This is Monica Perez here with a returning guest, a very soon returning guest, a PhD in economics from George Mason University, a research fellow at Mises Institute, which is near and dear to our hearts.

Marcel Gutro, thank you so much for being back.

Thanks for having you back.

And you are here to talk to us about, and I found out that one of the theses you wrote, I think you wrote a couple of them, it seemed like there were two.

It's a three-chapter dissertation.

There you go.

Okay. Well, one of the chapters, it appears, is freedom, unity, capitalism, Syria as an aspiring developmental state.

And I have a little personal interest in Syria. My grandmother was an immigrant from Syria.

And it kind of bums me out that it's totally being leveled and I mean

absolutely I understand completely well everyone's up in arms about Gaza 100% I understand totally

I think like 10 times as many people have died in Syria and that ancient civilization that

country is gone now so I'm sure it is no news to you that there's a lot

of hanky-panky going on behind the scenes. I'm reading a book by Jeremy Kuzmurov, Syria,

anatomy of regime change, talks about some of the outside forces that made it difficult for

anything good to come out of what was happening in Syria.

But you take an interesting look at what they were doing to try to kind of follow a blueprint

of your, I mean, I'm going to call it like the Social Democrat 20th century developing state model something like that and and you hear about

these success stories all the time or they like knows their way out of the absolute gutter but these

guys i you know exploded like a nuclear bomb and you you go into some of the reasons why

they are a failed developmental state and how under-analyzed

such a thing even is. So I know you well enough to know that you're going to just walk me right

through this and it's going to be crystal clear from beginning to end. Sure. So the developmental

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