 It's 100% true and fair for me to say that I could not do what I do now, if not for the skills and the knowledge that I gained while working at Mercatus. My name is Chad Ries. I'm currently the Activism Policy Manager for the Institute for Justice. In a previous life, I worked here for almost a decade at the Mercatus Center, working on the communications team, our outreach team, and then back again at the communications team. So thinking of a defining moment that really struck home to me, the fact that policy work was what I wanted to do with my life, is kind of tough because I spent almost a decade here at Mercatus, and I feel like I could point to dozens of those examples that were really reaffirming to me and say, no, this is what you need to be doing. But for me, the first one actually started when I applied to Mercatus as an intern or shortly before. I was participating in a summer program as part of a fellowship here in DC, didn't know anything about policy, knew very little about economics. But I heard a Mercatus scholar speak, and the way they talked about issues was so different than what I was used to working in campaigns and working in politics. And that's also what I think sets Mercatus apart. Again, they're doing something a little bit different than other organizations in the policy space tend to do, which is really trying to engage with thinkers who might be decades or centuries old in their research. Really trying to battle with ideas that have been around for a long time, but people sort of grab onto them when they're politically convenient and then let go as soon as they become challenging to implement. It just resonated with me and I realized all the complaints I had about the political process were sort of resolved if you look at things from a policy perspective rather than a political perspective. So that sort of started me on the road of thinking about policy, thinking about the role academic research plays in policymaking, and really focused on looking at Mercatus as an opportunity to explore that professional path.