 So I'm going to talk a little bit about the Austrian school, start with why we're so great, and then head into why we're not doing great enough quite yet. So the world has changed around us, and that means that we need to figure out a strategy to kick ass, to put it bluntly. Well, let's see here. OK, so the first question is, what do we do best? What are we really good at doing? Any ideas? That's not good. OK, I have some ideas. So we're really good at ground theory. We're really good at explaining how things actually work. We're really good at putting together a one integrated framework for understanding the whole damn world. OK, so when you study the greats that Lou mentioned, when you study Mises, when you study Rothbard, you can read those works, and you can say, whoa. And my students also say, whoa, and that's not my doing. It's Mises and Rothbard's doing. I understand the world. I can see how the world works in a different way than I did before, in a better way. So now I can understand what is actually going on. So we, as a school, way before my time, invented very important concepts, very important theories. We invented subjective value. We realized that value is something that lives in the mind of the consumer. The consumer is in a better place because that person has consumed some good or service. And because of that, I mean, that's why we're acting at all. That's what we're trying to achieve in every day and every moment of our lives. We're trying to achieve this better life for ourselves. And it's in our personal terms. It's not in the Fed's terms, in terms of dollars. We invented the concept of opportunity cost, that the cost of going somewhere is that we can't go this other way. So that's a core concept in any economic school. Well, maybe not Marxism, but all the other ones. Okay, we understand the market process. We know that the market is not what I call the economics gang sign. Supplying demand, okay? Or a tough audience. Okay, so we know that the market is a process that is dynamic, it's changing all the time, and it's, as several people have mentioned already, entrepreneurship is the driving force. It imagines the future, it creates the future, and we're heading in that direction somehow. It's not organized, it's not centralized, it's not coordinated or directed by anyone. We understand this, and we can explain how it happens and why it happens. We have the Austrian business cycle theory, ABCT. So we can explain why there are busts. Our explanation is there are booms, and there are unsustainable booms. So we have some actor that is affecting and infecting, if you will, the market process, creating this unsustainable boom that then must end in a crash. Not like all the other so-called boom bust cycles, a cycle series, but say, oh, you know this cycle that is just a crash. They only explain the crash, and they have these glorious explanations like animal spirits, and they call themselves theorists. Ridiculous. Our theory of the cycle is a theory of cycles, both up and down. It goes down because it goes up in the wrong way. So we do this really well. And we have, as a school, started all pretty much to grant debates in economic theory. So we have the Metodenstrait, the method struggle, back with Minger fighting with the German historical school, saying that it's not this inductive nonsense where we just look at the world and everything is different every time, so we can't really say anything at all. No, Minger and everybody else in the school have said, we can understand human beings and how human beings act, and therefore we have a framework for figuring out what is actually going on. And human beings are human beings no matter who they are or when they are. And based off of this, we can understand a whole lot about the world. So theory must come first. Theory is the lens through which we interpret the world, through which we can understand what is actually going on. Theory, to us, uncovers what is actually going on. We don't look at what is going on and go, whoa, crazy shit. And then we say, let's put this in models somehow. No, we already have a framework. We figure out how it must be and then we see the world how it works. We say, yeah, this is why. This framework helps us understand what is actually going on. We, well, Mises started the socialist calculation debate, the grand debate on central planning. Is it possible at all? When everybody assumed that obviously, if the government controls everything, it's much more rational and efficient than this marketplace where you have competition and redundancy and all this stuff. Not so to the Austrian school, where it's pretty obvious that since the market is a process, you can't really maximize where Stephen Schumpeter, who was an Austrian to begin with anyway, said that, well, a system, an economic system that is maximized all the time is outperformed by a system that is never maximized. What it meant by that is everything moves around. Everything is always changing. We need a little slack in the system so that we can invest in the future. But a system, an economic system, where we maximize every moment, we're not getting anywhere. We're back to this. We're in equilibrium. It's static, right? We have the great debates. I'm not thinking about the rap videos, but the sort of it between hike and canes, on inflation and unemployment. We started all these debates. We were always one side of all these debates. Basically, everybody else was on the other side. So even when we won the arguments, well, according to historians, we lost, because the historians were on the other side. But theoretically speaking, we always break it in one, right? We kicked ass. Okay, now, we still have those strengths, and that is awesome. The problem, though, is that back then, we really had more of a marketplace for ideas. Back then, scholars were interested in the big ideas, in the great ideas, the great theories, to solve those big puzzles, to understand the world. And they respected each other, even though they really did not agree with each other. And sometimes the language was pretty harsh, let's put it. Still, they took ideas seriously. So when Mises published his essay, and later the socialist calculation debate moved from German to English, those who really, really hated Mises's point of view, they still took the idea seriously. So if you read those old texts from the mid-30s, you're gonna see that, well, they say, oh yeah, Mises has a point. How many Marxists do you hear today say, oh yeah, the Austrians have a point. Let's discuss those. How many woke scholars do you hear say, oh yeah, the people at the Mises Institute, Joseph Lerner has a good point. You don't hear that, right, it's different. But back then, they could actually discuss those ideas, and the language was a little nasty, a little harsh sometimes, but still, they were interested in those grand theories, these grand ideas and opinions. And they took arguments for what they are, arguments. They had this common foundation of some form of scholarship that they wanted to find a logical inconsistency in the argument if they disagreed with the arguments. But they both, all sides, pretty much agreed on, this is how you argue about things. Logic applies. It's crazy I have to say this, but logic applies. It used to, okay? So they were on board with how to do science. They were on board with how to argue for things, what economics does and what it can do. Different opinions, fine. But they were still taking ideas seriously. In that sort of world, the Austrian school, the Austrian school of old was a perfect match, right? Our great theories, our great ideas, our great inventions, our deductive framework for understanding the world fit perfectly in this type of world where you debated these grand ideas. You wanted to find solutions to these grand puzzles and you wanted to get rid of ideas that were non-true, even if they were your ideas. So I'm exaggerating a little bit, but there was more of a scholarship going on among scholars back then, okay? So obviously we were very well positioned in that kind of world, in that kind of scholarship, because we were solving those great puzzles. We were offering grand theories, grand solutions to problems and so forth. So let's move ahead a hundred years or so. Well, things are changing a little bit. So I already mentioned woke and you're probably thinking certain things when I say woke and it's not that you briefly fell asleep while I'm talking, it's something else, okay? Today, unfortunately, from the inside of academia, scholars don't really have ideas. Very few scholars are what we would call scholars. And it's one of the first things that I learned in grad school sitting down with my advisor. You might have heard of him, Peter Klein. I mean, he said that, yeah, this is academia, but scholars aren't really scholars the way you and I think about them. I thought, what the heck does that mean? But I learned pretty quickly that, okay, that's true. Okay, so most people in academia and in research they specialize in statistical regression analysis. And they focus on digging into data. The big thing in economics is data mining. Can you imagine Mises or someone like that thing? I don't know anything about the world, but I'm gonna run these regressions on all this data and see what happens. What is actually going on? No, there's no way you can do that, right? But if that is what you focus on, how are you going to put the pieces together? How are you going to figure out the grand scheme of things? What the actual image is like when you start putting those pieces of the puzzle together? That's not your job. You're specialized on the piece. You're like, what are the actual colors of the piece? Nothing else. And in fact, the academic journals, the so-called scholarly journals, they don't publish ideas. They're not interested in listening to grand solutions, new solutions. No, everything is incremental. It takes another little step forward and you have to use the literature that is already published. So how can you then deviate from that? How can you present something else, something that competes with what everybody else has already believed or what is already published? Well, you can't really. Let's take baby steps. Well, if you come from, if you're going this direction and the literature is to go in this direction, how are you going to take baby steps over here where you should be? You really can't. So that's a huge problem. The question is, can scholars today even understand ideas? I'm not so sure always. So I'm not going to mention anything about my colleagues at Oklahoma State University, but discussing with my peers, so-called, at conferences and also when trying to publish in journals, very rarely do they understand logical arguments. Very rarely do they understand the big picture, the real theory, or even how to structure a new theory. They're interested in the statistics and whether something is statistically significant. Nothing else. And of course, add to this then, both within the academy and beyond, that we have activism has replaced the pursuit of truth. That we no longer are interested in what is actually the case, but what someone feels or what we all feel or if someone is offended, something like that. So we have canceled culture. We don't even want to hear ideas. If we disagree with the idea, shut up. Because we're offended. Imagine going to a college, trying to get an education without being exposed to new ideas that you haven't heard of before. What kind of education is that? I don't even know what that means. We also learned that words are violence, whatever that means. I have no clue. So is academia a lost cause? Well, we had a panel on this before, right? So we don't have to talk about this, but there's plenty going on in academia that's not good. So we already talked about DEI in this other panel. You know of CRT, critical race theory, OBS, that's other bullshit. Okay, so that must have been like fifth joke. The first time you laughed. Okay. So outside of academia, we have the glorious state. People believe that the state can do pretty much anything. The world doesn't matter. The world is whatever the state makes it into. Okay, so we have this out of control, welfare warfare, statism, where the magical monetary theory, all this stuff. People actually believe in post scarcity. That we're in the world where scarcity does not apply anymore. Everything is short term or immediate. We sort of have a new dark age in the sense that we can't really put pieces together. We can't really think of things logically and figure stuff out anymore. So where are the scholars? Didn't really know. All of this I think leads to a new socialist calculation debate. Another one. It's been a hundred years since the last one. We're heading to a new one. And there are several reasons I say this. One is that in practice we have all these forces pushing towards the state. And the state as a means to centrally plan society. And we don't even discuss whether it's possible or what might be the implications of this. So we have the moronic monetary theory. We have economic illiteracy is sort of the religion. There are articles published in scholarly journals that are rediscovering and attacking Austrians. Attacking the socialist calculation argument from Mises. Attacking Austrians history. Saying that we just made stuff up. Most recently a paper by Lopez from this year in Cambridge Journal of Economics arguing that no Mises was really a general equilibrium theorist. Austrians later in the 90s invented the idea that he thought of entrepreneurship and market process and so forth. So that's where the discussion is now. Obviously some realize that they need to get rid of Austrians as we're standing in the way. So as long as we get rid of Austrians it's just full speed ahead. Okay so this will lead to a new debate but it's going to be very different because we're no longer in a society where the grand ideas, the big ideas, real scholarship matters. It's a very different world. So where does this leave us? Okay so some of you might be old enough to recognize this picture. So we can stand here as a beacon of a true theory which we of course should do but that's going to leave us marginalized. Where no one is going to listen to us. We can keep pounding the Mises drum if we want to. Those big ideas in the same way as before but that's not where the discussion is at. So is there going to be a Patrick Swayze to pull us out of the corner is the question or can we do that ourselves? So theory still matters. Theory still comes first. So we have that on our side. It's just that to everybody else it doesn't really matter but it can still guide us, okay? So our adversaries, they don't give a damn about logic or consistency or anything like that. So whether it's in theory or in practice doesn't really matter. What we can do and what we have been doing pretty well is educate the remnant. So all of you and everybody out there who agree with us but don't really know of us perhaps or know of each other. There are plenty of people like that and more and more the crazier policy gets. So we do this really well and here are some examples. So we have podcasts, we have videos online. We have some great new books. We have study guides for the works of the masters so we can even millennials can understand them, that sort of thing. Okay, so we do this really well. We're teaching, we're preaching, we're reaching new people, that's awesome. But is this enough? Probably not. So we are winning battles in this new world and here are some examples. So I'm on Twitter in case you didn't know. There are others on Twitter too of course. So Greg here for instance should follow him, he's pretty awesome. But on Twitter believe it or not people appreciate some economic truth and some economic literacy. So just stating things the way they are, people respond, a lot of people. Some not in the best language, but others actually are pretty nice and they appreciate it. Other things you can teach courses in university. This is one of my courses that I teach every year on Austrian economics. Very highly appreciated among the students. I always get comments like, why isn't this required by everybody? Because suddenly you have economics majors who understand economics. Things like whoa. And they say that, not necessarily whoa, but they say that now I know what the heck we were talking about for three years because I take this one course. And I do this in the PhD seminar as well, which is based on Manger, Bambalberg, Mises Rothbard. Of course we need to reach out too and I write columns for the entrepreneur magazine trying to reach new audiences. I'm basically just interpreting Mises and Rothbard. That's what I'm doing. I have over 50 columns in an entrepreneur magazine speaking directly to entrepreneurs. This is how you should think about the economy and they go whoa, yeah, you're right. It's easy, right? Any other projects? Well, down in the corner there, a new project. I'm writing a primer, sort of really short introduction to Austrian economics, how to understand economics. And out there, you can help contribute to this project so that we can spread this primer to the rest of the world. And if you didn't notice, all of these are about me. Okay, but those are just battles, right? So how do we win the war? Because that's what is important. Doesn't really matter if we win each battle or we need to win the war. Well, the first thing is we need to try to make theory relevant. Because we're not talking to those big scholars who are interested in ideas. Because that's us. There's no one else. We're already on board. So we need to make theory more actionable. We need to make theory appetizing for doers, not just for readers and thinkers, okay? So yes, we have a theory based in action but we need to have a theory that you can act on and use in action. So we need to make it useful for real people in the real world. In a sense, we need to leverage theory, right? So we need to use theory to promote certain types of actions. And in the panel this morning with Hunter Hastings, we're talking about how we can speak to entrepreneurs and help them be good entrepreneurs and change the world. Okay, so more than understanding markets, we need to use markets and change the world that way, okay? And in a sense, applied economics, applied Austrian economics is applied libertarianism. Because if you are acting in the market, you are creating new value for others and you're getting value yourself through trade. It's horizontal, it's not vertical. It's voluntary, it's very creative, everybody's better off. That's the market in practice, whether it's in the black market or not, okay? So that's how we should do it too. Focus on the individual, not on society or something like that, it should be bottom up, should be actions first and then markets will follow. Because if we trade and you trade over here and more people trade, that is the market. There's nothing more to it, right? So let's go through one example that I think is really good here because what we're talking about is really entrepreneurship, big and small, okay? So you might have heard of this company. I don't mean Taxi, I mean Uber. It's a freaking app, if you haven't heard of it. But what did they do? It's entrepreneurship, they created a new company, a new type of service, offering personal transportation to people that was not a taxi company. Taxi companies were highly regulated to start a new taxi company, to compete with the others. You needed to do it exactly the same way as the old ones. So you would need to buy a fleet of cars, hire a bunch of drivers, put together a call center, get a phone number, get your license and medallions and what have you, all of those things. How are you going to compete with, you're not changing anything. That's not entrepreneurship. So Uber did something different. They said, we're not a taxi company. So they said, the regulations for taxi companies do not apply to us, because we're not a taxi company. We're doing something different. People want to use our service, because it's better. We're offering more value. They're still getting from A to B, but it's more value to them in many different ways. And we're sidestepping the regulations. What happened? Well the taxi companies, many of them went bankrupt. They don't exist anymore, because they couldn't make profits anymore. So the protected incumbents in the market, they're gone to some extent, because of this entrepreneurship that changed things. Very often Uber launched their services in towns that didn't want them, because very often the taxi companies were regulating the taxi companies. So it's super corrupt. So Uber just went there anyway, and the politicians freaked out. And usually they said, we haven't regulated this space yet, so you can't offer this service. And they were, well okay, we'll just do it for free until you have regulated it. Okay, well when you do that, guess how much the taxi companies are making? They're competing with free. So then the politicians freaked out even more. So they had to regulate the space, but they couldn't just over-regulate it, because people were already using the service. So this is a new type of audience for us. We need to help people change the world step by step, because what entrepreneurs do is really creating our future, like I said in this morning. They're creating the future world that we live in by offering us new and better services, and by doing that they are engaging in a creative destruction, as Schumpeter put it. They're creating something new and that destroys the old. Well the old is crappy, that's why it's destroyed. And the old is very often highly regulated and in cahoots with governments. The new is not, okay? Very often when I talk to entrepreneurs, they're already Austrians. They understand the market process, they understand what they're doing in the market. They understand that the customer is king. They just don't have the words for it. They just might not understand the implications of what they're doing. But we can help them with that. We can provide them with a language, we can provide them with a framework. And the economics for business project is one of those where we are educating entrepreneurs in how to be good entrepreneurs, just using Austrian theory. But this means we need a new type of language. Okay, so last slide. Where do we need to go? What is the strategy? Well, we need to show how theory is relevant. We need to present the future and focus on the future and the present, not the past. So we need to change our messaging. We need to explain what is actually going on in language that people can understand. So we need to translate our theories into a language that anyone can understand. Hence the primer, hence the columns in popular magazines, hence Twitter, what have you, all of those things. We need to extend the theory because very often it's abstract and up here. And I usually say that Austrian economics is awesome because we have a theory of entrepreneurship and we have a theory of capital. The problem is that both are pretty underdeveloped. We still need the details in those theories so we can use them, so we can apply them, so we can use them for offering guidance to people in the real world. So we need to do that. The Austrian theory of investing is a good example of that. Where we have plenty of books, plenty of investors just applying Austrian theory and they're writing books showing what it's like, what it means, how does Austrian economics inform my investment decisions? And they're doing it well. Of course, not everybody likes this. So here's an example of one of my recent articles in the quarterly journal of Austrian economics where I tried to prexologically extend the theory of entrepreneurship and Twitter put a warning on it. So this academic article heads up, conversations like this can be intense. Indeed they can. But rarely are prexological arguments this intense in social media. And of course, we also need to apply theory and we're doing that to some extent and yesterday's talk by Patrick Newman was a good example how we apply it on the past and look at history of economics thought and also economic history. We need to do it in the present as well. We need to use the theory to show what is actually going on. Not just present the theory, make it available and then hope that people use it to uncover what is going on, but actually provide them with the uncovering itself. Okay, to make sure that they understand it, talking a language that even millennials can understand. And that's, I think all there is to it. Whoops. Thank you very much.