 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to the Mises Weekends show. I recently had an opportunity to sit down with a great Australian Bitcoin and crypto podcaster named Stefan Levera. And we had a really enjoyable and in-depth conversation about everything relating to money and cryptos. We get into Austrian economics, Mises, Manger, deflation and so-called money hoarding. So stay tuned for a great interview. So Jeff, first of all, welcome to the show. Well, thank you so much. Let me open with a question for you. Sure. How's that? Tell us the state of the Austro-libertarian movement in Australia and how you came to find out about Mises Rothbard, etc. This is an interesting... Okay, so I would say the scene in terms of Austrian libertarianism in Australia is relatively small. How I actually found it, funnily enough, I was a kid. I was sort of 14 or 15 years old and I was on an IRC channel. And some guy in an AusPolitics IRC channel linked to a Mises Daily article. And he would regularly link to those. And at the time I was a kid. I thought, oh, what is this crazy anarcho-capitalism Austrian economics thing? But then over time actually started to read that. And as I understood more around that, that was what sort of started me going down that rabbit hole of then reading the greats such as Mises and Rothbard and Hopper. Well, I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad you stumbled across this. Yeah, no, that's exactly it. And I think Bitcoin is something that... Well, Austrian economics is something that's helped understand Bitcoin in some ways. So, Jeff, a couple of months ago, I think this is around August 2018, you actually interviewed Safedin Amous on his book, The Bitcoin Standard. So let's start off with a little bit on your thoughts on Bitcoin generally. Well, I'm glad I interviewed him. I'm glad I read his book. It was recommended to me by a great friend of ours in the Bitcoin community named Caitlin Long. Some of your listeners might know her. And here's the thing. What you or I think about Bitcoin doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, it's for the market to decide. And that's what's so beautiful about it is it's not a government-issued currency. And it's not issued by any big institution, at least by design. It's starting to have some problems, but by design, it's a peer-to-peer network with a currency sort of globed on top of it. So when we say, well, is Bitcoin money or does Bitcoin work well or is Bitcoin fiat or is Bitcoin susceptible to this or that? Well, all these are questions for the marketplace. And whether people want to use blockchain for all kinds of things, whether they in particular want to use Bitcoin for monetary exchanges, whether they want to use some other coin. Instead of Bitcoin, I would side with Safedin on that and say probably not, but that's a matter of very vocal opinion on both sides. These are all questions for the market. No one person can decree anything. And so none of us can decree its money. And that's the beauty of it is that it's something that is arising in the marketplace or attempting to arise in the marketplace. So all of us who are libertarian-minded are worried about central banks. We all wake up in the morning and say, oh my god, these banks are completely out of control. They're putting liquidity into places in the market where it shouldn't exist. They're keeping interest rates too low. They're encouraging all kinds of malinvestment. And more importantly, it's not just economics. It's a form of control. Money is half of the equation in every transaction. On the one side, you've got the good or service being purchased. On the other side, you've got the money being given for the good or service. So the idea that government controls such a big piece of every transaction ought to scare us, not just in terms of our economic well-being, but in terms of our control and in terms of our sovereignty over our lives. I would assume that, well, socialism is sort of coming back, as you may have noticed. But for most of us listening, we understand that socialism has been refuted both empirically throughout the 20th century and also theoretically by great writers like Mises and Haslett and Rothbard and Hayek. So most of us would reject the idea of a currency of a planning board to sit around for wheat or for automobiles and say, well, in Australia next year, manufacturers should produce this many automobiles. The workers should be paid this much per hour and the cars should be sold for this price. We would all say, no, no, no, that's central planning. That's a recipe for disaster. And that's what happened in the former Soviet Union. But in effect, it may be a bit overstated, but in effect, that's what central bank boards do. They sit around and determine the supply and price of money in an economy or in a society. And I think that's very worrisome. I think it's a pretty new experiment, too, especially in the United States. It's only about 100 years old. And so Bitcoin were cryptos as an attempt to build something, not a parallel system, but a separate system is something that I think we have to encourage. Fantastic comments there, Jeff. And so I suppose then obviously projecting out much further into the future. Obviously, if it is mass adopted, do you believe that Bitcoin could enforce some sort of financial restraint to learn on what are currently very profligate and destructive and wasteful modern nation states of today? Oh, absolutely. Bitcoin and cryptos, if they were successful, they could be a political challenge to central banks and also put the brakes on them. As a matter of fact, that's what Nassim Talib says in his intro to Safideen's Bitcoin Standard Book. He says, look, even if Bitcoin fails, we prove now it can be done. And that alone ought to give central bankers a bit of pause. I mean, it is a potential form of competing currency. And that's exactly what Hayek talked about when he wrote his essay on denationalized money. I think that, as I mentioned earlier, the relationship between money and the state is a deadly one. It's one that finances wars and inflation and all kinds of government mischief. And so I think anything that can take us away from government money is a wonderful development. I also think it's a scary development for central banks and profligate national government. So I think if Bitcoin ever got a lot more traction, let's just say they would be rooting against it and whether they would be openly or surreptitiously acting against it is a different question. But we shouldn't put it past them. Yeah, definitely. And now one of the comments that safety often echoes is that in many cases, the central bankers will be some of the last to actually understand Bitcoin because they're just sort of trapped in a certain paradigm of thinking. Do you have any comments on that? Well, it's true. And what's the saying I'm paraphrasing here? It's hard to make a man understand something when it's in his self-interest not to. In other words, they make a living providing us with dollars and interest rates and determining the money supply. So it's like a surgeon who any ailment you present him with, he suggests surgery. I think that central bankers tend to think that they run the world and that they ought to run the world. So sure, they have a self-interest in sort of ignoring it and hoping it goes away. And if they can't do that, we've already seen signs that they'll attempt to co-opt it. Certain countries have said, well, maybe our national bank will issue a crypto. And then even if it's one step removed from the national government or a national central bank itself, if you just go over to the investment bank houses, which in the U.S. are basically almost cousins of the Fed, the primary dealers who avail themselves of new bank reserves first, when a city bank or something like that starts talking about or a Goldman Sachs starts talking about developing a crypto or a blockchain or using crypto or even hypothesizing crypto, then you know that they're nervous because they're trying to take a look at a new industry and figure out how they can run it and co-opt it. So we really have to avoid that. I think any sort of intermediary in the cryptocurrency world needs to be fought against. We don't need any Goldman Sachs. We don't need any city banks. We don't even need coin bases and coin desks. We need true peer-to-peer wallet currency. That's my strong opinion that middlemen, brokers, Mt. Gox is one example, middlemen are bad news and they go against the whole point and the whole purpose of cryptos. Yeah, that's actually a really well nuanced take. I think many of the more hardcore Bitcoiners would really agree with you there, whereas a lot of the people who are not so steeped in sort of the philosophy and the ethos of Bitcoin would be more sort of comfortable with trusting the third party, let's say. Yeah, and we see where third-party financial intermediaries have gotten us. In the past 100 years or so, I mean banks aren't most people's favorites and the sad part about it is that they aren't even lending on actual savings of local people and it wasn't that long ago, just a couple generations ago. I mean people really lent money based on someone's, based on how much money they had to lend and there were small local banks and somebody like my great-grandfather obtained a loan because he was known around town and people thought he was trustworthy or whatever and he had a halfway decent job and so we're so far removed from all that when we're just in this era of digital money and this era where central banks can create dollars out of thin air, use those to purchase bank assets and inflate their balance sheets. We're so far removed from what banking was ever meant to be that we really have to say that we have to just get rid of it. I don't think there's any saving the banking systems in as corrupt as they are at least in the West. Right and I think sort of related question that just came to my mind now. One of the great Austrian monetary scholars, Gita Hulsmann, has spoken about how in the past under a sound money standard there actually wasn't as much. There was some level of credit but it wasn't so much like as much of an extending loans as what we have now but it was more like extending commercial terms to a business. So let's say I'll give you these goods and you pay me within 30 days, that kind of thing. Do you have any comments on what we might see from a debt versus equity sort of worldview if we move to a more quote unquote hard money standard such as gold or Bitcoin? Well, I think we'd see a lot less debt. I don't know who I was reading. I was reading a Twitter stream the other day. I think again it was Nassim Talib and somebody pointed out he said, look credit should always be difficult unless you're some absolutely blue chip bar where whether that's a company or an individual, somebody with lots of assets to pledge against it, collateral, somebody with a proven tracker, credit should always be tight. Credit should always come at a fairly stiff rate of interest. If we think about it naturally, I mean people loaning money that they might not get back and not only risking not getting it back but foregoing what they could do with it here and now, that should always carry a price if we just think about it in human terms. We prefer money today to money 10 years from now. That's why nobody wants their dream house when they're 90, right? You want your dream house when you're 40. So you might borrow some money to get it and that's okay as long as everyone's willing to do it. But the problem is of course is that central banks have come in and made the process of borrowing and lending so, so different than it would be otherwise. But I think we'd see a lot more things like our grandparents saw. I think we'd see 15-year mortgages would be the norm for example with at least 20% down and no more than let's say 3 times, no loans no greater than let's say 3 times household income. That was a pretty standard arrangement not that long ago and it turns out that when you loan people money and they've got 20% down default rates are much, much lower. I mean that because of skin in the game people stand to lose money. The money they put into something they'll fight much harder to figure out a way to get a second job or get some roommates or do whatever they have to do to keep paying their mortgage. Let's say if they become unemployed from their regular job and we saw of course the exact opposite especially in the US housing market and the run up to the OA crash we saw all kinds of undocumented loans, liar loans, people getting borrowing multiple times their annual income to buy 10 condos and all this kind of crazy stuff and none of that would happen in my opinion in a rational market-based lending system. It would just be a lot harder to borrow money and a lot of people don't want to hear that. They would, our neoliberal friends would say oh come on that's just going to be a huge drag on the economy and we'd all be poorer. Well if what we've got today is prosperity it's a false prosperity. It's sort of like saying well I had a $10,000 limit on my credit card. I had nine grand charged up. But then they sent me a letter that said they're raising my credit limit to 20,000 so I now can go out and charge $11,000 more. Well in that period where I'm charging that additional 11,000 my neighbors might look over and say wow he's doing pretty well. Seems to have all kinds of new stuff, big TV or something whatever. But you and I both know that that's artificial and that's not based on a foundation of actually increased earnings to justify the increased spending. So that's how I kind of look at the economy in the west and of course I include Australia weirdly when I say the west. You know there's an artificial, there's an artifice to it. Now look you got to hand it to the central bankers. They've managed to keep this thing going an awfully long time and we have more debt worldwide than we had in 2008 both at the governmental level, at the business level and at the individual level way more debt worldwide than we had in 2008. So you got to ask yourself whether anything's been solved. I think the answer is no. Fantastic comments there and the other thing I obviously agree with you about you know credit should be tight in a full reserve banking system. However some difficulties I sometimes face when I'm trying to explain this kind of system to people is they think oh but how would I afford this house because housing is so expensive. But then ultimately we have to understand that actually using Austrian economics we can sort of try and understand the world and understand why many of these things are overpriced as they are now. Well sure there's no question that prices always adjust but there's more of a almost a moral cultural question involved. If you read, you mentioned Dr. Guido Hulsman, if you read his books The Ethics of Money Production which I think is free in HTML form on our site, The Ethics of Money Production if you read that book you start to realize that maybe we have bigger houses and fancier cars and nicer vacations than we deserve. I mean nobody wants to hear that. Nobody wants to hear austerity. But what if that's the case? What if things are artificially swollen in our economy? I guess you could make a weird argument that that's a great thing and that central banks in tandem with fiscal policy have sort of created a prosperity that wouldn't be there but the flip side is if it all comes crashing down you haven't done anyone any favors you just sort of fooled them. So we think of these things in financial and economic terms but there's a much bigger society and cultural component to it as well. Yeah exactly, precisely that. And look, I think there are some relevant things for Bitcoiners that they can learn from Austrian economics. There are many key concepts that I think apply. So are there any key concepts where you believe Austrian monetary theory can help a person understand Bitcoin? Well of course I definitely think there are and it's great that you brought this up because again there was another Twitter dispute going on the other day about whether someone needed to know any Austrian economics to properly appreciate Bitcoin. A lot of people were arguing yay or nay. I kind of agree. I don't think you have to know much about economics or in particular Austrian variant of economics to appreciate what cryptos could be. I think you could just be wary of banks and wary of the state. I mean that said, clearly Manger's ideas about the origins of money that it rises as a commodity with some sort of pre-existing use value is definitely applicable here. I'm not really interested in the nuts and bolts or the weeds of the argument about whether or not Bitcoin satisfies Mies's regression theorem and just very briefly the regression theorem is the idea that if we go back far enough Bitcoin or any other money would have had some pre-existing use other than as money itself. It would have had a commodity use. And some people say well Bitcoin is just electronic network and it wouldn't have had any use. And then other people say no, no, no, the technology itself the ability to conduct transfers with a ledger that technology is the value. That's the underlying value and so we can't just be thinking in terms of the old analog world and physical things as commodities that in the new world there could be an intangible thing that's a commodity. I guess I'd lean a little bit towards that latter view but I'm not worked up about it because again as I mentioned earlier whether Bitcoin is money is up to the market to decide. It's not for us to decide by arguing and hashing it out. Our opinions don't much matter and we don't want big opinion makers when it comes to cryptos. We don't want certain people with lots and lots of crypto who can sort of move the market and make arguments one way or the other. We want it decentralized. We want it spread out. We don't want to hub and spoke. We want a loose sort of spider web network when it comes to crypto. So yes, I think Austrian concepts of the origins of money in Manger, I think Mies is his regression theorem. I think Hayek's denationalization of money. That's more of a political theory than an econ argument but maybe most of all just the calculation debate. I mean, if you understand why socialism fails in the Massessian sense and in the Hayekian sense because you can't, without profits and losses you can't figure out what prices should be and you can't figure out where to allocate things and where to place your capital and your time and your energy properly because you don't understand what's working and what's not without profit and loss signals. And I think that same argument applies in spades to central banks. They don't know. Who can know what interest rates should be for 350 million Americans? Nobody can know that. Nobody can know what's the best interest rate for everybody. If you happen to be an older person who's no longer working and hoping that your savings will last you you might want interest rates to be 15% so that without going out and having to buy risky fang stocks or whatever you could just make 15% on a simple money market account or something like that. If you're a young person wanting to buy your first home you might be thrilled. Like Trump said, in real estate, it loves cheap interest rates. You might love it if you get 2% interest rate. So there's no one-size-fits-all policy possible. There's no economic calculation possible. Central bankers don't have a magic wand or a crystal ball. So I would say that all of these concepts are great and I think really cryptos came out of an Austrian community. If you read most of the originators most of the early adopters these were people who were familiar with Austrian economics and of course one reason why some of our neoliberal progressive friends like Paul Krubin don't much like it. They don't like the people behind it. Yeah, exactly. I like the point you're mentioning there around the calculation debate and I think another component that maybe you could touch on is related to how Dr. Bob Murphy did a talk years ago and he called his talk almost defense against the dark arts. With an Austrian economics understanding we can help understand why we shouldn't be worried about the mainstream deflationary hoarding argument. Do you have any thoughts on where Austrian economics can help inoculate people against faulty beliefs on money? Wow, deflation. Some of you probably know Jim Grant of Jim Grant's Interest Rate Observer a really brilliant guy. He said deflation is the process of a society getting richer because goods and services become cheaper and things that used to be available only to the very wealthy come down the ladder a little bit become available to ordinary people like air travel which was once just the province of the very wealthy and now if we fast forward a few decades we find things like all kinds of things are very, very cheap that used to be expensive like laser eye surgery like a DVD player. I mean you name it. It's actually a good thing and people need to get over the idea that deflation means that the economy is suffering as far as people hoarding money look there's a form of satisfaction for money held. If somebody is hoarding money that generally tells you a couple of things. One is that they fear the future so they want to have some money put aside and maybe they fear the banking system if they're literally hoarding it at home but presumably they're hoarding it at a bank and number two is they're uneasy enough that they get more psychic satisfaction from having money in the bank than they would from the stuff they could go buy with it and so why is that a problem? Who are any of us to tell someone how much money they need set aside for a rainy day? How perverse. Imagine what our grandparents or great grandparents would think that we were hoarding they'd say good thinking because they endured things like the Great Depression in two world wars where they were thrust into great uncertainty in life so I don't buy this hoarding business at all that's nobody's business none of us has a responsibility to get up in the morning and stimulate the economy with all of our spending and if you want to look at that on a big picture scale a macro scale the Keynesians are just wrong to create a better economy by encouraging people using fiscal and monetary policies to go buy stuff you don't need to stimulate demand we all want stuff the question is whether we lead productive enough lives to pay for it all so the focus of any healthy economy is increasing and accumulating capital and then using that capital to create ways to make the provision of goods and services more efficient every person can produce more we in a roundabout way get a higher and higher standard of living as a society so it's saving money via profit and capital accumulation and then deploying that capital that makes us rich not spending and we all want stuff and if they make credit cheap enough most of us can get the credit to go buy stuff that we haven't earned the money to buy so that's not the problem of creating an economy that's more productive per capita and that's not harmed by people holding on to money yeah fantastic thoughts okay so Jeff you were touching on this earlier potentially with some of the comments around the regression theorem requirement for physicality just curious do you have any thoughts on why there is a slight split between some Austrian economists who are more bearish or anti-Bitcoin and this is some who are not necessarily think it's going to go to 10 million or whatever but some who are more open to the idea of Bitcoin a short answer is age the boomers tend to be a little more skeptical and the millennials tend to be a lot more pro I'm stuck in the middle as a Gen Xer so I'm pretty pro crypto but I don't focus on it and I certainly don't think gold's going away I think gold will always play a role in the world economy and I think if you doubt that ask yourself why central banks hold so much of it and a lot of central banks around the world are increasing their gold reserves even as we speak the reason they're doing that is not because gold is super special or it's some magic metal it's just that it has always served as a store of value in uncertain times and so even if it's just this lump of metal that sits there versus it's much sexier modern cousin Bitcoin it still serves a purpose of dealing with uncertainty because for all of our great talk about monetary policy nobody really knows what's going to happen and that includes brilliant central bankers and quants who went to Ivy League colleges and warden so in response to that the thing to do is to hold some assets that in the past with the best knowledge we have of history have held their value when things got a little sideways or a little rocky or even a little backwards and gold still serves that purpose so I'm not somebody who likes to dismiss gold and gold bugs out of some sort of feeling of superiority or something like that I think that's foolish and I think a gold standard could still be a great thing for the world I'm not sure that we'll ever get close to it but even Alan Greenspan said that his job as a central banker was to try to mimic a gold standard of sorts which seems a bit ironic now so I think the split is I think it reflects age like I said a generational thing and I also think it just challenges old orthodoxies and and that's part of it people don't like to give up a certain way of thinking and I sort of understand that on both ways because I like gold and I like crypto too yeah no I think that's a very insightful commentary to add on the topic I think some within the bitcoin community I think I'm sort of partial to this idea that gold may hold some level of you know store of value in the future I think some people in the some of the bitcoiners might argue that oh well see gold didn't necessarily fail from a technical point of view it just sort of failed from a centralization and therefore getting co-opted by the government point of view do you have any comments on that well sure it I don't think gold has failed but it's you know government's made it difficult there are legal tender laws you can't go pay your taxes or other bills in gold for example and also gold is not that gold is not just that easy to use it's just something you have to hold on to and then also a lot of gold is owned by people who don't hold it physically so you've got this metal and all of a sudden you've got a counterparty risk and that could be something as simple as your local bank and with the safe deposit might not let you in one day or might have a bank run or something much bigger where you've got your gold held abroad or it's just in a gold money account it's not in any way you know it's co-mingled with other with other gold and you know you never really know about or see the physical so there's you know gold became an asset almost like a stock or bond for a lot of people where they don't hold it physically so that can be a big problem and you know like you said it just sits there it doesn't pay any interest it doesn't give it ends it's just it really is sort of an insurance policy and of course the irony like it is like with regular life insurance let's say is that okay insurance is a good thing to have in a rainy day but in a real deluge insurance companies would go under and you wouldn't get paid in a real deluge you might not be able to use physical gold for anything so it's just one of those imperfect approaches where we have to say look there's never been a time in human history where gold wasn't worth something there's never been a time in human history where grandpa died and left us some gold coins and that was a bad thing but there have been times in human history where grandpa died and left us a bunch of worthless stock certificates for a company that doesn't exist anymore so you know the anti-goal arguments all I can do is shrug my shoulders and say I try to say I'm better than people for thousands of years who have given it value you know I'm not interested in bucking that sure sure and I think that's like you were mentioning earlier with Nelson Taylor that's very much like that whole concept of the Lindy effect this thing that because it's been around for so long it's more likely to now continue to be around for longer it's the best we can do you know and so much of this is muddling through we really think oftentimes libertarianism is just private solutions and the best we can do and better than government but not perfect and I think better not perfect ought to be our rallying cry as opposed because it helps us not only sound like but also steer ourselves away from utopian thinking yeah I think that's a very insightful comment as well great way to explain it let's switch gears a little bit but on this same idea better but not perfect maybe one thing I really admire about the Mises Institute is that it doesn't try to be a think tank or a built way libertarian institute but rather focuses on education and keeping the message true to libertarian private property principles and I think it might have been I'm not sure who I think it might have been Lou Rockwell who explained it as this concept of doing an end run around the state so maybe you could just comment a little bit on that educational strategy and the results so far well we're definitely not interested in public policy we don't think there ought to be public policy I don't think we need a housing policy or an oil policy or a bitcoin policy or anything else I think the market can work these things out so I personally find the term public policy problematic to use the awful parlance of our time problematic no it's just awful I mean public policy and anyone who uses the term unironically I think they really come across sounding pompous don't you agree public policy come on I mean the last thing we need is a bunch of 28 year old liberal arts majors deciding how society should be organized think tanks what we need is humility even in the libertarian world but especially outside the libertarian world there's just hubris everywhere and social media really intensifies that it really encourages us to be dogmatic and absolutist and to sort of cross our arms and say we've got all the answers and of course liberty is all about saying we don't have all the answers that's why government's so dangerous nobody ought to be in charge of organizing millions of people's lives it's a recipe for disaster so I really think libertarianism is a humble doctrine I think it's a doctrine of humility and letting private solutions local solutions work and so I hope in any way that we apply that at the Mises Institute and say look there's some brilliant thinkers out there a lot of whom are dead some of whom are still around some of whom are just coming up and you ought to be reading and learning from them but you're not going to get them in your public schools you might not even have econ in high school what we call high school you might not have it in undergraduate and even if you do you won't get very good economics you might not go to get a graduate degree or a PhD in economics you might not hear a single word about Mises you might not hear anything about the history of economic thought and this is often the case with the aforementioned brilliant young economists Ivy League economists who populate the Federal Reserve Bank staff for example so we're really here to just be a private school of sorts an end run around this academic gatekeeping to decide what kind of econ is taught I don't like the term mainstream but current mainstream economics because it wasn't always the case that we thought stimulating demand was the be all end all and by being an alternative school we can be exactly as much or as little as any particular student needs in other words some of our students are long-haul truckers with a serious XM radio in their cab and can listen on the road some of our students if you want to use that term are stay at home husbands or wives and they listen at home and some of our students actually come here and they want to be a summer fellow with us and they want to get really deep into it and use our library and research and then they say oh my gosh I love this stuff and I want to go be a PhD economist so they actually go off to some university and do that but some people just want to follow our Twitter feed and maybe occasionally click on an article or two and just by doing that they know more economics than they otherwise would so we want to be there for any kind of student any age any point in their life where they can just consume as much or as little of our free content as they desire and we hope that we strike a chord with some people and we do our best to do so with the understanding that we're probably never going to be a majority or our mainstream view that's just the way it is at least at the present moment I think we have to accept that and not water things down to try to be bigger because I think that never works but instead say look you know throughout human history a 5 or 10% devoted vanguard of people can make huge changes and I'd rather be trying to create a really great 5 or 10% than trying to sort of fool or pull one over on 51% to get them to start coming over to our side Excellent and as Ron Paul often said he spoke about this concept of the remnant yes it's a bit of a loaded term but it's true and what's so funny is because of baby boomerism no offense to anyone the remnant is actually younger today and I found this out working for Dr. Paul sometimes a parent would come in with their 22 year old college student son or daughter and it would be the son or daughter that got them interested in reading some Ron Paul or some Austrian economics or whatever it might be it wasn't the parent influencing the child it was the other way around and so younger people today are really more interested in some of these ideas because I think they face a tougher road than their parents and grandparents did so they're just looking around saying well what happened what happened to the economy what happened to why do I have all the student loan debt why do jobs seem harder to get why do people switch jobs so much more more frequently than my parents why aren't their pensions anymore why isn't their tenure anymore why isn't there a quicker easier track to partnership in a CPA firm or a law firm why isn't being an MD nearly as good as it used to be you know all these things that were so rock solid for the parents and grandparents are sort of shifting sands for them and as a result of that younger people are interested in these ideas they're also interested in socialism unfortunately it's a double edged sword but the bottom line is they're searching and it's up to us to do the best we can to help with the narrative and hopefully pull some people over fantastic and now on this topic of education I've noticed that some people who come into Bitcoin they then become more interested in learning Austrian economics so do you have any ideas on how these people can best learn and do you have any suggested resources or book recommendations from the Austrian school well yeah absolutely I think you know if you read the theory of money and credit which Mises wrote it's really his first full-length book you wrote it about the age of 28 so it's a little more than 100 years old now and I swear there are so many sentences in that book that just jump right out of you that absolutely apply today and it's so interesting to read that you know when the US Fed wasn't even created of course the bank of England existed then but to see how prescient he was and there's really no better book written I think about money if you can read and digest that book and it's a lot easier to read if people know about human action they find that daunting which it is the theory of money and credit is really an easy read and of course an even easier read is Murray Rothbard's little 98 page pamphlet which we have on our site free called what is government done to our money now obviously it predates cryptos but it'll really give you the lowdown on the quick and dirty lowdown on what what money is and how government corrupts it but look from an Austrian perspective there's no better book you can read on cryptos than the Bitcoin standard by Saifide Ammus not only does it explain cryptos but it also gives you a little mini history lesson about money about Austrian economics it's really a fantastic book it's not super long and I think pretty much anybody can can digest this book it's really written for a lay audience which is refreshing and it's such a great book so I recommend it very highly fantastic okay look I think that's pretty much all we've got time for so if you've got any closing thoughts and also just tell the listeners how they can find you and find the Mises Institute and also just if there's anything to keep an eye out for you know that's coming out from the Mises Institute well we're working on some fun stuff this year we are having events around the country not your way unfortunately but really we're getting more and more into the podcast space because for whatever reason a lot of people like to consume and digest information that way we've got some great new books coming out this year but you know just if you have some time go to Mises.org MISES.org look around we've got all kinds of stuff there you can spend the rest of your life reading some of these books and papers and watch some of the videos we've got there find me on Twitter my name is Jeff Deist it's DEIST so it's all one word Jeff Deist on Twitter and you can find out or keep abreast of pretty much everything that's going on at the Institute fantastic well look Jeff it's been a really great conversation I've really enjoyed speaking with you and thank you for coming on yeah it was a blast please have me on again