Dr. Doug Cardell: Capitalism vs Socialism — Which Actually Creates Prosperity?

What actually creates prosperity — ideology, or outcomes?

In this conversation, I sit down with economist and author Dr. Doug Cardell to examine capitalism, socialism, and economic freedom through what he calls “evidentiary economics” — judging systems based on real-world results rather than political identity or theory.

We explore why centralized planning struggles in complex economies, how human behavior makes forecasting nearly impossible, and why markets function as discovery systems rather than control mechanisms. Dr. Cardell explains how profit emerges from serving others, why subjective value makes voluntary exchange possible, and how incentives shape prosperity at scale.

We also examine the moral dimension of economic systems — whether capitalism is simply efficient, or ethically stronger because it protects freedom, rewards value creation, and channels self-interest into service. The discussion moves into why socialism continues to resurface, the dangers of zero-sum thinking, and what a workable Social Security reform might look like using personal accounts.

This episode is for listeners interested in economic clarity, incentive structures, and evaluating competing systems beyond slogans.

Topics covered: • Evidentiary economics and outcome-based thinking
• Why economies behave like chaotic systems
• Limits of centralized planning
• Capitalism as value creation
• Incentives, freedom, and prosperity
• The zero-sum mindset and wealth perception
• Capitalism vs socialism in practice
• Social Security reform ideas
• Habits for clearer economic thinking

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is not a podcast for comfort. It's a podcast for clarity. In a culture flooded with noise, dangerous narratives, and emotional uncertainty, this space exists to examine what actually matters and what actually works. Here we question power itself, belief systems, and the assumptions most people inherit without inspection. Most people accept instead of dissect. This podcast is about correcting that. Welcome. Bienvenue velocomen. Bienvenidos to the Magnificent Ones Podcast. Welcome back to the Magnificent Ones Podcast, where we explore the ideas, the principles, and the individuals shaping the world around us. Today's conversation moves into one of the most consequential debates of our time: how economic systems influence prosperity, opportunity, and the future of societies. My guest today is economist and author, Dr. Doug Cardell, a thinker who approaches economics through what he calls evidentiary economics. Rather than beginning with ideology, Dr. Cardell begins with the premise economic systems should be evaluated based on evidence and outcomes, not political preferences or assumptions. He's the author of the book Why Socialism Struggles, where he examines the structural challenges that socialist economic systems encounter and explores the moral and practical arguments behind free market capitalism. Through his writing in public discussions, Dr. Cardell focuses on questions such as what economic systems actually produce prosperity? Why do some economic models repeatedly fail? And how should individuals think about value, wealth creation, and economic freedom? With that, welcome to the Magnificent Ones podcast, Dr. Cardell. It is a pleasure having you. Thank you for being on today.

SPEAKER_02 2:05

It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_00 2:07

Absolutely. So I'm going to take this moment to do a brief introduction so the folks at home can get to know a little bit about you and your background. So, Dr. Cardell, uh, before we begin today's conversation, it's worth introducing you as a guest of many talents. You've worked in various fields. You're an economist, an educator, and a policy analyst whose work has focused on evidentiary economics, an approach that examines economic systems based on real-world outcomes rather than ideological assumptions. Over the course of your career, you've served as an aide to a member of the United States Congress, worked as a corporate chief executive officer, and spent many years teaching mathematics and modeling in both secondary and post-secondary education. Your academic background includes advanced study connected with institutions such as the University of Arizona, MIT, Liberty University, reflecting a blend of analytical and technical and policy-oriented training. You're also the author of Why Socialism Struggles, where you explore the structural economic challenges that centrally planned systems often face, drawing on historical evidence, economic modeling, and real-world case studies. In today's conversation, we'll explore some of these ideas and examine evidence, incentives, and human behavior shaped and the way it shapes economic systems and how they function. So with that, thank you for being a part of the Magnificent Ones podcast. So today. Absolutely. Dr. Cardell, I'd like to begin with the intellectual journey behind your work. Now many economists begin their thinking through political philosophy or ideology, but you've described your approach as evidentiary economics, where the emphasis is placed on outcomes rather than beliefs. So my question to you is what experiences or observations, you know, led you to adopt that perspective? How did you come up with this framework?

SPEAKER_02 4:17

Well, I I guess a lot of it has had to do with my background in mathematics, where obviously ideology doesn't matter. Two and two is four, and what you believe is irrelevant. And I I've also worked as an engineer, and the same sort of thing applies there. If you're building something, what you believe is going to happen is going to be dictated by the mathematics of it and the physics of it, not by what you wish would happen. And so it was a small step for me to apply that same sort of reasoning to economics and see that too many economists today are starting with ideology and trying to prove that their ideas work rather than actually looking at what does work and and actually studying that to find out why.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

You know, that's very interesting. You know, there's I don't want to jump ahead of myself because there I'm I'm actually very excited. What you're saying is that economic systems shouldn't be judged by ideology, they should be judged by real-world outcomes. Is that something that can be measured? And that's that kind of goes into something that I, as I was, you know, going through your your uh your information and some patterns, some patterns that uh that I recognize is you're you've somehow managed to bridge, bridge things. Whether it's concepts or like, for example, you know, the social the social security fix, for example, you've created a hybrid model of sorts that can please, you know, or satisfy multiple systems, right? I think that's very fascinating that it it's you're able to take philosophical things in nature and then have a mathematical approach to them that does have real-world outcomes and applications. So can you walk us a little bit through that?

SPEAKER_02 6:19

Well, yeah, I I I guess a lot a large part of that comes from my background as an educator and as an engineer. I I've learned how to look at how to solve problems, but I've also learned how to explain them to other people. And to find the clearest ways to communicate to others. And I'm certainly not perfect at it, but that's certainly part of my goal, is to find ways to make the difficult seem obvious, I guess is the way I would put it. And I think most of the time that's possible as long as you don't get into the weeds of trying to explain stuff as though you were talking to another expert. Um, and too often I think that's what economists do. They they tend to explain things the way they would talk to another economist, and that doesn't work when you're talking to people that don't have that kind of background.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Absolutely. You often say ideology asks for acceptance, intelligence asks for evidence. For listeners hearing that phrase for the first time, what does evidentiary economics actually look like in practice?

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Well, a really good example. I I'm a as I already think I mentioned I'm a musician and I'm a Beatles fan, and John Lenham is terrific. But he wrote a song called Imagine.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

Yes, I saw that in a year already.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

In that song, he lays out a socialist agenda that he used the correct title. It's me, it's his imagination. And that's an example of his creating an imaginary world based around an ideology that has no hope of functioning in the real world. And so that's often a lot of the problem, is that a lot of the people who are advocating socialism are advocating things that can't work in the real world for several reasons, but uh probably the two most important are economic reasons and human reasons. And socialism fails on both grounds.

SPEAKER_00 8:27

I don't remember which article I read, but uh it it it had to do, it was with centralized planning. It was it with this was one of your work, and I was trying to to bridge it with with with corporations and how you know me working for a corporation, I have to do things such as forecasting. Right. If I had to operate in in someone else's system and they were like, hey, this is what I planned and you have to stick with it, versus forecasting, which is there are things that change, you know, I can adapt if I need to. There's a level of freedom there, right? And and I can account for variables. If someone has planned a system and I have to be confined to that system, it'll be very difficult for me to be able to navigate whenever I need to pivot. There'll be moments where maybe there's a hurricane. And so because there's a hurricane and we have supply chain and all of these things that'll affect it, if I still went by the plan that was set in motion for me and I didn't adapt to it, then I will, my career would be over in failure. And so that's kind of like Mao's idea of you know collectivizing the farms, and 100 million people died as a result of that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

Yeah, that that's often the case. There are, I guess, three flavors of central centrally planned economies: communism, socialism, and fascism. But they're all basically the same. They're minor differences, but that's all they are, is minor differences. And so it's easy just to refer to them all as socialism. That's the more central term. And yeah, the the the first problem is that you mentioned hurricanes. The the economy is a chaotic system. And the the best example of that to most people is the weather. And a guy named Lorenz in 72 was working with a weather model, and he found out that a tiny, tiny input in an input variable could make a huge difference in the output.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 10:59

And so we spent the next good deal of time studying that. And you've probably heard his famous quote: can a butterfly flyback is it flapping its wings in Brazil precipitate a tornado in Texas? Yes. And yes, it can, because often any chaotic system is at a tipping point where the tiniest nudge either way can make a big difference in which way it falls. And I could make a similar statement about economics. Is it possible that somebody buying a pair of shoes in Peru can trigger a depression in Poland? And yeah, definite. Because it's it's a chaotic system. And it's even more chaotic than the weather. And it's pretty easy to show that. I mean, there are 9 billion people in the world. For me to plan what is going to happen to the economy, I would have to look into the minds of those 9 billion people and try and figure out what they're planning a year from now. Well, that's clearly impossible. I don't know what my wife is planning a week from now. And so, how could I possibly read 9 billion people's minds and figure out? And in point of fact, even if I could read all of their minds and find out what they're planning a year from now, between now and then, many of them would change their minds. Yes. And so the economy is inherently a very, very unstable place. And so any kind of fixed system like socialism is guaranteed to fail because those predictions aren't going to work. Part of my research was to, for my doctorate, was to do a 30-year study of the Federal Reserve's look at the consumption index. And in my look at that consumption index, what I found out was that the Federal Reserve, I I looked at 30 years, looked at what the Federal Reserve predicted, looked what would happen a year later. They were right 46% of the time. They could have done better flipping a coin.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 12:59

Now, I'm not saying, and it's really important to make clear that I'm not saying that the Fed is incompetent. They're not. They're not even a little bit incompetent. I couldn't do any better. The problem is they're trying to do something that's impossible.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 13:14

You can't forecast what because the personal consumption index looks at what people are going to buy. And it's so it's forecasting, saying, here's how we think they're going to spend their money. And they were right 46% of the time, because we don't know how people are going to spend their money. And so if we want freedom, that first of all means we have to have economic freedom. And that means people get to decide what they're going to buy, when they're going to buy it, and that means we can't predict.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Absolutely. You know what? I think that it's it's people forget the human component in the thing of things, right? So we talk about freedom, the freedom to buy this, and then we also have this thing called impulse. Maybe I did bring my lunch to work today, but as I was walking to the parking lot, I smelled a hot dog. I now go buy the hot dog, did not eat my lunch, because that's something that that happens as a human being. We change our minds, but we also have a freedom to change our minds. And, you know, even though the hot dog is a very simplistic example of that, you know, one of the things that I like to try to, I try to look at systems and deconstruct them. And you were talking about how, you know, all these variables affect each other. And I think in we talked about everything being in chaos. Well, from looking at it from an international relations perspective, the world is in chaos, but it works a majority of the time, right? But because countries do whatever they want to do, there's no actual person or government entity telling everyone what to do and controlling the entire system, that's what makes it successful. Because if we were to say, Venezuela, you should only produce corn, and this country should only produce this, then what would happen if a hurricane, we'll use the hurricane analogy again, a hurricane hit Venezuela or a frost hit Venezuela, now there's no corn for the rest of the world. So I I I think that your your evidentiary economics, as you, you know, as you've coined it, is very important because we have to talk about the human component and the fact that people have the power to choose. So my my my my Yeah, a really good way Yes, please go ahead. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 15:35

Oh uh a really good way to help people see that is the human body. You you our bodies are also chaotic systems. We don't like to think of them that way. In fact, we don't think of them that way, but they are. We have trillions of cells.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 15:51

And we like to think our brain is in control of those, but it's not. First of all, more than half the cells in your body aren't even human. They're virus, fungi, bacteria, all kinds of other stuff, but they aren't human cells, so clearly our brain can't control those. But let's take a look at a cell in your kidney. What's that cell doing? It's just being a kidney cell, it's produ it's doing what it needs to do to survive and grow and multiply, and it doesn't know we exist, it has no idea of what we are. And so to those cells, to every cell in our body, we are simply an environment. That's all. And they do the best they can to deal with that environment, and we benefit from that, obviously. Absolutely. Now, there are times to go to your world idea when that system does get out of control. We call that cancer. And that's when some of the cells in our body decide to get greedy. And when that happens, government, our brain, has to step in and say, No, we're gonna do something about this. We're gonna go get treatment, we're gonna get radiation, we're gonna get chemo, whatever we have to do, we've got to kill those bad cells.

SPEAKER_01 17:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 17:11

That's the legitimate role of government. Even before in the country or in to deal with things when they don't work rather than trying to plan things unnecessarily. I think a lot of the problem is because people don't understand how that can work. But it works all the time in the environment. Look at squirrels. We like squirrels because they plant trees, but squirrels don't know they plant trees, they aren't going around going about their day going, gotta plant trees, gotta plant trees, gotta plant trees. No. They're just finding food and storing it up for the winter. Yes, they don't know anything about the environment, trees, and they don't care. And same with bees. Bees do not see their job as to pollinate flowers. Their job is to collect pollen to make honey. Yeah. And they don't care about the environment. They aren't interested in that. They're interested in making honey. And that's the way the cells in our body work, and that's the legitimate way for people to work in the world economy. Just do our own thing and let our doing that thing make the world better.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

I think I would tie this to you, one of your articles, is greed good? And part of, I do believe greed is good, but I think that it's the definitions of things. People don't understand the concepts that are being presented to them in the first place. Is greed good? My perspective, yes. In this capitalist society that we live in, if I decide to start a business, am I starting the business necessarily because I want to benefit the world or because I want to be able to retire comfortably? The truth is, I work hard, I plan the business, the business grows, and as a byproduct of that, I get to hire people and to expand the economy be based on how much I'm producing and how much people are making and contributing to the economy at large. But my my initial driving factor was not because I wanted to make the better or the world a better place, it was because I want to live comfortably. I am greedy in in those terms, right? So my question to you is if someone wanted to evaluate economic systems honestly, what kinds of evidence should they look at or should they be paying attention to?

SPEAKER_02 19:36

Well, the first thing is what works. And since its inception and probably the 1500 to 1700 time frame, capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than any other system ever even imagined. And it does that because it makes the world richer.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 19:59

And that's a thing that people don't understand is that you like you mentioned not doing things specifically to help other people. But in a sense, you do do things specifically to help other people. Yes. Why is that? Well, because in order to to to make money, you have to find out what other people want.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

And then we have to find a way to give it to them. And so if we don't do that, then we won't make money. So, like as a musician, I've got several friends who are jazz musicians and it's their full-time gig. And they don't do great, they don't make a lot of money. And sometimes I've had them complain to me about that. And I said, Well, well, look, you know, if you want to make money doing something something, you have to find out what people want and give it to them. Yes. And and they say, Well, yeah, but jazz is better music than pop. And I said, Well, I don't know what that means. I I'm not in a position to decide what's better and worse. But an example I use in my book is The Beatles and The Grateful Dead. The Beatles have sold a whole lot more records than The Grateful Dead. But I don't think the Grateful Dead are whining about that. They knew what they were doing. They were making an altern a more alternative form of music. They had fun doing it and made a ton of money. Yes. The Beatles made a lot more money because they were better at producing what people wanted. Now, are the Beatles a better band than The Grateful Dead? I have no idea. That's an opinion question. And I that has nothing to do with evidence. But they were certainly better at figuring out what people wanted than the Grateful Dead were. And so when like right now, uh as we're talking, we are in competition with other podcasts. Yes. And part of our job is to give something to our listeners that those other podcasts can't or won't, or choose not to. And so our job is to create value for our listeners. Yes. And in order to do that, we have to have some sense of what they want. And I can probably rule out things that they don't want I'm sure you can too. And so, you know, if we were screaming at each other and arguing, I'm sure that we'd be tuned out right away. So, one of the things I think that we want to do is create value for others. But we have to do so in a self-interested way. Now, am I saying that the people, my friends that are jazz musicians, are doing it wrong? No, I'm not. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing art for art's sake. But you're but you have to realize when you do that that you're doing it for art's sake, not for money's sake. And so you can't complain then when you don't make money doing it. You have to go, okay, I'm I'm doing what I want. I'm getting to make my music my way, and I'm getting a little bit of money for it. So that's great. I think another thing people don't understand about capitalism is the idea that what I would love to see everyone do is find out what what the things they really love to do. So to first of all, start with their bliss, to find out what they love. How do they want to spend their day? What what what's what things do they want to be doing every day? Does it involve machines? Does it involve people? Does it inv- you know what does it involve? And then develop your talents in that area. Find out what your talents are and how you can use them to work with your bliss. And then take those two things and go out and create value for other people. And if you do that, you're going to do fine in the world. Because it's that creation of value that makes capitalism what it is. Is you know, people whine about the rich. That's dumb. I mean, it's really, really dumb. I'm on a PC right now, I don't know what you're on, and we're talking on the internet. Without Bill Gates, we couldn't be doing this now. Sure, he got rich, but look how he's helped our lives. And I'm on a Starlink, Elon Musk's system. I couldn't be talking to you at all if it weren't for Elon Musk. Yes. And and so when people complain about the rich, they don't know what they're talking about. I actually ran the numbers on Jeff Bezos, Amazon. Amazon has made every American two to three thousand dollars a year richer. Yes. So let me see if I've got this straight. I should be mad at Bezos because he has a lot of money, because he made me two or three thousand dollars a year richer. That's dumb. Absolutely. And most of the people that uh have done really well financially, at least in the U.S., are in that same boat. The richest top ten people in the world are all Americans, and every single one of them is self-made. They got there by creating value for other people. They didn't inherit the money, they didn't steal the money, they made the world a better place. And so that's what we want to do as capitalists is invest today to make the world better tomorrow. And it's all it's a whole way of thinking. I uh before we started today, I mentioned to you that I'd gone out running today and lifted weights. And that's those are capitalist activities.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 25:47

Most people don't understand that, but that's capitalist activity because what I'm doing is investing time today for a profit in the future. And I would I would argue strongly that virtually every world religion is capitalist. Because if you're planning for an afterlife, you're investing today for something tomorrow. Yes. That's capitalist speaking. And so the capitalism is about how to make things better. And since the inception of capitalism, it has done so. Even in fairly recent times, in 1950, about 35% of the world lived in abject extreme poverty. Now it's 9%.

SPEAKER_01 26:34

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 26:35

Because of capitalism. And the chances are very good that in the next decade or so we are going to eliminate extreme poverty, except possibly in places like North Korea where the socialist government forces people to stay in poverty.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Yes. Yeah, different economic uh models, they they they it oppose different systems. For example, when you mention, say, you know, North Korea, for example, if you were to empower people, give them economic stability, then they also get the right to choose. You don't and that would destabilize their country. So there's they there's incentive for empowering their people by giving them more money, more access to information. It's it goes against their incentives.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

Of course.

SPEAKER_00 27:26

I I find it fascinating. You know, one of the interesting aspects of your work, and there's so many you know, different things I can pull from you know, you know, your work it's so vast that it's hard to just choose you say five questions or even ten because you have so many interesting things that it's it's like, okay, how do I stick to just one? You know, and so that's a good problem to have. And that being said, you know, one of the interesting aspects of your work that I think many people they defend capitalism primarily on efficiency grounds, innovation, productivity, economic. But you've argued that capitalism is not just efficient, it's morally superior. And that is the the the crux of it. I I want to dive really dive deep into that to so that we can really extract as much information from there as possible.

SPEAKER_02 28:26

Sure, you bet. Yeah, I would I would argue that capitalism is the only moral system. First of all, it's the only system that gives us economic freedom. And if you don't have economic freedom, you don't have freedom. It's just that simple. Uh a lot of people would argue that capitalism involves too much competition and not enough cooperation. I would suggest that that's a false choice. That in capitalism, we compete to cooperate. Right now, you and I are competing with other podcasts. Yes, but we're doing it to bring value to the people. We're trying to see who can do the best for the population. And so, yes, we're competing, but we're also cooperating. And that's the nature of capitalism, is you can't be people imagine capitalists as some sort of ruthless fanatics that are are going about trying to do anything they can to make money. But first of all, if they're doing things that are immoral, that's part of the job of government. Like we mentioned earlier, if I have a cancer, my brain has to take over and say, no, you're doing something wrong. And the same thing is true in capitalism. If somebody is doing something evil in the capitalist world, the government needs to stop that. And and that's a perfectly legitimate thing for government to do. But in capitalism, again, the idea is for me to find out how can I how can I find the best way to create value for others. And the better I can do that, the more money I'll make, probably, but but more important, the more value I'm creating for others. The reason the people I mentioned earlier, Gates and Musk and Masos, the reason they're rich is because they the three of them have had more impact on the world than hard almost anybody in human history. I mean, they've made the world so much better that that it's hard to even fathom how you know what the world would have would be like today if it hadn't been for those three men. And I guess I would suggest to people that are complaining about that: do what I suggested earlier. Find your bliss, develop your talents, and then go create value for others. And I guarantee that just thinking about it that way changes your life. Let's let's imagine for a minute, somebody in a burger joint, he's sitting there flipping burgers, and he hates his job. It's boring, it's not interesting, and he doesn't think he's getting paid enough, and and so on. Now, what if he just makes a little bit of a mind shift? What if he says, you know what? That guy that's pulling up to the drive-thru, he's here because he won't, he's hungry, he wants to eat. And either he can't cook or doesn't want to cook. He's paying me to make this burger for him. So I'm gonna make the very best burger I can make. And I'm gonna put it together and I'm gonna serve it to him in the happiest. I want to make his day when I hand him that burger. I want him to pull away from this drive from going, wow, that was a great experience. Now, I guarantee that if he does that for a week, he's gonna start feeling a whole lot better about himself. Because when you create when you see yourself creating value for others, that makes you valuable. You've done something to create value for other people, which means they have to be valuing you. And so that that's a good feeling. Now, if he keeps that up for a month, his boss is probably going to notice and he's likely to get a raise or a promotion. And if he keeps that up even longer, he may end up running the company. The the current CEO of Costco started out there 30 years ago as a forklift driver. And by creating value, he ended up running the place. And so we talk about we work for a living, but we don't. Work gets you nothing. I can go out right now and start digging holes and filling them up again. I'll done have done a tremendous amount of work, but I won't get paid for it because I didn't create any value. And that's the whole ticket. We don't work for a living, we create value for a living. And so what we find is that the people that can create the most value receive the most value. In fact, I'll paraphrase the Beatles. And in the end, the value you take is equal to the value you make. And isn't that the way we want the world to be? Yes. Is it how can life be fairer than that when what you give is what you get? But unfortunately, too many people want to get and they don't want to give. Yes, that is something uh they want free stuff.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

Yes. And and and I think fundamentally, capitalism does work, but it's not pretty. And I think people look for the glamorization of things and ideas. It's not funny being, you know, I'll relate this to my personal story. It's not funny working a full-time job, going to school full-time, interning, not getting sleep, not being able to party like the rest of the kids in college. That's not glamorous. But when you graduate and you're graduating Magna cum laud, people thought, ugh, it was easy, right? Because people don't that if you would if someone tells you, hey, in order to get this, you must not do this. So you have to sacrifice a little bit now. Being an entrepreneur requires sacrifice. If you look at Elon Musk's story, it wasn't glamorous, you know, choosing between what company would fail and making those, you know, really tough decisions, or even looking at Jeff Bezos when he was just in his garage and he looks like the crazy guy with a bunch of stuff and people, you know, you know, look at his origin story. It's not glamorous. He's driving his beater car around everywhere. That's not glamorous. But now he goes to outer space. The guy that was in his garage. You look at, you know, Bill Gates, the story of his garage. You you look you look at Steve Jobs, a garage, right? You have these very simple things that that that are that are actually they're universal. You take the time to hone your craft, and it doesn't mean it's gonna be easy, because that's the hard part. And but people just focus on the end result, but not the journey it took to get there. And I think too many people are trying to bypass the journey to get there. That is how you earn it. It has to be earned, and that's why merit-bates systems are so good.

SPEAKER_02 35:30

Yeah, and and I I would suggest too that to me, the saddest part about that is that the people that are that want that want something that is a sad way to be. Where if you look at psychology, back in the early 70s, there were two gigantic psychology books published, one by Maslow and one by McClell McClellan. And in Maslow's book, he creates a hierarchy of needs. Yeah. And the top of that is self-actualization. And in in McClellan's list, the top need is achievement. Notice neither one of them said anything about money or anything physical. Now, yes, at the lower levels in Maslow's list, you have to have food and shelter and so on. But once you get beyond that, what people really want is to achieve, to find self-actualization, to find to be the best you can be. And when people don't do that, they have a sad life. I mean, I I see it all the time around me. People that they go to work every day and they don't like what they're doing, and and it's just it it it it breaks my heart that they're they're trying to do something. They want, they think, they see people like Gates and they see the money and they think that the money is the thing. What they don't see is that it's the achievement that's the thing, it's the self-actualization that's the thing, it's the accomplishment that's the thing. And the money just is an afterthought. It's what came as a result of that. But I'm betting that for none of them did they start out just thinking about money. I mean, Bill Gates sat in his garage writing code because he thought it was fun. Zuckerman started Facebook as a hobby in college. He thought it would be cool to make this way for people to talk to each other. And but all of them ended up making a lot of money because they they did things that helped other people. And but they were doing it in a spirit of self-actualization or achievement and letting the money come afterwards naturally. And so, yeah, again, I I would like to see people find their bliss and their talents and find ways to provide value for others by by becoming the very best they can be at what they're doing. And so I don't see how anybody can think that that's immoral or in any way evil. What it's about is everybody trying to be the best they can be, because that's the thing about the world, is that if we're all being the best we can be, we're all going to be better off because we we reinforce each other and make the world a better place.

SPEAKER_00 38:33

You know, I think that's a very important distinction because I think a lot of times, you know, in debates, a people mostly economists mostly focus on, you know, outcomes of wealth and inequality, and they they remove all the other factors that are associated with it. It's instead of simply saying rich or poor, how about we talk about what it took to got get there, right? What does it take to make to be able to retire comfortably at 65? You know, those are the questions that should be asked because then we can then do the work because it's you know, it is as as a as a fan of mathematics as well, as you say, you know, math is a language. And if we use the numbers to tell a story, we can also use the numbers to create a roadmap for how to live our lives and what pace to go on to say, hey, you know, maybe I should invest in a 401k because I am going to get turned 65 one day, and maybe Social Security won't cover all that cost, or maybe, you know, we should privatize, whatever. But we need data, not just talking about why people are rich or why people are poor, but also the data to to to mitigate some of those effects of this crazy world that we we live in.

SPEAKER_01 39:50

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 39:51

I want to ask you an important question. This is a long question, but you know, in your book, Why Socialism Socialism Struggles, you explore the structural problems that socialist systems encounter across different countries, cultures, and decades. Socialist experiments often seem to run into similar economic, you know, difficulties, regardless of the era. So what are the core weaknesses in socialist systems that tend to produce those those types of outcomes?

SPEAKER_02 40:25

Well, there there are two. The first is the economics part of it, and the second part is the human part of it. And uh, my first dealing with the human part of it was I was probably 12 or 13 years old, and somebody was trying to convince me that communism was wonderful. And I listened for 10 or 15 minutes, and I said, Well, that won't work. And she said, What do you mean that won't work? I said, Well, it assumes that people are saints, it assumes that we will all put our own self-interest aside and do nothing but work for the benefit of a group. And I said, People aren't built that way. And in fact, it's not just people, all life is not built that way. Every living organism must pursue its self-interest or it will die. It's just that simple. And so we talked about that cell in your kidney. That cell is pursuing its self-interest. It's not trying to help you, it doesn't know about you. It's pursuing its self-interest, and you're benefiting from it. The same thing happens if I pursue my self-interest in the world. The world will benefit because I'll be creating value for others if I'm really pursuing my self-interest. It's all my the only thing in my self-interest, in my true self-interest, is to create value for other people. Because if I can't do that, I won't be happy and I won't make a living. And so that's first of the first way that socialism fails. Now, collectivism was actually the first thing that was tried in America. The Jamestown colony and the Mayflower Colony both started out as collectivist or socialist enterprises. And they found out very quickly that it didn't work. Both colonies went through what was called the starving time, where the colony was almost almost died as a as a colony. And it was because human nature. People noticed very quickly that those that weren't working were getting the same benefits as those that were working. So people worked less and less and less. And because of that, it almost didn't until they gave people private property and said, Oh, just go make your own farm and and sell the stuff to the rest of us, that has started working. But before that, they were eating their shoes, eating their pets, digging up corpses to eat. I mean, it was a truly horrific situation, all because this pipe dream of collectivism or socialism or communism, whatever you want to call it, because it tries to make people into something other than people. It tries to take life and make it death, because that's really what it's about. It's all life from this from cells. I mean, if you put a plant in a room, it's gonna grow toward the window. It's just gonna do that because it has to do that to survive, and and every organism does have to do that, and so that that's the human part of the thing. On the economic part, it doesn't work because it can't work. It it assumes things about economics, like first of all, planning. That we've already talked about a bit, that it's impossible to plan an economy. And so, if you can't plan an economy, how can socialism ever work? What would that mean? I mean, the only way that an economy can actually work is if we let the people decide, and that's why. In most communist countries, there's a flourishing black market. And people in North Korea every day, literally every day, are executed because they're using the black market. So even though they can get killed if they do it, they're still gonna be uh pursuing free markets on the black market. And so if it's capitalism is the natural human state, and socialism is an attempt to make the natural human state into something completely unnatural.

SPEAKER_00 45:02

Oh, and in a sense, it's it's ca you know, communism or a centralized planning systems, they're trying to override human nature in a sense. If I had to put it in Yes. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 45:14

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 45:16

So despite these, you know, historical patterns, you know, uh and you know, why do you think socialist socialism's or collectivist economic models remain attractive to societies even after these ex examples of of failure? You whether you're in North Carolina North Korea being executed for utilizing a uh the black market because you have to go by a rationing system, or you're you're in you know, Mao's China, and and and 100 million people dying, or you're in Stalin's Russia, and you have, again, millions of people dying. Why do you think that in this era there seems to be this rebirth? You know, in the 60s, they were very popular, and now there's a rebirth of these ideas in today's societies. What do you think makes it so attractive?

SPEAKER_02 46:10

Well, I think there's several reasons. I think we sort of touched on one earlier. Because capitalism is a chaotic system, it's messy. And a lot of times people don't like messy. They would like to think that that things will go the way they want them to go. And in capitalism, that doesn't happen. It's messy because we've got nine million voters, nine billion, sorry, voters out there deciding what's going to happen next. And we don't know what the answer to that is going to be. And so a lot of people are very uncomfortable with that kind of ambiguity. I think another reason they are concerned about, or they are why they're attracted to socialism, is this competition versus cooperation mindset. That shouldn't we all be nice to each other and cooperate? And and of course we should. We should be nice to each other and cooperate, but that doesn't mean we can't compete to do that better. And and a lot of that problem comes from the idea that that people don't get that the consumer gets to decide value. I mean, that's I would suggest that that is the most fundamental freedom there is. That uh of anything else, I get to decide what's valuable to me. And nobody can have anything to do with that. And the the difficulty occurs because at some level we we we we want to convince other people to value things the same way we do. But you can't do that because we all value things differently. Ask any married couple, and you'll find out. Yeah, it's obvious that that people value things differently, and because of that, there is going to be a certain amount of interplay between cooperation and competition. And so let me give you an example. Let's say you and I go out to eat, and it turns out that you really love salad and I really like bread. And so when they come with our first little setting, they bring a plate of salad for each of us and a plate of bread for each of us. And I say to you, hey, since you like salad and I like bread, why don't we trade? And you take my salad and I'll take your bread. And so now I've got nothing but bread and you've got nothing but salad, and we're both happy. Now, a lot of people then look at that and say, Yeah, but but the salad had a higher menu price than the bread. So Dr. Doug got screwed in this deal. But that's not true. I got what I wanted, and you got what you wanted. And that's the whole basis of capitalism is that I take something that I value less than you value it, and I trade it to you for something that you value less than I do, or more than I do, and and we trade. And so that's the whole secret of it, is that since we all are different people, we all value different things, and that's what makes trade possible. If we were all, if if we didn't have that, trade would be impossible. Why would I want to trade with you if we all had exactly the same values? You if we've if we both value this thing, salad, let's say, exactly the same, we're never gonna trade. Because there is neither of us has an alternative that supersedes the other. And so, in order to have trade, you have to have disparate value. And and it's that disparate value that makes the economy a little bit messy. Because I was on a show the other day, and somebody said, Well, capitalism is messed up because they should have chosen Betamax as the tape recording format rather than VHS. And that's just silly. That's that's fascist thinking. That's saying I get to decide what you want. I've decided Betamax is better, so that means that it is better. But what happened in reality was people fought people looked at the two and said, yeah, Betamax has a better picture, that's true. But the tapes are only an hour long, and I want to record movies, and those are two hours long. And the VHS is two-thirds the price. So I'm gonna get we want we're gonna go with the VHS. Now, yes, Bea had better picture quality, but that's not the only thing people decide on. And in fact, people don't decide much of anything on unitarian issues. They don't go, this is the only reason I'm making this choice. They look at a balance of things that any item has and put together the the best way that works for them. And it's very, very, very likely to be different for everybody. Like I said, ask any married couple. I mean, my wife and I don't like exact the same things. And so we have to negotiate that from time to time, and and that's a good thing, not a bad thing. Because if if my wife were exactly like me and it and and liked exactly the same things I'd like, it would be a much less rich environment for me. It wouldn't be nearly as much fun, and and it wouldn't be it would just be boring. I mean, I'd be spending my life talking to myself.

SPEAKER_00 51:58

Variety is the spice of life. You know, I I'll share a small story with you. I'm wearing this watch right now. The story of this watch is this. I have a friend that's a doctor, and I was wearing another watch. And he says to me, I really like your watch. I'll trade with you. Similar to what you were saying. The watch that I bought was maybe$90 on Amazon. Right? Like I liked it, I thought it looked good. That was the be all end all of it. My friend sees it, he says that he wants to trade right there on the spot. His watch was more expensive than mine, but we value things differently. So for him, it was more valuable, and but he made the choice, and I made the choice to trade with him. As a result, we're both happy from that interaction. He paid a higher price, he was still happy because he got to choose.

SPEAKER_02 52:56

That's the whole point. That's it. I couldn't have said it better myself. That's exactly the way to look at it, is that what we're looking at is trading value for value. And the only the only value that exists in the world is the value in the minds of all the consumers. Nothing has intrinsic value. Nothing is valuable just because it exists. And so it's all these all these different values that make make life interesting and fun and and worth living.

SPEAKER_00 53:29

You know, I I remember I sometimes I get my philosophers mixed up, especially when going through Plato, and Aristotle and Socrates. I'll say the work, but I'll get the teacher wrong. But I believe it was Aristotle's the just price, if I'm not mistaken. And Aristotle, I believe, said that one of the greatest crimes of mankind was that we the concept of making money from money is bad as opposed to money from things. And I think that a lot of people kind of somehow use that to justify why capitalism is bad. There's they're they're saying, oh, you're greedy because you're exploiting, and they use these buzzwords such as exploitation, that it's wrong to put you know a dollar in the bank, the dollar splits it, and you know, I mean the bank splits it and creates more value or whatever. But that's how the system works. That's how interest is created, that's how wealth is generated. People, why do you think that you know people still misunderstand capitalism even though they live in a capitalist country? Why do you why how is it that they live, they benefit from it, and they still misunderstand it?

SPEAKER_02 54:45

I think a I think a lot of it, I'm not gonna say it's in our DNA, but it's it's probably close to that. If we look at history, around the year zero, we started getting halfway decent records. And so we can look at the how things were back in the year zero, or actually technically, I guess it was the year one, um, to about 1500. And during that 1500 years, per capita GDP, that is how much stuff per person existed in the world, didn't change a drop. So for 1500 years, the world didn't change economically. Now, what does that mean? Well, there's it means there's a fixed amount of stuff, there's only so much stuff, and it's not changing. So, what that means is if I want more stuff, I've got to take it from somebody else. That's where the idea of Robinhood came from. Back in 1500, or I guess he was 1400, but close enough. Back in that time, the rich really were the bad guys because they weren't helping anybody, they were taking stuff from everybody. That's how they got rich. That was the only way you could do it. But between 1500 and 1700, the world started changing. Capitalism was basically invented, it it gradually evolved for a couple of hundred years. And starting at the end of that period, 1700, 1800, the world suddenly experienced the biggest boom it had ever had. Because the difference is that in capitalism, there isn't a fixed amount of stuff anymore. Everybody that is creating is creating more wealth for everybody. In economics, we call that growing the pie.

SPEAKER_01 56:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 56:41

In other words, back in 1500, if I wanted a bigger piece of pie for myself, I'd have to take it from somebody. What happens now, though, is people like Gates and Bezos and Musk grow the pie. They create wealth that we all share. And so the rich are no longer the bad guys, the rich are now the good guys. But somewhere in our minds, we're still confused about that. We still think that the only way somebody got to have something is by taking it from somebody else. And that's just completely false. Nowadays, that doesn't happen. Nowadays, as I said earlier, the top 10 richest people in the world got rich by creating value for others. They didn't get rich by stealing from somebody. They didn't get rich by exploiting people, they got rich by paying people good money to do good things.

SPEAKER_00 57:35

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 57:36

And and and made the world better doing it. And so I think that's a lot of it, is that we were still stuck in this mindset of if somebody else has something, it must mean I have less. But it doesn't work that way. When you grow the pie, what happens is the person that grew the pie gets a bigger slice. But so does everybody else. Now, they may not get as big a slice as the slice he got, but it's bigger than the slice they would have had if the pie had stayed the same size. It's it's Jeff Bezos giving us each two to three thousand dollars a year extra because he created Amazon.

SPEAKER_00 58:14

You know, I think that's an interesting, you know, perspective because when I analyze systems, I I find that oftentimes psychology and culture can play tricks on us, right? Because your your mind, you know, your mind can you can allow you to see things that aren't actually there. Culture can blind you because of influence. But when you go by data, which does not have feelings, it's just data, say that you're not, say that millions of Americans aren't paying using their tax dollars to fund, you know, NASA not recycling rockets. So that billions of dollars are saved by by that. Say that you're not now, you're no longer paying, you know, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in wire transfers because someone came up with PayPal. And it's instant. And it's it's convenient. We a lot of times people don't look at what took it took us to get there, who had the idea and the and took the risk to make it happen. But it's easy to vilify these individuals because they are on a big platform and they're human, and maybe they don't say things the right way or just right, but it does not mean they're not benefiting each and every one of us. The work speaks for itself, as they say, the proof is in the put-in, which is the numbers. So another aspect of your work that you know, that you don't just critique economic systems and you also explore possible solutions. That's something that I value in any human being. Anyone can tell you what's wrong with something, but not everyone proposes a solution. And so I wanted you to talk more about the this the social security fix. I had to just put one of your your uh your articles in there just to really talk about it because I was very fascinated by that. So if you could expand on that for us, please.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:11

Well, sure. I mean, the I think the idea of the government doing something to encourage people to save for the future is inherently a good thing. Yes. The idea of taking their money and putting it where they think it ought to be, I think is a really bad idea. And so what I suggest in the article is that the government take the money, create an account in your name, and put it in a safe investment. Let's just say a uh an SP tracking fund. That's probably about as safe as you can get. And and then letting you reap the rewards of that when you retire. Now, at this point, then the money is always it's it's in an account in your name. You can't access it till you're 65 or 70 or whatever retirement age we're we're looking at. But but it's it's it is literally your money. And it it's gonna grow. It's basically like a forced 401k, if you want to think of it that way. And I don't have a problem with government doing things like that because it it still gives us a lot of choice. And there are people out there, sadly, that don't plan ahead. And so, because of that, there there is some benefit in the government saying, well, we're gonna have to do that for you, because otherwise we're gonna have to end up bailing you out later. Because we, you know, we're not gonna we don't have the the heart to sit to watch you starve to death because you root because you didn't plan well. Uh and so to to prevent that from happening, we're gonna do you know, we're gonna take some action. But the current system isn't gonna work. It it it was designed badly, and I don't know where it's gonna end. I think you know, there are things we could do that that would mitigate things somewhat, but but the system is was designed for a time that we're not in anymore. And so back when Social Security started, we had tons of people paying in and very few retirees, and so the whole thing worked out fine. But now, as people get older and older, the people in the system get older, now there's a lot more retirees than there are people working paying into the system. And since the system is based on the payer-inners paying for the retirees, it can't work. And so that's why I think it would be better to have our own individual accounts that could be put in a safe investment on our behalf.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:00

There's uh an article that I wrote, and I'll quote it directly. In the article, I wrote that the world has changed, but we're still playing by the same rules as though the world has not changed. You know, we have we people are no longer getting pensions, and and you know, we have 401ks, which is also which are also retirement accounts, but they're investment accounts, which does help the economy because we're investing in the economy as a result. What you're proposing would also help grow the economy as well, because we're investing into the future. And so there there's you're you're you're doing one thing, but it has multiple positive effects, reverberating, you know, it effects, right? And I think it's brilliant. But a lot of people like aren't taking the time to then talk about the numbers because there's a cost for everything. And whether it's a policymaker or you know, uh any politician, they don't want to ever have to explain the grim reality of something of what must we sacrifice to get from point A to point B. And it it it it it it kicks the bucket down the road a little bit more, but eventually the bucket has to stop, right? And so, you know, as we we we're beginning to close our you know our conversation, you know, I'd like to take a look at the bigger picture, which is the future, right? For someone who is listening today who wants to think about economics more clearly, you know, beyond you know politics and beyond ideology, you know, what principles would you encourage them to adopt when evaluating you know economic systems?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:39

Well, I think the first one is look at the freedom. Look at people that are in those systems and look at how much freedom they have, how much happiness they have. And often at this point, people bring up the Nordic countries and say, well, yeah, but people in Sweden are doing fine and they're socialists. No. The people in Sweden is not a socialist country, it's a capitalist country. And in fact, most of the Nordic countries have a freer economy than the U.S. does. Right now, the U.S. is ranked about 20th in freedom, and most of the Nordic countries are actually ahead of us. Now they do have a larger social safety net, but and and they call themselves social democracies. Somehow that's been twisted around, and people in the U.S. called it democratic socialism. That's just dumb. Democracy and socialism are incompatible. You can't have that because if you don't have economic freedom, you can't even vote with your money. And that's what we do in capitalism. We vote with our money every day. We decide what products get made by what we vote for. And so, yeah, I would say, first of all, look at freedom. Look at where the freedom lies, and that's the place that you want to be. I think the other thing is to think about this notion of creating value for others and finding what you love, finding where your talents lie, and then finding how to use that to create value for other people, and then reap the rewards of that. And so look for a system that can do that. Well, in socialism, as an example, you don't get that. They tell you what you're Job is. You don't get to pursue your own talents. You don't get to pursue what you love. You have to do what the government tells you to do. If they decide you're going to be a mine worker, you're a minewalker. Case close. Absolutely. And so, yeah, it's ultimately all about freedom. And capitalism offers by far the most freedom of any system ever imagined. The biggest place that capitalism runs into trouble is when the government tinkers with it. The government gets in there and starts messing around. I mean, that's what caused the Great Depression. That's what caused the recession in 2007. Is the government messing around in things it doesn't understand? Now, again, I want to be clear that the government setting the guardrails for capitalism is an important function. If there's cancer, the government has to get in there and apply radiation in Timo. Okay? But as far as trying to tinker with it, it would be like your brain trying to tell your kidney cell how to behave. And that's just a silly idea. You have trillions of cells in your body. If you could send a command one a second, it would take trillions of years for you to send a command to every single cell one time. The system is too big to mess. And exactly the same thing is true in capitalism. So another thing I would encourage people to do is if you're voting for politicians, vote for politicians that favor freedom and are against government messing with the economy. You know, I would go as far as to say, I don't think we need a Federal Reserve. I think it's probably the like I say, it caused the Great Depression. And they've admitted it. I mean, it's not like that's a mystery to anybody. Everybody knows that that's what happened. And so, and and again, the main thing is look for what works. If it's working, it's good. If it's not working, it's not. And one way to evaluate that is to look at people voting with their feet. One of my articles is that. And yeah, you don't see people in the United States clamoring to move to North Korea. That tells you who has the best system. I saw a Reuters poll, I think it was not long ago, that close to a billion people would move to the U.S. today if they were allowed to. What does that tell you? It tells you that people think that the U.S. is the best place in the world to be. And so, and if you look at within the country, everybody that by now knows that people are leaving New York, they're leaving California, they're leaving Illinois to move to places like Texas and Florida. And they're doing that because they want to get away from controlling governments and move to areas where the government is less controlled. And so believe your eyes. Don't believe what people tell you. People may say socialism is better, but look, observe with your own eyes and see where people are voting to go. And that will tell you where the best places are. That will tell you what the best systems are.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:46

Absolutely. I think I'll do the follow-up question for you is what are habits of thinking, you know, that would better help people understand how, you know, economics actually function? That'll be my final one to you.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:02

Well, the first one is the one we've talked about a good bit already, and that is finding encouraging everybody to find their bliss, to find their talents, and then go out there and and be the best you can be. Pursue achievement and self-actualization, and and be the very best you can be, and use that to create value for other people. The other things I would suggest is to try and eliminate envy from your mind. I think envy is is the most destructive impulse human beings have. It serves no useful function and does a lot of damage to people. And so I would try and eliminate envy from our lives. And and to to help others, but to be careful how you do that. For a while I was commuting a long-distance uh work every day, and I would see a lot of people on the street corners asking for money. So what I did was I'd go to Costco and I would buy a case of beans. And if they uh wanted a handout, I would give them a can of beans. Now, why did I do that? Well, if somebody's hungry, I'm happy to help cooperate. But I'm not gonna give somebody money to have them go spend on wine or cocaine. If I'm gonna help somebody, I'm gonna make sure that I'm actually helping, or at least do the best I can to do that. And so that's the other thing I would suggest is that as you try and help others, remember that their values are not necessarily your values. And so you you can't you can't make them do things your way. You have to try five try and find ways to help them that are is both beneficial but that honors their choice. And so, like I say, if somebody's hungry, I don't mind giving them food. But if somebody wants money, I start to get a little worried about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:13

That reminds me of your article, Jevin's. Uh is that how you pronounce the name? Jevon?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:19

Jevin, yeah, Jevin's Paradox.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:21

That's that's that that's the way I forgot to add it. So it was 10 articles that I went through then. I went through 10 of the articles, not nine. You know, so I again, you know, you know, I have really enjoyed, you know, going through a lot of your your information because as an academic, it's refreshing to see things that can be applied in real life. Information isn't useful if you can't use it, it has to have utility. And a lot of the concepts that you go over, there is utility, whether you're talking about the the Alaska model and such, it's it's very the real-world applications to the things that you're saying. It's not just, hey, I have an idea. It's here's a problem, here's a solution. And I think that's where the engineering brain comes in. So, you know, it has been a very thoughtful and fascinating conversation for me. You know, one of the themes that stand out is the importance of truly evaluating the economic systems that we're in. We should ask questions, right? As a part of the scientific method. If you you ask, there's a why. Why do things operate the way they do? And we can then get data. You know, there's a method methodology to everything. And I think too much of society now gravitates towards ideology as opposed to gravitating towards facts and what actually works. And we need to, those things they end up dividing us, and we don't reach a point to where we can work together to meaningful solutions. So, you know, uh, you know, for the listeners who want to explore your ideas further, I would definitely recommend them to check out your website, you know, dr uhcardell.com. And also, please, you know, Doug. Doug Cardell. I apologize.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:16

And don't they could and they could also my book.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:20

Yes, and that's that's what I was saying.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:21

I'd certainly be happy for them to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:23

Yes. Uh the as the author of Why Socialism Struggles, and that is out and ready to be consumed. So I would recommend you reading the reading the book. You don't have to agree with everything, but having a different perspective is also important for growth. And so I would highly recommend you.

unknown 1:14:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:44

I've had a yeah, it's an it's an Amazon best Amazon bestseller. It's got five-star reviews.

unknown 1:14:50

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:50

Uh if you you enjoy the Magnificent Ones podcast, you enjoy depth, and you enjoy learning about how things actually work, I would highly suggest you checking this out. So once again, thank you, Doug. If this podcast challenged you, good. Clarity often does. The point here isn't consensus or reassurance, it's to leave you more precise than when you arrived. Keep what sharpens your thinking, discard the rest. But don't confuse familiarity with truth. If this conversation mattered, follow the podcast and share it selectively with people who value depth and not noise. Until next time, stay disciplined with your thinking, selective with your attention, and honest about what you're really optimizing for.