This is Syrians, a new series brought to you by the ladies of bombshell, where we dissect the institutions of American power.

Join us as we sound the alarm on technology,

governance, and national security issues, and maybe lure some men to their death. This week,

in our mini episode, we are excited to introduce our guest, Catherine Edwards. She is an economic

consultant and the host of the Optimist Economy podcast. Catherine, welcome. Hey, y'all. Thank you for having me.

We are so delighted to have you and I am delighted to have a whole conversation here on Sirens

where we talk about economics. It's going to be so great. I had to like get Rodas questions just to back

off from the nerdiest of nerdy to like, okay, like you you haven't even introduced what that term meant. Like, you actually need to like give, where our listeners just the tiniest, tiny mess of on ramp in order to figure out like what on earth is going on as we let two economists go nerd out here. I should also say, Catherine, we did as our question of the week to, or the episode rather, to introduce,

I gave them options that we could either do what you had to look up in the dictionary this

week or executive order. And we picked executive order and paid tribute to our optimist economy

friends down south. Yeah, you're down south. I'm down south. I'm in I'm in Houston and Robin is in

L.A. So your optimist friends in small sprawling metropolises who are probably on a highway right now

and they're probably stuck in traffic because they live in L.A. in Houston. You know what? It's not

cold. So that's where they are. Two economists and two Texans, and it's hard to know which one of those things we're going to

talk about most. Totally. That is actually, that's a fair question. That's fair point.

Well, so again, really excited to have you on. And really, we wanted to start by just kind of trying to look at what is actually

happening in the economy. And Catherine, you've written a lot about this, about the ghost recession,

now the ghost recovery. And there's lots of talks about things like low unemployment or economic growth.

But can you help us kind of understand why maybe the economy looks good,

but feels broken and what is going on holistically in the, in the U.S. economy? Okay. Easy question.

Easy question. Start off simple and we'll build for you. You know what? Cut me off at 30 minutes,

okay? So I always think it's really helpful to zoom out. And if you zoom out and you

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