How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World | Tom Woods

[Music] tom is really one of those unique individuals who's able to 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 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 a there's an academic with a university position a tenured university positioned who is affiliated with the Mises Institute who recently wrote a book that is about a hundred pages in paperback tiny introductory book to Austrian economics he published this through an academic publishing house this introduction this cursory treatment of Austrian economics was available to you via Amazon for 104 dollars in paperback form the amount of readers of this book are low they're less than 10 that's my suspicion with that hundred $4 pricing Tom on the other hand produces excellent free downloadable ebooks 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 Marie Ross Martin Luther Brown 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 said he chose to go with the truth and with Austrian economics and with libertarians and so please warm welcome for Tom wood [Applause] 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 can have a little button when I need to coughs 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 you talked 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 going to 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 did I was in residence at the Mises Institute for four years but the Mises Institute is not a think-tank let's not 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 we don't say ain't none of that going on there's none of this some industry wants some favorable report and so they pay someplace to write but nothing like that happens to the Mises Institute so I definitely know think-tank vastly better and more important than that so I've had this unusual approach but another unusual thing is just being a libertarian and 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 you're going to do you pick one unless you're an extremely independent thinker and you say doc God there must be a third option here but by default you'll wind up in one of those categories and dog gonnit 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 doggone 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 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 no 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've heard me tell the story there was a day when I found him reading Candide by Voltaire and I said dad look enough sand up here you know 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'm not going to be one of those terrible people USA baby right so he he rescued me from the default position cuz I think the default position is leftism because in American society sort of assumed that you hold the fashionable leftist view on everything because when I hear well present company excepted but when I hear a lot of CEOs of American corporations speak I know what their opinions are on everything they are 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 a 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 neoconservatism 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 or they want to spread human rights and democracy around the world what is it the French Jacobins 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 that can't happen that's not happen [Applause] 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 US 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 that 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 remember what I'm talking about it was at one of his conferences it was in Los Angeles and it was a group of 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 you know government and all that and so I talked about Obama care 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 going to 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 are going to 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 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 attend 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 you can't trust the UN figure that five hundred thousand Iraqi children died of malnourishment or we 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 the undisputed figure she was as well you know it's okay no that's not 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 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 it's a disease neoconservatism and so I said to that group look you are 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 on the basis of totally 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 neoconservatism that's all yet I'll either 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 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 going to support myself here I could go into into the university system but yeah 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 going to be pretty decent and they'll 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 works 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 a nonfiction you don't you do not sell that many whatever number you think I've sold drop a zero off the end nobody re even though I've been on the New York Times bestseller list nobody reads nonfiction that's just a fact and you're going to 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 going to do so I created a product 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 you were a victim of what I call educational malpractice I'm going to cure you of that through my books well now I also teach courses why not write people like books maybe they'll like course it turns out they do man do they ever like them this I'm coming up on five years of my Liberty classroom calm 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 golf 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 eight hundred and fifty seven podcast episodes not counting the other podcasts I do with Bob Murphy contre Krugman which is another 75 episodes the 75th is coming out today case you're wondering where is in 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 ebooks 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 a hundred percent of those people that buy that paid product I don't need ten percent I don't even need three percent I can be doing very well if one or two percent of people say you know 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 ebooks on libertarians like I have one called 14 hard questions for libertarians answered these are all I have a page for this Tom's free books calm toms free books that come and you download it you say wow this is just super duper but there is a cost yes it seems like a 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 it'd have to be something mentally wrong with you because I have the best email list in the world okay 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 everyday I meant mailing you about some current event and I say now look you know if this boob had been a member of Liberty classroom you would have made all these errors right so I have a little 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 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 your happier your life is so I do that and I learned how to do that by studying what the experts are doing I learn things I've also become free I do not have to be a poverty areum I can do this without being a poverty rien and here I want to point out if Harry Brown had been around today writing about freedom in an unfree world I mean he would his mind would be blown at the opportunities blown at the opportunities and most people just sitting there going yeah that's kind of neat that we got these opportunities now let me go dig ditches for a living no no no what 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 it's 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 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 want to 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 does they have no idea how to so how to promote themselves they have no idea how to use any of these tools and it's like the war Marketing has become toxic among libertarians Walter Bloch 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 of scam you're manipulating people and Martin it's all a scam I don't want to hear about 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 the arthritis pain remedy IcyHot this product has helped an enormous number of people people right into the IcyHot company to tell them my life is totally transformed now I can actually go out with my grandchildren again I can do things I could be mobile again thanks to this product that's how good that product is but if they hadn't heard about it if nobody figured out how to market it to them it may as well not even exist so if libertarians aren't going to 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 again you don't have to be a libertarian siddhis 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 organization I've heard all that part of that every bit of that is nonsense that is absolutely insane to say that I'll give you a great example not 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 you go to the bank borrow a million bucks then you got to fill your shelves with products you've gotta cross your fingers are going to sell otherwise you got to ship them back and you don't know what to do you got to hope the right people come into your store and you got to hope it becomes profitable by like week ehn or your overhead and your utilities and your wages are going to crush you oh that's sounds like a wonderful life yeah Jia 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 it borrows 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 once as long as nobody ever does anything they hear all these amazing opportunities that are all around them that are back practically bashing them over the head with a hammer and they don't do it that's a 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 it alright so how about what I do personally well I got the ron paul homeschool 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 homeschool curriculum I love it because for one thing it teaches kids stuff they're not going to learn anywhere else so yeah each's them history and math and science and all that but it teaches them stuff nobody's going to teach them at high school teach them how to open your own small business teaches them how to write effective advertising copy now I know we also don't like advertising is evil no 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 going to 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 but 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 for hundreds of 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 Ron Paul homeschool comm and on my site if you join the curriculum through me I throw in Liberty classroom for free I throw in one of my autographed books for free I created a whole extra course for you for free if you just joined through Ron Paul homeschool com I earn a commission from this you are in one hundred and sixty dollars worth of free bonuses and the Ron Paul 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 want to again do promoting stuff as an affiliate this is the easiest way to earn money in the history of the world we talk about liberating yourself becoming free it's 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 alright well you want to get your web hosting through my link I get a commission but I'm going to 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 tutorial 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 that 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 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 actually I explained all this I actually I wrote a whole a book explaining everything I do and here's 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 going to assume you guys are awesome because what I'm going to tell you to do is take your phone out and use it right now because I will send you this ebook just shows you everything I do everything I do is how I'm doing it and all you do is you got to text a word to the number four four two two two you text the word prosper to the number four four two two two 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 alright let me say something you better believe I'm teaching my kids this I they are not going to waste their time flipping burgers that's mind-numbing they are not doing that I'm going to teach teach them the opportunities that are around them I show them already this is how I make a living I do I give they say well with me all you're doing is giving things away and you're making 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 going to teach them this because I don't I want them to go out in the world even if they want to 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 want to just write about how awesome capitalism is I've written a lot about that I want to be an example of it I want to actually do it not just talk about it not just theorize about it I want to 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 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 [Applause] [Music]

Channel: misesmedia

Views: 14,327

Keywords: Tom Woods, Freedom, Politics, Unfree, Mises, Liberty, Terrorists

Id: 3jR3_2_PMuM

Length: 31min 16sec (1876 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2017