So I'm John Cousins. I'm going to talk about content creation and content, a workflow for creating content. And anybody here have blogs? Lots of you, right, have blogs. Any of you have published any books? Great. And how about any online courses? Super duper, and podcasts? Anybody do a podcast? Great. And anything else that I didn't mention, those kind of things? Audiobooks, Audible, that kind of stuff? So cool. So let's see if I can make this completely into a, I'm not giving away the slides there. Let's see, how does this get? Great. So I subtitled this, The Matrix, because that's basically what I've come up with, this sort of a structure for creating content. And it's worked really well for me. So my company is MBA ASAP, this company. I've been an entrepreneur for a long time, started a bunch of companies, took two of them public, done all those kind of things, raised money, had investors, and had employees, and all that. And about five years ago or so, I started to actually teach as well, maybe more than maybe six or seven years ago now. And I teach at a whole bunch of the different schools, universities here in town. And I've really been enjoying that. I love having where students, where the light bulb goes off. I just love that sensation. So now I think of myself as enabled by technology, right? Then I'm an author, a blogger, a podcaster, a course creator. And my whole idea is, my whole intention is to create content and then get it out as widely as possible to the most people that it can, hopefully to influence folks. And my platform is WordPress. So I've built a platform kind of model where you have all the different social media and all these different sources, your mail, listen to all sort of inbound marketing. And then I use it as a marketing source. And I also use it with landing pages and then sending out to all the different places where people can buy my content or use it. And then also as a blogging platform, right? That's initially what WordPress was developed as, as a blogging platform. So it also gives me great SEO and all that kind of stuff. So I really love it. But you all know, right? You all are. I'm preaching to the choir here, right? You're all here because you love WordPress, right? So I won't talk too much about how great WordPress is because you've already been sold, right? I just wanted to give a plug to my, I host my sites. I have a number of sites and host them locally with Southwest Cyberport. And I really like that having a local hosting service. They've been good. Really great folks. So what I'm gonna start with is I started to think about this and I, oh, great, this is how I, this is how I put all my content together. I started thinking, well, wait a minute. Why am I doing this content? Why do I even think that this is something worth my time to do? And why am I so compelled to continue to generate content on this theme of business subjects, the MBA kind of subjects, you know? And so that's what I wanted to talk about first because really, I don't know if everybody's seen that Simon Sinek TED talk. If you have, if you haven't, you should check it out because it's great. If you have, it's really wonderful, right? And so I borrowed this from him. It's basically the why's the core. And Nietzsche, Frederick Nietzsche said, you know, as long as someone has a why, then they can deal with it any how or what.  Even just for myself to understand, you know, that it really comes from some generative force, right? So MBA, ASAP, it provides business skills and just like ASAP as fast as possible, right? And I wanna help people learn skill sets that can make you more valuable at your job so you can maybe progress up the corporate ladder or start a side hustle or start a company or anything that can enable people to self-actualize more using business skills because we live in this capitalist society and they can really well work to get your dream and your idea out and then if you're doing something that you love, you're happier and you're helping people in a meaningful way. And that's what I wanna do is help people do that. I wanna be a catalyst for that, right? So that gives me some sort of goal for why I'm doing this and a reason for doing it. And so everything I deliver is primarily from an entrepreneurial standpoint, you know, because I'm an entrepreneurial geek, is it's a business model where every, it's digital first, it's really digital. Well, digital first, right? Everything's a digital download. So once I make the content, I don't have to worry about packaging something and mailing it to people or even paywalls and all that kind of stuff. I just set it up. I have all automation drive through a nice marketing funnel and then it makes money for me. And I believe that business skills can be leveraged across lots of different ways to solve the big problems that we're starting to experience and also to help with economic prosperity for regions and for individuals. And I think that choosing yourself and investing in yourself is the greatest investment, right? So I think that it's wise to do that. Just like this guy here who has been very successful at those kind of things. So I like that, you know, thinking about formal education is great, but it's not the only path. Sometimes people have to learn things quickly and they wanna learn them inexpensively and I wanna access not just local markets but just all over the world. Anybody who's interested, they can pick this stuff up and start checking it out. And a lot of people have been talking about this, right? Reid Hoffman, the guy from the PayPal Mafia and Peter Thiel was his partner there. These guys just think that continual learning and being an autodidact is really cool. So I wanna give the materials for folks to be able to do that. And so this is just my way of doing it. And my personal story, I was an engineer. I went back to school, got an Ivy League MBA. It took me two years. I didn't work for two years. I spent a couple hundred grand on tuition and living expenses and all that kind of stuff. I ended up digging myself maybe a half a million dollar hole over those two years with lost income and everything else. And then came out and had this nice degree but was that really the best way to do it? Maybe, maybe not. You can learn a lot, I would argue now, you can learn a lot of these skills for a little money and then maybe apply some of that money that I spent on my education towards actually doing a business or something or other interesting things in your life. So this is about what the intention and goal is of what I do. As I've been teaching, I realize that textbooks are cumbersome, you may not need to go through the kind of process that I did. And how could I make that better for books? So what I also try to do is use the Pareto principle which is the 20% information that gives you 80% of the results. This is a power law. Pareto was an Italian economist that came up with this. And this formula actually goes across a lot of different things that's really interesting. Like power users of Coca-Cola, there's 20% of the Coca-Cola drinkers drink 80% of the Coca-Cola. So the 80-20 principle works in a lot of interesting ways. So I've written blog posts on this and all. And this is sort of my model. If you have computer skills and you have business skills and you have something that you love, whatever it is, you know, fly fishing, flower ranging, could be gardening, anything, if you have that thing, if you have those two skills at the bottom there, you can actually create a viable career for yourself doing the thing that you love. And that's what I wanna be an enabler of and an encourager of and a supporter of for everybody. So that's, you know, in the big picture, you know, capitalism and the market mechanism really works well and we should all participate in that. And this is a global kind of thing. And I always like the idea of doing good by doing well, you know, doing good work and then the money is sort of, or the support of a livelihood is sort of the artifact of doing good work. So I also wanted to test a newfangled business model, you know, doing these kind of things. So digital first, all automation, I'm just doing it myself, I'm a solopreneur, right? And as I thought about it, I really had enterprise fatigue, you know, working for a company, I don't like bosses, running a company, I really don't wanna, you know, all the employees, I don't wanna have investors, I don't wanna take on venture capital and have people, you know, I don't wanna have partners because all these things are drama, right? I just wanna be my own person, have a lot of little customers and they vote with their money and make this work. So that's been my model and what I've been doing. And it's really been fun. And I think that's why I wanna share it. So my ecosystem, it's just a hubbin, you know, outposts and those outposts of social media and other things that drive inbound using social media, right? And my website WordPress and my email list, I use MailChimp for email list. So now I just wanted to give you the background of why, you know, I think that that's the most, the generative seed is, right, is what, why would I wanna write this stuff? Why is it even compelling to me? And those are all sort of the reasons of why this topic is kinda compelling so that keeps me going and keeps me wanting to generate content. And so once you wanna generate content, then how the heck can you generate it and repurpose it and all that. So that's what we're gonna talk about now. This is the real meat and potatoes. So when I first started this thinking, you know, I'll just write a book, NBA, ASAP, just all the different subjects and just really quick and heck, if I put five pages or 10 pages of each, I'd get, you know, 200 pages and that'd be great. And as I started writing, you know, I took each of the subjects, they started telescoping out and I realized as I did say the first, you know, I did some accounting and well heck, this is almost a standalone book. Let me finish that and here's another one, you know, for finance and all these things. So I started to, from a monolithic kind of idea about this content just being one book, I unbundled it, right? It kind of unbundled itself. It just got, it grew bigger than I thought it was gonna be. And so then I thought of, well, each one's kind of a standalone product and then I can sell those as standalone things and then aggregate them together too, right? So now I have all these different subject matter, you know, for content, right? Entrepreneurship, reading and understanding financial statements, become a better negotiator, patents and intellectual property, how to file a patent, which is very, a lot simpler than you might think. Accounting, you know, what is accounting all about? Finance, economics, you know, corporate strategy, leadership management, all these kind of topics and I've been teaching these topics and as I teach them, started to write a little bit about it, have slide decks about it and all those kind of things and then how could I make that material grow is basically what this is about, right? So then I started to look at, I have all these different media that I could do it in, right? I do my books through KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing, which is super simple.  They have a nice little cover creator and stuff and you're off and running. They give you an ISBN number, you don't have to do anything, right? And then it's on Amazon and then they also have a paperback alternative too where they publish, it's print on demand so when somebody clicks and buys the paperback, they print one copy and send it to the person and so you don't have, you don't have to do a thousand copies and keep them in your garage and hope you're gonna sell them and then put them in mailing things and put a mailing label and ship it out the door. It's just, they print it out and it goes right out from there. No inventory, no work in capital. It's a beautiful business model and Amazon's a great partner for that, right?  So that's been really good. Infographics, newsletters, I have a podcast, you know, videos on YouTube and Vimeo and online courses on Udemy and Teachable I'm using as a platform now too. And then looking into doing gamification of this material so that people can gain intuition with in a dynamic way of how does this all interact sort of with business games and things and simulations for people. So this is the matrix part, right? It's not this matrix but I thought you'd like this picture, so.  It's this, pretty much this kind of matrix, right? Where I have all those subject kind of matters and then all of my different ways of delivering this stuff and then each one of those intersections represents a piece of content.  So if you have 10, just to do the math easy, if you have 10 different subject matters and 10 different ways of delivering it, that's 100 different pieces of content. If each one of those is creating $100 a month, you know, that's nice money. If each one's doing $1,000 a month, that's $100,000 a month. That's nice money, you know, starts to become real money when you have lots of different ones. None of them have to be home runs but if you have, you know, 100 solid singles, you know, I don't mean to use sports metaphors but suddenly it can start aggregating up into some money to support yourself. So here's basically my workflow and it starts from my blog, right?   You don't have to think about, oh my gosh, this whole giant amount of material. 300 words maybe, right? Or 1,000 words, whatever it is. It's a doable piece of material and you can also, the nice thing is, it's right away, you send it out and you see if people like it by how many people, you know, look at it or whatever and you can start to see the engagement. So it's sort of like you're a trapper or something or a hunter, right? Where you put out the blog, you hit publish, come back the next day and you see what's in the trap. You know, how many people have actually looked at it and then you can see, oh, people like this one more than this and this one's getting a lot of engagement. Maybe that's something that I could write more on because people are interested in that subject. Slide decks, again, that's, you know, slide share is a great place to share that kind of content and that's owned by LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft. But that really is a great tool for outlining things, you know, instead of just making an outline like you did in grade school or something, and I do lots of outlining, but it seems to me a really easy way to outline and you can actually see the narrative flow. You can see, oh, I want to go from this point to that point to that point. Here's the beginning, what I want to say, the introduction, it builds up and then here's the ending summarizing what I want to say. And then you have kind of a schematic to follow for creating your content and you can make a blog post for each way along the way or maybe three blog posts along the what for each step and suddenly it starts aggregating up into something that could be an e-book. And so e-books and paperbacks and then from there what I do is I take those books once I publish them and just take each chapter and read it into my computer into, I use GarageBand, but any type of audio source, I have a little USB mic that plugs in, right, and I just sit there and put up the book, read it, and then edit that file a little bit, publish it up to ACX is the Audible Creation Exchange, and that's also owned by Amazon and ACX, you just upload each of those audio files and then they review and make sure the audio quality is good and then you have that book goes out to Audible, iTunes, and Amazon. So then on your Amazon site you'll have a little thing that we'll show, I'll show you, well I'll show you later, but we'll show the three different options, right, where you can buy it for the Kindle, you can buy it for the paperbacker and you can buy the Audible version. And then what I do is I take those audio segments and put those into iMovie and GarageBand is a free thing that comes, a free audio workstation that comes on your Apple computer and iTunes iMovie is a complete movie studio that you can download from the Apple App Store for like $5, it's ridiculous, and it's a great movie studio, so I take those audio tracks and then just get lots of different images, put those on to the audio things, and then upload those to Udemy or Teachable or something like that and make audio, those are the audio segments which are the core of my online courses, so then I make online courses. So each one sort of flows from the last step, right? And then I also use those audio segments to create some of my podcast episodes. And I do other ones where I interview people, but some of them just from the books, you know? So the whole idea here is like a journey of a thousand miles starts for the single step and I got that picture because someone in China, I did some other Lao Tzu quotes on my Twitter feed and they said that the guy I was using was not Lao Tzu or some other Chinese philosopher, so sent me that picture, so I know that's really supposed to be a picture of him. But right, so if you can do it in bite-sized chunks, it's easier to do if you have a plan for how you're gonna get to aggregating of this stuff. And it's just like snow, right? It's an accretion kind of thing, you know? One flake on flake, right? One on top of the other. And as you do these things, suddenly you have a whole foot of snow, right? And it's all about, I don't know if you know from one of the big things in entrepreneurship is MVP, minimal viable product.  And so that's what I do with my books because it's just a word file that I've uploaded to KDP. I can go back and add a chapter, I can revise a chapter, I can find a spelling, crowd source for spelling mistakes and make those spelling things and just upload the thing again. And within 10 hours or so, the new book is up there. So I don't have to worry about is the book perfect? Is it really wanna, it's not set in stone, it's not a manuscript that then I'm publishing and then I'm gonna have 1500 copies that are gonna be the same. I can change it tomorrow. I can say, gee, I've left out a little section on that or somebody says, I would like you to say more about that or, well, you really said too much about that and I can just edit along and it's a fluid kind of thing and you don't have to be afraid about putting up your content that way. So I came up with a little acronym here, right? Creation, that's just doing it. Iteration, right? You're getting the feedback and you're iterating in this process and revision, right? And the phrase I was saying, the best writing is rewriting. So I actually thought of that and then looked it up to say, who said that? I couldn't remember who said that, right? And think about people grabbing content and copying each other and stuff like that. Look at this, here is, so here's E.B. White, that's a quote from E.B. White, right? Quote from Truman Capote. Quote from Robert Graves. Oh, quote from Louis Brandeis, the great judge. So I don't know who said it, but, and here's even John Iapdeck saying just about the same thing, you know? So that's an interesting thing that these guys just all, you know, steal each other's, I don't even know who said it. So the same thing for the podcast type of process too, right, it starts from the blogs and then the audio from the books. I also do interviews on Skype and use Ecam as a little Skype recorder and we'll do it that and then use GarageBand and then use liberated syndication, lips in to get it out to iTunes and Google Play and Stitcher and all these other sources. Very, again, a very simple process all from that initial material. And so then I'm thinking too, with my podcast content and also my other audio contents and stuff, I'm really anxiously awaiting, you know, a free or very low cost transcription service that'll take that audio, make it into words and then I can repurpose those words into all these textual kind of contents as well. So sort of go in reverse again. Yeah, Sonia. R-E-V? Rev.com? Super, oh, you said it too, great. Transcription, translation. Oh, I see. It's what? Transcriber. Transcriber, fantastic, that's what I, you know, I know there's been ones that I've been looking and I just haven't found it because that way, if I can just plug it into a transcription thing, get that content, I can lift out different pieces, put it into my books, put them into this, make it into blog posts. So the other part is not just bundling it up, right, but disaggregating things. And once I've written a book, I can like pull out all kinds of little three or 500 word things and say, here's a blog post, here's a blog post. Oh, and by the way, this is from my book or this is from my course and all those kind of things and cross promote everything too. So again, the content is fluid. The whole idea, you know, I bolded repurpose because it's repurposing the stuff in all these different ways, right? Revisions, we talked about that. And the blog is a great way to gauge initial interest, see what kind of engagement, which content topics seem to have interest and which ones maybe are a little bit lukewarm. And if they get a lukewarm reception, that doesn't necessarily mean the content isn't compelling. It may be that the way I phrased and wrote it wasn't that compelling, so then I'll go back to the drawing table and rewrite it and see if I can do it in a way that then does get some traction. Because it's all about engagement, right? It's about having audiences and engaging with them. So here's the next thing I'm going to do too, like rev.com, is look at how can I expand my matrix? I have all these contents, how can I get another layer there? And so I've started to translate my books into different languages and being in Google translate, believe it or not, are getting pretty darn good, especially in some languages like Spanish, they're quite good. And you can translate on that, get a native speaker then to go through and just revise the little bit of pieces. It might be a colloquial expression that didn't translate well or other things. And then suddenly you have your content in a whole different language that then you can go to a whole different market. And if you start thinking about some of the big languages, that can be really, really nice. So that's a way to expand my matrix that I'm just working on now and using new tools that are just starting to come out. You have a question? Well, you know what? The audio books. The audio books are my best sellers. And I'm really surprised even, I like, I sell a lot of, and that's another thing, is because I have this matrix, I don't really, I start out guessing what I think will be the best, but then I just fill in all the dots there, right? And one was an audio book on corporate finance. And I thought no one's gonna, I'm reading these formulas for net present value and internal rate of return. And they're kind of, the cash flow is zero to the square divided by, and then plus this term, plus this term.  But I did it, and it really sells. I can't believe it. It's like people will buy that. And I get these nice reviews and say, oh, I've read it, listen to it three times on my way to my final exam in corporate finance and I aced it and da-da-da. And so a lot of times people use it as supplementary materials if they're in a class or something like that too. But that was a surprising example of something that I really didn't think was gonna work but I did it because I could and it actually would surprise me. So then I do lots of cross promotion too, right? Everything gets cross promoted. So any blog post talks about the other kind of things, where this comes from, and refer to this blog post. So it's all interrelated and that helps with sales but it also helps with SEO and things like that, right? And then I also use AdSense and Affiliate. I make a lot of affiliate pages too where I use actually, my affiliate marking now is just Amazon affiliates. I just basically use Amazon affiliates on my web pages and I build a lot of web pages where they're just links from Amazon affiliates and I'll do like the top 10 business books by women, top 10 entrepreneurial books, top 10 business biographies and each one of those little books and I'll, these are ones that I've read and I'll put a little bio descriptions next to them. Seven minutes. And then if they click on that and go into Amazon, whatever they buy, I get a nice percentage of those sales from Amazon. So that's a beautiful thing. And AdSense is a tool that Google has that you just populate with ads. So there's other ways to monetize things as well, popularity. So I thought about, talking about my partners in this too, what are my key partners? And I don't know if you know this business model canvas, this is another thing from entrepreneurship, those two gold rings on that side represent who are your key partners. And I started thinking about who are my key partners? How, what technologies are enabled by and I realized that there's a few of them that have lots of different tools that I use. Like Amazon, right? I said I used that KDP and that's the Kindle stuff and the paperbacks on demand and the audio book creation exchange, ACX and that sends them out to all the audio things. They're the third largest search engine. So we start thinking about search. It's not just Google, Google's number one. YouTube is the second biggest search engine. I have a YouTube channel as well that I repurposed once I make the video. Amazon is the third biggest search engine of all. It's not Bing, it's not any other ones, Yahoo, it's Amazon. So they're this whole ecosystem that you can sell into and also use them. I use Amazon affiliate marketing, I said. And then as I do the translations, then I can have Amazon Spain, Amazon Germany, all these different ones. And then also AWS for my gamification and other things. I actually also made a Alexa skill that's not developed yet. I've been working on it though for quotes and things like that. So it's a thing that Alexa then you can say, Alexa please give me a quote for the day. Google, Google Analytics, AdWords, right? I use a lot of paid advertising in search using AdSense where I put their ads on my blog and my websites and then I get paid that way. They own YouTube, so YouTube is gigantic, right? Google Play for my podcast, Google Translation for my translations, Google Drive for a lot of my content I put up there. And Google Plus is a social media site. I mean, they're a giant system with lots of different tools. Apple, I use those for my production tools, right? They're also iTunes as my podcast and audio books. GarageBand's how I do the audio production, iMovies how I do the video production. And they're also my computer and phone and I use my phone a lot for my notes and all of the kind of stuff. So they're another big partner. And then Microsoft, right? Word I use to write all my stuff. PowerPoint for my slide decks. They own Skype and I use Skype for my interviews. If I'm interviewing somebody in Europe or somewhere else it's amazing. You just get a Skype channel going and you get the recorder and then you just do your interview and it records it and then you put it in the GarageBand and put it up on Libsyn and it's done. They own LinkedIn. I use LinkedIn, it's my big social media, right? Because it's sort of self screened for what I'm doing. It's all business folks, right? Linda is a great source for training videos and things and they're good. And Bing Translation in Asia is their cloud hosting service. So then obviously I'm doing this all through a marketing funnel where I get, keep and grow my customers, all the traditional kind of stuff that way. So I'm doing all that kind of digital marketing in all these kind of ways because at the end of the day you want to monetize this stuff, right? You want to make money on it. So here's all the ways that kind of do that. And please, I'll put this up and stuff but here's, you can follow me in a lot of, I'm just on almost all kinds. It's very active on Twitter and everything else. And you can subscribe to all my different stuff. And that's it. So you write a book and you put it on Kindle and then you put it, you record the audio, you put it on Audible and that makes sense because both are owned by Amazon. But then when you go to put it on Udemy, do they have any problems with you using the same content or are you selling? Well no, because on Udemy then it's all, it's videos. So it's a completely different content, it's all videos but I'll also put in a copy of the book as a digital download in there and I put in my slide presentations and all kinds of stuff and infographics and all that. So the Udemy course is, yeah I take that audio content and they make it into movie files and put lots of graphics and images and stuff on it. That's it, but great question. What else? Yes? So you handle the security for all this, for your sides and all your different platforms? Well the beautiful, I don't do anything, Amazon, I let them take care of their security and Udemy, I let them, so it's all platforms that I don't, they do the paywalls, they do all that kind of stuff, all the security, they just send me a, they just wire transfer money into my account monthly based on the sales. Oh I own all the copyrights, I copyright everything. You know, it's all, well that, my whole idea is basically is I have a holding company called Intelligency and it's all about making intellectual property, creating assets and so assets of mind, right? So it's all intellectual property. Yes, everything's copyrighted, everything has ISBN numbers, everything is, you know, my content. But I don't really care if people take it and steal it and share it and stuff like that because a lot of times, most of this, a lot of stuff too, I'll put out for free in various versions just because it's better, the worst thing you can have is obscurity, right? You want to be known in some way, so if somebody looks at something or you know, then maybe they'll buy something else they like that or so, I'm very freewheeling with having my stuff on YouTube, on my blog posts, sharing in all different kinds of ways where I'll give free coupons to this and that and the other thing. It's all about marketing and really engagement and gaining trust with a bunch of people and can't expect them to become customers right off the bat. You gotta show them that here's a bunch of stuff that can help you and then maybe later on they'll buy something. Well it is a lot of work, but it's not that much work. If you have a blog and if you've written 100 blog posts or 20 blog posts, you're well on your way. If you just start thinking strategically about how can I aggregate up my 300 words, I do a day or a week or whatever into something that's gonna be meaningful and that way so. If you're already blogging or thinking about blogging or like writing at all or like even talking, like the podcast is almost effortless in a way. It's just like, there's an interesting person. I wanna talk to them and ask them what they're doing. That's all it is. So yeah, it is, and it may seem like more work. It's work and that's why I wanted to go through at the beginning. It's like, why the heck am I doing this? Why do I even feel compelled to do this? Why would I wanna keep doing it? Why don't I just say I've done enough but I like doing it. So whatever you do that you really enjoy and that's another way to gauge it too. Whatever you're doing when you procrastinate, that's the thing you should be doing. You calculate, what's your business model?  I don't really have much expenses.  On the electricity for the computer or something, there's no, I don't have much in expenses and then once it's out there I have no expenses. Like I said, there's no inventory, there's no, I have no working capital. Especially I put it out there. And then I use, well I have a few expenses. I use some automated tools like CrowdFire and Social Jukebox and some other ones to help me generate content and move people through my funnel but a lot of these tools like Google Analytics and a lot of these things are just free. Most of them are free. All the social media sites are free. So I'm chugging people through a funnel that is primarily no cost, very, very low cost. So I have very little costs. And as far as I know, it's just then, it's just my revenues. So I can't really project those. I can sort of project, but each year I hope to do another, I did a mini presentation with a million cups back in June. I was thinking, well, how did I do? Because I was thinking I'm gonna do some of this content. Well, in that amount of time I did five more books. I did three online courses. And so hopefully I'll do a similar thing for next year so it just keeps building. And these things are evergreen. They just keep going, you know, so. And they're saying, right on. Is that what you're saying? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Can I just take one more question? What's your next step? What? Where are you based at? Out of, I have a little office in my house. Albuquerque out. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Albuquerque.  Will you tweet your slides out? I do what? Will you tweet your slide link out? They link to your slides. Absolutely, I'll put these up on slides here and I'll tweet it out. My Twitter handle is at JJCousins and yeah, I will. I'll put them up there, you bet. And if you email me, I'll send you a set two or something too. Thanks very much. Thanks for listening to me. I really appreciate it. Thank you.


This weekend we wanted to bring you another one of our great talks from our Austrian Economics Research Conference that just wrapped up last week. Now this speaker is perhaps not as famous as Patrick Byrne from Overstock.com, or as famous as Hans-Haran Hoppe, but he's a really unusual and interesting guy. And one of the things we like to do at the Mises Institute is introduce you to new names and new thinkers that you may not have met before. So Professor William Boyz is at Arizona State University. He heads the Center for the Study of Economic Liberty. And what's so great about Professor Boyz is that this is a gentleman who never came to Austrian Economics or Libertarianism until much later in his career, really until mid-life.  And this speech is really dynamite. In it William Boyz gives us the perspective of someone who's been on the other side, who's been a Keynesian, who's been on the macro side, who's been in mainstream academia really until just the last couple decades. So he demolishes mathematical economics and econometrics, the use of math models. He really demolishes the whole concept of macroeconomics and he really gives you a good take on what modern economic academia is like. This is a bit longer than most of our weekend shows in about 45 minutes, but it's well worth your time to get to know a little bit more about William Boyz.  I hope you enjoy it. Stay tuned. Thanks to the Mises Institute. Pat, I appreciate all your energy and arranging everything. And especially Joe inviting me. I don't know why he did it. For the life of me, I can't understand it. I thought maybe it might be because he published a recent paper of mine. Then I thought maybe it was because Murray and I were both from desert universities. And then I thought no, it's because Murray and I are both short and bald. But I am just unbelievably honored to be here. Mises is part of my daily life.  And we get our coffee and we open our notebooks. Okay, now I start reading Mises and the Wall Street Journal opinion pages and looking at the financial pages. My wife opens up the New York Times opinion pages. Now, I cannot sometimes even concentrate because she's swearing so much, she's defying, she's laughing.  Why do you torture yourself like that? Oh, I just want to see what the other side has to say. So Mises is a very important part of my life. This is great to be here. The other lectures were really good. I'm embarrassed that mine won't be anywhere near that good. And the title, it seems to make no sense. But I looked at the other titles and they were all pretty heavy. So I thought, I'll make mine light. Okay. So when I was six, I think it will make a little sense later on, maybe, maybe. But I wasn't really embarrassed at that title. I want you to know. Murray Rothbard told us that liberty is what allows human flourishing. And that human flourishing requires private property rights and behavior according to the non-aggression principle. And that this nation was conceived in liberty. What do mainstream economists tell us today? Well, I'll give you a couple examples. A few weeks ago, I went to a seminar in my department. And I walk in and the fellow has his PowerPoint deal up with just a hairy equation. And so when it gets started, he says, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to calibrate this model. Now, I don't know if you've run across that, but that means make up numbers for the parameters. And then simulate it. And if it doesn't match real life, then change the parameter values and run it again. Well, before he barely got that out of his mind, the rest of the department saying, oh, that should be a Cobb-Douglas function. No, it should be a CES function. What's that parameter? It ought to be lambda minus delta. Oh, no, that ought to be alpha. The whole seminar was that. That's mainstream economics for you. That's what passes for economics these days. Another illustration, if you run across mainstream macroeconomics these days, they talk about the overlapping generations model. OK, it is incredibly insightful. I'll put it up here so you can read how insightful it is. It's one generation, does some stuff, and then it dies, and a new generation comes out. You see, they barely overlap. That's where its name comes from. So I asked this well-known macroeconomist what the value of this model is, and he tells me it gives you really good insights on social security and pensions. So I asked him what the insights were, and when he finished, what do you need a model for? Oh, he didn't like that. And speaking of overlapping generations, I just read a paper by Larry Kotlakov and Jeff Sacks, just out of the MBER, where they use an overlapping generations model to come to the result that technology is going to take over the world and drive people out of jobs. OK, the worst part of that isn't the conclusion, it's that they then make policy suggestions on the basis of that. OK, this overlapping generations model they had had two sectors, high tech and low tech. So the high tech's just going to be growing too fast. So they say what you need to do is have a redistributive tax, impose it on the high tech sector and transfer the money to the low tech, and then that will slow everything down. Much of what's being taught in mainstream economics departments around the country these days is just nonsense. Mises dismissed academic economists as a collection of charlatans. The fact that the majority of our contemporaries, the masses of semi-barbarians led by self-styled intellectuals entirely ignore everything that economics has brought forward. Well, that's exactly what's going on today. There are some talented people who use the positive vist methodology, but most of the time it's just garbage. And the training results in a particular kind of economist. I conducted a survey with another fellow where we measured student attitudes toward free markets based on how much economics trainings they had had. We found that the more training they have, the less they support the free market. We also found, and this is kind of interesting, that the positive attitude toward the free market is an inferior good. Lower income people have a better attitude than the higher income people as econ students. The survey I've got up here is another type of survey. I just wanted to show you some results. I have carried out this survey non-scientifically for about 15 years all over the country and in China when I was there in Mexico and in Europe. This is just an average of the results. They all look fairly the same, although there are cultural differences. But this measures the percent of people strongly supporting or supporting a particular allocation mechanism. What we do is create these scenarios where there's a scarcity involved, like kidneys or something. And how do you propose solving that scarcity? So they have four choices here, the price system, first come, first serve, let the government do it or have a lottery, the random. Okay, so after giving them all these scenarios and averaging everything, these are the results and the red bars are the general public, the people that have no economics degree or have no MBA. And then there's the economists and that's the black and the blue is the MBA, people have MBAs. You can see the results of the public support for the price system. It's very low, about 20%, okay? You can see that the public support for first come, first serve is much higher, about 75%. You can see that their support of the government is even higher than that. Oh no, no, no, yeah, even higher than that. And I need to differentiate something here. You see the crosshatch and the solid. The crosshatch refers to non-health questions and the solid refers to questions that deal with health, the kidney transplants, kidney shortages, things like that, life and death decisions. So you'll see in this diagram that as the decisions move from things like a scarcity of strawberries at the grocery store to life and death decisions, people tend to want the government to do the allocating. And you'll see even the economists looking at the black, when it comes to the life and death decision, choose more government than they did before, almost as much as they choose the price system. Now, how's that even possible? I looked for other surveys out there and I found one by Dan Klein and Charlotte Stern that most economists favor government intervention in a wide range of areas. Income redistribution, minimum wage laws, environmental regulation, anti-discrimination laws and others, they found that a strong percentage, 80-some percent, support intervention in those areas. And they found a little difference between economists that voted Democratic and economists that voted Republican, but even the Republicans supported government intervention. These attitudes are created in classes. By the way, classes are taught and there's two viewpoints that have come together to create this anti-liberty perspective. One is, follows from Varad, Pugu, Marshall and Mill, and that's the market failure paradigm. From those guys till now, it's like a cottage industry to find something you could call a market failure. And several Nobel Prizes have been won by discovering market failures, quote unquote. This is one that Robert Frank uses, Frank at Cornell. This is a, I believe it's an elk, I ought to know this, I grew up in that country, but I think it's an elk. He says the elk, the bigger horns, the more sex they get. So the horns just keep getting bigger and bigger and attracting the females until, so heavy they can't lift their head. Now wait a minute, how much sense does that make?  Then some smaller elk will run around getting all the sex. And there's the gene, it's gone. Now how can that be a market failure? He says that's just like what goes on, we start to win with something and then we do too much of it. He says for instance, income. You start earning income and if you're earning too much of it, you're just wasting your time so we ought to have a 100% capture of income after $50,000. Then you don't have to worry about keeping up with the Joneses. This is another famous market failure. You've probably all run across this, the QWERTY keyboard as a market failure. The argument is that the QWERTY keyboard, whoops, sorry, QWERTY keyboard is inefficient, but we still use it. It was built at a time when typewriter keys had to go one by one and if you went too fast, they'd get stuck. So they developed this keyboard to slow people's typing down, okay? But we use it today when there's no letters being typed. Computers go fast as you wanna go. That's inefficient. We are stuck on a technology due to networks, due to the fact that nobody wants to get out of it. It's been shown that that's not true. They're looking at the history. They did races between this one and the Dvorak and others and this one won. It was efficient, not inefficient. They make up things they call market failures. There are no such things as market failures. I really have a hard time understanding this. I don't know how anyone who studies markets understands the market process can be a statist. I mean, that's what economics is, studying markets. Yet in 2010, I was on the stage with Alan Blinder talking about the global economy and during his presentation, Blinder said, he was really happy about the events of 2008 to 2009 because it just showed that he was right.  I fell off the stage. How can anybody claim to be a Keynesian? It makes no sense. It is not economics. Macroeconomics is not economics. If you're asked to teach macroeconomics, refuse on principle. Economics has been waylaid by these two things, market failures and Keynesian economics and our training of our students leads them to accept this. Most mainstream work today does not even acknowledge that markets require private property. They never refer to the non-aggression principle and often not even the price system. It's not widely understood that private property along with the non-aggression principle guided by price signals and disciplined by profit and loss accounting will steer self-interested behavior in the direction of social cooperation. Murray Rothbard recognized what was important. Rothbard was a remarkable economist, historian, philosopher, and so on. And he's had a lasting effect on thought leaders and liberty and it will continue. I'm amazed and very humbled that I would be invited to present this lecture in honor of him. Unfortunately, I never met Murray. You know, in lectures like this, you're supposed to find some dirt, some secret information about the person you're talking about. So I called people that I thought knew Murray and I've actually learned more here in the last few days about Murray, but you've probably heard all those stories. Well, a friend of mine was at UNLV when Murray and Hans first went there. So I called him and asked to see if he could give me any information. So he came up with something. Now, this is not very exciting, but it's all I got. I was told when he was hired, his office had brown chairs, but he wanted to have blue chairs like we're in the dean's office. So he said to the assistant dean or associate dean, he'd like to change chairs. And the associate dean thinking he was really cute, told him it took two brown chairs to equal one blue chair. So the next morning, the associate dean comes in the office and there's Murray with two brown chairs in tow. When confronted on the apparent contradiction that he wanted to dismantle the state, but he worked for a state institution, Murray said, I told you the state was decrepit and failing. He wrote editorials in the LA Times and once in a while, they really irritated the administration. Which Murray liked to do, I am told. He wrote movie reviews. And one of his favorite movies, the best kind of movie from Murray is a tightly woven story like Dirty Harry. Now the next generation of Austrians might not have seen that, but if not, go look at it. You'll see why Murray liked that. He was, every single person told me he was a great guy. He was exactly the kind of guy you want to go have a martini with or a beer summit with, whatever the case may be. Another friend of mine told me of a time he was talking with Murray and they were arguing about something. And my friend said, Murray, why are you so nice to me? I've seen you tear others apart on these issues.  If you were a goddamn academic, I'd tear you to shreds. I am astounded at Rothbard's achievements. I mean, look at it, the accurate account of America's Great Depression, the most systematic defense of anarcho-capitalism, contributions to economic methodology, philosophy, ethics, history, and everything else he focused on. Because of his wide-ranging and intellectually powerful work, I had no idea what I was gonna talk about today. But I did see a video of Murray explaining how he became a libertarian. And I thought, ha, I'll talk about that. You won't be interested in why I became a libertarian, but it gives me something to talk about. So I chose that topic. But my intention isn't to be narcissistic about it. My intention is to provide a little bit of a history lesson and a look ahead.  But he also said he rebelled against the state when he was six. He was a libertarian when he was six. But he was happy when he did it. Roderick Long's lecture a few years back, he says, a fourth grade teacher's report on Murray said, Murray is so exceedingly happy that it's sometimes difficult for him to control his activities. He must develop a more controlled behavior.  When I was six, my favorite game was Cowboys and Indians. I had a six shooter, a couple of six shooters, holster, a friend of mine and I would have quick draw contests. One day I wouldn't let my friend use my six shooter. My mother overheard me. She said, Billy, you need to share.  You don't share your car or your house. Why should I share my property? I'd really like to tell you, I said this, but I can't. I am definitely not Murray Rothberg. You know, what I was thinking about in early grades was playing baseball and lusting after my seventh grade teacher. Neither of my parents attended college, so it was a given I would attend. I got interested in economics and I don't know why because my two professors were a Keynesian and a Marxist. Then I went to graduate school. There I learned very little economics. The only thing I remember about my first micro-course was proving Cacatani's fixed point theorem and deriving first and second order conditions of optimization. Our text was Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis. Micro-Tube was linear and dynamic programming. And in macro, we covered Keynesian growth theory. Somehow I was awarded a PhD in economics. I knew very little economics. And after grad school, my initial position was investment banking. And in the first meeting we had, we were supposed to relate the economy and what's going on to the trust department and where their investments were going. The first meeting I panicked when I realized I couldn't even discuss current events. So I began reading anything to try to get up to speed. And what I chose, of course, was Keynesian. I read the Brookings papers. I did get up to speed on economic outlook and I could discuss what was going on and I could call Allen Greenspan on the phone and when he had his consulting company and talk with him. But of course, I didn't know what I was talking about. And my dissertation was focused on industrial organization and I had the usually conometric bells and whistles. In the years after my dissertation, I gained some distance and I began to wonder what sense do these market models make? Monopoly, monopolistic competition, perfect competition, they don't make any sense. But one thing you should note here, and it's very sad for me, I had not heard of Mises or Hayek or any other Austrians to this point. It was not until some time later when I became convinced of the benefits of market allocation and a decentralized system. Murray Rothbard used to live by his principles. Now sometimes that caused conflict with others, like I understand with Ein Rand or the Kochs perhaps, but he lived his principles. I find interesting how few economists actually live by what they preach or teach. Let me give you a couple of examples. Our business school built a new building and they wanted to move the economics department forward to the new building. And the new building had offices that were quite different. There were some with big windows and some with little windows and some with no windows. So of course every faculty member wanted big windows.  Office. Well, I asked the department what they'd like to do and the tallest guy said, we do it by height. And the oldest guy said by seniority and the most productive guy by productivity. And we had a former college wrestler in the department at the time and he said, we'll have fights.  So we did. And people bid on what office they wanted, raised some money and I got a call from the provost, get over here. He said, you can't sell state property. I said, I'm not selling and I'm renting it. I did get away with it because I put it into a scholarship fund for the students. But I also tried to decentralize everything else in the department. Most of you who have had experience with academic departments know it's generally sort of egalitarian. There's a budget that's allocated somewhat equally. Classes are assigned. Even salary increases in many cases are egalitarian. Typically it's more difficult to get travel money than it is to use a phone. Now these days with phone calls being free, it doesn't matter, but in those days, long distance calls were expensive. But at our university, copying and paper and supplies and phones were free. But there wasn't much travel money. So I decided I would decentralize the budget and I allocated the budget to the faculty and they could spend it on anything they wanted. And so you saw phone usage go way down and travel go up, just what you'd predict. I allowed them to bid on classes, class times, class sizes, the classes they wanted. I got a relative price for like a big principles class to a graduate class. So it was a really interesting experiment. Another episode of economists not living what they preach was I attended a Henry Manny law and economics seminar. It was two week long in Miami. And at the end of the two weeks, the students gathered to discuss the speakers and we had one that was excellent and one that was horrible and the rest were about the same. The students decided we would all chip in $25 and split the money equally. And these are economists. Faculty meetings give another great example of economists not living economics. These are typically egalitarian gabfests with no productive output and no recognition of opportunity costs. Fairness is often a focal point. Faculty meetings were very frustrating. I used to, they'd go on for an hour or so and they should have gone on for two minutes. And so I'd add up the hourly salaries of the people there and I'd make an announcement that the opportunity costs of this past hour is $10,000 or whatever. It really irritated people. But I was still put on committee so I decided, okay, I'll pull the MISA strategy and I kept calling other committee members socialists. And pretty soon I didn't get put on committees anymore. Rothbard recognized he was libertarian when he was six. As I tell you, I was much older. So there's an indication of our relative intelligences. The issues I was thinking about when I was 30 or 40 had already been written about by MISA's, Rothbard and others in the Austrian tradition but I didn't know this. Let me give you some of those ideas for instance. Aggregation makes no sense. GDP, national income accounting, unemployment, inflation, what do these really mean? To explain that the total measure of output in the economy is C plus I plus G plus X minus M. Not only implies that these categories are fungible but the more and more G obviously leads to more and more national income. Now Rothbard pointed out the idea of private product to maybe offset that a little bit but more importantly, he destroyed the Keynesian multiplier with his reductio ad absurdum and if you haven't read that you ought to go read it in man economy and state. It's funny. Hayek noted in the use of knowledge in society that aggregation throws away a great deal of valuable information. If we believe the aggregation, then we could make GDP rise by simple actions such as burning down your house, having your kids be juvenile delinquents, getting a divorce and so on destructive behaviors. These were pointed out by Lawrence Parks in the Freeman back in 1998 but it's a real interesting piece. Keynes is suggesting to hire unemployed to dig holes and then more unemployed to fill them up. Echoed by Krugman and the Keynesians worldwide completely ignore Sey's law. Unemployed resources put pressure on resource costs which lead to market adjustment. If those resources are employed by government in non-valuable activities, they no longer put pressure on resource prices to adjust and in the meantime they produce nothing. So we lose from the fact that those people aren't putting pressure and the market's not adjusting and we lose from the fact that those people are not producing anything. And when you put that into the Keynesian framework, you find out that there is no such thing as a multiplier. And like I said, market fairs make no sense in a system of private property rights and non-aggression. There are no such things as market fairs. Market fairs as several have pointed out are an equilibrium concept and in reality are profit opportunities. I don't know if you can read that or not but if one begins the slippery slope and this is about slippery slopes by allowing one violation of the non-aggression principle then we are left with a continually growing government. The logic dictates anarchism. All these areas Murray Rothbard was undoubtedly brilliant and yet he had two academic positions at relatively low level universities. And I know this has been talked about a lot but I always found it curious. And I believe there's an analogy with the climate change debate. There's a paper published in the Journal of Agricultural Economics in 2014 that provides a rationale for global warming proponents to lie, cheat, fix data, falsify results and these are considered ethical strategies according to this article because the end result's so important. Now this is probably due to an attempt to protect one's human capital. I mean we can all agree that devoting resources to protect our human capital makes some sense. You wanna avoid depreciation of that capital and so often cartels are formed and hiring is limited to like thinkers. This is what climate science is all about. All scientists support man-made climate change. Similarly, if you spend 10 years in economics programs developing a specific kind of human capital you don't wanna see that depreciator become obsolete and since Samuelson's foundations the capital developed by economists has been what Mises called physics envy and the methodology has led to an emphasis on market failure. In a paper in the Cato journal Dan Klein refers to the mainstream as a club and Gary North essentially agrees with that. He says because of Rothbard's commitment to the application of Mises's theory to virtually every area of modern politics he has earned the respect of intelligent people who are outside of academia and see through the delusions of grandeur and independence that tend to reflect those that are inside academia. In contrast, those who are inside academia and who gain their sense of importance from peers in academia regard Rothbard as a turd in the punch bowl. If Rothbard was right then almost everything they are doing is either irrelevant or worse. Now I think there is definitely a club and the club's maintained by a rent seeking society supported by the growth of the state. One of my environmental economists colleagues tells me that the EPA is a full employment agency for environmental economists. In mainstream economics government grants come from several agencies NSF, NIH, DOD, EPA, et cetera. But I just on the back of an envelope glanced at NSF for 2014 and I could have this number wrong but it looked like it totaled over seven billion and something like 400 had something to do with market failure and one had Hyatt's name in the title. Now I didn't look at it closely but it's probably critical of Hyatt. As the intervention of state expands it reinforces the need for trained experts who are conducive to furthering the growth of the state. The university system obtains subsidies for supporting graduate education that will provide people to employ in the government. Government in general is very good for economists. So wouldn't it make sense that economists would see a role for government and isn't there an incentive for scientists or economists to mimic each other in technique and thought? According to a recent paper, November 2014 by Marion Foucaud and others called the superiority of economists. She says, or they say, economists want to fix things. They've developed a precise theoretical framework for evaluating when markets are efficient and when market failures can occur. If things don't work the way they should then a smart intervention, a nudge, may be called for, the Thaler and Sunstein thing, a nudge, unbelievable. The study finds economics departments at the very top of the pecking order exchange students among themselves in higher proportions than in other fields, including mathematics. Hierarchy is much more clearly defined in economics. Hiring practice sustain and foster a strong temporal persistence of the prestige rankings. The top five sociology departments account for 22% of all authors published in the primary journal, but the top five economics departments account for 28% of all authors in the JPE and 37% in the QJE. Those with PhDs in the top five sociology departments published 35.4% of the articles. In Econ it is 45% and a sky high 57% in the QJE. The AEA compared to other professional organizations is much more centralized. AEA leaders are drawn primarily from the disciplines elite department. 72% of the AEA non-appointed council members are from the five top departments. In contrast to only 12 or 20% for political science and sociology. The president elected program committee run the program for the annual meetings which involves selecting the sessions to be conducted and the papers to be included in the papers and proceedings. A paper in 2012 called mainstream economists on a defense interviews several mainstream economists on why only the neoclassical view is provided in their classes. Most answer that neoclassical economists are diverse. Nothing else needs to be considered. Several said that edural docs perspectives were akin to unscientific theories like astrology. Harold Eulig of the University of Chicago said he had not seen anything that our models can't handle. Deidre McCloskey referred to this tendency for homogeneity in the midst of specialization and comparative advantage in her little note on Kelly Green golf shoes called the Samuelson. And if you look carefully you'll see I put an S on the side. But given all this, we especially recognize that thanks to the work of Lou Rockwell and the Mises Institute and all of you students have more chance of being exposed to Austrian economics than ever before. And surely much more than I did. For many years I never had a student who had heard of Mises or Rothbard. Lately in the last few years I've always had at least one in every class. And they hadn't been assigned any readings because I'm the only one in the department that ever assigned them. But this does not mean mainstream economists are welcomed in so-called, I mean Austrian economists are welcomed in so-called mainstream apartments. Several foundations decided they would set up a Center for Economic Liberty at Arizona State University to try to change the trend in student education from the left a little more to the libertarian side. And it was started December 2014. And part of our task is to hire academics to put into departments that will handle graduate students that will teach Austrian economics. But because of the club with the cartels formed by the department it's very difficult to overcome their barriers. We give them really good candidates and they say, oh they don't do what we do. Now some people in the literature have said the exclusion of Austrian economists from the mainstream departments is a market failure. Others point to mathematical technique or Austrian methodology, whatever the reason I think those are old arguments. I don't think there'll be an important question in the future. We know that the real battle is a battle of ideas, not esoteric academic journals or even tenured positions in mainstream departments. Now having those today might make the battles a little easier, but it's really the public and the thought leaders who have to learn the value of liberty. And this is what the Austrians are doing so well. And the Austrians with the help of technology are going to make a huge difference in the future. Patrick Byrne talked about particular technology he's using in his company, which is to try to use the Hayekian diffuse information idea, collecting that information. Now several companies have done the same thing with creating markets internal to the company and having auctions and having the prices actually do the waiting instead of some logarithm. But irrespective, more and more this is going to occur and with the internet having destroyed print media and having changed the world, and today we have blogged social media podcasts, online journals, and tomorrow we'll be able to provide information and experiences much more easily and rapidly. I mean today we have a personal assistance like Apple Siri and Samsung's S-voice and we can input with voice commands. With Kinect and weed like technologies we can control devices by using gestures, rain computer interfaces which read our thoughts are also in the markets. We can take Lyft or Uber downtown bypassing obsolete local ordinances such as regulations. And these are just the beginnings. These are the beginnings of social coordination in which technology itself makes it possible to communicate with people. Blockchain technology is decentralized everything and it will decentralize the university. The university as it exists today won't exist in two decades. Even now the Austrian school is growing and becoming more and more accepted outside of academia. Baron's Magazine was one of the few said Austrian School of Economics was right, talking about the crash. In the latest Gallup poll 25% of respondents say they're libertarian up from 17% in 2004 and still there's a lot of work ahead. The basic intuition of the general public is to reject free markets. We know that anti-liberty and anti-market attitude is an emotional reaction. To the general public freedom can be a scary thing. It requires personal responsibility. It's frightening to many to be responsible for all their decisions. Now those that are don't recognize the morality of voluntary association and freedom of exchange under which violence and coercion are removed. It is not recognized that life need not be a negative sum game. But to the intellectual in academia, according to Jonathan Gruber the public is dumb. Thus the general public needs the intellectuals to guide them and to fix things. What we want to do is educate the general public as to the value of thinking like the Austrians. A world, Rothbard would call on us to say there's a world in which free men and women may use their creative potentials in any way they desire is a world full of opportunities. A world where humans flourish. And a world where improvements in the human condition take place. This is what Murray Rothbard understood and what he communicated. He might have been a lone nut, but look where he brought us. Thank you very much for listening to this.


So now let's take a look at the standard capacitor equation. First, I want to clarify just a couple of terms. When I say capacitor, I'm referring to the device which is used to store charge. When I say capacitance, this is a property of that device called a capacitor. So our equation here is actually the equation for the capacitance. So let's look at this equation. C is our capacitance. Q is our charge. And our delta V is our voltage, or our potential difference across that particular capacitor. In terms of units, well, we already know that charge is measured in coulombs. And voltage is measured in volts. So a coulomb per volt gives us our unit for capacitance, which is actually capital F, which stands for a ferrad. So in this equation in particular, we need to be very careful because not everything is exactly as it seems. Particularly, we have way too many C's, the capacitance of the capacitor and a charge of coulombs. But capital C in the equation is capacitance. Capital C in the units is coulomb. So make sure you're keeping track of what information you've got here.


Hey there friends, how's it going? My name is Kevin, you got anything in there? Anything funky that I should be aware of? Anything that's maybe not allowed over the border? Alright, fair enough, I trust ya. Ah! Okay, well, now that I know I can trust you, we have to stop all the other people who cannot be trusted and are bringing vile contraband into our country. I'm not even sure what we'll be looking for. Weapons, I assume? Counterfeit potatoes? That's the worst thing about being Irish. There's so many counterfeit potatoes. I hate thinking I'm getting a name brand potato and then I open it up and it's a counterfeit. Anyway, I won't go into a rant, but we're about to start a new game. Join me in contraband police. The dream job. Gotta cut the cow to a border crossing. I'm gonna stand. 1981. The Voodoo Las Cue Adrum. I don't know how I slept through this music, to be honest with you, dude. Alright, we're here.  God, Rush is so ahead of us when it comes to self-driving vehicles. I wasn't listening to the dialogue at all, but I'm sure I'll be fine. Thanks for the ride. Oh Jesus, I didn't know you were in there. Why are you just hiding in here? Oh no, the previous border officer was arrested. And in other news, citizens satisfied with the government. As many as nine out of 10 citizens support the actions of the ruling party. Unemployment is falling, salaries are rising and the curfew is now only at 11 p.m. Did somebody get my job? Oh my God, I have the flashlight now. Okay, that makes it official. Sorry. I didn't know this was occupied. I guess I'll just wait for the bathroom. This is the bathroom, right? Cause I didn't see anywhere else. Just leaving all the doors open. Yeah, there is no other bathroom. That must be it. We got some build up here. Is anyone else doing this job or is it just me? Hello, are you gonna let them in? That is a lot of information I gotta get on people. Great, let's get started. Just to be clear, I didn't read that. I'm sure it'll be fine though. Go and make your way right over here. If you can pull up up there, that'd be great. Oh my God, he's getting shouty now. All right, fine. We'll see. I just got a card check and then he's like, no. I've seen your videos. I know what you're up to. That's it, open it up. You'll pay for screaming at me. All right, it seems to be okay. Nothing seems to be out of order with his details. Like if I look here, everything's matching up. So that's good news. Thought that was saying his weight for a second there. 1700 kg. I was like, God, you've lost a lot of weight. Congratulations. All right, inspection finished. You can drive off. Honestly, I just want to see you driving with all the doors open. He rolls up the window. I can't forget to roll up the window before he starts driving. All right, next one. What have we got here? That name doesn't match. There's a spelling mistake. I'm going to confront him on this. I didn't confront him. I just denied him by accident. Just wait for vengeance. What does that mean? All right, just enter. I don't care that much if you come in or not. Wait, hold on. Let's talk about this a little bit. He's getting upset now. Just keep opening all of the doors and boots and everything. Mark at least one actual error. Oh, I didn't actually mark anything. I just said no and handed it back to him. Probably just a typo on his ID. There's going to be something suspicious in this. What are you hauling, huh? There's something here. Ah, gotcha, flat tire. All right, I said vehicle damage. Will I just talk to him now and be like, hey, you got a flat tire. You got to go home. No flat tires in our country. But don't hand it out that window. I wanted to fix it. Now we put it back in. Give me your second ID or I'm just going to deny it. Wait a second. His passport number doesn't match up either. This is just a disaster, Vladislav. You can't come in here like this. Excuse me, sir, how long it'll take as long as I want it to take Vladislav, the poor guy. He's genuinely just coming in, I think. I don't think he's up to any trouble. I'm just giving him a hard time, especially the fact that I opened that boot. Like that's probably going to fall off. We just don't allow people into our country, it would seem. I wouldn't have confidence if I rolled up in this car and just ran over the traffic cone. But the fact that everyone in front of him got denied can't be good. All right, what do we got here? Are these like papers, please? Everything looks like ways. I don't think Republic of Pakistan is a real country.  Welcome to wherever it is we are. The Republic of Ireland. I never fix their hood or anything.  Just probably keep an eye on that. All right, I broke even now. It was not going well there. I got fine and I was actually in the negative after a hard day's work. Oh, come on, dude. You can't drive in on that. You know what? I'm sure you can find a garage to fix your car here. Oh, look at how enthusiastic he is. I'm sure you'll find a garage, though, to fix that tire. I'm sure you'll be fine. Oh, and everything actually closed on your car. Now, that is modern technology. He shouldn't be allowed in? What was it? Was it the tire? I'm being sent to my room. Oh, so that's where I am, of course. Acrotistan. Acrotistan, yes, of course. One of my favorite places actually. Acrotistan, Ireland. Two correct checks that's not bad. That's the third. That's the third that I got right. That's good. About as good as I can expect. Oh, we got suspects now. All right, we're looking for WALLENTI. What, no second name? See like a cartoon character and we're looking out for someone in a zaved whatever the hell that is just green car Oh, is that green? No, it's more of a teal. Let him through boys.   Oh god. I don't think I'm catching it Wait, wait, we got something counterfeit money. What are you doing with this? Huh? You know, I'll take it as a bribe and leave you through wait. No, it's fake. No Bad person wait a knife. All right, dude. We take counterfeit money very seriously apparently. Oh my god I can actually hurt him. I didn't expect it to work. All right now that I've subdued him I'm gonna start opening up your car if you smuggling this amount of stuff in the seats and he went to that much trouble Why did he have this just hanging under the glovebox? Watch yourself, buddy. All right Oh god, I didn't know the right click hits with the mouse, too. Oh my god. They're filled with I was gonna say crayons I went cigarettes. I don't know why I almost said crayons. What have you got here? Are these fragrant aides? Should I be continuing to hit them? Probably not There we go. I'm letting all the air out of his tires. All right, that's it. You're coming with me I was gonna give him the death penalty, but I guess that's not my decision to make there you go Now you get to watch this guy in the bathroom.   All right, there we go. That's all the contraband we got from his one car that room was empty beforehand Oh my god, I'm getting more tools pitchfork. I just have a burning torch in a pitchfork Ready to kill. Come on come through. Come on put it in H. Come on Fexx sake. I just know he's contraband though. I can smell it like why would you be carrying this truck through here? I did nothing on it coming over the border, huh? Good day Well, you don't tell me what kind of weather we're having. I'm mad with power. All right one second Let me open up the seat. I have no reason to do this, but I destroyed vehicle path. No, this is just foam What are you doing with this counterfeit foam, huh? You think you can just bring this into my country? I'm losing a lot of money here. There's gotta be something you're bringing something into the country I just gotta find it. Nothing. What? Tell me where it is. He's like, what are you talking about? Can I have your documents? I mean you don't really have a choice. I'm holding a pitchfork up to you Okay, I think you're good to go. Um, well, you're not because well, I've destroyed your truck completely I like how he thanked me He's like, God, please stop. This is my livelihood. Paper's clean. There we go I got a hundred bucks for that, but I lost like 200 from all the damage I caused. Oh, this is the guy I don't mean to profile, but you look like a Super Mario villain No, it's not him. This guy's name is Vladimir. I thought it was WALENTY. You know, I kind of tired myself out on the last person. You can just go through. Oh God damn it He shouldn't have been allowed through I checked everything on the first guy and he was innocent. The second guy I just gave him a free pass But no, he was hiding something. That's it. Good cop, bad cop, and I'm bad cop this time Where's the roof of your car? This doesn't look like it's supposed to be a convertible. Wait, I'm getting up on top of his car What am I looking for here? Just cut the brake lines. There we go. You better not be warranty No, he's good. He cannot see where he's going at all. What was his problem? Oh, he had a broken window Well, he didn't have a feckin roof. Did it matter? Oh, and his photo didn't match I didn't even know I should be looking at that. Oh my God. It's warranty.  Hit with pitchfork Hit with pitchfork. Oh my God, my pitchfork broke. No crowbar crowbar. Oh, there we go. What? Game lost. I don't understand. You said he was a suspect. They're like, yeah for littering We've opened the border come on through. I just have it permanently up now This is the guy with the contraband again, isn't it? All right. Let me just hold on there We go counterfeit money. You're being arrested Hey, don't close that on me. Hello finish control quickly. Well, you know what? I'm gonna go to the bathroom then I'll be right back. All right guys nature calls The poor people just staring at me. He's in shock. I'm a certain dominance. All right, sir I'm back. What takes you so long? Bowel problems. I'm looking for an excuse to not allow this guy into the country It's gonna be some reason I can deny you. Come on There is literally nothing wrong with this that he is everything above board everything is checked and ready That's it.  The punishment is death. Goodbye Hey, can you clear up this truck? You can just pull it off to the side if you want I would like to keep it for my own personal vehicle. I don't know what this button actually even does I've not been pressing it. Let me give it a try. Oh, it weighs them Okay, so I can check the weights see max weights 1700 kg. Yep. Oh, just you're looking great. How you've lost a lot of weight Congratulations. Oh, no, your passport number doesn't line up, buddy Let's put this as an actual reason like give him a reason for not being allowed into the country because usually I don't say anything I just say denied and I don't explain it. Yeah, it looked like he was gonna put up an argument there He went like yeah, but then I pulled out my switch blade and he backed off pretty quick I think that was the first one. I've actually done right when I told them no a justified review So that is the first time I've gotten that this one's gonna fail on weight. Is it 4,500? Let's see. He's got a smashed window first of all anyway, and I didn't do it for once Why do they always do that like they're playing a Yu-Gi-Oh card It really is just off-putting. The weight is fine. Passport number looks fine Okay, so should I reject him for the window or not? I'm gonna mark it and then I'm gonna say rejected I don't know if that's justified or not. Why? I just gave you the report. I told you for once Just careful with that turning circle Christ almighty and it killed someone over here criminal escape Oh my god, that was warranty wasn't it?  Oh, he's always one step ahead God damn it. I forgot two very different realities one where I met him and just went hmm You can go home and the other one where I just murdered him with a pitchfork not a bad second day on the job Minus five hundred eighty dollars We need to free up some space at the post those today You're going for a ride your task is transport prisoners to a labor camp and deliver intercepted contraband to the police base I'll remember at least half of that visit the store on way to buy some tools. Okay I'm like, should I write this down or something first?  They didn't like that at all All right, let's retry transfer to police care.  You want to come to actually No, yeah, I was thinking that too. Anyway, I best get going moving these prisoners out. Where are they? Oh There you are leave this open I got kind of an honor system going and we are in the middle of the woods So you could probably run but please don't sorry. I've never driven before so I'm just trying to figure this all out I don't really know what I'm doing this should I get yeah I think I need to go back in there and transfer the stuff Maybe you should keep an eye on them. I left the door open for no reason Well, there is a reason but it's just because of who I am as a person there We go got everything and I'll put it into the vehicle there We go they say I'm ready to go even if the door is just hanging open you could jump out at any time and the map Oh god, this isn't Google Maps. I'm here. I need to take a right and then just go straight a right on the fork All of us stay right. Okay. I'm on it. Wait. No don't go on the right side of the car There's no steering wheel over there. Oh short cut hang on guys.  Sorry Didn't mean to get you whiplash. I apologize They only ran a car off the road as well. They can still see me by the way I just left to the checkpoint off for sex sake just ram it Didn't work hold on guys Probably dead. I got an axe hold on. I'm a man of many talents jack of all trades master of none It just screams at me, please stop. All right, here. We are folks the labor camp That's what you get for smuggling crayons into the country. I'd send to labor camp sent a labor camp There you go mission complete. Happy days. Well, not not for them, but for me happy days It's just getting away at that rock just like They're not even trying. All right. I got to get here So I'll just go forward and take the second left the dirt trail. Can I go on dirt trails? They're my friends again. It's literally those two guys I don't know if it's worth having the labor camp just for those two. We gotta fill that place up We just got to start arresting everyone what? Okay, God damn it. He the same plan as I did I wanted to go this way and clearly the roads fine even though they say it's under construction like he came this way So I looked there's more. I know it's okay. I'm sorry. I'm taking out my frustration on the vehicle I should probably turn off the siren. It would be a bit more peaceful No, that doesn't feel right actually, I think it was the siren making it peaceful. Okay, this dirt track is open I'll go this way. I'm struggling enough to drive on the roads never mind the dirt roads. This is a shop Oh my god, what do they sell the bodies if so I could get your supply line. There's a lot of people I could kill All right, what what are you? Oh my god. Why are you selling scalpels out here? That's scarier than the bodies Give me this branch. Oh god. He's gonna line a customer. Sorry folks I didn't realize there's such a demand for scalpels out in this part of the woods you go ahead Okay, and last stop is the police base. That's him all gathered contraband. Oh, yeah, sure Hold on. I left it in the booth. It's my second day third day. I'm kind of new there We go. I have counterfeit money and an alcohol canister I don't know if it was worth driving all the way out just to give you these there you go And here have this branch on the house. Oh, he doesn't want my branch god dammit I try and extend an olive branch and he just won't take it. All right now back home better reverse without looking I'm here. Oh my god. I went right through our gate. I thought I just stop congratulations. You did well today Yes, lots of driving and all on a single tank of kerosene. This is quite the vehicle Anyway, I best catch some z's and look at the state of the place Fine before I showed up. Ah, yes Sunday April 19th food over production as is tradition in motherland We have too much food. This is not propaganda. This is truth. This is my truth the following products are not loud Food. Oh, yeah, we just do so much of it. He's like this is literally my lunch It's an apple and some crackers. Can I just not too much food in our country already?  Oh Christ almighty unpacking apple great ways You're bringing apples. Yeah, I know what they say an apple a day keeps the doctor away But it also sends you to prison. I'm arresting you. Okay, surely. He can't does have a lot of cargo It's just that say that I won't have to deal with the cargo, but I do Ah, sorry, I didn't mean to come that close to you I'm gonna open these bags one way or another while you're doing this some sick twisted thrill I don't know my upbringing. Maybe that's right. I was a Minecraft youtuber. Show me that contraband I know you have something that's it. All right tire pop. You're not allowed in you can't map out Damaged God damn it. I just go on in there. It's fine. Sorry about the anger.  You'll see the last two people I dealt with they're in the labor camp.  Oh wait, hold on. How It's flammable substances you want to be more clear on that what's in here. Tell me He must be freaking out. This is highly dangerous even if there was a spark off the mess All right, everything checks out just be careful on the road and there's so many potholes up ahead that Should be returned like I know we specifically told you not to allow food in but he's literally going in with explosive material You just let him in. Oh for fuck's sake. What is this?  They could just jump out at any point. Yes, that was fine. Okay, my last one of the day Let's go. He's already rolling up with a flat tire. This doesn't look good. Huffy Surely, that's not allowed. I may be willing to accept a bribe though. You know, maybe give me some of that coffee All right, you have one flat tire and I'm gonna say the the food is the issue So denied and the bright side even if you had to drive all night to get back there. He got your coffee All right. Have a good time in Valin Spectre report. Damn it. I'm just gonna try and make my escape This work clearly isn't for me. Oh, I keep coming back. This is horror Here we go, this is my only way out of this job by becoming an axe murderer There we go, I'm fired. All right, we are gonna end it there. I hope you enjoyed Let me know if you want to see more games like this leave a like drop a comment. I appreciate it Thank you so much for watching appreciate you and I hope to see you tomorrow. Bye for now