Student Educators for Liberty

Discussing The Hazlitt Project with Liam McCollum

I recently appeared on my friend Liam McCollum’s podcast. Another friend, Mike Dworski, did a rough transcription of the episode (as well as all of Liam’s other 92 episodes!) I’ve edited for clarity the initial part, where we discuss the Hazlitt Project at the Foundation for Economic Education. For more on the Hazlitt Project, see my article “Building a Bastiat Brigade.”

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Liam: Alright everyone, welcome to another episode of the Liam McCollum Show today. I have a very special guest on: Dan Sanchez. He was somewhat of a mentor of mine over the last year at the Foundation for Economic Education. I went through their apprenticeship, their Hazlitt fellow program at the beginning of the year. It was a six-month long apprenticeship, and I gained a lot of wisdom in it. I’m really honored to be able to have gone through that experience and meet Dan and build a relationship with him. So happy to have you on the show.

Dan: Thank you, Liam. It's definitely been one of the great benefits of the project to build connections with great young thinkers like you, and it's just been really great to see you become influential for the good, especially on social media and in libertarian movement activism.

Liam: What I wanted to talk about today is really a lot of the lessons that I learned from you going through that apprenticeship and I'm some of the recent things you've you been writing about, like the need for precise speech and the impact of that. But before we hop into that, would you just introduce yourself for people who don't know you?

Dan: I'm the Director of Content and editor at the Foundation for Economic Education, or FEE. We teach the freedom philosophy and especially sound economics—Austrian economics, particularly. FEE was founded in 1946, and it’s the oldest libertarian think tank in the world. We are all about spreading ideas, because our founder Leonard Read believed that it is through understanding liberty that society will come to embrace liberty.

He also taught that the way that you help other people understand liberty is to build your own understanding of liberty. So in the Hazlitt Project, that's what we are trying to develop: teachers who are learners and who “learn out loud” and invite other people into joining their learning.

That's been a passion of mine throughout my career. Even before entering the liberty movement, I was working in education, and I have always wanted to crack the code, not only of what makes for good ideas, but how people learn: how truth and understanding can spread. So that's what I try to do at FEE. I try to teach the public, but I also try to teach teachers of the public and that's what that the Hazlitt Project is all about.