 Guido Holtzmann, it's a pleasure to have you here at the University of Angers. Yes. Did I say it correctly? Perfect. Okay. Because everybody else introduces you as the professor from Angers. Yes. And then I always say I come from Angers, but not with. Oh, that's clever. But it's a well-rehearsed line. Yes. I know the problem. Let's do a brief review of the massive biography of Mises, a seminal biography that's thick, several books in German, one book in German, a few small books in German. And then most recently, let's see, we had the Ethics of Money production, which is a very interesting case of a book that had a sort of small start, but a long life. You know, I mean, especially after 2008, everybody got interested in the topic of money. Well, in any case, there's also this monograph on deflation, right? Small essay, some 50 pages or so. So this is quite a lot of work, a lot of production for a young professor. Well, thank you very much. Yeah. I don't feel that young anymore, but yeah. But the biography took you how many years? Oh, this was, in total, some 10 years in the making, I think. Yeah. Well, it was a frightening project because, well, anybody could just imagine what you took on. I mean, just imagine a stack of papers about, let's say, 10 feet high. Neither did I. Neither did I. I had known you never would have started. Probably. Yeah. But then once you're in the middle of it, then you go until the end. It's like the good German menace, and you eat what is on your dish, you finish, don't leave it half empty. Why? Would that be true? Well, it's just something that meant that you also teach your children, as I know. No, no, I teach them about the Sankos fallacy. Sankos fallacy, okay. Don't eat that. Don't eat that. That line, I should have known this, so I should have stopped off with it. It was all Sankos. Forget all this. Why finish it? It's just going to make it worse. I'm not the Sankos guy. I'm the way, we go to the end guy. Oh, it's just, yeah. A tradition all the way. I forget the fancy economic logic of eating. This Prussian duty of work ethic, or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and also there's a profound shortage of food in Germany, right? Absolutely. We need to work for our salary, you know, your slave labor, right, writing a Mises biography. Now, tell me, you're so thoroughly German in your heritage, in your accent, in your look, in your demeanor, in your attitudes towards life, and yet you're teaching in France. Yes. How did this happen? Well, I must say, in the meantime, I've been thoroughly Latinized, right? So many people wouldn't recognize the German in me anymore, right? As far as among the German friends, yeah, they think that I'm fairly Latinized. I gave a couple of talks in Germany in the past three or four years and said, well, yeah, one of the interesting things of having you is so different, right? Yes. No longer real German. Really? Yes, yes. It's almost like when Americans go to Britain for a few years or months or days and come back with a British accent, it's the same sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No longer how you supposed to be. Yeah. I feel like you've gone over to the French side, huh? Yeah. But you lecture in French? I do lecture in French and I have one class in English. Oh, really? Yeah. So because we have lots of foreign students and especially in business, it's important. I mean, one criteria for students to choose the programs to which they sign up is how many English language content is there because English is the business language. So in our program is international management. We have about half of our classes that are taught in English and our goal is to go to 18, 90, maybe 100% in the next few years. Oh, is that right? So that you can attract more international students and the only language there. Also prepare the French guys better for the international market. I see. Yeah. And English is of course the international language as it should be, I think you would agree. Yes. I mean, yeah. English is made for business. German for philosophy. And economics? Also to some extent, yeah. So this is higher torture for economists, Frieden German. Yes. Well, as a matter of fact, I know we could spend a short amount of time together talking about your works and we probably should, but why don't you say something about this new book by Schulack and Unterkopfler? Well, thank you very much for asking me about this. So these are two Austrian scholars, Eugen Maria Schulack is a philosopher and he's in fact the only self-employed philosopher I know. So he has his own company in which he sells philosophical consulting services and it works. And next to it, he's lecturing at a couple of universities, both private universities and public universities. He's been very successful in everything he's doing. He's a first-class intellectual, normally cultivated person and a great fellow. It's wonderful to be around with him. He's a very sweet person and has a wonderful wife also. And his co-author is Herbert Unterkopfler, whom I know a little less well. We have met occasionally. We spoke on the phone one time. Actually, his English is very good, I thought. Excellent. Yeah. He's in business. So he's also working as a consultant and had always very strong intellectual interests. So we now here have two people from outside of academia who write a very, very scholarly book and by this very fact already, they are in a great Austrian tradition that we can trace back at least to the times of Mises. Something that I point out in my Mises biography was that in the 1910s, 20s, 30s, until the rise of the Nazi party within Austria, there was kind of a free market network of different groups that were pursuing a scholarship on a non-professional basis. So they all had their daytime job, but then would meet in the evenings and sometimes on the weekends and so on to discuss things and present papers and publish a lot. So it was really fascinating. And these guys have a greater legacy than most of the professional academic university persons. So here too, right? No academic economics professor or philosophy professor has ever done a work of the similar sort, certainly not on the Austrian school. So these two, they have retraced the history of the Austrian school from its beginning from the times of Karl Manger to the present day. And they have based, there's not, I mean, a few histories of this sort ranging from a few pages to whatever book length that already exists. But what they've done is to base this book on original research. And this is where they make a path breaking contribution in particular. Even in the German speaking world. Absolutely. Yeah. Nobody's ever done. And inconceivable in the English speaking world, of course. Yeah, because it's, of course, you need, well, here again, so not only to speak philosophy, you need to master German, but also to write a good history of the Austrian. Well, I mean, look, most of our history is with the Austrian school. And I realized this when I was going through the draft of your book and I realized I knew nothing that was in here. I'd never read anything like this. And I realized that, I mean, it goes, it's obvious in retrospect. But of course, English speakers have been writing histories of, histories in English of histories of an English and it's all been this kind of inbred thing for a very long time. Do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. And so your book on Mises was a breakthrough in that sense that, oh. But these do they go beyond me, I mean, way beyond me in many respects. So it's really. The Austrian school, a history of its ideas, ambassadors, and institutions. So the German version, I was a reader of the privilege. So to be a reader of the German version, a few things that I could really contribute. So I gave a few comments, left and right, but by and large, this was an outstanding piece of scholarship, was greatly privileged. The apparatus, as we say, is immense. We have a bibliography that's about 45 pages or something. And so many footnotes and so many internal references. But here's the other thing. Didn't you find it entertaining? Yes. Very well written. Not at all from the arrogant point of view, not at the teacher's point of view, but somebody who has a passion for its subject and likes to share what they've found. Yeah. And do you agree? Am I right about this? It's really the first history of the Austrian school we have. Yeah. There was Mises' monograph. Yeah. Yeah. Right. We have a few histories of this sort. I mean, also as a rule attached to certain persons, right, like my Mises biography, which I give the background of the evolution of the Austrian school, Israel Kilsner's work, what Murray Rothbard has done, also a history of the Austrian school, in many shorter versions, short essays and so on. But again, what is here is astounding, is the depth in which the same subject has been treated. And in particular, what they also do is to give a much better impression of the breadth of the movement than I do, for example, in my Mises biography, because I concentrate on a few main figures and they go through a much larger number of... Well, I mean, they've got Menger teaching, here's the students, what did the student do, the student did, what did that student do. It's great. Yeah. It's so interesting and lots are filled with just the right amount of class. Magnificent comparison of the sociological background between the Austrian school and the German historical school, that was just amazing. Yeah, amazing. Yeah. And so it's engaging from the first page to the last. I have high hopes for this book. Do you? Yes. I mean, for me, it is already... I mean, this is a milestone in the literature and it will remain. I mean, high hopes in the sense that, yes, the young generation will read this book and it will form everyone's perspective on what the Austrian school is, where it came from and what it did and where it's going. Mm-hmm. That's how significant this work is. Yeah. You agree with this? Yeah. Well, I mean, where it's going, of course, this is always difficult to say, right? I mean, okay, and they don't actually speculate much on the question. No, they don't. Well, doesn't it end by saying Gito Hulsmann is the... Yeah, of course, that he's a... He's a very promising author. Yeah. That's what they say. But, okay. I mean, this comes out of, well, personal acquaintances probably and so on. So I don't... This is not the central part of the book. What is really central is this great scholarship that they display over the previous 200 pages and truly nobody will be... The future will be able to get around this book who does research on the history of the Austrian school. I wish I had brought a copy up so I could show it, but have you seen it downstairs? Yes. Isn't it beautiful? Yeah. This is beautiful. All books. Oh, yeah. Well, Chad Parrish designed the cover and I just loved it. Arlene O'Shennar did the translation, which everybody is praising for its beauty. I mean, the readability of it is very, very high and it's not an expensive book either, so... It would be great to have one of them here at the Austrian Scholars Conference. Well, I think we tried to arrange that this year, but it didn't quite work out. We're going to Austria, I guess, in the fall, so we'll see them and maybe we'll get them back here next year. It's very exciting and it's a thrill, I think, for anybody who's attached to the Austrian school to understand something of its history and its meaning and it's a heroic and interesting history. Yes. And they really convey a vivid picture of this and they are now themselves part of this. Yes. I mean, they are both of them are associated with the Institute for Werteverte, the Institute for Value-Based Economy, or Value-Based Economics, which regroups non-university academics during scholarship in the tradition of the Austrian school. And these guys, so it's Unterkürfler and Eugen Maria Schulach. And then there are a couple of younger guys, Reimtaggisauer, he has this Iranian name, I always screw it up when I want to pronounce it, and Gregor Hochreiter and a few other guys, even younger guys, and they are doing fantastic works with seminars and lectures, book publishing. And they have a real passion. I know that Schilach himself has a real passion for all the details of the history of the Austrian school because I don't know if you recall that Doug Finch went to Vienna, I think it was last year, something like this, and they had a tour of Vienna, but it was very detailed tours. It began very early in the morning. And I was receiving iPhone pictures of the way this tour, and in the morning, Doug looked very interested, enthusiastic, and bright-eyed and everything. And then you could see he was kind of by five o'clock, you know, everybody's just kind of, and Schilach's still going, and look at this manuscript, look at this. And now we've got one more building to go. Yeah, it's just this enormous breadth of knowledge. And yeah, I mean, in the past, this was one of our problems, right? I mean, we hadn't any local guide. We all knew about, well, the life stations and so on was based on readings, right? It's like if you need to find your way, whatever, in Cairo or so, based on manuscripts with hieroglyphs or something, right? So you try to find your way, and here you have somebody who has living knowledge of all these stations, because it's his city. Yeah, yeah. It's a kick, and it's a surprise, too. I think you're the one who sent the manuscript. So the Mises Institute is having the support of Summit this year in September. So it's a great opportunity to profit from this. Yes, by profit, you mean, of course, a benefit. Yes, I mean, for me, it's about the same thing. There's monetary profit, monetary profit, and non-monetary profit. I was just thinking, how are we going to make money at this? OK. I missed that part. And you have a book you're working on now in Capital Theory, and we won't go into the details, because it's not your way, really. I mean, you like to kind of save. Yeah, I like to remain vague and general. It's very strange. Yeah, well, it increases the aura, the sense of mystery of who you are and what you're doing. This is all good. Thank you so much, Kira Holtzman, for joining us today.