 Today, we have a special guest and it'll be in person. His name is Jeff Dysing. He happens to be now the president of the Mises Institute. Jeff, welcome to our program. Thank you, Ron. Good to see you again. Well, great. We've known each other now, Bob, about 14 or 15 years, and I had the brilliance to hire you in the congressional office, and you got a job that you weren't particularly trained for, and yet you were fantastic. You were the press secretary. So how did you feel about that job? Were you surprised that that was the job, and did you wonder about it? Because you weren't exactly trained in a conventional fashion, but I knew you knew the philosophy and I knew you could write. Well, I was surprising, but a dear, longtime friend of mine, Joe Becker, was already working for you. And at the time I was single, no children. I was able to sort of pick up and move. And so there was a vacancy in your office, and you needed somebody who could write and who also had sort of the libertarian and Austrian philosophy in their background. So it just sort of came together, and I found myself moving to Washington, and that was the year 2000. Well, did you have any hesitation because you know you got a government check? You know, and some of us aren't that excited about working for the government. Did you have to talk to yourself and say, well, this is one part of the government. If we're going to have government, at least it's a legitimate part of the government. Sure. I mean, that's something that I considered, but I think mainly I just wanted the opportunity to work for Ron Paul simply because I had known you and known of you since you ran in 1988 as a libertarian, and it was just an exciting opportunity. And I knew Joe really well, so I had a very sort of inside scoop on what the office was like. And it just sounded like a fun opportunity. You know, and one thing that I've tried real hard and I've gotten some credit for this is that I didn't have one individual on the staff, you know, the chief of staff that went out and just filled up all the slots, and the member didn't get to know them very well. And I was very interested in knowing the individual. But the other thing I did in my office, and you did this, although you were doing press work, you also had a lot to do with the legislation dealing with taxes. And in many ways, and you have a legal background. You have a law degree, and you got involved in taxes. And this actually was beneficial in a sense that, well, when you got a little restless in Washington, you actually did some tax work outside of Washington. Yes. Before I came to work for you, I was a tax lawyer. And then after I stopped working for you, I left and went back into sort of corporate tax work in that world. So I've been sort of in and out of it, but now I'm back into the world of ideas at Mises. Right. You know, and the other thing that I was generally pretty proud of in Washington is that the turnover, my staff, has been rather low. And there are some, as you know, in the other office, sometimes there's a turnover every six months or a year, you know, for the chief of staff. Would you like to name any names from that? No, I don't do this. I'm pretty conservative on that. But you know what I'm talking about. You did leave. And then my chief of staff, Tom Lizardo, had been with me a long time. He helped me get reelected back in 1996. And then it was time that he had had enough of it. And that is when I called you and you expressed an interest. And you came back as the chief of staff. And of course, that was beneficial to me. You had known the office and you were well versed in the philosophy. What what did you find the neatest part of the office? I know we did a lot of education where I don't know whether you ever got frustrated with me when I would get annoyed with legislating in the sense of tinkering with legislation. But you were really very helpful in helping me do the educational part of what how we used that office. Well, when I left working for you the first time and I came back, your profile, your public profile had increased enormously because of the 08 presidential campaign. So I knew when I came back, you had not yet decided to run in 2012. But your public profile was much higher. So the ability for you to communicate with people to spread your ideas was much greater than it was earlier. And so to me, it was thrilling to be able to come back. And we all viewed it as primarily an educational and outreach tool, you know, using your notoriety in your office to spread the message. Not only of liberty, but also of Austrianism in particular. Yeah. And of course, it became known that we had our conferences with other members. And you were always helpful in that and bringing special speakers in. Although they weren't huge, they were significant in that others, you know, were influenced by that. But you, of course, stuck with me and helped me close down my congressional office and I had the great wisdom to move to Texas and not become a lobbyist in Washington. And you went back to doing some tax work. But then I understand a friend of ours by the name of Lou Rockwell, you know, got ahold of you and he decided to change his career a little bit. And now you're a famous person. Hardly. Now you're the president of the Mises Institute. Yes, yes. And it's strange how things work out. I mean, I met you originally, you know, years and years ago. And then through you, working for you is how I met Lou Rockwell and came to be familiar with the Mises Institute. And of course, all of us on your congressional staff, we used Mises as a huge resource. We would go to the website, we would pull articles. We had all read, you know, obviously at least the basics of human action, you know, Murray Rothbard's work, et cetera. So we would try to pull as much of that into your speeches and statements and press releases as we can. So to create a more intellectual sense to your work, because as you know, most members of Congress, the content that they produce, you know, speeches, articles, et cetera, was just deplorable. It was just pure political hackery. And so we always took it as a point of pride to make your content more intellectual and more robust. And because of that, I think you single handedly brought many, many young people to the work of Mises and Rothbard. You know, you were mentioning how we used the Mises Institute to help our office. But in some ways, it's sort of ironic. The first president of the Mises Institute, because he established the Mises, it was Lou Rockwell, he had been chief of staff. So the second president of the Institute now, with somebody that served as chief of staff. So I like the Association. Matter of fact, I was very pleased that I could help Lou when, you know, he started the Institute because I consider, you know, the educational efforts so much more important than the political efforts. And you've heard that story a lot before. Now, you're in the Houston area, and I always love it when I can get a special guest into the studio. This is, it makes it a little bit nicer for me and a little bit easier. But you were in Houston here just recently and you sort of got broken in with a very special event. What was the event all about in Houston? Well, we do several events every year that we call Mises circles, which is basically the Mises Institute comes to you. And we put on a one day event in a particular city. And we always do Houston, which is a great city for us in January. And so people in different parts of the country who might not be able to make it to Auburn to our physical campus can come to a Mises event, see scholars, people like Tom Woods, see Leroc while you spoke. So we really like the idea of bringing Mises to you. And we had an event this weekend, this past weekend, which was about the police state and the growing militarization of police, which is a topic that's that's increasingly in the news. And it was absolutely fantastic. We had a great turnout and we use these events to to provide outreach, essentially, to to bring Mises to you. You know, early on, and this might be just my perception, early on, I think that the makeup of the audience for almost every place I went include the Mises Institute was an older audience. But I get the light now because the Mises Institute of the U.S. has emphasized education, bringing young people in and giving scholarship. So I'm always delighted because there's always some young people there. And that would happen to be the case, you know, this this past weekend, that a lot of young people and not only college student, they they're somebody, you know, in high school. I think I think that is fantastic. So do you have, you know, some ideas on, I know you're just feeling your way and things will continue. But every time a new person come in, sometimes they might have slightly different ideas. Have you had any thoughts of what you might do? Absolutely. I mean, we're in sort of a new era, you know, when Lou started the Institute over 30 years ago now, that was an era where everything was in print. And if you wanted to see a Mises, a speech from somebody at the Mises Institute, you either attended in person, or maybe you got an old VHS tape of it or something like that. And then, of course, when the Mises Institute went online in the middle nineties, that was the huge leap forward. And, you know, obviously the digital age has created, given us the ability to spread Austrian ideas like we never had before. But now we're sort of find ourselves in almost a 3.0 era where you've got the rise of social media. And you also have the sort of the demise of traditional academia, the bricks and mortars model work, where college costs so much and these young people are getting these degrees that aren't worth very much and oftentimes incurring a ton of debt in the process. So our Mises Academy is something that we are very, very, very optimistic about that we want is just a cheap, easy online platform where you can be sitting at home in your pajamas, you can be in Nigeria, you can be in Texas, you can be in Auburn, Alabama, or at any point across the globe. And at a very low cost, get what we would call some real economics training that you're not going to get at your local community college, your local undergraduate college. And, you know, we're teaching hardcore Austrianism, uncompromising, principled stuff. We're also teaching philosophy, political economy, you know, subjects that are broader than just technical economics. Yeah. And I think the image of the Mises Institute has always been economics. Of course, Mises is the greatest economist, you know, in the 20th century. So it's identified with economics, but just like this conference you held in Houston had to do with the police state, which is civil liberties, you know, and the attack on the American people. But how about foreign policy? The Mises Institute will talk about that as well, don't they? Absolutely. And it's part of our mission statement that we're advancing Austrian economics, freedom and peace. And of course, Mises himself wrote about this. He wrote about the concept of in socialist societies, you sort of at some point exhaust the ability to plunder folks within your borders. So socialist economies tend to be militaristic and more like economies because they need to spread and to consume. So there's no distinction at Mises between so-called. Well, I mean, we're not a political or policy organization, we're an educational organization, but we don't draw any distinctions between what some people would say, if foreign affairs or foreign matters. I mean, it all comes down to human action and economics at the end of the day. You know, in one of our presidential debates, I think it was in 08, the announcer, the interviewer came on and said, well, today we're going to be talking about economics and not foreign policy. And, you know, and I even made a comment about that, that you really can't separate to do. And I think when you read human action, Mises never tries to separate. He makes a pretty strong argument that these people who think that war spending is good for the economy, there's a lot of shortcomings in that argument as well. Of course, it's the old broken window fallacy, you're at large. You know, and if you blow up people and rebuild them that we generally do, it doesn't make any sense. But anyway, I'm very delighted that you're in this position and we're going to continue because we've worked closely with the Mises Institute. I think you're going to do a great job. And I'm sure our viewers are very much aware, you know, of the Mises Institute. I think that they needed a good introduction for you since you're, you know, the new president. And Lou, my guess is that Lou is going to be pretty close by, you know, and maybe less hands on with the Mises Institute. But he's still going to be what the he will remain president and CEO. No, OK, well, chairman of the board, chairman of the board. So that'll be good. But any messages you'd like to leave with our viewers today? Well, if people are interested, we always encourage people to go to Mises.org, which is an unbelievable treasure trove of information. And we're building a whole new website that's going to be a lot more user friendly in terms of its search function. But we have so much content at Mises.org. If you're interested in Austrianism and so much of it is either free or exceedingly low cost, there's PDFs that are downloadable. There's eBooks. And then, of course, we have our bookstore. So really at a very small or no cost, you could you could spend countless hours reading the free content that's on our site. Let me let me ask you one more question about how you got started in libertarianism and Austrian economics. And was there one person that you had as a teacher? You probably have met somebody like Murray, but didn't study under Murray. But were you in college? Were you interested in these ideas? I was. I fortunately, in when I was in college, my older brother, Steve, had I recall, he had a copy of the road to serfdom. And I believe I don't want to plug, but he's putting he was reading an early version of Reason magazine at the time. And so I really owe quite a bit to him. And then I guess just tangentially through that, I heard about your 88 campaign when I was a college student and ultimately saw you at a hotel. Yeah, OK, you spoke to Ben, you know, that was a long time ago. And we didn't particularly meet at that time. And then fast forward a few years later, 1992, I recall it very specifically, my dear friend, Joe Becker, was studying at UNLV, getting his master's degree in econ under Murray Rothbard and Hans Hoppen. Of course, he had chosen UNLV strictly because Murray was on the faculty and he was taking courses from him. So I had the opportunity to go up, drive to Vegas a couple of times and sit in on a couple of Murray's classes. Well, I was fortunate I'm two or three years older than you are. So I did get to know Murray very well and actually heard Mises Lecture and new Hans Senthold. So I did get to meet a whole generation, but there's a new generation. It's much bigger. And of course, most of them are aligned with the Mises Institute. So if you haven't gotten to meet every single one that's lectured at the Mises Institute, you're going to get to know them a lot better and and there will continue to see how much influence the Mises Institute have because I am convinced that that is where the real battle is. It's a battle of ideas and you change people's ideas. And, you know, the politics will change later on. And I'm also very much convinced that it's not a Republican effort. You know, we talk about our revolution. It's not to reform the Republican Party, but to bring people together. It's easier to bring people together left and right on on things about the police state and war. It's a little more difficult and a challenge that you'll have is how are we going to win over some of the progressives? You know, one of the things I find interested in Washington, people will come up and other members respectfully will say, Ron, I really like it. The one thing is, is you are really consistent. Then I keep thinking and then do it in a very positive way. And then the conversation ends and then I can think it. Well, if I'm consistent, why aren't you motivated to be consistent, too, because they recognize it. But I've never pushed him and said, why aren't you consistent? You know, so. But I think that's our real challenge right now is the failure of the system, you know, and war and NSA and all this stuff, bringing us a large group of people together. But at the same time, we need to get to bring people together, you know, in the economic sphere as well. Absolutely. But thank you, Jeff, very much for being with us and good luck with your new job, and I'm sure we'll be in close touch. Thank you. Well, thank you, everybody, for tuning in. I'm sure you're going to find this interview very fruitful and entertaining as well as very productive because I'm excited about Jeff's new job. And I'll continue to work with the Mises Institute and it will be easy to find the Mises Institute.org and keep up with all that they're doing. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you.