Churros! Delicious churros for you! Get a mother hut! Ah, man, I love churros! But how do I know if these are any good? Yeah, what if they're not safe to eat? Hey, come on! That's a great question. Do you think the churro man is trying to poison you? Well, no. You can't be sure though, can you? Hey, look, I take pride in my work. I just want to share my delicious churros with everyone! In that case, give me 20! You know, this is actually a pretty good example of the importance of social trust. What do you mean? Every economic transaction is predicated on some baseline sense of trust, usually between strangers. If you don't trust the other people in your society, you're not going to be willing to trade with them because you can't be sure if they're going to live up to their side of the deal. And if you're constantly worried that everyone's going to cheat you, Rob, you or hurt you, what incentive do you have to work with them? If you don't trust them, why should they trust you? Hmm, frown! Political scientists like Robert Putnam have studied social trust for decades, and find that high levels of social trust are strongly correlated to societies with lower levels of crime, lower levels of political corruption, and significantly better economic outcomes than places where the people don't trust each other as much. The US, much of Western Europe, Australia, China, and the Nordic countries tend to be pretty high on social trust when surveyed, but the formerly communist nations of Eastern Europe, along with much of South America and Africa, tend to report lower trust levels. Which really crazy is that causation can probably work in both directions. People who don't trust each other could be responding to real rates of crime and corruption, but others might become corrupt and commit more crimes because they've already decided that everyone else is just going to do the same to them. So it's a really important concept to get right. Well, I'm pretty glad I chose to trust Cheryl Man here. He's killing it with these things. Wow, yeah. These are great. And see if we didn't trust him. What would we have now? A poorer, more violent society? Jero's made by some bureaucrat working for robes? Yeah, gross. That would just leave me with an empty stomach. Yep, but the good news is the more you live up to your promises and interact with other people honestly, the more likely they are to follow your lead. Every two weeks, boy, oh boy, we love doing it. So you subscribe so we can continue. Thank you.