I think people are waking up to the importance of a digital or portable version of gold because so much of commerce is moving online. What gets really interesting is if you start to think about Bitcoin and its all time highs, not versus the dollar, but versus other regional fiat currencies. It's currency, it's a star of value, it's programmable money, it's got like the bill of the duck and the tail of the beaver and you know, it doesn't fit into any nice neat little bucket. Hello YouTube, welcome to the show. My name is Jackson and today I have the pleasure of welcoming Ryan Selkis who is the CEO and co-founder of Masari. How are you doing today Ryan? Doing great, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's really great to have you on, I've actually been really interested in speaking with you. So I guess we'll start things off on more of a fun note. There's been a lot of commotion on Twitter recently because J.K. Rawling, the author of the Harry Potter books, recently became aware of Bitcoin and is now feeling the full force of the crypto community. I saw that you mentioned the whole event in one of your recent tweets and I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on your thoughts and feelings of this whole event. To be honest, I haven't thought twice about it, other than to remark on how ridiculous the whole thing was in terms of frankly caring what J.K. Rawling has to say about magic internet money. I think it's just like anyone else, any other celebrity, there's an opportunity to educate, get them excited and maybe just get them curious or make a good positive first impression. As you can imagine, there is no PR person for Bitcoin and the community is rather interesting and has been for a long time part of the DNA. So I'm not surprised that all of the hilarity that ensued with that particular Twitter thread and everybody piling in, but who knows, maybe she and Elon will finally come over the hump at some point in the next year, given everything that's happened in the macro context. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be amazing and interesting is definitely a good way to put it. So as you know, and as everyone knows, the Bitcoin halving proceeded last week smoothly without any hiccups. And I'm really looking forward to reading Misari's post halving analysis and report. And I was wondering if you could give me a little prelude to that report and tell me how you guys approached researching the halving and what insights did you discover? Well, you know, I think I'm on record as saying that this is probably most important as a narrative hardener, right? So at a time where central banks are printing unparalleled, you know, dollars and fiat assets to recover from the coronavirus, you just happen to have the most important deflationary event in Bitcoin's life cycle so far, which is the symbolic threshold that has crossed from three and a half percent down to down to sub two percent, which is the Fed's target inflation rate for the economy. And I think that's, you know, it couldn't come at a possibly better time because you started to see institutional investors look around at alternatives and you've got gold, which is this traditional safe haven assets. And then this up and comer, which should potentially arrive a gold as a speculative store of value or at least be a digital compliments and as the added benefit of pretty pronounced portability improvements over gold, and this is something that has finally kind of caught mainstream awareness of my mainstream. I mean, you know, one major institutional investor in Paul Tudor Jones, which in, you know, institutional investing circles is massive because it's followed the leader. So I think that, you know, it's generally been a straight shot up for 10, 11 years, but the biggest opportunity, you know, going forward is just to reinforce this digital scarcity elements that Bitcoin created for the first time ever, and which was really the novel solution and not just money, but how do you create digital scarcity period provable digital scarcity? So I think that's important. You know, there's been there's been a ton of work that our team has done in putting different models in context like stock to flow and studying the difference between gold and Bitcoin inflation rates and looking at the potential, you know, quote unquote, mining death spiral that we think is more myth than anything else. There's there's there's quite a bit of good work out there on the having as in terms of actual quantitative deltas that you see in network security or, you know, other key network stats, but far and away, the most important thing is the market development of it all. Yeah. And the thing about the Bitcoin having is that it's primarily a mining event, you know, fundamentally, it doesn't have any immediate impact on the price and it's mostly just an event for the miners. So I was wondering if you could explain a bit more why you believe that this mining death spiral is just a myth. Well, because the the mining capacity that tends to fall off after these having events is it's the weak hands and it's the most it's the miners that have the highest cost basis. But with the price where it is, those that have the most advanced equipment are still profitable, right? You know, they're still making margin and as some of the less profitable capacity falls offline, you'll see a natural difficulty adjustment. We saw this in 2016. We're seeing it again now, but the march forward in terms of new ASIC chips and higher efficiency mining operations, you know, continues to march inexorably onward. So, you know, it would probably take the combination of a major liquidity event like we saw on Black Thursday and the having to really put the hurt on miners, which is not totally out of the question, but we've never seen a situation where things got that dire that the network just ground to a halt. And by the way, most of the miners, the institutional miners that are responsible for majority of network security, they have hedges in place. If there is an event that looks and feels exactly like that, it is very unlikely that they would do the equivalent of bricking all of their own, you know, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment, even in the worst Tuesday scenario where they had to mine unprofitably for a short period of time, because they wouldn't want trust to be diminished in the network and for blocks to take, you know, an hour, two hours, three hours, whatever it is and cause this short term dislocation and difficulty. So, you know, again, I think it's overblown. It's been one of those things that's been de-risked over time. And to me, the more interesting element is what happens in subsequent having cycles and will we see changes in the composition of the minor award to see you more towards higher fees as the issuance continues to tick lower and what exactly is that lower bound for network security? Great. So now I'd like to turn our eye more towards the macro and global scale. There's a lot going on in the world right now. You've got COVID-19. You've got universal money printing, massive job loss, and the stock market is rising amidst all of this. And I think it can be really difficult and overwhelming to really understand what's going on holistically and putting everything into a larger perspective. So I was wondering if you could kind of break down your view of what on the macro scale of what's going on in the global economy right now and where crypto fits into all of this. Well, you know, I think I hinted at it with the news from Paul Tudor Jones. You are starting to see a mainstreaming of the digital gold narrative. And given everything that's going on with the coronavirus, I think people are waking up to the importance of a digital, more portable version of gold because so much of commerce is moving online, so much of your life is moving online and especially in kind of a global lockdown. There is no flight. There is no physical flight to safety and people emigrating from hostile regimes or things that traditionally you'd want to wear the gold that you had around your neck in that kind of doomsday scenario. With this, you're hiding inside, so the escape and the exit is virtual. Well, gold doesn't do you a whole heck of a lot of good in that scenario.  Right. So why put all of your eggs in one treasury bill basket, given everything that's going on in the US? Why put all your bag, all your eggs in one basket of gold, particularly given how it did from 2012 to, you know, current when, you know, people forget it lost a ton of its value after the sovereign debt crisis evaded. So I generally think that maybe the most interesting development in this particular cycle is the fact that Bitcoin is finally ascended to that stage and that level of importance globally. So I'm curious, because there's this idea that I've heard, you know, there's a lot of money printing going on and people are expecting inflation and the devaluing of the US dollar and other currencies. And we're certainly seeing that, you know, there's the inflation is widespread. It's not just in the US. It's happening in other countries around the world. There's even hyperinflation in other countries around the world. And the idea is that because inflation is happening everywhere, the US dollar will actually retain or could even come out better in its valuation because compared to other international currencies, it will do much better. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this idea of the US remaining better relative to other international currencies and how that relationship between the dollar and other currencies will affect Bitcoin? Yeah, I mean, one of the more interesting things from our reports that's coming out tomorrow is it's kind of a follow up is, you know, taking a dollar centric view misses some of the larger picture. The same thing happened in 2011-2012, right? There was a flight to safety in the US dollar, even though one of the catalysts for the sovereign debt crisis was the US debt downgraded by S&P. And what happened? Well, treasuries rallied and they went to their lowest yields in years. And ultimately the dollar was just fine because people counterintuitively flocked to it as, you know, flight to safety. The big issue with a strong dollar is going to be felt in emerging market debt. And what gets really interesting is if you start to think about Bitcoin, and it's all-time highs, not versus the dollar, but versus other regional fiat currencies. So, for instance, we just saw a new all-time high for Bitcoin versus the Argentinian pay sale. We're very close to all-time highs for the Brazilian Real, the South African RAN, Turkish lira, and I'd expect we probably hit some of those all-time highs sooner than, you know, US dollar all-time highs. You're kind of revisiting the 20,000 market everybody talks about. So if you zoom out and you think about Bitcoin as a potential store of value, even if it is volatile relative to some of these other emerging market fiat currencies that do have high inflation that aren't benefiting from the reserve currency status the US dollar does, then it starts to look, you know, quite a bit different. Yeah. So you've really been hammering on this Bitcoin as digital gold store of value narrative. Have you totally counted out the Bitcoin as a digital currency? Have you totally counted out the Bitcoin as a currency narrative? Well, I like Spencer Bogard from some blockchain capital, his old comparison of Bitcoin to the platypus, right? It's currency. It's a store of value. It's programmable money. It's, you know, it's got like the bill of a duck and the tail of a beaver.  Traditionally, currencies have been relatively stable because they've been fixed supply and fixed population. What's interesting about Bitcoin is you've got an exploding population of people using it and treating it different ways for different use cases. And that results in, you know, quite a bit of dislocations in terms of how it's priced because it's fixed and doesn't match dollar to dollar with the population that's using it. So I do think long term as more people acquire it, as it starts to look and feel more similar to gold, that will stabilize. But, you know, by definition, that can only happen if it hits trillions and trillions of market caps. This is weird dynamic. And I would say that if you look at the shortest amount of time, it's an excellent currency because it can move faster than anything else anywhere in the world, right? Fastest, you know, your internet connection versus T plus two or whatever the settlement would be in your banking system. If you zoom out, it becomes an excellent currency because it's hard and it's commodity money like gold. Everything in between, it's a tradable speculative asset, right? And it's a trader's paradise. So it really depends on your time horizon. If it's instant or long term, it is a good currency. Anything in between, right? If you've got to pay bills in fiat, then you probably want to make sure that you have fiat revenue or fiat savings versus living and dying by the spec, the volatile wins of where the Bitcoin price is. I thought one of the issues with Bitcoin becoming a currency was the fact that it wasn't that fast. You know, it takes 10 minutes to confirm a block. And if you're sending a large amount of money, it can have even more confirmations required, which can make it, you know, take even longer, up to an hour or more. And I thought this issue with the speed of confirmations and transactions was one of the reasons why Bitcoin started veering more towards the digital gold narrative and away from the international global payment system narrative. Well, I think there are solutions around that, right? Lightning is still very, very early for small payments, but for large payments, you know, it's still by far the fastest method that you can you can actually settle any type of payment.  You can receive assets instantly. How long you want to wait and how many confirmations you would like to wait to ensure that that hasn't been double spent is entirely your prerogative.  The cost and the hassle of executing a double spend for a five dollar coffee transaction is just not worth it, right? For, for, for, you know, by and large for most use cases. So you're going to be comfortable taking that risk that the person on the other end of the transaction isn't going insanely out of their way to defraud you of five dollars, you know, if it's five hundred thousand dollars, what you're probably going to be comfortable waiting an hour and that's still a hell of a lot faster than anything else that we that we have today in payments, whether you're talking about, you know, central bank driven and kind of traditional banking driven or even FinTech driven. So now I'd like to switch focus to something that actually happened the day after the Bitcoin halving on May 12. Pavel Durov, who is the CEO of Telegram, announced that Telegram was terminating its association with the Telegram open network and would no longer be developing the gram cryptocurrency token. This came after a lengthy legal battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. And this is now the second time that we've seen a potential cryptocurrency titan, the other one being Libra, have major setbacks and in this case fail because of US regulatory policy. So I'm curious to hear what your thoughts on the potential role that one of these really big corporate cryptos could play in the macroeconomic structure and what are your thoughts and feelings on the US's regulatory approach to these entities? Well, I mean, the US doesn't want to lose control over its ability to print money, right? I think Libra will ultimately launch. It's going to be a permission system. It's basically going to be a hybrid between a cryptocurrency and a central bank digital currency. It's not permissionless, right? They came out of the gate saying that it's going to be single single currency pegs to the US dollar. So it doesn't look anything like the desired crypto currency and kind of true international reserve that they were working on. But a company like Facebook's spearheading that was probably too much to ask for, you know, right out of the gates anyway. There are going to be other stablecoin initiatives and there are other stablecoin initiatives that are taking, you know, different paths, Celo being one. Obviously, you've got the more regulated versions like USDC and Paxos. On the other hand, you do have algorithmically generated reserve asset or crypto dollars that are being created through things like dye. You've got the kind of frontier, I don't want to call it dark web, but kind of original cowboy, you know, crypto dollar, which is Tether, still the largest by an order of magnitude. So I think it's kind of like crypto more generally speaking, right? The US government can shut down individual projects because they're just in the crosshairs of this administration where they're deemed to be too centralized. And it's easier to go to court with Telegram or Facebook because they're large companies. It becomes exponentially more difficult to do that at scale with dozens of different implementations that are all taking slightly different design paths. And especially once these things do actually become decentralized, it is very, very difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. So I do think you'll see some stablecoin, probably algorithmically generated stablecoin projects that ultimately are issued and generated more like Bitcoin, where there is no off switch. And how long that takes remains to be seen. But I think we're kind of in the first inning when it comes to stablecoins and still second inning, maybe in Bitcoin and crypto more general. So I'd like to actually go back to someone that you mentioned near the beginning, Paul Tutor-Jones. And this news was really big all in crypto recently. And there's always been talk about the implications and timing of big institutional investors getting involved in crypto. So I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit more about your thoughts on institutional investment in crypto. And do you think that this is the beginning of a waterfall, a big wave of institutional investors getting involved? Or do you think that these investors are already here in crypto and it's just becoming more apparent as they start to reveal themselves? I think it's probably a little bit of both. I think it's almost certain that this is gonna have a positive impact on any institutional investors that might have been getting knowledgeable about Bitcoin, but didn't necessarily pull the trigger. And you need someone like that to kind of come out and take all the arrows and get all the press and make it safe for you to actually get off zero and start to put some assets to work. And then you think about what folks like Fidelity are doing, all the infrastructure now is in place. So part one was getting the unwashed masses excited about Bitcoin. That happened in 2009 to 2017, but then the money started to get real and everything that was built in the couple of years since then on the institutional infrastructure side is gonna pave the way for the Paul Tudor Joneses of the world to make their first purchase and ultimately everybody else kind of follows the leader. So I definitely believe in that path just from like an adoption standpoint and from an enterprise embrace standpoint, but that only happens with some of the macroeconomic backdrops that we have, even pre-coronavirus, record debts, consistent money printing, dysfunctional governments, all that was already in place. This has just been a massive accelerance of a lot of the trends that have been going on for 10 years. So for my last question, I think a lot of people recently have been bamboozled more or less by the stock market. You have this, our economies are failing. There's massive unemployment. Everything is forced to change and companies are really struggling and figuring out how to react. And yet the stock market is going up. So how do you make sense of this relationship between a failing economy and a rising stock market? Well, the stock market's forward-looking, right? So you could argue that there's too much optimism in the market or not enough. It depends on how much we're printing and what your inflation expectations are and expectations around kind of future growth. But with interest rates where they are, the impact of short-term hits to the economy are radically reduced in terms of how they're reflected in a different company's asset crisis. That's just kind of like basic discounted cash flow and kind of future value projections. But I think the crisis to watch out for is always going to be kind of liquidity and insolvency crisis, where are there permanent dislocations in certain markets? Are there companies that don't get bailed out or that just become structurally deficient and ultimately fall by the wayside because this health crisis lasts a year or two, right? Airlines being one, the restaurant industry and kind of small businesses being another. And that I think has an incredible deflationary impact on the economy. It's net very unhealthy for kind of main street and ultimately for kind of downstream spending. But at the same time, very large chunk of the stock market indices are tech companies these days. So those are the ones that tend to be weathering the storm the best. And in some cases like Amazon, you've seen a 10 percentage point increasing in e-commerce over the course of the last few months really. Well, that means Amazon's going to be a net winner there or digital content consumption Netflix is going to be a net winner there. So I don't read too much into the stock market in a given day, but I personally would protect against liquidity, place of liquidity and kind of panics like we saw in March, which is why I think safest place to be is in cash, but for people that are investing, you're going to want to have some hedged exposure for some of these potential crashes or think about what your game plan is if things really go sideways again. Thank you so much for coming on the show. That was Ryan Selkis, the CEO and co-founder of Misari. My name is Jackson. And if you enjoyed the show, please hit that like button and subscribe to our YouTube channel. Cointelegraph, like, subscribe and hodl.


Hello and welcome to the session in which we will discuss earnings per share as part of our series discussing the income statement. The first thing I would like to let you know is this topic earnings per share or EPS is covered much much more in depth in another chapter so this is just an introduction a basic introduction and the reason we need to cover earnings per share is there's two reasons actually one is earnings per share is listed on the face of the income statement two since we discussed this continued operation in the prior session earnings per share is also expressed as part of the discontinued operation figures so it's very important to cover this topic for now just to kind of introduce ourselves to it but earnings per share is a major challenging topic that we'll have to deal with later on so if you see this recording is short which will be very short don't think that this is all you have to know about earnings per share although earnings per share is covered briefly either chapter three or chapter four intermediate accounting there's a one whole chapter one whole chapter devoted for earnings per share because it's really challenging and earnings per share is an important indicator in the real world so for example if you watch CNBC if you read The Wall Street Journal if you follow Bloomberg Wall Street they always look at every company to determine what's there for every quarter what's their earnings per share how much did they earn how much did you earn earnings per share because when you're looking at two companies your concern is as a shareholder how much did I earned for each share let's assume we have company A and company B company A earned a million dollars company earned a company B earned 100 million dollars if I ask you would you like a share one share of company A or would you like one share of company B well for now you it's million what what if I told you company A they have in total one million shares in total one million shares in company B they have in total 200 million shares but here's what's going to happen we're going to take the earnings which is a million and one million and 100 million if I take for company A one million and earnings divided by one million and shares for company A I am earning one dollar per share if I do the same thing for company B yes the company earned 100 million ten times that of company A however I have to share this earning with 200 other million shareholders or 200 million shares therefore my earnings per share for company B is 50 cent therefore just given this limited information if you want to give me a stock of company A or company B I would say give me a stock of company A because company A stock earns on average a dollar per share now you're not going to get this dollar but not paid you won't get paid this is when they pay it in dividend but in theory that's how much you are earning per share now earnings per share is very important that it must be this this closed on the face of the income statement and there's a whole section in the notes explaining the computation for earnings per share now for the purpose of today of this session we assume we have a simple capital structure and we're going to talk more about simple capital structure later on because if it's not a simple capital capital structure the the computation will be much more involved so simply put earnings per share is computed as net income what the company earned minus any preferred dividend now again for now don't worry what a preferred dividend are but preferred dividend is a form of dividend is form of the profit that's distributed to certain shareholders that's all you need to know now so we have to deduct certain amount to prefer dividends so before you could compute your if we go back to company A and company B and what I did the company A and company B I preferred we have zero preferred dividend because we don't have a preferred shareholders to simplify the process but if you have a preferred shareholders preferred shareholders they get their money first therefore we deduct their share of the earnings before we distribute it to the common shareholders or common stock then we'll divide by something called the weighted average the weighted average of common shares outstanding now for this session this number is giving but don't worry later on you have to compute this number the weighted average number of shares outstanding so let's take a look at a simple example to see how we compute earnings per share adam ink reports half a million it declares and pay dividend of 100 000 so okay the weighted average number of shares is 100 000 so we're going to take what's earnings per share we're going to take the earnings half a million however we have to take out of the earning 100 000 and give it to those preferred they have a preferential treatment 100 000 what's left is 400 000 in the numerator in the denominator we have 100 000 shares 400 000 divided by 100 000 you are earning four dollars per share is this a good number four dollars per share well it depends what did you earn in the prior quarter what what did you earn last year what are your competitors earning obviously the higher the better and also earnings per share we will learn later on and you would learn much much more about this ratio when you take your corporate finance it basically it's the main driver of the stock price and that's why when i started i said wall street analyst investors they look at earnings per share as the base for making investment decisions that's what really frankly that's what drives the stock price earnings per share now again about the about the presentation about earnings per share this is a partial income statement where we have income from continuing operation 250 000 then we have a discontinued operation section now if you don't know what this discontinued operation please go to the prior session we already covered discontinued operation in the tail so we had income from operation of the health care division which is we discontinued the the amount of income is 59 000 to 50 net of tax well really the income was 75 000 then we took out 21 percent in taxes which is 15 750 so what we end up with is 59 000 to 50 so notice we have we had to pay taxes also we sold that division less applicable tax of 20 000 it means we sold it for 100 000 and we're assuming the tax is 21 percent so we pay taxes of 21 000 what's left for the income is 79 so what we do is we take those two add them all together 138 250 income from continuing operation plus income from discontinued operation equal to net income of 388 250 now what we need to do we need to compute EPS earnings per share for each of these sections separately we're gonna assume we have 100 000 shares outstanding well what we do is this we're gonna compute income from continuing operation income from continuing operation is 250 divided by 100 000 our income from continuing operation is 250 we'll do the same thing for the income from the health care division 59 000 to 50 divided by 100 000 shares and it's 0.5925 i'm just gonna say just 0.59 and 79 000 divided by 100 000 shares now if we add them up earnings per share overall is 388 now as an investor and this is the this is why i made this example as positive as an investor you don't care about 388 why because remember the health care division is being discontinued so what's going to happen those 59 pennies and 79 pennies that you earned they are non-recurring so really when you're evaluating the company determining the stock price you would look at earnings per share and i will tell you something you know real quick about earnings per share what most companies would do or historically the S&P 500 they would say okay what's your earnings per share and depending on your growth we multiply this by let's assume 15 or 20 and if we take 2.5 times 20 two dollars and 50 cent times 20 your stock price should be around 50 dollars okay this is how they estimate your stock price 20 is 20 times so i'm going to be paying since you're earning 250 per share i'm willing to pay 20 times your price this is the multiple the multiple is 20 now how do we determine the multiple well depending on how fast or what's the growth what's the growth capability of the company if the company has a tremendous growth capability early on this this acts this earnings this multiple could be in the hundreds then guess what if it's in the hundreds the stock price will be higher but eventually historically historically this earning multiple ranges between 12 to 25 so you'll take the earnings per share multiplied by this number and this you this is historically the number but again with technology stocks with fast growing companies the multiple could be very high for example of the multiple for this company we determine the multiple in other words the multiple how is that determined it's determined with the growth what's your potential growth if that's the case then your stock price should be 100 who determined the multiple the investors how much are they willing for that 250 we know the company is earning two dollars and 50 cent per share from their continuing operation how much are you willing to pay for that 250 are you willing to pay 40 times the amount if you the more you are willing to pay the more you expect the company to earn it means they have a very very bright future okay that's basically all you need to know about earnings per share at the end of this recording i'm going to remind you whether you are an accounting student or a CPA candidate to take a look at my website farhat lectures dot com i don't replace your CPA review course i'm a useful addition to that CPA review course i explain the material differently your risk is one month of subscription your potential gain is passing the exam don't hesitate the CPA exam is a lifetime industry i do have resources for other courses and my CPA supplemental resources are aligned with your review course such as becker roger wiley gleam so they go hand in hand with those courses good luck study hard and of course stay safe


This week, we're joined by Mises Institute Senior Fellow Dr. David Gordon. The man Lou Rockwell claims knows everything about everything. Our topic? The life and times of the late Dr. Murray Rothbard. David Gordon was both his friend and associate, and if you're a Rothbard fan, you'll really enjoy this week's show. We discuss Rothbard's life from an insider's perspective, touching on his experience founding the Cato Institute, his relationship with Mises, and the areas where they disagreed, his time with Ayn Rand and her objective as followers, and much, much more. Stay tuned. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome once again to Mises Weekends. I'm Jeff Deist, and I'm very pleased to be joined this weekend by none other than our own David Gordon, who is visiting us from Los Angeles. So he's in studio here. I'm face-to-face with him. And David, thank you very much. It's great to see you. Oh, great to see you too, Jeff. Thanks for inviting me. David, last weekend, we spent some time with Guido Halsman going inside the mind of Ludwig von Mises. This week, we'd like to talk to you in a similar vein about Murray Rothbard. So tell us first and foremost about your relationship with Murray. I met Murray in 1979. I'd actually read Man economy in state when it first came out in 62, when I was in junior high, but I didn't get to meet any of the major libertarians till 79. I met him in 79. I attended a conference at the Cato Institute in Eugene, Oregon in June, and he and I hit it off right away, and I met also his great friends, Ronald Hamway and Ralph Rayco. Right after that conference through Murray's influence, I was offered a job at the Cato Institute, and I was there briefly as probably no Murray split with the Cato Institute, and I went with him. But I always got along very well with Murray. What impressed me the most about him was he had an endlessly curious mind. He was always absorbing new information, and he would keep up with all the latest books, and although of course he's best known for his libertarianism and his workers and economists, he kept up with all sorts of subjects. He was new philosophy, history, he was up with trends in art and music, anything you wanted to talk to him about. He would have new ideas, and he'd know all the new books on it, and he would be very fast in the way he talked, and he'd want you to have to keep up with him. It was sometimes hard to do it. I'd always be on the phone with him, you know, at least sometimes several times a week in the annual for 17 years. So did you ever spend any time in his New York apartment, and did you know Joey Rothbard as well? Oh, yes. Well, I knew Joey very well. She was very protective of Murray. They'd met when they were both at Columbia. She was very, very smart, very well read. She knew American history very well. And of course, she was protective of him, and then he ultimately found himself in hot water with the iron rand circle over the fact that Joey was not rational enough for them in the sense that she was religious. Oh, yes. Yes. I remember she told me that one of the things they wanted her to do, they thought that they didn't want him to divorce her right away because she was religious, but they wanted her to listen to their stuff, and they thought if she did that she would convert to their views. Nathaniel Brandon apparently had done a series of tapes on the existence of God and proofs of God, and they wanted her to listen to them, and she wouldn't do it. She said something like, why do I need to listen to these tapes by this atheist? She was a quite devout Presbyterian.  There was a minister, I think, Dr. Reed in the church in New York she thought very highly of. David, of course, Murray Rothbard was known for being just enormously well read and able to carry on conversations about an incredibly wide variety of topics. In a sense, I guess this is the definition of a polymath. Oh, yes. Yes, very much. Although I got my PhD in history, most of my academic work has been in philosophy, and I found he was very good at philosophical arguments. His mind worked extremely fast, and sometimes when he writing, he wouldn't put in all the steps. He would expect things that were obvious to him might not be obvious to all the readers, and I think he'd expect readers to be able to fill in all the blanks, and sometimes they couldn't do it. If you ask him about something, he could explain all the steps, but it was just so obvious to him that I think he didn't always put everything in. So sometimes you'll find sometimes people say, criticizing myself, well, he said this and this doesn't follow, but in his mind it did, he just had to get the derivation and he assumed that readers would be able to do that. Well, David, another aspect of Murray's genius was just that he was so incredibly prolific. Can you talk a little bit about his tremendous output, both academic and otherwise? Oh, yes. It really is quite amazing. When he, man economy and state, which was his major work on economics, I think if you include the power and market, which he intended to have in the book, it's well over a thousand pages. That was something he was finishing just in his late 20s, early 30s, then he did a four-volume history of colonial and revolutionary America conceived in liberty. He has published, after he died, there's a massive two-volume work on history of economic thought and he has thousands of articles. While this was going on, most academics are just occupied with their scholarly work, and he was very involved in libertarian politics and he was constantly writing and commenting on all the different events that was happening. One thing also, he kept up with politics really in a very unusual way in this way that he would be able to tell you, say in elections, say he could take anyone, all the different congressional races in the country could tell you who was running and what the different issues were. Say if there was a conflict, say in the Middle East, like I say today, we have the conflict going on, but the Israelis against Hamas, he would be able to tell you, say what every subgroup of the different sides was and what all their positions were and what each one had said. He'd give you the history of all of them. When you ask him about politics, he would give you a detailed account, he'd have interpretations of everything that these accounts would be based on his own reading in the sources. He'd know all the different sources and he could tell you books about it and what he thought of it. David, do you think if Murray had had a more comfortable academic position and tenure at some prestigious school somewhere that his outcome in his drive would have been reduced? Well, it's possible, although I think with him, he just had, you know, Mises has in the human action discussion, the creative genius or someone who was driven to work no matter what. I think this was probably true of Murray. I think whatever his position was, he would never have gotten comfortable. I mean, when he got his job at Las Vegas, I mean, I think he was doing better financially than he had at the Brooklyn Polytechnic and he really didn't have to keep writing. He had really nothing to prove, but he really kept on. I mean, people didn't even know he was working on this multi-volume history of economics. There were some of his critics who had said, well, Rothbard was a scholar at one time, but then he gave up scholarship and he just decided he wanted to do libertarian political work. Then they were very surprised when this history of economics came out, because that work would have taken anyone else, would have had to work full time on it for years and probably then they wouldn't have been able to finish it, but he was able to do it. It's amazing how he had the time to do it, but he did, because if you read the book, he gives not just accounts of the major figures in economics, but he'll give accounts of all the minor people who were writing and he's read all their works and you'll have detailed comments on them and the secondary literature on them. So he really, it was a tremendous achievement. It's actually my favorite of Murray's books is the history of economic thought. So Murray Rothbard completes his magnum opus, man economy and state, at a fairly young age and this book is praised by Mises himself. Tell us a little bit about Murray's relationship with Mises. Murray always respected Mises a great deal when he started tending the Mises seminar at NYU in 1949. He always looked up to Mises and they would go after the lecturers. The students would, I think, go to a cafe and keep talking. Now, Mises, although he was from what all accounts of him, he was a very war friendly person, a typical old style European. He wasn't one who really paled around with the students very much. So I think Murray didn't enjoy would sometimes visit him and Mises wife, Margaret, I wouldn't say they were enormously close friends. I mean, they were certainly, you could certainly say they were friends, but they didn't really socialize enormously. One thing Murray said about Mises was he had a very dry sense of humor. I remember Margaret von Mises came to a Mises Institute put on conference and a dinner for Murray on his 60th birthday, which was in 1986. I was lucky enough to be there and Margaret Mises, von Mises was there and she spoke and she said how much she and her husband admired Murray. Of course, Mises was a very different kind of person than Murray. He was obviously an old world European gentleman. Murray was sort of a brash Brooklynite, very much a product of the 20th century. And I know Mises was a little uncomfortable with some of Murray's positions on, let's say, anarchism. Oh, yes, I think that's that's right. When Mises did an extremely favorable review, a glowing review of man economy and state, but he said as something he said, well, there are a few things on legal questions where he thought Murray's views were more questionable. It could be challenged. And I think Mises tended to associate anarchism with the left. This is what he's familiar with. And he the idea of individualist anarchism, pro-capitalist anarchism really wasn't one he was familiar with. I'd like to think if he'd had more time to study it, he would have gone over to that view. But as it happens, he didn't. And in fact, if in human action, he's very critical of Franz Oppenheimer, who's one of the heroes to the anarchists and one Murray like that. But Mises is very critical of him. I think one thing that you touch on in your question, I think is very important is Murray Rothbard was in foreign policy, very consistent, non-interventionist. He thought the US shouldn't have gotten involved in World War II, the Cold War we should be. He thought the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War was really had been just built up by the Truman and later administration. For him, the communism was more of an internal promise that socialism is a bad system. So the way to combat communism and socialism is just to establish a free market. But Mises tended to be much more sympathetic to sort of an anti-communist foreign policy. Mises was not an opponent of entry into World War II. I don't know that he specifically commented on American entry, but he would not, I suspect, have been sympathetic to the American isolationist. So he was one who, I think, on foreign policy grounds would have been opposed to Rothbard on the Cold War. In fact, I think in planned chaos, Mises suggests that because of there's something about the Soviet state, the socialist character state would cause them to expand necessarily. And in fact, he went so far in the second edition of Human Action. He defends conscription, which went against his own work in... He had some very good arguments in Nacional Economie, which was the 1940 German version of Human Action. But he endorsed conscription. So I think there'd be quite a bit of divergence there between them. But so far as I know, they didn't go into that. They never argued about it or went into it. But I think that would have been certainly an area that they differed. David, after Murray Rothbard completes man economy in state, his major economics treatise, he goes on to write some truly fundamental books about libertarianism, including, of course, the Ethics of Liberty. Talk about how Murray really created the foundation of the modern libertarian movement. Oh, yes, that's a very good point. I think if you do it through Austrian economics, Austrian economics is value free. But the Mises was the people who argued on the basis of economics for libertarianism. Mises was a utilitarian, that's to say, so roughly he was arguing. We should have a free market because this is the best, in fact, the only way to promote peace and prosperity. We should have free market because it's really the only system that works. But the approach through rights is saying that it's certainly relevant that something works. It's promoting peace and prosperity, but that really isn't the basis of ethics. It's that people have certain rights, such as the right to own yourself, a right to acquire property. And you get an independent argument for libertarianism on that basis. Murray, in philosophy, was mainly influenced by the Aristotelian and Thomas tradition, Thomas as followers of St. Thomas Aquinas and afterwards the Neoscholastic philosophies is sometimes called. And he studied that quite a bit. And this is another area where Mises differed with Rothbard. Mises had a very low opinion of the Neoscholastics. He referred, there was a footnote in human actuary first to a book by Louis Rougier, and very critical of the Neoscholastic. So that wasn't, and also Mises was critical of natural law philosophies. He thought that it was really very sound. So that's another area where they were rather different. David, you've identified some areas where Murray Rothbard felt Mises was wrong in his approach or his theory. Given the benefit of hindsight today, are there some areas where modern Austrians or modern libertarians might look at Murray's work and say Rothbard was wrong about X, Y or Z? Well, basically, I think Murray was on the right lines entirely. If I had to say anything, sometimes I think when he was refuting a position he differed with, when he was defending a position, his, what he would do would be he amasses many of his arguments as possible. And sometimes I think in a few cases there are problems in some of the arguments. I think as I was mentioning before, he thought enormously fast in what he was doing. So I think sometimes, I think in philosophy, you have to go a little slower. And then sometimes some steps that he would just say, oh, well, this is completely obvious. Sometimes there are objections one could raise to it. So it would have been nice if he could respond to that. I think he could, he would have if he'd been asked, but he just didn't. I remember there was one, you see, one thing about Murray was very, very open in conversation. But if he was convinced of a certain position, especially if it involved politics, this wouldn't be true, say just in any general intellectual issues, like you could certainly say, you know, I don't, I don't agree with what you're saying about German Baroque art, or of course I wouldn't know enough to differ with him. But I mean, somebody could certainly say that, but I mean, if somebody differed with some political point, you had to be very careful how you put it. Like I would usually say, well, if someone were to object to give this objection, how would you respond? I wouldn't say, I think this is a good objection. You had to be rather careful about this thing because Murray would get very enthusiastic about a particular way of looking at things and, you know, that, that would be it. Well, were you at all intimidated by him intellectually?  Oh, yes. I mean, you, I would very much hesitate to differ with Murray. You know, I thought, if, if I differed with him, the odds were very much in favor of his being right not me, you know, but I mean, sometimes you know, I just go over things. I say, well, here's a point. Like the one issue, and this is one I think that Murray, one where Murray was right and I was wrong, is I, when I tended to be very favorable, much more favorable than he was to Robert Nozick as a philosopher. I thought maybe there was a way of taking Nozick's position so that he really wasn't that different from anarchism. And Murray thought, no, no, this is wrong. And I think Murray was right. But what happened in their, the different philosophies, there was a complication in that Murray and Nozick really didn't like each other much. It was much more Nozick didn't like Murray than the other way round. But that was something you always had to bear in mind when you were talking to Nozick about, to Murray about Nozick, that he didn't like Nozick very much. They apparently had, there were different issues that they, I think one of the issues was kind of a purely obscure one that Nozick thought you can have measurement of someone's internal subjective states. Like you could talk about degrees of pain or sort of making this a purely objective measurement. In fact, Nozick had a paper where he defends measuring interpersonal utility. And of course Rothbard said, no, you couldn't do that. That was one issue. And then they differed very much on the Middle East that Nozick was very pro-Israel and Rothbard was very much the other way. And they had some differences on particular candidates in the Libertarian Party. They tended to support different people. Murray was very involved in Libertarian Party politics. I didn't keep up with that at all, but he would have particular people that he supported. And he would be very upset with people who supported a different group from the one that he wanted. David, even some of Murray Rothbard's close friends and associates like Ron Hamway, for instance, have remarked about his intransigence. Do you think if he had been a little less intransigent, a little smoother around the edges, let's say, would he have been a more effective Libertarian? Well, I don't know that I'd agree with that really. The thing about him was he tended, it was just among Libertarians that he insisted on what he considered to be the correct position. Say, if someone wasn't a Libertarian, he would be very, very tolerant of whatever he said. For example, one of his best friends, also from Joey Rothbard, there was a couple Leonard Leib and his wife, Leonard Leib was a historian who wrote mainly about the Netherlands. Leonard Leib was very much a conventional leftist, but they got along perfectly well. But the thing was, if you were a Libertarian, then Murray expected you to have the right position. Again, it would be all right if you didn't have the right position as long as you didn't insist on arguing with him. I think, to some extent, it's true that he was very intransigent. He would insist on what he believed was right. But I think the thing that sometimes overlooked is that the people who opposed him tended to be very insistent on what they thought and they kept arguing with him and wanted to insist on what they thought. It was only if they kept after him that he would eventually lose his temper. I remember there was one case where George Smith and Wendy McElroy were very prominent Libertarians in the LA, LA circles, were interested in nonviolent resistance to the state and they became very interested in thought of Mahatma Gandhi and wrote on him. Rothbard, with his, typically knew everything, he had some very negative comments on Gandhi. He'd gone through his career and he had a lot of negative comments on him. One thing about Gandhi, I forget whether Murray included this in his, in his, what he wrote about him, was during World War I, Gandhi giving recruiting speeches in India for the British Army, which you wouldn't expect, but that was true. So, after he wrote this, then Wendy McElroy wrote a reply defending Gandhi and then Murray was perfectly all right with that. But then George Smith wrote another very much sharper criticism of Rothbard. Then Rothbard got very upset and I think that broke up their friendship at least for a while. So, you had to provoke Murray to get him upset with you. But I think it, to answer your question more directly, I think if he'd been smoother around the edges, it wouldn't really be Murray. That was his personality. He was very much like the hero main character in Ibsen's play, Bran said, the devil is compromise. I think that was the really essential to Murray to state the truth as he saw it. David, I'd like to touch upon Rothbard's atheism. He was born into, I guess, a secular Jewish family in Brooklyn in the early part of the 20th century. Talk about how his atheism shaped his worldview and his career. Well, I think he was an atheist. He wasn't out of hostility to religion. It was more that he didn't find the arguments for existence of God very convincing. Now, toward the end of his life, I think he just said something like, if there is a God, it would be a being that we really can't know anything about or would act in a completely different way to anything we would understand. I think with him, it's more of an intellectual matter. He just didn't find the arguments convincing. For him, it wouldn't be an emotional thing. It was just that he didn't find... But I don't think that wouldn't... If he wasn't someone, say the Randians would be, if you're not an atheist, you're really irrational. He would not take that view. He was very tolerant of whatever people thought. That was just his understanding of things. One of his great friends was the Jesuit libertarian father, James Sadoski. That certainly Sadoski, being a Jesuit, never affected their friendship. I think that existence of God, or atheism, wasn't really a central issue for Rothbard. But he was able to construct his entire defense and theory of natural rights without reference to a theist deity. Yes, that's right. In doing that though, I mean, that's in the natural law tradition. I mean, remember Aquinas, who was great authority on natural law, thought that natural law is what it can be established purely by reason. So it's consistent with being a theist to support natural law in Rothbard's way of doing it. David, as we wrap this interview up, any last thoughts on Murray Rothbard's enduring legacy now that he's been gone 20 years? I always viewed Murray as a second father. He really meant a lot to me. And I think he's had similar effects on a lot of people that at the Mises Institute, we try to promote Rothbard's legacy. And I think he's really the one who's by far the most important person in libertarianism. I often wish when issues come up today, I wish I could call Murray and find out his views on things so he would always have a tremendously analytical and informed judgment on everything.  David Gordon, thanks very much for your time today. It was great having you in studio. Ladies and gentlemen, hope you enjoyed the interview. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week.


Hi, I am Prabhakar, I am going to talk to you about the World Wide Web today. So what is the World Wide Web? We know that traditionally Tim Berners-Lee has been credited with creating the World Wide Web in 1991 but actually the concepts existed even before that, much before that. The computer science people knew about how to organize text in an interesting fashion and the origin goes to 1945 by a person called Vannevar Bush. He was with MIT, he was a professor there and later became an administrator. So he conceptualized something interesting, let us read it. The human mind operates by association with one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. So what he is saying is we organize information in small chunks and they are all connected to each other in some kind of web and the way we think is when I am looking at some concept, some object my thought because of the association I have with that object jumps to another object that is how humans think, that is how humans organize the information in their brain. Let us see an example. So I am right now looking at the camera, I am imagining all of you behind the camera. So when I look at the camera, this is a very high end camera which can shoot movies. I think of movies, films, actors, actresses, Amitabh Bachchan, Hemma Malini, in your generation it is Deepika Padukone. But Padukone to me reminds me of Prakash Padukone who was a very well known badminton player. See how my thought is jumping from the camera I went to Deepika to Prakash to badminton but today badminton is associated with Sainanahual and when I think of Sainanahual I think of Hyderabad and when I think of Hyderabad my thoughts jump to Charminar and when I think of Charminar I go to Kutubminar. See where I have moved. I have started with the camera in front of me. I moved through a whole lot of web to the Kutubminar and of course from Kutubminar it goes on to the history of my country and so on. So what we have essentially here is some pieces of text which are connected with each other what we call hyperlinks. So if you have it in this fashion it is hypertext. Actually it is little more than that it is not just hypertext it is hypermedia because what I have is not text like this but images you know these are all images right. Actually they could need not be just images they could be movie clips they could be programs that execute when you go there and the interesting thing is all these images and text and programs and movie clips need not be on the same computer they can be on multiple machines. For example the Kutubminar photograph may be on the archaeological survey of India machine and this information about Deepika Padukone is on her personal website or in the Wikipedia and this is on the badminton association of India's or the Indian Olympic association website and so on. So they are on machines which are probably distributed all over the world but this information is connected with each other through hyperlinks. So that is why we call it hypermedia which is distributed which means distributed hypermedia. So essentially what I have is hypertext is text with links between them these are called hyperlinks and when you click on one link takes you to the target page right this is what happens in a web website you know you are looking at some content and there are links emanating from various words or images and so on and you click on them they take you to the next page. Now the targeted page the page you go to need not be just text it could be a movie or an image or a program which executes and so on and that is what we call this hypermedia or distributed hypermedia. So if you want a definition for what is the worldwide web the worldwide web is a program running on the internet implementing what we call distributed hypermedia. So you know what is dub dub dub now right. Now let us look at some simple terminology this you will encounters with the web HTML what is HTML? HTML is stands for hypertext markup language it is basically simple text in which you insert some tags to indicate the computers to make it bold or underlined or italics or you know to show it in color and so on. So this is a way to tag the documents that you have to make them appear beautiful more pleasing and so on. So a program which will allow you to create HTML pages is called a HTML editor. Now we have seen there is some document sitting here and when I click on this it goes to another computer and brings the document sitting there. So that means this computer is talking to the computer somewhere else anywhere in the world right. So it talks to that computer through a protocol through an exchange of what is first and what is next and the protocol is called the hypertext transfer protocol HTTP and the programs which do this talking on HTTP is called the HTTP server. So you know all about HTML and HTTP and so on thank you.


Gary Stein with head coach Ed Hodl after a big 28 nothing win over Wilkes to close out the season and clinch the birth in the post season for Stevenson. First, I want to talk about senior day. You had it out here very emotional. 26 seniors. That's a big class. So just talk to me about your emotions on this day in terms of your seniors. Well, it's a little bit easier because I think we know we're playing again. So right. It's not it's ceremonial farewell, but certainly not not farewell. We're going to see him next week in the weight room on Monday morning at 6 30. So whether they're happy about that or not, I'm not sure. But you know, it's a great group of guys. You know, a handful of them are still kind of on the fence, whether they're going to come back or not. And a couple of them, you know, certainly did play their final football games, at least home game regular season game today. And I just couldn't be more proud. And I said this in my in my interview earlier in the week, not only proud of these guys, but proud of all of the seniors, not just here at Stevenson, but nationwide who were interrupted by the pandemic. And, you know, they had the strength and they had the courage to just stick to the education and see it through to the end. So, you know, just just couldn't be more proud of these young people. For the last couple of weeks, we've talked about your defense and conversations that we've had during the week. And you said, Hey, our defense is going to have to step up and, you know, they're not going to have to win the game necessarily, but we're counting on our defense.  Talk a little bit about their performance today and what they did right against Wilkes. Well, I think if you look particularly early in the year, you know, Justin Rotowski, you know, Justice Pettis, you know, CJP, you can go down the list of guys that played very much college football. And we kind of felt like as they grew and matured and got actual game snaps that they would get better and better throughout the year. And they proved us to be right. And I think what they were able to do today was go out and execute a game plan that was, you know, well put together. Coach Holland did a great job, you know, kind of mapping things out with the defensive staff. And they went out and executed at a very, very high level today.  You know, we missed some tackles, could have put them down a little bit sooner. We were able to get the locker room to have time to clean some of that stuff up. And, you know, when players can execute the plan, good things happen. Well, you certainly couldn't ask for a better start, though. You got the pick on the first possession that set you up at the 27. Brandon Walker took it in from there. That kind of set the tone for the game right there. For sure. You know, and, you know, we talk about that all the time, playing complimentary football. You know, we were able to get a take away and, you know, the offense's jobs to put in the box. And they did. And, you know, I think that was Brandon's career long run.  You know, we don't want to be that. We want to be a four quarter football team. And I think we were able to do that today. Ground and pound was definitely the key as far as offense. You talked about Brandon Walker, his career long run. This was the first time I could be wrong about this, but I think that you've had a 100-yard individual rusher all season long and it couldn't have come at a better time. Yeah. And that's something that we're, you know, we're aware of and we continue to work to get better. And again, the right, you look at that offensive line. It's got three first year starters that are sophomores, you know, and, but they're growing, they're maturing, they're getting game snaps.  Couldn't be more proud of all the guys. All right. So they're not done yet. They've got the bowl game coming up in two weeks, if I'm not mistaken, from today. I think you'll be on the road for that game since you're the number two seed in the conference. What's the plan over the next two weeks? How much rest do you get? What do you try to make sure happens over those two weeks? Well, I want them away from football.  This is our bye week. And, you know, these guys are tired. They're beat up. They've played 10 straight. The back five included three of the longest trips in the conference.   And, you know, we're going to get out here Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday next week. We'll run around a little bit. We're going to get in the weight room. But, you know, they're going to be off for a couple of days at the beginning, couple of days at the end of the week, just to kind of rest and recharge a little bit. Final question. What do you do? Do you get away from football for a couple of days? Are you asking me for the right answer? The answer my wife wants or the football coach answer? I'm asking for the right answer. Well, a little bit of both. How about that? We're going to walk that line a little bit. Hey, listen, congratulations. Absolutely. I've really enjoyed being with you guys this year. I must say, I may not see you before Thanksgiving. I don't know, but happy holiday. Great season. Best of luck to you. Thanks very much. I appreciate it. He's Ed Hoddle, football coach at Stevenson. Big win. 28-nothing over Wilkes. They're on to the postseason eighth consecutive year.