 Okay, when I got the email from Joe inviting me to come to this conference, he said he wanted me to talk to him about the conference where I was, well, what he in retrospect calls the was it the academic organizer? Is that what it was at the conference? Academic host of the conference, okay. And since I've been here, I've gotten several questions that I've been asked over and over again, so I'd like to just answer those questions. If I can, although the one of them I can't actually answer, you know, I've tried to research it a little bit. The first question was how did I of all people happen to become to be selected as academic host of this conference since I had no known previous association with Austrian economics? And it's true that at that time, my acquaintance with Austrian economics was sketchy to say the least. As a matter of fact, until just a couple of years before, I never even heard of Austrian economics. I went to, I was just out of graduate school at Yale and at Yale there were only two kinds of economics. There was regular economics and Marxist economics. And I read a lot of regular economics. I read some Marxian economics and decided that it was puzzling but probably a dead end. But I was my specialty was Soviet studies at the time. And as part of my dissertation work, I took a long 10 week trip to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1969, I think it was. And as I was going, a couple of friends gave me some books that they thought would be subversive of the Soviet Union that were both books I had never read. But they thought that if I smuggled them in the Soviet Union gave them to some young Russians that they would realize that the Soviet system was hopeless. And so I took these books along. I hadn't had a chance even to open them. And I never did find anybody who was appropriate to give them away to. And I was very near the end of the trip. I was sitting in an unair conditioned hotel in Toshkent where the temperature was about 104, I think. And the only way to get reasonably cold was to cool was to sit in a bathtub filled with cold water. And I was sitting in the bathtub and I took these two books in with me. And the first one was, I think it was, if I'm not mistaken, it was Herbert Marcuse or some Marxist. And it certainly, well, I flipped through that a little bit. It was pretty impenetrable. I could see why I was given it because this was although it was a Marxist perspective, it was a version of Marxism that in some ways was pretty subversive of the Soviet Union as existed at that time. But it didn't look very interesting. I put that aside. I didn't think it had much to say. And the other book was a copy of Hayek's Road to Freedom, Road to Serfdom, Road to Serfdom, which I had never read. So I started reading that. And that was pretty fascinating because, lo and behold, it really did explain why the Soviet Union just didn't work. So I thought, I gotta follow up on this guy when I get back. And I did. And I started asking around what people were reading in that. One of the things I got on to was very quickly was Rothbard's Libertarian Forum. I just wish they had blogs at that time because then 10,000 people could have read every issue instead of 250 or whatever it was. But I started writing for that. And when, it's probably when the IHS got around to organizing the conference. As far as anybody remembers, I talked to Bruce Johnson about this and some other people who were at IHS at the time. As far as anybody remembers, it was Murray who mentioned my name as a possible organizer. So that brings me to the second question, which is, and this is a reason, if some of you have read things like Karen Vaughan's 25th anniversary account or some other people's comments on the things. Another question I keep being asked is, why on earth was this place, the conference held in South Royalton of all places? And probably people told you all these notorious stories about how terrible the accommodations were. Well, first of all, I was teaching at Dartmouth at the time. I happened to be living in South Royalton, which is about 40 miles away. And I thought South Royalton was a pretty nice place. And I'd gotten used to the fact that, you know, it had in those days some kind of primitive aspects. We had electric lights and flush toilets, but it wasn't exactly Manhattan. So anyhow, the conference was originally supposed to be held at Dartmouth, which had very nice modern conference facilities. And when the idea was first mentioned to me, I approached my mentor at the Dartmouth Economics Department, who's a guy named Colin Campbell, who was the only person in the department who was friendly to free market ideas. And he was actually not oriented toward Austrians himself, but he was, had been one of Milton Friedman's early graduate students and was very much sold on free market ideas of any kind, whether it came from Austrians or anybody. And so he said, this would be a great idea. And I said, well, who do I talk to? And he was, I was new at Dartmouth, and he'd been there for years. And he knew everybody's name. He gave me the name of the people at the conference center. And I started talking to them, and they said, sure, you know, we've got vacancies, we've got rooms, we can do this and that, this, how much it cost. And we went along that track and I told IHS this was going to work out. No problem. And partway through the developments, some of the rest of the people in the economics department got word of this. The rest of the economics department was entirely composed of people from Harvard. Now at that time, I should say that academically Dartmouth, although it has quite a good reputation and always did as an undergraduate school, it has no graduate economics department or at least didn't happen at that time. I don't think it still does. So in terms of economics, you might say it was the lowest tendril on the Ivy Vine. And yet the powers that be thought that they had to hire all of their faculty from Harvard, because that was how things had always been done. And in fact, there were very few people on the faculty that were not from Harvard. I think it was only Colin who was from University of Chicago PhD and myself, who was from Yale, which they considered sort of like touching dirt with a long stick. But at any rate, the rest of the people were all there. But as you can imagine, it was hard to attract really top PhDs from Harvard to come to a school where there was no graduate department. And so as a result, it would be too strong to say it was filled with the dregs of Harvard PhDs, but they certainly were not in the top of their class. And they all happened to be pretty leftist. And so anyway, these people got word of the fact that this Austrian conference was being organized. And they were convinced that by being associated, the name Dartmouth being associated with the Austrians was going to give the department a bad name. And so they said, no, you can't do this. And so I had to break off my negotiations with the Dartmouth Conference Center and find something else at the last minute. This was probably six weeks before the conference is occurring. Time was running out. But since I was living over in South Royal Town, I knew this crazy guy, Anthony Doria, who had all this real estate over there. And the real estate was a little run down a shabby, but there were a lot of square feet. So I said, can you host the conference? He was one of these guys. He was a true entrepreneur, true entrepreneur. I can do anything he says. And he can't. He later on started a started a law school, which is still there and quite a distinguished law school, he started a law school with a budget of $5. It was successful by permitting $5 into a law school. But at any rate, he said, Sure, we can hold the conference. How many people are going to come? Well, I checked with IHS and they said, Well, we think that there'll be about 35 people. And so he said, Yeah, if we stretch, we can accommodate 35 people. Well, you know, by the time the conference happened, it was, there were 50 participants, I think there was maybe 50, even plus the distinguished members who got the best accommodations. And so I think the explanation of some of these wildest stories about how bad the accommodations were. Roger Garrison was reminding me of that that we had to his room, he was assigned didn't have a bed in it, I think. And so we had to run around and find a mattress. And he said he remembered running around in my Jeep, looking for a mattress and finding one. And I told my wife about that story last night on the phone. And she says, Oh, yeah, she remembered that she said it was the mattress off our fold out couch and I live. So you can see we're stretching the bottom. But as Karen said in here, as Karen said, very kindly in her retrospective on it, that that the whole bad accommodations and everything gave a sort of a summer camp bonding atmosphere to this thing. And I think that that perhaps that actually was a positive, a positive experience gave people sort of a shared survivorship of this experience. Then the last thing I wanted to comment on the last question I've gotten I got into conversation with Roger about this just yesterday and he gave me a paper he'd written on a freedman and the freedman in the Austrians. And he asked me about a comment that I'd made in the introduction to the to the book The Modern Austrian Economics, where I had quoted Friedman's famous quip about how there's only good economics and bad economics. And I had said what I thought Friedman meant was that he thought that any economics that was good, regardless of what school it came from, could be smoothly incorporated into the mainstream. So Roger says, and then I said, for example, any economics is good. For example, Friedman probably had Hayek in mind and could be easily incorporated. Well, Roger says, do you mean to say did I mean to say that Hayek's business cycle theory could be smoothly incorporated into monetarism? Well, that's an interesting question. I hadn't thought of that before. And so after reading Roger's paper, I have an answer to that or at least what I had in mind. First of all, what I had in mind when I made that comment about any ideas that are any good could be smoothly incorporated into the mainstream. I really was thinking more in terms of micro economic issues. For example, ideas like the fact that something like the policy like the minimum wage would have unintended consequences that would defeat its intended purpose. This is an idea which as far as I can see can you can arrive at this from starting Austrian starting point, you can arrive at it from a neoclassical starting point, you come to the same conclusion that it's a bad policy because of its unintended consequences and you can fold all these things together. And I probably also had in mind some of the political economy conclusions because the Friedman and Hayek had in common that they were ardent representatives of the classical liberal tradition that believed in a not an anarcho capitalist version of Austrianism, but a limited state version of Austrianism in terms of political economy. I don't think they were too far apart. With regard to Austrian business cycle theory after reading Roger's paper, what I decided was that Friedman was right, but probably not in the sense that he met about Austrian business cycle theory, that in this case, Friedman's monetarism was the bad economics. But as Roger points out in his paper, I don't know, is this forthcoming or something like that? Okay, so it's coming out when you read it and coming out basically the conclusion is the bottom line here is that the valid insights of Austrian economics like the idea that money matters and so forth can be incorporated into Austrian economics. And in fact, Roger says that some lesser known comments and insights of Friedman's can make it possible to put a sort of a quasi Austrian spin on the hidden dynamics behind things like long lags between money and their effects on the economy and so forth. So in this case, I would say that monetarism in its naked form was the bad economics and it can be smoothly folded into good Austrian economics. Okay, thanks. I've apparently used up my time.