This morning we're going to be talking to Michael Grunwald who is a senior national correspondent for time and has just written The New New Deal, which you're all aware is an argument against a lot of Republican criticism that Obama's 2009 stimulus bill did nothing and was a huge political failure. So very interested to hear from you this morning, Michael. And Michael, you joined time in 2007 and before that you spent about a decade at the Washington Post, so lots of experience in D.C. But now you're based in Miami, you're telling me correct. Great. So I guess my first question for you, when President Obama was first elected in 2008, he was this incredible orator and it seemed like if anything he was going to be a tremendous communicator for much of his presidency. But this, it seems, the stimulus bill is a communication battle that he has lost. He has won the Substance War as you've argued, but he's lost this communication battle. How did that happen? That's a great question. Well, I guess in several ways. First of all, he lost it really fast, which is one of my favorite parts of the book. I sort of tell it in granular detail how this thing got out of control really quickly. But to wildly oversummarize, there were sort of four reasons he got busted on this. And the first, which now that I've become pigeonholed as an Obama shill, I should probably say that I actually think this is, I think this is the most important one, is that he had a really tough case to make for a couple reasons. The first one is the obvious one that in the fourth quarter of 2008, GDP was crashing at an 8.9% rate. That's a depression. And then January 2009, he takes office, we lost 800,000 jobs that month, we passed the stimulus less than a month later, and the next quarter has the biggest improvement in jobs in 30 years. It's great, right? Except it's improved from absolutely terrifyingly hideous to bad. And it's just hard to sell a jobs bill when jobs are disappearing. That's just a tough case. It's hard to sell anything when in double digit unemployment. And graft on to that this notion that Keynesian economics is sort of counterintuitive to most people. This idea that right when families and businesses have to tighten their belt, he's coming right out of the bat by chucking another $800 billion and borrowed money into the economy right after this incredibly unpopular bank bailout. He was going to have a tough sell from the beginning.  He had a sort of tough case to make. That said, there were three other reasons that rather than ramble on, I'll try to rattle off quickly. One is that I think I do have some of the first reporting in this book about, you know, what people have called, basically correctly, the Republican plot to destroy Obama before he even took office. And they've done an unbelievable job, really a brilliant job of completely distorting what the stimulus was about. They made it sound like $800 billion worth of mob museums and levitating trains to Disneyland and, you know, snow making machines in Duluth and Congress. They made a lot of condoms and sod on the mall and all sorts of nonsense that actually none of that is in the stimulus. But it was all, you know, great sound bites. And they've really, rather than focus on trying to have a substantive debate about, you know, we'll talk about some of the massive policy transformations that were embedded inside this bill, they really focused on the cats and dogs. And when they couldn't find the cats and dogs, they made up cats and dogs. And that's been incredibly effective.  And suddenly he's stuck in a debate about honeybee insurance. I think he was surprised about that, which leads to sort of reason number three is that the Democrats really did screw up the message. Being Democrats.    I mean, just quibbling about it instead of sort of making the case like, hey, wait, this is what he meant by change. It may not be perfect, but let's do it. And even Obama seemed to at times be sort of grudging about the whole thing. He was always saying about how he didn't intend to start his presidency with a spending spree. I do also in this, I think it's kind of a fun narrative. You know, this book is not really an argument. It's really a narrative. It's a story. And I do think the sort of story of how the White House got their messages crossed is kind of fun and perhaps frustrating to read. But there were some real questions about, you know, whether they should sell this as a jobs bill. Rahm Emanuel was sort of the main adherent of that versus kind of, you know, what I would say, should you sell it as a new, new deal? Where actually Joe Biden was more, was big on that.  But then, you know, then Doris Kern's Goodwin said it sounded like a girdle and, you know, it's never heard of it again.   You know, I get in trouble for saying this, especially when I'm in this town, but most of the national media, particularly the political media, is not interested in public policy. And when you do have, you know, the right saying it's a mess and the left kind of saying it's a mess, the sort of he said, she said, temptation is so strong. And the boy, let's dig into this and really see how it's going to transform the country. Temptation is so weak that I think you had this kind of perfect storm where the, you know, within a year, the percentage of Americans who believed that the stimulus had created jobs was lower than the percentage of Americans who believe that Elvis is alive. So it was kind of, they lost that battle quick. How did the story unfold for you? I mean, were you reporting on this back in January or February of 2009? Were kind of the signs to you that this was something to dig into and that this wasn't just a kind of shallow, well, this is a failure. That's a great question. You know, I did, I was assigned in January 09. I wrote, it ran in the inaugural issue. You can look it up. I wrote a story called How to Spend a Trillion Dollars. That was kind of about principles for the stimulus that actually I went back a few weeks ago and looked at it and it mostly stands up. There are a couple of things that I didn't understand that I would like to have back. But then I kind of forgot about it for a year and you didn't mind. I live in the public policy paradise of South Beach. So I was not part of this Washington group think where there was just this unbelievable herd mentality where you were not allowed to talk about the stimulus as if it were anything but an $800 billion joke. I mean, it just showed that you didn't get it. And when I did start getting into this, some of my friends of yours honestly thought I had lost my mind. I'm kind of a contrarian guy to begin with. I went down to the BP spill and wrote that the environmental damage was being exaggerated because I have very good scientific sources down there. But this was if I was writing that the BP spill hadn't happened. So I think that was helpful. What really got me into it was I write a lot about energy and there was $90 billion for clean energy in this bill when we were spending like a few billion dollars a year. And Bill Clinton in 99 had come up with this big clean energy plan. It was going to be five years, $6 billion. And he got laughed out of town. That was considered completely ridiculous. And then here Obama in his first month in office before his aides knew where the bathrooms were in the West Wing had come up with $90 billion. It was going to leverage another $100 billion for this industry that had been dead in the water after the financial collapse. And we're talking about just order of magnitude increases in wind, solar and other renewables, energy efficiency in every imaginable form. I think I mentioned that like New Jersey's energy efficiency program got a 95 percent, a 9500 percent funding increase. You had advanced biofuels, the smart grid, electric vehicles, the factories to build all this green stuff in the United States, clean energy research. These were all game changers. And so that kind of got me thinking, well, geez, I wonder what else is this thing. And, you know, being an amazing investigative reporter, I did a couple of Google searches. I was like, oh my God, Race to the Top is part of the stimulus. Like, I knew that there were like, you know, a million conferences like this one going on about how Race to the Top was the biggest education reform in decades. But I had no, like, did you know it was part of the stimulus? I bet a lot of you didn't. You know, high speed rail and, you know, the largest infrastructure investment since Eisenhower and the largest one time research investments ever. And, you know, health IT, which people have been talking about for decades, this idea that we need to drag this antiquated pen and paper medical system into the digital age so that your doctor won't kill you with his chicken scratch handwriting. You know, people have been talking about this. They'd maybe thrown like $20 million one year, $30 million another year. This thing had $27 billion with a B. I mean, they were going to do it. And so just clearly this, this gigantic story that was hiding in plain view.  Honestly, it felt like I was that you guys watched the newsroom. Right. It felt like that blogger who's always trying to pitch the story about how Bigfoot is real. Right. But to their credit, they let me write stuff about it.  So you were talking about Clinton's energy bill. And I think it's interesting to note that there are so many Clinton alums in the Obama administration and, you know, many of whom had played a big role in the creation of this bill. How much of the bill can you kind of see Clinton era, you know, prints on? And is that a big part of its success, do you think? Well, one thing, I have two responses to that. One is that, and I talk, I have a whole riff in the book. It's actually one of my favorite parts about about like it's sort of a new way to think about about Obama versus Hillary. That I think sort of explains the next four years in a way that I won't give away the whole thing. But part of the idea is that Obama did not run on new ideas. He ran on the kind of same old democratic ideas and some bipartisan ideas that people have been talking about for years. He ran on change. And then he had that we can believe in addendum, which was sort of his way of saying that maybe this time the same old ideas are actually going to happen. And the sort of long story short of the stimulus is that it shows that it actually, it did. You know, but it was, you know, with the exception of race to the top and some of the education reform, this was really a kind of standard democratic agenda of reversing the Bush era. And, you know, kind of moving towards clean energy and laying the groundwork for health reform and, you know, promoting education and research and infrastructure and making the tax code a little bit fairer with the largest middle class tax cuts since Reagan. So in that sense, I think, you know, Clinton and Hillary Clinton and, you know, Joe Biden and everybody else who had been part of, and New America and, you know, CAP and everybody who's been sort of part of the democratic policy establishment sort of drove this thing. Because there are a few, but very few things where you'd be like, whoa, where did that come from? I mean, this was stuff people have been talking about forever. There wasn't. Now, the sort of Clinton night takeover of the Obama administration has in some senses been kind of well documented. I mean, you know, he comes into office and he, this is wrong. This is his first hire. And, you know, I think Hillary was number two and, you know, his entire economic team practically came from Clinton. But one thing, a story that had never been told, I think, before my book is this shadow transition that John Podesta led. This was after Obama, after Hillary finally conceded. One of the first things Obama did was he asked John Podesta to put together a sort of transition to the transition team. I mean, it had to be very secret so that Obama wouldn't get accused of measuring the drapes in the White House. And so he put together, I focused on the shadow economic team, and it was just, it was like all Clinton people. Bob Greenstein, who runs the Center on Budget down the road, he was the only non-Clinton person on the team. They were all giving him a hard time because his PowerPoint slides weren't formatted like everybody else. He was like, guys, I wasn't in the Clinton White House. I'm sorry. But it really was. This was, and I sort of quote, blind quotes from some of the Obama people grousing about how this is when the old guard took over. And there is some of that that I won't get into now. But one thing that I think is really important is that these Clinton guys, whatever their policy, minor policy differences with Obama, they did have one, what most set them apart was they had been through the Clinton wars. And they realized that this guy may have a halo of hope and change right now. But this economic emergency was that if you wanted to get something done, now is a pretty good time. And so even though it wasn't their agenda, Jack Lew actually wrote the memo from The Shadow Transition about stimulus, which I'd write about in the book and I actually posted recently at time.com. But one of the main themes of that book is that now is your chance to do change we can believe in. That maybe that lovely 70% approval rating will withstand the slime that you're about to get thrown at you. But just in case, this might be a good time to do some of the things you wanted to do, particularly in green energy. And I think that that attitude was very influential as they put this thing together. Speaking of energy, can you talk a little bit about Cylindra and the huge kind of, speaking of communication disasters that was. You know, it's funny. One of the things I write about in the book is that, you know, in addition to this sort of policy transformations that are in this thing, that there really was a new approach to government sort of embedded in this.  Nobody ever asked like, does this thing make any sense? Like, does this advance the public policy interests of the United States of America? And the stimulus to a remarkable extent and a completely unnoticed extent really was about trying to create these competitive, you know, where, you know, the good thing is like, you know, we're asking not just if you're shovel ready, but if you're shovel worthy.  What are going to be the ridership benefits? What are going to be the, you know, what's the, what happens if we don't do it? How terrible is that? And if this is handing out money, it's like you've got to compete. And do you have customers lined up? And do you have, et cetera, et cetera. The bad side is it requires some subjective decisions. It requires, you know, which is good in that it, you know, the sort of bureaucrats, right? These were, you know, public servants who worked for the government. Instead of just checking the boxes and making sure everybody's in compliance, they actually have to make some decisions. All right, that's a lot of lead up to Selindra. I did, when I, so I would talk to, I remember specifically asking Secretary Chu about this. I talked about it in depth with Arun Majumdar, who was the head of ARPA-E. They're kind of the new DARPA for energy. And he would tell me, he would say like, we are pioneers. And the pioneers were not afraid to fail when they set off across America. We are not afraid to fail. That's part of the, we are going to fail. And I'd kind of listen to him and then this was like in 2010 and I would say like, yeah, but what happens when you fail? And he said, we are ready for that. They were not ready for that. Selindra, Selindra was, you know, Selindra was a disappointment, but a totally expected disappointment. This, it was, I don't want to say it was like a no brain or judgment call. And I quote somebody blind in the energy department who, I remember if I said it was a he or she. So I'll just say this person, their, their first day at the energy department, they found out that the first line had gone to Selindra. And the person said, oh no. You know, this was somebody who had looked at Selindra in the private sector and was very skeptical of their high costs. But not everyone was skeptical. Selindra has raised a billion dollars in private capital before it ever got a government loan.  But they were, they were a billion dollar company. The Bush administration, which remember this clean energy loan program that has now become socialism and the death of free enterprise was started in 2005 by, by President George Bush. They couldn't get their stuff together. And, and in December of 08, they suddenly realized, oh my God, we haven't given a single loan. We've got to pick somebody. They picked, of their 143 applicants, they picked Selindra was the most promising company. They tried to get that done before he left office. The career civil service blocked it, said this is a good loan. This appears to be a very viable loan. But we have, you know, this was too hasty. It's going to take, you didn't cross all your T's and dot all your I's. They finally got it done in the Obama administration. And long story, somewhat shorter. It turned out it didn't work out. And the reason it didn't work out was because solar got cheap. They were based, they had this incredible new type of technology that, you know, their solar panels did not look like any other solar panel you've ever seen. They looked like lizard ladders kind of with these little, and they used an entirely different material. They didn't use silicon because silicon was so exorbitantly expensive. They were going to use something else. And they had this unbelievably high tech manufacturing process that I did go to Selindra, you know, after they started to get some bad press. And I was like, dude, this is a very complex way of making solar panels, which is a pretty cheap product. But they had, they had, they were, they had really gotten their stuff together. They were starting to sell. They had incredible customers like Frito Lay and Walmart and Southern California Edison was going to be building, you know, they had like 15 on all of their substations. They were going to be putting a Selindra panels. They were very cool. They clicked together like Lego. So you didn't need tools. They were very cheap to install, but then silicon got cheap and their entire business model fell apart and they went bust.  You know, if, if every one of these loans succeeded, that would mean that they were being too conservative and you didn't need government for these loans. But, but the sort of the flip side is that as solar has gotten cheap with in large part because of help from the support from the stimulus and also the Chinese stimulus, which has been very solar focused. Solar installations have increased 600% in the United States since, since Obama took office. You know, Selindra went down, solar cities going public. You know, Sun Run Homes has seen their business increase. I think it's now up to like 5,000% since, since January 2009. So it's true that there are going to be winners and losers, but what Obama really did or what the stimulus really did was pick the game. And the game is clean energy. And the, you know, there ought to be a great debate about whether we ought to be, you know, having this kind of green industrial policy. You know, the argument for it is that we're too dependent on foreign oil. We're broiling the planet with our carbon emissions.  And then plus that these are the industries of the future, that there are millions of kind of jobs that play to our special sauce of innovation. Those are all good reasons to do it. But it's not like, you know, Joe Biden's like, it's not like we just picked Nissan or we just picked Solyndra. You know, they picked not just one solar manufacturer, but a dozen solar manufacturers, all with different technologies and different entrepreneurial approaches. And they didn't just pick solar manufacturers. They also picked solar, you know, they picked on the demand side and the supply side and all different parts of the solar chain. And then not just solar, but wind and geothermal and, you know, and even making fossil fuels more efficient. And then advanced biofuels and, you know, electric vehicles and the different parts of the electric vehicle and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They did the entire clean energy food chain and then the market will pick the winners and losers. But that's my weak defensive cylindra. How much, you know, say we do get a president Romney in November, how much could the clean energy components of this bill, other components, how much could this kind of be rolled back? You know, how ironclad are some of these investments versus others? Well, the first thing I would say is that in 2010, the Republicans can't, you know, they had their pledge to America, right? And I like plank number one of the pledges that we are going to roll back all this unspent stimulus money because the stimulus was a big joke. And I think at that, you know, at the end of 2010, I think there was still about $250 billion in unspent stimulus money. And actually they've only, of that $250 billion, they've only rolled back $0.  You know, that seems to be, I think that there was less enthusiasm for that than people might have expected. I do think, you know, going forward, you know, so certain things that I think really needed a jumpstart, the smart grid is one example. Where now I think utilities will pick up the ball and, you know, sometimes it'll be fast and sometimes it'll be slow. But I think that's an area where you're really going to see, you know, you can't turn that back. I think once it started, we're on our way.  I think this has by, you know, reducing the cost, things like electric vehicle batteries where I visited a company that is now, has come up with a better battery. Thanks to, you know, Obama's support and they're doing the battery for the next generation Chevy Volt and it's going to take probably $5,000 to $6,000 off the cost. Those are things that can't be turned back, which is a health IT, I think that's going to happen. You know, that has been waiting forever for a jumpstart and now it's already, we've already tripled adoption in a few years. It's the fastest growing industry in America because of the, you know, there's money out there and, you know, by 2015 just about all of us are going to have an electronic medical record and that will change the way healthcare is conducted in the future.  I think that's become a political football. There used to be a lot of bipartisan support for so many things in the stimulus. Things like unemployment benefits and the smart grid and health IT and, you know, you know, the Obama's education reform, which actually some Republicans like Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels have said nice things about, but in Congress it's become toxic because it's part of the Obama stimulus. I think what will depend and just the idea of stimulus, right? Romney had the largest stimulus plan of any of the 2008 presidential candidates and Paul Ryan voted for a $715 billion stimulus that was quite similar to Obama's $787 billion stimulus. But now that it's become part of the stimulus, this stuff has become politically toxic in Washington. The question is to what extent Romney will be sort of willing to embrace it as his own? And like so many things with Romney, there's stuff that in the past he had no problem with, but then now he, now ARPA-E is kind of the only thing that he will say is okay. Now even parts of Obama's healthcare bill are okay apparently. What time is it? Right, tomorrow we'll be back to repealing the whole thing. So let's go back to 2008, November and December of 2008 because you just had a really interesting piece in time and adaption from your book about these secret meetings of Eric Cantor and others where the basic mentality was we're going to oppose anything that Obama does no matter what. So this obstructionism was obviously a clear, you can see this clearly in the coming years, but can you talk about those meetings a little bit and what that meant for the stimulus? Sure, I mean there were a couple of them. One was Eric Cantor brought together his whip team and this was in December of 2008 when two million people had just been on the mall saying yes we can. And you know Obama was at 70% and everybody, and the Republicans were an endangered species and everybody was arguing whether they were the Whigs or the Federalist. And Cantor brought together his team and he said we are not going to roll over for this guy, we are going to fight. And they did not have policy people at that meeting. They just had communications and political people at this meeting because what he recognizes, we are not legislators anymore. We are communicators. And the most important, what was going to keep them, you know, the most important part of their message was not allowing Obama a clean bipartisan victory on anything. And that of course Mitch McConnell later said that publicly that I mean the basic, what they understood is that Americans, you know, so I am and probably a lot of you are paid to follow this stuff.  All they know is like, you know, they hear about something happened and either it's bipartisan, which means sort of reasonable people got together and did what reasonable people do or it's the same old Washington bickering.  And so that was really, they realized that was key to their strategy. Mitch McConnell likes to talk about, well, not publicly, but within his caucus, he talked about 1984, that election, because everybody remembers, right, Reagan morning in America, big landslide. What McConnell remembered, but most people don't, is that every Democratic senator except for one got reelected. He remembers it because he was the one Republican who beaten incumbent that year. But his point, what he was telling his, and he had a demoralized caucus. I do talk about this meeting where they show up, it's January 09. You know, Bob Bennett is talking about how he gets up and says we might be a permanent minority.  And what Mitch McConnell says is look, like this guy is just, you know, this guy's telling us he's going to have to tell America he's going to fix the economy. And if he does it, God bless him, we're all going to get reelected. But if he doesn't, and we say no, in two years, this is our ticket back.  But just about everybody else, they sort of rediscovered, you know, their message of fiscal discipline. Even though they were voting for a Jim DeMint amendment that would have blown another $4 trillion in tax cuts onto, you know, that was their stimulus plan. And they all supported it except for the three Republicans who voted no, plus George, who voted yes on the stimulus and George Vojnovich. So they hadn't really changed, but they had a message of no. And that was their ticket back. One of my favorite moments in the book is after the House Republicans voted unanimously against this thing, they had this retreat in Virginia where, you know, Obama had just passed this gigantic bill that's, you know, a huge down payment on his agenda, and they're having this huge celebration.  And Eric Canner jumps up and says, you know, we're going to have more votes just like this.  Right.  But, you know, they felt like this is our moment. This is our moment. We've found something to fight. And the polls were starting to show that the, you know, Obama was losing the stimulus battle. And even though substantively, this was a, you know, a center left dream, and they didn't care about the substance.  Well, you have to imagine, if they're saying no to absolutely everything, were there any times that they were saying no and maybe that was the right thing to say? I mean, what aspects of the, I'm kind of asking you to argue against yourself a little bit, but what parts of the bill really were not well thought out or were not well executed? Well, I should first of all say that, you know, like the Republican National Committee put out a five page memo about my book, which everybody was like, oh, what was their rebuttal? There was no rebuttal. It was five pages of stuff that they cherry picked from the book that they think make Obama look bad. And, you know, their spin is interesting, but the facts are all there. So this isn't like, you know, this isn't just a cheerleading book. You know, there's stuff in it and there's, you know, there's a Valerie Jarrett story that I'm surprised has not started a congressional investigation of her putting inappropriate pressure on, you know, on one of these clean energy loans, not Cylindra where there was no pressure whatsoever. This was a different one. You know, this was an imperfect bill put together by imperfect people through an extremely imperfect process. And some of it didn't belong. You know, some of it was, you know, the best example is they tweaked the annual patch for the alternative minimum tax, you know, where every year they protect middle class taxpayers from getting hit by the alternative minimum, something they do every year. It should not have been in the stimulus. It's $70 billion of wasted, you know, it provides no stimulus. So really it was more like a $700 billion stimulus, but Olympia Snow insisted on it as it really sort of is a favor for Chuck Grassley, who was running around talking about how the bill was socialism. As Rom said, it was like the strangest $70 billion I ever spent and it wasn't my money. But this is one of the themes of the book is the sort of tyranny of 60 votes where bills that don't pass the Senate don't make change. And so to get 60 votes, Arlen Specter wanted $10 billion for NIH. And as Ron Klain points out, half the bad stories about the stimulus have been from NIH studies about like, you know, cocaine monkeys or, you know, you know, why is it that men don't like to wear condoms or, you know, all kinds of things that have been easy to ridicule because science often is. But, you know, if you wanted Arlen Specter to vote for it, there was going to be $10 billion for NIH. And so, you know, Daniel Inouye, who was, you know, the Senate Appropriations Chairman, he wanted $150 million for to reimburse the Filipino veterans of the Baton Death March, which is like a very worthy cause, but like sending money to Manila is not really, you know, great stimulus for Milwaukee. But, you know, he was the Senate Appropriations Chairman, he had to get something, you know, Blanche Lincoln wanted her catfish subsidies and so there are definitely a few, you know, there are elements of that in the bill. And then there was, you know, James Clyburn insisted that there had to be $3 billion for rural broadband, which I would say at best the jury is very out on how well that's going to work, you know, sort of sending broadband to, you know, sort of like the New Deal rural electrification. But I haven't done enough reporting to be absolutely sure, but there's some questions about that. So I think I'm certainly by no means saying this thing is perfect. But a shocking amount of it was just sort of standard Keynesian stimulus of, you know, tax cuts to people who aren't likely to save the money and aid to victims of the Great Recession and aid to states, which that there was some question about how well that would work, just, you know, states that were about to lay off all their cops and teachers and cut all their Medicaid programs and got these massive infusions of checks that helped them balance their budget. And I think at the time it wasn't clear how well that worked, but there have been a lot of empirical studies and that really helped prevent the depression. So definitely some cats and dogs, but the bulk of it was uncontroversial stuff. Well, I'm going to open it up now to questions that you all have. So does anybody have any questions they'd like to ask? Yeah. Oh, hold on one second. The mic. Oh, sorry. One question I had is one of the criticisms of the act from the left has been that it wasn't big enough. That basically the Obama administration kind of negotiated against itself. It went smaller than it could have gone. And that didn't have the kind of impact that was needed to slow the downturn or to boost growth enough. How do you respond to that? Well, I have a sort of two-part answer. The first part is, well, it's basically true, at least that it wasn't, you know, more aid to states would have saved more teachers' jobs. And we've actually, in the socialist Obama era, the public sector has actually shrunk by 600,000 jobs. So more state aid could have prevented some of that. More tax cuts could have put more money in people's pockets. More public works could have gotten more jobs for unemployed laborers. And in fact, after the stimulus passed, although there's been absolutely no attention paid to it, Obama has gotten another $700 billion in stimulus.  And as he says to his, I quote him, telling his economic theme, like, I get the Keynesian thing, but it's not where the electorate's at.  He says that he was screaming at Mitch McConnell saying, like, these are our people. But finally, he did get it across the line. So more would have been better. He did get more. Even more would have been even better. That said, the stimulus could not have been one dime more than $800 billion. And if you read my book, I think that's, like, I hope that, you know, I know it won't, but it ought to put that argument to rest forever because I interview everybody who is in the room and everybody who is involved in the negotiations. And you had, first of all, you had these three Republicans, Colin Snow and Specter, who were saying absolutely no more than $800 billion. It still cost Specter his job. But you also had at least a half-dozen Democrats, Claire McCaskill and Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu and, you know, at least a half-dozen because once you got to a half-dozen, it was clear that this thing wasn't going bigger. They drew the same line in the sand, no more than $800 billion. Actually, Mark Begich, who I quote on the record, right? I don't know who died and made him president. But he said, like, we decided this thing could not be bigger than $800 billion. That was just getting too big. And why too big? That's just too big. Arlen Specter had the same kind of thing. It's like a trillion was definitely too big. Even $900 billion kind of sounded too big. You know, there's no kind of economic theory for any of this, but that's what they decided. And, you know, these kind of liberal fantasies like, oh, if only Obama had campaigned for it if he'd gone to the grassroots, why didn't he go to Maine? And then Susan Collins would have had to support, what, I don't know, $850 billion. And then how was he going to go to Alaska too, and Arkansas? Like, they didn't really like him in Arkansas. $800 billion was a cap. I quote Brian Byron Dorgan, who's one of the senators who actually did want. He thought it should have been bigger, but he was in the room. And he's like, look, this is representative democracy. You know, at some point we had to say, what do you want? And that was what they wanted. And so it was, you know, as Ram said, he's like, I would like Paul Krugman to tell me how to seat Al Franken, who is sitting in Minnesota right now, you know, hasn't joined the Senate. That would be useful to me. Telling me that we need a bigger stimulus. That's not useful. You know, Paul Krugman doesn't need a supermajority to pass this column. Sorry. It's one of my pet peeves. Sure. Andres, you can go. We'll go to the boss. Hi, Michael. I'm Andres Martinez, and I apologize that I was running late. But you all got an upgrade in terms of moderating. That was a great conversation. I wanted to ask you about the interplay between the stimulus, which isn't spoken about much on the campaign trail these days, and TARP and the financial rescue package. I feel like today, you know, today is a notable milestone in that the Treasury is selling a big stake in AIG, recouping a lot of that investment, and for the first time getting the federal stake in AIG down below 50%. And that was the one part of TARP that people felt this money's never coming back. So maybe today should be some kind of holiday. But clearly, you know, if stimulus is a tarnished accomplishment, politically in terms of what the administration accomplished, TARP and the, quote, Wall Street bailout, that's far worse, it seems, politically, and cost a lot of people their jobs on the Hill. But to what extent do you feel that the administration's efforts on the stimulus side that your book is about was just, you know, that the brand just became too tarnished because it was part of this overall climate of, you know, bailing people out and, you know, that all of this happened in a kind of a blur, again, for people, as you point out, in real America who can't follow this blow-by-blow. But talk a little bit about the extent to which TARP influenced what happened with stimulus, vice versa. And I know it's kind of a convoluted question, but... No, absolutely. And that relates to the last question, because that's one of the big reasons that they had said no more than $800 billion, too. It was just like, you know, there was just enough is enoughism where it just felt bad, you know, and people and the backlash against TARP was swift and strong. And one of the reasons the stimulus is so unpopular is because people think that's when we bailed out the banks. And what the hell? I'll name names. You know, when I interviewed John Dingle, who...  He's like, no, the stimulus. I was like, oh, man. You know, and even Charlie Rangel had the same kind of brain fart, and he rode half this thing, at least on the tax side. So I think it's created a terrible political climate where one of these... And it's one of Obama's problems was like, unlike... I talked some about this in the book where Larry Summers had said, you know, in a way, FDR was lucky. He had three years of depression under Hoover before he took over. Everybody knew it was Hoover's depression. And even...  And even those two months later, there would have been another 1.5 million jobs lost on Bush's wash instead of Obama's. This really created a horrible, you know, the idea that like bailouts plus, you know, this financial earthquake that had hit, but the economic tsunami hadn't hit the shore, that created this horrible political, you know, where Obama was really catching this falling spear. And, you know, that sort of things could have been worse from the beginning turned out to be the, you know, the sort of best argument you can make, which is, as everybody knows, that's a lousy bumper sticker. Substantively, you know, the financial bailout and the Wall Street bailout and the Main Street bailout sort of go hand in hand. And in fact, there's...I also mentioned this kind of cute little story where Tim Geithner says to... says to Christie Romer, Geithner being the sort of big fan of the bank bailout and Christie Romer being much more of a, you know, let's help Main Street too. Geithner says, you know, there's more stimulus in TARP than in the stimulus. And she says she shoots back that there's more bank stabilization in the stimulus than in your bank stabilization. But I think what the larger point of that is that they're both right, in a sense, that by preventing a financial cataclysm, TARP created a lot of stimulus, or certainly anti-stimulus, as I call it in the book, and that by giving consumers some money and doing at least something about their hemorrhaging personal debt situation, the Main Street stimulus and companies as well did help, you know, provide some stability to banks who were being hosed by people not paying them back. So I think politically, you know, substantively and politically, they both worked in the same direction, but they were very different. You know, but substantively, they worked in a very good direction and politically in a very bad direction. You had a question? I have sort of two questions because I don't do anything. I do research. I don't do anything on messaging. I do do something on messaging when it's finished. The first question is whether you think there's been a, when we go back to the carry campaign and the swift boat problem, the mantra is from that experience that it wasn't answered quickly enough and that there's this similar kind of criticism of the Obama messaging thing that he takes a very long time to, or his folks, to respond. And the other sort of link to that thing is the, I did some work on a rather broad assessment of what was going on on one aspect of the stimulus in several, in many states. And the impression I got at the state and local level was irrespective of the party in power that there really was understanding in the administrations and the people who were responsible for implementing the stimulus and appreciation for it. And is there something that is not done properly or adequately about the difference between letting the national media create the message and what's done at the state and local level in media in messaging.  And it's out there. The governor has to put up the signs. So I think only 22 states have the signs. Yeah, well, let me get to the first question, was do they respond fast enough? And on the stimulus, they didn't. And there's actually a kind of, I have some funny quotes in there from, I quote Dan Pfeiffer on the record who is, he's now the Obama's communications director. And he has this, I think actually true and legitimate, but also kind of whiny quote about how we had just run this, basically the entire communications team had just been fighting every day for two years over this campaign. And they'd run this marathon and then suddenly they had to do this 800 yard sprint and they didn't know where the bathrooms were and people are telling them that if the Recovery Act doesn't pass in the next couple of weeks, the market's going to crash in other 3,000 points. And we didn't have time to do the kind of strategic meetings. We should have sort of some whiny stuff. But also fair, they weren't kind of, they didn't have their A game together yet. I also tell this story about Obama, like as the message was getting away from him, Obama decides, it's like, all right, we've got to take this thing back. This can't just be about honeybee insurance and mob museums. So he calls up all five of the major network anchors and invites them to do one-on-one interviews in the Oval Office that he's going to talk directly to the American people about stimulus and this is going to be like his first fireside chat, the kind of equivalent. And that morning, Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination to be his health czar. And so all the questions were about Daschle and the big soundbite takeaway was Obama saying, I screwed up, which was not the message they wanted. And again, I think some of these guys in the White House attached a little bit too much importance to that one moment, but I think it is a sort of symbolic moment of them failing to get the message across. Second one, look, like every Republican governor, they all came out, they said, this stimulus sucks, we're not taking the money, this is the death of free enterprise, and then they all took the money. The only one who legitimately made a principled stand against taking the money was Mark Sanford, who is actually kind of, I think he's sort of a hero in my book. I don't know, he's like the principled Republican. He sort of takes the Hoover's Treasury Secretary, Mellon, who had this whole thing about, you know, basically we need to purge the rottenness out of the system. He genuinely, like Sanford genuinely believed that.  And he was very honest about his Republican colleagues who, you know, he said like, you know, suddenly now that they don't have the keys, suddenly they want to shrink government. They sure as heck didn't want to shrink government when they had the keys. But he actually did try to turn down the money, but his Republican state legislature overruled him.  So I saw he's getting married now, so that's another stimulus achievement, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Right. In the back, yeah. I'm Mark Schmidt. Oh, my new hero. Well, as you know, because I read a little bit about it, my favorite part of your book really has to do with your reporting from within the government agencies, which is really remarkable and a real reminder of how little reporting of that type there is outside of scandal. And I wonder if you could say a little bit more. I mean, you talked a bit about the culture of competition moving into government. But you have really had some wonderful other sections about real turnarounds in agencies and bringing a kind of entrepreneurial culture. And I wonder if you could sort of talk about how far, you know, how much of a real transformation of the executive branch, the administration of government really was triggered by the stimulus or by other things. I mean, there's a very good piece in the post by Suzy Kim about the culture of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, which also has a sort of startup culture. We haven't talked at all about that aspect of the book today. First of all, I say like I'm not related to Mark Schmidt. But he's definitely my new best friend. You wrote something really lovely about the book. I do think that there's certainly the stimulus itself, which there was this recognition right up front where I tell the story about how Joe Biden kind of made this pitch that somebody who has a lot of juice in the White House and is a real people person and can talk to governors and congressmen and mayors and really get this thing moving and cabinet secretaries, somebody ought to be put in charge of this thing. And Obama kind of reads the memo and says like, okay, Joe, go ahead and do it. But there was this recognition by Biden who I think has done a terrific job and everybody in the White House will say, like kind of, I know he's goofy, but he really has set the tone that, and Obama has set the tone, that this money, we can't screw this up, that this is $800 billion that can't get stolen. We are going to be watching it. Steal some other money. And seriously, like before this thing happened, there was the sense that 5% to 7% of it, the trade associations would say, you can expect to be lost to fraud, so far the number has been 0.01% of it. And there really was, I think a lot of this came from this conscious decision that we are watching. We are going to hold you accountable and we are going to take you seriously if you work in government. Like we want you to be making decisions, we want you to make them fast and we want you to make them well and we are going to be judging them. And so I think there was that culture where, and this is also where something like, it's hard to quantify except things like, well, there was no fraud and like if you read the book, shit seems to be working pretty well. But this is where I, you know, interviewing 400 people sort of helps where you really do here again and again that with the stimulus we felt in this agency we were putting our best people on it and there was a real sense of excitement about it. And I do think that then there has been, in the Obama administration, particularly on the anti-waste, anti-fraud part of it, there's a sense like, hey, let's try to bottle this. Let's try to bring it to other parts of what we do. The energy department, which is sort of the bureaucracy that I burrow the deepest into, they brought in a guy from McKinsey to oversee the stimulus and he really tried to change the culture of this sclerotic bureaucracy, which was partly about accountability and partly about empowerment, where we're going to, they have these kind of tag ups every morning where you bring together 100 of the top civil servants in the agency and it was kind of, what did you do yesterday? What are you going to do today? What obstacles did you run into? How can we fix it? Where it's really a kind of more corporate culture, you can say, but accountability has become this buzzword, but A, by making these programs more about competition, as I discussed earlier, and not just for race to the top, but turning everything into a race to the top, turning lead paint removal programs into a race to the top and building firehouses and broadband and all of these things where you're constantly having to justify what you're doing with taxpayer dollars. I interviewed this guy at this Republican who Ed Rendell put in charge of Pennsylvania's stimulus and he was a businessman and he actually was not a stimulus supporter, but he said that we're going to be spending this money, we're going to do it right, and he told me a story about walking into, I feel bad, I don't want to make these people sound like they're just, doing airy-fairy stuff because it's important stuff, but he went into this domestic violence program and he was asking them about their metrics and how they judge success and that sort of thing. They were like, what? I'm like, what are you talking about? We try to help women. He's like, well, yeah, how many women? And does it work? And I do think it's a little bit ineffable, but I do think that there was a new culture that was put into place through this Recovery Act, partly because it was the most scrutinized federal dollars in history. And there's certainly an awareness in the Obama administration this is something that ought to spread. And then they're trying, I think a lot of it depends on whether he gets re-elected and whether, if he doesn't get re-elected, this is something that Romney, who comes from a corporate culture, sees as something that ought to continue. Just a question about, are there records of kind of a similar transformation when it comes to FDRs, you know, when the New Deal was implemented? Was there a transformation to be had back then, I guess, in these government offices and administrations? Well, it was a very different kind of transformation because that was really the creation of big government. That was sort of making the case that government has a role and so it was much less worry about how this money was going to be spent and much more, let's hire four million people in the winter of 1934 and whether they're, you know, if some of them are digging holes and filling them back in, that's okay. But this was much more of a focus on not just making government, not just making the case for big government because we already got it, but making it work. In the sense that even though it may not be the best stimulus to be, you know, making a list and checking it twice, you know, it would be perfect, you know, you can, wasting money is good stimulus too. But there was this sense, Biden's line was, you know, what he would always say is, if somebody finds out we blew a billion dollars, this thing is gone, gone.  But there was a sense that people are watching that there wasn't in the new deal, that this is like, we've got to make the case that at a time when, you know, people don't think government can run a, you know, a two-car funeral, that we're going to try to make a case that government can work. And of course the irony is, I think, they showed that government can work, and the lesson that everybody took out of it is that government can't work. Yes, right over there. Hi, Robert Shreda, international investor. I'm a member of one of the larger groups of economists here in Washington. And my question is, beyond the media, what your views are in terms of the profession of the economists in terms of being able to analyze and offer good insight into this problem? Specifically, I haven't read your book yet, but do you talk about such things as the multiplier effect as a result of some of the spending and the productivity pop or even the long-term productivity effects? Do you find that the economics profession has been able to step up and offer some assistance to say, well, this is what's happened to similar programs in the past, this is what we might expect from these in the future? Absolutely. And in fact, there was, you know, they had a lot, this was another big difference with the New Deal, is that the New Deal, they were really flying blind.   And now we've got to, you know, there's a lot of work done before this where you had very, in fact, in January, oh, nine, no, January, oh, eight, January, oh, eight or no, nine. God, I'm going to forget when the Brookings, the Brookings had just come out, it was oh, eight, I think, where Brookings came out with some work on multipliers and Moody's Economy.com came out with some work and the CBO where there was a really, a lot of very solid information about what the, you know, about what kind of things work and that was taken very seriously by the people who were making these decisions.  That public works, economists had a very strong feeling that it wouldn't be spent right away but also a very strong feeling that it's good stimulus when it happens and that was taken into account by these people who said, well, we're going to, this is a really deep, this is going to be, we're going to need stimulus for a couple years. We have room for a different kind of stimulus. Obama in January, oh, eight, came out with a stimulus plan that was by far the most short-term stimulus of all the presidential candidates. It was a kind of textbook Keynesian short-term stimulus and he had actually gotten into a debate with Hillary during one of the, I think it was a debate in South Carolina where she was explaining, you know, people were saying, like, how come there's no green energy in your short-term stimulus plan? This was when it was a very small downturn and he said, because that's not stimulus. You know, that's pushing an agenda. Obviously, as this thing got bigger, he realized that it would make sense to push an agenda as well as the short-term stimulus. But I think there was a lot of serious economic thinking, you know, by guys like Larry Summers and Jason Furman and, you know, and Christie Romer who were very steeped in the academic literature and, you know, Christie's a depression scholar. They took it very seriously. They may have underestimated the difficulty of, you know, Jared Bernstein's always talking about how it turns out that Keynesian stimulus is that they never taught us in grad school about how to sell Keynesian stimulus.  It's like antibiotics. It's really got a fair amount of across the political spectrum, you know, well, people can disagree about the makeup and, you know, how much of it and how to do it. There's a basic idea that, like, you know, you're going to provide some stimulus with a stimulus plan. And like I said, in 2008, every Democratic and Republican economist and presidential candidate was okay with the notion of Keynesian stimulus. It was only something happened on January 20th, 2009 that suddenly made it controversial. I don't know, it was cold day, seemed to recall it. Somebody raised their hand and went like that. That seemed to debate, change some of the debate politically, but I saw the University of Chicago did a survey of economists and I think something like only 4% that said that the Recovery Act did not create jobs or boost growth. So I think, you know, within the profession, there are still differences, but the Post did a sort of meta-study of what I think now there have been 15 empirical and non-empirical studies of the actual Recovery Act and 14 of the statistically significant ones have found that basically it helped. And the one that didn't was John Taylor, who as you know is a very prominent Republican economist and his data, as everybody has pointed out, showed just as well, you know, you could just use that data to argue that the stimulus should have been bigger. So I hope that answers the question. Last two questions. Thank you. This was a fascinating discussion. To follow up on the question from Mark on the long-term effects, I was wondering there has been a lot of discussion in the policy circles about the increase in inequality that has happened over the last several decades, not only in the United States, but also across the industrialized world. And I was wondering to what extent you think the Recovery Act long-term effects might counteract that trend because it seems that we have some conflicting indications in the short term. On the one hand, there was the recent article in the New York Times about poverty in the magazine by Paul Toff, I think, about the fact that the social spending, social program spending has blunted the sort of poverty increase that might have been expected. But on the other hand, there's the National Employment Law Project study that shows that a lot of the new jobs being created are actually not so good. So there still seems to be a continued bifurcation in the labor market. What can you say about that? Thank you. Well, the first thing I should say is that I should have pointed out in the last minute, like I'm not an economist. And actually, I think it's a legitimate criticism of my book probably that I don't get as deep into some of these inequality issues as I should, because it is a big question of our time and it's certainly a legitimate thing that Obama has to answer for in ways that probably he hasn't adequately so far. I will say the initial stimulus, this also falls into the things could have been worse rubric that nobody likes to hear. But there have been studies that shown that just the direct transfers prevented 7 million people from falling below the poverty line and another 32 million people who are below the poverty line obviously made them less poor. I like talking about this homelessness prevention program that was started by the, it was $20 million in the budget before they had done a pilot project in 2008. It seemed to work pretty well.  Let's put $1.5 billion into this thing and take it national. Nobody has ever heard of this program. I can guarantee you. And basically, what people have found is that if you end up, if you become homeless, that's very bad. It creates all sorts of social problems and expensive social problems in the shelter system it's really bad. You don't want to become homeless in the first place. So this was this idea like, well, if people are on the brink of homelessness, why don't we pay some of their back rent or their utility bill or their moving costs and see how that works. And the long story short is that it served 1.2 million people. And I actually went and talked to the people who did the program in Miami where I think it's 0.87% of them have shown up in the homelessness system. So there's been almost no recidivism. And it's impossible to know how many would have otherwise. But if half of those people had ended up on the streets, the homelessness population would have doubled. And instead, homelessness actually declined slightly during the worst recession since the Great Depression. So I think that's an example of how, you know, is that creating great jobs for those people? No, but things, you know, that could have created a real problem. There was an effort to sort of make the tax code a little fairer through, you know, making work pay, things like that. Some of the other refundable tax credits, which were definitely an attempt to redress some of the imbalances that showed up during the Bush tax cut era. And there was, and this I wouldn't want to judge to what extent this has worked. But Obama did have this, you know, like I say in the book, that he had this very distinct theory of the case. And the Recovery Act sort of put it into practice. But the theory was that these things that kind of liberals think are terrible, like, oh, it's terrible that our schools suck. It's terrible that health care costs are too high. It's terrible that we're broiling the planet. And it's terrible that our tax code is so unfair and our infrastructure is falling apart. That if you deal with those problems, that those are economic problems as well as moral problems. That in fact, we need a more educated workforce if we want to compete. That clean energy industries or really are can provide good jobs in the future. That our health care costs are dragging, that when a GM car has seven times the health care cost built into it as a Japanese car, that that really is dragging down our economy. And that when people don't have money, when we have this kind of inequality, just as FDR, the post-war economy really was driven by the middle class, having a consumer-driven economy, that we need to sort of have that kind of people with good jobs so that they can spend money and will all benefit. And that infrastructure and research are a part of that. So that was sort of the theory of the case. And I wouldn't want to judge on the inequality spectrum how well that's worked, but he has followed through on that agenda.  And I've been in some of these factories and the first thing I always notice is, where are all the people? You know, this is not creating that many jobs. But then when you talk to the people, you notice, well, it is creating some jobs and they're really good jobs. And these people, and that if you don't have these jobs, there's the danger that the innovation is going to follow the manufacturing abroad.  So this is a long winded way of saying they did think about this stuff. And I guess we'll see, right? I mean, certainly nobody's happy with the state of the economy in 2012. Last question for you. To, when we, when Obamacare, as it's been derisively called past, because of the way it was mischaracterized and criticized and the way it was put together, for almost two years we saw Democrats and also others who just thought they would benefit from it say, well, it will eventually be better understood and become popular once it takes effect and people really see what it is. I was at the convention, the Democratic Convention in Charlotte and for the first time in almost two years congressional Democrats as well as the President's campaign openly embraced it after either ignoring it or running away from it. And I wondered to what extent it's possible or to what extent should and could the same arguments be made for the stimulus package. That is, your research and your reporting suggests over the long term it will be better understood. It will be, it will have long-term payoffs. But what about even just in the next eight weeks of the campaign, do you think there's any potential for explaining it better, for taking credit for it? I think after my book becomes a runaway bestseller. I'm chink, everybody will understand. It made the list this week. But honestly, no. You do hear him talk now about middle-class tax cuts and Pell grants and that we've doubled renewable energy. You know, I'm the guy in the back saying, because of the stimulus! It's because of the stimulus! They don't say the word stimulus, but they are at least talking about the achievements in it a little bit more than they did. I wrote a piece, you know, and when the book first came out, he tried to flack it in every different way. So I did a piece about the five myths of the stimulus for the Washington Post. I don't know if you guys saw it. But that guy living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue saw it. And he started giving his, he was giving some of his political guys a hard time about it. He was like, oh, this is great!  Which they seem to think that cake is baked. But, you know, you're not going to hear them talking about the new, new deal. It seems like alas. You know, since I feel like, since I'm getting everybody's trashing me as a shill anyway, I might as well get some shill points. But no. But you guys can go, you guys can go spread the word. And with that, we are selling the book outside. But thank you so much for coming today. And thank you all for being here. Our next New America Delvin to 12 event is going to be on September 18th, and we're going to be dealing with the topic of voter ID law. And we've actually got a bunch of students coming in from News 21, which is this student journalism organization that these students have been reporting on the subject for the whole summer, and so they're going to report on their findings about voter ID law and how much it's disenfranchising Americans here September 18th. So keep a look out for that on the website. Thank you all so much for coming.


Just arrived at my new villa last night Out in nature Paradise I was walking out the back here last night, and I saw a frog hopping along Nice to see but I haven't seen any lizards yet, but this is my new workplace Where I sit down to make my videos Three-bedroom two-bar from villa YouTube is monetized again Narc survivor is back or not immediately, but gradually It does take time here is the messy master bedroom All the clothes just dump on the floor. You know how I do Pikachu but unfortunately Nala is not here yet. I was just thinking how much she would enjoy just running outside The back there just got to watch out for the dogs and Any lizards or snakes? So yeah, this is what I'm doing. Just been churning out here today and soon Gonna head out Get something to eat Maybe just a Burger King today Have an hour Burger King for a long time And they do vegan options. So it's great for me. But yeah, let's get into the topic of this video because this is a very interesting one and Yes, there is a way to know if You were dealing with a narcissist Despite how they may try to lie to you gas like you food to fake and all of this there is a way to Wholeheartedly know and the way to do that is simply To recognize that a relationship is a mutual exchange of value It's meant to be reciprocal Unless you're dealing with a narcissist because then it won't be So just look at it like this if you left the relationship with less Than what you came in with and not only that But they left the relationship with more than what they came in with and I'm not just talking about money Material possessions although those are very significant factors I'm also talking about Experiences Your emotions your validation Any connections that you provided to them Maybe you took them on trips All of these things they gained from being with you And what did you gain in return? Typically how it goes is They target you because you have what they want and you give them everything they want While you were with them, but they're not giving anything back to you Even if they do have a job and they're earning money They're keeping that for themselves and not only that they are saving up everything you're giving to them And they're keeping it for the next person they meet Because maybe the next person they meet isn't going to be in the same position as you and they already know that They know it's going to be hard for them to find someone as good as you So they know that they need to be a better a better person in the next situation And it's really as simple as that. That's how you know what you were dealing with. I mean, that's what it really comes down to In these interactions and engagements You were always the one putting out You were never getting something back in return And this is how everything should work in life. There should be reciprocation Even when I put out these videos, I take time out of my day To give you this information to share my knowledge and experiences and I get a lot back in return and I'm not just talking about the monetary value from this. I'm talking about the Validation that I get from putting out this information. I get your support And that is very valuable to me, especially In exchange for my time, but when you're dealing with these narcissists You can give them all of your time money attention energy effort and It's not going to be worth your time It's not because they're not good investments They are very bad investments everything you put into them you will lose and you will get nothing back Because despite what they led you to believe about them being high-value people because they're so arrogant and entitled They are actually very low value people Which means that you will not get anything of value from them or return Your high value, which is why You were able to give so much to them and they left with more than they came in with So you're a high value person even though you may not feel like it by the end of it And after everything they've brainwashed you into thinking about yourself because that's how they keep you locked down is to Trick you into thinking you're less than who you actually are as though all of these things you're doing for them Isn't enough I've been with narcissists. I've given them all of my money.  I mean even if you forget all of the things like Maybe you're earning more than them.  It's really messed up when you think about it and that is why I just had to come out and Put this information for you all You all deserve to know this You were given the best part of yourself to someone who can't even receive it someone who refuses to even acknowledge it and They feel nothing. They're not even human. I mean for me for me to see someone Given the best of everything that they are to someone who doesn't even appreciate it or reciprocate it That really kills me inside It makes me feel something And that is why I come on you every day and put out these videos For people like that Because I don't want anyone to suffer in silence It's not right. It's not fair. I Mean this is what makes us human and these narcissists. They are not human. They are not real people. I've said that before and Even after everything I've learned I can still stand by that statement and say they are not real people And that's why we need to know whether me don't feel like you're dealing with a real person you could be with them But you still feel alone You still feel like you're missing that's something in your life You feel like you don't even exist even when you're sitting in the same room.  It has to be this exchange This back and forth where we build each other up. We grow we become better together That's how we made it this far our species Otherwise, we would have died out a long time ago But these narcissists don't seem to understand that And instead of working together with other people they just leech off everyone And that's how they get ahead by stepping on you like a step on a ladder But yeah, that's how you know what you were dealing with If you left with less than you came in with and they left with more than they came in with I Mean That's really the definition of a narcissist. That is the whole point of their disorder That's where they do what they do so that they get that outcome So yeah, that should tell you everything that you need to know All right, that's it for this video. I Hope you enjoyed my little tour around the villa and Hopefully Nala will be joining us very soon. Hope you enjoy the video I hope it was helpful. If it was please give it a thumbs up down below Leave your thoughts in the comments Subscribe share the video For coaching go to my website. It's narks 5 at a code of UK and donations You can go to my PayPal it's paypal.me slash not survivor and any other inquiries. Just send me an email I'm always available. It's coaching at narks of either that could UK All right, thank you all and you will have a great day


Hi, hey Welcome to above-life channel the purpose here is to inspire your spirit and to fill you with hope today We're gonna do an episode of Sunday morning coffee the podcast. We're gonna talk about radical acceptance now This concept is actually inspired by Molly McCord. She is astrologist and you can find her on iTunes she's got a podcast and also on YouTube again That's Molly McCord. I think she's great I follow her and I get a lot of info and like, oh, yeah, okay That's why as far as the astrology goes and she talked about for this week The concept of radical acceptance This is what is and So I thought that would be a good topic to have a conversation about today All right, so before I get too far in let's check the sound I am also gonna mention that tonight. We have a first group experience of twin flame So if you would like to join that there is going to be a There will be oh, let's just see here if this is Whoops. Nope. Just a minute At 6 p.m. Tonight on March 3rd Sunday March 3rd for about two hours, we are gonna have a twin flame group session where I am going to First the first part I'm gonna share my twin flame experience So that's like some juicy stuff. You might want to show up just for that It is a service that I am providing So the second hour is about strategy and tips and how to navigate at least just starting to have a conversation about Navigating that twin flame experience And of course, we're going to highlight the difference between twin flame and soul mates But we've already done that here on Above life channel the difference between soul mates and twin flame So if you're interested in this topic make sure you check that out. It's here Okay, there's actually a playlist for the twin flame stuff So, let's just make sure you guys can all hear me Okay, let's check that out and see how that goes For some reason my phone doesn't have just a minute. I can't hear my phone That's interesting communication. Are we having a communication barrier? Are there something going on communication wise? Let's check it out Okay, it was working. So we're doing good. All right. All right. Glad to hear it Here I am radical acceptance of what is the tricky part here. I think is that This whole idea of it is what it is Kind of sounds like a cop out doesn't it sometimes like come on come on. Don't you think it is what it is We're not gonna have that conversation and we're gonna focus on the idea of acceptance of getting to a place of acceptance and and Sometimes that can feel very very very radical as I'm contemplating the twin flame group tonight. I'm thinking about how Radical it is to just accept the scenario happened the situation happened Or I'm in the situation that I don't want to be in when you're in a twin flame scenario And I don't understand it. It's really intense and I would like to have my life back Thank you, but at the same time it feels like when you separate from that person or that energy There's this myth that like you're gonna die or something, right?  I can tell you that it can literally Give you broken heart syndrome, which you do not want I do not recommend that am I being dramatic? I'm always a little dramatic, but am I being truthful? Yes Yes, so the radicalness Is sometimes something that you can Embrace and then utilize it use it like you're yielding a sword of truth Okay, Archangel Michael come on in. Yeah, that it kind of energy that protective energy Tonight I will be working with Archangel Meditron Meditron is one that really aligns the energy systems and Recalibrates the grid system so our second hour of our group session tonight We'll be working a little bit with Meditron will be available to help re-align some of the energies so that you know where you begin And where the other person begins so you don't Just take on their entire identity because that's kind of what happens So this idea of radical acceptance is something that really spoke to me It really made me feel Like I had power like it it invoked some powerful energy like a power power Hey, thanks in the chat. I just got a super chat. I appreciate it. Thank you for that Hey rebel. Hey v I am always always an advocate for your soul and for your healing process Where in sometimes you can't see the force through the trees with the complications of being in relationship and This concept of radical acceptance. I think is extremely extraordinarily poignant when it comes to that twin flame energy or when it comes to a relationship that is one-sided or imbalanced if there's Consistently imbalanced whether it be the energy matches are off or There's a lot of given and a lot of taken And it's happening over and over and over again the same person the same person's venting all the time the same The same story keeps coming up over and over that other person has so much happening in their lives Where they are leaning on you way too much That is Really difficult as an empath and that is going to just erode your wellness overall and your energy structure You're going to get impacted in other areas of your life. You're not going to be able to focus You're not going to be able to sleep.  To stop in this moment and say this is what is This is what is it's not this is the way it is. I can't do anything. I can't I can't do anything I'm not talking about victim hood which sometimes Really intense relationships can put you in a state of questioning yourself bring it up self doubt and Insecurity and and just causing you this like crazy making And and I'm not even talking about relationships that are abusive like narcissistic or toxic relationships I'm just talking about an imbalance can really throw you off and You are human and so are the people you're in relationships with and so everybody enters in at different times and on different levels of development and evolution and the the key is is the evolving and growing together and it's This is just the way it is Isn't about lack of change or the fear of change I'm not talking about that because it can be really difficult to face resistance our own resistance And we know we're going to be triggered because that's what relationships are about right showing us our shit Which unfortunately for that other person can be very tumultuous and dramatic But let's not let's not lose sight of the point of all of this All of it Is to be in this place of power with that radical accepting what is What if you believed someone? What if you believed what that person in relationship with you was showing you their actions If their actions and behaviors aren't matching what they're saying and telling you there's a mismatch an imbalance there Maybe just maybe you could radically accept that there's an imbalance there the facts The truth the truth is is they're not balanced We don't have to judge people We don't have to look at somebody and say oh you're bad Or oh you need healing Or oh, you're so much better than me. Oh poor me.   We're talking about that a lot this year empathic stuff Stuff for sensitive people I'm really it's really on my mind. This twin flame stuff is so on my mind. It's so Not just relevant, but it's like freaking everywhere and now I just had another person This morning a friend of mine a psychic friend of mine a yogi psychic friend of mine yogi friend of mine yogi psychic Are you psychic come I'm trying to think Yeah, you are I'm just gonna say you're intuitive for sure. She's very embodied And she texted me and said hey look at this and I'm like, oh Oh Oh, she and I have been friends for a well over a year now and she had said um shared with me her Experience with I'm gonna say twin flame and she said is this a twin? I'm like, yes is the twin flame thing and this morning she happened to get some weird energetic thing where that person's Information just showed up on her like as a recommendation on tiktok or something and I'm like what you guys know I'm on tiktok, right above life channel is on tiktok. Yes. Yes, it is yes And she's like look look at this. She texted it to me said look at this and I'm like, oh It's twin flame day. I'm talking about that. I'm like, oh Lots of people have that that person you can't let go of that person you cannot forget And so where are we at? Where is our power? Where is your power? That's what I'm gonna ask you You can complain about them. You can vent about them You can tell me all the past stories of how they did you wrong and they did you dirty And then you can tell me about how much you ache for them And you know what I am not going to judge you because I've been there multiple times in the state in the cycle with the twin flame experience that I had and I'm gonna share that tonight And I'm not sure my personal stuff tonight is very juicy. I'm gonna share it, but I'm not gonna record it So you don't get a recording that Because that would not be right to spread that all over the internet, but As a person that can mentor and facilitate your healing around this topic. I am glad to share it with you I'm glad to be open about it with you because you know what? Nobody escapes that energy. Nadia. I don't care how good a psychic clear you are you still are human We still we are the same you and I empathic heart-based people And the people we're attracted and drawn to are not necessarily bad people They're just in the bad of the timing of things and maybe wrong place wrong time. Maybe they are They are in a big mess And You are not here to fix Anybody's anything because I'm guessing You might be working on yourself stuff I would hope you are if you're here on above life channel and we're chatting with our sunday morning coffee that I hope you are working on your stuff Yes Yes queen is queen here. I bet she is if she's not hey queen chatting out to queen Hey drus here. Thank you drew. Thanks for that super chat. I appreciate it So if we just say People are who they are And when they tell you or when they show you who they are over and over again, just believe that You don't have to judge it. You don't have to make them bad. You don't have to make them Make them you don't have to punish them. I mean, I know girl. I know you want to do do them some hurt I know I know It's like you're really hoping that next relationship. They're in just sucks But And you can do that because that's a human thing, right? That's a human thing But the truth is And the thing the thing that I really really really want all of us to just really understand Is that like our lives are about us Your life is about you. My life is about me, which means you're responsible for you And the choices you make and how long you stay in The intensity of the grief of the last Of the loss of the person that isn't even really worthy of your love let alone your grief and instead of getting down on yourself and feeling bad and going into that The the bowels of depression. I've been there It would be so much more Purposeful and meaningful for you to see what is And to just radically accept that Radically accept that that person Is that person? They get to do what they want. They get to say what they want. They get to to Feel what they want. They get to make their own choices and when they affect you you get to decide if you're going to accept that Receive that as part of your problem Or if you're just going to radically accept them for who they are and be like about your way go about your way And if you are going to be a fixer if you're going to be a people pleaser to the extreme and you're going to Really the people pleasing vibe is very similar to victimhood I'm just going to tell you and I know because it's been hard for me to handle for myself because I know I'm I am a fixer I got four kids. You know how much I get a chance to fix.   That's why the world is in a shambles because we are all playing into that That place of i'm a people pleaser. I want other people to like me I need to take care of everybody. I need to fix things and therefore i'm never good enough because I can never fix everything And I i'm not solving world hunger or world peace or i'm not i'm not i'm responsible for everything and yet not responsible for myself And the truth is What is Is if we could radically accept that we are the answer We're the answer to the world's problems But not the way we have been acting Not by trying to please people make things better calm people down and help people and to our own detriment You can't give what you don't got If you're well as empty, you don't have water to give somebody that is thirsty And by the way, it's not your job If you don't have it, it's not your job And it's not your job if you do have it I mean I get that we're regenerative and every energy is regenerative, but when you're in a relationship cycle We're over and over and over again You fall into the people pleasing mode and then you go to victimhood because they are so close people Fixing seems all powerful like you're oh look at you You're fixing because you're not dealing with your own shit And you're triggered by theirs. So you need to fix them's that you feel better Hey, don't try to snow me on that one. Let me just tell you I see that you might say oh, no, no I'm not doing that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you are and you learned that pattern from somewhere because you got some kind of recognition or love by doing things for other people that they wanted you to do so instead of Disappointing other people you're constantly in a state of self-doubt self sabotage and disappointing yourself. Does that sound familiar? Those are victim traits and characteristics I know because I get into that place too sometimes like oh poor me kind of thing I mean, believe me.   Yeah, but it's the truth and who else is going to tell you But the good news is you can change at any time you can shift your perspective all it takes is a perspective shift It's little tiny things that make all the difference. Let me tell you Now I get excited Even more so you know how much I love if you follow me on any kind of social media You know that I post a lot about the sunrise And the sky and the colors. I mean I love the rainbows. I love the The the clouds and I love the sunrise in the morning watching the colors kind of just peel off of The the energy coming up on the sky and it kind of just peels off like the the edges of the earth It looks like off in the distance. God it's gorgeous And now more than ever I get so I get even more excited to see that The sun the light you can see the light it's coming in and out and it's going to be a super beautiful and It's it really is those subtle tiny little things over and over and over again that that boost us that fill us up that feed us Those are things that are simple and accessible to us That is filling us up that is bringing us into alignment that is putting our energy right back where it belongs Come to mama. Come home to mama. That's what we want. That's what we need That's what will make a difference in the world. That's what will make a difference in your kids lives That's what will make a difference for you at your next job Because you're leading by example because you're being that By allowing yourself to receive those little things in the warm cup of coffee You know snuggles from your puppy Great book or an awesome new song that you just heard or an old song. That's fun But if we can get into a state of radically accepting what is What we're really doing is we're being present right now And then recognizing that when we want to create change or want things to look differently We get to do that. We are so at power. We are so in control as individuals and then what we do ripples out and impacts others just like that person in your relationship that that disjointed imbalance of power kind of energy just like that Just doesn't quite feel right doesn't quite fit When you give yourself that permission to disconnect from that disengage from that and come back into your home Your heart home and yeah, I know it's sad and it's hard at times, right change is difficult loss is difficult So you build yourself opportunities for grieving and for healing and that looks different to different people for artists That they might go go in the studio and create musicians. They might write lyrics to beautiful songs And for the rest of us, we're just gonna get up and look at the sunrise You know, it really is that simple it can be that simple I look forward to it every day. I don't have all the answers, but I'm willing to show up I'm willing to show up Are you? Whoo, this has been a super charge sunday morning coffee I Hope I'll see some of you tonight in the twin flame group. I think I will do another one It depends. It's a kind of as hard to say. I think I will I'm definitely doing twin flame coaching It's one of my new services that I'm offering And you can see that if you just click the link on my services There's a whole menu of services that you can see that I'm offering now including a monthly audio forecast Mm-hmm where I do an audio I kind of spin around a compass like energy a beautiful compassing energy To plan out the month for you energetically and I do an audio recording for that That's a new service. You probably haven't heard of before so you can see that and then I am obviously doing intuitive life and energy coaching as well like I've done before in the past. I actually have a Small group coming up too for the old school inspired psychic experience where we do kind of psychic greetings in the round Kind of fun stuff. That is a group that I will be hosting once again That group is going to show up on march 21st at 6 p.m. Central time I do try to do those groups monthly. So and that's a very affordable service I think it's only like 40 bucks or something. It's super cheap and it's only like an hour and a half or whatever Um, it's it's fun. I enjoy doing that. Um And then I'm trying to think of what other ones what other coaching stuff did I have I shared I'm trying to think of all the stuff what I did make live and what I didn't make live yet um Yeah, I think that those are the big The big heavy hitters right there my mentoring program, of course is also available Um, so you can sign up to have a conversation with me about that if you're interested in Intuitive mentoring with me So, yeah, all right. So that's it for sunday morning coffee. I am I have a couple ideas for tomorrow for our monday video I'm not sure which direction we're gonna go So I don't want to commit for sure because I feel like stuff is bubbling and shaking if you haven't looked at the astrology You might want to because there's some stuff and so let us all commit to just being in this state of presence today and taking care of ourselves in a way that We're gonna give ourselves some space from some some people and some things maybe that are kind of leaking our energy And maybe we could do something like maybe we could journal Maybe we could do Some cards if you have oracle cards, maybe you could go outside for a nice walk if the weather is Nice where you're at just really simple recognition of self Okay, and right where you're here where you are now. This is not about judging You're not far enough. This is not about judging this person's better than me or i'm better so much better than this person It's not about judgment at all. It's really about This just Acceptances to what is right here right now in this present moment Okay, and so I thank you in this chat for showing up and being here with me. Thank you v Thank you nash Hey lisa nice to see you 18 muses. Oh my gosh. I haven't seen you forever. I think Hello Mackie grand rising. Okay rebel rebel already said hello to you. I know I did My dear and drew. Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate you all so very much I look forward to talking to you guys soon. I'll see you tomorrow here on above life channel remember i'm also on tiktok at above life channel on tiktok i'm working on A schedule for maybe getting on facebook too during the week, but that's going to be a bit that'll probably be after Probably be maybe april or may before I add that one in again And um, yeah, i'm my website's not done yet. I'm still working and I've been on like I don't know how many iterations of this thing has been taking me forever, but that's the creative process That's how it works But in the meantime if you need a session with me go ahead and sign up all the descriptions will be in the The description section here of the video, but it will also be under just the first thing for current services click on that And it will show the whole list so Thank you so much for being here so much love to you all have a fabulous day I hope I've inspired your spirit giving you some hope and this Tell it like it is I was gonna say ted talk Pep talk This is caffeinated. I think you probably noticed Oh My poor family they're gonna have to deal with me. I already did yoga and I already meditated now It's time. I think to go for a walk or hit the treadmill. So All right. Thank you so much for being here. I'll see you tomorrow Maybe I'll see you tonight