 I'm going to indulge myself and deviate a little bit from my prepared remarks today because of just everything that's going on in the news. It's really almost hour by hour. And I saw earlier today Senator Rand Paul tweeted out something apparently people had been attempting to dox senators residences and announced these addresses publicly. It's probably not that hard to find anyway. In order to create mini protests, presumably, outside of their homes to convince them to vote one way or another, this coming week on the Kavanaugh nomination, which seemed like a pretty mild tweet. But nonetheless, he was immediately savaged in his responses by the Twitterati. So it's interesting. Because the topic I wanted to speak about today is whether we're winning or losing. And we can look at that a lot of different ways. In terms of economics, in terms of politics, in terms of culture, society, civilization, et cetera. And I think the answer to that question depends very much so upon your focus. But what we've seen in full flight the last couple of weeks with this Kavanaugh business, especially the last couple of days, is we've seen the political world. This is the political world in action. And I think what is fraying is the idea that politics creates some sort of compromise down the middle, where we all get a little bit of what we want, but not everything. And that, especially democratic voting, that particular form of politics is a way to reduce conflict in society. I think that's fraying. I think the idea that democracy eliminates a lot of kinetic action that we might otherwise find ourselves subject to is fraying. And I'm not sure that that's a bad thing from our perspective. We've certainly seen what I think Lou Rockwell calls the unique evil of the left. We've seen that in spades in the last couple of weeks with what's going on with Kavanaugh, and this adivistic desire to cause hatred and dissension among the sexes of all things. What a terrible, terrible way to try to organize a society, presumably I guess so that women will all vote Democrat. I guess that's the goal. But it sure seems like an awfully malevolent goal at that. And as the father of a 12-year-old boy, I'm just going to read a couple of representative headlines from the last couple of months that I don't appreciate as a dad. New York, or excuse me, Washington Post, why can't we hate men? I want to burn the frat house of America to the ground. And here's my favorite. This is a couple of days ago in the New York Times, pigs all the way down. OK. Well, that's the political world for us. That's what the Kavanaugh confirmation is giving us. And of course, Trump being elected to office and some of the insanity that that's caused in the left-wing hive mind is behind a lot of this. But as with most of the political world, of course, it obscures the real issues and it obscures principles. Let's not give Mr. Kavanaugh too much of a pass here. It turns out not only was he someone charged with giving legal and intellectual cover to the Patriot Act when he was working for the Bush administration, he's apparently a favorite of John Yu, who is, I think, might be termed a war criminal and a legal advocate for the Bush torture regime, the Bush invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. So Mr. Kavanaugh has Mr. Yu's stamp of approval. And he's also, if you listen to the judge Napolitano, very, very bad on this pesky little detail called the Fourth Amendment, which at least presumably protects us against government surveillance and metadata collection and some other things, but not in Mr. Kavanaugh's view. So isn't it interesting that with all of the ranker that we're experiencing with all the hatred and division, none of it gets to substance or principle whatsoever. It's just about this tribal left versus right and now this new tribal man versus woman. So one of the things that really motivates me and makes me enjoy working the Mises Institute is we're the anti-political organization. If we agree with the formulation that there's basically two ways to have wealth in society, to obtain wealth. There's basically two ways to organize society. The political means and the economic means. Well, we're about economics here, and that's in effect, it's an antidote to politics. It's another way of organizing society when our critics say, well, what would you have? You've got, your politics is interested in you, you have to engage and et cetera. And there's some truth to that. I don't deny that entirely. But the point is that when someone says, what would you do differently? Well, we don't have to say necessarily political anarchism or political atheism or agnosticism. We say, well, we'd organize the world around economics. In other words, property and trade and exchange and capital and not politics. So I think when you put it that way, it makes things not only a little less radical, but really a lot more enjoyable for me. I think that the idea that we're waking some people up to a different way to organize society is an exciting one. And that people are starting to understand that what we're seeing in Washington is a sideshow. And it's not only a sideshow, it's malevolent, it's harmful, it's making all of us worse off. So on this question of whether we're gaining ground, whether we're winning or losing, I have a professor friend. He teaches at a large public university in the South, not Auburn. And I was talking to him last summer and he said to me, he said, I think the majority of my freshmen have never read a book that they enter university never having read a full length book. And is that true? I'm not sure, but it makes us worried. It makes us concerned about the non-intellectual and anti-intellectual tenor of our age. And it makes us worry that these young people are gonna be awfully susceptible to the kind of platitudes that are coming out of both parties this week around the Kavanaugh business. And of course, it's this kind of ignorance that lends credibility to people like Bernie Sanders and this Miss Acasio Cortez, I can't remember her first name, Alexandria, Alexandra. And it also bears out that information is not knowledge. We basically have the sum total of worldwide information garnered to date at our fingertips in this little deck of cards created for me by the Apple Corporation. But yet it seems like the wisdom you might take from some of that information in your fingertips is hard to arrive at. So that asks the question, what should we be doing? How should we be combating this? Well, I think the Mises Institute's role in combating this is to find those kids who do read books. And not just books, but sometimes a 900 page book. Because I think it's those kids who are gonna be just that much more important in the future and what's gonna be increasingly probably a technical and intellectual future as what at least we hope that science and technology continue to grow and outpace the state. Because I think that's really the source of our real wealth is that technology and innovation somehow, despite all the odds, outpace all the state depredations. But if there's one thing the Mises Institute could do to help, I think it would be to save young people. And when I say save, I'm gonna bring up an example from Murray Rothbard. If some of you have had an opportunity to get into the Progressive Era book, you'll know that if there's one thing Murray Rothbard hates as a reformer, and if there's one thing he really hates as a Yankee pietist reformer. And probably nobody personifies a Yankee pietist reformer more than the late John Dewey. Now John Dewey was a psychologist and he really earns Rothbard's wrath because he was almost, although he was a secular person later in life, he had this sort of evangelical zeal for saving the world through progressivism and progressivism meant statism. And according to Murray, John Dewey had a seemingly endless career. And that's because he was prolific. He lived from the 1850s all the way into the 1950s. He was a very influential man. And of course he was involved in the early stages of the founding of the New Republic magazine. And of course the New Republic was created as an unholy alliance between big business and left public intellectuals. And one of its first tasks being created just in 1914 was of course to gin up support for American involvement in World War I. And it turns out that throughout the 1910s with something like 60% of Americans having at least some German heritage that folks weren't necessarily that enthusiastic about going and fighting their first cousins over in Germany. But nonetheless, this was something that from Dewey's perspective had to be done. So in 1917 he wrote an article with a really remarkable title that's called The Conscription of Thought. We think of conscription as the military draft, the physical commandeering of young men, but he wrote The Conscription of Thought. And the purpose of this article was to reach other New Republic readers to educate them about what they could do to encourage a war spirit among these stubborn Americans who were still dubious about what from Dewey's perspective was something the United States should obviously do. And what's so interesting about the article is his desire to get America involved in the world had nothing to do with the actual battles or what was going on in Europe. He didn't care about Germany or Britain or Austro-Hungary. He didn't really care about US interests in those areas. His focus was entirely domestic. He thought that by getting the United States involved in World War I, that would enable us to create more of the collectivist government that he admired here at home and that the war collectivism he was seeing in Europe should be emulated and admired. So war would become a tool of democracy and it would foist socialism on us at home. So this was a way to achieve national greatness. And his way to achieve national greatness was that we had to go out there and take the intellectual class and we had to conscript people. We had to conscript their thoughts because up until then they had not yet been convinced. And of course, if we conscript their thoughts, then their bodies and their wallets will follow fairly certainly thereafter. And so today I think we were in the same situation where young people were having their thoughts conscripted and that we have to do everything we can to provide them an alternative to this. And I think that's really what the Mises Institute does. So some of the ways we might say looking back and looking forward that we're winning is of course to compare today to let's say just 20 or 30 years ago when the Mises Institute was being founded. If you talk to someone like a Joe Salerno or a Roger Garrison or if you've moved down a little bit generationally and talked to a Peter Klein, moved out a little farther and talked to a pair of Bieland, I think that they would all tell you that in academia things are much improved for people of our mindset, specifically for people who are an Austrian bent in economics departments. And certainly if you compare academia today as rotten as it is to the tenor and tone 100 years ago when Dewey was at his height, when socialism and communism were viewed as the future in the West. And people thought that there was a scientific or a technocratic way to engineer prosperity that didn't involve markets. I think things are very much improved in that we somehow miss this because we get so mired in the problems of our own age. I think if we mentioned this last year in New York City, if we look at the legacy of Ludwig von Mises himself today versus 30 or 50 years ago, things are very much improved. Gary North makes the joke that as recently as the 1970s perhaps if you mentioned the name Mises people would say do you mean Richard? Meaning his very, his somewhat famous mathematician brother who is a brilliant statistician at Harvard for many years. Nobody says when you say Mises today nobody says do you mean Richard? So we're making progress and especially when it comes to technology in the digital age, I mean the access to virtually every great book, to every great paper in the Austro-libertarian tradition, immediate, generally free online and digital form is pretty astounding if we think about it. And I'm sure a lot of people in this room can recall it wasn't that long ago. Let's say you went into your local bookstore, your Walden books. Does anybody remember Walden books? Or B. Dalton? Antoine's looking at me with an odd. He's got to look at me sideways. But the point is that when you went into that bookstore they might have had some Ayn Rand books. They might have had John Kenneth Galbraith's A Fluent Society, a few books along those lines but they didn't have any Rothbard. They didn't have any Mises. And in fact, even your local public library or your local university library wouldn't have any Rothbard or Mises. Not so, so long ago. So that's radically changed. So technology has been an almost unbelievable leveler for us in the libertarian and Austrian movement. And of course, even if we look at the two dominant political ideologies of our day which are basically neoliberalism and neoconservatism, both of these are deeply flawed doctrines. But you'll notice, unlike in Dewey's time, both of them at least give some lip service to the idea of markets and property as a generator of wealth in society. You'll notice even Bono from U2 who's a human I find insufferable. But nonetheless, people like to listen to him and he's involved in aid in Africa and he's said some pretty interesting things in the last couple of years about what Africa really needs in terms of capitalism. So you'll see that there are in drips and pieces where you're starting to break through culturally. So what then is the exact role of the Mises and Sue? We say we wanna reach people, we wanna save their minds from being conscripted but what might that actually look like? Well, I think in the future, it's going to look more and more like what we might call a newer alternative school. You know, when we think of school and when we think of universities today, and I know Peter Klein and Parab, Byland have both talked about this, they're basically using the same model that they were using a thousand years ago. There's basically a one directional lecture given to the passive recipient students to go home and sort of regurgitate that on a test and that hasn't changed that much. And we think with all the student loan debt out there, more than a trillion dollars, about 1.3 trillion dollars in student loan debt. And this is, of course, is having ripple effects throughout the economy in terms of marriage, home buying, having children, all kinds of things. You'd think, guys, that can't last too much longer. And there's different opinions on that. We certainly hope it's crashing down. Brian Kaplan has a new book out where he seems to, he's a little more pessimistic. He says, you know, states will prop this up and this will go on a long time. But whether it does or doesn't, I think for a lot of individuals, the amount of debt that they might incur versus the benefit of this credential they earn is starting to become a losing proposition. And I think that rises, that raises the prospects of the Mises Institute in this equation. So if we think of education not as something that you necessarily do in a university setting or in a particular place where you go to in a brick or mortar form, if we think of education as something that is increasingly important as a lifetime prospect, a process of lifelong learning where no one is in these sort of set stable careers where you can just learn a particular set of skills and then coast for the next 40 years like people used to do in certain careers, when we think that that's out the window. When we think of the growing role of online learning in all of this, I think it really positions us to be an alternative school of sorts and nothing short of that. And you'd be amazed at the people who contact us and reach out to us as to how they consume our material. So school in the form of lifelong education becomes radically reconstituted. What's school? Well, it depends. It depends on how much education you feel you want or need to consume. In other words, you become a consumer of sorts. So for some people, all they want or need from the Mises Institute is maybe to follow our Twitter feed or our Facebook feed and occasionally see an article that looks interesting and click on it and learn something. And that's all that they need or want from us. And then there's other people who become so inspired and so interested in all of the world of economics. They end up coming here. They decide they want economics to become their profession. Maybe they spend a summer with us as a fellow. They go and get a PhD in economics and go commit their lives to teaching economics. But there's a lot of people in between those two polls. And we wanna be here for those people really on every level. What we've learned about online learning is that it really doesn't match that 1,000-year-old model. What people want out of it's different. They want shorter, pithier, video-type material. And they tend to, just like in regular university, they tend to have a lot of enthusiasm at the beginning of a course. And then as the course proceeds, they start to drop out and lose interest. The participation wanes. And so no one's really figured out the online model yet. Even websites like Khan Academy and Udacity have not completely figured out what it looks like. But we're learning. We're slowly but surely learning. And we're getting more and more people consuming some of our online content. And of course, what's interesting about it is that when you don't have some of the motivators you have in a regular university setting, and one of those big motivators is if your parents are paying. And the other is that you don't want to flunk. And the other is that you need the credit to graduate. And all of these kinds of things, if you take that away, you find that in an online context, people still need some amount of systemization. They still need us, the Mises Institute, to come along and sort of put it together in a way that makes sense for them. So it's not enough to just hand them human action or man economy and state. They still want us to filter it a little bit and package it a little bit. And present it in a way that's palatable and understandable to them. So there's still a big need to get just beyond the great books itself. So that's really part of our vision is to systematize things for people and make it easy for them and make it accessible for them, make it convenient for them, and make it cheap or even free for them to do. So when it comes to those freshmen that I mentioned who enter university without having read a single book, we reach a point where we have to have a target audience. We have to say we're not a mass movement. We're not necessarily for everyone. We want to reach the people who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow, at least the thought leaders, the intellectual people of tomorrow. And that's really our goal is to be there for them and to be there for them in new and radical and innovative ways, because the political status quo isn't working. I think what we're going to see, especially if Kavanaugh is confirmed next week, is a lot of protests and almost insurrection. And again, none of it has anything to do with principle. None of it has anything to do with philosophy. None of it has anything to do with right or wrong. The Republicans and the Supreme Court with or without Kavanaugh are not going to touch Roe versus Wade. They're not going to do anything about that. They're not going to change that. The Democrats, they don't care about the Fourth Amendment. They don't care about any of this. They care about reducing Kavanaugh into a bloody pulp on the ground. And so this isn't an alternative to war. This is a prelude to war. And it's something that I think we have an obligation to do everything in our power to resist. And resistance means education. And the antithesis of politics is economics. So education and economics is why we're here and it's why you're here. And hopefully it's why we'll be here for the next 35 years. So thank you very much. Thank you.