Orlando, FL and Washington, D.C. January 2, 2024—Thinking Outside the Boxe has released the transcript of founder Robert M. Clinger III’s special guest address at the 20th Annual Symposium, held December 28–31, 2023, in Orlando, Florida.
The transcript of Mr. Clinger’s speech follows:
Good evening. Thank you for that warm welcome.
I have listened to quite a few speeches over the years about anniversaries, milestones, institutions, and legacies. Most of them make the people involved sound as though they knew exactly what they were doing from the beginning.
I am not going to do that to you tonight.
Twenty years ago, I did not sit down with a blueprint for what Thinking Outside the Boxe would look like in 2023. There was no twenty-year strategic plan. There was no organizational chart showing an Annual Symposium, Champagne Summits, correspondents around the country and the world, an archive of commentary, research, transcripts, and everything else that has grown from the original idea.
There was simply a belief that there were questions worth asking that were not being asked often enough, and arguments worth having that were not being given much room anywhere else.
That was enough to begin. Sometimes that is all you get.
You begin with an idea, you try to do the work properly, and you see whether the idea deserves to survive.
Twenty years later, Thinking Outside the Boxe is still here. That means something to me.
I spend a great deal of my professional life looking at businesses, institutions, assets, risks, and value. In that work, you learn fairly quickly that what somebody says something is worth and what it actually proves itself to be worth are two very different things.
The same is true of ideas.
Anybody can announce a mission. Anybody can print a statement of principles. Anybody can start an organization. The test is what remains after some time has passed.
Does the work continue? Does anybody still care? Does the original purpose survive growth? Can the institution change without becoming something else entirely? Can it survive the loss of people who mattered to it? Can it admit when it was wrong? Can it preserve things that are inconvenient to its present image? Can it still ask a difficult question after twenty years, or has it become more interested in protecting the institution than doing the work the institution was created to do?
Those are harder questions. And I think they are the right questions for tonight.
Thinking Outside the Boxe began in 2004. But its habits began earlier than that. Some of them began on benches around Myrtle Beach.
Sebastian Peréy and I spent a lot of time talking. Business. Money. Economics. Government. People. Why businesses succeeded. Why they failed. Why people repeatedly made the same mistakes even after somebody had explained the mistake to them. Why governments did the same thing. Why comfortable answers were often the most expensive answers. Why people would rather hear something reassuring than something useful. And why, every once in a while, somebody needed to say the useful thing anyway.
Sebastian was very good at that last part. He could tell you something you did not particularly want to hear without wasting much time getting to it. He had spent his career in finance and economics. He understood numbers. But the thing I remember most was that he understood people. And he understood that numbers do not become less true because somebody finds them inconvenient.
Sebastian taught. He did not always announce that he was teaching. That was probably why it worked. You sat down. You started talking. At some point you realized he had taken apart whatever assumption you brought to the bench. And then you went home thinking about it.
There are worse ways to learn.
Thinking Outside the Boxe came out of that same instinct. Ask the question. Do not decide in advance what the answer is allowed to be. Follow the evidence. Be willing to reach a conclusion. And if the conclusion makes somebody uncomfortable, that does not automatically mean the conclusion is wrong. It also does not automatically mean it is right. You still have to do the work. That distinction has always mattered to me.
Thinking outside the box is not the same as disagreeing for sport. There is nothing intellectually impressive about automatically taking the opposite side. If everybody says two plus two is four, the independent thinker is not the person who insists it might be five. The independent thinker is the person who checks the math and says four because four is where the evidence takes him.
Sometimes the unconventional answer is right. Sometimes the conventional answer is right. The obligation is to find out. That was the foundation.
And Sebastian was part of that foundation from the beginning. I wish he were sitting here tonight. It has been twelve years since we lost him. That is long enough that there are people who know Thinking Outside the Boxe now who never had the opportunity to know him.
That is one of the strange things about an institution that survives. Eventually, people become part of its history who were once simply part of its day. Sebastian would have understood that. He probably would have made fun of us for getting sentimental about it. And then he would have made some comment that ruined the sentiment completely.
I would give quite a bit to hear that comment tonight. After Sebastian died, we established an endowed scholarship in his name at Coastal Carolina University for economics students. That mattered to me because it connected his name with something he valued: education, economics, and people who were still figuring out where they were going.
Later, Mr. Cartwright wrote Conversations on the Bench. That book preserved something different. Not Sebastian’s résumé. Not an official organizational history. The conversations. The lessons. The way he thought. The things two people talked about when neither one was trying to prepare a public statement.
I am grateful Mr. Cartwright did that. Because organizations tend to preserve the wrong things.
They preserve meeting minutes. They preserve announcements. They preserve photographs of people standing behind podiums. They preserve whatever somebody thought looked official at the time. But the things that really shape an institution are often informal. A conversation. A standard. A sentence somebody keeps repeating. An expectation everybody understands even though nobody wrote it down.
One of those expectations at Thinking Outside the Boxe has always been very simple: Tell people what you think is true. Not what you think they want to hear. That does not sound revolutionary. It should not be revolutionary. But it does require a certain independence. And it requires accepting that not everybody is going to like you all the time.
I can live with that. In fact, after twenty years, I would be concerned if everybody liked everything we published. It would probably mean we had stopped doing something important.
When we began, one of the things I wanted was a place where arguments could be made without first asking whether they fit neatly into somebody else’s political category. That remains important. Thinking Outside the Boxe is nonpartisan. I want to be clear about what I mean by that. It does not mean nobody has political opinions.
Our correspondents certainly have them. It does not mean everybody arrives in the middle. They do not. It does not mean every issue has two equally persuasive sides. Many do not. Nonpartisan means the party does not own the conclusion.
It means you do not begin with, “What is our team supposed to believe?” You begin with, “What do I believe the evidence supports?”
There is a significant difference. We have correspondents from both major parties. They disagree. Sometimes they disagree substantially. In election years, they tell you whom they support and why. We publish it. We do not tell them whom to support. That is not a complicated model. But it has become an unusual one.
Our correspondents are not professional television analysts. They are not people whose primary occupation is having opinions in public. They work. They deal with businesses, roads, freight, plants, courts, insurance, accounting, construction, energy, hospitality, and the rest of the economy that keeps moving while the national conversation is busy arguing about itself.
That was deliberate.
I have always believed there is a serious weakness in a public conversation dominated by people who mostly talk to other people whose profession is participating in the public conversation. There is a whole country outside that loop.
Policies eventually arrive there. Regulations arrive there. Interest rates arrive there. Inflation arrives there. Taxes arrive there. Labor shortages arrive there. Energy prices arrive there. Bank failures arrive there. Border policy arrives there. Crime arrives there. Wars arrive there. Bad ideas arrive there. So do good ones.
I want to hear from the people who live where things arrive.
That is one reason the correspondents write under the names of the places where they live. Prescott Valley. Owatonna. Gastonia. Novi. And all the other places that have appeared over the years.
The argument comes first. The person making it does not need to become the story. That has protected something valuable. It allows people to be candid. It makes it more difficult to turn every disagreement into a personal dispute. And it reminds us that intelligence, experience, and judgment are not limited to Washington, New York, university faculties, or television studios.
There are smart people everywhere. There are foolish people everywhere too. Geography does not solve that problem. But broadening the room helps.
The Annual Symposium grew out of that same idea. Put people at a table. Ask a serious question. Let them answer. Let them challenge one another. And let the discussion go where it goes.
Do not script the conclusion. Do not decide that disagreement is a failure. Do not assume consensus proves anything. If somebody changes his mind, fine. If nobody changes his mind, fine. The purpose is examination. That sounds simple because it is simple. A lot of worthwhile things are.
Thinking Outside the Boxe has now done it twenty times. I will admit that number surprised me when I first stopped and thought about it. Twenty Annual Symposiums. There are traditions people inherit that are older than that. But there are also an extraordinary number of organizations, businesses, publications, and projects that never make it twenty years. They disappear because the economics do not work. They disappear because the people involved lose interest. They disappear because the original purpose gets diluted until nobody remembers why the thing exists. Or they disappear because the person who started them cannot allow them to become larger than himself.
That last one deserves some attention. Founders can become a problem for the things they found. That is not a comfortable thing for a founder to admit. But it is true. At some point, if an institution is going to have a future, the founder has to understand that preserving the mission and preserving personal control are not always the same thing.
Thinking Outside the Boxe cannot be about Robbie Clinger. If it ever becomes that, somebody should close it. I founded it. I am proud of that. But founding an institution is not the same as owning every future thought that comes out of it. The people who came later had to bring something of their own.
Sebastian did. Mr. Cartwright did. The correspondents did. Readers did. People who disagreed with us did. Even people who wrote us angry letters did. Sometimes especially the people who wrote angry letters.
An institution that cannot absorb anybody else’s thinking is not an institution. It is a personality. I did not want to build a personality. I wanted to build a place where the work could continue. That is why I am especially pleased to see what Thinking Outside the Boxe has become without pretending that everything about it is exactly what I would have predicted twenty years ago.
It should not be. If nothing changed in twenty years, that would not be fidelity. That would be stagnation.
The question is whether the core survived. I believe it has.
Ask the question other people have stopped asking. Look at incentives. Look at costs. Look at what the official explanation leaves out. Say what the evidence supports. Say what it does not support. Do not be afraid to conclude. Do not erase the record later because the conclusion became embarrassing.
That last one matters. We have taken positions over the years that were controversial. Some turned out better than critics expected. Some did not. That is part of the record. Keep it.
I do not want an archive that makes us look smarter than we were. I want an archive that tells the truth about what we thought. There is a lesson in being wrong. Sometimes more than one. You cannot learn it if you rewrite the past every time the present becomes inconvenient. There is too much of that now.
People delete the old statement. They revise the old webpage. They pretend the prediction was more nuanced than it really was. They explain that everybody misunderstood what they clearly said.
I have very little patience for that. If we got it wrong, say we got it wrong. Then figure out why. Bad assumption? Incomplete information? Wrong model? Political bias? Wishful thinking? Failure to understand incentives?
Fine. Learn something. Then move on. An organization that cannot admit error eventually becomes an organization whose primary business is protecting its reputation.
Once that happens, serious inquiry is finished. The reputation has become more important than the truth. I do not want that for Thinking Outside the Boxe. And I do not think Sebastian would have tolerated it for very long.
This twentieth Symposium comes at an interesting time. We are discussing artificial intelligence. Banks. Inflation. Interest rates. The border. China. Entitlement obligations. Commercial real estate. Digital currency. Urban public safety. Universities. The Middle East. Regulatory power. Law and politics.
A lot of that sounds new. Some of it is new. The technology certainly is. But underneath the new vocabulary, many of the questions are familiar.
What are the incentives? Who has the risk? Who bears the cost? Who has the authority? Who is accountable when the decision is wrong? What problem are we actually trying to solve? What unintended consequence have we ignored? Are we measuring the thing that matters, or the thing that is easiest to measure? And are we applying the same standard to people we like and people we do not?
Those questions do not age very quickly. That is one thing twenty years teaches you.
Headlines change faster than human behavior. Technology changes faster than human behavior. Political coalitions change faster than human behavior. Human beings remain impressively consistent. We respond to incentives. We protect our interests. We rationalize. We overestimate our ability to predict. We become attached to ideas we helped create. We forgive mistakes made by people we trust more readily than the same mistakes made by people we distrust. We spend other people’s money differently from our own. We become much more concerned about the limits of power after power changes hands.
None of that is new. That is why institutional design matters. That is why rules matter. That is why skepticism matters. Not cynicism. Skepticism. There is a difference. Cynicism says everybody is corrupt, everything is fake, nothing matters, and there is no point trying. That is intellectually lazy.
Skepticism says: show me. Show me the evidence. Show me the cost. Show me the authority. Show me the assumptions. Show me who benefits. Show me what happens if you are wrong. Show me whether the rule works when the other party uses it. That is useful skepticism. And it is increasingly necessary.
We live in an era in which people have access to more information than Sebastian and I could have imagined sitting on those benches. That should have made people harder to fool. I am not sure it has. Information is abundant. Judgment is not. That may become one of the defining problems of the next twenty years.
Artificial intelligence will make information cheaper still. It will generate language. It will analyze documents. It will summarize. It will model. It will answer. It will do things that would have seemed ridiculous not very long ago. That it will not eliminate is the need to ask whether the answer makes sense. That remains a human obligation. Technology can accelerate bad judgment just as efficiently as good judgment. Maybe more efficiently.
So the future of independent research is not simply collecting more information. It is knowing what information matters. It is knowing what question should have been asked. It is recognizing when the data are incomplete. It is understanding incentives. It is knowing when a precise number is disguising a weak assumption.
I have spent enough years in finance and valuation to know that a spreadsheet can produce a very precise wrong answer. Precision is not truth. Neither is confidence. Neither is consensus. Neither is credential.
They may all be useful. None is sufficient. You still have to think.
That is what I want Thinking Outside the Boxe to protect. The habit of thinking. Not reacting. Not repeating. Not searching for the approved phrase. Thinking. That includes the willingness to change your mind. It also includes the willingness not to change your mind merely because everybody else did. Both take judgment. And both take some courage.
I am also increasingly convinced that one of the most important things we can preserve is the ability to disagree with people we respect. Sebastian and I did not agree about everything. If we had, the conversations would not have been very interesting.
Respect does not require agreement. Friendship does not require agreement. Citizenship cannot require agreement.
If the country reaches a point where every political disagreement is treated as evidence that the other person is morally defective, stupid, dangerous, or undeserving of a hearing, then we have a much larger problem than whichever policy started the argument. Self-government requires people who can lose an argument and come back to the table.
It requires people who can win an argument without believing victory gives them ownership of the other person. It requires a little humility. And a reasonably thick skin.
The Annual Symposium has tried to practice that for twenty years. Not perfectly. We are human. Some arguments get heated. Some people talk too long. Some people answer the question they wish had been asked. That may happen in this room from time to time. I will not name names. But the table survives.
That is what matters. You come back. You ask another question. You disagree again. There is something healthy in that. Something increasingly rare. And something worth preserving.
I want to say something tonight to the correspondents who have participated over these twenty years.
Thank you. You have given this organization credibility that no mission statement could provide. Because ultimately Thinking Outside the Boxe is not what I say it is. It is what the work demonstrates.
Every time one of you answers a question honestly, even knowing somebody will disagree, you demonstrate it. Every time you bring your profession, your city, your experience, and your judgment to an issue instead of repeating something you heard on television, you demonstrate it. Every time two correspondents reach different conclusions and both remain in the publication, you demonstrate it. Every time one of you says, “I was wrong,” you demonstrate it. And every time somebody writes something I personally would not have written and we publish it anyway, the institution demonstrates something too.
That is independence. It is easy to support independent thought when you agree with it. The test is publication day.
I also want to thank Mr. Cartwright. He came into this story after it had begun and became part of its continuation. That matters. Institutions need people who understand what came before them without becoming trapped by it. They need people who can preserve the original mission while allowing the work to develop. They need people willing to carry something they did not personally originate. That is a responsibility. Mr. Cartwright has understood that responsibility. And I am grateful for it. I think Sebastian would have appreciated that too. Probably after criticizing something first. We should keep that possibility on the record.
I have been asked over the years what I want Thinking Outside the Boxe to become. My answer today is probably different from what it would have been ten or fifteen years ago. I am less interested in size than I used to be. Size is easy to measure. Importance is harder. I do not care whether this becomes the largest organization of its kind. I care whether it remains worth reading. I care whether the question is good. I care whether the research is honest. I care whether the conclusion follows from the evidence. I care whether people are free to disagree. I care whether the archive remains intact. I care whether somebody can come here ten years from now, read what we said tonight, and understand not only what we thought but why we thought it.
That is enough ambition. If growth serves that, good. If growth interferes with it, choose the work. An institution should know what it is not willing to trade away. That is one of the responsibilities of twenty years.
At the beginning, you are trying to survive. Later, you have something to protect. The danger is protecting the wrong thing. Do not protect the brand at the expense of the mission. Do not protect access at the expense of independence. Do not protect relationships at the expense of honest conclusions. Do not protect a political alliance at the expense of consistency. And do not protect our own history from scrutiny.
If Thinking Outside the Boxe deserves another twenty years, it will not be because we had twenty good years behind us. History is not a renewal option. We will deserve the next twenty only if the work remains good enough to justify them. That is the standard. The same one we had at the beginning. Do the work. Tell the truth as best you can determine it. Correct the record when you are wrong. Do not let somebody else decide which questions are permissible. And do not become so impressed with yourself that you stop listening.
That last one should probably be engraved somewhere. Maybe near the champagne. Because twenty years deserves celebration.
It does. I am proud tonight. I am proud of what began in 2004. I am proud that conversations on benches became conversations around a larger table. I am proud that people from different professions and different parts of the country have made this institution something more substantial than it could ever have been if Sebastian and I had simply kept talking to one another. I am proud that the work stayed on the record. I am proud that there are people here who care enough about it to continue it.
And I am grateful. Grateful to the correspondents. Grateful to the readers. Grateful to Mr. Cartwright. Grateful to the people who challenged us. Grateful even to some of the people who told us we were wrong. Occasionally they were right. Again, let us not get carried away.
And I am grateful for Sebastian. I wish he could see this. I suspect he would look around the room, listen for a while, wait until everyone was feeling appropriately pleased with themselves, and then identify the weakest assumption in whatever we had just said.
That would be Sebastian. And that would probably be the right way to honor the twentieth anniversary. Not by becoming satisfied. By asking the next question.
So that is what I want to leave you with tonight. Do not preserve Thinking Outside the Boxe as a museum. Preserve the habit that created it.
Ask. Listen. Check the numbers. Check the incentives. Check yourself. Let people disagree. Keep the record. And when the evidence takes you somewhere inconvenient, go there anyway. That is how it started. That is why it lasted.
And if the people who come after us continue doing that, twenty years from now somebody else can stand here and decide what forty years means. I hope they mention us kindly.
But more importantly, I hope they can say we left them an institution still capable of thinking for itself.
Thank you very much. And to everyone who helped bring us from 2004 to this room tonight—Happy twentieth anniversary.
Transcript as delivered. Any departures from the prepared text are noted in brackets.
