Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Hey, check it out, guys.
On the line, I got the great Tom Woods.
He wrote a whole bunch of stuff.
Nullification, rollback.
He edited with Murray Polner this great historical anthology, We Who Dared Say No to War.
And then, of course, Meltdown about the crash of 2008.
And Real Dissent is, I believe, the latest.
And, of course, he's the most podcastingist podcaster in the libertarian movement.
And gives great speeches and all kinds of things.
Welcome back, Tom.
How are you?
Glad to be here, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you on the show today.
And it's for purposes of commerce.
It's not exactly an interview along the lines of what I usually do.
But I do think it will be absolutely of interest to my listeners.
The fact of the matter is, just in the past few days, I've gotten a few automatic emails saying that people are signing up for the Liberty Classroom by way of my link.
And it caught my attention.
And I thought, you know, I should interview Tom all about the Liberty Classroom.
And I should probably do everything I can to sell subscriptions to the Liberty Classroom for your interest and my own selfish interest.
It's a mutually beneficial exchange like in capitalism, right?
Absolutely.
And I got a great deal for your people specifically that I'm not sharing with anybody.
This isn't some BS thing where I'm actually promiscuously going on other podcasts giving them stuff.
Only Scott Horton is getting this.
Okay.
Well, first of all, we should say what the thing is.
What is the thing?
What is the thing?
Liberty Classroom is a website that I launched six and a half years ago now.
Jesus, this is old.
Yeah.
So I have a daughter who's younger than Liberty Classroom.
So that's a while.
So yes, it's been around.
The idea is, obviously, we know you go to the university and they're going to teach you a lot of nonsensical stuff.
They'll teach you some okay things, but how are you going to know what's what?
So half the time you get out of there and you know less than you did when you went in.
So what I decided to do is I took people who have knowledge that I don't have or who are experts in areas where I know some, but I'm not an expert, like Bob Murphy in economics, for instance, or Kevin Goodsman in history, and just all these other people I think are really, really smart and sharp.
And I brought them all together and we created the courses the way we would teach them.
And the result is you have this nice dashboard university.
While you're driving in your car, you can learn American history the way it should have been taught and economics the way it should have been taught.
And we actually go through one of the most common economics textbooks in college.
And we go chapter by chapter, talk about what's right and what's wrong in it.
So it's very helpful.
And plus we have Q&A forums.
You get your questions answered.
And even once a month we do a live thing.
You come on and there we are on the screen.
We take your questions in real time.
And you can consume these courses at three o'clock in the morning for all I care.
So that's what we've been doing.
We created the whole thing.
And we've got a special membership tier where you can be a lifetime member.
As long as we haven't all dropped dead and we're still creating courses, you would get all of them.
Cool.
And, well, I'm just looking, you have, well, like a dozen different speakers here, almost 10 or something.
And so how many different courses are we talking about?
Right now it's 23.
Wow, great.
There'll be American Economic History added in the next month or so.
And there's all kinds of stuff to overturn there.
And that's not 23 videos.
That's 23 courses made up of X many videos.
Right, right, right.
And if you don't want to watch videos on a device, you just want to be driving or something, you can listen to them as audio files.
We have a mobile app to make it easy.
So, you know, hey, it's something I'm really, really happy with and proud of.
And it's an example of how, if you can't fix all the problems in society, you can create your own parallel thing.
And this is our parallel thing.
So this is all, this is basically undergraduate level stuff?
Yeah, we have some homeschoolers who have used it.
We have people of all different levels.
You know, some of the material is more challenging than others, but you can see which order you should probably do it all in.
And the idea is it's mainly for adult enrichment.
It's for people who feel like, doggone it, I probably didn't get the full, the real story.
And I don't really know what it is.
And you have these annoying gaps in your knowledge that you just wish you could fill, but you don't have the time.
And even if you did, what book would you read?
It solves all those problems so that nobody's going to.
The thing is, nobody will want to debate you anymore because you'll be so good at it.
You think, oh, I'm going to go use my debating skills.
Thing is, the better you get at it, the fewer people actually want to engage you.
So it may not have quite the effect you're expecting, but you'll feel better about yourself.
Well, and, you know, I mean, you give an example here about, you know, in the kind of introductory little summary on the page about arguing with leftists who, you know, have a monopoly on fairness and concern for others.
And, you know, challenging that, essentially following Horton's rule and attacking the left from the left and explaining why it is that capitalism is good for poor people.
If that's your concern, confront your concern where it lies.
And after all, like, unless you're really some mean SOB, even if you're rich, you should be and are presumably concerned about the poor and everyone else and whether everyone else, liberty and justice for all.
That's what we all believe in, right?
So it seems like, well, to certain degrees anyway, but it seems like, you know, this can be very valuable for, in that Bob Murphy way, right?
Like he does in A Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, where he just, you know, confronts every leftist argument from the left.
And so who's the liberal now at the end of the thing?
Who's the one who really cares for, you know, the real results for poor people and how they're going to live and how they can live better?
Exactly.
I mean, basically, you kind of, everybody really ought to try to learn, frankly, how society works, because that's how you're going to be able to fix things.
How you're going to be able to help people if you're operating in opposition to how society works, how things naturally work.
You've got to learn that stuff.
So that is what we are trying to do and basically create like a libertarian cadre of invincible people.
You know, like we're going to be prepared for whatever comes our way.
It won't be this, I want people to solve that problem where they're at work or they're at the water cooler and some topic comes up and they think, oh, I know I should be crushing this thing.
And I don't really, because it's hard being a libertarian.
You have to know everything, because on the other side, all you have to do is say, oh, that's a problem.
Maybe the state will solve it.
But whereas a libertarian, you've got to think of all, how would we solve it without the state?
How can you know everything?
So we're trying to get you to know everything as quickly as we possibly can.
Training you to, you know, we've got all the stuff I did for the Ron Paul homeschool program.
I throw that in as a bonus.
That's another 400 video and audio files on history from all the way from the ancient world, all the way up to the present day.
I mean, it's a ton of stuff and it's a good use of your time.
Man, it really sounds like I should have been taking advantage of this all along.
I'm one of those guys who always meant to read human action.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And see, look, now you can secretly not read it, but you'll have the same knowledge as if you did.
Don't don't tell anybody I said that.
Oh, wait.
Was I ever really going to get around to it?
Probably not.
You know, honestly, I have a tab open here for Mises from like six weeks ago called Human Action, a chapter by chapter summary.
And I haven't even gotten to that yet.
Well, look, we need you to be doing what you're doing already.
So fair enough.
All right.
Well, I guess so.
Hey, listen.
Yeah.
Now, here's the thing about it, too, is when I look at the page at Liberty Classroom.com, you got I really like Kevin Goodsman, of course, as I mentioned, co-editor of that great book, We Who Dared Say No.
Oh, no, that was Polner.
What am I thinking, Goodsman?
Oh, Who Killed the Constitution?
He and I wrote Who Killed the Constitution.
Yes.
Right.
Well, we have we have a chapter on the draft in that book, which would have shocked most of the right wingers buying that book.
Yeah, that's true.
I don't know.
For the last two years, I got that mixed up for a second.
But anyway, yeah, no, he is great.
And then who's this Bob Murphy character?
I don't know.
Some guy, you know, he was sitting in the street and I figured I'd give him a hand.
He's he's he's been a friend for so many years now.
And we do a podcast together.
We host a cruise together where we featured you as a speaker.
And he just knows so darn much about economics.
It's unbelievable.
So I thought we're going to harness that knowledge.
We're going to put it to good use here in the Liberty Classroom.
Yeah.
Cool.
You want to tell us about the rest of these folks, too?
Well, Brad Berzer is a guy over at Hillsdale College.
And, you know, Hillsdale has a reputation for being a little on the neocon side.
And Brad has just he's such a nice guy.
It's impossible to dislike him.
Even if you're a neocon, you have to like him.
He's that nice.
And he's just kind of quietly stood his ground over the years, which I deeply appreciate.
And he's really knowledgeable about a whole bunch of things, like everything from Jacksonian America to science fiction and mythology.
And I mean, so he can do courses on all kinds of topics, not to mention he has the correct musical taste, which is a side benefit that has nothing to do with Liberty Classroom.
But he wrote a book on he wrote the biography of Russell Kirk over the past few years, whom he portrays as despite his anti-libertarian rhetoric from time to time.
He basically says, you know, Kirk was more of a libertarian than he was willing to admit.
I mean, he wrote a book on economics that was totally laissez faire.
So that side of Kirk comes through through the Berzer lens.
His wife, Deidre, did a course for us on Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House books and Rose Wilder Lane, her daughter, who was a great libertarian, Rose Wilder Lane.
So we and Gerard Casey is in there.
On Bradley, what is it that he teaches?
He's a historian.
So he he's I mean, at Hillsdale, they've had him teach pretty much everything, but he teaches he's done liberty in science fiction.
He's he's done a history of the Old West for us.
I mean, he's when you know everything you can teach on pretty much anything.
So that's that's been great.
That's interesting.
A libertarian history of the Old West.
That sounds fun.
Oh, it's so I'm so thrilled about all this.
And then a guy you would just love.
I wish you guys have a chance to meet.
He's the one of the most underrated libertarians out there.
It's Gerard Casey from Ireland.
He's a professor, a retired professor of philosophy over there.
Funny, great.
Got the Irish accent.
He's got everything, everything there.
But he does, of course, on the history of political thought from a libertarian perspective.
And David Gordon gives it a thumbs up, which means it must be pretty darn good.
Yeah, exactly.
Talk about a tough book reviewer.
Yeah, I know.
She's like you're just sweating bullets the whole time.
And then I've known Brian McClanahan has a nice podcast.
He's like a he's like a libertarian with a southern twist to him.
And then there's Jason Jewell, who teaches Western civilization.
He's over at Faulkner University in Montgomery, Alabama.
And how he knows all the material that's in those Western civ courses, I just will never will never know.
And then Jeff Herbner, who teaches at the Mises University.
I chose Jeff because I've known him for over 20 years.
And I have asked him so many questions.
I have exploited that SOB so much over the years with my stinking questions.
And I've never stumped him.
He just seems to know everything.
And so when I put this thing together, I thought if I were learning all this stuff from scratch, who are the people in the libertarian world I would give my right arm to study under?
And these are the names that came to my mind.
And that's why I chose them.
That's awesome.
Man, this is a great project.
So what was the origin of this?
This grew out of the Ron Paul curriculum or what?
No, this preceded the Ron Paul curriculum by about a year and a half.
I knew nothing about that.
It hadn't even really started at that point.
But I do add, as a bonus, I add in the stuff I did for the Ron Paul curriculum.
I add that in as a bonus.
But they're two separate things.
Which is a lot, right?
Oh, jeez, yeah.
400 videos, Scott.
It was the worst thing.
But I'm glad I did it.
I mean, it really, really is going to help a lot of people.
And that's what matters.
So yeah, the origin of it was somebody sat me down and said, you know, Woods, at this point, you've written books and you've done all these YouTube videos.
You've kind of built up a bit of a following for yourself.
But you're not doing anything with that following.
You should be building a business out of it, building something to support yourself.
And you really have become very entrepreneurial over the last, what, five, eight years?
Yeah, I mean, basically, because you get to a point where you realize, I deserve to be able to support myself for what I do.
You know, there's nothing wrong with it.
And he said, and moreover, when you earn, it's only because you're providing something people value.
So there's no shame in it.
Especially for ideological libertarians like us.
Isn't it funny, like, how commie we are and how much we hate profit and all that at the end of the day anyway, somehow?
You're having a conference and I have to pay 10 bucks to get in?
Well, I mean, there is something compromising about being seen as selling out where the money comes first now.
But it's pretty clear when you're dealing with Tom Woods that the money does not come first.
Oh, for crying out loud.
First of all, almost everything I do, I give away for free.
But secondly, I think there's a little bit more money in being a neocon than there is in being a libertarian.
But I would be able to live with myself.
I couldn't do that.
But anyway, it came down to, what is it that you can provide?
What's a way you can provide value to people who follow you?
If they like your books, maybe they might like courses.
That was the thing.
So, all right, maybe I'll give that a shot.
And it was a real roll of the dice because I brought on, you know, these other academics to help me.
I could not guarantee them that this thing was going to be profitable.
So here I am asking them to carve out a lot of their very, very limited spare time to create courses for me with no guarantee of success.
So I basically put up my own money.
It was easy, wasn't it?
They all were perfectly willing to bet on you.
Well, I appreciate that.
But it didn't hurt that I fronted the money for it.
And I paid all these people for their time.
Oh, OK, well, yeah, that probably didn't hurt.
But I bet it wasn't necessary.
Oh, no, I know.
But I felt like it was only fair.
If I can do it, then I felt like it was only fair to do that.
And so just coming out of the gate, I was already out of pocket by about 50 grand.
So this thing needed to succeed.
And it did.
I'm glad to say.
I mean, six and a half years later, we are still, you know, we're still cooking with gas.
So let me give out the coupon code for the Scott Horton people.
Yeah.
So what is this deal that this coupon code is for?
All right.
I had a big, big blowout over Black Friday weekend.
But people may have missed that.
So that's closed.
That is it.
Nobody else gets access to that.
Except the Scott Horton people.
So the deal is the coupon code is Horton.
What else would it be?
The coupon code is Horton in all has to be in all caps.
It's like it's like you're in a debate on foreign policy and you're wishing Scott could be there.
So you're shouting Horton.
OK, so it's in all caps.
The coupon code.
It's in all caps.
And the coupon code takes 200 smackers off the master lifetime membership.
And if you get it through Scott, if you use that coupon.
Also, Scott, I think.
Do you have a graphic for Liberty Classroom?
It's Scott Horton.
I do in the right hand margin.
If you go to Scott Horton or I should have said this at the very beginning.
It's actually the last one on the list.
For some reason, maybe someone else's fault.
It'll help us track it.
A flashing gif there.
Yeah.
OK, it'll help us track it a bit easier.
If you go to Scott Horton dot org and enter Liberty Classroom from there.
But we'll track it one way or the other.
But here's the thing.
Use coupon code Horton.
Get yourself 200 smackers off.
Scott is going to throw in.
What's Scott going to throw in?
A copy of Fool's Errand.
Timed in the war in Afghanistan.
Signed and personalized.
Yeah.
Right.
To the person.
Yeah.
Scott's going to send you that.
And Scott's going to earn a commission from this.
And you're going to help keep the Scott Horton show going.
And what better way to help him than by getting an unbelievable deal for yourself plus an autographed book by the same guy.
So go to Scott Horton dot org.
Click on Liberty Classroom and use coupon code Horton in all caps.
And that deal is yours.
I don't know when it's going to end.
We're going to yank that coupon code at some point.
But for now, go grab while the grabbin's good.
And do we want to say how much that costs?
It's normally $4.97.
You take off the 200 smackers.
You're down to $2.97.
Now, the courses that I sell for the Ron Paul curriculum, those come to $2.50 if you buy them by yourself.
By themselves.
Well, I'm throwing those in as a bonus for nothing.
Great.
So it's I mean, you look at all the stuff that it comes with and it's for the rest of your life.
And it's like one credit hour at a community college.
That's how much it costs.
And it's the rest of your life.
And you're helping out Scott Horton.
I mean, come on.
At least go have a look at it.
It sure sounds worth it.
And that's very generous of you to do the discount like that.
I really appreciate that.
My pleasure.
And I'm glad you're doing the bonus because that will be the thing that people say, you know, I could order this any which way, but doggone it, I'm going to get it through Scott.
Right.
Now, that means, though, I mean, when they order this, it's going to go to you.
So you're going to have to let me know.
I will let you know.
Now, the 30 day refund period has passed.
So you can't buy it, then get a refund, and then have poor Scott send you a book.
That's just not fair.
So we wait till after the 30 day refund period has passed.
Then Scott will send that baby right on out to you.
And you'll think, oh, my goodness, it's my own copy of Fool's Errand autographed by Scott.
There you go.
Which means the one that you already have can now be your loaner copy.
Exactly.
That's right.
Yeah, man.
Everybody needs a loaner copy.
You can't have a copy of Fool's Errand.
That's impossible.
Yeah, probably.
Maybe not impossible, but yeah.
All right, man.
You know what?
This really sounds great, Tom.
That's the only reason I have you on here to do this.
It's not just for the money.
I like money.
But it's also because I think this is really great.
I think you do really great work.
And I also am a libertarian and want everyone else to be.
And so, therefore, this kind of education is exactly the kind of thing that I'm interested in.
So, you know me.
I have no degree.
I'm not interested in the formal education.
But I am interested in exactly this kind of learning.
You know?
Well, you know what, Scott?
Just as the day we're recording this, just this morning, I sent out an email to my list about my father, who is now 22 years deceased.
But he dropped out of high school.
So he definitely didn't have any college.
He eventually got his GED when he was in his 70s.
And he was in high school.
He didn't have any college.
He eventually got his GED when he was in his 40s.
But he dropped out of high school.
But yet, he was a guy nobody dared to debate because he knew so much.
He didn't need the formal education to learn this stuff.
And because he didn't have the formal education and he did kind of believe in the traditional theory of education, he kind of felt really self-conscious about not having that piece of paper.
It made him crazy.
So he was always reading and reading and learning and studying so that he just was a formidable opponent.
He's a great guy.
Wonderful, wonderful guy.
Very kind and generous.
But man, if you were trying to argue with him that communism was a superior system or something, you would never get him to shut up.
Never.
That was not going to happen.
So I come from a household where I just watched my dad, a guy who didn't have the pieces of paper, just say, well, why should that stop me from being an educated guy?
I'll just read the books myself without other people telling me that's cool, man.
You know, yeah, it never bothered me the whole thing about not having a degree.
In fact, part of my reasoning for not finishing college and, you know, as a cab driver for many years and people would always say, oh, man, you should be teaching college.
What are you doing driving a cab?
And I always thought that if I had a PhD, then the people that I care about and want to listen to me wouldn't take me seriously because now I'd be, you know, some elitist ivory tower but regular people don't care what they say and actually aren't really within earshot of what they say.
So I would rather be talking to people who are more on, well, the same level where I was happy to stay in terms of, I guess, class being just working class or very lower middle class or whatever you call it, you know?
Well, you know what?
Not to mention, Scott, you reach way more people than the typical academic does.
I teach a room full of kids when I could be on the radio and teaching I don't even know who.
That's what's the fun part, right?
Is you don't even know who's out there listening.
But whoever they are, they're listening because they want to listen, not because their mom forced them to go or the state is going to put them in prison or whatever.
They like to hear what Scott has to say.
And especially on the radio, hopefully they're listening by accident, right?
Oh, what's this?
But...
But either way, I've not regretted being out of academia myself one bit.
I'm really, really glad where I am.
And jeez, navigating the politics these days would just be atrocious.
So you don't have to.
You got LibertyClassroom.com and help out Scott with coupon code and help yourself out with coupon code HORTON in all caps.
Got to be in all caps.
Great.
Well, there you go, everybody.
And the link is in the right hand margin at ScottHorton.org, too.
Happy Thanksgiving, Tom.
Thank you, man.
Same to you, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right, you guys.
And that's, of course, the great Tom Woods.
Check out TomWoods.com as well for his great interview show about all things libertarian.
And of course, all of his books.
He has all kinds of free books, too, that I didn't mention them all.
Bernie Sanders is wrong about everything and you can find me at LibertarianInstitute.org at ScottHorton.org AntiWar.com and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book Fools Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
