 This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to the Human Action Podcast. Very pleased to be joined by a special guest, a friend of mine, Hunter Hastings, who lives in my one-time hometown of San Diego, California, and who is someone who has been involved for many, many years, both in entrepreneurship and in marketing, as an executive working for big brands that you've heard of, like Coke and Proctor and Gamble and Kraft and that sort of thing. So now in his second career of sorts, he's taken a particular interest in entrepreneurship and he works with people like Professor Peter Klein and Professor Pair Bieland in crafting and creating what we have as a new program, a new offering called Economics for Entrepreneurs. And many of you have probably already heard his voice on that podcast, which of course we feature at Mises.org. But I wanted to get together with him and talk a little bit more about the underlying Austrian economics that serves as a foundation of sorts for entrepreneurial activity. So all that said, Hunter Hastings, great to talk to you. Thank you very much, Jeff. It's great to be here. Well, I want to start with something that I discussed with Pair Bieland in an interview recently that we did for the Austrian magazine and you know, Hunter, this criticism. This criticism comes from people like Nassim Taub, who say business schools and economics departments can't really teach business acumen. They can't teach entrepreneurship. You've either got it or you don't. So I wanted to get your thoughts on that for starters. Well, I break that down, Jeff, into three components. One is there's a process of entrepreneurship and that can be taught. And the problem is that most business schools and most teachers of entrepreneurship get it backwards. And that's captured a lot in this idea of product-market fit, which is a perfect illustration of getting the process backwards, developing a product or a service and then figuring out how it fits into the marketplace. And the opposite is the right process, which is understand customers or consumers, understand the market that they make up, identify some need or opportunity which is unmet and then design your product and service to fit into that space in the marketplace. So product-market fit and most business school teaching about entrepreneurship is backwards and we can teach the right process. And we've had guests on our show talk about that. Kurt Carlson from a couple of weeks ago is a great example of teaching that. So you can teach the process, you can show people and give them case studies and case histories. The second component is tools and tactics and you can teach some of that. So you can teach financing, how to raise money, how to borrow money, what the meaning of debt is, what's a P&L, what's a balance sheet, how a growth company should think about that, how to hire people, how to put teams together. We can certainly teach the principles of that. But some other tools and tactics we can't. We talk a lot on economics for entrepreneurs about empathy, which is the individual art of getting into somebody's heart and mind and understanding their needs. We can describe what that is, but I'm not sure you can teach it. That's something that is inherent. Maybe people can learn it over time, but I'm not sure you can teach it. And then there is a third element which is personal attributes. And I believe that that's applicable in entrepreneurship. A word that comes up a lot is courage. If you're a small business owner and you're trying to make payroll, you're trying to sign the lease on your store, you're trying to introduce a new product or a new service, you're trying to deal with a client. A lot of times that requires courage or at minimum self-reliance. I like to call it individualism. The economists call it embracing uncertainty, which is, hey, you can't know what's going to happen, so you're going to have a pretty tough-minded approach to embracing uncertainty or have a bias for action. So I think some of those traits can be learned, but they can't necessarily be taught in school. So that's a long answer to a short question. Well, it's funny that third quality, we might have a different word for that that we won't use on air today. But when we talk about tools and tactics, I think sometimes we gloss over things like HR and finance and accounting. These are real skills that you can go learn in a class, and those are certainly important if you're going to be successful. Right, and I agree with you. We can teach those kinds of things and we can especially teach them for entrepreneurs who are usually dealing with greater scarcity of resources, as the economists would say, than a big corporation like some of the ones you mentioned in your introduction. So how do I decide on those hires? How do I decide whether to add a marketing capability versus another engineer? Those kinds of issues, their resource allocation issues, their team-building issues, we can teach the decision-making that helps folks make the right decisions and allocate resources in the right way. So yeah, we wouldn't gloss over those kinds of things. They're very, very important. I see them every day in venture capital funded firms. It's a big issue. Now, in your own work in venture capital, let me ask you a slightly personal question. Do you have skin in the game? You have your own money involved in some of the firms in which you invest? Yes, in two ways. One, I'm a general partner in the fund that I co-manage. So that's my money, as well as other investors' money. I really invest in some of the deals that come by, not all of them, but many of them. So yes, I have skin in the game. So at the outset, when you were talking about process, let's unwrap that a little bit more. Embedded in a lot of what you were saying is the Missessian idea of consumer sovereignty. What's interesting is Rothbard didn't particularly like that term. He thought it made it sound like the consumer was the boss of the producer rather than someone who was involved in a voluntary exchange with him. But nonetheless, talk about that. That seems almost entirely lost, at least when I watch things like, let's say, Shark Tank. People have some idea, and it's more about them rather than the need of the consumer. So what should we think about consumer sovereignty? Well, I'm a big subscriber to that idea. When I was at Procter & Gamble, and I was marketing soap and detergent and mundane sounding things like that, we investigated the need of the consumer. My particular consumer was mom. I was marketing tide. I needed to understand mom and help her to make decisions. So she would buy my product as opposed to somebody else's. And we came up with the phrase, or Procter & Gamble did, I didn't, that the consumer is my boss. And so my boss was mom. And that was ingrained in us. That was our process. And so an economist like Ludwig von Mises calls it consumer sovereignty. We called it the consumer as boss. And it is absolutely applicable because it's the second part of Austrian theory, subjective value that values in the mind of the consumer that helps you figure out how to meet the needs of the customer who's your boss. So I got to the point where I understood that mom's subjective need, I never used any terminology or words like that, was she wanted to be a good mom. She wanted to feel that herself and she wanted to have others recognize her as a good mom. And you can write all kinds of psychological analytics around that, but it was absolutely true. And if I could communicate that Tide was helping her to feel like a good mom, I was successful. And that's universal, that whole point is universal. So we're actually doing a lot of new research now about where value is formed. And the business schools talk about value creation as if an entrepreneur creates value. Well, in fact, they don't. The consumer creates value and in a very complex form of their life, and they invite you to fit in. And if you can fit into their life in a way that makes them more comfortable, makes them feel better, then they've created value from the offering that you've made. So I am an absolutely strong believer in consumer sovereignty and I think that's one of the great strengths of Austrian economics. That's what we keep trying to do on economics for entrepreneurs like the theory is customer sovereignty. What does it mean in real life? And if you understand that, you're way ahead. But talk more about value. That's difficult to understand conception. I mean, even Manger had a theory of value way back in the 1870s. He was talking about use value and exchange value and commodities and that sort of thing. But when we say the value has been created, there's buzzwords like value added or what's my value maybe it's become buzzy. What do we really mean? Does the consumer experience value? Does the consumer create value? Does the entrepreneur set the conditions for the consumer to attain value? How should we think about it? Well, you got the word exactly right and that is the consumer experiences value. So it doesn't happen until they've had that experience. And it's a feeling. That's what subjective value means. If you go back and read Manger, you said this yourself when you reviewed principles of economics on this podcast. It reads like 2019. It's all about subjective value and what the entrepreneur has to do to create that. So value occurs when the consumer or the customer consumes what the entrepreneur has offered feels like that's better than before and might be disposed to continue to consume or consume more or become loyal all of those things that we use. But value is a feeling on behalf of the customer. And so that requires the entrepreneur to have what the economists call empathy and get into people's lives. We had Elizabeth Isabella neighbor on our show a few weeks ago and she talked which was a great expression about understanding how consumers feel value and analytics and big data and those kinds of things they can give you some pointers, they can see patterns and they can give you some analytics that you can work on. But they can't give you that emotional understanding of how the consumer is going to feel value. And it's subjective, it's also idiosyncratic it changes all the time, it changes with context, it's a very elusive thing. So you can't create value. The consumers got to understand it, got to feel it rather, you've got to understand that feeling. And we say that entrepreneurs can facilitate value, they can make a value proposition, they can make an offer and hopefully that will be experienced as value by the consumer. So it's very humbling thought and that's one of the ideas that Mises had in human action. It's a humble idea. Well, it is humbling but I want to think more about this facilitating the process for which and values of feeling. That doesn't sound very econ-ish and I don't really like behavioral economics. The idea that something's a feeling, let me give you an example. I don't know if people know this but suede is generally very expensive and now that you can get what they call ultra suede in a sport coat, for example that's made of some kind of newfangled high-tech polyester that has a look and feel and that sort of sheen of suede and I happen to have a suede sport coat that I really like and I got a Facebook ping the other day of one that was very similar to it and I had sort of a strange visceral reaction. I'm not a big shopper or consumer type but that's pretty amazing because that's not even a human entrepreneur at that point, that's an algorithm although a human built it somehow. So they got to me, I didn't buy it by the way, but they got to me. So is that it? I mean that feeling that I might value that ultra suede sport coat more than whatever the price was? Well there are two parts to what you just described and entrepreneurs have to combine those two things. One is technical knowledge so the ping that you described from Facebook is some human being somewhere wrote an algorithm that said we can figure out how to send a ping to Jeff Deist about suede sport coats since he's been seen in one or has written about them or something like that. That is technological knowledge. The second part of that is human knowledge and the AI that sent you the ping has no idea how you feel and so it can attempt to write some words that might elicit some expressions of feeling from you. That's a kind of semantic analysis it can do but you have to have the feeling that boy this new suede sport coat will make me feel better than the old suede sport coat and you're creating that value that's Jeff Deist doing that not the AI. So the two go together the technological component and the human component but the human component is all subjective all human. But if that's the value lies it's on the consumer side of things and the consumer sort of creating it isn't that bad news for the labor theory of value a Marxist looked at things and in terms of how much time they took how many people the cost of the inputs and so isn't an entrepreneurial mindset almost by definition contra Marxism? Oh absolutely I no one equates cost with value anymore so creating value is entirely a it's a conceptual idea it's a theoretical idea you can't measure it you know that Rothbard's famous about that you can't you can't measure in utils or anything like that you can't measure value there's a proxy for it which is price somebody might pay a certain price but why does somebody pay $260,000 for the new Ferrari Roma as opposed to $35,000 for afford there's there's lots of reasons why most of them emotional and the cost has relatively little to do with it so I you can't even relate those two concepts today cost and value that they're just not related they're on the same field but do you think that's true do you think we really have defeated the concept of the cost area value or the labor theory of value or is that just in our circles where we think we've defeated it well you're talking about circles of economists I'm trying to talk about circles of entrepreneurs so yes theoretically it's totally defeated but that's not our concern our concern is thinking about entrepreneurs how can they create value and the second step is I've got to organize costs so that my cost is lower than value it might be by a lot or might be by a little and so again going to my training when I was in the big corporations the business schools used to teach cost based pricing so figure out the cost of your ingredients add 40% and that's the price to the consumer well I found out quickly it's the wrong way around again it's backwards the right answer is price based costing how much value does the consumer think they're getting out of this offering that you're making what's the price they will pay for that value that's the proxy now organize your resources so that your cost is less than the price the consumer will pay and that's called profit so even cost based pricing is the wrong way around price based costing and pair pylon talks about this with respect to iphone he says you know what's the next iphone 10 or 11 or whatever number we're on what's it going to cost people immediately begin to talk about components and how much development time apple has into it and everything and that's really irrelevant isn't it I mean it's going to cost what the market will bear but I want to add to that I want you to respond to this is cost does come into play in other words if the realities of payroll costs materials costs become too high and the market simply won't pay then a product might go away so cost does play a role well let's back to customer sovereignty again that the customer decides what the price is in the marketplace and if you can't control your cost as an entrepreneur to keep them below that price you don't make a profit then you can't continue so in that sense cost is a responsibility of the entrepreneur that they might get wrong the second part of it is competition might come along and say I can make that for less money I can offer it at the same price and make a big profit or I can offer it at a lower price and still make a profit so the competitive function is very real in entrepreneurship now what we try and make people think about is can I get to the point of uniqueness where I really don't have any competition my application is so specialized that I'm genuinely unique and that's the ideal place to be but it's a very hard place to be and it's very hard to maintain in a competitive marketplace so cost is the responsibility of the entrepreneur well there's also the point you made earlier comparing let's say a fancy high end luxury car or a sports car that cost $250,000 to a $35,000 or $40,000 Camry I mean you can reach a point where a Camry is half as good but it costs a tenth as much so again there's ranges of choices here we don't all have to own the latest greatest iPhone we can own a five year old Samsung or something like that. Yeah in the analytics of value to those two consumers are actually very very hard you've got that Ferrari what part of it is prestige how much value are you putting on the prestige how much are you putting on the tradition how much are you putting on the brand why does a Louis Vuitton handbag cost $15,000 because the consumer will pay that because they see that value in it can I understand that value perception on the part of the consumer I can try really hard but boy that's got to be tough I'm not a person myself who would spend $260,000 on a Ferrari so I've got to empathize with that consumer I've got to think about what would the mindset be what would the context be what would the circumstances be that would make that value and how many of those Ferraris can I make and sell if I'm Enzo Ferrari or as successor those are very very delicate calculations it's not easy. But again there are people and let's just say on the left who would resent the purchaser of the Ferrari the Louis Vuitton handbag saying you ought not to be able to to value the feeling you get from having a fancy car that much when there's privation and starvation and such in the world and we ought to spread that money around nobody ought to buy a Ferrari so the idea of consumers creating value for themselves and the idea of consumer sovereignty are again sound like they have an ideological tinge them because we're saying hey it's okay if you want a $15,000 Louis Vuitton handbag that's what makes you happy that gives you some sort of cachet knock yourself out a lot of people don't agree with that hunter yeah but there's no ideology and entrepreneurship Jeff so if the customer is boss you try and understand what it is that they want so maybe they want some superb piece of machinery and as Mises explained often in the beginning the market invent new technologies or new designs and new ways of doing things for the very few who can afford them first and there's an interesting concept in that kind of economics which is you want venture some entrepreneurs but you also want venture some consumers and venture some customers because they'll try the new technology first and then eventually if it catches on with them then some new entrepreneurs will come in and say interesting maybe I can make that valuable to more consumers instead of a $25,000 Rolex I can invent the $35 swatch and a lot of stops in between as well so eventually it benefits everybody and I've never understood the mentality that we shouldn't let our entrepreneurs try hard enough to create new value that's never been seen before because it always dissipates into the marketplace in fact there's never a huge profit in selling very expensive things to a few people there's a lot of profit in selling very attractive things to a great number of people well you mentioned that entrepreneurship doesn't have an ideology per se Austrian economics is viewed rightly or wrongly as being steeped in theory and ideology at least by some people so when it comes to the process of teaching people or learning how to become a better entrepreneur you see all kinds of online marketing you see all kinds of business self-help books at the airport there's a whole industry of podcasts and coaching and life coaching all this sort of thing I always sense that people don't want any ideology or theory snuck in they really just want the nitty-gritty how to and sometimes it feels like Austrian economics is encumbered with a theory well I'd separate those two things with a very very thick high wall theory is good theory is how we think about how the world works and if we can get the theory right then we can take that as a general principle and use the deductive method and figure out how it applies to our own individual business so in our new free e-book that we just released it's think better think Austrian that's not ideological it's theoretical so if you can think straight if you can look at data and figure out based on general principles truth principles how those work then you've got a better start then we talk about developing knowledge so Austrian economics has a lot to say about distributed knowledge and for the entrepreneur the implication of that is develop more and more knowledge that you can bring to the marketplace and it's got extra value develop some skills based on that knowledge that other people don't have be multidisciplinary think across a lot of different fields when you're applying your knowledge and then Austrian economics talks about imagining the future which is just the best way of thinking about innovation imagine what it will be like and then think better about working your way backwards to how you can implement it so all of those applications are applications of theory ideology there's nothing to do with ideology we look at the economy we look at it from the individual standpoint we look at it about individual serving individuals you roll that up into economic growth and betterment that's not ideology that's just how the economy works so I'd separate those two I'd a big green light to theory and a big red light to ideology well give us a couple of examples you've hinted at some what are some examples of Austrian theory that has real world applications for business or entrepreneurship well I think we've talked about the two most important ones one is customer sovereignty so if you think your way through that that's perfect for any business development we've talked about subjective value for example the advertising industry is an exercise in subjective value how can I communicate to a consumer that they will feel better as a result of trying or consuming my product that's the application of subjective value but a third one that's really interesting that that Per and I have been talking about Dr. Byland I should say and I have been talking about a lot is the economic name for it is Austrian capital theory and Austrian capital theory says your capital structure if you're a firm should reflect the consumers preferences in the marketplace and the consumers preferences are always changing so how can you do that how can you you flexibly build a capital structure that changes as fast as a consumer did and for a long time we never knew that and then we've finally started working our way towards that so outsourcing is a way to have flexible capital I'll make it with these outsourcing resources but as soon as I need to change I can because it's a contract not a piece of fixed capital and the latest thinking about agile which is an organizational approach Steven Denning who's going to be coming on the program soon wrote a book called the age of agile and it says it changes the structure of the firm think of it not as a a big building or a machine but think of it as a flotilla or a tiny speed boats that is always peeling off and peeling in and going in lots of different directions so how could you how can you build an agile company well it's Austrian capital theory and if you if you keep thinking about that how can I make my capital and my resources as flexible as possible so I can turn this part off tomorrow and turn that part on tomorrow that's a revolution and in organization so we've known this theory for a long time in Austrian capital theory and we just now learning how to apply it in real life so it's super exciting actually it's exciting to figure out how to apply that well one example I recall you pointing out to me is something like uber where they built this company based on an app and an algorithm and they've got all these vehicles in play and they don't they don't own them their fleets were sitting out there already in people's garages and they don't employ the drivers and they don't have to go out and find the customers the whole thing was was not only highly decentralized but it just represents a new kind of company where it doesn't have to own physically all the resources that go into the service it provides exactly so uber is a very as you say decentralized and agile company and the idea that the the benefit the value to the consumer comes a lot through the app through the software somebody was telling me the other day that one of the great values that has appeared in research is that little algorithmic visual of the car getting closer and closer to you so all the idea of waiting for a cab and you don't know whether it's coming you know whether it's yours you don't want whether someone's going to push you out of the way and you're replaced by that knowledge that is represented by the visual algorithm of the little car approaching the capital is as you say owned by others owned by the drivers and dispersed all the way through the the city or the country so yeah it's a great example another great example I think is is Amazon and in Jeff Bezos seven principles of running out it's up to 13 now maybe I'm not up to date but anyway one of them is customer obsession and that's his way of saying Austrian customer sovereignty theory so if you always think about the customer if you're always obsessed about what the customer wants then you're always going to make the right decisions you're going to allocate resources in the right way you're going to build your apps in the right way and Amazon now is basically infrastructure so there are third party sellers on Amazon there are people who are not employed by Amazon driving trucks and delivering your stuff it's a very decentralized operation from a capital standpoint but it's highly highly focused on the customer to an obsessive point of view so I think that's another good modern example but this is actually radically changed the structure of production itself right I mean Austrian customer control theory goes to the structure of production how long it is and how round about it is but here we have resources that were lying fallow for example in the case of Uber in people's garages and now they're being put to use albeit owned by someone else so this really changes things doesn't it if we think of companies as highly decentralized versus the old IBM or Ford Motor Company it was sort of a hub and spoke and everything went through corporate at the top well it's still very helpful to think about the production chain in the way that Manga did with higher orders of goods and lower orders of goods and they're all connected through a chain of production and the value of each one of those components no matter where it is is determined by how much value is created by the customer so you continue to think like that the difference is you don't have to own it so you can build your supply chain from Alibaba in China and bring it to the US on some transportation company that's providing a service and you don't own and then they'll get it to a third party warehouse or the Amazon warehouse you don't have to arrange that somebody else will then Amazon will deliver it and you've just got to focus on the value component of telling the customer that your product is available what price you would like for it and what its features and benefits are so yes it's changed ownership of the capital but no it hasn't changed the idea of thinking through the production chain from higher order to lower order but it focuses the entrepreneur on what do I do best what do I do best is facilitate value for the customer with my website on Amazon with my communication on Amazon on my own website and I don't do what I'm least able to do which is build the original capital it's a fabulous world for entrepreneurship now because it's so flexible it's so dynamic it's a great time to be an entrepreneur well let's talk about the entrepreneur as an individual this isn't always just some rich kid this isn't always just somebody who lucked into a business and this also isn't someone who's fungible they are just an input a widget that you can swap out with another human the entrepreneur has a very special role to play obviously Mises Kurzner talked at length about this so talk more about that to other schools of economics really understand the role of the entrepreneur and if not what is their conception of the firm is it flawed well I break down the concept of the entrepreneur in two ways the economic model which as you rightly say the entrepreneur's role in the economic system in the beneficent economy and that role is making the lives of others better and that's pure economics that's what entrepreneurs do and economists call it rearranging the factors of production I'll find the need and I'll rearrange the factors of production which means you invent something or you start up something or you're a marketer you're an engineer you're an innovator you can be an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur if you're an entrepreneur you try to do that by making a profit so that whole role of the entrepreneur that exists in Austrian theory it doesn't exist in mainstream theory because the mainstream looks at aggregates and mathematical equations and there's none of the emotion and subjectivity that we have in Austrian economics so yes that part of it is an Austrian economics monopoly if you like nobody else thinks that way but then individually the way I think about being an entrepreneur is being the best node you can be in the network that you choose to join so we just describe the entrepreneur who sells on Amazon and what that network looks like when you assemble it and you can certainly do that and you can play the best role and leave the other roles to others but you can do that if you're working for a company you can be on an entrepreneurial team trying to create value for customers you can do it as part of a small firm you can do it as part of a group or a team and your job is to assemble that specialized knowledge that we talked about and apply that specialized knowledge in network interaction with other people so again to quote the age of agile you call it the law of the network connecting yourself in a network in a way that produces value for customers and consumers I don't think other economics talk about that the theory of the firm is just not developed in mainstream economics they think of it as the components of a market structure so if there's a monopoly there's one firm as a few and if there's perfect competition there's an infinite number presumably but they don't actually think about people and acts of entrepreneurship and making lives better and facilitating value that's got nothing to do with mainstream economics well I think we should point out that even if you're not in an entrepreneurial situation per se let's say you're just an employee at a large company there are all kinds of entrepreneurial things you can do within any environment to sort of sell yourself or learn more market yourself or build up or develop within a firm so you don't have to actually be starting a business of your own necessarily to think and act entrepreneurly no absolutely not Jeff the firstly always focus on the customer always think of the customer first and modern thinking about the theory of the firm from a business standpoint rather than a textbook standpoint is everybody serves the customer you've got to think about what am I doing that helps my customer feel better have more convenience experience more value even if you're an accountant in the cost department try and think that way second collaboration is a big part of entrepreneurship so find out how you can work on teams how can you contribute the the thinking about teams right now is to keep them small keep them very specialized have multiple disciplines on them and have them work on a single end to get that job completed and then you roll up the results of those teams into a bigger project or a bigger division or a bigger outcome so be a great team member that's another way of being the best node you can be on the network you choose to join and then pick up specialized knowledge as you go along there's so much to pick up you know when I think about my entrepreneurial career I started a consulting company on global branding when I was in my late 40s I think and that's you know that's pretty typical for when people start companies so I worked for Procter & Gamble in multiple countries multiple categories I then worked in other large corporations with similar footprints then I worked in some consulting companies and then I started my own so by that time I picked up knowledge about global branding and a lot of categories a lot of countries a lot of tactics a lot of cultural experiments so as a consultant I genuinely had something to bring it took a while to accumulate that knowledge so you can be doing that while you're working for a firm and that's a that's a great way to look at entrepreneurship keep developing knowledge until I'm ready well the economics for entrepreneurs E4 E project and the podcast itself just tell us a little bit about them where to find them but but also the goal how do we deliver at least some Austrian theory applicable actionable Austrian theory to people and what's the format how should people consume this because I'm sure some of our listeners are interested and also I I view this long term as a project of the Mises Institute where where that can almost be a sister podcast to the human action podcast we have the the econ and the theory on one side and the application on the other so just tell us a little bit more about how you conceive of this project well you're right Jeff it's a long term project which the Mises Institute has funded and authorized and it's an exploration of how we can apply Austrian economics in business and why should we do that well we we're trying to help people we're trying to help people become better entrepreneurs but actually it's broader than that become more employable become more promotable become more fundable become more successful if you're a small business owner anything that helps people in in business using all of the applications of knowledge that we've been talking about for the past few minutes and the economics for entrepreneurs podcast which you can find on Apple podcast and other podcasting platforms and at Mises.org slash e4e that will get you there it's exploratory so our opening episodes have been an alternate of professors like Kerr Byland and Peter Klein and others talking about economic theory and how to apply it and then in the alternate weeks practicing entrepreneurs who may never have heard of Austrian economics but they'll tell us how they were successful how they learned when they weren't successful how they're recovered from that so we've covered many many categories with with real life entrepreneurs and every week we do what we call the key takeaways so that's a business way of saying hey what are the learning points that we got in this episode and we also have a free downloadable pdf that tries to capture that that you could pin on your wall or put in a drawer at least refer to and now we've just produced our first ebook which is a compilation of multiple episodes Kerr Byland always says for the entrepreneur if you understand the laws of economics and the mind of the customer you'll be successful so our first book is understanding the mind of the customer and it takes six of those episodes six of those tools and I will say I've used many of those tools in my consulting career I've worked on global brands in multiple countries using those self same tools so one of them just to illustrate is the means and ladder so Austrian economic theory says that people are always acting in the pursuit of ends and then they choose scarce means from scarce means in order to achieve those ends so that's theory so you put that in practice if somebody buys my detergent or my car or my website what are they trying to do that's the end if they buy the Ferrari or they're trying to drive 150 miles an hour or they're trying to impress their neighbor those are the ends you're trying to figure that out and then why do they choose these other means and can I persuade them to choose these other means and so the means and ladder is the Austrian tool and then we talk about how you apply that in real life and we've got more tools like that the brand framework tool the customer journey mapping tool you'll see them over time and then eventually we'll add more online courses we're working on our first releases now we hope to build eventually a community where entrepreneurs can come in and ask questions maybe there be some mentorship there that we could offer maybe be some service exchange the lawyers can get marketing from the marketers and the marketers can get legal help from the lawyer so that's all to come that's the future so the podcast is the first step we hope people will sign up but think of it as a long engagement stay with us for a long time and then please send ideas and questions and suggestions and I wish I used to have a tool Jeff when I was consulting I called it IWIC which stood for I wish I knew so a wiki is what I what I know is it's very assertive but an IWIC is hey I wish I knew how this worked well send us your IWICs and we'll try and respond well Hunter Hastings thanks so much for your time we're going to put ladies and gentlemen links to not only the podcast but also the e-book also the interview with pair byland and a couple of other helpful links this is the the topic that I think we all have to be thinking about no matter where we are in our careers no matter where we are in life the idea of a safe comfy paid job with benefits and a pension is you know quickly becoming obsolete and something that a lot of us will never achieve so we we need to be educating ourselves and thinking along these lines and Hunter we appreciate so much your willingness to roll up your sleeves and dive into this endeavor well thank you Jeff I appreciate it appreciate all the support of the Muses Dude and let me just re-emphasize to anybody who might be listening please send along your ideas and suggestions you can do that at the Muses.Business LinkedIn page or the Muses.Business Facebook page either one will get it so thank you very much Jeff The Human Action Podcast is available on iTunes SoundCloud, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and on meses.org Subscribe to get new episodes every week and find more content like this on meses.org