This episode is phenomenal and I'm 2 hours in, but had to pop in the comments because my personal pet topic was brough up - cars/climate change/electric vehicles/etc.
I work in the auto industry at a very large automaker, specifically on hybrid and electric vehicles, and just spent a week at the global conference for automotive engineers. First off, nothing has radicalized me against cars and for public transit more than working in the automotive industry. A cleaner, connected world has a few automobiles in it as possible.
These companies are the perfect example of state-directed capitalism. In the ten years I've been in my job, I've watched products and programs be eliminated at the drop of a hat due to constant flux in regulations. These companies are only producing lower emissions/higher fuel efficiency cars because they are legally required. In fact, now that emissions standards are starting to widen between the federal requirements and CARB requirements (~20 states have adopted the emissions standards of the California Air Resource Board), automakers are putting out two varieties of the same vehicles depending on where they would be sold to save a little bit of money, rather giving everyone the vehicles with lower emissions.
Asides from the direct state intervention via emissions/fuel economy requirements and consumer tax subsidies (in the US and EU), you have the Saudi government via Saudi Aramco investing billions of dollars into research and development in products to keep gasoline engines around as long as possible.
The Chinese EV market is fascinating and so radically different from the rest of the global auto market. The timelines, marketing choices, etc. are unlike anything we do in the US. They are marketing their vehicles to customers based on the kinds of microchips in the cars. The design cycles are half as long, and the companies are organized with R&D driving the decision making (which is certainly not how it works in the US). The market is also heavily subsidized by the Chinese government (~$230B over 15ish years, not including battery subsidies) in what I think are more effective ways than what is done in the US.
The US is so scared of acknowledging its state-driven capitalism that it just does things in more inefficient, less effective ways to maintain the ruse that it's market driven.
thank you so much for sharing this insider insight, the idea that american capitalism has extreme elements of central/state planning is something i learned from grace blakeley that really helped me connect dots that seemed like plot holes before
Thanks so much for posting this, fascinating to hear and that last sentence is a banger. Makes me think of the MBTA, the Boston subway, which is an example of an incredibly cursed public-private partnership that, in seeking to pretend it's less state-based than it is, seems to have picked up all of the weaknesses and none of the strengths.
Two chef’s kiss moments - Caro’s proclamation that vaccines are the most important innovation in recent history & the rant about how the government funded researchers who do the hard, deeply intellectual work are almost never rewarded for it financially…as someone with a PhD in microbiology who was until very recently a broke grad student, so true bestie 🤌🏻
The way that we talk about the luddites has always pissed me off. The very fact that the story of the luddites is framed as a tech story is capitalist propaganda. The luddite’s story is a labor story, and the luddites were right. The technology they fought against eventually destroyed their communities as it robbed them of their livelihood and the owners profited massively. To this day we use “luddite” as a derisive moniker for people who just don't get technology. Obviously we see this repeating once again now with Ai. It benefits none (almost) of us to seek to further technological advances that will ultimately doom us all, and under capitalism that is the only possible outcome for advancing Ai. I apologize as this is only tangentially related to the end of the of the podcast but I wanted to get this off my chest.
Gotta say, catching up on this podcast and the comments/chat while on the clock at work but not doing anything except listening to anti-capitalist critique makes it all the sweeter.
I am 21 mins into this episode and hahahaaa omg I am a flight and guidance software engineer that previously worked for Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin for his New Glenn rocket originally under the pretenses of a more kind/accepting/democratic space Corp (compared to Space Xs asshat bs and NASA's bureaucracy and low pay - i have a 2 year old ) and I am tentatively planning to start my own space simulation and control GNC company post graduation from GaTech Grad school in few weeks..... I am fully sweating already 😅 and I'm girding my loins for the remainder of this episode lolll. Also have good friends who met with Katy Perry after their New Shepherd launch.. cringing so hard. Boy oh boy do i have stories to tell about Jeffy B. Lolllll ugh anyway. Onward with this episode-- love you guys
Lolllllll so I'm an hour and 6 mins into now to the episode
I think there are many subtle things I could say about working for Blue Origin lolll. The most heinous was that I was put on a performance improvement plan for using too much of my benefit-provided PTO to take care of my sick 1-year-old.
Also Jeff B was so fing pissed we didn't launch New Glenn on his Bday. Fing man-baby kept calling us in the Hardware-in-the-loop lab to certify the flight software as ready for launch lollll we found a fing bug that would have blown the rocket up on the launch pad -- fing child lollll
I should also say that obviously these are not the worst things that have happened to people working for JB loll they are just personally the most annoying and hilarious to me lolll
But also I'm thinking about how to use this gdamn understanding of flight software for "good" in this current moment. Im honestly at a loss. Either sign myself away to some corporate behemoth, to another "defense" company, or try to maybe make a way for fire seeking drones or deep-sea explorers. Not much money in that, as you highlighted. I wish the world were setup differently. Where climate scientists were more valued. This is the point you are making-- 1 hour 39 mins in now.
Love this latest episode so much! Halfway through but wanted to point out that Che is from Argentina. His life and how he ended up in Cuba is hella interesting. But anyway thank you for covering this issue! I think we’re at a crucial point where there is revolutionary potential in the US and the political education that y’all are doing needed now more than ever 💕
Excellent episode! When you began introducing the optimistic conclusion I thought you were about to cite Hickel, 2024 but perhaps that's bc we're semi-colleagues lol. A good read nonetheless! It's framed through climate resilience and concludes that good lives for the global population could be achieved with 30% of current production/energy capacity. I have the pdf if interested but citation is
Hickel, J., & Sullivan, D. (2024). How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? insights from needs-based analysis. World Development Perspectives, 35, 100612. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612
I'm in planning and landscape architecture at a very average civil engineering firm. I did grad school at UIC Barcelona, we collaborated often with ICTA-UAB and I did an internship with them! Mostly I'm on the urban resilience listserv now lol. Hickel was also on an excellent episode of Upstream discussing this research!
a woman after my own heart!! im a lover of upstream and currently looking into applying for UABs degrowth masters program. urban resiliency sounds really awesome. whatd you think of UAB and your time in barcelona??
Another banger, and I'm not even done yet. 💯🔥 Will be listening multiple times. Thank you for covering the US's interference in overthrowing soooo many democratically elected socialist leaders. Way too many Americans have no idea! I didn't start learning that history until grad school, and certainly not because anyone taught me. Just wanted to note that Che Guevara was Argentine. He actually got the nickname "Che" because that's a common slang expression in Argentine Spanish that he used frequently, so his Cuban comrades started just calling him "Che". His given name is Ernesto. His story is fascinating. Highly recommend reading more about it. He grew up upper-middle class and was studying to be a doctor. His motorcycle journeys through Latin America (of "Motorcycle Diaries" fame) were the beginning of his "radicalization" as he traveled through the countryside and witnessed first hand the poverty and exploitation of US capitalism throughout the region. He did spend time in Guatemala and I believe a lot of his ideas began to crystalize there. But his life story and trajectory is so interesting, even more I think when you consider he wasn't born into poverty, he was born into wealth and seeing the effects of the US capitalist system precipitated his revolutionary work. I started reading a lot about him after a trip to Cuba. And boy oh boy was that trip an eye opener. Anyways, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk and also can I volunteer to lead the Diabolical Lies group trip to Cuba?! Pretty please. 🙋🏻♀️🙏🏻
thank you so much, Emily! I've added a correction at the bottom of this post and my sincerest apologies to Che — I think I made that mistake because the Jakarta Method talked about how the events of Guatemala further radicalized him, and I think I assumed it was because that's where he was from. The fact that it happened so many times in that region that I can't keep all the countries straight...
Totally! Easy mistake since we have essentially overthrown the democratically elected government in every single Latin American country. 🤦🏻♀️ And they are still living the consequences. It's so fucked. I just checked out the Jakarta Method from the library yoday--thanks for the rec.
emily, what did you study in grad school? i find it so fascinating that most people rarely learn these things at school. i learned a bit and was initially radicalized in undergrad in my international relations classes, but if it weren’t for that i’d have no idea or foundation to build upon.
I studied politics and history and heard a bit about him, but him as an unpredictable revolutionary force. Definitely learned more about him through a group of friends who were huge Noam Chomsky stans. I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t really thought much about that sad reality until now, thanks for pointing it out!
My favorite (read: one of the ones that makes me most upset) of the "wait they were a socialist?" crew is probably Helen Keller. There was a great book I read in my youth, though that was long enough ago that probably it hasn't aged well or has better successors, called Lies My Teacher Told Me, that had a wonderful summary of the Keller situation, which I'll paraphrase because I no longer have a copy. Basically the author, James W. Loewen, pointed out just how sad it is that pretty much every American of my generation learned how Keller learned to talk, but never learned what she had to say. That one hit teenage me like a ton of bricks, and still carries a punch today, I think.
As for the rest of the episode - I grew up mostly in the US, but live in Japan now, and while listening to the whole thing in the very nice electric train while returning to my little consumerist paradise Tokyo neighborhood with more shops within 5 minutes than were in the entire US town I grew up in did give a certain feeling of smugness, you of course took care not to let it last with the very astute point that the "good" capitalisms like Scandinavia and, yep, Japan, rely on the entire system in all its hideous evil.
That said, I still think it can be a good illustration of what we might stand to gain. These kinds of compact, human-focused living areas are not incompatible with other economic systems and are in important ways much less resource intensive than the US model. Tokyo works and is somewhere you can easily live without a car partially because of all the trains, but also because so much stuff is available profoundly locally, meaning that many people can easily live day to day without the need for any kind of transit beyond legs, bicycle, or wheelchair, and does it with a lower cost of living than the US. The difference, of course, being that if I walk to the grocery store, only the grocer makes a profit, whereas if I drive the car manufacturer made one and the fuel supplier is making one. Let alone the highways, parking areas, and so forth. A lot of the costs of the American style are easy to ignore because they're subsidized by taxes, like a lot of the roads, or because they'll be paid in the future, like the air pollution. But they still matter when you're looking at what can be done by something like collective labor, even if our financial system, which is largely a shared illusion, is taken out of the picture.
Anyway, like the trans sports episode I was already on-side with this one, as it were, but y'all continue to have a great gift for conveying the relevant stuff with clarity and style and, despite the evidence of the run time, succinctly - you just keep picking gigantic topics (absolutely not a complaint). I'll definitely be sharing it around, and I always end up with a lot to think about. Thanks as always for the great work.
This author, her book and this interview seem apropos of your discussion on climate and capitalism (and patriarchy) "Earlier this month a board member of global insurer Allianz SE said a rise of 3C would render many regions uninsurable and make investment too uncertain – ultimately capitalism would cease to be viable. Does that ring true to you? It’s interesting to hear it in such terms from an insurer. Capitalism as we know it now would be unviable. We are on track to tear it down by accident." "The German scientist on her new book arguing that inequality, wealth and sexism are making the climate crisis worse – and what we need to do about it" https://greystonebooks.com/products/climate-injustice?srsltid=AfmBOorf1-uI0qo8kkHe7YtW4MKCSSiuBLowuHiiJOyS6FUlzup6mGUi
Katie did a great episode about home insurance and climate change on her Money with Katie pod! I definitely think we’re headed toward property insurnace as the first nationalized industry as climate change makes insurance an unsustainable business.
I'm only 1/2 way through so I haven't heard if you mention this, but this series is excellent as are all of their podcasts https://sceneonradio.org/capitalism/
Relatedly, you guys should 100% do an episode on property insurance in the US. Katie, I know you had that guy from First Street on MWK but I just think the climate crisis is absolutely going to take the bottom out of the insurance market and I think about it ALL THE TIME
Using ‘rise & fall’ as a headline and releasing on Easter Sunday is a solid flex.
I hate that this wasn’t intentional LOL
☠️🐇☠️
👏👏
This episode is phenomenal and I'm 2 hours in, but had to pop in the comments because my personal pet topic was brough up - cars/climate change/electric vehicles/etc.
I work in the auto industry at a very large automaker, specifically on hybrid and electric vehicles, and just spent a week at the global conference for automotive engineers. First off, nothing has radicalized me against cars and for public transit more than working in the automotive industry. A cleaner, connected world has a few automobiles in it as possible.
These companies are the perfect example of state-directed capitalism. In the ten years I've been in my job, I've watched products and programs be eliminated at the drop of a hat due to constant flux in regulations. These companies are only producing lower emissions/higher fuel efficiency cars because they are legally required. In fact, now that emissions standards are starting to widen between the federal requirements and CARB requirements (~20 states have adopted the emissions standards of the California Air Resource Board), automakers are putting out two varieties of the same vehicles depending on where they would be sold to save a little bit of money, rather giving everyone the vehicles with lower emissions.
Asides from the direct state intervention via emissions/fuel economy requirements and consumer tax subsidies (in the US and EU), you have the Saudi government via Saudi Aramco investing billions of dollars into research and development in products to keep gasoline engines around as long as possible.
The Chinese EV market is fascinating and so radically different from the rest of the global auto market. The timelines, marketing choices, etc. are unlike anything we do in the US. They are marketing their vehicles to customers based on the kinds of microchips in the cars. The design cycles are half as long, and the companies are organized with R&D driving the decision making (which is certainly not how it works in the US). The market is also heavily subsidized by the Chinese government (~$230B over 15ish years, not including battery subsidies) in what I think are more effective ways than what is done in the US.
The US is so scared of acknowledging its state-driven capitalism that it just does things in more inefficient, less effective ways to maintain the ruse that it's market driven.
thank you so much for sharing this insider insight, the idea that american capitalism has extreme elements of central/state planning is something i learned from grace blakeley that really helped me connect dots that seemed like plot holes before
I read Vulture Capitalism on your recommendation and it made so many things click for me 🤯
Thanks so much for posting this, fascinating to hear and that last sentence is a banger. Makes me think of the MBTA, the Boston subway, which is an example of an incredibly cursed public-private partnership that, in seeking to pretend it's less state-based than it is, seems to have picked up all of the weaknesses and none of the strengths.
Just reading this outline turns me on a lil bit?
i was gasping laughing at these show notes when i read them
Were you chuckling and gasping tho? 🙃
Two chef’s kiss moments - Caro’s proclamation that vaccines are the most important innovation in recent history & the rant about how the government funded researchers who do the hard, deeply intellectual work are almost never rewarded for it financially…as someone with a PhD in microbiology who was until very recently a broke grad student, so true bestie 🤌🏻
When I got to American baby boomers own 20% of the world’s wealth I had to stop the podcast to breath because I had tears in my eyes OMG
The way that we talk about the luddites has always pissed me off. The very fact that the story of the luddites is framed as a tech story is capitalist propaganda. The luddite’s story is a labor story, and the luddites were right. The technology they fought against eventually destroyed their communities as it robbed them of their livelihood and the owners profited massively. To this day we use “luddite” as a derisive moniker for people who just don't get technology. Obviously we see this repeating once again now with Ai. It benefits none (almost) of us to seek to further technological advances that will ultimately doom us all, and under capitalism that is the only possible outcome for advancing Ai. I apologize as this is only tangentially related to the end of the of the podcast but I wanted to get this off my chest.
Tbh the most shocking fact presented in the podcast was that Caro couldn't finish that Taylor swift lyric.
hahahahhahahhahahah
Was anyone else screaming “ARISTOTLE, CARO”
im so ashamed
@Gwen the podcast History is Sexy has a GREAT episode on the Luddites!!!
Gotta say, catching up on this podcast and the comments/chat while on the clock at work but not doing anything except listening to anti-capitalist critique makes it all the sweeter.
it’s an honor to be a part of your private resistance
I am 21 mins into this episode and hahahaaa omg I am a flight and guidance software engineer that previously worked for Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin for his New Glenn rocket originally under the pretenses of a more kind/accepting/democratic space Corp (compared to Space Xs asshat bs and NASA's bureaucracy and low pay - i have a 2 year old ) and I am tentatively planning to start my own space simulation and control GNC company post graduation from GaTech Grad school in few weeks..... I am fully sweating already 😅 and I'm girding my loins for the remainder of this episode lolll. Also have good friends who met with Katy Perry after their New Shepherd launch.. cringing so hard. Boy oh boy do i have stories to tell about Jeffy B. Lolllll ugh anyway. Onward with this episode-- love you guys
TELL US YOUR SECRETS
Lolllllll so I'm an hour and 6 mins into now to the episode
I think there are many subtle things I could say about working for Blue Origin lolll. The most heinous was that I was put on a performance improvement plan for using too much of my benefit-provided PTO to take care of my sick 1-year-old.
Also Jeff B was so fing pissed we didn't launch New Glenn on his Bday. Fing man-baby kept calling us in the Hardware-in-the-loop lab to certify the flight software as ready for launch lollll we found a fing bug that would have blown the rocket up on the launch pad -- fing child lollll
I should also say that obviously these are not the worst things that have happened to people working for JB loll they are just personally the most annoying and hilarious to me lolll
And this is where I pitch my Diabolical Lies flight software company where we target capitalist assholes lol
Omfg 2hrs 10 mins in-- y'all are on the same tiktok with me -- Gary's economics fing blue my brains out similarly to y'alls podcasts have -- loooove
But also I'm thinking about how to use this gdamn understanding of flight software for "good" in this current moment. Im honestly at a loss. Either sign myself away to some corporate behemoth, to another "defense" company, or try to maybe make a way for fire seeking drones or deep-sea explorers. Not much money in that, as you highlighted. I wish the world were setup differently. Where climate scientists were more valued. This is the point you are making-- 1 hour 39 mins in now.
Love this latest episode so much! Halfway through but wanted to point out that Che is from Argentina. His life and how he ended up in Cuba is hella interesting. But anyway thank you for covering this issue! I think we’re at a crucial point where there is revolutionary potential in the US and the political education that y’all are doing needed now more than ever 💕
thank you! I've added the correction to this post!
Excellent episode! When you began introducing the optimistic conclusion I thought you were about to cite Hickel, 2024 but perhaps that's bc we're semi-colleagues lol. A good read nonetheless! It's framed through climate resilience and concludes that good lives for the global population could be achieved with 30% of current production/energy capacity. I have the pdf if interested but citation is
Hickel, J., & Sullivan, D. (2024). How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? insights from needs-based analysis. World Development Perspectives, 35, 100612. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612
oh wow really excited to read this, i hadn't come across it in my research. thank you so much for sharing!
yesss!!! degrowth for the WIN !! and fangirling that you’re semi colleagues with jason hickel! what do you do??
I'm in planning and landscape architecture at a very average civil engineering firm. I did grad school at UIC Barcelona, we collaborated often with ICTA-UAB and I did an internship with them! Mostly I'm on the urban resilience listserv now lol. Hickel was also on an excellent episode of Upstream discussing this research!
a woman after my own heart!! im a lover of upstream and currently looking into applying for UABs degrowth masters program. urban resiliency sounds really awesome. whatd you think of UAB and your time in barcelona??
Another banger, and I'm not even done yet. 💯🔥 Will be listening multiple times. Thank you for covering the US's interference in overthrowing soooo many democratically elected socialist leaders. Way too many Americans have no idea! I didn't start learning that history until grad school, and certainly not because anyone taught me. Just wanted to note that Che Guevara was Argentine. He actually got the nickname "Che" because that's a common slang expression in Argentine Spanish that he used frequently, so his Cuban comrades started just calling him "Che". His given name is Ernesto. His story is fascinating. Highly recommend reading more about it. He grew up upper-middle class and was studying to be a doctor. His motorcycle journeys through Latin America (of "Motorcycle Diaries" fame) were the beginning of his "radicalization" as he traveled through the countryside and witnessed first hand the poverty and exploitation of US capitalism throughout the region. He did spend time in Guatemala and I believe a lot of his ideas began to crystalize there. But his life story and trajectory is so interesting, even more I think when you consider he wasn't born into poverty, he was born into wealth and seeing the effects of the US capitalist system precipitated his revolutionary work. I started reading a lot about him after a trip to Cuba. And boy oh boy was that trip an eye opener. Anyways, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk and also can I volunteer to lead the Diabolical Lies group trip to Cuba?! Pretty please. 🙋🏻♀️🙏🏻
thank you so much, Emily! I've added a correction at the bottom of this post and my sincerest apologies to Che — I think I made that mistake because the Jakarta Method talked about how the events of Guatemala further radicalized him, and I think I assumed it was because that's where he was from. The fact that it happened so many times in that region that I can't keep all the countries straight...
Totally! Easy mistake since we have essentially overthrown the democratically elected government in every single Latin American country. 🤦🏻♀️ And they are still living the consequences. It's so fucked. I just checked out the Jakarta Method from the library yoday--thanks for the rec.
emily, what did you study in grad school? i find it so fascinating that most people rarely learn these things at school. i learned a bit and was initially radicalized in undergrad in my international relations classes, but if it weren’t for that i’d have no idea or foundation to build upon.
I studied politics and history and heard a bit about him, but him as an unpredictable revolutionary force. Definitely learned more about him through a group of friends who were huge Noam Chomsky stans. I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t really thought much about that sad reality until now, thanks for pointing it out!
Will be listening again and taking notes because I am *shook* by this episode and have no coherent thoughts. Well done, ladies
This community needs to have an in-person party with a champagne tower and five different piñatas on the day Katie receives a McArthur grant
LOL
This whole chat is filled with badass intelligent people and it gives me hope! thank you for educating and enraging us!
My favorite (read: one of the ones that makes me most upset) of the "wait they were a socialist?" crew is probably Helen Keller. There was a great book I read in my youth, though that was long enough ago that probably it hasn't aged well or has better successors, called Lies My Teacher Told Me, that had a wonderful summary of the Keller situation, which I'll paraphrase because I no longer have a copy. Basically the author, James W. Loewen, pointed out just how sad it is that pretty much every American of my generation learned how Keller learned to talk, but never learned what she had to say. That one hit teenage me like a ton of bricks, and still carries a punch today, I think.
As for the rest of the episode - I grew up mostly in the US, but live in Japan now, and while listening to the whole thing in the very nice electric train while returning to my little consumerist paradise Tokyo neighborhood with more shops within 5 minutes than were in the entire US town I grew up in did give a certain feeling of smugness, you of course took care not to let it last with the very astute point that the "good" capitalisms like Scandinavia and, yep, Japan, rely on the entire system in all its hideous evil.
That said, I still think it can be a good illustration of what we might stand to gain. These kinds of compact, human-focused living areas are not incompatible with other economic systems and are in important ways much less resource intensive than the US model. Tokyo works and is somewhere you can easily live without a car partially because of all the trains, but also because so much stuff is available profoundly locally, meaning that many people can easily live day to day without the need for any kind of transit beyond legs, bicycle, or wheelchair, and does it with a lower cost of living than the US. The difference, of course, being that if I walk to the grocery store, only the grocer makes a profit, whereas if I drive the car manufacturer made one and the fuel supplier is making one. Let alone the highways, parking areas, and so forth. A lot of the costs of the American style are easy to ignore because they're subsidized by taxes, like a lot of the roads, or because they'll be paid in the future, like the air pollution. But they still matter when you're looking at what can be done by something like collective labor, even if our financial system, which is largely a shared illusion, is taken out of the picture.
Anyway, like the trans sports episode I was already on-side with this one, as it were, but y'all continue to have a great gift for conveying the relevant stuff with clarity and style and, despite the evidence of the run time, succinctly - you just keep picking gigantic topics (absolutely not a complaint). I'll definitely be sharing it around, and I always end up with a lot to think about. Thanks as always for the great work.
Niko, thank you so much for this thoughtful comment. I lol'd at the "despite the evidence of the run time."
This author, her book and this interview seem apropos of your discussion on climate and capitalism (and patriarchy) "Earlier this month a board member of global insurer Allianz SE said a rise of 3C would render many regions uninsurable and make investment too uncertain – ultimately capitalism would cease to be viable. Does that ring true to you? It’s interesting to hear it in such terms from an insurer. Capitalism as we know it now would be unviable. We are on track to tear it down by accident." "The German scientist on her new book arguing that inequality, wealth and sexism are making the climate crisis worse – and what we need to do about it" https://greystonebooks.com/products/climate-injustice?srsltid=AfmBOorf1-uI0qo8kkHe7YtW4MKCSSiuBLowuHiiJOyS6FUlzup6mGUi
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/19/climatologist-friederike-otto-the-more-unequal-the-society-is-the-more-severe-the-climate-disaster
Katie did a great episode about home insurance and climate change on her Money with Katie pod! I definitely think we’re headed toward property insurnace as the first nationalized industry as climate change makes insurance an unsustainable business.
yes 100% i think it's going to become a reckoning moment for sure if we can get over our fear of 'socialism' — i don't think we'll have a choice
I'm only 1/2 way through so I haven't heard if you mention this, but this series is excellent as are all of their podcasts https://sceneonradio.org/capitalism/
Relatedly, you guys should 100% do an episode on property insurance in the US. Katie, I know you had that guy from First Street on MWK but I just think the climate crisis is absolutely going to take the bottom out of the insurance market and I think about it ALL THE TIME
“I got a b+ in macroeconomics” is my favorite flex 🤣