So a little bit about myself. My name is James Laws, and I am the co-founder and CEO of WP Ninjas, the creators of a plugin called Ninja Forms, which are on the sweatshirts that you have there. I actually got my first sales job about 20 years ago. I was looking for a change in, I don't know, change in view, a change in direction. And so I applied to an ad in the paper. Now the ad itself didn't really say anything about what the job was. But it talked about the certain lifestyle that I wanted to live, right? I wanted to be flexible and travel. I wanted to be able to buy the house that I want, the cars that I want. And so I kind of reluctantly, and yet with a little bit of anticipation, decided I'm gonna apply for this job. So I called and I set up my interview, at least what I thought was my interview. And actually when I showed up, there were 15 other applicants. And we spent about the first four hours and 10 applicants leaving. Watching what I can only call a propaganda video that was hosted by William Shatner. True story. As he interviewed people who were doing this job that we still did not know what this job was. We knew it was sales, that's all we knew. So some more people laughed. Only three of us made it through. I wanted to see how far the rabbit hole went. And then I found out I was joining an elite and prestigious group that very few get to say they've been a part of. I became a door-to-door vacuum salesman. That's true. On the next day when I showed up, I don't know why I showed up. I should have just said I'm gonna go look for a real job. But I went there, not any vacuum before I say that. Any door-to-door vacuum salesman in the audience. Okay. I really dodged a bullet there. I should have said no, but I decided, you know what? I'm gonna just try this out. I'm up for new experiences. And you may not know this, I'm actually an introvert, so door-to-door sales, cold call, like that's a scary endeavor, but I decided I'm gonna try it out. And they taught me a lot. So we were selling the generation four Kirby vacuum cleaner. Now this is actually an amazing piece of machinery. It was very, I'm not gonna sell you one right now, but it was a lot of fun. We had a really good time with it. They also taught me about all these other vacuum cleaners, how to take them apart, why they were inferior, because really the goal was to destroy their vacuum cleaner so that the Kirby looked all shiny, new, and great. And I've learned other things too, like did you know when you're doing door-to-door sales, you should use the door that they commonly use. Like the door they go to. So if you see a door that's all barred up and locked up, they probably don't use that. You wanna knock on the other door because it makes you an insider.  So my first day out selling vacuum cleaners, I came to this house and the front door had this kind of walkway that was gated off with these iron gates. The door was iron and there was like vines growing over everything. So I'm like, obviously they don't use this door, but the garage door was open. And they had a, I feel like you know where this is going. The garage door was open. I'm like, obviously this is the door they use all the time. So I walked in and to my lock, they had a doorbell in their garage. So I pressed it. Now this is 20 years ago.  So I ringed the doorbell and I didn't hear a ding. Instead, what I heard was the garage door start to close. But all I had in my mind was a sales pitch, right? So I didn't think that presence of mind of if I press this button again, it'll probably just start going back up again. So I did what any common sense person would do in that moment. I relived all of my action movie days and I went as much as I could Indiana Jones on this garage door. And so I ran for the door and I dove and barrel rolled under the door. And as I picked myself up and dusted off my jeans and my ego, the guy comes out that gated iron door wondering why somebody was in his garage. Needless to say, I sucked at selling vacuum cleaners. In fact, I never sold one vacuum cleaner. But the truth is we're not here to talk about selling vacuum cleaners. We're here to talk about web forms. And most of us in the same respect suck at building web forms. We're terrible at it. And the reason we're terrible at it is because forms are difficult. It's challenging to build a good form that converts if people wanna fill out and wanna engage with you. The other reason is is because you get all these tips and people to say this is what you should do with your forms, but one size does not fit all. You may need different data than somebody else needs. Your form may require more fields. Your market could be completely and totally different. So what we're gonna talk about today is not about a particular form building plugin. Most of the form building plugins will solve your problem. But what we're gonna talk about is techniques that you can apply using, whatever form plugin you're currently using, or if you're really saucy and wanna just hand code it yourself, like you can apply these techniques even though forms suck, they don't have to. We can get better at it. Because here's what we all truly know, right? We all know forms are important. We know that interaction with our users, our visitors, our customers, it's extremely important. Why is it important? Because forms provide data. Forms give you data. Oh yeah, that is funny. Sorry, I forgot what I even had up there. Oh, forms provide androids that will come and give you, so forms provide data, they provide information for you. And this information, after as collected, day after day, year after year, time after time, actually becomes knowledge. And as we all know, right, knowledge is opportunity, right? It's opportunity. It's an opportunity to do a number of things.  Most people stop with the idea that web forms collect data. So we build forms that look like this. Now this doesn't have any styling, it's just a form, right? And we say, well, if web forms collect data and data produces knowledge and knowledge is opportunity, then I'm gonna ask every single question I can possibly ask. I'm gonna ask, what is there, you know, kids shoe sizes, what is their pet's name, what is, I'm gonna ask as much information as I possibly can. Strangely enough, this is a little cut off in this and I don't, there it is, all right? This is actually a real form, 1200 fields. And this is actually only 25% of it because my GIF screen capture couldn't record more than 25% of me scrolling through this form. It's pretty insane. But the problem is this is where we stop, right? Forms collect data. But that is a very narrow-minded understanding of what forms are. Remember I said I did door-to-door sales for a little while? And here's something that I realized. There was more important than anything else. What I was really trying to do in that first interaction is not sell a vacuum cleaner. What I was really trying to do is get permission into someone's home so that I could sell them a vacuum cleaner. But if I didn't get through the door, I wasn't gonna sell them a vacuum cleaner on the front porch or in their front yard. I needed to get in the door, right? I needed to have that conversation with them. So part of the problem that we have with forms is we don't realize that forms, yes, collect data, but forms are actually a front door to your user and to your user's home and to your user's email. Not to you. We think of forms kind of this one-way road, right? I have a form on my site and you're contacting me. You're coming into my house. You came to my website. You filled out my form and you've come into my house. But that is actually the wrong way to think about it.  Your user's email, they're giving you permission. They're giving you access. What are they giving you permission for? Begin a dialogue, right? You collect data. Data's great. It's great to have all of this data. It's great to have all of this information. It's great to have this opportunity, but if they don't give you permission into your email, what do you got, right?  And so we have to start thinking about our forms a little differently is the fact that they are actually giving us permission into their email and permission to start a conversation. So now users aren't just coming to your website and reading information on your website and hoping they can find what they want. They're giving you data so that you can custom tailor a response, a dialogue to them. So what is our mission then? If we know all of this is the case. Our mission is simple. We want to increase conversions by building better forms, right?  And they're long and they're 1,200 fields. And I don't know about you unless I'm filling out a tax form. I don't want to even do that. That's what I ask a lot of people, like they're like, I need 1,200 fields for my form. And I'm like, are you like doing taxes through your web form? Like this feels like really excessive. So the first thing that I learned when doing door-to-door sales is you want to keep it simple, right? When I was on the door and I knocked on that door, again, I was not trying to sell a vacuum cleaner. I was just trying to get in the door because once I was in the door, we could have a dialogue. We could have a conversation. I could land on the charm. I could tell them some jokes. I could show them how filthy their home was and what a piece of junk their vacuum cleaner was and how great the Kirby was. And we have this conversation and we sell vacuum cleaners. Although I never sold a vacuum cleaner, so we'll see how that goes. So here's a situation of a basic contact form. It seems it'll be a little washed out so you're not seeing the field. That's kind of terrible.  I should have really added a lot more contrast to this. Well, you'll have to imagine the fields underneath those labels. These are two contact forms that I commonly see, right? They ask for first name, last name, an email address, maybe a phone number, message, an anti-span field. Just look at those two forms. Which are you more likely to fill out, right? You're more likely to fill out the one on the right because it's simple, right? Three points of information and you got it. The question you have to ask yourself is can I get the phone number later? Like, do I need it right now? All I really want is permission into their email box. Once I've got that, everything is great. So I just want to get in the front door. This is the most important thing. Here's a common web subscription form. Again, some of the fields are missing, but lots of these newsletter programs, MailChamp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, when they you build a list, they immediately give you first name, last name, email address. And so I think sometimes we think we have to use those. And so we put first name, last name, email address. But do you need their first and last name to send them a newsletter, right? You just need their email address. Chances are you haven't even made those two fields required, so some people are not gonna fill it out anyway and so some people are getting a personalized email and other people are getting dear comma, right? They didn't even use it. So you have to think about those things when you're building your form. So this is so much easier, right? I just type in my email address and go. And now I've given somebody, somebody has given me access into their email box immediately. But I know what you're saying, right? I need long forms. Like, I need 1200 fields. If you don't understand, I'm registering for, like that form, I'm doing a camp registration. And there are like 10 kids per family that might register and I need long forms. The truth is there are times when you need long forms. Hopefully it's not the first time somebody is interacting with you, but somewhere down the road you may need a longer form. So there are ways that we can deal with it. So let's talk about tackling longer forms. First thing you have to ask yourself is, can the data be collected later? Like the phone number field or an address. Do you really need a mailing address in the very first contact or is that something that can be done in a follow-up? And saying, all right, now that I have access, now that you've granted me permission, now that you have started a dialogue with me, I am ready now to say, hey, can I get your phone number? Let's connect on the phone and let's have a phone conversation. Or can I get your mailing address so we can send you some information? We don't need that information right from the very beginning. So can the data be collected later? Remember, these are tips that you can apply to any form. You're not gonna do them to every form, but certain things, you may have to look at your demographic, your user, and kind of test which things work. And you may, for a little while, just pull off a few fields and let's see how this form converts better if I don't ask for this information, knowing that I can get it later. The other thing you need to ask yourself is, can the data be retrieved in the background? Like some of this data, do I even ever have to ask the user for it? So most of the plugins that you will use will probably have some sort of a user analytics extension or a feature built into it. And what that'll let you do is you can collect IP address, you can collect the browser they're using, you can collect what kind of operating system you're using. In some cases, they're latitude, they're longitude, the country that they're in, the state that they're in. Like you can get a lot of data and you never have to put those fields on the form. You don't have to bother your user with this. You can just collect it in the background. But if you do have to have longer forms, there's a few other things that you can do to kind of make that easier. So you can break forms into smaller parts. So instead of having one long, huge form, you can have little microforms that they can step through and see their progress and know exactly where they're at. Oh, I'm on page two, I'm on this section, I've only got six fields, it's not a big deal, and then I'll move on to the next section. There's a TV show that I just recently watched on Netflix where she talks about, you know, you can do everything for 10 seconds. So I just count to 10, and when that time's over, I can't start counting again, because that's a new 10 seconds and I can do anything for 10 seconds. And they just keep doing that over and over again, right? You know exactly what I'm talking about. I couldn't remember the name of the show. Unbreakable someone-someone. Yes. And I thought about that and I think, you know, that's why multi-part forms actually work. So like breaking forms down into multiple parts is because I can handle three fields.  And I see my progress and I can get that information and that's helpful to me. The other thing you can do is allow users to save and return. If you have a really long form, I guarantee at one time what you've done is in the middle of the form you've asked for information that your user does not have on hand at that moment. And so they have two choices. They can try to leave their computer open in that state forever until they can get that data and it's, you know, God forbid that data is in another location, like at home or at the office.  And you can come back and sign in and your data will be there waiting for you. And now when I get that data, I can come back and fill it out because the chances are if you don't have something like that in a long form, they don't wanna come back. Man, I just filled out 50% of your 1,200 fields. All I needed was this information to keep going.  And you may have lost a contact and lost permission into their email. The other thing you can do, which we use a lot, so here's one of our forms. You can collect and present additional information conditionally. This is probably the most important form on our website because this is how people get support. So we have a few options, right? My form or extension's not working as expected.  That's actually my favorite feature, my favorite question. We did that as a joke just to kind of have fun with it and obviously we still get refund requests and that's just the nature of business, but now every one of them has to come back and go, oh, I don't hate it. And I feel so more inclined to refund.  That's awesome. That's actually my favorite question right now. But so we have some stuff. Now these different people, depending on what they answer here, we may need additional information from them. So for instance, if they check the last option, my form works perfectly, we just send them right to the form that you cannot see because of my magical ghosting input borders. But nonetheless, we just give them the form, they can fill it out and they're ready to go. Now, we break some cardinal rules here, right? We asked for first name and last name and I said, do you really need a first name and last name? You can just say name. But they want support so they're just gonna fill it out. Our form's a little different. That's why I said one form doesn't fit all. People who are reaching out to us want us in their home. They want us in their email box and so they'll pretty much fill out anything we ask for, generally. I have to say that because, or I have to take that back because we many times don't get information we ask for. But if you pick the other option, this is one of my favorites, right? My former extension isn't working as I expected to. So now we say, all right, well what's your request regarding? So we have like top five, six, seven issues that we know they probably have an issue with and if they click that, click that, we can just give them their answer. We don't have to give them a form, we don't have to give them a submit button. Why bother them to submit the form? We can just give them the answer, just present that information conditionally. But of course in all cases, maybe it's not working even with the solution. They check that box and we give them the form and they can, we grant them permission, if you will. Now regardless of whether you're using longer forms or short forms or some other things that I would highly recommend that you do to increase conversions of your forms. One of those is remove captures. Here's the thing, and I feel pushback. By the way, I have a couple more hoodies back. If you can solve that equation, just come see me and I will give you a hoodie. No, I'll just give you a hoodie if you get, take a gas. I have no idea what the answer to that question is. Remove captures, here's the thing, they're terrible. They're annoying. They're actually, the whole point of a capture is to make it hard to fill out your form. Why would you do that to your users, right? Now I know what you're saying, but I don't wanna get spam. Well first of all, let me explain. Here's another reason why you don't wanna use captures. My partner Kevin used to do, teach some classes at the public library in our hometown. He would work with people, it was kind of like an elderly workshop. I don't know, I don't wanna offend anyone. I don't even know, I'm afraid to even say what I'm saying. It's like anywhere from like 50 to 70 years old and they're wanting to get into tech, right? So they're asking, so one of the things he might do is say, I wanna sign you up for Gmail. And so he'd have everybody set up and set up their own Gmail account, get them in the email. Well at the time Gmail had this really hard capture and none of them could answer the questions. So he'd have a room of 20 people that he'd have to go, computer to computer and enter the capture for them and most of the time he couldn't get it right. Captures are terrible. So what do we do then? We wanna prevent spam. There's a great technique that we use on all of our forms and we get zero spam and it's a simple thing called a honeypot field. And now there are, certainly there are ways that that can be broken but I have, we get tons of traffic and we get zero spam so I have to assume the honeypot is doing something really, really well. Here's the basic idea of a honeypot because you're gonna say I don't understand what that concept is. A honeypot is simply a hidden field hidden generally by CSS and when bots come to fill out your form and you get all that spam, ugly spam, it just generally fills out every field it sees. Every field it comes to, it's just blah, blah, blah, here's my answer, here's my answer, here's my answer and it submits it. A honeypot is hidden and it says basically, I don't wanna be filled out and if you fill it out, the form fails. It just says okay, this is spam because somebody filled this field out and they shouldn't have but because they can't see it. So how did they fill it out? It's a bop, right? So that's basically how a honeypot works. The other thing is it's actually accessible too because there's text in there that tells people if you're using a reader that says hey, this is a honeypot, don't fill it out. Like this field is not meant to be filled out and then they know so this is an accessible solution as well and you don't have to have any of that information on there so that's I think crucial. Most plugins will have some sort of a honeypot solution. It's basically a field that just gets added to your form like a first name field or an email field and while you may see it in your form builder on the front end, nobody sees it. Completely hidden. I have found it, I would never say anything is 100% effective but I don't get a lot of spam and like I said, we have tons and tons of traffic. Was that? 99.9. 99.9 maybe, I don't know. I'm not comfortable putting a percentage on it but here's the thing too.  Like what's more important to you? So you have to kind of gauge that and then consider your market when you're deciding do I put a capture, do I do a math question on there? We've used math questions before and we've put a little excerpt on there that says really we're not trying to test your math skills. Like we try to keep it as simple as possible. Although I have gotten some wrong that were really basic multiple times because I wasn't looking at it right. The other thing you wonder when doing your forms regardless of the length is your form structure. Now we get a lot of questions. Now you can't see this, this is the worst one. This is the worst one. So I have to explain this slide. I had no idea what I was getting into. I have to explain the slide. So in this form right here it says name and then right next to it is a field and then down is email and next to it is a field. Message, next to it is a field. This one just straight down the line name, email, field. So you have labels left positioned to your input field and you have labels above position. Now a lot of people say oh I want my labels left positioned and their theory is right, it makes the form look smaller. Shorter, like in comparison one is shorter than the other but here is the thing you have to consider when you're doing that and that's eye tracking. Like when you're looking at a form what are you visually seeing? It actually takes seven points of eye tracking to look at this form because you're going from label to field, you can't even see it in one shot. So it's label to field, label field, label field to submit where in this other form I can go straight down the form and I can generally see my label and my field in one shot. So you have to think about that, think about the structure of your forms as well when you're talking about conversions. Yes? Say that again? Removing labels in place of placeholder text. That's a solution. I generally am not in fan of using placeholder text instead of labels. There's a number of reasons, accessibility reasons are one. Also depending on how your placeholders are configured, when you click in there you lose the label so now you have to sometimes click out to see what am I filling out here, I forgot. And so that tends to not be a great user experience but it's certainly a way and I would say it depends on the market. So some users may just be fine with that and they don't care about it. So you have to kind of think of your market who you're trying to attract and what will be most appealing to them. I would test it. Like I would do some A-B testing and say all right let's see what's going on here if I do this, what kind of advantages do I get from that. But generally speaking I've never seen labels done in a above the field effect of form inversely and placeholders end up actually being really helpful because my next point is add descriptions and placeholders, right? Like if you're asking for questions and maybe you're unsure the user may not know what to enter, tell them. Add a description so you can say hey we're looking for this information. So in my name field I'm asking for your first and last name. I'm not asking for a nickname, I'm not asking for, I wanna know what is your first and last name. But you can also put a placeholder text so that's my email address in there is placeholder text. Those are options. I would generally use placeholders to guide users as to what to fill not to act as labels for the field itself would be my advice. The other thing you can do is use different texts for your submit buttons. It has actually statistically been proven that the terms like submit and send convert less than actual actionable texts. So what are you trying to do? Are you trying to start a conversation? Are you trying to fill out an application? Are you giving them access to something? Are you trying to give them something for free? Like sometimes just changing the text to something actionable will actually help them entice them to submit that form even more. So this is actually an interesting experiment that I play with like what are the actions? What are you actually trying to get your user to do? This is a really important one and this is one that I see missed a lot. Make your forms mobile friendly. Now this is a really easy fix in almost all cases but you have two forms here. You can kind of see the field that's selected here and over there the field that's selected username. I think it's selected over here, it's the subject. And you can see the keyboard's up so we're already ready to start filling out that form. But one is just a singular column and what you can't tell from the look here is this form is actually bleeding off of the page. So you can actually now scrolling all over the place with the form. So the submit button's over here, you're scrolling over there to get it and it's really bad. Simple fix, right? Your form fields should have a font of 16 points or better because most mobile devices, when you click on that field, it's going to zoom in and make up the difference if it's not at a 16 point font and so you get that kind of weird zoom in on your form. And if you don't wanna do that which is really kind of annoying to me, for the longest time I had no idea what was causing it and I'm like why does my forms keep zooming in?  Selects as well, so if you have a select box and you don't have that to a 16 point, you'll zoom in, you'll still get the little selector but you zoom in, 16.5 or 16 pixels. You wanna make sure that you have that and that will actually prevent that kind of weird zoom in and effect. And another thing you can do, real simply, provide a privacy policy. You're asking your users for data and you're asking them to trust them with your email address, maybe their phone number, whatever other information there may be. Provide a privacy policy that tells them explicitly what you plan on doing, what are your intentions with them and you can do it with just a link to a privacy policy, you can actually put that privacy policy right in the form if you want to but just telling them, hey, we're not gonna sell your email address, we're not gonna do bad things, we're not gonna sign you up for porn websites, we're not gonna do any of these things, right? We're just going to start a dialogue and that's all we're gonna do. Here's your information is safe with us and finally, the best way to increase your form conversions is offer something in return. People like getting free things and if you give them something free and if they know at the end of that submission, at the end of that data submit, I'm going to get something out of it, they are more likely to fill out that form and give you information. In the beginning of this talk, I handed out some sweatshirts and I asked some questions, some more personal, like your pets and things like that.  So maybe you wanna give them, maybe you have a white paper on a particular topic that's interesting to your users and you can give that away a free. That's kind of an enticing way to get in that. Maybe you have a whole series of content that you wanna drip out to them in your industry and you wanna help them out, that kind of thing will help them fill out your form and convert better. So that's it, that's why your web form sucks, how you can make it better. My name again is James Laws, here's how you can contact me, James Laws on Twitter, JamesLaws.com, WPNinja.com or NinjaForms.com and for now, I'm done. We'll open up for questions and answers. So you mentioned form point 16.5. Generally across the board, I haven't even noticed a big difference. Now granted, I have to be honest, I'm on iOS, we have a few Android users, your Android, yeah, 16.5 is generally, and I said 16 point, sorry, not 16.5, I didn't know if I clarified, I just might have slurred that. So 16 pixel or 16 point font is preferable. These are, we talked about long forms, a form that isn't that complicated, something that I wouldn't use contact seven or possibly gravity forms for, would NinjaForms? Yeah, if you're doing a basic contact form, so there's so many things going out there. So if you're just doing a basic contact form, for instance, Jetpack is here, Jetpack comes bundled with a contact form, so if you're already using Jetpack, it has a contact form, and if that's all you need is those basic fields and no customizations, that works great. NinjaForms can work in gravity forms, they're both work, and there's FormablePro and it's called AirForms, there are hundreds of form plug-ins and they will all work for the basic forms. Like they're all gonna work for a basic contact form. I think where you start to see yourself needing is when you get into things where you need conditionals, where you need breaking your forms into multiple parts, where you need to accept payments on your form, things like that, you start to move into where you need to work, you need a more robust system. Now the other reason you might use a gravity forms, right, the other reason you might use a gravity forms on NinjaForms is just simply because you want the drag and drop interface, right?  Yeah, like Content4Seven, you're doing kind of all this code and it's like you're like, I don't even know what this means and like with gravity or an engine, you just, you add your field and you're done. Like it's pretty simple. Generally I suggest that's best done in the theme than the form. Like if you have a theme and you wanna break your page up and divide your page so sidebar and content or you wanna divide your content up in some sort of a grid layout, so you have two columns, that's better done in the theme than trying to force the form into that confines of that. So I would suggest working with some sort of, some something with your theme to do that. It's probably a better solution than actually trying to make the form be like, okay, here's a graphic and content and here's the form. Most forms can do it though. I mean, most forms offer some sort of a text element and if you know a little CSS, you can do a lot and sometimes they will also have certain things that let you style your forms in the UI. Yes, you can. And again, I come back to being platform agnostic on this. Almost all of the larger form plugins will allow you to put text and images and other content right into your form. Absolutely. Yes. Collect all that data. Collect all that data and use that. I can tell you, this is something that we, like for Ninja Forms, it's something that we want to build a better reporting extension so to speak that can kind of collect that data and let you report on data based on that information. But I can tell you Ninja Forms doesn't have anything specific for that at this time. I know there's some, was that? You can export a CSV and do run different things in a spreadsheet and do it that way. Yeah. And that's a solution, but right, it's kind of a, it's not an ideal solution. It would be great to have something right in the dashboard that you could just say, hey, I want to filter and look at these reports based on very specific criteria. I know some gravity folks people are here. Do you guys have a reporting, any kind of reporting in gravity forms? I think we don't, but. So it's more specific for a use case than just general all submissions reporting. And I think you're gonna see more of those things getting built probably into gravity and Ninja Forms. I think that's a need for a lot of users who want to get that data and maybe more generic and maybe even build their own report because they have very custom needs for their data that's coming in. Pieces of data that they have not already submitted to you. Yes, there's a few ways of doing that. Zach, do you want to talk to that? Because I see you nodding. Yeah, we have an extension. If you, if they're logged into your site and you already have their email address that they can pre-populate anything attached to their user meta and we're under the stats. That's probably the easiest way to do it. And there's other ways with like some small code snippets or conditional logic or different things that you can add or manipulate the values in the form too. Yeah. Because that's another way of limiting the amount of information that shows up. You can just ask for what you need like you don't already have. Yeah, and matter of fact, a lot of times what we'll do is we'll have hidden fields that actually populate that data. It still sends us the data, but it's hidden. So they don't even have to see it and change it. We just get that data automatically because they're logged in. Absolutely, yes.  I don't have any colors.  But Formstack actually does not long ago came out with a whole big survey of their forms and what they, you know, the conversion numbers and how just removing this field increased conversions for this particular company by such and such a percentage. So I don't have hard fast numbers but if you just search form conversion in Formstack there is a Google article, there's an article that you can find there that they did that kind of has some numbers for some basic industries. So yeah, yes. I'm going back. Yeah, so there's a few ways you can do that, right? So once you have permission into their email, you probably, I would think you've subscribed them to a mailing list, so you have all of your users and so you can be very strategic about the next emails that come out. I know Mailchimp just recently has edited the ability to do some very specific dripping of content as it goes, right? Like you could say, okay, when I get this email I want to do this in two weeks and then three weeks I want to do this and four weeks I want to do this for a particular customer. So setting something up like that I think would be actually ideal because you get their form, you've gotten permission and then you just turn around and send them a tailored email for the next step. But by getting that initial data and getting that initial contact they're a lot more likely. I wouldn't, my general opinion is I wouldn't the very next time ask for data. I would just have a conversation and kind of soften the water so to speak and then the next time I can come back and say, hey, now that we've had the success if you're interested, if what I've said interests you here's some other information that we'd like to get from you so we can do this. And tell them what you're doing. I mean, when you're asking for information it's really important to ask why I'm asking for this information and that can be very helpful. How do you feel about pop-up forms, like the forms that you get a blogging form? Like automatic pop-ups? I detest automatic pop-up forms. Now here's the thing, there's some great plugins for it. Actually we have one that does a little bit of like pop-up and I don't use it because I don't like it. I feel like most time users don't like it but the numbers show OptinMonster is a plugin that you might look at that does this for subscriptions and their numbers seem to show that people do it. Like it increases their sign-ups and stuff. So I think that's something you have to test with your own users and find out what kind of pushback you get. We had it for a little while on Ninja Forms and we got a lot of flak for it so we were like, nope, mix, done. Pop-up forms in general are also fairly bad experience on mobile devices. So if you're on a mobile phone and you're going to a sign-up that has a pop-up form, the form doesn't look right on a mobile device. So the majority of your users are on a mobile, it's not gonna be a good experience if it's a pop-up form. What did you change? I broke it. I don't know what I did. There we go. Yes? All right, so you're saying like what is an OptinMonster? That's supposed to be pretty awesome, right? Yeah. So that's not a very good user experience as far as the numbers are concerned. So I would think retargeting is probably a better option to promote conversion. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so things like OptinMonster, pop-up control and different things like that, someone can actually, you can do some segmentation and look at the specific actions. So I don't generally like I come to a website and immediately, bam, I'm hit with a form and I don't even know what I'm looking at yet. Like that puts me off pretty fast. But if I'm doing something and I take a specific action and that pop-up is for that specific action and I can see that it's related to the action that I took, that is something I'm more likely to look into. I don't know of a lot of plugins that do that really well, but ExitIntent is kind of an example of that. Oh, I'm getting ready to click the X, although I get falses on that all the time where I'm like, I'm just trying to click on your menu, stop showing me a pop-up. Like your menu's at the top of your page, of course I'm scrolling up there. Yeah, oh, I see what you're saying. So is it more effective to say, hey, ask for a little information in a very passive way and then as I continue that conversation, I can get more data. Is that more effective than just bam in their face with pop-ups? I would generally say yes. And the reason I say that is because they have grant, again, we talked about it's getting in their home, getting in their email, they've granted you permission. But when that pop-up comes up, I have no relationship with you yet. I've not given you any permission and now it's not like it's kind of, using the door-to-door salesman concept, it's kind of like not only did you knock on my door, but when I didn't answer, you went around and started knocking on my windows.  I said no. I didn't answer my door for a reason. So if you have a form on your site and I want to access you, I'm going to come and I'm going to fill that out. If I didn't come to it, Kansas Army, I'm not going to go to it. You can do nice, gentle nudges and not so in your face. Yes? We're creating a post? Yeah. Yeah, we have a front-end post creator plugin that basically you can add a title field, a content field. You can map any field, a custom post meta. So if you have very unique needs for it, you can map all that stuff and any time the form is submitted successfully, you can go ahead and do that. You can also pair that with a payment gateway and say, hey, I want them to pay to submit content and only when the successful payment will go through, will it go. And that can also be saved as a draft to be checked later so you can approve it so you don't just post everything to your site. You can say, okay, this is a draft and I need to review that. Just clarify, if you want to write your custom post type, you have to create the custom post type first. It won't create the custom post type. Yes. We collect the data. That's all we do. And we will put it where you want us to put it. But yes, if you have a custom post type, you would first register that post type and we can connect any of that data. Anything else? Patrick? Do you know any... So like I'm looking at my newsletter sign up form and the wages in the sign bar has a 0.03 conversion rate which just does not sound good. Like do I need to offer something? Do I... It's only first in an email. Right. Submit button. Right. What do I need to do? I'm guessing too that that's probably on every page. That's on every page. I think there is a level of scarcity increases conversion. Like if it's on every page, it's so common I just ignore it. I'm most compliant to it. How many of us ignore ads? Like you see like they have sidebar ads. They're like those 125 pixel ads. I won't even look at them anymore. We just know that's an ad. I'm ignoring it. Like I think that happens with sidebar forms as well. I think when they're so common, I would rather see something like at the top of the page as a call to action or at the bottom of a single page and direct them to that. So I think there is scarcity kind of breeds a little bit more higher conversion I think in a lot of ways. Anyone else? Sidebar which of course everybody involved. You know, is there something like that? Absolutely. I mean I think every one of the form plugins will allow you to do something like that. So you can either in your template file, you actually just call the function for that particular form and it'll display out there. Or if they have widgets and you have like after entry widgets which some lot of themes will put in, you can put that widget in there and it'll show up at the bottom of every post. We do that on NinjaForms.com and WPNinjas.com we sign them up. So the newsletter's there. So after you read the content, hey if you like us and you liked what you read, maybe you want to fill out some more. So absolutely. I think the difference between a sidebar is it's that high priority and it's in that kind of, I think the sidebar gets dismissed a lot. Lot of content and not just forms. I think lots of content in the sidebar just gets dismissed because we kind of know that that's the garbage collection. It's like here's all the things that I think everybody wants to see on every single page of my site and so I'm just gonna throw it all in the sidebar so we ignore it. By putting it at the end of the post what you do is you kind of get them in that linear idea. Like I've read this article and now here's a call to action to get more information. I really like this article, but I don't want to go to this website every single time to get this article. I may sign up for their newsletter and get that information. So I think there is something there that says it's almost like a call to action after the fact. Instead of before on every single page, here's our form, yeah. Yes. So on that is there a way to identify which posts they were actually reading at the time? So there is. So with Ninja Forms we have default values and so one of the default values is the page or post title or the paste or post idea. I think most of the other plugins have that as well. So again, I want to keep that as agnostic as possible. Most of them will probably have that. You should ask if that's a critical need. You might want to ask first before purchasing something because you want to make sure it fits your purpose. And I would generally put that in a hidden field, yeah. So you add a hidden field to your form and you say, hey, I just want to collect when this form is submitted, send me the page title or post title with that content so that I know. And like I said, you can use ID as well if you have more programmatic reasons for using that. You could also use the ID. So anything else? I think that's kind of my time. Is that what they said, 45 minutes? All right, awesome. If you have any other questions about forms, about anything else, we'd be happy to help us. Just check out, look for the red hoodies unless it's somebody that I just gave a red hoodie to. All right, you have all, if you have a hoodie, you've been commissioned. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.


Brigadier General William Billy Mitchell, also known as the Father of the Air Force, conducted experiments for aerial bombing of watercraft off the Virginia Capes on July 21, 1921. This was a monumental demonstration that air power would dominate enemies in the air, land, and sea.


Okay, why don't we go ahead and get started if you guys could settle down. So before I jump in, let me do two housekeeping announcements. First, many of you, I've said this privately, but just officially say once, well I've got y'all here for this last big talk that I'm giving. I'm at the Free Market Institute, which is located at Texas Tech University and it's a PhD granting program. So if you're interested in getting a PhD in economics and you wanna study with faculty and even do a dissertation that is Austrian, then we're a program you might wanna check out. We have funding and so forth. So I just wanted to officially say, the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech, check that out if that pertains to you. The other housekeeping announcement, just wanna talk about this for a second. So this is, yeah. All right, so this isn't a joke. There's good news and there's bad news. We just wanna be transparent. Unlike the GOP healthcare approach, we're gonna be fully transparent here. So the good news is we wanna make sure you know what this is. It's not like these are students who love Austrian economics and they also like to play around with the guitar in the garage once well. These are professional musicians coming in. They play in California, New York City, Nashville and they've come here for this event. They also happen to be libertarians and love Austrian economics and economics in general. That's why they associate with me. And so that's what they're here. But again, these are professional musicians that they're sure we're gonna put on. The problem is we just found out about this yesterday. There's an issue. I'm hoping it doesn't matter. I'm still gonna talk to you later. But it's possible that with the venue, they're having some trouble with the city and the fire code. And so it's conceivable that we can't get everybody in there all at the same time. So what we're doing is for sure, if you're going bring your name badge so that, cause we're telling the bouncers, okay, make sure the only people you let in are our people to at least make sure it's all our group. I'm not saying you have to wear it like walking around on a Friday night. I like Austrian economics. You don't have to do that. You know, girls, you can put it in your purse along with the six billion other things you have in there. I didn't really understand that situation. But okay, so just wanna make sure. So if especially it's a, the venue's gonna be great. I'm not trying to discourage you. It's gonna be awesome. We got a nice stage. There's a big dance floor. So especially if you're eager to dance tonight, come out. But the sooner you get there, the better in terms of making sure we get in there. And also, if you do happen to get there and you can't get it. I mean, there's plenty of stuff on Auburn on a Friday night. Where this place is, it's literally right around the corner from where Sky Bar is for those of you who've been going out there, right? So if you get there and you can't get in right that moment, you know, there's all kinds of stuff you can be doing. Maybe later, somebody else will be. It's sort of like fractional reserve banking, unfortunately, all right? Fractional reserve concert. All right. Okay, so today we're talking about the market for security just to clarify what this is. It's a, you know, a lot of these ideas we've been talking about, private is eight of things. And sometimes, you know, you take the logic and say, all right, a lot of people say, yeah, sure, I get post office, clearly free market incentives work there. Entrepreneurship, you don't need a monopoly. Even roads, not a big deal. Schools, clearly, okay, all this stuff you can think about charity, sure thing. But a lot of people when it comes to the law, you know, police protection, legal opinions, legal ruling, so forth, it seems like that clearly has to be something issued by a monopoly agency, right? And military defense also, that seems like something where yikes, I don't know about, you know, just turning that over to the free market, that seems kind of scary, all right? So this is, we do this later in the week and we don't want to scare you away early on. I think at this point, most people are familiar with this. It's not so radical. I do want to say though, it was about, this was over 10 years ago. I went to, I was still a grad student at the time and it was like Wednesday night or something and people are all sitting around talking. And there was this woman who was middle age that was, you know, there attending and she, in the middle of the conversations, I mean, the stuff I'm hearing this place is pretty radical. It's like, this sounds like anarchy. And everyone was like, awkward, you know, so. All right, so let's go ahead and just, let me just say as a blanket announcement, I mean, it is, I'm gonna try to focus on the positive case, another like building the stuff up and showing you how it would work. But again, for those of you who went to my economics of the stateless society talk, it's funny that the burden of proof is on us. Now here, it's more understandable why that's the case, but all the problems we have with monopoly and having the political system in charge of some service, that all still applies here. So it's always the case when, you know, you're in this situation thinking about one versus the other, there are all those standard reasons why other things equal. You would certainly want to have a service provided not by one group that's suddenly ordained to have the monopoly and be in charge of this. And also think of it this way, if you would be leery about letting the state be in charge of wheat production or healthcare, you know, because, oh geez, those are really important things. I wouldn't want, I wouldn't want a bunch of politicians in charge of whether I get fed or not.  These are pretty important things too. And so it's weird that if you wouldn't trust them to be in charge of lollipop production because they would screw it all up, they can be in charge of nuclear weapons, all right? So I'll say that just as the outset to frame it, but now I will take these obvious objections head on because again, this is obviously more difficult, both conceptually and practically than some of the other things like having mail delivery be privately produced. Another thing just that confuses people sometimes, so I personally am very sympathetic to pacifism coming from the Christian tradition and sometimes that confuses people. They say, Bob, you wrote a lot about private law and military defense, but I thought you, there really is nothing, there's no contradiction there and the reason I'm stressing it is just because I wanna make sure part of what you get from me says you is the distinction between what libertarian theory says and what your own personal value system is. So let me just quickly use an analogy.  Libertarian theory doesn't say it should be a crime to use heroin, right? So libertarian theory says you can't put someone in jail or use other kinds of physical force to prevent someone from using heroin or being a heroin addict, but that doesn't mean we have to say, hey, I'm not judging, do whatever you want, right? It's not just like the difference between vanilla and chocolate ice cream. It could be, I can't prove to you necessarily that it isn't like that, but the point is libertarian theory, per se, isn't about that sort of question, just about the acceptable use of force in certain situations. When are you allowed to use force to stop somebody from doing something? So I personally, even though I'm gonna be talking about this stuff, would not probably pay a lot of money to private defense agencies that are gonna use missiles and so forth in a free society, and I would be free to do that. I wouldn't be taxed to fund something, but as an economist, I can tell you what I think the market would likely look like. Just like as an economist, I could say if they legalized drugs tomorrow, here's what the market would look like. Well, they probably wouldn't legalize it on a Saturday. It'll probably wait till Monday, but if they legalized drugs on Monday, I could tell you as an economist what that market would look like, and it certainly wouldn't be me endorsing the consumers in that market. I'm just telling you what it would look like. All right. So I'm gonna spend more time, I think, in this talk on private law rather than private defense because to me, the conceptual challenge with this stuff comes with private law, right? Whereas if you stipulate that framework, if you just for a minute assume you could have voluntary relationships when it comes to legal rulings and so forth, or at least what would that mean to talk about introducing competition in the legal system? How could that work? I think that's the thing where there's the real stumbling block, right? Just the idea of the rule of law sounds like there's gotta be one agency that promulgates it, whereas military defense, that seems more like a practical problem. And so that's part of the emphasis I'm gonna give here in this talk. Before I forget, let me just mention, in case you want further reading, because at the end I might be rushed and I might forget to say it. So, Ethics of Liberty is a great spot for this sort of thing. Hans Hoppe has essays on private defense. I have a pamphlet called Chaos Theory, you can look up, I also have it, in essay called The Possibility of Private Law. Okay, so that's some reading where here I'm obviously gonna have to just skim over some of these topics quickly just to give you a broad taste of it, but those are some things for further reading. Okay, one way of trying to approach this is I wanna disarm you a little bit because admittedly things like, gee, you wanna have the rule of law, right? It seems crazy, how could there possibly be 19 different legal codes? I can see how there'd be competition in the fast food industry, and you've got Burger King, you've got Taco Bell, you've got all this stuff, but it seems weird. What does it even mean to say that we don't want a state monopoly when it comes to the legal code? So let me try to get you out of that mindset by showing you we don't have a monopoly in other areas where that same objection superficially might seem to work, but then it's pretty silly you can see, all right? So for example, when it comes to the science, so something like physics, we don't have a monopoly. It's not like there's a world government body that says this is what the acceptable body is that promulgates physics. Physics is a science, a field of open entry, right? But notice it's not haphazard, right? You could go around, there is a fact of the matter, a consensus, let's put it that way, of who the authorities are, right? That word authority, we can say there are authorities when it comes to physics right now, but it's clearly not based on coercion, right? It's not that they're in charge because ultimately they have more guns than anybody else, and I don't wanna dwell too long on it right now, and also even scientists might ultimately disagree philosophically about what's the nature, what constitutes that authority, how do they get it, and how do they demonstrate it, and why do people defer to them? But I hope we can all agree that, yes, there are people who are, the community would recognize and say they know a lot about physics, and these other people don't, and even within the physicists themselves. Of course there might be peddling rivalries and they might disagree and say, this guy's a genius, and somebody else will say, nah, he's a fraud, but there they would be petty personal disagreements. They would realize that yes, this person knows the standard stuff. He knows basic physics compared to some person off the street, all right? And again though, notice that there's no coercion involved there, and even though, and also throughout history times when science has been politicized, and we've seen this even in relatively free Western countries, right, with climate change debate and so on, but there's more famous examples of the Soviet Union and biology and so on about the politicization of science, and clearly that's not good for science, right? So the scientists themselves recognize you ultimately don't want state coercion involved in this stuff. They might say, oh, I wanna get my subsidies and so on, that's just because they want money. You can see how having political authorities say who are the good scientists and who are bad, that even scientists would recognize that wouldn't be a good idea, and of course, I think we all recognize throughout history that wasn't necessary. All right, so you might say, okay, fine, I grant you, you don't need this monopoly agency in charge of running science, and notice, science is very orderly, okay? It improves over time. I think we all agree that scientists know more now about physics and chemistry than the scientists from 1800 did. So there's definite progress there. There's open entry, so there's clearly a sense of freedom into the field of science. So typical arguments about why we need one group in charge of issuing legal pronouncements or deciding who owns that house over there, you realize, okay, if you thought that, if you thought there needs to be one group that has a monopoly to be able to say who's the legal owner of that house across the street, because otherwise it would be anarchy and people would be fighting and there would be no consensus. We wouldn't know, this group would say, Jim Smith owns that house and I'm saying, that sounds superficially plausible, like yeah, how could private legal systems work if different people are claim, and so again, what I'm just trying to say is, notice how silly that worry would be in the context of science, that well, gee, what if some physicists are saying that the moon has more mass than the sun and other ones are saying, how would we know? All right, are we gonna go measure it? That would be silly, you would realize, well yeah, maybe you couldn't really explain how they do know, but I think you realize that yeah, physicists are pretty sure about which is more massive than the other and there's no real fundamental disagreement on that and they didn't need to settle it with guns back in 1972, that they settled that question. Just like Tom and I like how sometimes people talk about states' rights and they say, wasn't that settled by the Civil War? What kind of argument is that? But all right, that's a separate thing. Now you might say, all right, I get your analogy, Murphy, with science, but the reason that's not a great analogy is that science, those are laws of nature that you're talking about, so there's experimental evidence if one physicist is saying one thing and somebody else is saying something else, there's experiments, you can make observations, it's empirical and so that's not really a great analogy for private legal rulings where to say who owns that house, that's not like a fact of the world, the way the mass of the moon is kind of an objective fact. So that's not really a great analogy. Okay, what about then the definitions of words? That's clearly not a fact of nature, that's a human convention, right? Humans through our actions, our speaking patterns and writing patterns, we determine collectively in some sense what words mean, right? And notice it evolves over time. If you try to read Shakespeare, it's clearly English but it's a different kind of English from what people right now with their LOLs and so forth, right?  No, at any given time, there is a fact of the matter to see is this sentence grammatical, there's a fact of the matter, okay? And now also, I mean, you can push this analogy as far as you want and actually I think language is a pretty good analogy for legal codes because it has all the, or it has several of the attributes that you would want where there's clear cut cases, you know, say, I've done gone to the store today, that's clearly not grammatical, right?  Some people might say, oh, that's ungrammatical. You can't end a sentence with a preposition. Other people would say, eh, actually, a lot of people do it and the usage has made it change. It's fine. Or with whom shall I go to the store today? You know, some people say, I can say with who, it's fine, right? So I'm saying there's disagreements there and at any given time, some people might be sticklers, but so it's, I think it's very analogous to private law where there's certain things that are clear cut that the community is gonna recognize immediately. Any expert in the field is gonna say, yeah, you're just out in the park and some mother's pushing her baby in the stroller and you pick up a rock and go and drop it on the baby, that's illegal, that's against the law, right? And no serious legal scholar is gonna say otherwise and you can say, well, how would you know that? Well, how do you notice that I done gone at the store today is wrong? You know it's wrong, how do you know it's wrong? You know what I'm saying? So it's, we can get real philosophical, but there's no doubt that just going and dropping rocks on babies is wrong, okay?  So by the way, one of the baby crawlers, he's got a lot of drool going on. So I'm just saying this. I don't wanna get in on this jacket. All right, so, okay, but I'm being serious. So you see there, whereas it's sort of like, okay, what if somebody is running at me with a knife? Can I punch him or something? And I think probably most legal scholars in the kind of culture that we're talking about, with a lot of us, let's assume we're talking about the United States, if everyone read Rothbard all of a sudden and just went anarcho-capitalist, what kind of legal system would arise in that framework, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about right now. So in some other culture where people had vastly different religious views and it might be different what a private legal system would produce, but I have in mind something like Western Europe or the United States, if the major change was simply, they thought, oh yes, we don't need to use coercion in the legal system. Let's try and make everything voluntary with a market. But other than that, they had their same opinions about property rights, all right? So in that kind of a framework, I believe at least early on in the first few decades of that type of a system, clearly all the reputable judges, the ones who had business who were working as judges would agree if somebody is run up to me with a knife and is trying to kill me and I pop them or something that that's not, I haven't committed a crime. They say, no, that's justifiable self-defense. Now where they might start to say, what if somebody's running up to me and they don't have any weapon and I pull out a gun and shoot them in the head, now it starts to get a little bit grayer, right? That's kind of like saying, do I have to say with whom shall I go to the store and some people might disagree? Okay, so I'm trying to show you that that's the kind of disagreements where there would be. So it's not that when I say there would be a fact of the matter and consensus, I mean on real standard, easy to answer black and white questions and then there would be gray areas. But notice, in case that troubles you, you're like, aha, see, there wouldn't be a rule of law in your system. You're already admitting there'd be, well there's disagreement right now, right? If you go and even in the United States, there's not the rule of law meaning the same rules apply to everybody. In certain states, you can get the death penalty, in other states you can't, okay? In certain states, one type of thing might be a crime altogether, in other states it might like the legal drinking age or something could be different theoretically. Okay, so notice there's not the rule of law and certainly if you start going from country to country around the world, things are different. Okay, so introducing the state and that apparatus doesn't give us the rule of law anyway. The way, if what you mean by that is every single human being has to have the same laws applied to them and later in the lecture, I might come back to this point but when you start thinking through, okay, yeah, but I really would like as much as possible for there to be consensus in the same rules. I think actually a market would give you that more so than the state system because with the state system, often what can happen is the groups in contiguous regions might have elections that only pertain there and then the representatives could go past the law so you could have fundamental differences from this state to that state, like can places sell beer on Sunday and you just go two miles and all of a sudden the rules totally change, right? And so that kind of thing I don't think would differ just like opinions on grammar and so on, you wouldn't think would have such quick, sharp distinction if you just go two miles one way and all of a sudden things are totally different, generally speaking. Okay, you might say, all right, I get your dictionary analogy. Let me say one more thing about this because this is again, I think the best analogy for picking something that's obvious we can all think about, what does a dictionary itself do, right? The actual dictionary, the publishers of dictionaries, are they defining words, right? So if Webster's publishes a new edition and it comes out and you look up the word UP, UP and it says moving towards the floor, would you say, whoa, I had no idea, right? You wouldn't do that. You would say they got the definition wrong.  And people would like tweet it around and make fun of them. Nobody would say I was, I stand corrected.  Webster's gets the definition wrong, right? They would be a laughing stock. They would have to quickly correct it. What if for some reason they didn't and what if that error or that type of error was for more obscure words where it wasn't obvious to people what the word meant but actually they were giving what the experts said. What the heck? No, that's clearly not what that word means, right? Like what if they had oxymoron? Paul Krugman, right? That might seem plausible to many people but you'd realize, no, that's not the definition. What is it? So what would happen? Webster's would go out of business. They would stop being the go-to people that publish dictionaries. It's not that all of a sudden people wouldn't know what words meant. It just means that company would go out of business. They would have for some foolish reason squandered their position and some other authority would rise to fill the vacuum and people would go to them, okay? So again, notice there, it's not that the people publishing dictionaries or style manuals for grammar usage, you know when you're writing a term paper and you say, oh gee, let me go see. The teacher wants me to use the Chicago manual and you go look up how do I cite things for the works that I cite? What's the format? Do I put the author for it? Do I put it the date parentheses? What do I, that stuff, yeah, there are facts to the matter. There are conventions, but again, if somebody botched that and started just saying stuff that was totally wrong, they would fall away. And notice also that again, there's competition within there. It provides uniformity, but then if there's some new standard that arises and eventually people say, yeah, actually that's more convenient, right? I've even noticed that in my career, the way we cite papers has changed, right? Now you just do like the author's name in the year in parentheses. It looks kind of ugly compared to the old school way, but it's more efficient, right? It's easier just to look things up that way than having a footnote or something and saying Ibbid.  So again, it might seem like I'm saying something kind of trivial, but that's a crucial point that Paul Krugman is not an oxymoron right now. The crucial point is that the companies that codify these things, that's what they're doing, they're codifying definitions. They're saying what the community knows these definitions are through their usage patterns, all right? So similarly, in a private legal system, if some judge has people come before him or her arguing a case, what is the judge doing? The judge is rendering an opinion, right? Notice that's the actual word we use. Even in our current system, the judge writes an opinion saying this is my interpretation of the relevant facts of this case and how the law applies to this particular dispute. That's what a judge does in principle, in essence, and that's what a judge would do even in a private legal system, all right? So I'll come back to this in a minute. So how would the judge know what the law was? Well, they would go to school, just like now how do experts in grammar know what the right word usage is? Well, because they study it and so on, and there's books written on it by authorities. But again, it's not that any one group has the power to make definitions. They're merely codifying things. Even though the community over time does have the power to change definitions, right? We as English speakers kind of control what English words mean by the way we use them, and that's how language can evolve over time, just as in a private legal system, it would have to evolve too, right? That in the year 1500, they didn't have property rights regarding radio spectrum. They wouldn't even know what that was. Whereas there is some scarcity involved and so there's an issue of am I stealing something if I have a pirate radio station, right? So I'm not taking a stance on those issues, but clearly that's something that the legal system would have to talk about once people began using radios and broadcasting signals, and then if somebody else was interfering with it, there was some issue there about it. Do we need property rights in the electromagnetic spectrum? So the legal system would have to evolve too. And so I'm saying that just because that happens doesn't mean therefore, oh, there's gotta be some group in charge of it with a monopoly. It doesn't mean that. Okay, you might say, okay, fine, yes, the dictionary, that's a better analogy, or language is a better analogy than natural science was. But the other problem Murphy with this thing is there's not a lot at stake. The definition of up, it's not like billions of dollars stand to change hands based on that. And so you wouldn't expect Websters to be corrupt. That their business is just codifying language just to help us communicate. It's not, there's not really a big issue there. Whereas property titles, the people in charge of defining who is the owner of that house, that's a big deal. And so we might worry about corruption there. Well, I mean, yes, that is true. So that's why the analogy is not perfect. It's not that spoken language is literally the same thing as property titles. But let me push that. Or do you really think, so here I've got just various definitions of physical constants. So what if I have a contract with somebody and I say, I'm gonna spend, I agree, I'm gonna spend 10 ounces of gold to buy three cows. And so then the guy gives me his three cows and I give him an ounce of silver. And he's, what are you doing? The contract said, I said, oh no, when I wrote 10, 10 to me is what you think of as this. I just use a different definition. And yeah, for me, gold, that's not the yellow thing you think of. I'm thinking of the silver thing. So there you go. Or I would hold up the silver coin and say, this is gold to me. That's what I would say that'd be right. So suppose I get my brother-in-law to agree and say, yes, I'm Earl, the person in charge of definitions and weights and measures in this jurisdiction. And I agree that that's what those words mean. Is Earl gonna be a reputable member of the community who people are gonna listen to when he says that what 10 means is this quantity? No, no one's gonna listen to him. And even if somehow if we had enough guns and we're pointing it and say, everyone agrees, right? And they're like, yeah. Everyone inside is gonna know these guys are just stealing from us. Okay, so it's not gonna be where the community, geez, we just don't know what 10 means. Huh, there's an honest disagreement. No, everyone's gonna know what 10 means and that they got ripped off. And so I'm saying just like with dropping the rock on the baby in the park and so on, there's gonna be standard things of the legal code that the community will know. All right, and it's, yes, we can get real philosophical and say, well, how do they know that, man? Yes, that's an important question, but you know it's wrong to drop a rock on a baby and you know some guy paid money to the person that everybody thought owned that land, got wood and so forth, lumber, built a house and all these things and that's been in the family for six generations and someone else walks up who's never been around and says, oh, that's my house and I have 15 guys with guns who agree with me. Maybe he's gonna get away with it just out of fear but no one's gonna think there's some honest disagreement now with the property titles. Okay, there's gonna clear cut black and white cases that everyone's gonna agree on and yeah, there will be borderline cases of disagreement and you'll need expert opinion and judges might even overturn other judges' opinions but that happens right now, right? So it's not that introducing the state solves the problem of genuine honest disagreement. Getting rid of a monopoly though does allow the fact that when there's clear cut cases where true experts all agree on something, we can at least be sure the legal code will endorse that whereas right now there's all kinds of crazy stuff that people with their common sense know is absurd and unjust and yet that goes through as legal. Okay, let's give it walk through a specific example, the TV thief. All right, at some point I'm gonna have to change this because people are gonna be like, what's a TV? But you guys do know what a TV right here. So I come home and I see somebody walking out of my apartment and they have a TV and they run away and I get inside and my TV's gone. All right, so what do I do? I have footage on the camera showing the person leaving. It looks like it's my neighbor who lives down the street from me. I'm pretty sure I know. I go and I peek in and he now is looking at a TV that looks very similar to the one that I just had stolen. Okay, so what do I do? I could now in terms of standard libertarian theory and probably your own personal moral code, if I'm absolutely sure that that's my TV, I can, I have the right to just kick in the door to give me my TV and a guy says no and I can go and grab it. And there's question about what can I do? Like what if he, you know, says over my dead body? I'm like, oh yeah? No. So there's a question about what could I do if he really tries to get in my way and stop me? But clearly if it's truly my TV, I can go take it back. But the question, but that's not really the issue, right? So if I did that, right, if I just kicked the door or if I went to some agency that has a bunch of real burly guys who have flak jackets and stuff and said, hey, this guy stole my TV, they're not just gonna follow me down and on my say so kick in the guy's door and go retrieve it because the community might say, whoa, what are you doing? You're stealing that guy's TV, Murphy, what are you? Right, so I need to first prove to the community or demonstrate good faith that that really is my TV. Not again because of some deep-seated moral reason, I might be absolutely sure that it is my TV and so long as I'm right, I think most people with their moral system would agree, yeah, I can go retrieve my actual TV from the thief, but the question is that would be reckless, that would be a silly thing to do in a community and there also might be contractual things. Like if I'm living in a gated community, I mean there might be things I sign going into it saying in the events of a serious dispute with one of your neighbors, you agree to submit to arbitration, there could be stuff like that so it's not so much from a natural rights reason but perhaps I've signed something saying in a situations like this, I'm agreeing ahead of time how to handle it. But even if I don't have such a contract that pertains, nonetheless in the interest of getting along with the community and not making people worry that maybe I'm a hothead, it would be good for me to do it the right way, go through the proper channels. So what would I do? I would mask as much evidence as I could. If I had a video footage, I have the receipt from Best Buy, when I bought that TV, did all the stuff I can do and then there would be experts available who specialize in small amounts of theft, right? Did there be certain experts who specialize in labor disputes? If employees think they're not being paid enough or they're vacation times, there'd be employees who are judges who specialize in product, some of the product blows up on you or something, you get a shock from the other people on that. Environmental law, there'd be all sorts of different experts in various areas. So I would go to somebody who was listed, who was reputable, known in the community for excellence and fairness in rulings pertaining to cases like breaking and entering and small amounts of property theft. So I would go present all the evidence. Perhaps I would even say to the person, my neighbor, say, okay, look it, here's something, there's 10 people in this zip code who specialize in this. I'm willing to take my case to any one of them you pick and what the person, no, no, I'm not doing it.  Now I'm getting more and more evidence of the community would start to say, okay, I think Murphy's in the right, this guy's the thief, right? So either the guy agrees or not and then I go to the judge and I get an official ruling, right?  I've been doing this talk forever and I used to use Hans Hoppe as the legal thing and I think, what am I doing? There's literally a judge who comes to me as you. I'll use him instead, all right. This is the second year I've had that epiphany, all right. So have him issue the legal opinion, okay? So again, it's not that the judge in this case is defining what the property title is. It's not that the judge has the authority to create my ownership and say, ah, I dictate or I issue a, by fiat, I declare that that TV is Murphy. No, he's saying the evidence I've seen and my understanding of property law is irrelevant in this context. The facts of the case, in my opinion, I believe that yes, the preponderance of the evidence comes down in the favor that Robert Murphy is in fact the rightful owner, something like that, all right. So then I go, this is crucial and this is where I think standard expositions on what's called anarchal capitalism. I mean, not that they're wrong, but I think it's, I empirically, I disagree empirically about how the markets would organize themselves and I also think it sounds more palatable to the outsider when we say it this way. I don't think it would be the same company that would decide who's in the right and then also execute enforcement of that decision. I think these would be separate things.  I think those would be separate agencies. I mean, they're quite distinct functions but I don't see why it would happen to be the same agency. So I would just take his ruling, his opinion and then go to one of those reputable agencies and say, look it, here's this, now will you come and get my TV? And then they say, sure, okay. So then they send in the goons to come get it. It's Tom DeLorenzo. It's hard to see in the back because of the lighting but it's Tom DeLorenzo, all right. So you see how that's different. So again, that company, so how does he stay in business? Either him as a sole proprietor, as an expert at large or working for a law firm by issuing fair, issuing rulings that are quite fair in the eyes of the community. If it were ever discovered that one of the sides in a case was slipping him money under the table and that's why he'd be out of business, all right. So I can't guarantee that won't ever happen but the penalties to him, the incentives for him are a lot swifter and sureer than they would be for a government or a state system where the judges are, either they have to win an election every once in a while or they're appointed by the political process. Okay, because it's not that you get rid of corruption by having politics be involved, obviously not. And then how would these people stay in business? Right, the people who take, so for one thing is they wouldn't act on cases that hadn't been decided upon by a reputable judge or some other entity that was known to give trustworthy legal opinions, right.  That's, they would not be a big reputable company in the community. There might be a little petty gangs and so on just like there are right now. I'm not saying that thing would be unheard of but to be a big reputable company that people just know, oh, that's where you go to have an enforcement of a ruling to retrieve stolen property, they would only act on rulings done by reputable judges also notice when they do kick in the door, are they going to like send in chemical weapons that have been banned at international warfare that might kill any children in the house? Probably not, right. And what I'm alluding to is that that's what, you know, the BATF Janet Reno did back with Waco. If you don't know what that is, just go look that up. All right. So all sorts of horror stories about police called police, overreaction, police doing things too aggressively. I'm not talking about necessarily cases of brutality but just where they use more force than they really need to to bring somebody into custody, things like that. That sort of stuff, even whether or not it's legal or not in this world, right? Maybe there would be some sort of thing where the legal code would say, oh, yes, if you're trying to enforce a just property decision and the person resists or gets in your way, even if that's it, they're gonna go out of business, right? Cause it just looks bad.   And they just, you know, smack them and knock them out. And he goes to the hospital. That's not good for business. Whether or not that the person gets in legal trouble for doing that, right? Certainly the company is gonna get rid of the person and the company is, you know, it's gonna engage in better training and so on. I don't think they're gonna use, you know, particularly strong armed tactics. I think they will try to just resolve the situation as peacefully as possible. Okay. So because of competition. All right. Handle that sort of case. Now let me move on here. I know there's all sorts of questions just from the TV example, but let me move on to hit some other topics. So would there be prisons in a free society? So on one hand, that seems like an, you know, an oxymoron that seems impossible. How could it be? But on the other hand, you say, well, wait a minute. When we say free in this context, what do I mean? I'm saying a society where the default presumption is we always respect people's property rights. We never try to steal or aggress against somebody. And you might say, well, okay, then everybody's for a free society. No, they're not. Everyone is not for a free society. Well, they are, except you'll say, oh, so even when it comes to state employees. And they'll say, well, what do you mean? I say, okay, so you agree. Like, if I don't support the stuff that U.S. empires or the military is doing overseas, I load the deck there. If I don't support the stuff the U.S. military is doing overseas, I don't want to pay for that. You know, so I'll just, I just will reduce my taxes, right? No, of course not. We're gonna take more. And if I don't pay, then ultimately people will come and throw me in a cage, right? So there it's not that they think I've broken any other laws, committed crimes against my neighbor or so on. It's just I've refused to pay for a service that I never agreed to. So that's what I mean when I say a free society is one in which that sort of thing doesn't happen. It certainly doesn't happen institutionally the way it happens in a status society, one that has coercion as a central element in it, not just as something that happens once in a while and we try to minimize it. So in a society like that, could there be prisons? I think there would be a lot less of it than there is in any kind of state analog given the same type of people. So with all this stuff also, I know I'm trying to throw a lot of information at you. Let me say, well, I'm thinking of it with all these things, you want to be doing apples to apples. You want to say the same type of people with their value system, their proclivities, the violence, their willingness to engage in public discussions before they rush to use their guns to settle a matter. Hold those things constant and just say, would a group who believes in the state versus ones who say, no, we just, we can't use that. It's unacceptable, it's immoral.  Those two groups, then how would things play out? That's really the issue. So I think the free society, analog of that same population of people, there would be a lot fewer people in prison per capita. But if it were to happen, how would it happen? So here, I don't think we need to get tied up with the question of, well, gee, how would, like from a natural rights perspective, it's kind of tricky to say, how can you go like tackle somebody and put them in a vehicle and then put them in a cage and hold them there for 10 years and not hold them there for eight? Like that's not enough, but 10's the right number or holding there for 15, right? It's a lot of the stuff we think of is in terms of imprisoning people, it seems kind of arbitrary. And so I think there is a big problem there in terms of standard libertarian punishment theory, and how would you get that to pop out of the other end of the analysis? So I think fortunately, you don't need to worry about that, that just remember in a free society, every piece of land, every square meter is owned by somebody, right? And so everybody clearly has the right to say who can and cannot be on my property.  Just the whole serial killing thing, you know?  I'm not saying what you're doing is wrong, just not on my property, right? Everybody can say that all the apartment, you know, no one has to rent them an apartment, they would be pariahs, okay? So again, now you can, we can talk about the family members of the deceased, can they hunt them down? Yeah, there's all that stuff. I'm not minimizing, but I'm saying clearly, you can say if there's some wanted criminal and people know this person has been ruled by a reputable court to be guilty of murder, multiple counts of murder, no one's gonna hire them, no one's gonna sell food to them to get out of here, right? So there'll be social pariahs, so what would happen to those people? I'm saying there would be oases of relative, you know, guarded freedom, if you will, where companies would arise and they would say, hey, people like that, you can come here, now we're gonna patch you down and give you a new outfit or make sure you're not smuggling weapons in or whatever, we might have you, you know, heavily restrict your movements, but when you come in here, you can work and we'll interview you, see your skills, we'll provide you with a workstation, what have you, and you can be here, all right? We'll try to rehabilitate you, particularly if it's a religious or sort of philanthropic organization, but it could also just be a profit maximizing business. There could be people out there who have good job skills, it's just they have anger management issues, right? And so it's just like, you wanna build a bridge that way, you know, but the guys are really good engineer, it's just you don't wanna be around them when you disagree, all right? So there could be places like that where they could earn money, right? Cause think of it right now, it's so wasteful what the state system does, you've got people sitting there breaking rocks or making license plates, right?  You think we're gonna reform somebody, you know, have them doing completely useless things, well, they know they did something wrong, right? And so in this kind of framework, there might be this big pending judgment and say, yes, you killed this person, you owe that person's estate, whatever, $400,000, okay? And so now maybe you work that debt off and you live in this restricted thing because the community doesn't trust you, but maybe once you pay the thing off and you're perfectly model citizen inside this community for 10 years, psychologists sign off on it, maybe then you get more and more freedom, other places have degrees of okay, yeah, you can be over here, some elementary school is not gonna hire you to be a third grade teacher, right? Which maybe you can live in an assembly line, you're working in an assembly line and live in an apartment where there's other adults and they know that with the situation, okay, you get the idea, I think that system would be much more humane and would be truly more likely to rehabilitate people because they actually could feel like they paid their debt and could get out with their lives whereas what the state does right now, you do some petty crime, you get thrown in a cage mixed in with people who are killers, right? That's not gonna, that's gonna mess you up and the guards don't protect you in there, right? That's a horrible system, right? Designed to just produce more crime. Okay, the other thing about this is it's kind of like the hotel California, all right. So, but notice there's competition here, okay? And so there's not gonna be the guards beating up prisoners because if there were, the people would just go to a competing place, right? Is these places are trying to attract residents, right? So yeah, it's like a prison but it's a very odd type of prison where the people want to be there because they know at least I can be here and people will let me step on this property and not think I'm a pariah. Okay, in two minutes, I'm gonna do private defense. You guys ready? Hold on. Okay, now it's a private law, I said that's the hard part. Private defense, again, go to my pamphlet chaos theory to get this. It's insurance companies, right? How does that work? So a picture of big city like New York City, insurance companies, if a big skyscraper burns down, how do you have fire insurance? Okay, so what if there's a chance that some outside country state is gonna have their battleships come in and start shelling it? You could have insurance to protect against it. So that's where the funding would come from. You don't need taxation. You could have billions of dollars going through big, huge companies from people buying insurance against being invaded by a military or having your stuff blown up or being captured or killed from an outside military, whether state or private. And then it would be the insurance companies now that would have the incentive to go ahead and fund things, missile-based land or surface-to-air missiles, things like that. I don't think there would be huge standing armies. They certainly wouldn't have swastikas. That would just be horrible for business. Why would they do that? But I don't think there'd be large standing armies. Just why would you, you wouldn't need them. That would be crazy, just like in general, businesses try to produce their services and products with as little manpower as possible to keep labor costs down, all right? So the whole enterprise of military defense, I think in a private setting, you would have all the advantage of economic calculation and so forth in that setting. All right, you'd have competition. There would be prices. So let's say there's an outside state that's getting ready to invade the insurance companies would run the numbers and they would say, okay, we've got hundreds of billions of dollars of our insurance, our clients property insured on the line here. We stand to lose hundreds of billions, us as the insurance company. So you know what, if somebody could knock out one of those enemy choppers, we would be willing to pay $15,000 for that. We've run the numbers. That's how much it would help us. If somebody takes out one of their infantry, we would pay up to $1,200 for that. So there would be market prices bounties on the opposing forces and it would be specific and it would be quantitative and the numbers wouldn't be arbitrary. They could run it and say, oh, because they can do this much damage to our stuff and lives would also have a property value too in terms of the insurance, life insurance. Okay, so that's where the numbers would come from. You would get market competition. Different firms would enter. Last thing I'll say, you wouldn't have all your eggs in one basket.  Well, they wouldn't have, but France didn't stop Nazi Germany either. Okay, so it's having a state doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't make your troops better. It doesn't make them shoot better. It doesn't give you more tanks. We know in any other area, having the state in charge cripples it and the same would be true here. All right, thanks everybody.


In this study, a model was developed to evaluate the economic value of the health and climate benefits of reducing fossil fuel consumption by employing different low-carbon energy projects. The model was then used to simulate four different types of projects individually at six different locations in the Great Lakes-Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. In these simulations, both the type of low-carbon alternative and its location strongly affected its impact on human health and the climate. The model was developed in consideration for policy makers, especially those working under President Obama's Clean Power Plan. For the six studied locations, these projects could provide health and climate benefits worth up to $210 million annually and up to $170 per megawatt hour of electricity generated. To reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, electrical utility companies can turn to energy efficiency strategies, which can displace fossil fuel use by decreasing the demand for electricity, and also renewable energy sources, which can displace fossil fuel use by substituting more environmentally friendly options. This study modeled the effects of two renewable energy installations, a wind power plant and a solar photovoltaic installation, and two energy efficiency projects, one that reduced the electricity use at peak demand times and another that reduced electricity use at all times. The six locations covered a variety of population distributions, electricity requirements, power grid conditions, and electricity generation capabilities. The researchers then calculated the changes in the emissions of CO2, SO2, and NOx for each low-carbon energy project and calculated the benefits of each project based on the estimated damage induced per amount of emissions. All the installations in the simulation reduced the electrical grid's overall emissions and therefore its impact on human health and the climate. However, the locations with the greatest health and climate benefits were not necessarily those where the new installation saved or replaced the most energy. Instead, the benefits of the projects varied by installation type and location, even when adjusted for the amount of electricity generated. For example, the wind installation near Cincinnati was twice as beneficial as the one in Virginia, not only because the wind installation near Cincinnati displaced more coal, but also because Cincinnati has a larger population downwind of its coal plants. Meanwhile, the solar installation near Cincinnati was nearly three times as beneficial as the one near much larger Chicago because it displaced much more coal. In the future, the model in this study may be used to predict the benefits of other low-carbon energy projects in different parts of the world. The specific findings of this study may also be useful for planning new low-carbon projects within the Great Lakes mid-Atlantic area, particularly in the wake of the Clean Power Plan, which requires policymakers to devise plans for meeting state-specific goals for reducing carbon dioxide emissions.