 Thank you, Joe, and thanks for inviting me to the conference. I want to thank Roger for being my straight man. He mentioned the paucity of women at the Colorado School of Mines. And it was nothing compared to the paucity of women at the South Royalton event. And in fact, there was really only one eligible woman at that event. Ida Walters, who's now my wife. I don't usually find myself the most competitive in these things in a large group of people. So I really regard it as one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. So in terms of what I have to say beyond that, which by the way, also when I was chatting with Ida at the time, she said, are you going to be in New York soon? And like Roger, I found a reason to go to New York soon. Which fortunately, I saw Murray at the same time. So what I want to do is just really two things. One of them is just a few recollections of the conference. And then I want to talk about sort of what happened intellectually to me after that conference. Everyone else has talked about before. And I started reading Anne Rand in the ninth grade. It was reading human action in high school. So it's another thing that makes it surprising. I was able to track Ida or any other female being that nerdy, you know, but. So anyway, I want to talk about what happened afterwards because I went in a lot different direction. And I think where I ended up, there's opportunity for Austrians and lessons. So first of all, I want to remind everybody that the people who paid for the conference to the best of my understanding are the Koch brothers. And I guess their ability to leverage money is exemplified by the fact they didn't have to spend a lot on accommodations and look at the result they got, right? So, you know, I'm understanding why the left is so terrified of the Koch brothers when they can get so much for so little in terms of their investment in the early days of Austrian economics. And obviously I applaud them for that. And I'm a great admirers of them. So the next sort of humorous things, you know, my wife is of course very charming. And the most charming people at the conference other than Murray, you know, were the Haslots. Francis and Henry Haslot, who were just utterly delightful people. And I just spent quite a bit of time with the two of them. And the first story, which, you know, it all begins with Anne Rand, right? The first story is that Francis actually worked in Hollywood with Anne Rand at the studios. So I had a great time hearing all of Francis' stories about the early days with Anne Rand and Hollywood, which I thought was rather interesting. And I actually knew Anne Rand as well at that point in time. So that created more interest for him. And then the second thing goes to Friedman's visit. As you know, he kind of hijacked the conference to a certain extent. He was famous. And when he showed up, everybody kind of went out and listened to Milton. And Milton, as he often was, was extremely rude in his discussions, which we've heard what he had to say. And Ida was sitting next to Francis. And Francis' comment was, I suppose he doesn't think there's a Chicago school. Which not only it was quite trenchant at the time, but as you probably realize today, the Chicago school's almost gone. So today there's hardly a Chicago school in the sense that there used to be for better or for worse. Well, anyway, so that's kind of my recollect. One more thing I would wanna add. Everyone talks about how horrible it was. Well, you know, I'm a Canadian, eh? And so having grown up in Northern Ontario in my summers, and of course that was back in the days when Canada was more socialistic than the United States, which, you know, I made the wrong immigration move because now that's reversed, right? But so it was much poorer as you'd expect of a socialist country. To me, this was just like a normal Northern Ontario resort. I never, this is the first I've discovered it was a pest hole, you know? Now I will tell you that I've now become for the rest, for much of my life an entrepreneur. So I'm the subject of, which I hadn't realized that Austrian economics had become so interested in entrepreneurs, obviously a major part of this conference. So I'm becoming the subject of the study instead of the studier. But I haven't been working on a deal in New Hampshire, 25 miles from South Royal, which I was there last week. I'm going back there this week and I drove over there and I can't find a trace of the hotel, so time has eliminated it. Well, anyway, how did I get there? I was at UCLA and, you know, UCLA at the time was a very different school. It was the most libertarian school in the country. It was a school that, you know, wasn't sold on the neoclassical model. We taught it, we learned it because, you know, we had to hopefully survive if we graduated and when we graduated and obviously many of the graduates really haven't survived. Very few of us are a tenured faculty anymore. Almost all of us went into business or other things. I think the training there was great for that, not necessarily for being an academic. But, you know, the whole idea of how you get to equilibrium, how you use information, we had the Austrians as part of our reading lists, you know, Demsets and Alchin were big fans of everybody really except Murray. You know, Murray was kind of like Friedman. I mean, both of them could be charming but they could be pretty abrasive too and they'd run into that side of Murray, which is unfortunate because he's an extraordinarily brilliant guy and I think if he'd been a little more accommodating to those guys he might have had great common cause with them. So, you know, we went, David Henderson and myself, another Canadian, we went down to UCLA together, we went to South Royalton together, which by the way another reason South Royalton didn't seem so bad is at the time Roy Childs was living with us in LA and I don't know who remembers Roy Childs. So having Roy Childs in your home is, you know, the definition of entropy. So, you know, anywhere else we went was an upgrade as I did will attest. Of course Roy was incredibly brilliant and incredibly charming. Anyway, so we went to South Royalton, you know, as fans of Austrian economics but people also who are very fascinated with the new institutionalism at UCLA. And, you know, UCLA already you could see the death throes of monetarism to a large degree. There was only one monetarist there. There were a bunch of other people with various odd views really that haven't survived but, you know, a good understanding that lots of parts of monetarism wasn't gonna cut it. And so, you know, we had a whole different view from people coming from a more conventional background and felt, you know, really at home in South Royalton and a lot of things that we were interested in. Now for me, I was kind of dismayed at the whole hostility between the monetarist and the Austrians. And here's where I'll probably get myself in trouble but what the heck, you know, I'm not an academic anymore so you can discount whatever I say, right? Well to me, if I looked at the Austrian theory of the business cycle that depends on the government manipulating interest rates and then wrong investment decisions of various sorts which is an oversimplification but I think directionally correct and you look at the business cycle theory of Friedman that you have the government inflating or deflating and people get the wrong signals about price. First of all, I never could understand why they were mutually exclusive. They're both about expectations, right? So it seemed to me that, you know, they should be getting along with each other but they weren't. Anyway, so I left UCLA, went to University of Chicago thinking about expectations. At Chicago, I got heavily involved in finance and to cut to the chase, the thing that probably had the biggest implications for my thinking was Maurice Kendall's discovery in circa 1950 that the security markets were a random walk. To me, I think that's the most important empirical fact in economics. And of course, ultimately it became evident through Mert Miller and many others that that implied efficient capital markets which, you know, we don't need to go into the detail on that and ultimately that led to Lucas. So when I got to Chicago in 76, Lucas had published his first and most important article on rational expectations and really the monitors were already dead at Chicago. They were gone and rational expectations had really replaced them and, you know, the monitors survived in schools like UCLA where Michael Darby was for a number of years but had no really further influence, okay? So, you know, if I go do the two key things of rational expectations that I think are important for us to think about and incorporate into Austrian economics, the first one was that to the extent things are anticipated in terms of government, whether it's interest rate manipulations or specifically the money supply, it doesn't have an effect on the economy. It's only the surprises that affect the economy. And the second thing is that econometric studies can't forecast the economy. Both those things, and particularly the second thing, is should be bread and butter to Austrian economics. I mean, we're all saying that the government can't run the economy and here is, you know, now there's what, a number of Nobel Prizes, Lucas, Sargent, these people are libertarians, Lucas is, Sargent's pretty much one. And they basically have refuted the government's power to really manage proactively the economy. And anyway, if you have a rule, the rule won't work because if the rule's understood, guys like me, entrepreneurs are out there going, you wanna do this to me, I'm not accepting it. You know, you manipulate the interest rate, I'm not gonna borrow, which I can tell you actually I've done. So, to me, you know, the core Austrian idea of how you get to equilibrium and how markets react is really manifest in rational expectations and I'd like to see a lot more connections between the two. And I'll close with saying that you always have to promote yourself, of course. First of all, a lot more detail than what I've had to say. Ida and I wrote, excuse me, in the July 97 Liberty Magazine, so you can take a look and sort of ties all together. I think it's one of the few places where you'll see the rational expectations as a logical outcome of efficient markets, the finance and the macroeconomics. And then the other thing, if you think that math is required, you know, the two books by Merton Miller, Miller on Derivatives and then Miller on Financial Innovations, we edited both those books. I help with it to some extent. They're published in the 90s, 91 when he won the first prize, the Nobel Prize and 95. Those are great books, they're accessible, they're not mathematical. It seems to me they'd be highly congenial to Austria in seeking to understand these things.