 Yeah, after hearing Randy I have the urge to tell my own story and so I will, I mean after all you can read the papers out of Ed Dolan's book and you're getting a gist of how good the accommodations were and I will verify what Ed was saying and in fact the first night I was late even finding my room and it took a while to realize that I didn't have a mat, it's just a small room but it took a while to realize I didn't have a mattress and the reason for that is I didn't have a light either. There were no lamps turns out that there was a screw-in bulb but it was burnt out and so anyhow we finally persevered. The food though was good, do you all remember the food? It was great, that sort of saved us from a lot more complaints. So anyhow I want to tell my story because I would offer up myself as the most unlikely person to end up arriving at South Royalton as you can imagine and the reason, several reasons, one is that my bachelor's degree is in electrical engineering and from a very hardcore engineering school, Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy has about four thousand male students and as we counted thirteen female students and we weren't even sure we were counting the right one. So you really had to be interested in engineering to go to that school. And then I'm a fan of Milton Friedman's in a lot of ways that Ed I'm sure realizes. The main thing I have against him is that he waited too long to put an end to the military draft and too long for me to take advantage of that and it turns out that my brother was actually drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam that's when I ducked into the Air Force, took a commision and was stationed in a little town in upstate New York, Rome, New York where I was working in an electronic countermeasures lab trying to figure out how to jam Russian radars, actually it was antique radars because it was the ones they gave to North Vietnam. That was my business, that's what I was all about in the Air Force and worrying about ECM. We didn't have any bad economics at University or at Missouri School of Mines but we didn't have any good economics either. It was just engineering and I didn't know anything about that kind of stuff and I kind of shied away from any of the social sciences anyhow. I just couldn't get my teeth into it like I could in engineering. But my brother right before he went to Vietnam told me that he had discovered Ein Rand and he'd read a book or two and he wanted the rest of them. And so one of my missions was to find more Rand books and you couldn't find them in Rome, New York. You had to go west to Syracuse or east to Albany. But I would find the books and I'd buy two copies, mail him one, read the other one. Later on I was in the Air Force there for four years, 67 to 71. It was in 71 that Jerome Tushilli wrote the book, it usually begins with Ein Rand. I would have made a good data point for his empirical study on that because that's how that's how it worked. And so I read those books and it's particularly the capitalism, the unknown ideal which had a bibliography in the back, listing Mises and Hayek and a few others. Didn't have Rothbard in there but I found him soon enough. It was delayed. I actually, I was trying to be objective about this. I went to the base library and asked for two books. I wanted Murray's book, Great Depression, and I wanted Galbraith's book, The Great Crash. And it turns out I got the Rothbard book. The one for Galbraith, it was a book on the Hindenburg that they sent me. So I forgot about Galbraith and went ahead and read Rothbard. Okay. Anyhow, when I exited the Air Force I was in trouble like so many other electrical engineers getting out of the Air Force because the economy was pretty soft and I kind of wondered why. Had no idea at the time why the economy would turn down. I didn't know about those such things. And some of my fellow officers were going into MBA programs and I thought, well, maybe I'll do that. And I looked at the curriculum and I thought, God, it's dull. It's an MBA program. It just seems way too dull. And I thought, well, economics is what I ought to go into because I knew some of it at least by reading Rand. And ended up at the University of Missouri at Kansas City to get a master's degree in economics. Well, UMKC was a hotbed of institutionalism, Babylonian, Eurasian institutionalism. And they also had some Marxists. They had a little bit of neoclassical, certainly Austrian. But I kind of strived in that atmosphere because there really were three camps, the institutionalists, Marxists, neoclassicals. And everyone thought I was in somebody else's camp. So I just sort of kept it that way. So anyhow, but that's the time that I wrote that first pamphlet thing that eventually got published by IHS. And I was invited then, actually one of my professors who arranged the invitation, to present it at the Midwest Economic Association in Chicago. My God. I was pretty green to be presenting any kind of economics and especially something this far out. And besides, there was no Austrian around to read this paper. And so just on a hope, I sent it to Murray Rothbard. And it turns out that not too long a week later or so, I got a phone call. It was Joey, actually. And she said, Murray liked your paper. He wants to talk to you. And she gave Murray the phone. And I had that same experience at the other tunes. You know, I heard a lot of cackling, you know, and I tried to figure out what was going on. He liked the paper. He liked it mainly because, as he said, it beats Keynes in his own game. He loved that, you know, that was something. And so he asked me, so are you going to be in New York anytime soon? And no plans to go to New York. And so I said, yeah, I'll be there spring break. And it was a wonderful evening at the Rothbard's. And we stayed up till three o'clock in the morning. Walter Block came over to Walter Grinder and one of his students. And we went through that paper, paragraph by paragraph. And I felt fairly confident about going to Chicago and giving the paper. But then when I got through with Kansas City with UMKC, I needed a job. I knew I wanted to go to grad school somewhere else, some PhD, but I didn't know where, okay? I needed a job. I had one offer from Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. And I would question that. And then I'd interviewed with the Bendix Corporation who made electrical power systems. In other words, I'll go for engineering or economics, whichever works, although my engineering was getting a little stale and couldn't decide. I had a good interview with Bendix and I got a call a few days later. And the guy started talking more about the engineering and it just all didn't sound like fun to me. And finally he says, now the one thing with this electrical stuff I want to ask you, he says, do you know anything about corrosion? And you know, if it's a job interview, you can fake it, you can bluff it, you know, but I'm sure there's a little silence on the phone. And then I said, no. Ended up going to the Federal Reserve for a year and a half. Maybe, maybe if I'd understood just a little more about the Federal Reserve, I would have become a corrosion expert. But I know my time's running short so I'll hurry up a bit here. But in that trip to New York and the visit with Murray, he was making lists of people to go to a history conference at Cornell. It was exactly a year before the South Royalton Conference and he invited me to that. And so I had that experience under my belt before Royalton. I even had to postpone my start date at the Fed in order to go to the history conference. And then a year from then I took all my vacation time to go to South Royalton. And glad I did that. And then I'll just say here is where I figured out and partly from talking to Murray the year before, where am I going to go? You know, where am I going to go to school? And Murray had told me go to UCLA, NYU, or Charlottesville, UVA. And I knew about New York. I knew about LA. I didn't want to go either place. So I went to Charlottesville, you know, and then at the conference itself, Larry Moss was there. I enjoyed his tricks too. But he was able to tell me a lot about what was going on in Charlottesville and made me happy to decide on that without bothering about the other two. Okay, thank you much.