not was not what was driving them. Well, I don't know if I'm entirely that cynical, but even if I were, my point is there got to be 100 million Americans who think these things either did work or were supposed to work. They absolutely believe that. And so before you start telling them, oh, by the way, it's lizard people who are running the world, I do think that step one is showing them none of this stuff worked. That is the first step. Well, if none of this stuff worked, then that gets them thinking in productive ways. Well, then why did we stick to it for so long or whatever? Or are these people as competent as we think? Or should I listen to these people in the future? Or should I listen to them on other things? It gets them thinking in very productive ways to first establish that the stuff didn't work. And yes, I know that producing charts is not going to convince Joe Biden not to do this again in the future. I'm not trying to convince Joe Biden. I'm trying to convince average Joe American who doesn't quite know what to think. He does feel like some of it seems like BS, but all the official sources tell him it was the right thing to do. So he doesn't quite know what to think. I want to tell him, Joe American, you're right to be skeptical of this. And here's the evidence. That's what I'm trying to accomplish with this book. And that's not nothing. No, that's that's a big task. And it's very important to capture the historical record. And you did it in a journaling type fashion, which, you know, details it day by day, which will then give people, you know, a chronicle of the, it'll be a kind of COVID chronicle that pits the narrative against, you know, reality. I think that's hugely important. In fact, thank you, Michael. In fact, let me add one more thing because I've decided that I'm going to give away a volume two of this book for free to anybody who asks for it. It'll be electronic version, but it'll be for anybody who asks for it. Full length book. And this one is going to be called COVID stories. And I don't remember offhand exact, exact wording of my subtitle, but I have it here. It's COVID. Yeah. Oh, tell me, tell me what my subtitle is, Michael. It's COVID stories, victims of the lockdown regime speak out. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Because as, as you know, having, we all lived through this, that you were not exactly encouraged to talk about ways in which the lockdowns damaged your business or your health or your kids' lives or whatever. That was not allowed because if you, if you question any of this, there's something wrong with you mentally. You want to see people die, whatever. But these people have some stories to tell. And if we're going to tell the full story of this tale, it has to include those stories. If historians in the future are going to tell this tale, it has to include those, the kinds of stories that the New York Times did not follow up on. So what I'm going to be, it's not set up yet, but I'll have a website for the book. And on that website, I'll say, by the way, if you buy this book and you'd like the second volume, all you got to do is, you know, just get it right here. And so what I've done is I've made an appeal to people on my newsletter list. And I've said, if you are one of these people who has a story of deprivation and sadness and loss caused by these measures themselves, then please submit it to me and tell me if you want me to use your name, whether or not. I mean, I prefer to use names, but I can have a handful of entries that will be anonymous for obvious reasons. But I'd like to compile a book of these stories. So anybody listening to this now, if that's you, and these stories can take any form, if it involved avoidable human suffering, then just send it to me. If you go to tomwoods.com, you'll see at the top, there's a contact page. I receive those like an email. Just submit it to me right in there, and I'll get back to you and thank you for it. But I bet people listening right now, you know what I'm talking about. You know about people who committed suicide, or even lesser things like that than that, people who were ostracized at work, or lost friends, or whatever it is, or your father died alone, or whatever the story is, I'd like to have it to put in this book that I'm going to be giving away. I make no money on this. It's just somebody's got to compile these stories. So just send me your story, tomwoods.com, on the contact page. Yeah, that's excellent. One of the stories you included in one of your newsletters, it was I think a young woman in Boston. I forget what her career was, but she was also a sufferer of bipolar disorder and had been on a medical regime and had been stabilized for, I guess, years, or for some period of time. And thanks to the COVID lockdown regime, you know, basically went spiraling out of control. Yeah, the gains she had made started to be lost. And I mean, I thought from the very beginning that people who really, really are suffering with depression or related types of things, this social distancing thing is a death sentence for them. And even if it doesn't mean they're physical deaths, it means a kind of death in what's being asked of them. Absolutely. I think to show stories of people like that or who are vulnerable to begin with, I think it's very important, because that's the kind of people that actually exist out there, and we shouldn't pretend like they don't. It's funny, Michael, I went back and looked through old copies of my newsletter, and one of them said somebody should write a book called COVID Stories, and I thought, here I am doing it. I knew this was a good idea. Yeah, I often take hints from people on social media without them knowing it, you know. And actually, they give me a lot of ideas for what kind of topics to plumb and research. I try to give them credit for it, but you can't really give credit to everybody. It becomes too difficult. So I thank them basically globally. I thank them globally for everything they've suggested, and I think we both have probably benefited from such comments. Oh, absolutely. There has to be some upside to putting up with Twitter. I got to get something out of this. Yeah, absolutely. It's terrible, generally, and I'm still basically shadow banned there, suppressed in many ways, but I continue to use it for, you know, just giving the outside chance that I might break through with something in terms of what I'm trying to get across. Well, the thing is, even if you curate your following in such a way that you're following only interesting people, or people with good manners, or people who feel who's message is going to be uplifting, the problem is some of those people occasionally interact with not such good people, and their interactions will show up in your feed. And then I get, because of my temperament, I get drawn into them because I can't just, you know, people say just scroll past easier said than done when you're me. Right. I hear you. I'm the same way. The trolls get me almost every time. I know. And I want to pretend that they don't. But I mean, I can't do it. Speaking of such, you know, I'd like to move a little bit towards a more, you know, some more about your private professional life. What amazes me is how much you do. It's so prodigious that I'm just in awe. And I would ask you about the secret of your success, except that it's not a secret. You publicize and share all this regularly with your school of life and other efforts. And I'm still amazed at your prodigious output. Can you tell us like, what is your daily routine? How do people follow in your footsteps? Which I think many should, and I don't mean by being you per se, but following in your habits. You know, how do you manage to do all this incredible work, especially under current conditions? You know, but I recommend people being as entrepreneurial as possible. And that's one of the recommendations in my recent most book, because you don't want to be working for these institutions that can cancel you on a dime. So how do they do that in short? I know you have whole programs set up to address this question, but I think it's an important thing that you've added to the movement. And that is not just theory. You're telling people about practice and how they can improve their lives directly, not simply by knowing the correct theory of the state and the correct economic principles, but what they can do to improve their lives. So can you just kind of give us a brief? Yeah, sure. A little something about that and a little something about time management and stuff like that. I did launch something in February 2022 called the Tom Woods School of Life. The name for that was given to me by a guy named Jay Abraham. If you look him up, he's one of the top executive coaches in the world. And he came up with the idea for the whole thing. And it was that, Tom, I think your followers know an awful lot about libertarianism now and there's nothing wrong. That's great. And for the sake of your intellectual pleasure, you should learn more and more. But he said, I bet the kind of things keeping them up at night are not, I need more information about the non-aggression principle, or I need more about George Washington. Was he a good military strategist or not? You can get that information if you really need it. But the kinds of things keeping my people up at night are, I've got to educate my kids in a world that hates me. How am I going to do that? Especially when they feel like they can't homeschool, they haven't got the time. There are alien ideologies that want to colonize their kids' minds. That keeps them up. Or my money loses its purchasing power, but all I hear in the libertarian world is buy gold. But that can't possibly be the full strategy. So what am I actually, what practical thing am I supposed to do? Or I don't particularly fancy trying to go back on the job market when I'm 55. So I'd like to learn how to run my own little business, but I don't know where to begin and I have no budget for this. So what do I do? So it's practical things, one practical thing after another. I've had a hostage negotiator on to talk about how to get what you want from other people. That's a practical skill to know. So every single thing we've talked about is a practical thing. So during COVID we were talking about which states should you move to. And so I had prominent people from a number of states come on and make the pitch for their state and then I published a report on how to relocate on a budget. Maybe that state or that city is crushing your soul, but you can't leave because you don't have the money. So all sorts of things like that we cover. But it's not just that we, it's not like a series of recordings. The idea of it is the main value proposition is what we call the accountability groups. We break into groups of 10 to 15 people virtually and these groups are on different topics. Fitness, so we have people trying to lose weight, business and entrepreneurship, people trying to start or grow businesses. We have a tech group. We have all different, sort of we have a women's group and they meet every week and each person talks about who, here's what I'm working on and here's what I'm having trouble with and then everybody else gives advice and or helps them make connections. Oh, I know somebody who could help you with this. And then at the end of the session, at the end people say, all right, well, my goal for next week is to do this particular finite thing. And that goal setting makes people, you don't want to show up and tell all your friends, oh, I'm a bum and I didn't do it. It keeps you moving forward. Sometimes when you work on a project by yourself and you hit a snag, you just give up on it. But this group is going to keep you on that path to reaching that goal. And so an example, the guy who runs the Kevin Dolan's, the guy who runs our groups and he says he had a guy in a fitness group and he was consistent. He showed up every single week and every single week he was there to report how badly he was doing. He says, oh, I ate some cookies. It was somebody's wedding and I had some cake or whatever it was. But after eight months, who had lost by far the most weight? It was that guy because just showing up and being accountable. So what I'm trying to do is say, there are so many areas of your life where you could enjoy freedom, where you could enjoy fulfillment right now, whether or not Joe Biden is in office, but you got to do something. And one thing is working with other people who have the same worldview you have, who are cheering you on, who have knowledge you don't have. You have something to contribute. They have something to contribute. There's a synergy here. And so to me, this is the most fulfilling thing that I do these days. So that site is tomschooloflife.com. That's that site. But in terms of how do I accomplish a lot of things, I write a newsletter every weekday to two different lists. I have an entrepreneurship list and I have just a libertarian list and I write to them basically every day. Occasionally I miss a day, but that's because I'm a father of five and things come up and I'm not going to reproach. What are you paying for the newsletter? It's for free. So I do that and I have all these podcast episodes and then I have to monitor and stay on top of these memberships that I have like the School of Life and Liberty Class from whatever. So the way I've started to do it is to break it up into particular days. So what I'm going to start doing in the future is, I haven't told anybody this, but I'm going to scale the Tom Wood Show back to three episodes a week, but have video on them now. Have video. I can't have somebody do video editing for five episodes. Just not possible. But instead of making them so short, maybe have each one be closer to 45 minutes to an hour. So it'd still be the same amount of output, but it's hard to do five episodes a week and not have some of them just be throwaways. I don't want to do that. I want to have them all be worthwhile. So my goal would be Monday I do my episodes. So the podcast is done for the week. Then Tuesday I go to the beach. I'm super productive at the beach. I don't know why. Super productive. And I just write as many emails as I possibly can that day, finishing them up the next day. So the two and a half day, halfway into my week, I've done all the newsletters and I've done all the podcast episodes. Now I can spend some time on what? Monitoring the forum at the School of Life or figuring out which experts I should bring in and talk about what topics. Get all that squared away. Stay on top of my email inbox because I can't answer everybody who writes to me. But some people are writing to me about, you know, business related things that I've got to respond to. And then at the very least, that leaves Friday for if I want to start a brand new project or work on something or whatever, I have Friday to do that. And if it's a super crazy week, then Friday is just my catch up day. So that's the way I kind of want to do it. And by doing it that way, because right now or up till recently, I would do like a little bit of everything every single day. But I feel like getting in the groove of one thing, I'm much more productive with it. And then also it absolutely is true that working in like 30 to 40 minute chunks, I'm much more efficient. And then I take a break, maybe I do a few chest puzzles, I get a snack, but I just focus, I shut everything else off, I focus. In fact, sometimes I'm working on the newsletter and I say, look, I got to get this done in 25 minutes. So I literally set a timer. And when that timer is going, there's something in that brain that makes me more efficient. And 25 minutes down the road, I have got that newsletter done. You have to come up with the topics every day. This is what amazes me is that you have these topics. But I'll tell you the secret. If you want to know the secret, I do get, not all of them, because some of them are just things I see in the news and I say, oh, I got a comment on that. But other times it's Twitter. And what I've done is I've curated a list and I'd like to make it bigger. But right now it's 20 people that I follow who put out consistently interesting things or share interesting news items. And some of these give me ideas for the newsletter. That really is, is where, where I get a lot of it. But I'm not sharing that list with anybody. That's private. That's proprietary. I take it. I'm not on that list, Tom. Oh, you're on the list, Michael Rectonwald. You are. You are on the list. All right. That's good to know. As is Bishop also at the Mises Institute. Tho is on the list too. Oh, okay. Yeah. Tho's great. He's doing some incredibly good work and his writing is really stellar. I don't have a heck of a lot more to add, Tom. I just, but I do want to say this. I wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank you for everything you do, in particular in my case, what you've done for me. You were the one who introduced me to the libertarian community in both senses of that phrase. That is, you invited me into the Liberty Movement by having me on your podcast several times. And you've recommended me as a speaker for the Mises Institute and introduced me to the libertarian audience. But also you've introduced me to the classic libertarian texts. You've also invited me to produce courses for your excellent educational venture, libertyclassroom.com. And so for all of that and more, I owe you a deep debt of gratitude. And I just wanted to make this public while we're talking here. Well, that is a very generous thing of you to do, Michael. And I appreciate that. And I've been very, very glad to do all those things. I remember the first time I told Joe Salerno about you, I was almost giddy. Joe, where do you see this guy? You're going to love this guy. So I was very, very happy to do it. But you know what? At the same time, Michael, thank you because you stepped into a void. I mean, you didn't know what life had in store for you when you decided, I'm making a break with positions I've held for a long time and people I've been associated with. I'm making a break. That is a very, very scary and bold and courageous move. So I would say thank you right back to you. Oh, that's great. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, it wasn't easy. And I don't want to make this about me. But yeah, that was tough. And I got to say that I found the liberty community to be amazing. And I found it to be, you know, so receptive. And I didn't know everything when I came over here. I didn't know all, you know, I hadn't read Rothbard. I hadn't read some Mises. I had read some Hayek and others. But I hadn't read Hoppe. And I hadn't, you know, so there was a lot that I had to learn. And so it was very disoriented and dizzying. And you helped me to gain some sense of orientation through that. And that I just wanted to acknowledge. I'm very grateful to you for that. Thank you. Well, thanks for coming on, Tom. I appreciate it. And did you want to give us any last words about how people can get on your newsletter list or how they can find you and your podcast and so forth? Yeah, sure. TomWoods.com is the pivot point for everything I do. So TomWoods.com is what I would recommend people check out. Great. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Mike.