 Alright, it's two o'clock and it's time for the writer panel, which is just for editors and writers talking about our personal opinions about what good writers do, so take it or leave it. However, there will, some of the program will be devoted toward helping you get published at the Mises Institute should you wish to do that, although there's just more general comments about it, because I think between us all we've all had actual careers outside the Mises Institute too, which involves writing things. So I've written for plenty of hostile audiences, written stuff that has nothing to do with my personal beliefs, so these are all useful skills I think. So we'll just talk about that a little bit. So let's just introduce all the panelists first and then I'll do my eight minutes. So I'm Ryan McMakin, I'm executive editor at the Mises Institute, so primarily the time you would interact with me is if you want to submit any articles to be on Mises.org. So Mises Wire, Power and Market, Academic Work goes through Joe and Mark and Timothy Terrell, but if we're talking popular writing, that would all go through me for Mises.org. So by the way, you can send it to me and Bill, should you wish to submit any stuff? It's all on the site. I'm RW McMakin at Mises and he's Bill at Mises. And so hopefully we'll get some submissions from some of you should you wish to write anything for the site. Now next up after me will be Daniella Bossi. Oh, I guess I should talk about my background, I don't know. Before this, I was a state economist, so I had to do a lot of writing for that. So lots of report writing, but most importantly I wrote a lot of press releases and we'll talk about that a little bit. And these were short articles designed for reporters to recreate and basically reprint in their own publications. And so this is still very much a thing. I guess some AI writes it now. But especially for niche stuff, you definitely need to be able to have the skill. It's very brief writing, it's very to the point and it's for an audience that isn't particularly interested in the topic you're writing about. So you need to be able to get these people somehow interested in the topic. So I taught political science for nine years at the freshman level. And I think that was actually very useful in this job because grading people's papers gives you I think some insights into what makes a terrible paper. And you had to, but you couldn't give them an F without explaining why. And so I got pretty good at explaining to people why the article or rather why the assignment, the written assignment had failed. In many cases, it was because they didn't know how to summarize information or they weren't giving the information requested. And so all these sorts of issues, just the combination of that of some academic work of working with the media on a regular basis. Also I was a lobbyist of the state legislature for a number of years. And so you had to write policy papers for legislators and they don't like to read stuff. So you had to take stuff and you had to take an entire complex issue and turn it into one piece of paper, maybe front and back at most because you had to call the legislature out in the lobby, ask them to vote a certain way. Here's my piece of paper. Hopefully you can read it. If it's any longer than that, they're never going to read it and they're not going to care what you think anyway. So you got to be able to summarize, break down information and get it out the door to people in a way that they're going to understand it with minimal effort. And that's something I'll talk about too is you can't ask people to expend much effort in reading your stuff. So that's about it for me. So let's go to Daniella. Daniella comes to us from an academic background and she has been editing academic journals in the past and I'll just let you talk a little bit about your qualifications. So I'm senior editor here. Before I came here, I worked at the William & Mary Quarterly. It's a journal in early American history and it's really hard to get your academic paper published here. I think we only take about 6% of the submissions there. And so that's where I learned how to edit and how to fact check. Before that, I got my master's degrees in history at William & Mary and the University of Vermont. So I did grade some undergraduate papers. I would grade like hundreds of papers for my professor. Some of them were pretty bad. But some were pretty good. So I've seen a lot of different kinds of writing. Here at the Mises Institute, I've actually been involved in all kinds of stuff. I've edited the Mises Wire for years, copy edited. And our two journal articles, the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and the Journal of Libertarian Studies and the Austrian and some of our books. And now I just kind of oversee some of those processes. But I come at things more from a copy editing point of view. So just kind of how is the paper structured? How is the grammar? Does it make sense to go from one idea to the next? And that's kind of what I look for. So that's the kind of thing we'll be sharing. You're probably tired of me at this point. That's a third panel in a row. So I am the content manager of the site. My background is professionally it was political writing in the forum for the committee that I mentioned earlier, the House Financial Services Committee. That was fun because then you realize that so many of the op-eds that have a politician's name are written by like 21-year-olds on the hill. There's going to have fun, though. There's some opportunities that exist within that. A friend of mine ended up being a go-to ghost writer for Corey Lewandowski, who was Trump's campaign manager back in 2016. So he wrote an article about, I can't remember the topic was now, but he was able to get some Mises quotes in there. Like dropping in some Rothbard references here and there. And so you can have some fun when you have an ideologically driven sort of goal here within writing. Now writing right now, you talk to a lot of our faculty members. You talk to most people that have any sort of reason to read content from someone y'all's age, and there seems to be universal recognition that the generation is not cutting it. That's one of the, so what this means is that one of the easiest ways to distinguish yourself amongst your peers is by becoming a competent writer. You have to be a great writer, but a competent writer. And one of the areas where, again, I had a lot less college papers graded than most. One of the areas where I did most of my writing early on that I kind of developed myself was actually during good old fashioned message boards. I love message boards. There's something wonderfully meritocratic about debating ideas with a avatar and an anonymous name. Where some 17-year-old snot knows kid can debate a successful professional guy in his 40s. And the way that people grade the back and forth is purely based on the content of the writing. I had a lot of fun with that. And so I think that's one of the biggest things is the best way to improve your writing is to write. We are in an environment right now where we don't have to write a lot if we do not want to. I think, again, unfortunately, message boards, I think, as a potbed of information, as a made source of kind of old school, social media sort of content, I think I've largely gone away. It's a shame because within the history of Austrian economics, a lot of the best content in the modern era is like blog posts between like the comments of blog posts between Steve Horowitz acting crazy about something and then Joe Salerno writing, putting him in his place and like Richard Ebeling sort of kind of being a moderator between the two. I love that stuff. I love the content. But that means writing. And I think Twitter can play a role within that. Right. Twitter is obviously a very small format. It's unfortunately a lot longer format than it used to be. I hate the over 280 whatever limit. Like I hate that aspect, but still, what Twitter does is allows you to interact, allows you to engage in a battle of ideas, right? It allows you to argue points. And I think that's one of the aspects is that it's difficult to make arguments if you do not have someone to argue with. And so if you're looking for who can be foils to argue ideas with, that requires a little bit of work on your report. And so once you get comfortable writing, then you can, you can benefit from some of the tools. Daniela is one of the best editors you're going to find anywhere. Her experience and her resume in terms of dealing with all of the minutiae of proper writing is, you know, we were extremely fortunate to have her. Ryan is perhaps the most prolific Austro-Liberarian commenter of the modern era. The depth by which he can write about so broad, you know, array of issues is never stops to just amaze. One of my favorites of his is about political decentralization, sort of bringing in a common ground between Misesi and monarchism and Rothbardian anarchism. It's, I can remember the name of it on the top of my head, but it was very much featured kind of in his book on secession. But just again, one of the best writers out there. So constantly read Ryan MacMacon. You'll be a better writer. Well, so as much as I would love to have you continue on this line of thinking for a while, let's let Bill tell us what he does. And then we'll come back and do the more full part of the discussion. Hi, I'm Bill Anderson and I'm the old man of the group. And so and they actually brought me on because Ryan wanted to write as opposed to get worn out by having to do lots and lots of editing. But anyway, my background, I was a journalism major in college. And in two years, it'll be the 50th anniversary of my graduation. And the I went to the University of Tennessee, ran track and and all that all that requires, including hating Florida, but and beating them. And I beat lots of guys from Alabama, too, I'll have, you know. But but at any rate, I was worked as a journalist for quite a while, also taught school. Ultimately, I I don't know how I did it. One, the Olive Garvey contest back in 82 went to the Montpellarant Society and and presented my paper and had Milton Friedman say, oh, you get to be the star this week. I said, yeah, that's the last time you hold me in deference. And the Met Murray Rothbard tour at East Berlin with Murray Rothbard. That was an interesting thing. And then I end up getting my doctorate in economics here at Auburn, finished in 1998. James Chapolo back there, Professor Chapolo was one of my students in money and banking and did a good job. And so my job now is I get the daily stuff, in other words, that pretty much everything that is in the queue, especially for Mises wire stuff that I've I've done and gone over. I'll go a little bit more about how that process works later on and what we look for and what we do not look for. And the like. But so my background, it's a little bit different. And it's it's, you know, academic, you know, at the doctoral level. I was a professor at Frostburg State University for more than 20 years. That's in Western Maryland and also is at North Greenville University for a couple of years. So back to school and, you know, they were constantly stabbing each other in the back. And I thought I'm getting out of here before I get my knife in my back. And so I ended up going to Frostburg and also they paid me twice as much. But but at any rate, so that's my background. It's a it's varied. It's academic, but also have a journalism background. I've got a flair for writing. I do a fair amount of writing myself, although not as much as I used to. All right. So back to Ryan. All right. So we're just going to throw at you then some general principles that we've noticed that might might be helpful. I'm talking more generally about writing just in general. So this should just apply everywhere. But of course, I'll factor it into how it would affect your writing for the Mises Institute specifically. So I just broke it down to four general rules that I would recommend. And the first one is to know what you're talking about. And when you work in PR and you work with other PR professionals, people who write in journalism or they write press releases, that sort of thing. A lot of the time, they'll tell you they're generalists. Well, I can write on any topic, I'm a generalist. And this is what a lot of people who come out of journalism school will tell you, because they didn't spend four years studying any particular topic. They were studying how to report on a variety of topics. Some specialize in financial news and that sort of thing, but many don't. They come out and they tell you that I can just write anything when they interview at a PR firm and they don't always want to hear that. They want to hear that I am particularly proficient in writing on some particular topic. So I would definitely say that you want to develop some sort of area where actually know what you're talking about and you have some sort of depth of knowledge. This requires a lot of reading. And certainly, if you're if you're interested in just having a deep background, I would certainly recommend reading a lot of history. Depending on what you're interested in, maybe cultural history, maybe economic history, not necessarily political history, but just have something there that you can talk about. And you'll notice that in reading Mises or Rothbard or any of these people who seem particularly erudite, they always seem to have a very broad knowledge of historical events. And that gives them a wide variety of topics and examples and time periods that can draw upon and different sorts of people. And without that knowledge, there's just really not a whole lot you can do. You're just not dealing from a position of having a depth of knowledge in any particular field. And just in general, you have to keep up, right? You got to read the finance news if you're going to talk about finance or talk about economic trends. And so that takes effort. So before you write anything, you just have to keep up with all of that sort of stuff. The second thing is, number two, what kind of writing are you doing? Is this an op ed? Is this a book review? Is this a press release? Is this a fundraising letter, which is very, very difficult? Is this an academic article? So you probably going to need to decide that ahead of time before you can really approach the article and definitely know what the differences are between all of these things and know what the general form is. And even today when I read just like trash sites, even like Buzzfeed and stuff like that, right? There's still a recognizable form to the articles. It's not like one article is 2000 words and the next article is 300. They tend to form or follow the particular form that that matches their publication and and accomplishes what they're trying to do. So length is often a determinant. The use of the vernacular, the the level that you are trying to write for, these are all important issues. And so you need to, I think, figure that out ahead of time. If you start out writing the article and you're like, well, this could be anywhere from an 8000 word academic article to a quick 600 word op ed. That's not a great place to start. Part three, number three, know your audience. Who are you writing this for? Right. Are you writing this for people with a 10th grade education, which is perfectly fine? And are you going to help them understand the information or are you writing it for extremely erudite group that has read a lot of philosophy and knows a lot of big words like ontological and things like that, right? I mean, if you're going to use big words, you better define them if your target audience is just regular people. So keep that in mind. Probably the number one place I encounter this where people are throwing out jargon that normal people don't know at all are Bitcoin bros. They love to write articles with all sorts of terms that normal people have never, ever heard in their entire lives. And they'll fill an article with that stuff. And that's just not good writing. I mean, if you are writing to just people who are in your tiny little group, it might work, but it's not going to work with anything targeted to the larger world. And then finally, number four, get to the point. This is an important part that requires organization because it's really easy to just start writing. And then the next thing you know, your six paragraphs into your introduction and your reader still has no idea what your thesis statement is or what this article is all about. I have rejected many articles in my day and explained to the writer that I didn't understand what this article was about until two thirds of the way through. It was only then that I figured out what the topic of this article was because there was just lots of introductory material that didn't go anywhere in particular. So that that is certainly a big issue. And there's an old saying that they used to tell priests who would do homilies, right, sermons, lectures. So there were three bees of a of a sermon. I think this applies to a op ed or any sort of short article. Also, it was Be Brief is the first bee. And the second bee is it could be any number of things. Be bold, be brilliant, be memorable, make some point. That's interesting. But the third bee is be seated, sit back down, you're done. And that's just an important part. Standing up there for 30, 40 minutes when you're trying to reach this this audience that's that has a full time job and they're tired and they want to go home, they want to have some coffee, you're just going to have to keep it brief. And that reminds and looking at that, you think, well, what if I have big, big ideas I want to communicate? You know, how can I do that in nine hundred words? Well, I think you want to look at your body of work as something that's beyond any single article. You you can build a writing career. You can build a persona around hundreds of articles. And it just when I think of this, I think of a I'll just close with this. There's a great journalist who won multiple awards for being a sports columnist. His name was Jim Murray. And he for 27 years, I think he wrote four columns a day for the Los Angeles Times. So you can think about how many thousands of articles that adds up to. And he was a award winning guy. And the old the old story about him was that he was never cocky. He never thought he was doing anything particularly important. And so he would always complain that he didn't have any sort of angle and he didn't know what he was going to write. And then he would write his article and he would call it in. And then he would take a big sigh and lean back and say, fooled him again. And these idiots think I know how to write an article. And I convinced them of this for the 10,000th time. And so I think you can take the Jim Murray approach just a little bit at a time and you can build quite a nice impressive writing portfolio in that way. And that's probably going to be what's mostly open to regular people is writing short articles for a variety of publications, because most places they don't want big, long stuff unless you're committed to the whole book thing, which can take up years of your life. So if you are interested in writing, I would definitely recommend you learn how to write short, interesting pieces. And Mises.org is a perfectly good place to start. So thank you and we'll go on to Daniella next. Thanks, Ryan. Some of these points I definitely, well, most of them I agree with. I the main thing I want to emphasize is just the importance of of learning to write well and building building airtight, well substantiated arguments, especially when you're coming from a dissident point of view. You know, you can't assume that everyone is on your side and will know exactly what you're talking about. So I think even though these publications, we probably don't don't really want to read them like The New York Times. I think it's it's great to take a page from their book. Like The New York Times has a really thorough process for putting out its garbage. You know, they do a lot of they do a lot of fact checking. It goes through multiple stages of editing. You know, every single letter, every single character in those articles has been looked at by many people. And, you know, that's any even though it comes out a lot, you know, it's a I mean, it's a periodical and there's breaking news. I mean, it's still that quality, even if it's crap. So I think it's important to kind of. Make that the ideal process for for our writing, just finding finding readers to look over your work, you know, finding finding proof for every every statement that you make. And yes, considering your audience, you know, you don't have to rotally explain every single term in Bitcoin, if you're writing for a Bitcoin audience, they'll, you know, they know some of these things. But, you know, if you're if it's a broader audience, you don't want to use a lot of jargon in academic writing, which I'm most experienced with, like the main pitfalls I see, you know, I see that people use they just use a lot of a lot of theory sometimes, and they don't really they don't go deeper and kind of really illustrate their ideas. Another problem is when you get into these more complex arguments and you're writing longer pieces, it seems that sometimes people run out of room because even journals, they commonly only want people to write 10,000 words max and then includes footnotes. So that's really not that long. So, you know, things kind of. The transitions can be rough. It doesn't always make sense, like to go from one idea to the next. So I think it's important to get readers and to always consider your your first draft that, you know, don't consider it complete unless you've had people read it and vet it. And, you know, everyone needs editing, myself included. So humility and writing. Thank you. We'll move on to though. Well, speaking about the importance of organization, I got my previous session is confused with the eight minutes of content there. So I'm just going to largely just say, remember what I said last time, write more and I'm going to pass it over to Bill and we'll we'll take questions from that. All right. Thanks, though. All right. So what happens, you know, when I get this email with an attachment and and what do I do with it? Well, you know, I glance at it often. I'll just open it up real quickly in that way. I can tell right off the bat, you know, if it's if it's a loser, I can tell that right off better. A winner is a little sometimes a little harder to define, but a loser definitely. But then I will I have a daily file, then I have a spreadsheet. So I put the, you know, the and it's got to be in word format. Don't send me PDF. You send me PDF. I'm sending it right back to you with a nasty note. But that but but I put it in a file. I make a notation, the spreadsheet, and there's a number of things that I want to know. But then, all right, what happens? What happens once that thing? You know, I get it in the file. All right, depends on how far down the queue. Sometimes if it's really timely, I will jump on it right away. And but sometimes it's going to have to wait. Right now, the queue is three weeks out. All right. And I don't like to have it longer than that simply because you lose flexibility. I mean, I really I mean, right now I could have one month out and I don't think that would be good. You know, it would be just, you know, because soon or later, something's going to happen and we've got to jump, you know, jump in. But all right. So what do you know, what happens then? All right, then when I get to it, I read it, I go over it. And and for the most part, the subject isn't that complicated. I'm looking right now at a piece of David Brady sent me. And that this one was unfed now. This one is complicated. OK, you have to know what you're talking about, because I went over it and I real carefully because I thought, oh, my gosh, OK, this is this is a lot more advanced than than what I often get. And sometimes what I'll do is I'll send it over to something, you know, another economist, somebody as well, because I. I want to make sure, you know, I'm, you know, in fact, I'm probably too cautious sometimes. I think I drive Ryan a little bit crazy. Sometimes I'll send him something and, you know, he's thinking, oh, come on, you can handle that. But but there are times I'll send something to David Gordon. I'll send something to Joe Salerno that understands something. And this is all of us here. You know, Mises.org is the front porch of this organization. This is where most people go. And we're going to protect that thing. We're protecting that front porch. And and you've got to make. You know, we have to make sure that something comes up there. We put something up there that it's worth reading. And so, you know, you go in there and. And that's important to us, you know, it's got to be worth reading. All right. What are some things that I'm going to look for? Obviously, content, it's got to be in the Austrian tradition. Don't, you know, don't try to to convince me that the Federal Reserve really is that wonderful, you know, bank of last resort, you know, I just got an email from somebody, you know, have it, you guys, right? Don't you know anything about the Fed? Don't Doug French know anything? Don't you know anything? Don't you know this is what the Fed does? And I don't even answer. And I just sent it. I forward over to Doug and basically, you know, with a few choice words. And but nonetheless, it's got to be in the Austrian tradition or something, you know, some things we're not doing. We're not going to fix libertarianism. Do not send me something on how the Constitutional take care of this. The Constitution is a document that prevents the government from doing those terrible things that it does to us. And and so, you know, there's one guy, he's incorrigible. He keeps sending stuff and I keep sending back. I finally said, look, you know, this is not going to work. And every once in a while, unfortunately, he sends me something that I can use. And, you know, I haven't quite closed them out yet. But but that you've got to send all right. So content's got to be good writing. Don't send me paragraphs that are like this, you know, work. I mean, have you ever tried to read through an article? One big block of something? I mean, it's just awful, you know. And and so and if it's badly written, I'm going to make one or two assessments. I'm going to think, OK, maybe this person really can be reformed. And and I'll ask you to do it. I am not going to babysit your article. You know, if you send me something that's bad, it's going to get rejected. And but remember, it's got to be broken up into some do not send me stuff with big block paragraphs. Make sure that you've written within your own competence. Like I said, and it's a compliment that David David can handle something like FedNow that is complicated. And in fact, I had to have somebody else look. I just needed to make sure on that. But not everybody in this room and myself included probably could write that well on that subject. And so you have to. But you could probably find some things that you can write well on. All right. And so let's say that, OK, I've finally approved it. We've gone through. By the way, what I'll do is I'll give you one rewrite. And that's all because I just don't have the time. One guy went through four rewrites, and I still haven't published it yet. And I'm not doing that anymore. You know, I'll give we'll give you one time, one chance to to reform yourselves and to behave. And if not, by the way, if I reject it, that doesn't mean I'm going to reject everything down the road. But then, you know, in some time around midnight, because I like to work late at night and I'm on Pacific time. And Daniela, you know, has a nice set of emails like this in the morning with attachments. And now the important thing is that Daniela will call B.S. on something, including mine. I I had something. I thought, man, it's a great piece of work and all that. And I sent it over to her and she sent it back. Bum, bum, this problem, this problem. I thought, that sucks. You know, so I just I decided not to run it. You know, I just shelled it permanently. I might get to it after a while. But but nonetheless, I mean, what you've got is one of the best in the business. And so when she's got people under her that they don't care who you are, you know, they are going to fly spec it, you got a length that doesn't work. You've got a weird source. You've got everything I'm telling you, they're going to pick it up. All right. And so therefore, what I'm telling you in the process is fair, it is fair. I mean, I try to be fair to people. But the one thing I'm, you know, going to do with everybody else, I want to protect our page. I want to protect its integrity. I want to protect the quality of, you know, that we are really the foremost spokespeople for Austrian economics. All right. You know, and especially than the Missessian and the Rothbardian tradition, we are it and we're going to protect that. So keep that in mind. But I do encourage you, by the way, one last thing. That, you know, if we start publishing more and more of your stuff, you are likely to be paid. Now, it won't be a lot, but I mean that that's something down the road, too. And it's always nice to get a little bit of a check and to get paid for something. All right. Thanks. All right. Well, we will take some questions. But I do have a question for, though, of my own, because while you were heaping praise upon me, I was hoping you would continue doing that. But I have a question unrelated to what you talk about message boards and those sorts of things, right? If, since I don't keep up with where young people go on the Internet anymore, where should someone go now to engage people, practice with the writing to learn where the weaknesses are? That sort of thing, I don't know where to go. That's one of the frustrating things is a lot of the discourse now is either super short form or it's podcasts and YouTube. And I think that leads itself to like being overly bloviating on this sort of stuff, because I don't think I feel space. I think the Osher Economics Discord server provides a good opportunity for a lot of written discussion back and forth. Facebook groups used to do that. I mean, I think Facebook used to be so the cornerstone of that's where everyone in the Liberty Movement kind of knew each other and they could argue and whatever. And I think that's that's Facebook's kind of killed itself in that regard. So I'm still trying to figure out where are the frontiers from a writing perspective outside? I mean, you have, you see more, a lot more sub stacks. And so that creates a little bit more entrepreneurship in your own right. It can be kind of difficult to kind of keep a sub stack going because of that comfort, seeing numbers go up. That's why you should write for Mises.org because Mises.org is a wonderful opportunity to help not only get your ideas out there, but actually have it be read and consumers consuming your your work that you get the work of writing an article is more or less the same outside of dealing with the editing structure. But it's a lot better if you're going to put time into putting out ideas. It's a lot better to get those ideas read than to have them set on a blog that only you and your your mother reads. And so that's another reason for writing on Mises.org. And you can get feedback. You put your email address in your bio or, you know, create a special email address where people read your article, send their stuff so that it's not in your like regular inbox. But we did we did kill the comment section, so right. And so what that with the comment section gone, what that means is more people will email you because that outlet isn't there anymore. So you might want to set that up and then you can hear from them. And some of them actually do have some good questions and ideas. And that can definitely make you better because they will say stuff that we didn't mention in the editing process and which nobody had thought of until this person comments on it. So OK, so Discord and Substack. I hadn't even thought of Substack, right? Because anybody can start that at Substack and long form Twitter threads and another. Sure. Yeah, right. I mean, Pear B. London does that. So it's perfectly legitimate. Are there any questions from the audience? Yes. You right there. Yes, I'm I'm talking to you, right? Or should I do you think do you think it's helpful to sort of have a writing portfolio on something like Substack when you're writing and so that when you go to sort of put an article before a publication to have sort of have that writing portfolio, do you think it's helpful or not? No. And I'll. I really would not recommend going to Substack until you've got a little bit of a following or you could be writing to yourself. And and you know, I think probably all of us think, oh, man, if I could get on Substack, man, I'd make lots of money up. You know, I've disavowed myself of that, you know, nonsense. A long time ago. I think that there are different ways. I think one of the things is just it's just to do it. You know, my first article that I ever published on something, you know, and that kind of I'd done a little freelance writing on other topics. But I had an article in the Freeman in December 1981. That was my first one. I just decided just to write and try it out. And so I, in fact, I'd sent him something earlier. They'd rejected it. And so I wrote it another one and sent it out there. And Lo and behold, it got accepted. And that was how I got my start. I started writing more things for the Freeman and the next thing you know, I mean, it's, you know, you start getting a little bit of a following. And so I've been able to and I've had a lot of a lot of luck. The Mises Institute. Once I started writing for them in the in the mid to late 90s, that really gave me a wonderful audience. But, you know, it takes time. But the only way you do it is to do it. You know, that's the main thing. Just, you know, try and by the way, and if you get it rejected, it's not the end of the world. I've had stuff rejected. Like I said, you know, and I had Daniela said, Bill, there are some serious issues with this serious enough for me to shelve it. And, you know, we're still friends. Though, what do you think? Like the quality of your Mises dot wire submission is going to be graded on its merits, not your resume. And so again, so long as you have enough skills to write a decent article, not don't don't feel like that should be a barrier to to publishing. If this is the first time Mises dot org was actually the first place I think it's ever published an article of mine, which is way back in like 20. It was about the romantic boom and bust, the Valentine's Day article to 2011. But but I had a different editorial team. But, you know, they they accepted it because they thought it was good enough at the time. So then your resume won't hinder being published. Your calling card is is that draft that you send sent to us. And I and it's the same if you're trying to become an editor, too. When I when I hire people, when I'm looking for people, they direct me sometimes to their website. And it's kind of I asked you to send me an editing sample. I want to see how you edit. And I don't really, you know, it'll it'll attract attention. You know, if you have certain qualifications on your resume and if you have a following. But but the most important thing is that thing that you put in front of the content editor. I take the opposite few of Bill on this, I think just. Well, it depends on what we're talking about. If the question is, is it helpful in terms of getting published, which I think is what Bill is responding to, then I don't think it's necessarily all that helpful, because probably they won't for a short article, they probably won't research your stuff. But I would say just as a writer, as an exercise, having a place where you write stuff that you haven't submitted is good. One of the benefits of that, too, is that you can endlessly change the article if you want. It's up there for a while. You go back and you read it. You're like, I want to make I want to change this. And then you can change it. You can play around with it and you become a better editor that way. And also you have a place you can go to and look at some of your old ideas and modify them over time and change them. And then you just write up a different part two of that article, a later revision, and that's what you submit. So I think just as in terms of developing your skills as a writer, having another place for your writing stuff, just for your usage is good. And you never know what people might stumble upon either back when the Internet was fun, like in 2002 or so before social media. And people just had like random blogs that they wrote stuff all the time. You would stumble upon these websites that were hilarious and fun and like weird quirky stuff and they didn't have high traffic, but it was there and there was that was a real pleasure in life with stumbling upon some blog where like you and three other people thought it was a lot of fun. And so I think the world needs more of that. So yeah, if you want to do that, go ahead. One thing and that is that if you submitted it elsewhere, don't submit it to us then. I mean, that that's that now if you've had on if you have a sub stack or if you had a blog and you put it on there, no problem there, that you can you can send it our way. Although send it to me. Do not send me a link and make me, you know, have to work through that thing. You sent, you know, you sent me something in a word format. That's W-O-R-D and that anything else, I'm going to send it back to you. So all right, we have time for, I think, two more questions. You think that we can squeeze them in you right there? Yes. All right. So I'm as somebody who's written quite a bit and has tried to write, I find myself getting like bogged down, trying to find sources for my articles. What tips do you guys have as far as like finding sources, making sure they're accurate ones and not just like some some mom blog that doesn't have like any reputability? I would say so a lot of times we get stuff with some Wikipedia links in them. And I just, you know, I love Wikipedia for learning, but I just try to kill all those links, like try to get them out of there. So a lot of times I replace them with Investopedia links and Britannica links. So those are great common references. And if you're doing like Canadian stuff, the Canadian encyclopedia. So just common reference works are are great. And just and depending on, you know, if you're sitting down to write, you might know more than you realize. So kind of use some of those articles that that got you thinking about this subject as kind of a starting point, you can link to them. And sometimes they link to others do that too. And that's with academic research, too. You jump back to the you look at the footnotes and the and the index and the bibliography and you just kind of follow their footsteps. Yeah, follow the footnotes. And this is how you use Wikipedia to cheat. You read Wikipedia, Wikipedia has sources, right? You go to the bottom, then you go to that source and then you find the larger context of the quotation, you use it yourself. But as long as you're quoting, you're using that source directly and not going through Wikipedia. I mean, that's perfectly legit. To give you an example of this, you know, there's all this brouhaha about the bricks starting a gold base currency, right? And so it got out there. Then Russia today did a new segment about it. And then all of a sudden, all these people on financial Twitter were talking about it, where you go back and you actually you follow the links. You that's the thing you have to work for, right? You have to if you have to work the sources to get back to where things originated. And it was like the Russian embassy to an African country that in a little deleting the tweet. And yet because of that, it sparked all of this commentary about this announcement that people were then using to justify, etc., etc. So that's the thing is it requires some some diligence in your part where something doesn't smell quite right. Then lean into that instinct and try to figure out if it references elsewhere. If they can't reference within the site, then look for reference elsewhere. If you can't find it, then don't use it. All right. Yes. Oftentimes, I find myself rewriting large sections of things I've already written, like I'll rewrite my introduction three or four times and spend 30 minutes on it. Do you have any advice for getting over that? I find it very, very annoying. Yes, writing the intro can often be the most time consuming, annoying part of the article. Often, what I do is I pretty much write the meat of the article. And then I try and figure out what's an appropriate intro. The and it really is often the hardest part. Less is just usually more. I think that's just save. Don't feel like you have to justify yourself so much in the intro. I think that's the problem on the road. I go down a lot of the time is like, well, I got to I got to like, I got to partially explain it in the intro and then I'll really get to the meat in the in a few later paragraphs. But I think I'm over explaining things in the intro in a lot of those cases. So I say, just keep it real simple and just get to it. Like, and you don't even have just like Link to, oh, well, Joe Biden said the stupid thing the other day. And now we're going to talk about a related topic. I mean, that's enough. But, you know, phrase a little bit more artfully than that. But all you have to do with the intro is establish that it's a relevant topic and not just like your musings about something. And I think that's enough to get some some interest in it. But one of the things also is, please, please, please, please do not send me your own personal little narrative, which winds down this street and down that one. You know, that I get those and I do not like those. And so that's that's what they end and not often happens in the introduction. That's why people get stuck because they start doing a personal narrative and weaving along, just get over that. Don't send me any articles that say I was talking to my neighbor in my driveway the other day. And by the time I was done with him, it was a diehard Rothbardian. So we're we're out of time. And so Felicia is going to explain how the scavenger hunt works or not Felicia's. I have the well, first, let's give our panelists a round of applause.