Recommended Listen: Rick Rubin interviews Tom Hanks

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin: Tom Hanks

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t always agree with Rubin’s choice of guests. But when this show is good, it’s really, really good. This episode with Tom Hanks is a really good one. I always love listening to accomplished craftsmen discuss craft (as I’ve said before, if there was a documentary interviewing accomplished old plumbers called “Talking Toilets,” I’d be there). In part, I just enjoy hearing the intricacies of any craft. But I also like the consistency that I hear across crafts and craftspeople, and it boils down to something like this:

In order to be good at a craft, we need to accept and embrace the fact that we are an intelligent conduit for that craft. We are nothing more, and certainly nothing less.

Hanks says basically that in a gajillion little different ways here, and each is worth hearing.

UPDATE: we nuked $1.1 million in medical debt

Remember this project from last November?

Well, for those who like closure:

Y’all did it!

Just before Xmas we closed out the project, having raised a bit more than $10,000 with your help. The end result was the abolition of $1,114,133.50 in shitty medical debt, freeing 2,006 Michiganders across 17 counties from one more dumb late-stage capitalism headache:

Bummed that you missed out on this project? Then I have excellent news:

You and your pals can start your own! The folks at RIP Medical Debt are super sweet and helpful, and it’s a blast.

I want that to be the takeaway here: there are plenty of religious and moral and political and ethical reasons to work on a project like this, but I still believe the best reason to do it is that it is fun. Every day, multiple times each day, it would occur to me: We’re going to nuke a million dollars of medical debt. And just that thought, that a bunch of us regular folk going about our regular lives could do just a little something more and move such a big goddamn rock—it’d make me laugh. It literally tickled me, that notion. And it worked! And that cracks me up, every time it comes to mind.

Good job, all! When you start your project and need a little dough to nuke a little bad medical debt, hit me up.

Merry Xmas! Please beware of “suicide cables”!🎄🔌🙅‍♀️

‘Tis the season to hang your Xmas lights—and, for many people, to hang one strand backwards and instead of pulling it down, head to the hardware store in search of an “adapter” that is colloquially referred to as a “suicide cable.”

DO NOT DO THIS!

I’m not kidding around. If you don’t kill yourself with such a arrangment, you can easily kill some hapless person who stumbles across your work later.

Recommended Consideration: Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast

These aren’t always great and I don’t agree with everyone he features (in fact, I super-duper disagree with ever listening to some of these nutbags). But Rubin is a always a wonderful and honest interviewer, so the episodes are often quite revelatory about art and human thinking (at the very least). 

This one with  Rory Sutherland is quite good and worth your time (even at 3 hours!)

I also really like the two-parter with Tyler Cowen. The first half is also on YouTube (embedded below) while the second isn’t (maybe because of copyright? It’s dedicated to Cowen talking about and offering samples of music he finds interesting and is available here):

VERDICT: Extremely interesting, and honestly worth the time, despite extreme length. 

$10 will erase $1000 of Medical Debt in Michigan RIGHT NOW! 💸

We are facing a lot of terrifying problems right now: climate disaster, civil unrest, labor injustice, opioid abuse, the profusion of hate and extremism.

Most problems cannot be solved by throwing money at them. Medical debt is one that can.

I’m collaborating on a project to erase $1 million of medical debt in Michigan.

Fortunately, because of the way this debt is bundled, it’s possible to buy it extremely cheaply on the open market, for just a penny on the dollar (i.e., $1 buys $100 of bundled medical debt). If bill collectors buy that debt, they will hound the debtor for the full value of the debt, even though they only paid 1/100th of that.

But if we buy the debt, we can just forgive it and clear the books for someone who had some bad luck and didn’t have the insurance to cover it.

Incidentally, in Michigan this burden hits Black communities especially hard; buying and erasing debt here is thus a “Good Deed twofer”: one donation relieves a family’s economic woes AND strikes a blow for racial and economic justice.

A bunch of you have already given (we’re over 76% of the way to our goal!), and that’s amaaaaazing! The more you give, the more we can forgive. THANK YOU!

Eliminate Medical Debt in Michigan TODAY!