Today’s podcast is titled “China’s Overreach and Its Derailment.” Recorded in 2023, McCuistion program Perspectives Matter co-host Jim Falk interviews Susan Shirk, Ph.D., research professor, and chair of the 21st Century China Center at UCSD, and author of Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise, and David Firestein, President and CEO of The George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations on the topic of America’s foreign policy relations with China and China’s domestic situation. Listen now, and don’t forget to subscribe to get updates for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.
Capitalism Means Nobody Does Everything Themselves
Think about the last person you hired to do something you could have figured out on your own. Maybe a plumber. An accountant. Someone to handle your social media. At some point, you sat down, weighed how long it would take you to learn the thing, how long it would take you to do the thing, and how much it would cost you to just have someone who already knows what they’re doing handle it. And you hired them. Or maybe it wasn’t even that formalized. You simply understood that a certain task wasn’t worth your time to do yourself, …
Advait Sarkar on Why Smarter AI Might Be Making You a Worse Thinker
You’ve probably noticed how easy it is to let AI handle the tedious tasks on your to-do list, from summarizing your emails and drafting your reports to analyzing your data. It feels like a productivity win. But Microsoft researcher Advait Sarkar has a provocative take on what that efficiency is actually costing you. Sarkar’s work at Microsoft Research focuses on how AI tools affect the way we think, and his findings should give every entrepreneur pause. When we offload cognitive work to AI, we might be saving time, but we’re losing practice. Research shows that people using AI assistants produce …
How Global Trade Makes Everyone Richer
For most of human history, if you wanted something from far away, you had two options: Go find it yourself or take it from someone else who already did. Conquest was the preferred method. Armies marched, ships sailed, empires expanded, and people died—all because someone somewhere wanted resources they didn’t have at home. But over time, we figured out that you don’t actually need to conquer your neighbors to get what they have. You can just trade with them instead. It’s simpler, it’s easier, and it’s a lot less expensive. This shift from conquest to commerce represents one of the …
Episode 259 – Is Our Healthcare System Broken? (Podcast)
Today’s podcast is titled “Is Our Healthcare System Broken?” Recorded in 2022, McCuistion program Perspectives Matter co-host Vince Poscente leads a panel discussion about America’s healthcare system with Marianne Fazen, Ph.D., President & CEO of Texas Business Group on Health, Todd Furniss, author of The 60% Solution: Rethinking Health Care in the U.S., and Jim Holder, a partner at healthcare insurance consulting firm Holmes Murphy. Listen now, and don’t forget to subscribe to get updates for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.
Creative Destruction: Why the Old Makes Way for the New
Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had a gift for memorable phrases. When he described capitalism’s relentless cycle of renewal as “creative destruction,” he captured something profound in just two words that initially seem to contradict each other. But there’s no contradiction. The term brilliantly encompasses both sides of innovation’s equation: the creation of something new and the destruction—or disruption, as we tend to say now—of what came before. And crucially, the order matters. Creation comes first. Destruction follows only when something better emerges to replace it. In our last post, we explored why innovation faces opposition and how it generates wealth …
Episode 258 – Political Polarization: What Caused It? Part Two (Podcast)
Today’s podcast is titled “Political Polarization: What Caused It? Part Two.” Recorded in 2022, Dennis McCuistion, former Clinical Professor of Corporate Governance and Executive Director of the Institute for Excellence in Corporate Governance at the University of Texas at Dallas, with speaker and author Jim Cathcart, psychologist Dr. Terry Paulson, former chair of Amnesty International USA Chip Pitts, and author Robert Hall continue their discussion about America’s deep political polarization following the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidential election of 2020. Listen now, and don’t forget to subscribe to get updates for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.
Adam Guild on Why Your Team Is Your Entire Business
Like every entrepreneur, you’ve heard “hire the right people” a thousand times. But when Adam Guild, founder of Owner.com, talks about team building, he’s describing a fundamental shift in how business owners should see themselves. Guild started Owner.com at 17, bootstrapping a restaurant marketing platform that survived COVID-19 by pivoting to online ordering in weeks. That scrappy survival mentality served him well early on, but it nearly became his limitation. Like many first-time entrepreneurs, he saw himself as the hero with employees as helpful sidekicks executing his vision. Then he encountered a quote from legendary investor Vinod Khosla that changed …
Why Innovation Always Faces Opposition
“This time, it’s different.” You’ve probably heard some version of this lately. AI is going to eliminate jobs. Automation will make human workers obsolete. Unlike all those previous technological shifts, this one will actually leave people with nowhere to go. Except people have been saying “this time, it’s different” for centuries. And they’ve always been wrong. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder tells a remarkable story. A glassmaker came before Emperor Augustus with an invention—flexible glass that could be hammered back into shape after being dented or dropped. He demonstrated this “vitrum flexile” by throwing it on the floor before …
Episode 257 – Political Polarization: What Caused It? Part One (Podcast)
Today’s podcast is titled “Political Polarization: What Caused It? Part One.” Recorded in 2022, Dennis McCuistion, former Clinical Professor of Corporate Governance and Executive Director of the Institute for Excellence in Corporate Governance at the University of Texas at Dallas, with speaker and author Jim Cathcart, psychologist Dr. Terry Paulson, former chair of Amnesty International USA Chip Pitts, and author Robert Hall discuss America’s deep political polarization following the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidential election of 2020. Listen now, and don’t forget to subscribe to get updates for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.