POTW #20 - The Basic Income Podcast

I’ve highlighted UBI once before in this series via a Freakanomics episode dedicated to the topic. Since then, UBI has exploded into the podcastiverse.

The primary source is now The Basic Income Podcast. Created in the bay area by Jim Pugh and Owen Poindexter, two of the most active leaders in the UBI space, this podcast has followed every recent UBI development through conversations with academics/activists working around this concept and occasionally in episodes sharing their own thoughts. Pugh was one of the original organizers of the UBI Meetups at which I was drafted into the movement and is a co-founder/director of the Universal Income Project and a founding signatory of the Economic Security Project. Poindexter was also a regular attendee of the UBI Meetups and has followed his passion for this idea into local politics, he is currently running for CA Assembly in District 15 (South Berkeley) on a UBI platform.

Their podcast is the easiest way to stay up-to-date on the state of the UBI movement. Episodes are 15-20 minutes and include talks with Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, labor leader Andy Stern, Dorian Warren on UBI and racial justice, TED Talker Rutger Bregman, UBI self-tester Scott Santens, and representatives from all the major UBI experiments world-wide. They recently informed me that UBI has been added to the official platform of the California Democratic Party! Please subscribe.

Aside from Jim and Owen’s weekly updates, UBI seems to pop up in my playlist on a regular basis now. It is encouraging to know that the concept seems to have cemented itself as a main point in every discussion of our economic future. We even have a 2020 presidential candidate running on a UBI platform, Andrew Yang.

Best of the Left weaves UBI into its episodes on economics and culture on a regular basis. Some of those episodes:

• #1119 The inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men
• #823 It makes moral and economic sense (Minimum Wage)
• #879 Capitalism will not set you free (Economics)
• #941 Taking food out of the mouths of babes (Poverty)
• #978 The future of work (Culture)

99% Invisible explored UBI In “The Finnish Experiment”. Planet Money has been mentioning UBI a lot recently. Sam Harris has mentioned UBI at least a dozen times in the last few years and while he hasn’t come out definitively for it, his insistence on putting it to his guests makes me think he’s a supporter.

UBI remains one of the only policies with supporters on both the left and right. Check out “The Conservative Case for the Universal Basic Income” from The Atlantic. The first modern proponents of the idea were free-market fundamentalists Friedrich Hayek and his protegé Milton Friedman (mostly through a negative income tax). Martin Luther King Jr. supported UBI in the last years of his life as he shifted his focus towards economic justice. And now UBI is an official part of the platform of The Movement for Black Lives. While it initially states “a guaranteed minimum livable income for all Black people” if you read further on it clarifies their point to mean “a pro-rated additional amount included in a UBI for Black Americans”.

I don’t think UBI is the end-goal of the progress we need to make in our generation. It’s not going to heal the environment or the manifold “-ism’s” that plague our culture. I do think it is the best means proposed thus far to use our current capitalist toolkit to move beyond late capitalism. A world with UBI will produce a mind-space from which we may collectively make the quantum cultural leaps necessary to survive another century. We are simply too weighed-down by our current system to imagine a better story in which to live, too traumatized by our conditions to see beyond the veil of our personal needs. UBI will be an analgesic that, while not a treatment in itself, will allow us to see beyond our pain and invent a new, healing, sustainable toolkit for future generations.

If you know any other good clips, discussions, or other sources on the topic please share.

POTW #19 - Joe Frank via Scott Carrier, Jad, and Ira.

On the drive to LA for Throwback a few weeks ago, a friend introduced me to a new podcast, Scott Carrier's Home of the Brave.  I've always really liked Carrier's contributions to This American Life so I added his podcast to my playlist.  The next week, while climbing a tree, I was listening to an episode titled "Two More Stories About Mountains" and the second story shook me from my day and brought me to the quintessential experience of art.


"What is this?  Have I been somehow transported to another world without noticing?", I was asking myself in that tree.  My audio universe was different now and I think it always will be, because I found Joe Frank.  This particular story was about a psychedelic "ascent" of K2 which I assumed would be a true tale.  I'm not even sure when (or if) I ever decided it was fiction.  I loved it.  I've now listened to it two more times with other people.  More Joe Frank, please.

Joe Frank, photo by his partner Michal Story

Joe Frank was a radio pioneer.  He died two days before I heard that story, though that episode was released weeks ago.  I learned he died from the next episode of Home of the Brave when Carrier shared another of his stories.  This week, Radiolab released a tribute episode containing Jad's interviews with Brook Gladstone (here's the full segment from On the Media) and Ira Glass about Frank's influence on all of them.  Listen just to hear Ira Glass say "fuck" more times than he probably has in the last 15 years combined.  Podcasts would not be what they are now without Jad and Ira, I'm happy to learn they share such a trippy, subversive radio ancestor.

I can't wait to listen to the Frank stories I've already found.

Podcast of the Week #18 - BOTL #1123 - Preparing for the end of the world, or at least capitalism

I've been feeling re-activated recently.  Through conversations with respected friends and thinkers, I'm urged out of my comfort zone of job and complacency.  And when I hear podcasts like this I want to drive off into the world and discover what people are actually doing to subvert, sabotage, and substitute our poisonous culture.

Best of the Left #1123 - Preparing for the end of the world, or at least capitalism

Some of these segments are dense but may provide support for those thoughts that are scary to share.  I hope we are all finding the courage to discuss this in polite company.  I'm less and less tolerant of apologists these days.

If you don't do podcasts (why did you come here?), or if you only have 15 minutes to spare, one segment is a must-hear (or see below).  Last February, Casey Gerald delivered the greatest TED talk of all time in Vancouver.  That this video has less than 90,000 views (of which I'm three) isn't surprising.  It's in the same vein as talks TED has banned in the past and I'm sure they've received pressure to suppress this message.  The audio is one segment of the podcast but please watch the video if you can.  This video should have millions of views.

What ideas do you think are actually helping undo the damage we've done?  What systems can we build ourselves, in parallel to the existing one?  What does the world look like on the day we wake not needing the state, the patriarchy, or the Abrahamic religions?

Podcast of the Week #17 - Nuclear History

Common themes are becoming apparent in my educational media consumption so I'm going to try to compile related podcasts, articles, documentaries, etc. into single blog posts.  Please comment with suggestions for further listening/learning.

http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-of-worlds/

While I absolutely love every episode of Hardcore History--I usually listen to them 30 minutes at a time while cooking or cleaning at home, they are too engrossing for my usual workday routine--this recent show covers topics that keep popping up in my life; the end of the world, technological vs ethical evolution, and the obsolescence of our current political-economic paradigm.

Having just watched Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States, Dan Carlin's take on nuclear weapon proliferation struck me as rather kind to the Americans central to the story, especially Harry Truman.  Stone's cold portrayal of Truman as a bitter, small-minded person comes as a shock to someone used to the historical sanctification of US presidents.  I did a report on Truman in 5th grade as part of a report on the state of Missouri and I don't even think I mentioned that he was one of the world's most successful mass murderers, responsible for the unnecessary deaths of 200,000+ Japanese civilians and celebrated for it to this day.

I can recommend Untold History (available on Netflix) but only for what it adds to one's American history education.  Stone himself is a terrible narrator and each episode is an hour of nonstop tragedy.  But if you manage to follow Stone's staccato cadence and breathless America bashing you may certainly be disabused of any glorious notions of American foreign policy.  The first couple episodes are directly related to nuclear weapons.

I have a personal connection to this topic as well.  My grandparents, Harvey and Margeret "Peg" Walker, met at Los Alamos while working on the Manhattan Project (they weren't high ranking scientists or anything).  They are the grandparents that always lived far away so I don't know much about their story but I will try to learn more from my grandma Peg while I still can.  What would you want to know?

Nuclear technology has brought some good into the world.  If anything it sparked scientific innovation and forced a conversation we needed to have.  Placing the power to destroy our species in the hands of a single person was one of the first leaps in our evolution toward the unification of humanity, the fatal blow to tribalism and any hope for a return to our natural past.  While the threat of nuclear annihilation remains, it was just a warm-up for the challenge posed by environmental and cultural collapse.  These are problems that cannot be addressed effectively within our current paradigm.  Once again we are up against an evolutionary cliff, except this time we can't win by simply not pushing "the button".  The button has already been pushed, we have to diffuse the situation while the bombs are in the air.  This will be our largest leap.

Bonus - This relevant episode of 99% Invisible came out recently too.

Podcast of the Week #16

The audio-book version of the much vaunted founding document of the anti-Trump movement.  The Indivisible Guide is free to download and adapt.  Whether you prefer text or audio, everyone should put this information in their brain.  I don't think working within the system is ever going to bring us the change we need to survive on this planet but these skills are absolutely necessary if we're to survive this administration.

Best of the Left - Indivisible audio version

The Indivisible Homepage and Download