TRASHFUTURE - A MILF to End Austerity feat. Alex Yablon

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

This week, Nate, Milo, Alice, and Hussein speak with journalist Alex Yablon (@alexyablon) about a US program in 2020 where the Federal Reserve leant money to municipalities--and the possibility of cutting out market-based austerity, if we want it. We also check in on Lordstown Motors and read a deeply insane ‘philosophy’ piece about why we should welcome a meteor. Sign up to Alex’s newsletter on Ghost here! https://alex-yablon.ghost.io If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Please consider donating to charities helping Palestinian people here: https://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/palestine-emergency-appeal/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3oja5NbR8AIVSOmyCh2LdQ9rEAAYAiAAEgKM9PD_BwE and here: https://www.grassrootsalquds.net/ *MILO ALERT* see Milo perform in London here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/milo-edwards-voicemail-preview-tickets-167077291677 *TF LIVE SHOW ALERT* We have a live show in London on September 1! Patrons have a discount so check the posts if you are a subscriber! https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/event-details/trashfuture-live-at-vauxhall-comedy-club-1-9-21 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Trash Future. It is me, Nate, filling in for Riley, who's on a holiday far away from the United Kingdom. Today is not the bonus one, it is in fact the free one. He's in a unique microclimate. It's the free one. Exactly. Riley, can't stop me. You're listening to The Gunch.

The Gunch. Exactly. Yeah, I wrote notes for this episode. We've got a guest on this episode, but we're just going to fight the urge to do bits nonstop and not talk about anything on the subject matter. You're going to fight the urge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, crucially, I am not in the studio right now, so what that basically means is

they can just go hog wild and mute me if they want to. But I have today, it is myself. It is, of course, Milo and Hussein in studio. We have Alice Caldwell Kelly on the Distant Lines in Glasgow. And we're joined from the greatest city in the world, New York City, by Alex Yablon. Number one, classic slice, Nets World Series. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome to come on.

Yeah, we're happy to have you today. Alex has written some great stuff about municipal financing and a lot of just the state of how things are called too expensive even when we need them in society because of neoliberalism. That's kind of a potted summary. We're going to talk about that. But before we talk about that, we have to have a special bulletin update because our friends at Lordstown Motors have finally done it. They claim they are actually going to be able to build an truck and single truck that a couple

of their clients who have paid in advance a long time ago are going to receive an electric pickup truck sometime early next year. The pickup truck will be delivered to them from the top of a very large hill. And it will be at an increasing velocity. Their clients, a guy who owns a muffler shop in Ohio, have been quoted as saying, oh no. So effectively over the past couple of months, all has not been well with Lordstown Motors. Their CFO and CEO have both resigned. They basically had to do an emergency round of funding.

They got some funding from a venture capital firm or a private equity firm rather that dumped $400 million into their company so that they might be able to produce a single electric truck. I'm going to read quick stuff from this press release that I found about this. Effectively, they said, executives struck cautious tone in the second quarter earnings calls. They tried to assuage shareholder concerns and address the near term realities. Bring its first vehicle to market without any revenue, without any revenue to offset its costs. Lordstown's approach, at least this quarter, was to try and reduce operating costs from the previous quarter, helping it offset its increase in capital expenditures.

Lordstown reported a net loss of $108 million, which is a 13.7% improvement from the first quarter loss of $125 million. It's getting better, you know? We've managed to only lose $100 million this year. It's net losses. It's getting the coveted trash future most improved badge. It's net losses are more than tenfold higher than the negative $7.9 million. So a loss of $7.9 million. That might sound like a lot of net losses, but you got to look at this from the other side.

That's a hell of a lot of net lessons. Exactly. They've learned so fucking much. I can't see you, but I knew that you were going to go there. We worked together a lot. I was just like, I could tell from the confidence in your voice kind of drawing out that sentence that it was going to be all my losses as lessons. So I just want to point out, we don't really have a lot to talk about with this. We do, however, need to reiterate that this country, this country, fuck it, this company went public via SPAC and was at one point valued at $1.6 billion,

without having ever produced a single vehicle. Does the market really want an electric truck and nobody can build one? Yes. You know, someone's got to do it. The Cybertruck looks like you've turned the polygon count really low because your graphics card is glitching. I don't know. I mean, this kind of looks like an old Mazda pickup truck. It just doesn't exist.

So there are problems with each, unfortunately. I have a very sort of ignorant observation, but also one that's really in truth, which is very much like, look, if the guys on Pimp My Ride could make cars with two TVs and a fish tank in them, it can't be that difficult to do a self-driving electric truck. It shows how much lazier engineers have gotten since the era of Pimp My Ride. That's true. They don't have Tim Westwood to motivate them in Pimp My Ride UK. Or exhibit in the United States.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they need exhibit to go and hype them up. Yeah. The great exhibition. Alex, I don't know if we're about the same age, but I feel like I'm part of the micro generation for whom having a PS2 in a car was like the coolest fucking thing. Oh, yeah. I guess so. Oh, yeah, definitely.

I mean, my parents only ever got me a PS1. And so like, PS2, they were like, what do you need PS2 for? We got the PS1. Not that they actually sound like that, but like, that's my, you know, that's how. PS1's are worth a lot these days. So like, they were, I think they were onto something. Can I still go on somewhere? But I mean, like one thing I don't get about these like EV startups is like, you know, Ford's going to do this.

Like Ford's got like, they're going to roll out theirs at the same time. You know, they've just eaten the lunch of Tesla and Lordstown and these like fly by night. And it's like actually the boring old companies. I have an answer, which is that like all of these things in order to attract this investment have decided to do the same thing. Not in like the more sort of like reasonable way of we're going to beat Ford's or whoever to market. But in the, we're going to do some weird baroque shit. So the Lordstown Motors trucks deal was that the motors were in each wheel. Oh, okay.

That shit did not work ever. And also it kept setting the wheels on fire. This is like, are your own personal like F 35 or something? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we did an episode on this with Brian Quimby from Street Fight Radio about the idea that they were like, oh, we're going to revive this rust belt community with an American made electric vehicle. Just the problem is that it's a walking fire trap that also, if I remember correctly, yeah, the engines were in the wheels. They caught on fire and it couldn't like it breaks didn't function.

So we just roll downhill or like it's engine didn't actually generate any. They weren't able to make it work. I'm sorry. I'm distracted. A neighbor cat has sneaked into my fucking house and I'm watching this cat try to get out the window. So I'm going to let you guys do some. I have a toddler and we just got a book from the library about a delightful cat that is sneaks in and out of his London terrace blocks. Different town houses and has a different.

So I'm just assuming you're a character and my kids. No, I think I think I think the real message of that book is that houses need better borders and better border control. Yeah, we need a volunteer border force for Nate's garden. That's right. Oh my God, did you see that they made the volunteer border force real? Yes. Yeah. Incredible.

Hussain, you were the one who told us about this, right? Yes. What's going on with this? So what's his name? But he's the kind of like head of the labor group in Ashford, which Alice, you might be familiar with, but anyone who is familiar with the People's Republic of Kent will be aware of both Ashford and the place that it occupies, especially in his proximity to Dover. So the head of the labor group in Ashford CLP basically put out a tweet that went along the lines of, in order to stop the migrants coming in from Dover, maybe we should have a volunteer border force in order to like, you know, because the new kind of like right wing thing is that the, you know, the, I can't remember what it's called, but the kind of boating service that kind of helps. The RNLI.

Yeah, the RNLI. Those fucking snowflakes in the RNLI. Yeah. So very apparently. Lifeboat snowflakes. So they're apparently, yeah, they're apparently snowflakes, but also like hard line, identitarian communists. And the only way to stop them is to get lokes down the pub to form volunteer anti-micro. Sorry, did you say that this is labor putting together?

Yes. Yes. Labor local politician has suggested we just, we use local people. Local people from the town and we form them into. Local diseases. His comparison was the home guard from World War II. I've got the tweet. Yeah.

I've got the tweet here. I'm just going to read it out. So this is Brendan Chilton and he says, here's an idea. It's quite clear the channel migrant crisis is not going away. The government haven't got a clue how many people arriving and then disappearing. Perhaps we need to form some sort of quote, home guard voluntary to support the coast guard. Police border force, et cetera. Excluded voluntary.

Yes. So, you know, just so you know, he's not going to draft you into this. Yeah. I mean, that would be very funny. Yeah. I mean, like you wouldn't be the modern labor party if like even, even with your like bizarre state fund or like your bizarre kind of border force, they have to be voluntary because in order to get your like Duke of Edinburgh gold award, you have to do some border guarding.

You know, I have to say, like I'm always really grateful for the existence of the labor party because it makes me feel a lot better about myself having to vote for the American Democratic Party. Like that's like, I'm really excited for the voting for the labor party and I haven't. I still do it reflexively and every time that's a like, oh, that that's a dark experience. I'm very excited for the volunteer border force biopic film where they have to get Jason Statham out of retirement to be the volunteer border force. And then he's just like, I've retired and also I've only ever run it nonces.

I don't know anything about the border. They're like, it's like, they're like nonces, Jason, but for borders, they're trying to nonce the country. All right then. Yeah, if you put it that way. That's right. That's how it be. The thing about the labor party is that while for a brief four and a half years span, the

leadership was captured by the left of the party. Basically, there's about 30 people in the labor party who aren't insane authoritarians. And basically, now that Corbin is gone, done and dusted, they they've returned to their original form, which is punch left, punch migrants, punch people on benefits. And why is country not voting for me? Kill alpacas. That's the other party trick. Kier Stammer weighing in entirely unprompted in a sort of like minor silly season scandal.

There's this alpaca, right, which has bovine tuberculosis. And the government have had the conservative government have said, okay, you have to like kill this alpaca. This alpaca has to be put down for public health reasons, which fine. Regular like public health, agricultural decision, whatever. The owner doesn't want to kill the alpaca. And so this alpaca named Geronimo has been dragged through all of the newspapers. And then just as this was sort of petering out and they were going to kill the alpaca,

Kier Stammer in his role as sort of like a sacrificial alpaca for this government just like threw himself on this grenade and just went, well, I welcome the government's decision. The government's decision to murder this alpaca. Kier Stammer. I'll welcome the government's decision. Look, I think here in the Labour Party, what we need to do is say to alpacas, whatever kind of wool that they have, that they are welcome here in Britain as long as they go through the proper channels.

And I think some alpacas, alpaca, if you will, they're trying to jump the queue. Ahead of a lot of alpacas who have applied for residence in this country and maybe being prioritised for reasons of their need. And I think that that cannot be allowed to happen. And those alpacas should be humanely destroyed. He's in the sun as heartless Kier Stammer right now, which is great. There was no reason for him to say anything. But it was amazing too, as if I remember correctly, the quote that he gave was, I'm afraid it

seems there's no alternative to killing Geronimo the alpaca. Did you just do thatcherism? There's no alternative about fucking petting zoo? I would have preferred if he had come out like John Cena. I fucking love it here. Compromise Geronimo the alpaca. Yeah, well, both Bin Laden and this alpaca, both codenamed Geronimo when they're about to kill.

Very little bit of resonance there. Well, you know what? We've talked about Lordstown Motors. Alex, you and I had a conversation and I wanted to give you a chance to address this just before we move on to your piece about a lot of people are invested in the idea that if you just make every car electric, then climate change goes away because we no longer have a problem. And I recognize that electric cars to my eyes are pretty like there's a lot of people buying

them here is there's a lot more infrastructure here. There's not like the Tesla infrastructure, but because distances are shorter, like for most people's journeys. The government have like announced that they're going to do an iconic charging point design. Yeah, they're going to make the red phone booth. It's going to be so bad. We know it's going to be an oblong red thing. I'm excited for a little Thomas Heatherwick on every parking spot.

I think that's a you know, apparently because of all the lockdown binge watching from toddlers and slightly older children of Peppa Pig. If they just do a Peppa Pig theme charging point, Britain's going to have so much fucking tourism for the next 20 years. On every street you plug your electric car into like the snout. But I was going to ask you the question though about this this conundrum that's getting across that having electric cars does reduce emissions, but that doesn't mean that you do away with all of them because steel, carbon intensive.

That was what you told me. I know nothing about it. I mean, like, you know, I like the fact, you know, it's certainly like way better to have an electric vehicle than it is to have a than it is to have an internal combustion engine. But at the end of the day, like, you know, the cuts that you have to make are so intense, like it's still like an electric vehicle is still like a two thousand or four thousand pound hunk of steel. And we don't really have like a non carbon intensive way to make steel.

And I mean, I guess, you know, like obviously you're not then burning tons of fossil fuels once you make it. But you're still like you got to you got to make two thousand pounds worth of steel, then you've got to transport it probably on a non electric shipping, you know, contain, you know, mega, mega shipping boat. This is this is why my my political position, my sole political position, that more cars should have 70s style wood grain on them. So strong is that we just make more and more of the car out of that.

I mean, all the wood is really like driving electric Morgan. Right. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, you know, what would really be low carbon is just living somewhere where you don't need a car at all and can like walk places and bike places. And I mean, this is like a very huge amount of steel and a bicycle. Right. I mean, there's, you know, there's like some.

Especially if you've got a carbon framed one, like a cool guy. Right. Yeah, exactly. A business guy. But even like, you know, in old school, like, you know, steel bicycle is still like, what's it going to weigh? Like 20 pounds, maybe. Yeah.

It's just. I would say also to me, the solution is clearly we have to prioritize retrofitting old cars and just dropping batteries in them. So we just keep reusing the same frame. Yeah. Yeah. Because that will allow me to have an electrified Nissan Micra. Right.

But within the sane range. And then my dreams will fucking come true. What is it with the Nissan Micra? Man, we don't have them in America. Nick and I have both fallen in love with the same car with a different, like a different sort of like body kit on it. Because what I want, and this is now retro because it was made in the 90s, is a Nissan Figaro, which is a Micra with like a retro body kit on it.

I want one of those, but it goes for like 500 miles on one chart. Yeah. The Proclaimers car. Well, you know how like, how like, you know, Cuba has these, these medical experts that they send around the world, they should, what they should do is they should send around the world all the Cuban mechanics who are really good at keeping like 1950s era, like, you know, boat size cars in like perfect working condition. And just like teach everybody how to like, you know, obviously they, they're probably

don't get any, any, any electric engines because of embargo. But, you know, The monkey's poor curls. And as a consequence, much like Cuba exports doctors to crisis zones around the world, the United States begins exporting car YouTubers. Exactly. If I, if I could get an electric engine in a 90s Porsche, that would be kind of sick nasty. Yeah.

I'm just laughing at the idea that we find a solution, but it involves really old cars being retrofitted. So like Indiana's Hay Day is restored because everyone has to drive a Studebaker for some reason. Yeah. I'm like driving around in my Austin seven, but it makes zero noise. Nate's 1996 Dodge Neon is the only thing that can save transportation. Yeah.

You can, you can drive a personal car. You don't have to use public transport everywhere, but it has to be from one of the first three need for speed games. Yes. Yes. Well, that being said, we have, we have, we have done our update on Lord's down motors. So I wanted to get a chance to talk about Alex, your piece in the New York times that you recently had published back in July, in which you brought to the attention of their

readers that the government did actually briefly, the US government did briefly begin direct lending to municipalities. There were not a ton of examples of people taking them up on it, but it happened. And then an almost like perfect bipartisan consensus to shut it down immediately happened. So I wanted to give you, there's a, there's a couple of quotes here I wanted to read from your piece. I'm just going to read these three paragraphs and then folks can react and we want to, you know, get your opinion on what, what this actually means because there's, this has been

like a refrain forever that like interest rates are so low that in some cases they're negative yield. Why are we not using this to finance stuff that we need both for climate change and just unfucking America and Britain and other countries. And the answer is always like, nope, that is not possible. Right. It doesn't feel like it. Yeah.

So I'm going to read these, these paragraphs from the piece you, you, you said economists at the Fed have given glowing reviews to the central banks emergency credit line to states and cities called the municipal liquidity facility. Yeah. The MILF. Yes. We're sending MILFs to your area. Yes.

Yes. Horny MILFs. See, this is why I have to read it to you guys because I, I would not have clocked that, but immediately you picked up on it. That's why you're a, you're born to podcast, despite it's a horrific name or it's horny name. If you want to get into that way, it was an unprecedented extension of, it was an unprecedented extension of the Fed's lender of last resort powers.

It inserted the bank into the municipal bond market, which states and cities basically used even out revenue streams and finance some large projects. And it was successful in its primary mission. The Fed's very entry into this market prevented its collapse and kept private lending flowing. It kept borrowing levels relatively near the pre pandemic status quo. Still, because the Fed itself didn't offer very generous loan terms compared with private lenders, the MILF directly lent to only two borrowers, the state of Illinois and New York's MTA, then the Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration showed it down

in December. But in both its modesty and its success, the MILF suggested that something more radical and sustainable was possible. The MILFs are always doing this recently, a growing course of economists, legal scholars and policy experts as proposed a suite of initiatives that could replenish the public employment ranks, which have yet to recover from the great recession and boost the credit lines of states and cities as the emergency, the climate emergency deepens all by relying on the inexhaustible monetary powers of the federal reserve.

So the big summary is America is uniquely positioned with the ability to invent money more so than any other civilization in history. You're milk rich. The federal money printer does in fact go brrrrrrr. Yeah. But we are choosing not to. The federal money printer in fact goes, you're a big boy for 18. I bet you know what this milk means.

I bet you know what this milk means. Right, yeah exactly. Alex, I welcome your thoughts on the summary there. Yeah, sure. So like this is all like, I like sent this piece to like my, so I didn't really write about this stuff until like basically COVID hit. And I've since like spent too much time stuck in my home reading Adam twos and listening to odd lots and stuff like that and obsessing over political economy.

So I guess this is now my beat. But like I don't and I don't know how it works in Britain with like funding for local governments in a in a crisis. It just doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen. It's shit. Yeah. It's a volunteer border.

Right. But like the way, you know, like I've been obsessed since I was like a teenager with like the New York City fiscal crisis and you know how that shaped the city and and and you know the the. Was it like it was it like a like while you were at parties I was studying New York fiscal policy. Well, now you come to me for well actually as I as I wrote in a follow up newsletter is that it's because of my interest in like going to like DIY shows in Brooklyn and like wondering

like why aren't you know like why can't we all just hang out and go to punk shows all day? Why do they always get like destroyed? Why do these DIY in venues always get like displaced by like huge condos or vices headquarters and like oh like to understand why my right like why to understand why my friends can't like just hang out and make an ungodly racket all the time for you know and live in an extended adolescence forever. I had to understand like central banking and like municipal finance and anyway.

So like I'm kind of a I'm really getting out of myself here. But like. No, it's it's good. The other interesting thing in there really really quickly is that the New York City fiscal crisis in the 70s I feel like it's such is hugely important point just because it was sort of the end of if you could consider New York City from my perspective of having like any kind of semblance of a welfare state that was really when it started to crumble. And I mean I'm a graduate of a CUNY college and yeah like CUNY was free until 1976 I think

and then they're like nope tuition we're doing it now and it's never gone back right. And stuff like that you know that here's this crisis that completely reshaped the city and it's like it's now treated as that's just how nature works right. Milfs are looking to fund college educations in your area. So like for the first like three quarters of the 20th century from like the progressive era up until basically the 75 fiscal crisis like cities that wanted to could fund like really good public services and you know even like welfare provision and like you know not New York wasn't the only place that was doing this but it was the place that was doing it

like the biggest and you know like you had you know like you had like CUNY like like Nate just mentioned like you know was free to anyone who who graduated from high school in New York City which you know like that's a thing that didn't exist anywhere else in the country like a city university that was free and there was also like you know top notch that was like had like Nobel laureates on faculty and like they were able to do this because of like the structure of American finance where like basically you know cities were funded by like these local you know like local kind of city fathers and local banks that had like a really vested interest in their city's success. Yeah guys with Dutch names.

You know or like you know the people who like owned the local banks who you know like they basically like they needed to make sure their local real estate was still valuable. The richest the richest guy in New York until about 1970 is named like Bunny van der or whatever but then like this kind of misunderstood part of this and like I really recommend this book Fear City by the historian Kim Phillips Fine if you haven't read it but it's all about the fiscal crisis but a point that she makes and something that I didn't appreciate until reading this is like the whole way that cities finance themselves really changed in like the 1960s and into the 1970s and you went from like financing this stuff you know like with and like particularly

like big investments in like new infrastructure and like whole new agencies and public functions you know with like you know a combination of like local taxes and and you know bond sales to local rich people and you know banks loans from like local banks. Yeah city's kind of like running their own economy right kind of like you know these all these lenders they they depended on the city succeeding for them to make them you know to to to you know continue thriving themselves then in like the 1960s like finance globalized and you know financial institutions became these multinationals that had no loyalty to anyone you know to anyone location. The richest guy in New York is now like still called Bunny von der vonk but he's from the Netherlands.

And like technically he works for a German bank that's really all like Russian money and like you know they don't feel any kind of like they don't and and also they they increasingly began to rely on the bond market as opposed to like local tax receipts which you know you were vulnerable because of white flight and like capital flight and like outsourcing and then like local bond markets and like you know you had this kind of the rise of the kind of neoliberal financialization of everything in like the the early 70s which became the way of of disciplining you know the public sector and what what was deemed out of control spending which was to say like spending that did not primarily juice corporate profits or spending that could lead to

increase you know worker bargaining power by say making higher education free for everyone. And it briefly it briefly came back in a sort of a loophole thing because of the MILF right because the Fed made this made this temporarily possible that you could like have this sort of like bond market back again only instead of like one old Dutch guy it's the federal government and its money right exactly and not and like and not even the money printer it's kind of like it's the guarantee it's like the Fed so like the Fed the MILF only directly lent the two borrowers like Illinois and the MTA and because those both have like dog shit credit ratings and you know it lent to them at like pretty onerous terms but the real effect of the MILF was to like prevent

everybody else from seeing their their bond yields blown out and so like everyone else who like the state of New York and the city of New York which is different from the MTA like they were still able to get you know bond financing on like as if COVID had never happened and in fact like in the middle of COVID like the New York City did this bond issue and their bonds were oversubscribed like they could have taken even on on even more debt at a lower rate if they had wanted to and like that's because like the MILF said like look cities will absolutely have money if they need it no city is going to like go broke this year because of COVID. Lender of last resort. Right exactly and so they don't even have to make that many loans

to like kind of to you know they just have to backstop they just have to have this standing guarantee. No wonder nobody hated it because it's the it's the last sort of like counter to the no such thing as society thing right is like oh the federal government does on some financial level care to prevent you from robbing these cities blind. Right exactly it's just like it's more that they're taking an interest than it is to do with the substantive like loans. Yeah it's basically like they're saying to the bond market like look please don't like you know do you know it's do not do escape from New York you know do not do escape from Los Angeles like there's no need for that. There was no need to do escape from Los Angeles the first time. There is a thing that I half

remember which I'm curious if anyone can like remind me about which is was there not an attempt to do this at the municipal level from like DSA and some other left organizations in California because I vaguely remember like a sort of a people's climate bank thing and then. Oh that's super popular I mean I would say everywhere and that's not even contained at DSA like these kind of ideas about like public banking and kind of like you know basically like giving states and cities like a kind of a. Wasn't Josh Androwski doing that. Yeah Josh Androwski was on here in 2018 for the there was a referendum I think for public banking in LA it did not pass. Times for it becomes very difficult for me that I wipe my memory at the end of every show we were doing. Oh yeah well

you I don't think you'd ever been on the show at that point yet Alice I was still in New York when we got you guys did that episode. I remember this because I was in Josh's house in LA and he was plying me with huge amounts of weed while he's use astically telling me about this people's right. I mean that describes basically like how I've gotten into this stuff over the past two and a half years like you know like this this money stuff like I had always assumed was very boring but it does go very well with being stoned all the time. But it's like it's a pincer attack right because you have the people's bank and stuff from like essentially the bottom up especially coming through like referenda and stuff and then you have this which is we are

going to convince the federal government that this is a thing that it should impose on the market. Well it's like it's not even that much of an imposition it's like that's that what's particularly wild about it is that it is like it was really it was both unprecedented and like so easy for them to do. I mean like so much this is this is how far it's been rolled back that like this incredibly bold thing that terrifies people is like the least you can do. Right it all is. The dial has been turned so far back in one direction that like nudging it back one increment gives people panic attacks. Right like they made two fairly small loans and like you know congressional republicans were absolutely losing their shit and being like this needs to

be wound down immediately and like you know I mean to their credit there were a lot of like Democrats like around that time I mean and not even people like Ayanna Presley has been like really big on like using you know really radically changing how the you know the Fed is sensitive to like you know inequality and unemployment and then like Sherrod Brown but also like a total moderate squish like Mark Warner you know from Virginia who's like the richest member of the Senate you know and has like is famous for like having these like salons at his house with like deficit scolds even he was like hey like this actually worked pretty well we shouldn't we shouldn't crush it but also maybe he just signed down to it because Sherrod Brown was into it and

Sherrod Brown was the chair of this committee but anyway that's well look you know it's a slippery slope like you know first it's small loans to like make cities like function at a very basic level next to Islam so like right next to Islamic finance no interest it's all coming together Alex there's one thing I wanted to pull out of your face that I really interested in me which is that like there's a bit in there where you kind of suggest that part of the reason why this was able to happen until people noticed like the reason why they're able to turn the big society dial back one notch was because it was boring and because the Fed was boring yeah absolutely I mean so much of what I think happened with the American response to COVID

you know like obviously it was awful in all kinds of ways but Nate we were kind of talking about this like we like we did really we did a pretty good job of making the money printer go burr you know and I don't think and I think a big part of that is that of why that happened is that it's so uh right it's so boring like people who you say budget people's eyes gliss over when you say liquidity people are like like when you say liquidity you know you give people money people like wait what why do you why is it why is the money wet I don't understand that like what's really really funny spread is that uh there's a group of people who are not immune to this of just like being bored and it's guys who actually work in finance oh yeah and it's so funny to me to

have this realization for the first time that like a great deal of the sort of like whimsical bullshit schemes that we talk about on the show where like a finance guy just decides to like implode the economy uh because like guys who end up working in finance do not like it and want to do something else but the money is too good to quit right sometimes one Australian man in an insurance office on the beach it's just like yeah whatever I'm not going to read the stuff I'm signing that sounds pretty boring just going to sign it exactly all of these guys hate doing actual banking stuff which means you can kind of slip stuff by them sometimes well you know but in a perverse way though like uh those guys get it more than the you know the like old school

like neoclassical economists and the kind of like the pat to me like it is just about like there's this flow of money and like it's not like you know you kind of like you know if you know you're kind of like in an advantageous position to like siphon off this part of the flow um like you know this is like a really silly thing but like uh uh have you seen the original like Oliver stone wall street no more of a jfk podcast I'm sort of familiar with it the sec would have you believe that all the side of straightening is yeah I saw it but like for some reason I remember the sequel a lot more the one of shia labor I was like it's just which is like an objectively very bad film but it has some very funny moments in it I mean the

original wall street is like actually like it's weird it's sort of a strange thing like you know if you're a more of a jfk fan to watch it and it's like actually like a pretty cogent movie like it it it makes sense it's like tightly made there are like it doesn't have like three different kinds of film stock there's no like imagined it's just like a really good tightly made like thriller for grown-ups but anyway at some point like the Michael Douglas character says like nobody it's not like you own this stuff you kind of position yourself well in the flow of money and like most of the I mean like for the past year and a half that I've been kind of like reporting on this stuff like a lot of the people who live in and work in wall street

like they don't subscribe anymore to the like Milton Friedman you know Austrian stuff they're all Keynesians because they know it's like this is this you know all these things are just policy levers and I can you know that that creates opportunities for me if you get that yeah yeah well that that does make sense I mean as as Gordon Gekko says greed is good and so eating pussy is better well you know as he found out there can be too much of a good thing there can they really can but I mean that's a true way for a king to go out you know well he beat it real kingshit yeah that's right because that that is that is an act of faith like you eat pussy so much that you know you're likely to get throat cancer from it but you have faith that the gods of pussy eating

will smile upon you and reward you for your service well so one of the points that you made Alex was that this was a quote from Claudia Sam from the Jane Institute this is what you close out the piece with which is basically that she says to me pat senator pat to me and others get exercise because the Fed is competent they'd get it done basically it's not like oh the government can't handle money kind of shit it's like these the neoclassical economists and the the conservatives in this regard don't want people from what I can read of this for your opinion would not would prefer people did not realize that there was in fact an alternative yeah and and and that this was a demonstration a small demonstration but a sort of like a test case of okay well if you made

this actually if the if the terms were better if it was if it could if you didn't need the banks at all then this was a thing that could could could solve this problem of how are we going to pay for it and you know I think about this too sometimes there's a part of me that's just like because of the really insanely crippling debt that the mta is saddled with that's causing the pages enormous amounts of interest on really really old debt that cripples their operating budget it's like if the government wanted to they could just eliminate that debt tomorrow and put them on like have it be completely change their operating budget because they just wouldn't have to deal with it anymore but they don't because it's just sort of like well you know manage the finances like

households kind of shit it's like yes but this is the biggest city in america and its economy depends on this thing functioning do you ever think it's just really funny how a term is serious sounding is neoclassical economics just refers to people who refuse to understand how the economy works yes they're just like sticking their fingers in their ears and going no no it doesn't no that's in those fucking rocks and you can poke it out yeah basically the same as neoclassical architecture so maybe just as a term what's wrong with columns you know that's not this isn't an anti-colonial understanding how shit works yeah so so the the thing i wanted to to touch on before we move on to our next segment

was uh you on your on your ghost page the alternative to sub-stack that doesn't have a bunch of turfs on it uh you you mentioned in yeah it's exactly you mentioned that one of the crises that american governance has based since the great recession is the serious reduction of the workforce like the federal the state the municipal workforce and um you basically you described it this also continued under covid i'm going to read this paragraph as a segment from it that you say recessions devastate local public budgets and lead to brutal cuts to the kind of basic services to keep the social fabric from fraying states can't avoid immediate cost counting whenever revenue shrink thanks to local balance budgets amendments and restrictions on we don't

have that in britain yeah well good job that's just you guys over there and restrictions on borrowing that could make up for temporary shortfalls the inability of localities to keep spending through recessions makes these recessions worse the number of public employees also fell by 1.5 million from february to may 2020 and as of june 2021 it remained a million down from its pre-pandemic peak this that accounts for approximately one out of seven outstanding covid related job losses so in your eyes from what i understand this is a potential solution to rebuild that workforce to make things not be shit anymore though understand that in britain since 2011 we've been also doing just just slashing shit non-stop and um it it has it as you might imagine

has led to a particular kind of local psychosis when people who never really had problems with the services they depend on are suddenly like wait i can't get my trash picked up every week like they used to and things like that once again it's just like this hardcore austerity economics and so you're saying that uh if we can kind of force just like just crack the surface on this shit and get people to understand like there's literally no fiscal case why this has to happen it could it could change the whole picture yeah totally i mean i i'm not exactly my understanding was that in britain like the cuts and you know obviously like i you should correct me if i'm wrong was that like there was this decision at the very top like in like you know 2011-2010

you know we gotta do austerity from the very top uh and like that that happens certainly in america but like what i think i was getting at is like these american states and cities have these legal like these these you know there's like state constitutional amendments there's laws that kind of automatically trigger it even if you know like you even if like say you had like an ostensibly left left leaning govern or or like we sort of have that too like they brought in some laws that basically govern how local authorities are allowed to like manage their budgets and stuff so like local authorities aren't allowed to do things like if they've got some money build public housing with it like they're just not allowed to do that like they're not allowed to

do anything that doesn't involve a private company they fundamentally used to be able to but they can't i mean like are like the local authorities like are they funded by like local property taxes and local income no that's the wildest thing here they are funded by a flat some amount tax that every tenant or resident has to pay landlords don't pay property tax in this country but their tenants basically pay a fee for local services so there's very few exceptions to it where i live we pay our rent and we pay our utilities and we have to pay 120 pounds per month to our local council but like it doesn't matter what your income is basically there's almost no exceptions to it you have to subsidize your councils alpaca right well yeah well yeah and and and and and since the 80s they've

made it much more restrictive that was a thing that thatcher did to cut the funding to local councils but then also cut their ability to spend or to raise money and so you're locked in this cycle where they're not allowed to borrow money at all yeah like they're not oftentimes they're not allowed to build uh public housing on land they own they're not allowed to sell assets to them build public housing like if i'm not mistaken if they generate profits it has to go to a national general fund it can't go to the local council like there's so many restrictions to basically make governance local governance intentionally underfunded here so they can keep privatizing it um and my impression is but we don't have like we don't have the sort of madhouse of every state has its own thing but

yeah being from the midwest the balanced budget amendments i know that's a huge deal and it's like it basically hamstrings legally hamstrings like if you try to do something it doesn't matter it's gonna get defeated in the courts because of these amendments it forces you to like lean into the punch of a recession you know like you have to do what every like you know anyone who's like read the wikipedia page on keen's unism would tell you don't do that we have all these laws that force you to like in a recession to slash public employment so that just deepens the recession because those are all people who were spending money and keeping businesses alive and they have to cut back um and then you know like you could i mean like and this goes back to the new york city

fiscal crisis like pre 1970s you know states kind of were able to to borrow to make up for shortfalls more aggressively and i mean this was like a problem you know like you can certainly abuse this uh and and like even i would admit that like new york did uh but like you know the the kind of there's a there's an attitude that like oh these balanced budget amendments and these these restrictions on on like borrowing even during a sort of like exogenous shock like covid like um you know they're necessary they're it's the the harsh medicine that that these localities have to take and like this must be because you know if they fall short you know well there's there's no help coming for them uh even though things like the mlf show like you don't even act like the federal

reserved the federal government doesn't even actually have to spend their own money to help them out like they can kind of signal to private markets to to invest in bonds yeah the the government the feds just go hey knock it off right yeah put up yeah and it works kind of yeah it's like hey the invisible hand throw my throw my little buddy something come on yeah it's amazing that we're kind of like running basically like every western country into the ground over like a slavish devotion to an analogy that it turns out isn't an analogy that works like basically like yeah well uh governmental budget is just like a household budget and we've discovered that that's basically the same as saying well eating food is just like eating pussy you should eat food the same way you eat pussy you

should like lick it about a hundred times several times a day yeah that's right you should just like you should just lick the outside of your food sensually and never take a bite and that's and that's you know you can't argue with it they both use the word eating so that's how you should do it and this is actually this is another hobby horse of mine that i'm getting on i i just wrote a column for business insider about um this guy pete peterson uh do you know who he is great name yeah i recognize the name yeah shout out to that guy right off the top for a great name so he's uh he died in 2018 he was one of the co-founders of the like of the private equity giant uh black stone not black rock black stone uh or black water or black water all of these all of these have such

like enticing names yeah exactly yeah look into the black stone right exactly we've talked about nothing about the black stone um uh circling black stone's offices anyway so it was part of my finance so he was like a he was like a you know he was in the nixit administration as the commerce secretary and was like this like he was like he and he and like kissinger were like wingmen in georgetown in you know like the 70s like like they were the only two people nightmare blunt yeah exactly anyway so he like used his government connections to like get into private equity and and he became a billionaire that's crazy and then so the way that he fulfilled um he did the like warren buffet giving pledge and the way that he fulfilled the giving pledge is by giving his personal fortune

to his personal foundation which advocates for cutting government spending um awesome awesome cool guy and so like he's like he bankrolls or his estate rather bankrolls all these think tanks like from beyond the great exactly um where he's now that right there is the invisible right it's the invisible skeletal death grip around our throat the invisible stranger jacking off the economy while it feels like someone else is doing it so he's like the one like he like you know like there's a paper trail like he's the one who like bankrolled all these these nonprofits that like it quoted as if they're like totally nonpartisan in like newspaper articles that are like you know they kind of spread these cliches like the household metaphor so like it's very like this

thing isn't just like common sense that comes out of nowhere it's like it's a political project spread by like one dead rich guy um you know and it serves very clear ends but but also like it doesn't even make sense you know like from from like on its own terms like you know how many how many households are there that can buy a car without taking on debt or buy a house without taking on debt or like you know uh like and every you know rich person knows that like the way you start a business is with someone else's money you know like it no one ever you can't ever self-finance anything like that's like that's that's for uh you know tightening your tightening your belt is for is for poor people you know kind of like paying taxes everyone everyone needs debt

to do anything or credit you know if you don't want to use the dirty word debt everyone needs like help uh everyone generally like the way people get rich is by getting more generous terms of credit not by like you know epistemia self-denial and like you know hiding cash under a mattress being being extremely smart right yeah having a lot of like leadership skills like that doesn't work no i was told that you could get like really rich and successful by running a mom and pop so with good christian valleys um and having your children work for free well right that's that's that's the important part yes the problem is is that everybody who's ever done that who almost got rich but then they were forced to bake the gay cake and so the psychic trauma they took on

stop them from being able to become rich so it happens every single time uh all i started with was some hoots per and like some good business acumen and 400 million dollars that i got from my father which i assume is pretty normal right so this is i i hope that little things like this force people to realize that not only can it be different but here's an instance of it actually being different uh in which we don't have to suffer this just idiotic penury for no reason we don't have to be like nope the best that governments can governance can be and that that uh social services or any kind of societal function can be is shit that annoys you until you are rich enough to buy your way out of it right i would like to hope that will change however

bit of a segue because there is a counterpoint there's a particularly british counterpoint if you will to all of this oh no to the implications of yeah getting rid of austerity and a monitorism and all of this weird yeah the the terrible metaphor of uh of the family budget yeah or using using the power of the the central bank or the federal reserve to fight climate change there's an an even more british take which is what if we just give up because i have found an article from the new statesman by a philosopher at oxford named roger crisp called and i'm not crisp roger disgusting british flavor like you know like vinegar and like you know yeah i i love to go to the british corner store and and eat some like jambly wambles and a roger crisp

exactly fantastic i like to roger some crisps so i was gonna say exactly it's it's it's the fried potato slice that smells like sex uh the article is entitled would extinction be so bad cheese and it says oh no i love blackpilled columnist i was i was pleasantly surprised but this kind of base that the new statesman v kind of like ostensibly left wing magazine of this country has kind of just taken the position of what if we all just gave up which like die which is kind of like the same position that the british labor party has taken so there's no alternative to destroying your on emoji and everyone else there's no alternative to just dying it is worth destroying the earth of every alpaca is destroyed in the process you know one thing i don't get rid of is those smug woollen

cunts i i mean one thing i really really threw me for a loop about this is like so i did like a like very silly like study abroad program in london when i was in college and like i spent one day like um you're a master of jumbly wumbles right exactly um yeah uh anyway my like girlfriend at the time now wife like came to visit me she had a family friend who was a then a like a professor at oxford and like we we took a day trip up to oxford and like you know got to be shown into all like the secret faculty lounges that like you know tourists can't go into and like the eyes this is where you get sucked off right exactly you know this is where like i just assumed only the male ones however right i just saw like brideshead revisited just taking place all everywhere um

but and prides don't reveal one thing that really struck me like and i i will you know like i i know like this this podcast is in large part about shitting on britain and and rightfully so but like i was you know like i still have some like part of myself that's a bit of an anglophile and like i know oxbridge is you know the reason for some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century or in beyond well alex i mean no one on this podcast knows anything about oxbridge we absolutely would never advocate and then then then it was good or fun in any way some people say this yeah some people say it's actually doxbridge right that's right i would thank you to use the correct term that's right honorable gentlemen will please refer to doxbridge by

its full time i mean this is all to say like you know if you're in at oxford if you're like you know if you have one of those like you know uh incredible offices you know on like one of the old quads like i would be like super strongly motivated to not give up on that like it's you know like if you've got it like it's really nice i briefly dated a girl who was a marxist academic who had a fellowship at all souls which is like the really fancy like you have to be a genius college at oxford like it's like only post grad and you have to like sit like i'm doing scare quotes but you can't see this the hardest exam in the world to get this fellowship and she got it but basically they just throw infinite money at you you just get like you get your own

fucking office in the college and they just give you and so like and they would randomly get grants to do certain things like so she's like yeah the college just gave me two grants to buy new computers so i'm just gonna do that even though i really don't need new computers she had like three different like fucking computers for like different parts of her life i mean i'm like yeah it's kind of dope if i were in on that racket i would really want to not go extinct it's it's pretty nice i would spend so much money on gamer chairs so that's the thing is that the the surest cure for anglophilia is to live here and not be in one of those sweet ass jobs because then you're like wait this this is just this is just people glassing each other in the face and a lot of vape shops

i'm gonna read this piece because i know that we were spending all your also spending all your all souls money on a noscan canister that is actually a specific like ring fenced fund you do get from all souls is the nos money alex alex this is a particularly british thing that you may not be up on but people here love huffing nitrous oxide in balloons without canisters so everywhere you go in london especially in areas where there's more young people congregating you'll just trash huge happens to have an office yeah there's just like these fucking piles of discarded empty noscanisters i'm constantly having to avoid them on my bike to not blow up my tire like they're everywhere but we've got fentanyl here okay so yeah so roger crisp says

get the mccarthy this is like we have gun crime in fentanyl and you've got noscans and knives knives guys sorry and paedophilia yeah yeah guys that's often yeah and guys who drive around in Mercedes from 6 6 p.m to 6 a.m selling cocaine to anyone who texts them yeah it's a different country um on call active till 6 a.m in recent decades it has often been said that we are living in the quotes hinge of history unquote an unprecedented period during which we live in a hit a catastrophic event such as rapid climate change nuclear war the release of a synthesized pathogen may bring an end to human and perhaps all sentient life on the planet most people think such an extinction would be bad in fact one of the worst things that could happen it's plausible actually it's good

the process leading to various forms of extinction and extinction itself would be bad for many of us given that our lives are overall good for us and that all else being equal the longer they are the better but it's also plausible that extinction would be good for some individuals those in the final stages of an agonizing terminal illness for example who's pain no longer why does this person sound like a character in a socratic dialogue who's about to it's it's it's it I gotta keep going this means one key factor in judging the overall value of non extinction will involve weighing these disparate interests against each other how might we do that let's focus on sudden extinction imagine that some huge asteroid is heading to earth

which if it hits will remove any possibility of life on earth if you have the power to deflect it should you do so from a moral point of view if extinction would be bad for all sentient beings both now and in the future the answer yes seems hard to argue with but as we just saw that's not the case guy who's only seen the film armageddon I'm getting serious armageddon vibes yes see the problem is that he didn't see deep impact and I think you need to kind of see both yeah to kind of like get the pros and cons of what happens if an asteroid destroys the earth that is true consider the huge amount of suffering that continuing existence will bring with it not only for humans and perhaps even for quote post humans unquote but also sentient the boot on the

road ask him to do a column in the fucking new state sorry it's fucking is lucretious writing for the for the new statesman now as epicureanism made its way into the pages of the new statesman are we trying to achieve a state of ataraxia by dying it gets it gets worse but also for sentient non humans who vastly outnumber us and what certainly would continue to do so as far as humans alone are concerned hillary greaves and will mcaskill at the university of oxford's global priorities institute estimate there could be one quadrillion people to come an estimate they describe as conservative these numbers how much money does the global priorities institute take from the cia because based on its name i'm going to guess a lot that is a deeply cias name these

numbers in the scale of suffering to be put into the balance alongside the good elements individuals lives are difficult to fathom and so large that it's not obvious that you should deflect the asteroid this is your fucking brain on utilitarianism hey no no no this is exactly like a slightly more academicized version of that graph you drew once to take the piss out of someone on twitter which was the degree the graph that said degree of when you nut versus when she stops sucking you drew a dotted line above the intersection and wrote the unknowable zone yeah yes this is true i was doing that to make fun of james cleverly who had drawn some bizarre completely iraq nominative chart about brexit or something prior to brexit happening

um so basically he says you should these numbers in the scale of suffering to be put into the balance alongside the good elements in individuals lives are difficult to fathom and so large that it's not obvious that you should deflect the asteroid in fact there seems to be some reason to think you shouldn't i would simply deflect the asteroid and then live off of the fact that i was the person to deflect the asteroid for the rest of my life alice actually could deflect the asteroid and we know exactly how that's right that's right we're gonna need one bottle of glens vodka yeah and the tallest woman you know yeah we're just we're just going to need some hijabi women and some haramese and we can save mankind a little a little charcuterie plate yeah how can

we make comparisons like these c i lewis a leading harvard philosopher in the mid 20th century offered an intriguing thought experiment to judge the value of some outcome you have to imagine yourself going through the relevant experiences usually when we think about extinction because we are not in great pain we focus on the good things we'll miss but if god were to offer you the choice of living through all the painful and pleasurable experiences that will ever occur without extinction i've changed my mind can i direct the asteroid at this guy specifically yeah it's gonna have to be your most finessed nut yet alice yeah i'm gonna do like a pool yeah like a pool queue i wanted to like put a skin this guy off the face of the earth and nobody

else yeah basically if god would offer you the choice of living through all the painful and pleasurable experiences that will ever occur without extinction would you jump at the opportunity i have to say i wouldn't uh there are of course many other ways of measuring value more technical and precise than lewis's thought experiment most of them assume that values can be compared against one another on a continuous scale imagine that you want the pleasure of being admired on the beach for your impressive impressive tattoo but getting it will hurt so you balance the pleasure against the pain and decide to go ahead only if the first outweighs the second yeah that is why i have a tramp stamp this is jumpers hit it on my lower back

this guy's such a little i have i have a little line tattoo of the trolley problem on my bicep you know when people when people talk about incels and stuff like this is really this is really the damage that is done to society when a guy doesn't get domed off for this long is that he writes an article like this and we have to read it but perhaps there are discontinuities in value john stewart mill for example used to claim that some pleasures such as enjoying some great work of art are quote higher unquote than others in the sense that no amount of lower pleasure such as that of eating peanuts could equal the higher pleasure in overall value that's right 20 dollars can buy many peanuts human experience may be very bad but it also helps a lot of people

get to work on time so it's impossible to say here's whether or not john stewart drill but here's an idea better guy john stewart mill because the highest pleasure is admiring a mill yeah likewise some planes might seem discontinuous in value with others imagine that the devil offered you the choice between stop asking me to imagine things philosophy was a mistake this guy is flucking for wapping through different philosophies he's gone from like epic here is now he's on like daycar this guy this guy has this guy like has post his brain yeah in the sense of like he will kind of he will start like a thought experiment in a fairly kind of conventional way and then just like out of no way he'll be like imagine if the devil showed up

and offered you a deal yeah would you take it or would you I think like I think that something about like the cascading weirder and weirder thought experiments somehow makes you forget that the original thought experiment makes no sense at all like you're like okay we're facing climate change but what if there was a an enormous asteroid that was going to destroy all life on earth in an instant coming at us like we might as well give up on climate change and like this just those things it's it's like it's like saying to you know someone like you've been diagnosed with terminal with potentially terminal terminal but treatable cancer but what if someone had a gun to your head like he's like he's basically the argument that he's putting forward it is kind of

an epicurean one whether he realizes it or not which is like well if like the rest of your life from here on out is basically going to be not very good you may as well die because that's not you can't have a bad time when you're dead however when he's making this argument in light of climate change it's like no climate change if it does kill us is going to kill us all very slowly and painfully so is this guy suggesting that we have some kind of like brian jones town style fucking like suicide packed and like the more you give up brian jones town massacre we're going to get that bad to kill everyone they're going to get us and geronimo the alpaca and then they can kill themselves jones town named after the brian jones town that's right before turning before turning

the pop rock on themselves but i gotta keep going with this because this is really incredible imagine that the devil offers you a choice between a year of the most appalling agony imaginable okay i take it yes yes thank you yes next question in some period with a with a barely perceptible headache some would take the second option however long the headache lasted perhaps even if it were to last for eternity since we are considering whether extinction might be better than continuing to exist the question arises whether some pains would be so great that they outweigh any number of pleasures or other goods to avoid the worries that arise from imagining large numbers consider just one kind of pain undoubtedly the worst that any

sentient being could experience that of torture by electric shock one recent pretty cool actually one recent victim of such torture you know us in the sounding community we really don't appreciate this being i've been saying this for years we've got any sounding heads out there i'm sure we do depends which head hey one recent victim of such torture described it as like they're breaking every bone of every joint in your body at the same time along with sheer physical agony of such torture go many emotional horrors dread terror panic humiliation degradation this is this is a thing right like once you spend too long in academia for some reason it happens to lawyers too you just start envisioning torturing people in some sort of platonic way like i cannot

i've lost count of the number of law professors who have just been like well okay but just as a thought experiment if we were to start putting like needles under people's fingernails and you're just like you realize you were the only person who is saying well i mean also there's just the extent to which like the weird juxtaposition of this being an academic philosopher from oxford writing in the new statesman you know like you said a sort of center left magazine not notionally center left magazine in the uk and it's basically like opening up sky mall and it's got an offer that you can challenge the devil to a fiddling contest like it makes no fucking sense so i'm just going to continue to get through this now consider some relatively short period of such torture an hour

say and return to see i lose his thought experiment imagine a choice between on one hand the non-existence of immediate extinction and on the other an hour of electric shock torture followed by some period of pleasure and other goods which would you choose but what if i could combine the the hour of electric shock shock torture and the period of pleasure well also like what kills me that is like one easy pain there are undeniably people who have been tortured by electric shock torture who are alive now like maybe ask them like hey would it be better if like we just killed everyone would you prefer to have been hit by a meaty right would you would would you have preferred separate one in my fantasy seven i am getting 2000 pounds a day

from all souls college to go around asking victims of torture whether they would rather have been hit by a fucking asteroid this is such a normal country isis is new technique of just firing asteroids at captured soldiers i feel like i feel like it's very much the extension of that like we live in society mean or like the whole um but that mean where it's like um uh like uh we should improve society somewhat and he's the guy who's just like um maybe instead of improving society somewhat we should just like get hit by weight yeah weight to die by getting hit by an asteroid my my my analogy to this is like and my cop out for this is your thoughts experiment stupid because none of us could control any situation like this like okay fine we're doing

the trolley problem i'm i'm not the guy with the lever i'm the guy tied to the trolley tracks as is everyone else and also like the idea of the well there's operating on this incredibly you know extended hypothetical that it's like well an asteroid is on a direct course for earth but we also have a black mage who could cast reflect should he do that like all of this is just it just seems like like a really really done-up parody of this kind of thought experiment but what i want to do is i want to get through though there's five more paragraphs uh i feel as though we can we can we can expand our our brain palaces in a brief span of time please i would love to not brackets i hope having been tortured you might want to ask one of its victims just how bad it is unfortunately it

is common for such victims to say it is impossible to convey the badness jacobo timmerman for example was tortured in argentina and said in the long months of confinement i often thought about how to transmit the pain that a tortured person undergoes and i always concluded that it was impossible it's a pain without points of reference revelatory symbols or clues to serve as indicators another problem why would you write the fucking article then i guess i guess that only 200 pound fucking freelance fee you need more than $2,000 a day from all souls college to go around buying every computer in oxford the only people i have ever met who could understand my pain were horny trans women on the internet i do not know why another problem is it appears to be hard to

remember the true nature of agony harry at martin o who suffered terribly through her life from a uterine tumor once said during a period of remission where are these pains now not only gone but annihilated they're destroyed so utterly that even memory can lay no hold upon them perhaps one reason we think extinction would be bad is that we have failed to recognize just how awful extreme agony is nevertheless we have enough evidence and imaginative capacity to say that it's not unreasonable to see the pain of an hour of torture as something that can never be counter balanced by any amount of positive value and if this view is correct then it suggests the best outcome would be for the immediate extinction that follows from allowing an asteroid to hit our

planet yeah okay i'm gonna i'm gonna turn the asteroid on myself and everybody else because torture exists if this view is correct i suggest that you're a fucking nerd shut the fuck up because it's more like or we could stop people doing torture that there's a way like you know we could actually no no no no it's happened before and that's because it's happened uh jenova has to fucking destroy this entire planet that's just the way it's gonna work the planet's dying cloud exactly exactly you have to let midgar collapse on you because somewhere somehow someone stubbed their fucking toe and you know what that did hurt really intensely for a brief instant um last two paragraphs of course allowing an asteroid to hit earth would

probably be bad for you i love i'd love england i fucking love england you get to write this in a major magazine allowing an asteroid would be bad for uh your portfolio of bioelectricities that can be said and in that respect that is worse than an hour of torture as the asteroid closes in the daily mail is worrying about house prices of course allowing an asteroid to hit the earth would probably be bad for you and those close to you but given what's at stake it may well be that you should pay these costs to prevent all the suffering as the philosopher bernard williams once said if for a moment we got anything like an adequate idea of the suffering in the world and we really guided our actions by it then

surely we would annihilate the planet if we could do you know what's what's speaking with a belt around his neck and orange in his mouth this man said do you know what a better uh philosophical discussion and thought experiment is than this what it's the tweet that says it is uh like it is part of catechism it is catholic belief that when christ saw uh when christ was like decided to sacrifice his life in death ceremony he saw every human sin which meant that he saw a guy blasting rope to anime and still decides to sacrifice his life you're remembering it wrong he said blasting rope he said blasting rope to waluigi for that's that's a that's a better philosophical inquiry than this is i'm not i'm not christian but i absolutely remember that tweet i was like

all right all right i get down with the spirit of death i'm not christian but i absolutely believe that whilst jesus was not the messiah according to the tune to the juice he did nevertheless see a kind of blasting rope to waluigi born and for that reason he was a very good Jew but not the messiah the question of whether extinction would be good or bad overall is obviously very important especially in the face of potential catastrophic events at the hinge of history but this question is also very difficult to answer ultimately i'm not claiming that an extinction would be good only that since it might be we should devote a lot more attention to thinking about the value of extinction than we have to date the end shut the fuck up why because we might

decide to extinct ourselves like what what would be the possible like productive outcome of thinking about that like even if he's right like what is he i can't understand is what the fuck is his suggestion we think about it more there's something about the way that he's that he sets this up that like the possibility of of some unknown suffering in the future means that we should never go on it just suggests he's like never suffered like he's just like the idea is just it's you know he's led and you know i don't know the guy but like he's lived it seems like the kind of thing you can only suggest after having lived like the cost of life of an oxford dawn born during like the sweet spot of of history for like why the fuck isn't there like immeasurable joy right yeah like

like there's like a lot of really good jokes on twitter and like you know if an asteroid is the guy blasting like i don't want to live in a world where i don't see the blasting rope to while luigi i mean i rather i do want to live in the world where i do see that tweet and i want to think about that tweet and visualize it in my mind that's the joy of this article immediately after uh at his like eyes wide shut dinner in an oxford college the uh the claret had run out and then he noticed that the the twink who's thigh he was stroking had left right and he was like what is the point i i was not expecting such a like forceful statement in defense of like humanity and our right to exist from the podcast that i do with my friends but well the point i would make

two is that i mean and you can connect it to a larger point that in in in this the sort of face of this complete conservative hegemony in this country and the sort of like law nothing matters that has happened with just i mean this is my armchair sort of analysis here of post covid and post the 2019 election and post brexit and all this stuff that basically like oh yeah corruption's legal nothing matters do the fuck you want like it's the law of the jungle um there's this extent to which it's been very weird to watch people try to like adopt a kind of very calming pleasant tone to sell you on being completely blackpilled and it's like this reads like the council has written you a letter saying we're going to burn your house down with you in it and it's just yeah

kia starmer reading this entire column to an alpaca haha perhaps you might consider i welcome good things but i would also encourage the government to go further by killing me because bad things also happen and that is something which on the left we must take into account that good things are good but bad things are also bad and sometimes bad things are better than good things are good well uh on that note it falls only to me to say alex thank you so much for making time to be on the show today please plug your ghost the non turf alternative to sub stack uh and uh all the other content yeah sure so um i uh i'm just a guy who

posts um i would i i have a uh a newsletter the the url is alex dash yablon.ghost.io and you know i kind of like basically do the stuff i can't get editors elsewhere to publish i put it up there you know like my thoughts on like bond markets and postpunk and like you know recipes i want to make and like how much you know doing a close ride a close reads of like you know uh doing pop psychology on on on billionaires based on their bad memoirs uh so if you want to read that kind of stuff you should subscribe to my uh my ghost um and then uh i write uh elsewhere for a bunch of other places um i'm a contributing opinion uh writer a business insider where i do somewhat regular columns about all the kinds of stuff that we've been talking about here um

embracing the void embracing the void drinking the kool-aid wallowigi porn um you know it's a regular it's a regular roundup of the best wallowigi porn on the market and to be honest with you alex i i've not read a better one i think yours really does thank you you know and i think just to understand the potential you know great turn the great hinge we're in you know the potential move beyond neoliberalism the kind of the meeting of the climate crisis you've you've got to look at the wallowigi porn it's all there well we will link to uh we'll link to your to the ghost your ghost page in the show notes as well as to your twitter i love saying subscribe to my ghost that sounds like something that would have gotten an eight point nine on pitchfork in 2005

uh hontology is when you subscribe to alex's go exactly um and uh as as you all know we have a please goop on my grinch it's vital to my income it's for haunting tear yeah so uh uh we also have we have a patreon and you can spook us up exactly you can subscribe to our ghosts on uh you can goop on our collective grinch uh that the link is in the show notes as well five dollars a month gets you tons of bonus content and the ten dollar tier gets you two brit analogies a month we also have milo's shows which are yeah masters of our domain listen to that it's a cool podcast i do it with phoebe you've you've

probably heard of phoebe um we talk about seinfeld but not really um and uh yeah i am doing a preview on the 24th of this month august at the seckford there will be a ticket link in the description to this episode and hussein has a show multiple shows i have two shows yeah we have uh 10k posts with phoebe as well um people like are getting kind of convinced that she is real more and more people are asking who is phoebe where did she come from uh yeah who's who's funding her there were genuinely some hogs who thought that phoebe had won like some kind of f***er fan contest but you're not understanding the concept of having friends that's right that's right yeah like you know friends don't exist they're all just like they're all patrons um and yeah it's colonialists to have friends

and speaking of shows that you can listen for free you should also listen to human error on bbc sounds i do that with friend of the show auger cock uh and that's very good too and it's a quick plug for killing yourself before uh and your whole family i mean like magnetas consider killing your whole family as well norwegian style which i mean like yeah which podcast would you listen to as the asteroid comes to destroy you mine would be pod save america which trash future bit would you be playing when the asteroid impact is valhalla valhalla valhalla of course you have your show as well a show about james bond yeah and about how we must kill james bond because his existence is meaningless so uh kill james bond oh can i just i want to add one thing about the james bond i just

there's a there's a piece i was just reading in the london review of books did you know that that ian fleming actually came up with the idea for the cia the article is spy masters by charles glass and it just uh alexander coburn blamed ian fleming for the creation of the cia well alexander coburn kind of blamed a lot of people well things mostly justly but in a kind of like uh vitriolic way which we would never do but uh but fleming was a naval intelligence officer and he was sent to washington in 1941 and uh he was whisked off to a room in a new annex of the embassy locked in with a pen and paper and the necessity of life colleague recalled and there he wrote under arm guard around the clock a document of some severing 70 pages covering every

aspect of a giant secret intelligence and secret operational organization he then handed it to wild bill donovan who was the guy who set up the os s who uh basically stole it yeah and then nothing and then and then i didn't see what happened right right exactly and then that became the the cia so yes uh ian fleming created this podcast is about is about to get cut off suddenly mid-sentence so yes i agree we need to kill james bond kill james bond listen to kill james bond listen to hell of a way i won't plug it too long and uh thank you very much for listening and we will talk to you next week bye bye