Get ready to take a flamethrower to the official narrative and learn what the elites don't want you to know.

You're listening to The Tom Woods Show.

Hi everybody, Tom Woods here. It's episode 2761 of the Tom Woods show, and we're joined today by Aaron Brown, author of the new book, Wrong Number, How to Extract Truth from a Blizzard of Quantitative Disinformation. And Aaron, I don't ordinarily do this, but I was looking through your credentials, and I think of the great many authors

I've had on the show over the years. You are one of the most qualified to write your book. So I'd actually

like it if you could start by sharing a bit of your background with us rather than my barking it at

everybody. Sure, yes. I am extraordinarily well qualified for writing this book.

Unfortunately, I'm very well qualified in a negative way.

I'm not a great researcher who discovers new things.

I'm a professionally qualified skeptic for debunking other people's claims, but it's a valuable thing to do.

I guess I got my start in all of this. I traced it all the way back to when I'm a freshman in

college. This is 1975, and Fisher Black got me a job on the National Stand By Gas Rationing Plan.

And by the way, he was extraordinarily skeptical about the plan, and he put me on it.

I don't think there was any big endorsement of what he thought of me.

It was a comment on what he thought of the plan.

And I was assigned to figure out how we were going to ration

gasoline if we had to do that. Back in 1975, that was a real possibility. And I was assigned to worry

about agriculture. You know, could we harvest the crops? Because we didn't want everybody to starve to

death because farmers couldn't get fuel. And I'm a city boy, and so I didn't know

whether tractors use gasoline or diesel fuel. So I call around, and I got Department of Agriculture,

and they said, yeah, yeah, there's a guy who knows that, but he wasn't in. And I called Ford because

Ford makes most of the tractors. And I got passed around. We got to a guy and said, oh, yeah, I just finished a comprehensive economic model and 75% of the tractors in this country run on diesel fuel. Great, thanks, you know. Well, we went through. I got a lot of other detail from him. And then the Department of Ag guy calls back. And I didn't want to, you know, blow him off because, you know, he was nice. He was returning my call. So I say, sure, he said, oh, 75% of the tractors in country run on gasoline. And I said, oh, you mean diesel, right? He said, no, gasoline. I said, well, Ford just told me it was diesel. He said, oh, you know, Ford, he's talking about new tractors manufactured.

He's not talking about the existing stock. Well, that just wasn't true. I mean, it's been a lot of time with the Ford guy, and I knew exactly what he had done. And when I went back to the Ford guy, he said, oh, yeah, you know, the agriculture, they're counting tractors that are rusting in barns or were shipped to Mexico years ago. Oh, you know, they just have no idea what's actually in use today.

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