WEBVTT NOTE What the Enemy Fears Most 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.000 Okay, I just got an instant message from my mother who's informing me that she was going on a trip or something, wanted me to know where she was going. 2 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:21.000 And I said, okay, great, Mom, it's great to hear from you. Listen, if you want to, I'm in San Francisco, if you want to watch my speech in a few minutes, you can just click here. 3 00:00:21.000 --> 00:00:27.000 And she said, what do you mean? I said, well, I'm giving a talk and you can watch it right there. 4 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:29.000 She said, but now what channel is that again? 5 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:33.000 Sorry, it was great. I said, the Mises channel. 6 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:41.000 So, I hope she's watching. Actually, I can say it, right? 7 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:43.000 I can say, hi, mom. Hi, mom. 8 00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:51.000 The confidence is, I hope it all goes well, being broadcast all over the world. 9 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:54.000 These kinds of things are just unimaginable. 10 00:00:54.000 --> 00:01:00.000 I guess I feel like a kid sometimes in dealing with all this technology stuff. 11 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:03.000 It's just every day it's a miracle. 12 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:10.000 And what we're doing with the website right now in terms of delivering information 13 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:15.000 far surpasses anything I could have imagined happening just a few years ago. 14 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:21.000 In a sense it makes our working for the Mises Institute every day a new kind of experience. 15 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:51.000 Experience. You know, I've had people ask me, you know, look, you've been working for the Institute since 1985. Isn't this sort of unusual? Isn't a person supposed to change jobs from time to time, you know, in one's professional life? Well, it is like changing jobs. You know, every day I get up and I think, where do I want to work today? Where do I most want to be employed? And the Mises Institute is, every day, it's always the same answer. The Mises Institute is perfect. 16 00:01:51.000 --> 00:02:10.000 And not only the colleagues, not only the opportunity to promote and distribute the ideas of the greatest thinkers of our time, of all time, but with technology the way it is, the job is endlessly changing. 17 00:02:10.000 --> 00:02:24.000 So, I had the great pleasure of spending the next 20 minutes talking about one of the things I love most in this world, and that is the Mises Institute website. 18 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:33.000 I was talking to a fellow the other day who actually assisted me over the summer with doing some massive upgrades. 19 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:38.000 I don't know if you read the story, we co-wrote a story about this. 20 00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:57.000 So we were trying to think of what sites in the world compare in terms of the size and just the sheer amount of distribution of MP3s, of PDF files, of just sheer downloads throughout the day. 21 00:02:57.000 --> 00:03:05.000 And we thought of sites like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, JSTOR for academic purposes, these kinds of sites. 22 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:15.320 of Sites. This is what Mises or compares to. These other sites have hundreds of employees. 23 00:03:15.320 --> 00:03:25.720 We have just a few of us. In a way, we've been very blessed and very lucky and benefited 24 00:03:25.720 --> 00:03:31.880 so immensely from technology. It's difficult to explain it all. I know there are probably 25 00:03:31.880 --> 00:03:34.880 Some people here, when I said the word MP3, thought, what is he talking about? 26 00:03:34.880 --> 00:03:37.880 Actually, somebody came up and said, oh, so now we're going to get the big high-tech thing, 27 00:03:37.880 --> 00:03:40.880 you know, with the screen and the website, and yeah, I guess so. 28 00:03:40.880 --> 00:03:46.880 I guess that's what we're going to get over the next few minutes here. 29 00:03:46.880 --> 00:03:51.880 I mean, quite simply put, what we have with Mises Org, to my mind, 30 00:03:51.880 --> 00:03:58.880 is the greatest example of the unity of technology and truth anywhere in the world. 31 00:03:58.880 --> 00:04:07.880 It does precisely what the enemy fears the most, it provides instantaneous access to the whole world of scholarship and the defense of freedom, 32 00:04:07.880 --> 00:04:13.580 a tradition of thought that the state and its affiliated institutions have been trying to suppress for centuries. 33 00:04:13.580 --> 00:04:22.380 And so compelling is this tradition and so strong is this persuasive power that it works on its own to draw and maintain interest and adherence. 34 00:04:22.380 --> 00:04:29.380 Just yesterday, Jim Zostrosky posted on the blog some happy birthday greetings to Lew Rockwell. 35 00:04:29.380 --> 00:04:34.380 And you're welcome to read the thread that's developed as a result of that posting. 36 00:04:34.380 --> 00:04:44.380 Last I checked, there were 50 some odd posts of people talking about what Mises.org and Lew's own personal site has meant in their own intellectual development. 37 00:04:44.380 --> 00:04:50.380 And it would be very difficult, there's nothing I could say that can compare to what you can read right now, 38 00:04:50.380 --> 00:04:55.380 That's what people have posted from 5 a.m. this morning up until just now. 39 00:04:55.380 --> 00:05:00.380 It's remarkable in so many ways the site is changing the world. 40 00:05:00.380 --> 00:05:06.380 But let me begin by announcing, and I've saved this to today, a new addition to Mises Org 41 00:05:06.380 --> 00:05:10.380 that to me somehow captures the marvelous power of this technology to do things 42 00:05:10.380 --> 00:05:15.380 that no one would have imagined only a few years ago to say nothing about all of human history. 43 00:05:15.380 --> 00:05:23.380 And I'm going to do something very dangerous. I'm going to click on that button, and we're going to see if it works. 44 00:05:26.380 --> 00:05:29.380 Very nice. Okay. 45 00:05:30.380 --> 00:05:37.380 The story of the newest addition to the site begins in March 1934, 46 00:05:37.380 --> 00:05:43.380 when Mises received a letter from the Institute of Higher International Studies in Geneva 47 00:05:43.380 --> 00:05:47.380 Asking him to be a visiting professor. 48 00:05:47.380 --> 00:05:53.380 Accepting this position would entail a big pay cut and leaving his beloved Vienna, 49 00:05:53.380 --> 00:06:00.380 but the offer also meant security and relief from his growing disgust at Austrian politics 50 00:06:00.380 --> 00:06:06.380 and the rise of a great menace just outside his door. 51 00:06:06.380 --> 00:06:15.380 The National Social German Workers Party was an adjunct to Hitler's growing power in Germany. 52 00:06:15.380 --> 00:06:18.380 He was rising there in Austria and he knew he would be personally threatened. 53 00:06:18.380 --> 00:06:26.380 But he also knew that from Geneva he could think and he could write and he could even travel as time allowed. 54 00:06:26.380 --> 00:06:31.380 It was an ideal setting with constant seminars and a good library and cordial environments. 55 00:06:31.380 --> 00:06:45.380 and he went there and he found wonderful opportunities. There were 6 staff, 12 faculty, and 100 students, of whom half were working towards their PhD. 56 00:06:45.380 --> 00:06:51.380 And as I read that sentence, does that remind you of any other setting you might know of? 57 00:06:51.380 --> 00:06:59.380 of Mises University, six staff, twelve faculty, a hundred students, it's about right. 58 00:06:59.380 --> 00:07:08.380 Guido Holzman's forthcoming biography of Mises contains many wonderful details of this period of Mises' life. 59 00:07:08.380 --> 00:07:13.380 I can spend the next 20 minutes just talking about that. I have the privilege of having read it in draft form. 60 00:07:13.380 --> 00:07:17.380 But let me just raise the point that's relevant for this talk. 61 00:07:17.380 --> 00:07:47.380 Jesus was working on a book during these years, a very large book, it would be a synthesis of all of his previous work on money and banking, the methodology of the social sciences, business cycles, political economy and socialism, and his studies of war and collectivism, everything would be combined and he would add additional theoretical details on production and development and interest rates, value theory and history, and a range of other fields. And most importantly, he would attempt to tie it all together in a unified 62 00:07:47.380 --> 00:07:52.780 System of Economic Thought, one large enough to stand next to the great classical treatments 63 00:07:52.780 --> 00:07:58.440 but surpass them in scientific rigor. This book would seek to construct an entire intellectual 64 00:07:58.440 --> 00:08:04.720 system in opposition to nearly all the trends of his time and ours. It would employ deductive 65 00:08:04.720 --> 00:08:10.740 methods in the social sciences when positivism was on the march. It would reject mechanical 66 00:08:10.740 --> 00:08:16.160 analogies in economics, science, and focus instead on human choice. It would advocate 67 00:08:16.160 --> 00:08:22.160 laissez-faire, not just in trade, but in all areas of political economy, including money and banking. 68 00:08:22.160 --> 00:08:28.160 And this would be the book that would come to be nuts in all economy, forgive my German. 69 00:08:28.160 --> 00:08:35.160 And he would work six years on it, six years. 70 00:08:35.160 --> 00:08:41.160 But as he worked, he could not neglect to see what was happening outside his window. 71 00:08:41.160 --> 00:08:45.160 Europe was going to be torn apart by war again. 72 00:08:45.160 --> 00:08:50.760 The second time in his lifetime, he was observing the rise of two competing forms of socialism, 73 00:08:50.760 --> 00:08:58.060 competing the speed at which they could smash civilization and the rise of Keynesianism in the US, 74 00:08:58.060 --> 00:09:07.960 which he recognized as just a very cranky form of economics that had long been overthrown. 75 00:09:07.960 --> 00:09:13.960 When the war came in 1939, he was probably examining the page proofs of his book, 76 00:09:13.960 --> 00:09:17.240 and he must have had a great sense of foreboding even now. 77 00:09:17.240 --> 00:09:27.880 And the book appeared in 1940, a treatise on economics, written in German, published in Geneva, and appearing in wartime. 78 00:09:27.880 --> 00:09:36.840 And you can guess what happened. It was a disaster. The book went nowhere. It sank, almost without a trace. 79 00:09:36.840 --> 00:09:43.320 And even worse, Mises was just then being pressured to leave for the US. 80 00:09:43.320 --> 00:09:46.720 It wasn't sure at all that he would be safe in Geneva. 81 00:09:46.720 --> 00:09:51.120 Now keep in mind he was 60 years old, 60 years old at this time. 82 00:09:51.120 --> 00:09:58.520 This is supposed to be, things are supposed to be secure for a man like Mises. 83 00:09:58.520 --> 00:10:02.420 He was asked to start a new life and a new career. 84 00:10:02.420 --> 00:10:06.420 He would have to become proficient in a new language. 85 00:10:06.420 --> 00:10:10.520 His French was very good, his English was less so. 86 00:10:10.520 --> 00:10:12.920 And it was during this period that he wrote his darkest thoughts 87 00:10:12.920 --> 00:10:17.920 about how he started off as a reformer and only ended up as a historian of decline. 88 00:10:17.920 --> 00:10:24.920 Now, after he came to the U.S., this great book, Nuts and All Economy, would end up being rewritten in English 89 00:10:24.920 --> 00:10:26.920 and published as Human Action nine years later. 90 00:10:26.920 --> 00:10:30.920 And when you dig through the archives of the letters back and forth, 91 00:10:30.920 --> 00:10:35.920 it's striking to see how close this book came to not being published at all. 92 00:10:35.920 --> 00:10:38.920 The publisher didn't really want to publish a book of this length. 93 00:10:38.920 --> 00:10:53.920 Profession economist wouldn't write in support of his publication. He had a friend at Yale University Press who talked to some of his former colleagues, some of whom wouldn't even support the publication of this book because they said there was nothing new in it. 94 00:10:53.920 --> 00:11:07.920 It was thanks to Fritz Machlup and Henry Hazlitt at the New York Times that finally Yale University ended up publishing the thing. Anyway, Human Action was a work of genius. It came out in 1949. It's been a bestseller ever since. 95 00:11:07.920 --> 00:11:31.920 What disappeared from history was this 1940 book, and I'm not sure why, of course we have Human Action now, but to me there's something very, very special about being able to give you this 1940 predecessor. 96 00:11:31.920 --> 00:11:42.920 Thanks to Firefox, we get a pretty good, there it is. There's the book. That's the one that sank without a trace. 97 00:11:42.920 --> 00:11:50.920 The whole treatise is right here for anyone in the world to download and look at. 98 00:11:50.920 --> 00:12:00.920 It's completely scannable. It's very fast. This is one of something on the order of 100, 150 books or so that we have on the website. 99 00:12:00.920 --> 00:12:08.520 website. This was scanned in by our dear friend, George Reisman, and it took just a few moments 100 00:12:08.520 --> 00:12:15.360 to upload it and make it live and active. Now, can you imagine such a thing? To the 101 00:12:15.360 --> 00:12:21.520 young people here, you think, well, that's just the way the world works. But to guys 102 00:12:21.520 --> 00:12:31.520 And as my age, this is amazing, and it's just one of many amazing things on the site. 103 00:12:31.520 --> 00:12:39.520 We also offer our own scholars edition, completely free. 104 00:12:39.520 --> 00:12:43.520 That's the book we published a few years ago. 105 00:12:43.520 --> 00:12:47.520 I've written quite a lot in support of the idea of online books. 106 00:12:47.520 --> 00:12:51.520 So, people say, why would you put a book online when you're also selling it? 107 00:12:51.520 --> 00:12:55.520 Well, the answer, the first answer to that is, that's our job. That's what we're here for. 108 00:12:55.520 --> 00:12:59.520 We're here to get the ideas out there. That's the job of the Mises Institute. 109 00:12:59.520 --> 00:13:03.520 And it would be absurd for us, if we have the technology, we have the server space, 110 00:13:03.520 --> 00:13:08.520 we have the ability to pull it off, we should get the truth out there. 111 00:13:08.520 --> 00:13:15.520 That's what the whole site is dedicated to doing. It just so happens that having books online actually increases sales. 112 00:13:15.520 --> 00:13:20.520 The Omnipotent Government, we put online, you know, the great book, it was a great book. 113 00:13:20.520 --> 00:13:24.520 We put it online about four months ago. 114 00:13:24.520 --> 00:13:26.520 We hadn't sold any copies of that thing in years. 115 00:13:26.520 --> 00:13:30.520 And suddenly hundreds were flying out the door as soon as we put it online, you know. 116 00:13:30.520 --> 00:13:35.520 And we had to persuade, as a matter of fact, we had to pay a lease to the publisher to put it online. 117 00:13:35.520 --> 00:13:42.520 And he said that the purpose of the lease was to reimburse him for all the lost sales. 118 00:13:42.520 --> 00:14:04.520 I'm old enough to remember a time when in order to get a book or an article in the hands of another person, you had to hand deliver it. You had to give it to them or rely on the government to get it there for you. 119 00:14:04.520 --> 00:14:16.520 This, as far as I can tell in my massive research, this situation lasted from the ancient world until the fax machine of the 1980s and finally the invention of the web browser in the mid-1990s. 120 00:14:16.520 --> 00:14:22.520 That's how quickly everything has changed for us. Communication technology has meant so much for us. 121 00:14:22.520 --> 00:14:32.520 For a marginal radical intellectual movement like ours, it means that students can, for the first time, discover that we exist. 122 00:14:32.520 --> 00:14:44.520 When I was an undergraduate, I had a professor warn me not to read Mises, so what's the first thing that a person does, you know, you go talk to them. 123 00:14:44.520 --> 00:14:54.520 That was great advertising. And I had read many works of Mises at the time. I didn't know there was a Mises Institute, you know, who knew? 124 00:14:54.520 --> 00:15:05.520 In 1985, I happened to be walking down Massachusetts Avenue and looked up and saw a brass sign, a gleaming brass plaque on a building that said the Mises Institute. 125 00:15:05.520 --> 00:15:10.520 And I'll never forget this moment. I mean, you can imagine, it was an amazing thing. 126 00:15:10.520 --> 00:15:22.520 An institute devoted to the thought of Mises, the unity of radical laissez-faire politics and economic science all coming together to oppose every trend of our time, 127 00:15:22.520 --> 00:15:52.520 To, you know, bring about a free world, I couldn't imagine such a thing. It was thrilling. I mean, my heart just jumped, you know, and I remember going in and having my first conversation with Lew Rockwell at the time, and things went well, but now look at it. I had to be walking along the street to see this thing. You could, of course, look in Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. How many remember doing this, you know? Yeah, okay, so those days are gone. Now, all you have to do 128 00:15:52.520 --> 00:15:59.520 What we have to do is type the word Mises into Google and you get this amazing world of information. 129 00:15:59.520 --> 00:16:06.520 We have, I'm not going to have time to take you through it, but we have a good friend of ours 130 00:16:06.520 --> 00:16:11.520 who keeps track of how many audio files we have going up there. 131 00:16:11.520 --> 00:16:17.520 And I asked him this morning, I said, did you say we have 100 or 150 hours? 132 00:16:17.520 --> 00:16:19.520 of Audio Files 133 00:16:19.520 --> 00:16:23.520 250 hours of audio files we have up here 134 00:16:23.520 --> 00:16:27.520 and it just occurred to me that's as much as the average Frenchman works in a year 135 00:16:27.520 --> 00:16:33.520 It's amazing 136 00:16:33.520 --> 00:16:39.520 Most tenured professors don't lecture that much in a lifetime 137 00:16:39.520 --> 00:16:43.520 It's an enormous amount of material 138 00:16:43.520 --> 00:16:50.400 I've mentioned this in the past, this left and right over here you see in the bottom. 139 00:16:50.400 --> 00:16:55.840 You know, Murray put out this journal back in the 60s to see it in a few friends and 140 00:16:55.840 --> 00:16:59.760 distributing it only to those people who were very interested. 141 00:16:59.760 --> 00:17:04.760 You know, it came out three years, brilliant stuff, but when it stopped coming out, you 142 00:17:04.760 --> 00:17:05.760 figure that's the end of it, right? 143 00:17:05.760 --> 00:17:12.120 That's the end of the journal, it was fun while it lasted, and well, Murray died before 144 00:17:12.120 --> 00:17:16.120 knowing that his journal would be resurrected and it's now there for the world to see. 145 00:17:16.120 --> 00:17:20.520 It's linked websites all over the place. 146 00:17:20.520 --> 00:17:29.760 Mises Institute, Mises org has thousands of links coming into it from student sites, from 147 00:17:29.760 --> 00:17:33.840 professional sites, from professors' classrooms all over the world. 148 00:17:33.840 --> 00:17:37.400 And I keep saying all over the world, it's very important to remember that the Austrian 149 00:17:37.400 --> 00:17:41.240 School isn't just an American school, it is an international school. 150 00:17:41.240 --> 00:17:53.240 Jeffrey Herbiner a few years ago mentioned at the Austrian Scholars Conference that the Austrian School is the closest thing we have to matching the power that Marxism had in the 19th century, in the late 19th century. 151 00:17:53.240 --> 00:18:05.240 It's truly an international school and it's been the website that's made this possible for us. 152 00:18:05.240 --> 00:18:11.240 This blog itself is one of the most trafficked areas of the site. 153 00:18:11.240 --> 00:18:13.240 I'm not going to take you through it. 154 00:18:13.240 --> 00:18:16.240 Let me just mention a few other things that we're very excited about. 155 00:18:16.240 --> 00:18:22.240 Man Economy and State is also online. 156 00:18:22.240 --> 00:18:24.240 I need to do another dangerous thing. 157 00:18:24.240 --> 00:18:26.240 I'm going to click on the link that says entire text in PDF 158 00:18:26.240 --> 00:18:30.240 just to show you how fast the site is going. 159 00:18:30.240 --> 00:18:31.240 It's amazing. 160 00:18:31.240 --> 00:18:32.240 Okay, there you go. 161 00:18:32.240 --> 00:18:39.340 Page book comes up like that. It's great. Yeah, it's very nice. We've got Ethics of 162 00:18:39.340 --> 00:18:46.060 Liberty up there. Within the next month, we'll have Menger's Principles of Economics. Menger's 163 00:18:46.060 --> 00:18:51.540 Principles of Economics is going online in PDF and in text and every other kind of thing. 164 00:18:51.540 --> 00:18:54.660 You know what? I'm going to stop right there, although I could talk about this all day, 165 00:18:54.660 --> 00:18:59.500 because ever since I got to this conference, I've been hit with a ton of questions about 166 00:18:59.500 --> 00:19:09.500 What's it costing us every month? 167 00:19:29.500 --> 00:19:35.980 actually to run this site because it was very expensive, but we did some shopping around 168 00:19:35.980 --> 00:19:42.500 and discovered that bandwidth prices had plummeted in the meantime and we did some little competitive 169 00:19:42.500 --> 00:19:48.380 work and dropped our costs down to just a small fraction of what they were a few months 170 00:19:48.380 --> 00:19:49.380 before. 171 00:19:49.380 --> 00:19:50.380 That was great fun. 172 00:19:50.380 --> 00:19:53.460 I tell you, to be able to go to our current provider and say, you know, you can go ahead 173 00:19:53.460 --> 00:19:54.460 and turn off the server. 174 00:19:54.460 --> 00:19:55.460 We've moved. 175 00:19:55.460 --> 00:19:58.580 We found the same service for virtually nothing. 176 00:19:58.580 --> 00:20:28.580 It was great. The big cost is time. Let me just say this. People always ask, how is it possible that this kind of site could be put together by this kind of organization, as I say, a site that compares to JACE or the Wall Street Journal? How do you do it? How is it possible that this could happen to only a handful of employees and none of us are totally devoted to this? 177 00:20:28.580 --> 00:20:50.580 The answer is that we're all just fnafs. That is the answer. The title of this conference is Radical Scholarship. We're radicals, we're crazy for what we do, we love the ideas, and there's nothing we'd rather do, so we work on it just constantly. 178 00:20:50.580 --> 00:21:13.580 I've been saving a complete collection of the Journal of Libertarian Studies from issue one, planning to sell it and finance my retirement. 179 00:21:13.580 --> 00:21:20.580 What am I supposed to do with this? 180 00:21:43.580 --> 00:21:56.580 You can hit, it's very important, you can cite it this way, you can continue to reference back to it, you can read something online and say, well, this is getting tedious, I hit the screen, and go and pull out the book, you know, they work together. 181 00:21:56.580 --> 00:22:06.580 The value of a book is enhanced by having the same thing online. We've gone to enormous effort. Oh, listen, I have to show you one other thing. Mark is going to be leaning on me about time. 182 00:22:06.580 --> 00:22:14.580 And again, I'm going to take a big risk here because, you know, not everything is supposed to work this well. 183 00:22:14.580 --> 00:22:19.580 Okay, Joe mentioned, what was the book you mentioned, Joe? Where's Joe? 184 00:22:19.580 --> 00:22:25.580 The Tussig's Tariff History, right? Okay, so I'm going to click on the word Tussig. 185 00:22:25.580 --> 00:22:29.580 What do we have here? Tariff History of the United States. 186 00:22:29.580 --> 00:22:41.380 Please. Look at that. Now, let me tell you, this book, you can go to Bookfinder and get 187 00:22:41.380 --> 00:22:45.480 old dumpy copies. It's not in print anymore. You can get a cheap old paperback with crazy 188 00:22:45.480 --> 00:22:52.900 print or whatever. Look, this is a flawless edition. And this isn't just a graphic scam. 189 00:22:52.900 --> 00:22:59.460 This is, oh, look at that. This is, we reset this book completely. We scanned every word 190 00:23:29.460 --> 00:23:31.460 Oh, wonderful! 191 00:23:31.460 --> 00:23:33.460 A shill. 192 00:23:33.460 --> 00:23:37.460 Yeah, a shill. 193 00:23:37.460 --> 00:23:41.460 Gosh, look at all these jokes I passed up here. 194 00:23:41.460 --> 00:23:44.460 The future. Oh, this is a section called the future. 195 00:23:44.460 --> 00:23:45.460 Okay, mass media. 196 00:23:45.460 --> 00:23:50.460 Obviously we're going to do more of what we're doing right now with audio and video. 197 00:23:50.460 --> 00:23:53.460 I'm very excited about this. 198 00:23:53.460 --> 00:23:56.460 We have converted about a third of the site into .net. 199 00:23:56.460 --> 00:24:07.460 David Wexler is listening and laughing. We have converted a third of the site to .NET, which reduced the load enormously, which is the newest technology. 200 00:24:07.460 --> 00:24:14.460 We want to complete that conversion starting in January, I hope, and we're going to be working from January to August to totally revamp the thing. 201 00:24:14.460 --> 00:24:22.460 It's hard for you to imagine. This site has not had a broken link or no pattern of broken links, I should probably say, 202 00:24:22.460 --> 00:24:33.460 Since we first made our conversion to .asp, which was in something like 1997. This is unprecedented. I mean, no site is this old and yet works this well. 203 00:24:33.460 --> 00:24:45.460 You know, a lot of institutions dump a million dollars on some, you know, set of geeks to revamp the whole site and chuck the old thing away. We never did that. 204 00:24:45.460 --> 00:24:50.460 We always believed that you should keep a link active, you know. So we've been constantly refurbishing it. 205 00:24:50.460 --> 00:24:58.460 The Refurbishing, you can imagine, it's like a house built two centuries ago that you're continually adding to, you know, that's what Mises Ord really is. 206 00:24:58.460 --> 00:25:04.460 So anyway, we've converted about a third of it to .NET. We want to do the whole thing to reduce the load, to increase the delivery. 207 00:25:04.460 --> 00:25:16.460 So we want better delivery and better expertise. There's all sorts of things that I would like to do on a database that we haven't been able to do. 208 00:25:16.460 --> 00:25:20.460 The commercial end of the site, the catalog is a little bit weak right now. 209 00:25:20.460 --> 00:25:24.460 I mean, it works fine for us, but there's a lot more that we could be doing. 210 00:25:24.460 --> 00:25:33.460 More interactivity. There's an unlimited number of books that we can get online. 211 00:25:33.460 --> 00:25:36.460 I have a stack this high that we're working on. 212 00:25:36.460 --> 00:25:38.460 We just want to make sure that they're all perfect. 213 00:25:38.460 --> 00:25:41.460 So it takes a lot of time. 214 00:25:41.460 --> 00:25:52.460 To calibrate where we're going from here, is it fair to say that you have hundreds of books now available online, and how long will it take to double that number? 215 00:26:11.460 --> 00:26:13.520 Other books you can scan and just throw them right up. 216 00:26:13.520 --> 00:26:16.600 If you want to do things like we've done, Man Economy and State, and like we're going 217 00:26:16.600 --> 00:26:26.400 to do Minger, you provide text, PDF, complete searchability, or fun things like on Human 218 00:26:26.400 --> 00:26:38.140 Action we have a fully interactive index, yeah, that's neat, so let's go to bureaucratic 219 00:26:38.140 --> 00:26:39.140 management. 220 00:26:39.140 --> 00:26:47.140 So, things like this, the little tricks like this take a long time, a lot longer. So it really depends on the product that we're doing. 221 00:26:47.140 --> 00:26:56.140 And this is one of the things, this took a few months, actually it took far less time than I ever imagined. 222 00:26:56.140 --> 00:27:00.140 Oh, by the way, I want to just say on this, on this Man Economy and State, this is really exciting. 223 00:27:00.140 --> 00:27:08.140 This is an example of what we're going to do for the future. Part of the difficulty with this book, as you know, is that it's very, very long 224 00:27:08.140 --> 00:27:38.140 Robert Murphy, economist at Hillsdale, is working right now on a wonderful study guide, and this thing is really great. It's a study guide to Man Economy and State. It's going to be about 150 pages, so it's like 4 or 5 pages per chapter, and he summarizes all the important points, directs you to the key things in the chapter and helps guide you through the thing. Starting Monday, I'm going to put these things up chapter by chapter here. 225 00:27:38.140 --> 00:27:42.140 So you can go to this, you can read the book, or you can go through the guide. 226 00:27:42.140 --> 00:27:48.140 And I hope also to be able to make the study guide interactive with our quiz software. 227 00:27:48.140 --> 00:27:52.140 I'm sure you've all taken the quiz. 228 00:27:52.140 --> 00:27:59.140 We've got a nice little quiz program so we can write quiz and generate tests for people as they're going through Man Economy. 229 00:27:59.140 --> 00:28:01.140 Anything to make it easier to read. 230 00:28:01.140 --> 00:28:07.140 We've all been convinced for some time that if everybody could just have the patience to sit down and read this amazing book, 231 00:28:07.140 --> 00:28:10.140 What about traffic rankings? I don't see any traffic rankings. 232 00:28:37.140 --> 00:28:46.140 in terms of traffic. It's the largest. It's the best. I mean, it delivers the most of anybody else, of any institutional sites dealing with economics. 233 00:28:46.140 --> 00:28:59.140 And as far as I can tell, the Mises Institute has the highest Alexa rating of any policy-oriented nonprofit in the country, left, right or center, as far as I can tell. 234 00:28:59.140 --> 00:29:09.140 How about Economist Magazine? 235 00:29:29.140 --> 00:29:32.140 Okay, I really need to stop. Thank you so much.