Talk with Warren Mosler - I

If we are going to create chatMMT for fun, we are going to need a decent corpus of writing from Warren Mosler. You can’t easily get the snappy one-liners otherwise.

A lot of the cool stuff from Mosler is in youtube interviews, so some audio-to-text transcribing efforts are needed? Unpaid internships anyone? (Excuse the crassness! Couldn’t help myself.) At least Google tensorflow tools can do most of the work for us these days.

Backstory

Warren knows me as this Kiwi bloke who supports MMT activists. But otherwise he does not know me from Adam (inside joke there). He’s got a tonne of contacts, so it’s no surprise he won’t remember your name. However, he has somehow picked up on the fact I am a mathematical physicist (just a journeyman, but that puts me ahead of 99% of humanity).

To ruin the coolness of this story a little, I did email Warren about a Bretton-Woods question from a follower on tw33ter. But otherwise I get a call from Warren almost out-of-the-blue!

To be fair, Warren did email me a cryptic one-liner:

“We should chat about this!”

I replied I cannot talk before 9am NZT, due to sleeping beauties in the house. Plus I was hung-over from a cold virus, and had been up all night writing, this was around 4am. So I thought I could get 4 hours sleep.

Bad mistake.

I dozed off and woke up at 9:30am. But thought, “Surely Warren would not call me (a nobody) before 9am?” However, there was a bit of panic fumbling for the phone. Nothing. No alerts. Cool, got time to compose myself.

Check email then. Oh no!

Warren: “I’ll be on chat in a few minutes.”

Me: “Wat [sic.] chat?” I do not have his phone number of course, and so I’m thinking Google Meet, since Warren is on gmail. But there’s no Meet link. I’m a bit clueless about all the Apps. I work on the GNU+Lnixx commandline baby! But for tutoring and livestream I do use Meet.

But I check for a “Chat” app, and so I find it. Hmmmm… maybe….?

Doh!

Guess what?

Four missed calls to me from Warren Mosler. He started calling at 8:30am NZT. Dammit Warren!

So without breaking a sweat, I hurriedly reply and apologise.

5 minutes later, the Chat buzzes, and Warren’s on the line saying, “Hi! How’s it going? What’s up?”

As if I hadn’t just (potentially unprofessionally) ignored four of his calls.

So that’s where the rest of this blog post picks up…

The Phyzik