I spent much of yesterday travelling to and from, and then taking part in, an extended Novara Media interview with Aaron Bastani.<\/p>\n
This will come out on Sunday as part of their Downstream series and will be about two hours 15 minutes after editing, I am told. That will apparently be their second-longest ever interview. We found a lot to talk about.<\/p>\n
I was genuinely pleased to get this invitation, and I know many people have asked why this has not happened before now. Even Aaron did during the recording. I suspect my Channel 4 podcast<\/a>, which has now got nearly 550,000 views, might have been a tipping point on this one.<\/p>\n What did we discuss? Essentially, the state of politics, the state of the economy, and how we might manage the crises coming our way in some way or another.<\/p>\n The Iran conflict, AI, food supply chain issues and climate change all get an inevitable look-in.<\/p>\n So, too, did reactions to the far right.<\/p>\n And, as I expected, since Aaron has previously made clear his difficulties with it, so did MMT. Here I was quite clear. I said MMT explains how money works, just as Newtonian physics explains how gravity works. MMT is not a belief system. It explains what is. Aaron seemed to buy that.<\/p>\n The key point I made, and this is where I markedly differ with some in MMT, is that it is not a political programme. Some claim it is. I disagree. The point is that MMT is a platform which explains money on which the foundations of economic policy can then be built.<\/p>\n We did, however, cover a great deal more than that, including a lot on my methodology, motivation and methods of campaigning.<\/p>\n The video comes out at 3pm on Sunday. I will share it here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"