 We'll talk about the website a little bit. And of course, as Jeff mentioned, I spend my days editing the website, and what that means basically is just monitoring it, making sure that it updates at least three times per day. We usually update it four or five times per day with new articles. People who want to submit articles to go on the website would send those to me. And so I try to select what I think are the best that we can and then edit them a little bit if they need editing. And Judy Thomason also will proofread them. I'm sure you've found a typo here and there, but we do attempt to get rid of all of those. And so just all the daily mechanics that go into curating articles for the site, posting them, and encouraging our writers to write more and to add to what's already existing on the site. We also, of course, try to carry and highlight our archival information because our website is just so huge that there's lots of articles people have never seen. And we're also in the process of taking old PDFs and turning them into HTML, because we found that people don't really read a 20 page PDF that we've posted. They're more likely to read it on their phones and so on if you actually convert it to a more versatile format. So those are all little pieces of what go on just on a daily basis for the site. And the title of the talk is, however, how Mises.org fueled our movement. So we'll just kind of talk about a little bit what the role is of the site in an ideological movement like ours and how we try to get the site to emphasize what it is we stand for and to really back up our mission. And really the mission of the website is more or less the same thing as the mission of the Mises Institute itself, which is to spread good economics, specifically Austrian economics, freedom and peace, as our tagline says, and how do we do that? We do it by trying to stay true to our core values while also using the website to bring new people in. And but really at the core of it, the idea is to change people's thinking about economics to change their ideas. And that's, of course, what the organization tries to do overall. But one of the better quotes that you hear from John Maynard Cain sometimes is, and this is often quoted in other places too, is he talks about how there are lots of practical men out there, people out there who imagine themselves, we don't fool around with all this ideological stuff. We're interested on stuff that's going on in the practical world. And he says, you know, people that say that, they're really just quote slaves to some defunct economist, quote unquote, that without even realizing it, they've adopted the views of some scholar, some writer who came before them and those views have filtered down to them. And he says that these people who imagine themselves immensely practical are quote distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. Now, when he said that, he was, he wouldn't mean that in a way we would agree with what he was saying is that all of these hopelessly laissez-faire people out there, they're wed to the ideas of these 19th century people who convinced the general masses that markets are a good thing. Now, of course, that's less so today that we find so many people are hopelessly laissez-faire that we have to change their ideas to something more Keynesian. But nevertheless, I think he was generally correct in the idea of that if we do have certain ideological views, we should perhaps be curious about where they came from and how we got that way. And maybe are these views good? Are they based on some kind of good ideological or historical foundation? And of course, our side attempts to explore that a lot of the time to really help people maybe see the flaws in bad economics and to adopt better economics and to make all that information really quite easily available. And that's one of the big advantages of our site is that rarely anywhere else do you encounter a website that has so many books, so many articles, everything that's so much for free and easily available that gives you the time and the ability to really leisurely explore your own views on something and to delve deeply into it, moving beyond just 800-word articles. And certainly, this doesn't exist anywhere else that I've found, just the sheer volume, the sheer number of books devoted to this topic, least of all to economics, which isn't the most popular topic in the world, at least where I went to college to see you boulder. Economics was a small department. Not many people were econ majors. I can think just back to a couple of years ago when I had the flu and I had to go to the doctor and I was sitting there and she was asking me what I did for a living. I said, oh, well, I'm just editor for an economics website. And the look of horror that came across her face at how insanely boring this job must be. And of course, this was a person who I would assume I would hope is used to mastering difficult topics being a physician. And nevertheless, economics just seemed beyond the pale of anything you would want to spend your precious time doing. So I think to a certain extent, it's amazing that we can create any interest in this topic at all. And I think you see that also a little bit in our strategy for how do we attract people. It's pretty hard really to find a lot of economics websites that do what we do or even approach doing what we do. I mean, you think there are plenty of news commentary sites out there that talk about politics and things like that. But are there sites that really have academic papers about economics that attempt to really teach people economics whether even bad economics. And there just aren't that many. And of course, looking at the website of our nemesis, the New York Fed or the federal Board of Governors. What about those websites? Now those are interesting websites. They have, of course, I don't agree with a lot of what I read on them, but they have lots of academic papers there, lots of research, interesting things to read if you're into that sort of thing. And but the Mises Institute has much higher traffic than those sites. If you look at the Alexa rankings, the New York Fed has just a fraction of the traffic that Mises.org has. And the Board of Governors, of course, people go there for news items a lot as well. That's less traffic than the Mises Institute as well. And so I think we're making, we definitely have a presence among people who are actually interested in economics. And I think if you go online, you're looking for economics websites, it's likely that you're going to stumble upon Mises.org. And so the question is, what should we do then with the fact that if people are looking for economics, they might find us. And so that comes down to what we do on a daily basis then is how can we attract people to the site, get them to engage the site and maybe come back again. And now when I was brought on, the idea is that I would help bring in content, produce content, showcase content that would be for the intelligent layperson. Because of course we've always had lots of good academic work. We have the quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. We have presentations from our academic conferences. We still have all the archives with the Journal of Libertarian Studies online and so on. But a lot of that is very dense. A lot of it's very difficult to read. So how do we highlight that material either directly or indirectly and produce new material in that tradition that is going to help people engage and maybe see a new way of thinking about what's going on right now. And so that's really what the front page is for, is that with an eye toward what's already on the site, what is the intellectual tradition established by people like Mises and Rothbard? How can we hold true to that work and then apply it to what's going on right now and then provide content that will be engaging for people, maybe get shared around the internet and then people bring people in and even get them interested to the point of coming back. Now that then limits us to a certain extent if we have real devotion to what our core intellectual mission is. Because any website, you're a website editor and you're running a website, there's always that temptation. You want more clicks, right? You want more attention. You want people to come back because you can always point to that indicator. Oh look, we got lots of clicks. Of course, there's an easy way to get clicks, right? We could have lots of articles with titles like top 10 sexiest libertarians and the things that just appeal, the latest economic hot take on the Stormy Daniels thing. And so if we're gonna be respectable, of course to the people who have always liked what we've been producing for the last 15, 20 years, if we start doing that, we're gonna be betraying our core audience. It would bring in lots of new traffic, presumably. But then we would really cease to be the Muses Institute at that point because now we're now a place that runs articles about sexy libertarians and we're not something that's trying to delve into some reality about the Federal Reserve or standard of living or economic history. And so we constantly have to try to balance that. And I like that. I like that that limits me and us to a certain extent. I like that it means I didn't have to follow every up and down of the Kavanaugh hearing. We're not a Washington D.C. gossip site. And the other point being is that there's countless other sites that are doing that stuff already. And so if we're the Muses Institute and we're something special, we're something different, then we're gonna stick to certain topics without ignoring what's going on in the world right now. So of course, I then encourage writers and I welcome them to produce that sort of content. And over the past five years or so, without being sell-outs, I'm proud of the work we've managed to do in order to maintaining traffic, growing our traffic. In the last five years, the traffic has risen by 35% without a lot of pandering articles. I'm sure some people interpret some of them as pandering, but that's never my intent, of course, is to just put something out there that I think is interesting and that people might learn something new from them. And if some other non-traditional audience member happens to like that and brings them in, that's great as well. But we wanna continue to bring new people in. And so we're talking in terms of sessions or individual users talking, depending seven to 10 million people per year, sessions per year, kind of depending on how you calculate it. And there's some ups and downs over the last five years, but that's holding and growing. And then as Jeff has emphasized in a couple of comments here as well, we're not interested, since we don't make money on clicks for an advertising-based organization and we don't gain our reward by having someone just occasionally show up and read an article. What we wanna do, of course, is get people to engage us more deeply and to really engage the information and using those daily articles to get them to actually maybe read a book that is for free on the site or to buy a book. And so that's really the ultimate goal is not just to have lots of people who come and go, but to bring people who are actually gonna come and stay and buy books. And that, of course, is going back to the issue of all this free content. I remember in college when the history of economic thought book, if you wanted to buy that, that was $190. And that's just by itself a great thing that the site has done is make hyper-expensive books like that available that weren't at the time. But in order to get people to that step, you gotta first get them to come to the site. And so what sorts of topics do we do and what sort of topics are popular? Sometimes it's surprising. It is surprising at how popular a lot of central banking articles still are. People are interested in that and how the Fed affects them. I don't think people were interested a whole lot in that before Ron Paul ran for president a couple of times. I think that helps substantially there. And if you look historically at our traffic, you can see those increased a lot in 2008, October 2000, right before that election for one. And then also in early 2012, a few months before that election there. We saw a lot of interest in Austrian economics there. But that traffic has never fully gone away. There continues to be some interest in Austrian econ as young people come in. And of course a lot of young people now, a lot of college students don't even really remember 2008 very well or they were small children when that was going on. And so it's a matter of sustaining that interest. And so articles about the Federal Reserve, articles about money, articles about inequality from our point of view continue to be very popular. Economic history, this is something I've found continues to be very popular and especially relating it back to standard of living issues. I think people, just as people always want to compare themselves how they're doing related to the Joneses down the street or to their friends, I think they also like to compare themselves historically. How am I doing well compared to my ancestors and things like that. And I think people like to see information about what were people able to buy and obtain a hundred years ago. It might seem dry at first glance, but once you start to get into some of the details about how people were leading their lives prior to industrialization or immediately thereafter, I think people find that material very engaging and that shows up in the website statistics as well, issues related around to poverty and automobile purchases and home prices and those sorts of things and then taking Austrian wisdom if you will and then applying them to those issues. And so we're always trying to explore ways that we can take Austrian economics and then use it in that way where this is a topic people are already thinking about, already talking about and making it more interesting. Other issues include the effects of prohibition on both guns and drugs. I'll admit that probably our most popular articles of all time are about gun prohibition and crime and that sort of thing which I didn't actually expect early on. But people like that and that illustrates kind of the site that the sort of site that we are is that when we approach an issue like that, we try to approach it more from looking at it in terms of a praxeological stance without using that term. I try to not use lots of big fancy words that outsiders wouldn't understand but nevertheless I'm using those methods and that wisdom in our articles. And so those are sorts of issues that people think a lot about as well but which we can put our own stance on and present them in a way that makes people feel like they learned something which were deeper. We're not necessarily in the business of just confirming people's biases or telling them what they wanna hear and just making people feel that, yeah, somebody out there agrees with me, that's fine too, of course. That's a perfectly good reason to come to our site. But also we want you to leave the site feeling like you actually learned something and that there's something different about Muses.org. This is a place that gives you new information and helps you think about something that you haven't thought about in that way before. Other topics include decentralization which that of course is a way to produce more loopholes for the market to breathe as Muses used to say and for really looking at the effects of that and the decentralization inherent in the marketplace as well. And these are all things that we find at time and again continue to be interesting to the general reader and which have some real potential for writers in the future as well. And that brings us to another purpose of the site which most average readers don't think about is that the site can also serve as a very helpful place for our writers to feel like they have some sort of community that it provides an outlet for the writers to when they're thinking about something and they're thinking, well, can I produce a short article on this that would be interesting to me and my peers and then might lead to further research as well and also helps provide a record maybe of their own thinking over time and provides a way for them to engage other Austrian economists in a way that doesn't require them to go through the whole journal writing situation. And so we like also not only that that this provides a way for writers to come and engage each other and feel like they have a home but also I like that we have a lot of the same writers that show up again and again. There are a lot of sites where a lot of the writers come and go and you don't see the same people over and over again. And I like that you can read a Mark Thornton article today and you can also read a Mark Thornton article from 10 or 15 or even 20 years ago and that there's a feel of permanence among a lot of the stable of our writers. And of course we always want to bring in new people as well, but I like that you can go to the Mises Institute site and feel that there is an actual group of people that are working with each other, reading each other's stuff and trying to build on it and make it better. But without the purpose of setting ourselves up as the final word on anything. Of course I happen to think Austrian economics is the best sort of economics. And when I run an article, I think it's a good viewpoint that you're probably not gonna see anywhere else. I try to avoid an article that I think has run 1,000 other places. And also I try to avoid things that, well, I don't want us to be just an aggregator site of articles that have already appeared elsewhere. I want us to be a place that has mostly original content that you haven't seen. If it has run somewhere else, I wanted to have run at a site that most of you didn't see yet. And so I wanted to provide a service to you in terms of this is an article you probably haven't seen before. It's a little bit different than something you're gonna see at just a host of other libertarian or conservative sites. And also that it has a certain, it has a feeling like it belongs to the Mises Institute. And so all of these advantages, really hitting some of these hot button issues that people are thinking about already, applying then our own viewpoint to them in a timely way, all without pandering or selling out our core audience or looking like we're chasing clicks. What is the overall service that this is all to? It's of course to change minds as I noted, but I also see it as preparing for the future as well. When I came to the Mises Institute, I was before this job, I was an economist for the State Division of Housing in Colorado. And what I found was that mostly, most of the time, so in say about 2005, 2006, nobody cared what we were doing or the reports I was putting out and things like that. But then after the housing crisis occurred in 2000, beginning in our state in 2007 and then 2008, 2009, suddenly everybody was very interested in the information that we were putting out in any analysis that we had about housing and so on. And so I suspect that that's true as well for our site. And of course you saw this reflected somewhat in the traffic back in 2008, 2009. There was a lot of interest then, which I suspect was driven as well from the economic crisis that was going on. And so I wanna make sure that we're positioning ourselves now to have writers who are prepared to write on these topics, to be a place that people are used to going for a unique viewpoint, a place where they can go for good economics so that when there is a new crisis, when there is a new recession, that we are prepared to offer our own viewpoints on that and to point people toward good economics when people care about economics more so than they usually do. Cause people are far more interested in economics when things seem to be going badly than when things are fine. And so I just wanna make sure we're gonna be ready for that as well. So that's really the view for the future. And I hope that you all visit the site every day. I'm certainly, I like suggestions as they come in when people ask for certain types of articles. And so if I, you know, never, I do sometimes get overwhelmed by the volume of email. So if I don't respond, of course, in a wordy fashion, it doesn't mean I didn't read the email or that I don't think it was a good idea. I just ran out of time that day. So I definitely welcome ideas or submissions or knowing what you would like to see on the site. And then we will see how we can improve. And we're constantly trying to improve to offer better content. And also to reach out beyond what we're already doing. Which sometimes where I would just note as a final note that sometimes these articles really take off. And this is what I wanna especially make sure we're ready for when the next crisis comes because we did get a lot of questions back in the day back in the last crisis for people who were experts on money and banking for Mark, for Joe Salerno. And the site can function very much as a way for other new sites to latch on to an article of ours that they think is quite timely. And this can translate into coverage on television shows, on other radio shows and in other publications as well. And then so we just wanna make sure and use our information to reach beyond the site as best we can, again, without abandoning our core mission. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.