 I first saw the painting in in Rotterdam, where I wrote most of the book. Four gentlemen are standing in front of the ruins of Pompeii with the Fesuvius in the background. This was different. It was figurative art. It's a it's a dark painting. It's a painting that symbolizes and declines. But then there's one more aspect which really tied it all together, and that is that the painter is actually in the painting. Now that is incredibly important for the story I am telling about Austrian economics. I'm Erindeker. I'm an economist with a big interesting culture. So this particular project really has to do with interwar Europe and the crisis in interwar Europe. So it has to do with the rise of socialism, the rise of fascism, and then the rise of Nazism. And there were different responses to that. And those responses were drawn from all over the intellectual world, natural scientists got involved, artists got involved. So I really treat economists as intellectuals on the same plane as say novelists or visual artists. They are part of the culture that they're trying to save or to sustain or to cultivate. And that painter being in there, then I realized, this is my painting. The painting is called La de Bazookas from Pompeii or late visitors to Pompeii by Karl Wilink. Interwar art in the Netherlands is very simple. It's abstract. So this immediately stood out. It was un-purposely symbolic. And even in that sense it reflects how my economists are different from the economists of their time. Because economics is becoming abstract. It's becoming technical. In Vienna there was still a sense that the economists were talking to the political scientists, they were talking to the philosophers, they were talking to the artists. So there was a much broader conversation that you could find anywhere else. But that conversation in Europe at the time, especially in interwar Europe, is increasingly lost. They're all turned with their backs toward one another. And it's clear that these gentlemen have stopped talking to each other. One of the things that is unique about Vienna in this period is the way in which intellectual life is organized, so to say. And that is in the Viennese circles. And they range from political to artistic, to very specific interests. These circles don't turn their back toward each other. The discipline of economics doesn't turn its back to sociology or philosophy or history. So I got into contact with the widow of the painter and she told me, you know, this, the fella in the back, that's actually Oswald Spengler. Now Oswald Spengler is a very famous German historian of the time, and he wrote the book The Decline of the West. It's a fatalistic book. Then I went back to the painter, you know, Kao Willing himself, who is on the left of the painting. And there he is, looking over his shoulder, slightly guilty, slightly as if something's bothering him. My way of explaining that posture of him is saying, well, I am aware that I have a role to play here, but what is that role? I am not Oswald Spengler, who's depicted here with his archaeological kit, who has only done the digging, but knows of no way to construct something new again. But I am here, do I have a role? So the painting, it reflects the difficult period of the early 1930s, in which people don't really know what to do with the threat from the east, which is socialism and communism, or the threat from the center from Germany, where Hitler has just taken power. This tension between fatalism and acting as a custodian, acting as a defender, somebody who stands up for the civilization, is one of the central tensions that I explore in the book, and that I argue is the central sort of turning point in the Austrian School of Economics from a more fatalistic trend toward the acceptance of the decline to the desire to fight back the idea that we got to show why liberalism, why the age of liberalism has not ended, why liberalism still has a future. My book is aimed at my fellow economists, saying, you know, we shouldn't study the economists as some isolated thing, but we should be studying it as part of a wider civilization. Suspicious if you're in the ivory tower and never come down. The main message is that the shared, the commons are the most important things, and we don't realize how much societies depend on what is shared and what we have in common, whether they are ideals, whether they are practices, that there's something shared in our culture, in our economy, in our society. That is, I hope, the main message for the wider world.