BWB Extra gets to know this week's guest , Dr Phil Armstrong, a little better. Phil is a no nonsense Economist, Teacher, and Associate at The Gower Initiative For Modern Money Studies, an independent, non-profit organisation which is part of a growing international movement challenging the economic status quo of the last four decades.

So kick back and get to know more about the man behind the magic of explaining Modern Monetary Theory.

Check out Dr. Phil Armstrong's show recommendation:

• Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing

BWB is powered by Oury Clark.

Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Bwb Extra, where we get to know this week's guest, Dr.

Phil Armstrong, a little better.

Phil is a no nonsense economist, teacher and associate at the GOER Initiative for Modern Money Studies, an independent non-profit organization, which is part of a growing international movement, challenging the economic status quo of the last four decades.

So kick back and get to know more about the man behind the magic of modern Monetary theory.

What are you doing exactly and how did you end up doing it?

Well, I'm a teacher.

That's how I define myself.

You know, certain day earlier that I, I.

Finished my first degree in 1979.

Then I had a year at home as a lab technician, turned some money and then I, uh, did teach training and then I taught in a comprehensive school.

Economics mainly, but other subjects, math, bal, what is they teach economics.

Uh, economic is 16 20 18.

Did teach, is that what you did at University Economics?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I did economics and accounting, but I couldn't do the accounts.

I dropped that and I just did economics all the way through.

But when you teach economics in the school, economics is a six form subject.

So you have to do all the things.

And also back then, you know, cuz I'm, 20 years ago I taught, and I don't have a P D C or anything, but in private schools you could just walk in.

Yeah.

Basically teach anything.

Oh, really?

You don't even need to do I didn't, I mean, I taught Latin and I didn't, I did Greek at university.

I didn't do Latin, but I taught Latin.

No, you had to have a teacher figure.

If it ends in em, it's accusative.

That's all I did for a year.

So, and what's your long term girl, do you think?

I like helping students, you know, like, uh, Maybe mentoring's probably too strong a word, but maybe guys doing PhDs or Masters in economics.

I like doing and I like writing.

Uh, I working for the gis.

The GIMs are like, I'm about to plug the GIMs, just three.

Now, what's GIMs?

GIMs is called the Goer Initiative, modern Money.

They're basically a group of women, you might call them ordinary women.

They're not especially academic, but they're forces of nature, national treasures, and essentially, you know, They're just women who had probably heard blot talking in pubs about how solve the world and they got tired of it and they said, right, well let's stop 'em just talking.

I've heard of the GA Institute.

Yeah.

And they just met in the Gaer Institute and just formed a website and basically they got all the world's greatest economists.

In my opinion.

All right.

People like Warren, bill Mitchell, Randy Rees, Stephanie Kelton, they're all the top people in the world.

They're on their advisory board.

Okay.

And what happens is the sendal out to do talks on behalf to explain mt to explain how the world is better.

Are they, are they pro MT though?

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're, they're M advocates.

But the, their MMC advocate, the institute was around beforehand, was it?

No, no.

They, they just met in the go rooms and that's why the cold, they formed it.

Okay.

But the thing about it is, is.

Without being over sort of too sentimental about it.

They want to make the world a better place.

Right.

And the way they can do that is if people understand mmt, it's not a policy, just ize what happens.

So you realize what you can do.

You, we are limited by our real resources, you know, if we, we don't out to be, but they, they've inspired us.

So is is it a pressure group or is it, it's, it's a, I don't know whether you're caught.

I guess so it's, it's, how old is it?

Oh, I ought to know.

I'd say not that old.

I mean five or six years.

Wow.

It's the leading MMT group in the country by far.

They have a, like a fantastic website.

They've got loads of resources on it that people can find out about mmt, people who want to know about the.

Contact them and then people who, if they have questions to pass them on to associates.

I'm one of the associates, the other guy is Neil Wilson, super sharp guy.

Um, and we just try and build the MT community.

But the point of understanding mmt, it's not an end in itself.

It's if you understand the system, then you can build policy based on it and it has to come from the bottom.

Cuz as we've already said, people at the top won't take the risk.

What's the most misunderstood thing?

So, I mean, in your job, I guess, right?

Oh, well, the thing is, in teaching, there's kind of three stages in teaching.

One is like what?

So when you start, and you know this, you are really worried about, do you know the stuff you're supposed to teach?

So what you have done is gone by and tried to.

Work out how to teach Latin.

When you degrees in Greek and you worried about being shown up when you work on what the next stage is, technique, how am I gonna teach you?

So like what techniques will I use to get it?

Now, unfortunately, the world and Ofsted, they think that's it, but there's a third stage and it's what you are like.

Mm-hmm.

Now the most important aspect of teaching.

Without me waxing too lyrical is what you are like and how you make the students feel both towards you and everybody else.

So when I taught engineering, which is I know nothing about engineering, but I mean, I could be wrong, but the kids said, you know, I was doing a good job and I, I got a good reviews from 'em.

I got good results.

Well, how much do you really need to know to teach?

Well, you don't.

You need to know enough, slightly.

You need to know a bit.

And I did have to learn some stuff.

But funda, fundamentally, it's about.

You, and if you think back, all of you guys, think back to your own school days.

If there was somebody that you thought as a teacher, well, I can't like this person, or they, they, they understand me or they're inspiring or they're doing something, it was nearly always because of who they were and how they made you feel about them and everybody else in the classroom.

It wasn't necessarily that you thought the guy understood.

More than everybody else or indeed use different techniques like nice worksheets and stuff.

And actually, to be honest, the people, you know, when I think back to school, the absolute genius is.

Weren't good at the teaching because they, it came so easily to them.

Yeah.

That they didn't understand why everybody else for from what you lost in the subject.

Yeah.

In all my 42 years of teaching, I've never seen a kid leave a classroom and said, do you know what?

I really enjoy that worksheet because it's beautifully decorated around the edges, and I love the word.

The teacher had put a lovely border on it.

They're not interested.

He said that was a laugh.

Or Yeah, that was funny.

Or when, when teachers said, that's Arthur, we all have the right laugh.

So the ashes, they don't really know a lot of the time how much they're learning.

You know, sometimes a kid, how I'm the best will say, we seem to go really slow in your lessons, but I can't work out how we've learned so much.

And I go, ah, well, That's the trick.

And I'm not in any way pretending.

I'm still learning and I still make lots of mistakes and I still talk too much.

But you, you, it's a difficult job, but it's not about fundamentally, it's about not about technique.

You've got to like the students.

Yeah.

And you gotta want 'em to do well, you know, end of story.

And they know.

They know if you care even, and they'll forgive you.

Young people are very forgiving relative to adults.

If you make a mistake and you get something wrong, but, but they, they know whether you are bothered.

Can you influence these kids?

You can, well, not, not so much about the subject, but like, I mean, again, I'm getting a bit over a philosophical, like believing in themselves.

Arguing with me and things like, go to university and don't be put off by student debt because considering things on a wider basis.

Yeah.

Consider on the wider issues.

Have you thought about studying that?

Or see a kid looks nervous and I say, are you okay?

And they go, I don't think I can do it.

And I say, well you can, and this is, I'm gonna prove it to you.

Uh, what do you think is your biggest cock up in terms of what you've sort of in your career and where you've ended up?

Oh, um, I think I, I, my main cock ups related to it, I mean, I'm really bad at it.

If I touch a computer goes wrong, I'm well known that, I mean, one guy said he, he's never known a guy like's qualified as me who can just break a system.

And when I used to teach, Right.

They had a thing.

You got dangerous hands.

That sounds correct.

Yeah.

The, the, the head of it had a thing called Armstrong Proof, and what that meant is, see, he had a new thing he wanted to introduce to all the staff.

He would send it all out.

And if I could do it, anybody could.

And I once said to him, am I the worst at teching the school?

And he laughed.

Not the worst, but you are the worst that will try.

Have you got a passion outside of business?

I suppose my, I'm very in, in sports.

All right.

So I like sporting middles breast.

C.

So that's very important.

No, I cricket.

Uh, I'm a Christian, so I think I'm very passionate about faith.

Have you always been a Christian that's unusual in this country these days?

Do you Not always, no.

For about 30 years something happen or, yeah, I just got a sense that the world can create itself.

You know?

Mm-hmm.

It's gotta come from somewhere.

Uh, and that kind of bugged me for a while.

I, yeah, yeah.

Can't, I mean, I, it can't go, you know?

Yeah.

Like the e equals mc squared, you know, like where, where did it come from in the middle?

And I just kind of got a sense that you look at the world and.

There has to be some element of design in it.

And then I went from that.

Did you do alpha or something?

No, I, my wife is, I went to church.

I'm with you wife with step two, but to then pick a religion as well.

I fall down.

To be honest, that's quite hard and, and a lot of people don't take that step, I think, and I wouldn't want to judge anybody that would be really bad.

Mainly because, If you believe in a particular region, there is a sort of external constraint.

You, you, you know that little voice in your head that you think you maybe shouldn't do that suddenly would you agree?

It becomes a bit more real.

So if you think, well, I know the universe really can't create itself, but I'm just gonna ignore that because no one's really given me.

A good enough explanation.

And because faith is in fact faith, it's not science and you'll never get it proved.

Cause if it was, it wouldn't be faith.

So in a sense, that becomes your problem.

And in in the end it comes from like within, you just get a sense, you are ready.

The balance tips where you just think to yourself.

In my case, I read about Christ.

I, I believe in the fact that, you know, he is a man fully, man, fully, God die for me.

And that really has helped me.

It informs what I do, and I think as well for me, I, it's very important, rightly or wrongly, that I'm a Christian na socialist.

In that order, but I'm also a Christian socialist and there's a great, mm-hmm.

Jesus, my head just exploded.

A Christian socialist.

A Christian socialist, right, is someone, and there's a long heritage of it.

The people who I would look to be like Irish, Tawny.

Carl p and to an extent, Tony, Ben, and these are people Irish.

Tony.

This doesn't what really think this, right?

What?

What?

How can you translate?

Christianity is, and Christianity is like two great commandments.

Love the Lord, you, God with all your heart and all your soul, and all your mind and love your brother as yourself.

Now, can you.

Be a, a rightwinger and love your brother as yourself.

Gosh, what does right wing mean?

I think that's what we're all struggling with now, because rugby for by that definition, means can you, a bastard can't be kind.

It's like, yeah, well, If you're saying Right.

Okay.

If you are a rightwinger, I mean, I'm, I'm going to, what is a rightwinger?

A philosoph, right.

Whoa.

This is a great question.

Yes.

Right.

Okay.

That's the thing.

There's two kind of views of the world, isn't there?

The, there's the right wing view, which I'm calling it right wing, is when you're born, you're born an individual.

With tall rights to do whatever you want to do without worrying about anything else.

It's called methodological individualism.

That the definition of Right.

W Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And evangelism.

Charity begins at home.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now this view really is, and factious summarized it with, you know, the.

There's no such thing as society.

It's just a collection of individuals doing what's best for them.

The offering is, it's fully so essentially, and then in so doing the happy accident as we all end up happier.

The ob, the opposite of that is a communitarian view, and the communitarian view is, From birth immediately.

We born immediates part of a community.

So we have both rights, but those rights bring with them responsibilities to care for others.

Balancing the selfish, selfish, it's very, um, rooted.

Spiderman with great power.

It comes great responsibility.

It is.

It feels Spiderman.

No, but great power, great responsibility.

And don't forget, we're selfish bastards.

Should be the, the whole sentence, you know, we're fucking like tribal, selfish.

But that's the thing about, the fundamental thing about Christianity, I suppose, is that it's, it's sort of counterintuitive in that it's not the way people, it's not the way you start thinking, loving somebody else as much as you, that you, so that you, you know, the greatest love.

Somebody can have is to lay down their life for somebody else.

Yeah, it, you know, it's not the way most people think.

It's something you have to kind of physically do because it's not natural.

I mean, without evolving myself in too much theological controversy in a simple, which is always as dangerous.

Cause I'm not a preacher, I'm an economist, but, but the thing is, If you look at that second point I made, love your brother as yourself.

If you take it seriously, then you are.

I I, it's an old fashioned word, morally obliged.

Aren't you, obviously to tell people why you've got a faith, cuz you know you believe in it, but also you have the other element of trying to open people's eyes to making people's lives better.

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Now back to the chat.

What's the worst piece of advice you've ever been given?

I would say don't be interested in cricket because my dad said it's boring.

It's a slow game.

You know, there are certain types of music.

It's difficult cause people tell you this music's good and when you listen to it, You don't really like it.

First time, you gotta keep on listening and eventually you get it.

Now.

Crickets like that, it's an investment.

What is brilliant is my PhD supervisor, he loves Marks and cricket, and what he does is he does his profound thinking about marks.

While he's watching cricket because it's a game that is so cerebral and you can be involved in the, the beauty of the game, but you can think about other things.

Well, it's a bit like baseball in that respect cuz you can spend all afternoon at a baseball game and anything exciting that happens, they show again on a big screen.

So you don't really have to pay attention.

Yes.

You can just sit in the sun.

Yes.

People bring you food and you read a book at the same time.

And, and I've really, really, really enjoyed.

Watching cricket because football, I find, although I'm a big Bo fan, I watch football.

I think my wife described football to me once as an exercise in frustration, because if you're playing really well, Nearly all.

You don't score as many goals as you should.

You can at the tv.

Yeah, keep going.

There's not enough goals and if you're behind, you're going, oh no, we're gonna lose again.

It's very rare in football once every hundred games.

Yeah, you, you'll win five nil and it's really tense.

It's nervous.

There's a lot of passion when you score your lead.

But cricket add, you have tense moments in cricket, which is brilliant, but a lot of the time.

You just enjoy it.

And that's why Cricket is great.

I'm, I'm advertising cricket in all its forms.

What's the best piece of advice you were given?

Ooh, that's a good question.

I would say follow your heart and yours will follow.

Well, I've met him, mine, he's like a legendary figure in May.

I've met him at school.

Uh, a cleverest kid in school.

And he could do anything.

And I lost touch with him, but I knew he was clever and I found him, and he's now like a major professor and he always, he could do anything, but he followed his heart and that's, he always says like, when you're a kid, do what you love.

Is he a professor in an ice cream factory?

He's a professor of Semitic languages.

Nice.

At Cambridge War, he write, wrote the textbook.

He is the most modest and wonderful guy, but, uh, Hetic, uh, languages of the Jewish language on and arama, all those kind of levantine languages.

Yeah.

All, all.

I'm from the Middle East, all the dialects.

Strange, hearty boy's.

Clever.

Yeah.

He, but modest.

Any recommendations, something to watch Gigi podcast.

You record your own podcast?

No.

I, I, I wouldn't, I'm not like, it's nothing like this, but what GIMs get me to interview famous economists.

Ah.

So I sit at the other side of the mic sometimes and ask them about their lives and economics.

It's not as widened kind of as free range.

Free range.

Yeah.

It's very false.

That's what we like ourselves.

I mean, I obviously, I.

I like various TV shows and I love Mormon.

White House gone fishing.

Oh, why, who doesn't?

Because Bob Martiner is from Middles Race.

He's a similar age from me.

I love, he's got my, he's got the same sense of humor as me.

He's just clever and funnier than me.

Uh, and, um, well, Paul Whitehouse is very like my PhD supervisor.

Oh.

Is Paul Whitehouse.

And, uh, I have you not seen it?

It's the loveliest thing.

It's, it's.

I do both at my house.

I know, but they just go and fish and it's really slow when they talk about random shit.

Oh great.

Yeah.

While they're fishing.

And the other thing I think people gotta do is watch Kegan driving around.

You've gotta listen to your podcast.

You know the B w B podcasters.

Absolutely.

Andy, you've gotta listen to that.

And also NMT podcast and Macaroni Cheese podcast.

Okay, so this is where we give you 30 seconds to pitch a book or anything you want.

Well, I've written one book.

I'm still in debt at, uh, with the Edward El Gabba.

With the publishers.

With the publishers.

Cause my, my, by all these ads, what's the first book called?

It's called, uh, Can heterodox economics make a difference?

So this is all the rebel skills, the pluralist skills, mmt, all the others.

If you imagine trying to destroy the death star in Star Wars, all the ragtag brigade of like outright rebel, can they work together?

Five?

Yeah.

Can they blow the death star up?

Yeah.

That's a, and also on a more serious note, uh, gis, uh, are bringing out their own sponsored.

MMT book in January.

We've got all the best writers in the world, and by definition, if they're the best MMTs, they are the best economists you must say.

If you've got any to recommend to come on this pod, do let us know.

Oh yeah, they will.

They'll follow you.

You know, uh, so Warren Moores are in there.

Bill Mitchell, uh, Randy Ray all been economists now quite.

Sexy names, don't you think?

They all sound like they're porn stars, you know?

Well, that's Randy Ray.

Ray.

Well, he, if you meet him, you probably think differently, but he's a lovely guy.

They're all drug guys, so I don't, I recommend buying these books.

They are expensive and I do apologize, but I didn't set the prices.

So that was this week's episode of Bwb Extra and we'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday.