Uh, do you think children should be able to see this or is this, uh... I-I think-I think the idea is that they need to see this. They need to have their eyes opened at the horrors of what we're seeing. Wait, we need to make sure that every man, woman, and child knows that what's behind me is happening. Absolute bedlam. But it's strangely-it's strangely beautiful.


We understand that time is precious when you're running a nonprofit and that's why we feel that Give Big is just a natural progression into your fundraising efforts. I'm Chris from Polk County Special Olympics, and we participate in Give Big. I'm Karen. I'm with Interfaith Care Groups of Polk County. Join us in Give Big. Give Big is a online fundraising tool to help local nonprofits reach not only their current donors, but to be able to expand their reach. We do a big fundraiser for Polk County Special Olympics as an auction, but it doesn't reach everybody. This way you can reach everybody, people that haven't heard of it. I love it. I think that the more nonprofits you get involved, it just raises awareness for all the nonprofits. I remember last year looking through the list of nonprofits, and there was somebody I'm like, well, who is this? And I'm like, well, who are these people? I better go online and learn some more things about them because I've never heard of them before. Through Give Big, success comes in lots of shapes and sizes for local nonprofits, and sometimes that success is just getting the right exposure they need in their communities. I'd say it's just a great opportunity to raise money for your nonprofit organization and also an easy fundraiser to spread the word of your organization and also collect donations. We also recognize that not everybody is online, and so we do have some marketing efforts as a Give Big organization in which we do some mailings, we do some newspaper ads. Our average donor for our program is an elderly lady in her late 70s.  They'll send in their checks. They'll go online and give. So we encourage a variety of ways of giving. Let's work together to broaden your reach within our communities. Consider joining us this year for Give Big, St. Croix Valley. Give Big is an easy way to get involved with your community. Join us!


I thought we said we were doing masks. I'm so curious. What? Good evening and welcome to my weird hair for your reference brought to you by your friendly neighborhood librarians from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I am Robin Biedenbough. I'm Paris Whelan and I'm Sarah Johnson. Welcome back guys season two episode two and as usual, I have a question to get the show started. Have either of you ever used one of those meal kit delivery services? To like look at different ones like pretend and like window shop, but I'll ever actually like purchase them. Yeah, I there are like way too many services for me to make a decision. I'm too indecisive to pick one. Sort of similar here. We have a friend who does one of these and she went to town recently and forgot to cancel her her meals for that week. And so, you know, we got to call him. He's like, hey, you want to you want to have some free food? And we're like, sure.  You know, totally smooth. Bring it home in like the the first night we make the wife and I make this, you know, nice little shrimp dinner. It was pretty pretty good. And the next night, wife's out of town and I'm making this all by myself. So it's a nice little salmon meal kit. You know, they give you the recipe card and it tells you exact instructions for what to do and here like the exact amounts of food you're supposed to have. So I'm working on this. I got the salmon going in the pan and just as the recipe instructs, I'm working on the salad while the salmon is cooking. So get, you know, get just the right amount of leafy stuff. For a salad for two. Right about the same amount of cherry tomatoes, you know, some cheese and everything, a little bit of vinaigrette. And what also comes along with this salad is a cucumber that is approximately the size of Florida. So very explicit instructions to cut the cucumber lengthwise and then cut it into half moons and mix it all up with the salad. And so as I'm working on this cucumber, I realize I'm getting angrier and angrier. Who knew I had so many opinions about salad and textures in salads? This is way too much cucumber. Secondly, these half moons on this cucumber are way too large in proportion to the size of the cherry tomatoes. And I'm adding just matter and matter and matter at this recipe. And it took me way too long to realize that that this recipe is not the law. The spot team is not going to show up. And they haven't like exactly how I have prepared this cucumber. So like finally, like I was like, okay, look, what I'm using probably a third of this cucumber. I'm cutting into the little quarter size pieces because that is the right size for this salad. Anyway, so I'm glad you didn't like that cucumber. Dictate how much you put in there. Exactly. Cucumbers are not law. What was that, Sarah? Cucumbers are not law. Okay, so tonight we have some special guests with us as usual. And the first our first two guests are going to be are here to talk about power and how it works to get issues on the congressional agenda. This is reviewer two. I would like to extend a very warm welcome to our first guest tonight. She is Dr. Janna Morgan, professor of political science at the University of Tennessee. Hey, Robin. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Good to have you here. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work? Yeah, sure. So yeah, I'm a professor in the political science department here at the University of Tennessee. And my work has to do with questions of power and inequality, and I'm specifically interested in how unequal power and exclusion can distort the way that democracy works and harm citizens' lives. Sounds like very, very interesting stuff. Glad you're here to talk to us about it. So playing the role of reviewer two tonight, we have Dr. Nathan Kelly, also professor of political science at the University of Tennessee. Welcome. Hi. Glad to be here. So why don't you tell us a little bit about you and what you do? You have some interesting interests. Yes, absolutely. So I'm a professor of political science here at the University of Tennessee Knoxville as well. And the work that I do is focused primarily on economic inequality in the United States. I'm really interested in connections between politics, policy, and the distribution of income and how the distribution of income is connected to the distribution of political power in the United States and more broadly in the Western Hemisphere. Great. Great. So we're very happy to have you here to talk tonight, and we have a very specific question that you two are going to talk around. And that question is, why does it so often seem that politicians ignore the problems that really matter for people's lives? And I will remind the audience if you're out there and you have questions as these two are talking, feel free to go ahead and type those in the comments on YouTube or Facebook, and we can surface those after the talk. And a reminder to you two that as soon as you see my face, show up on the screen again, it's about time for Q&A. All right. I'll let you two take it away. Great. Thanks, Robin. All right. That sounds good. So that opening question that's at the bottom of the screen is really central to the book that we're going to talk about tonight. So maybe I'll just ask Jana to start out a bit with giving a general overview of the argument that we make in our book before we start diving into some of the more specific evidence. Yeah. So we're going to talk a bit about our book that came out from earlier this summer called Hidacking the Agenda. And it focuses a lot on how money and power shape the kinds of issues that politicians care about. So the opening question is why do people think that politicians ignore the problems that really affect ordinary people? And my short answer to that question is it seems that way because they really do pay very little attention to the issues that affect ordinary people, especially compared to the attention they give to matters that concern wealthy individuals and corporations. So really the core argument and empirical finding of our book is that those groups in American society that have a lot of financial resources get outsized attention from politicians and policy outputs often align with their goals and address their concerns. And this may seem kind of obvious. Like, yeah, we already think this. Everybody thinks this. It's sort of just like out there. Everybody believes that money gets you what you want in the American political system. But surprisingly, maybe political scientists are just a little bit dim or something. I don't know. But surprisingly, perhaps, before our book, very little research actually had been able to uncover empirical evidence that supports this basic intuition that everybody believes, which is that wealthy interests dominate the US policymaking process. OK, OK. So you're saying that it's kind of conventional wisdom that economics and politics are intertwined in a way that those with lots of economic resources like businesses and the really, really wealthy people have big advantages over the poor in the middle class in politics and policymaking. It's like, yeah, we all know that, right? But you also said that there's a lot of researchers out there who have tried to find systematic evidence of these sorts of elite advantages in Congress. And they haven't really had much luck finding those convincing effects. So can you tell us how this can be and what's different about our work that makes it more likely to find these effects that others have struggled so much to identify? Well, I mean, while I'd like to think that we're just smarter than everybody else, I don't think that's true. I think that basically what we were able to do was kind of break down the process a bit more than maybe previous scholars had done. So I think we do two things in the book that are a little bit different that help us to get at this question empirically in a way that provides what I think is some pretty compelling evidence in support of this basic intuition. So the first thing that we do is that we look in detail at the policy process and we really analyze not just outcomes, like which bills get passed, but we analyze the issues that members of Congress actually talk about. So that helps us to understand not just whether a bill gets passed or not, but whether certain issues actually get onto the agenda and the composition of those pieces of policy as they move through the policy process and so we're able to identify lots of nodes in the policy process where money and power influence outcomes. And so breaking down the process and really looking at speech. So we analyze congressional speech and what members of Congress talk about and that really helps us open up and get a bit more at their underlying motivations that maybe looking at conventional kinds of outcome variables might allow us to do. So I think that's one really important thing that we do in the book that's different than what's been done before. The other thing that we do is that we think about how influence works in a little bit of a broader way. So lots of the work that's tried to show that money or that power matters for politics has looked at money. So they've looked at campaign contributions and tried to show that if an organization gives money to a member of Congress then the member of Congress does something on their behalf. And finding evidence of these kinds of very clear transactions can be a bit tricky because politicians aren't stupid. They don't want to look like they're just doing what wealthy interests tell them to do, right? So they're a lot more clever than that. And so we need to look beyond these like outright transactions and we want to look not just at money which we do in the book. We definitely look at campaign contributions but we also look at the broader power system that shapes kind of the big picture of what kinds of issues get on the agenda at all. And so what we do is we kind of break down power into two components. So one is what we call in the book kinetic power and this is kind of like the things that we think of organizations doing to try to influence politics. So it's money, campaign contributions, lobbying. These are the two like most obvious things but it could also be like grassroots efforts.  Those are kinds of grassroots examples of kinetic power. But we don't stop with these things that are really super observable. We also look at something that we call structural power and structural power isn't about doing something to make politicians respond. Structural power is about laying claim to the idea that your value to the country or for our purposes your value to the economy is just so important that politicians have to listen to what you want because not listening to you would be damaging for the whole economy. And so structural power is really kind of close to a trump card in the policy process where if a group can say, look, if you don't do what we want then you don't, the economy is going to go to hell in a hand basket. That's a pretty powerful thing to be able to claim. And so this is something that we really look at and we provide empirical evidence that structural power is really important in the policy process. So I wouldn't be a good reviewer too if I didn't throw you for a loop at least one point in the conversation. Oh, you're so bad. Just a lot of these things. I wanted to just raise one point and go back to something you said earlier. You said that what we do in the book is that we analyze the things that members of Congress say. But members of Congress talk all the time. I would say that probably a lot of people who are watching this would say, of course members of Congress talk.  So the question I have is, how is it useful to pay attention to what members of Congress are saying when everybody knows that talk is cheap and they can just say whatever they want to? Well, first of all, I would say talk isn't exactly cheap, right? So we're talking specifically here not just about what they say any old time but what they choose to say on the floor of Congress. So this is what we analyze. We analyze members of Congress speech that gets entered into the congressional record. So there's a finite amount of space on that floor that they have. And so they have to choose how to use that time. But there's also lots of other things competing for members of Congress time. And so it isn't just cheap. It is somewhat costly to take a position on the floor of Congress about a bill or about an issue that a member cares about. So first of all that, second of all, we're able to show through our analysis that what members of Congress talk about actually affects what happens. It affects which provisions get into bills. It affects which bills get on the agenda. It affects which bills get debated and voted on and ultimately passed. So the speech matters. Okay, I'm easy to convince on that point. But so you've given an overview of the argument that we have that the political system is tilted to those at the top of the economic heap because of structural and kinetic power inequities. And we have an approach that might allow us to find real systematic evidence of these advantages. So what do we find? What sort of evidence do we have from the book and the analysis that we did that those with lots of economic advantages can tilt the political process in their favor? So we use two main empirical strategies in the book and both draw on the text of the congressional record as a key source of data. And the first is quantitative text analysis where we examine the volume of speech on different economic issues and analyze the relationships between members' speech and the contributions that they receive. So this part of the analysis is kind of big picture stuff. But the other part, which is I think more fun, is the part that's focused on specific policy processes where we examine how congressional attention is influenced by structural power and the ways that organizations kinetically leverage resources. So the book's intentionally multi-method and its approach. And the qualitative process analysis really lets us look at how the sausage kind of gets made. So we do a bunch of different policy process tracing in the book, but just to give you some examples, for instance, we carry out detailed analysis of the policy process that produced a major financial deregulation bill in the late 1990s. And this bill essentially deconstructed the entire financial regulatory system that had been put in place following the Great Depression. And this financial system had essentially prevented the US from having any major financial crises for 60 years. But the big financial institutions around the country and in New York on Wall Street had become frustrated with the system and the limitations it placed on the size and scope of their business. And so they were wanting to deconstruct that regulatory system, which they succeeded in doing an incidentally in less than a decade. We had the Great Recession, which was in large part due to inadequate regulatory oversight. So clearly the old system wasn't all bad. But anyway, our analysis shows that wealthy interests got what they wanted in this process. And we bring together a lot of evidence identifying both structural and kinetic power. So just to give you some concrete examples, legislators in their speech in the congressional record demonstrated that they really fundamentally believed that what was good for big financial institutions was good for the country. This is structural power. They believed that if they did what was good for big banks and big insurance companies, that the whole economy would prosper. So let me just give you a few quotes. So here's Phil Graham, who the bill was named after. This was the Graham Leach-Bliley bill. He was one of the authors of the bill. He said, Wall Street is the foundation on which Main Street is built. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, also argued that this bill was vital for the future of our country. Sorry, not just our economy, vital for the future of our country. And John Boehner said that the financial services sector is the irrigation system for our economy. It provides the fuel that the rest of our economy needs to grow. And opponents of the regulations saw this structural power operating, and they tried unsuccessfully to unmask it and use that unmasking to prevent the bill's passage. So here is Paul Wellstone, a Democrat from Minnesota. He lamented that, quote, the influence of finance is felt at the systemic level. Government officials and members of Congress will be prone to confuse big financial corporations' interests with the public interest. He was trying to say, yo, guys, there's the structural power thing happening here. Maybe we need to worry about other things besides spade corporations. That didn't work. We also see evidence of kinetic power. So one thing that we do that's cool in the book is we trace the behavior of specific legislatures in conjunction with the positions of their key contributors. We can show that members of Congress behaved in ways that were inconsistent with their party's positions on the bill or inconsistent with their own expressed ideological values. But when we look at their contributions and where they came from, we can make sense of their behavior. So let me just give you one example of this. Newt Gingrich. Newt Gingrich was a Republican. He ideologically would have been in favor of deregulation. But a major campaign contributor to Newt Gingrich was the insurance sector. And insurance was a little bit unsure about deregulation in the mid-1990s. And during that time, Gingrich repeatedly maneuvered in his role as Speaker of the House to keep deregulation off the House agenda. So other big financial interests were pushing for deregulation. Gingrich's ideology and party would have suggested that he should be in favor of deregulation. But he worked really, really hard to keep deregulation off the agenda until insurance changed its mind in 1996. And at that point in time, then Gingrich becomes this big advocate of deregulatory reform. And he actually gets it onto the House agenda and the House passes a bill. This bill was not ultimately the bill that became law. But he worked really hard. As soon as insurance changed its attitude, so did Gingrich. So, and we can show this, there are other examples along these lines. Here's a Democrat one. John Lewis actually received a ton of money from insurance as well. And he was a consistent opponent to deregulation. So if we just looked at his votes, we wouldn't see any influence of the contribution. But if we look at his speech, we can because John Lewis would always, if there was a bill, specifically a bill that promised to threaten the interest of minority communities, John Lewis would be a big opponent of the bill and very vocal. So in a previous debate on a Savings and Loans bill that was introduced about five years earlier before deregulation, he said on the floor of the House, I am outraged by the treatment that blacks and minorities have been getting from our nation's banks. The facts clearly reflect open and blatant racial discrimination, yet the Federal Reserve does nothing. I think we have a moral obligation to act. So he was a big proponent of protecting the interests of minority communities from large financial institutions. But when deregulatory reform came onto the agenda, Lewis was silent. He didn't say anything. He voted against the deregulatory of reform. But unlike some of his other colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, Lewis was silent. So you can see evidence if you start to break down the behavior and especially the speech of members of Congress and see evidence of this influence. So Nate, I keep talking about being focused on previous policy processes. Do you think that there's any way that we can see some of this stuff happening today? Yeah, we'll start to wrap up with this. I think that anybody watching will notice that my co-author would do really well in the Senate where they have the filibuster. And you can just keep talking in order to close it. But yeah, I think that there are some current events that are very much in line with the patterns that you're talking about. Right now in Congress, they're trying to work out this reconciliation package and it's really a negotiation among the Democrats. And two of the key players are Joe Manson and Kristen Sinema. And both of those players, you can see the way that money is influencing the things that they are being attentive to. So Joe Manson, for example, you talked about structural power. He has a lot of connections with the coal industry. And in West Virginia, there's this sort of accepted belief that what is good for coal is good for everyone. It's a very clear example of an industry that has structural power in the state of West Virginia. And his resistance, Manson's resistance to the climate change legislation and things like that really fit nicely with our patterns with regard to structural power. And on the Sinema side of things, you see that she's been recently holding fundraisers with very conservative organizations and is now putting up roadblocks to raising taxes on the very wealthy and some of the policy proposals like that. So you can see a clear linkage again on sort of what's on the agenda, what these senators are caring about and how it isn't really what they're caring about. But it's about structural power and it's about kinetic power coming into play in this current policy debate. All right. And I'm back to shut down conversation. That's what I do around here. Thank you both so much for joining us. We've already got a few questions coming in. We're going to let Michelle go first here. Why do voters seem unable to hold these Congress people to account? Why do we not ever seem to have political candidates who see this and yet are unable to resist the coming to this influence? Shall I take a crack at that one? I mean, so on the one hand, there are a lot of structural advantages that give incumbents advantages in legislative races. And so challengers are sort of at an inherent disadvantage to begin with. But I think the core answer is that for the most part, people are not paying attention to these kinds of nuanced details. The level of information that people in the mass public have is about politics is shockingly low. So the fact that you're watching this probably suggests that you're very, very different from the average voter. Because you're seeking out this kind of information and interacting in this way, it means you're probably different than the average voter. And the average voter just doesn't really pay very much attention to these kinds of things. And for that reason, you're not that likely to see accountability along these lines. So you are giving some specific examples, you know, mansion and cinema. And are these examples really part of a larger pattern that you see as you working through? Yeah, they really are parts of bigger patterns. And I mean, we collected a lot of data. We looked at millions of words. And I actually brought along a couple of charts. And there's one chart that's like a comparison between the amount of words that were spoken about labor and workers as compared to corporations and businesses. And you can just see in this chart, look how much more often members of Congress talk about corporations and businesses as compared to labor or workers. I mean, those corporate interests just have an extreme advantage in terms of the agenda. And if you look at another chart that breaks this down even more specifically, where we look at very specific words, inequality, depreciation, dividend, portfolio. Depreciation, dividend, and portfolio are words that are very specifically about corporate interests. Whereas inequality is something that's a lot more involved in middle class and lower class interest. And just look across the board. You see that the word portfolio, which is usually mentioned in the context of stocks, easily doubles up the amount of words that are spoken about inequality. So these are clear and consistent patterns that exist when you're looking at millions and millions of words that cross dozens of years. And we also conducted quantitative analysis where we looked at really rigorous statistical models that can capture the effect of money on what members of Congress talk about. And that's a third chart here. And what we can see is that there are two kinds of contributions that we look at. The white bars are contributions from labor and the dark bars are basically contributions from corporations. And it's hard to see with inequality, but this pattern really goes across the board on this. When we're talking about issues that are lower and middle class issues, like inequality and wages, when labor makes more contributions to a member of Congress, they talk more about those issues that labor cares about. However, when members of Congress get money from corporations, they talk less about those issues that middle class Americans really care about. And if you look at issues like the deficit, it's much more likely that members will talk about that issue if corporations are making contributions to a member of Congress and less likely if they're receiving money from labor. So even when we do a very generalizable quantitative analysis, we see these patterns definitely popping up over and over and over again. So it is very much part of a broader pattern. It's not just my stories, right? It's like big patterns. Yes. All right. I think we, let's squeeze in one more question here from Milt Kelly. It would seem that the problem is only getting worse as is income equality. What can we do to reverse the trend? Is there any hope?  Well, everyone is usually more optimistic than me. Everyone says that when they read my books, they are always depressed and not usually very happy when they read the books. And I'm sorry about that. But I think that if we understand problems, it's more likely that we'll be able to figure out ways to solve them. I don't think there are any magic bullets in this context, absolutely no magic bullets. You can point to campaign finance reform and do things to try to make it harder for big money interests to have direct influence through monetary contributions. But that is unlikely to really solve this problem because when you talk about structural inequities, those are baked into the system and changing the money side of things doesn't change the structural side of things. So that's a problem that's an answer, a solution that's not really going to completely solve the problem. What I think you have to do is take a multi-pronged approach and what really needs to be done is that economic inequalities have to be tackled. They have to be put front and center because in a capitalist economy and in any kind of a political system, it is likely that those with more are gonna have more power than those with less. So the core way to narrow those power differentials is to narrow the economic differences. So putting in your policy agenda a clear emphasis on reducing economic inequality is essential for overcoming this problem in the medium to long-term. And I would just add to that that I think empowering lower-class groups also is really important. We see that labor at some points in time in our analysis, we didn't talk about it much, but there have been moments where organized labor, for example, has been able to exert some form of counterbalance to the interests of corporations and other wealthy groups. And but organized labor has really been deteriorating in power over the past few decades. And so those types of grassroots organizations that represent the interests of lower and middle-class Americans really could kind of provide at least some counterweight to a wealthy interest. Awesome. Thank you again. Those of you for joining us tonight. The book, let me see if I can get it in the camera here. Hijacking the Agenda, Economic Power and Political Influence. As you can see, I've read it. I've bookmarked some spots in here. It's a really interesting book. I should get you to go out and find it. You can actually check it out now from Hodges Library as of this week. And thank you both again. Thanks, Robin. Thank you. All right. And now we send you over to the panel. Over to Paris Whalen with Check This Out. One, thanks for joining us again on the Check This Out segment. I'm your host, Paris Whalen, and I'm the Media Literacy Librarian here at University of Tennessee, not still. And this is basically the portion of the podcast where we talk about information literacy in relation to the topic at hand. And this evening we're going to follow that same trend, but instead of a subject liaison, which is what I've been doing, usually from U2K, our guest today is going to be a local activist and friend who has recently found their voice and is using it to incite change. So, hey, Drea, thanks for taking the time to hang out with us this evening. We're glad to have you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm so excited. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, you're great. Okay, sweet. Yeah, I realize when Paris called me up that I technically am a local activist. I was like, what can I bring to the table because we have professionals, but theory and practice are both really important. And I just was hoping to make it sound more accessible to other people today. So, yes, that's me. Sweet. Thank you so much for that little introduction. So I brought you on to kind of talk about your experience and what resources you use. But before we go there, before we start talking about that, I want to just draw a quick parallel between our topic and information literacy. So as many of our viewers may remember, or if not, I'm hanging there with me, information literacy is the ability to kind of find and use information effectively and ethically, okay? So keep that in mind as you listen in today and think about controversial topics and subjects that you kind of feel strong about. Kind of consider taking those next steps and taking those thoughts further by using the resources provided by UCK Libraries. I know I stand on that soap rocks every single time this podcast airs, but I'm serious about it. I'm harping it just a little bit more. As I don't know, not only can you use the UT Libraries resources to access scholarly articles, newspapers that are international, national, local, or congressional transcripts, but if you really don't know where to start and you're looking for kind of your one-stop shot, you have your research guides, which is something that I've talked about in the past as well. Specifically for this subject, we have a political science research guide which is curated by the subject librarian, Chris Bronstead. That is Chris K.R.I.S. Bronstead. So check that out if you get a second. It has a lot of awesome resources, such as databases, interest groups, newspaper links, and things like that. The one thing I do want to harp on that I found to be super helpful is a resource called CQ Press Researcher. So CQ is in CUE Press Researcher. And this resource basically contains reports and current reports and controversial issues. And it's really excellent for finding an overview of a topic. There's a list for the pro and cons. There's a timeline and a list of key resources. So if you're just starting off with a subject and you need a general place to start to figure out both sides and get your bearings, go ahead and log in to CQ Press Researcher to start you out. So I'm going to start talking now and actually include Andrea in this conversation. So let's start off where many of our viewers might be at the beginning of their journey. So what moment did economic disparities and political priorities become apparent? So that moment when you felt like something wasn't right and you were moved to explore it a little further. Yeah. So those resources sound great. And I'm happy to answer that question. So I grew up in a bubble. I am a white individual. I grew up middle class. I was raised in the South for half of my youth. And so I thought racism and sexism and all the isms were fixed in the 60s. And that's how I was raised. And I wasn't really looking for activism, to be honest. I thought we were all good. And I went to Miami after I graduated undergrad from UT with my degree. And I did AmeriCorps in a high need public high school for two years. And my first week there, I get there.  And it was really thorough. And it talked about the systemic nature of racism in our country and how it's structural. It's not about somebody said something mean or there was a slur. Somebody didn't include someone else. It's about highways going up in black neighborhoods and that destroys families and where they used to live or not having tax dollars for the school and having no teachers for my students. I had students who didn't have a teacher for months in the school year and we just had rotating substitutes. And I remember thinking I went to a public high school and I had teachers that had PhDs and they had teaching awards. And how come I'm at a public high school because public high schools are all made the same. And my students are getting yelled at and they don't have teachers and they don't have books and the teachers have to buy the books themselves. And there's no computers. And there's gun violence. And I just thought, oh my gosh, I don't know anything. I don't know anything about anything. And I have a degree. So that's kind of how I got started was just kind of, you know, thinking that everything was fine. Going somewhere else and realizing it's not because we kind of went through some diversity trainings and historical trainings. But then I had the blinders on and thought, oh Miami has problems but Tennessee doesn't have any problems. It's fine. And then I came back and didn't realize that we have a 42% poverty rate in East Knoxville which is predominantly black. And we have a lot of problems. We have a lot of problems with a lot of gun violence. We had a lot of police violence. And all those problems exist here. And that's why I got involved with working and trying to be an activist here. Sweet. Thank you for that real raw answer. I think it's super important that our listeners kind of hear how it starts. Because you know, not all of these stories, not all of us have parents who are super active or things like that are super crazy stories. So a little bit of curiosity and even a little bit of disagreement is a really good opportunity to kind of explore a topic from a different perspective and hopefully with an open mind, right? But so once you realize how important these issues were to you, what programs and events did you participate in in the beginning to gain perspective? And how do you kind of continue learning? And I know you touched on this when you mentioned AmeriCorps, but I know you have tons of other experiences as well. Yeah. So programs and events that I participated in to get perspective, like I said, I didn't know anything. And so once you realize you don't know anything, you're like, wait a minute, how much do I not know? And so I started seeking out, you know, I was meeting a lot of people that I'd never met before, people that were, you know, not white, people that were not straight, people that were not Christian, and just making friends with them. And then also just looking up on my own to like the movies that they recommend or the books they recommend or things that I stumbled upon myself. I wasn't asking them for recommendations and don't do that because it's not for them to do. You can use the internet. But like we'd be talking about stuff and they'd be like, oh yeah, have you watched The Color Purple? Have you done this? Have you watched this documentary? And I was like, well, I have not. And so a lot of 2014, 2015, 2016 was, I'm not an activist, I'm just learning stuff. And then after I kind of started learning enough, I was like, all right, I am with people who are doing things and then they invite you to do things with them. Like, hey, we're going to go help with voter registration. Do you want to come along? Sure, that sounds fun. Or, hey, we're going to go do a march. Do you want to come along? Yeah, that sounds fun.  So a lot of it's network and it's very social. You know, being community organizing and community involvement is like really social thing. And so a lot of it you'll just find through, you know, friends or through social media. And so, yeah. Sweet. Thank you so much for mentioning voter registration. I just want to bring up a couple of resources because that's what I do. So for those of you who have already started being working, or looking at political issues that you're interested or you're just getting started and you want to kind of figure out what's going on locally, I want to talk about two things. OpenSecrets.org and the Federal Election Commission. If you wanted to find out what type of, what contributions are being made to a campaign and by who to say our senators and things like that, these are great resources for you to check into and see who's funding the situations as Jana was talking about earlier. So I would suggest you tune into that. That might be a second level thing. You might just need to start out in CQ press researcher for now, but just consider that in the future. Do you have anything you want to add to voters rights or anything like that? Go vote. City Council elections are right now. You can go vote this week. Do it. Early voting. So how did you find interest groups that you wanted to be a part of? I know we talked a little bit about social media and kind of the pros and cons that come with that on Sunday, but do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah. I was talking to Paris about this yesterday, but I'm a perfect case study for with and without social media. So I got rid of all of my social media, except for LinkedIn. So people don't think I'm a serial killer when I apply to jobs. I got rid of all my social media in like 2014 or 2016. And so I was watching documentaries and stuff, but I wasn't connected with anyone. And then there was a lot of Black Lives Matter protests last summer, and it was very easy to know when things were going on because a lot of people were going to them. But after that, I thought to myself, there has to be more happening. I saw all these people come out on the streets and you all like, what's the next move? What are we doing? What's the next pressure point to get these things past that we were talking about? And I couldn't find anyone because I don't social media. So I would like talk to people and be like, hey, can you look something up for me?  Let me just make a Facebook burner account. I have no friends on it. It's not my name. I just use it to look at events. And so I check it periodically before the weekend or whatever and see what's going on. And just with that, I've been able to connect with people in real life because you find an event of something you're interested in and then you see who's going and there's an event and you go to it and then you meet people, whether it's on Zoom or in person. And then they know people and then they're involved in other things as well because a lot of people are not just single issue people. Like I care about voter rights. I care about climate justice. I care about what the matter, LGBT rights. And so there's a lot wrapped up in there. And so there's overlap. So if you go to something for climate justice, you might meet somebody who's also going to an abortion rights rally later or is trying to hold an event to get public interest. And so, yeah, I found them through social media. So I have a Facebook voter account. And then another thing is like, I was just saying to her, to Paris yesterday, this sounds so unofficial and like not professional at all. But a lot of things I found just through derping around Twitter. Well, you find one person, you know, maybe it's a politician that you really like or it's a movement leader that you really like. They follow other people, they interact with their posts and you can see more people. And then you like what they're saying and, you know, verify the resources that they're providing. So a link up or they put a post up about something. Go check it out, see if it's real. And, you know, I know that's very hard in this day and age to know what's misinformation, especially when social media is not very regulated at all. Speaking of deregulation. But some really easy ways are like, are there tons of ads on this page? Who wrote this? Like can I go look up who wrote this or what are they funded by someone? You know, so I do think you can do your own research that way, but to make sure you're not following a crazy version. But social media can be really helpful. For example, I was following a sitting house member and she tweeted out about Sunrise Movement, which is a climate change movement. And like, hey, check out to see if you have a local hub. And then I joined it. And then now I make videos for them and my best friend makes videos for them.  It's because we were just hanging around on Twitter. So you never know. That's awesome. We also spoke about how there are different forms of activism. So we talked about podcasts. We talked about trolling. Do you want to expand a little bit on that? Yeah, I think a lot of people, especially introverts, I'm also an introvert. Surprisingly, I know. Oh, I can't do, I can't do activism because I don't want to be in the streets. I don't want to be marching. I don't want to be tear gas. I don't want to be, you know, whatever it is. I don't want to do that. I don't want to leave the house. You don't have to the ways you can be an activist. It's literally anything. Even having a show like this is helping raise awareness. So anything you can think of can be activism. And that includes, you know, making videos, making graphic design art for posters or social media.  You know, it could really be anything. And trolling is in there. And one example is there are some very suspect laws going on around the country, in my opinion. And there are some websites where you can tell on people if they get certain things done to their body and get $10,000 cash rewards for doing so. Yeah. And we have TikTokers and youths who know how to code. They know how to make algorithms. And they're like, what if I made an algorithm that crashed this website that is unethical? And they do it. And then it works. And then the website's down and they've just done something. And you know, you could say, oh, well, that's illegal or whatever. But in my opinion, things that are legal are not always right. Discrimination is legal for a very long time. Slavery was legal. Women weren't allowed to vote. That was legal. Internment camps were legal. So what's legal is not always what's ethical. And so if you find something really unethical and going against your human rights, there are ways to be an activist without being violent. And activism in a trolling fashion is one of them. I don't know if that was... Yeah, that was it. Perfect. Thank you so much. So I'm going to wrap it up with this question. What is a topic that you would like to put on the map for our listeners? And where can we find more information about it? So many. Like for other people said or other hosts said, the Build Back Better plan, not only is this already a compromise in my opinion, but the certain democratic people are trying to make it whittle down even further. And we know that they are paid by the coal industry and by health insurance industries. And if we really want to have two individuals lock saving the planet, then you will do nothing to stop them.  But if you would like to live above floodwaters and not in fire and not, you know, with a blizzard every other day and without national disasters all the time, then you would do something to stop them because it's literally two people that are doing this. So yeah, the Build Back Better plan should not be cut down any further. They're already compromised. So that's fun. And in the future, we want to have a great new deal because that's what's really what we need in this moment. The new deal was what everybody hearkens back to as the, you know, the good old days. Those were the good old days. Like I was able to afford a house and my grandpappy was able to do this and not the other because we had social spending. That helped people and not corporations. And small donors, small dollar donors can make a difference. And there are certain people in office who get 62% of their donations from small donors. And that's big. So not a lot of people do it. They want to take big money, but it is possible for us to have grassroots funded candidates. It takes a lot more work, but it's possible. And that's the type of thing that makes me excited. Well, thank you so much for sharing with us today. I really love talking to you. I always feel super inspired. I hope that our viewers feel inspired as well. Remember that you can be a part of the change. You don't have to be on the front line, but the first step is going to be becoming informed. So use those resources that I talked about. This basically concludes our Check This Out segment. Andrea, thank you again for joining us. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. It's been great. Next, we have stories from the stack with our new host, Sarah Johnson. Welcome to Stories from the Stacks. I'm Sarah Johnson. Great to be here. So tonight, we're going to talk about crime fighting and who doesn't love a good crime story. But even more so, the story is how someone uses their power for their own agenda. Does that sound familiar? So our main character tonight is U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver. Yep, you heard that right, a U.S. Senator. So Kefauver's crime hunting days became so popular among the American public that he turned out to be pretty famous in the 1950s. So famous that he ran for president a couple of times.  So he won the 1950 Democratic primary of New Hampshire and beat Truman, which is, wow. And in the end, Kefauver didn't make it to the presidency. However, it's still a noteworthy piece of history because he was essentially a freshman senator at the time. Like he was just starting out. But he had attracted so much attention nationwide that it boosted his standings with the American people, or at least the people of New Hampshire. So now you might be wondering, what did Estes Kefauver do that was so intriguing? And how did crime hunting play into this? Well, I'll tell you. But first, let's get the lay of the land of what crime looks like in the 1950s and specifically organized crime. So after World War II, the economy boomed. This like left people with a ton of extra money and they were spending it on things like gambling and prostitution, which were illegal at the time. And then we got J. Edgar Hoover, who's the director of the FBI. And Hoover paid no mind to crimes like these. He actually refused to acknowledge organized crime and he spent his time concerned with communism along with most of America. But people were noticing that these goods and services were being sold illegally, but that like people were getting away with it. So now we've got the lay of the land. In comes Kefauver and his crime fighting unit. No, really it was an actual unit. So Kefauver was chairman of the United States Senate special committee on organized crime and interstate commerce. Try saying that 10 times fast. It was also known as the Kefauver committee. This committee was charged with exposing networks of crime. And Kefauver made sure to find ways to circulate this information and do his best at snuffing out these networks. So the committee held hearings in 14 cities and they heard from over 600 witnesses. But the really juicy thing is these hearings were put on television. And just to be clear, so these were exploratory hearings. They were not legal proceedings. And so there weren't any rules about not televising them. But it was still a really controversial decision to be made to be to put them on television. But also they were super popular and people love them. So these hearings got better ratings than regular TV shows. And networks would play the hearings at a loss because people couldn't get enough of them. And Kefauver won an Emmy for bringing the work of the government into the homes of the American people. So Kefauver had essentially become a character in his own right by this point. And also keep in mind, like TVs were getting really popular at this time. More and more were being bought and put into households. That meant that these hearings and the work of the committee on organized crime was reaching out to a large and growing audience. And then along those same lines are print resources. Creating and distributing print media was becoming increasingly easy and consumers were really grasping on to the organized crime mobster storylines. I mean, I feel like that's still today. So what did Kefauver do? He used it to his advantage. He began using his connections with journalists and his position in Congress to continue getting his stories out to the public. Now it worked both ways because the journalists were happy to sell this story because they knew that it was going to benefit them as well. But if we look at the beginning, Kefauver was always using his connections and power to get his message out. The interesting thing about it is that even with the fame and popularity, the Kefauver committee didn't lead to anything substantial in terms of bills or laws. Kefauver organized this group to fight against something that he cared about, but it didn't actually create any legislation. However, they had a very significant impact on the culture, changing the way that people viewed crime and putting it front and center by streaming it into the home. That was a big deal.  But as Kefauver, it's actually a silver lining example of politicians using their power for their own benefit because while I think Kefauver did do this, I'd like to also think that his intention was helping the American people because organized crime. Another example, though, that I'd like to mention about Kefauver is one of his most notable legislative achievements that didn't have anything to do with this was the Kefauver-Harris Drug Act of 1962, which actually required drug makers to provide proof and effectiveness and safety of the drugs before they were approved. So even though I say all of that, I think that we can all be really thankful for his work on that act. And this is just like a teeny tiny glimpse into Kefauver's story. If you're curious to learn more, please visit our political archives, which is the division of the Betsy B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives here at UT. And then I just would love to give a really big thank you to Chris Bronsett, who was mentioned earlier, the modern political archivist who curated this information that I was able to share with you tonight. You rocked. No, that was it. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. OK, well, that brings us to the end of another show. And from overly large cucumbers to income inequality to crime-voting, we've covered quite a bit of ground. So and the planning for this episode was fun, because especially, if you all remember when the producer was joking about us making cucumber likenesses of ourselves. Oh, can you imagine? You were joking? Wait. You were joking? I did it. Awesome, Sam. Doesn't it work just like me? That actually is kind of a remarkable likeness. I love the glasses. Beautiful. Glasses really make it. Take a bite, Aaron. Say goodbye, cucumber Sarah and Sarah in Paris. That's all for tonight, folks. See you again on November 18th for our final show of this fall semester. Take it easy.


I don't know, let's kind of sit down here for a bit. Still warm from the showbiz. Well, for sure, I like it. And this is where he was. No, no, no. No George was sitting there. When? Well, it got kind of feisty there. First of all, he opened up with it. We were the threat. But it was they who were from it. We had surrounded them with weapons, pointing at them, and so forth. And the war was over. We had the monopoly. We had the monopoly. If we would have progressed from then, for now, we could have done it then, and no one could have resisted us. Thanks to him. Like a statement by Lenin about this last bastion of capitalism falling into their unstretched hand, and all the way up to Manuel's scheme. That was the one. Remember Manuel's scheme? It was the one that said we would talk peace, and talk disarmament until we have lulled the West into a false sense of security, and then we will strike with an iron fist to close. Well, I'm letting you say, you're using the negotiations behind which you engage, and you're going to take it to the Soviets in the grid. How can I not know that? How can I forget that? I think, though, that there's every evidence, I'm sure you agree, there's every evidence that this is the first time. The challenge of statesmanship is to have the vision to dream of a better, safer world, and the courage, persistence, and patience to turn that dream into reality. Since the dawn of the nuclear era, all God's children have lived with the fear of nuclear war and the danger of nuclear devastation. Our moral imperative is to work with all our power for that day when the children of the world can grow up without the fear of nuclear war. So today, we reaffirm that vision, a world dedicated to the elimination of nuclear weapons, a world in which technology provides ever greater safety rather than greater fear. Today, we set out on a new path toward agreements which radically reduce the size and destructive power of existing nuclear missiles. Soviet leader Konstantin Chinyenko said last month, our ultimate objective here is the complete elimination of nuclear weapons everywhere on this planet, the complete removal of the threat of nuclear war. Well, I welcome that statement and assure Mr. Chinyenko that the elimination of nuclear weapons is also the ultimate objective of the American government and the American people. It's now our task and responsibility to take practical steps to turn this vision into reality. We should have no illusions that this will be easy since the any venture of this magnitude will take time. And since the most vital security interests of both sides are at stake, this will clearly be long and difficult. We're realistic because we know that our differences with the Soviet Union are great. Patience, strength and unity, western unity will therefore be required if we're to have a successful outcome. Next week, the United States and the Soviet Union meet in Geneva to begin a new dialogue on these issues. And above all, we seek agreement as soon as possible on real and verifiable reductions in American and Soviet offensive nuclear arms. For our part, the United States is ready with firmness, patience and understanding to negotiate fair and equitable agreements reducing the dangers of nuclear war and enhancing strategic stability. I've just concluded a very good meeting with our three negotiators, Ambassadors Max Campeltman, John Tower, and Mike Glittman, which culminates an extensive round of preparations. In the meeting, I gave my instructions for the first round of talks. These instructions enable our negotiators to explore every promising avenue for progress. And they have my strongest personal support, like Americans everywhere. I want these negotiations to succeed and will do everything I can to ensure that this happens. And I pray that the Soviet leadership is prepared to make the same commitment. I want to thank our team for the fine work they've already done in getting ready for this endeavor. As all of you prepare to leave for Geneva, I can't think of a more welcome message than an unmistakable vote of confidence from the American people and the Congress. Ambassadors Campeltman, Tower, and Glittman and all the members of our negotiating team, I know that all of our fellow Americans wish you every success. And I know from my conversations with the bipartisan leadership of the Congress that the Congress of the United States joins in supporting you. So to all of you, those who will be at Geneva and those who will be supporting this crucial effort from Washington, best wishes, and God bless you.


Your cat has a lot to say. How she talks to other cats though is not through meows, like you might think. Cat language with each other includes some meows and other vocalizations, but body language, chemical cues, and sense make up most of feline communication. Learn more about cat's conversations. Vocal cat speech patterns. When you talk with your cat, you usually expect to hear her talk back through meows or purrs. When she wants to be fed, your cat might come to you and meow with a certain tone. Domestic cats have learned certain vocalizations activate their human guardians to give them what they want. This cat-to-human interaction, though, is not the same as cat-to-cat communication. Feral cats tend to be silent, with the occasional hiss or perhaps a purr. When domestic cats vocalize to each other, their sounds can include a range of meowing, murmurs, or purring, and higher intensity growls and howls. Loud meowing or hissing expresses anxiety or fear. Less intense meowing happens when your cat is confident in content. Low growling should be taken as a warning, especially after hissing. Feline body language. Inter-feline body language is another important communication tool. Cats can convey affection toward other cats through physical contact. For example, they might touch noses or rub against each other in greeting. Or, one might lick the top of the other cat's head. Why? This is a throwback to when their mother would groom and comfort them as kittens. Some part of cat's psyche recalls their time as kittens when their mother would lick them clean as they fed. When grown, cats will mimic this affection with cats they're friendly with. Your cat's tail can be quite chatty. When the tail is straight up, held vertically in the air, when approaching another cat, your cat is indicating friendly intentions. When the tail is held out and moves slowly from side to side, your cat is showing aggression. When your cat's tail is puffed out and held up, your cat is trying to appear bigger in the face of another cat's aggression or some other threat. When your cat tucks her tail between her back legs, she probably is signaling she is nervous or demonstrating submission. Ears and Eyes. A fight is about to happen if your cat's eyes are wide open and dilated and her ears lay flat. If your cat's ears are upright and her eyes are slightly open or closed, then the cats are at ease with each other. If your cat closes her eyes around another cat, then she trusts that cat enough to not be at full alertness. Belly Up. Sometimes a cat will roll onto its back when engaging with another cat.  While this belly showing move could indicate trust between the two cats and a willingness to be vulnerable, the belly up position could mean something entirely different. Feral Cats Expose Their Stomachs as a defensive posture. Cats roll onto their backs when fighting off predators. From that position, the cat has full access to its teeth and claws, its weapons. Hello. This video is sponsored by Beemix Pets. Are you looking for high quality cat collars at an affordable cost? Check out BeemixPets.com. Use coupon code KittenLife to get 20% off. How Cats Smell What Other Cats Are Saying. Cats have highly developed all factory senses, and they use these extensively and communicating with other cats. In fact, chemical conversation cues are the main ways your cat communicates with others. When you think of cat scent you might wrinkle your nose at the memory of cat urine. And yes, urination or spraying is one of the more obviously noticeable methods of communication. What is it communicating to other cats? Spraying marks territory and shows dominance. Cats have much less pungent forms of scent talk. A key form of feline communication is through pheromones.  How and where cats deposit the pheromones and oils from these scent glands signal different meanings. Cats use scent to identify members of the same colony, define territory, create familiarity, announce reproductive status, learn more about unfamiliar cats in the environment, self soothe, bond with another, or as a form of covert aggression. For example, when your cat scratches on objects for marking purposes, she also leaves deposits from the scent glands in her paw pads, establishing her territory. Cats use the scent glands around their face as a bonding gesture and to show affection, through rubbing heads with each other or headbunting. Cats exchange scents when rubbing their bodies along each other. Communication between cats can be rather nuanced, and experts have not mapped out the entire dictionary of the feline language. Still, if you pay attention to your cat's interactions with other cats, keeping in mind the translations that were mentioned earlier, you'll probably be able to hear what your cat is saying. If you enjoyed this video, kindly press the like button. Also don't forget to subscribe with notifications on, so that you don't miss out on videos like this. Thank you for watching.


Today, we are going to have an admixture of novel concepts, controversial views, and plain, old-fashioned, in-your-face defiance by your favorite professor of psychology, blue professor of psychology, Sam Vakning, the author of Malignant Self-Love, narcissism, revisited. And we start with a concept borrowed from neo-Marxist, no less, neo-Marxist socio-economic theory. The word is interpolation. It is a process first described in socio-economic settings by one Louis Althusser, a French, his name notwithstanding, a French psychologist and philosopher who ended up in a mental asylum, as most psychologists and psychiatrists should. Okay, Shoshanim, interpolation in Althusser's work is a different thing, and I recommend that you watch the video I've made about Althusser. But interpolation, the way I use it, is when someone reacts to other people's wishes, other people's desires, other people's urges and expectations, as if these were his own. I'm going to repeat this. When you react to other people's desires, wishes, hopes, dreams, demands and especially expectations, as if these were yours, not theirs, but your own, you are being interpolated. So now you know what's happening to you. You're being interpolated. And then if you act accordingly, the interpolation is translated into action.  This expectation becomes yours. You experience the other person's expectation as if it were your own.  So this is interpolation. It's a form of mind control. It's a very subtle state of hypnosis or trance or brainwashing, if you wish. People-pleasers are the reification of this process, the reification, the embodiment of interpolation. But interpolation makes an appearance in many other mental health disorders, such as, for example, dependent personality disorders, a.k.a. codependency, or borderline personality disorder. Interpolation appears also in psychotic disorders, anxiety disorders, and to cut a long story short, in many other mental health issues. Interpolation is a way of taking over your mind. By forcing you to adopt the expectations and wishes of another person, when that other person renders you an extension of themselves. Narcissists do it very often, and so do psychopaths to a lesser extent borderlines. Now, masochists, the self-destructive, psychopathic narcissists, and people-pleasers are different breeds. They're different kinds of people. Sometimes they behave in the same ways, so it's difficult to tell them apart. I repeat, masochists, people who are self-destructive, psychopathic narcissists, and people-pleasers behave in ways which resemble each other. And so they're difficult to tell apart, but they all interpolate other people and are interpolated by other people. In other words, the dominant interactive process, the dominant interpersonal process is interpolation. Whether active or passive is a recipient. Start with masochists. Masochists crave pain. They desire to be hurt. They want to be hurt. The opposite of pain aversion, pain averse, the opposite of hurt averse. The pursue, the pursue agony and torment. The engineer, the orchestrate incremental situations whose outcomes are agonizing, mortifying and humiliating, but never life-threatening. Masochism is not about suicide. Masochism is about staying alive to experience the pain and in a very perverted way, a very sick way, enjoy it. Okay, so these are masochists. What about self-defeating, self-loathing, self-destructive folk? What about these kind of people? These kind of people act out recklessly, patulently and defiantly in order to sabotage their best interests and their well-being in a decisive, self-harming, self-trashing and almost suicidal manner. So one could say that self-sabotaging, self-defeating, self-harming, self-trashing and self-destructive people are at the very end of the spectrum of masochism. The same way psychopaths are at the end of the spectrum of antisocial personality disorder. These people are exaggerated masochists, masochists whose pain is so extreme that it leads to life-threatening situations. You could say that self-destructive and self-defeating and self-trashing and self-harming people are suicidal masochists. On to the third kind, psychopathic narcissists. Psychopathic narcissists puppeteer others. They play with others. They brainwash others. They co-opt and manipulate others into goal-oriented scenarios that superficially appear to be masochistic. But in reality, these scenarios are actually sadistic or, in the best case, self-efficacious as far as a psychopathic narcissist is concerned. In other words, the psychopathic narcissist would engineer or orchestrate situations that would cause him pain. And so, superficially on the surface, it would appear to be that he is a masochist, but actually is not, nor is he self-destructive or self-defeating. These scenarios, these scripts, these theatre plays, organized by the psychopathic narcissists, intend to fulfill some goal, they are self-efficacious. They are ends-oriented. The narcissist wants to accomplish something. And so he inflicts pain on himself because that's the inevitable cost of obtaining the goal. Sometimes there's sadism involved. Psychopathic narcissists enjoy inflicting pain on other people, even if it means that they have to pay a price in terms of being hurt. That's how twisted the minds of psychopathic narcissists are. And finally, people-pleasers are conflict-averse. They need to be needed. They need to be accepted and to belong. They are self-sacrificial. And so again, superficially on the surface, one could be excused if one were to confuse people-pleasers with masochists. People-pleasers are sacrificial, so they endure pain and suffering exactly like masochists. But as distinct from masochists, they enjoy this role. They find it gratifying. They pursue it. The masochist inflicts pain on himself and also enjoys it, but these are isolated occurrences more like a life strategy.  And so the way to do this is to sacrifice one's best interests and to have no boundaries. You see the distinction. The people-pleaser pursues his or her best interests. He's the opposite of a masochist. He loves himself or herself, but the people-pleaser engages in dysfunctional strategies to realize this self-love by giving up, by surrendering, by being submissive, by echoing other people, by oversharing, by succumbing, by being interpolated all the time, adopting other people's expectations as one's own. Let's take an example which I think will disambiguate all this and make it very clear. And again, I'm going to take a very extreme example. A masochist would push his girlfriend to cheat on him in order to endure exquisite torment. The torture of witnessing his girlfriend with another man, if the masochist is a male, this torture is delectable, is desirable, is wonderful, is ambrosia, is nectar to the masochist's soul. Yes, he wallows in excruciating pain, but this pain is a kind of delicacy that masochist pursues relentlessly, almost like an addiction. So the masochist would send his girlfriend to another man to cheat on him, if he is a cuckold, for example, because it gives him pleasure. Ultimately, he transitions through the pain into a state of elation. Now imagine the self-destructive thought. The self-destructive thought will act the same way. He will push his girlfriend to cheat on him, but then he will proceed to break up with her, or to divorce her if he is married. In other words, the self-defeating, self-harming type would push his girlfriend to cheat on him in order to destroy his life, in order to devastate himself, in order to ruin the institutions to which he adheres, such as his marriage. He will shatter his life against the rock of pain and infidelity. He will leverage his partner's disloyalty in order to accomplish the goal of dismantling his own life. The psychopathic narcissist will send his girlfriend to cheat on him, exactly like the masochist, exactly like the self-destructive thought. They all will act, all three will act in the same way. So that's why when looking from the outside is very difficult to tell which is which and what is what.  But he would do this in order to get rid of his intimate partner, to get rid of an unwanted and burdensome relationship. The psychopathic narcissist will leverage the partner's shame and guilt to get rid of her. So it's goal-oriented. The means justify the end and the cost of the inevitable pain of having to watch your girlfriend with another guy is acceptable. This is the only way to ensure or to secure her future absence and without any stalking or demands or recriminations. So this is an example of the psychopathic narcissist acting the same way as the masochist does, in the same way as the people-pleaser does, but for completely different reasons. Very selfish, very interest-oriented. And finally, the people-pleaser will simply permit his intimate partner, permit his girlfriend to sleep with others, just so as to make her happy. The people-pleaser would want to please her partner, please her partner or his partner by allowing him or her to sleep with other people. Again, we have the same behavior, honey, you can sleep with this guy, but the reason is, honey, I want you to be happy and I want you to stay with me and I want us to be together. If this is the price I have to pay, I will do it because I'm a people-pleaser. Same behavior, four different explanations. Pushing your intimate partner to cheat on you, the masochist to enjoy the pain, the people-pleaser to please the partner, the psychopathic narcissist to get rid of the partner, and the self-destructive type to destroy his marriage or his relationship.  What about respect? What about boundaries? What about rules of conduct? What about codes? Social and others? What about scripts? What happens to all these things?  They don't know how. They have no self-respect, so how could they possibly respect other people?  And don't expect the mentally ill to not breach your boundaries. Of course, they will, time and again. They are unboundary. Mentally ill people have no boundaries, or they have porous boundaries. Mentally ill people are hurtful. They cause pain, hurt people hurt people, because they fail to perceive the separateness of others.  They don't exist, actually, except through the agency of other people. And existing through the agency of other people means you have no boundaries. You don't know where you stop and other people begin.   They're self-centered. They're entitled.  Everyone else is to blame for the egregious misconduct of the mentally ill. It's known as alloplastic defenses. So I'll give you two tips from the art of psychotherapy. Number one, if a certain action or some inaction has outcomes, these consequences are intended, whether consciously or unconsciously. People are often only dimly aware of the full range of their motivations and usually they get it wrong. But when people make behavioral choices to act or to refrain from acting, they actually seek and they intend the most likely outcomes. Even when and if they are not aware of the desired ends of the consequences of the outcomes, even when they vehemently deny any such intention and motivation, that's precisely what they want. If someone acts in a certain way and there's a likely outcome, they want the outcome. If someone does not act and there's a likely consequence to not acting, they want this consequence. Don't listen to any denials. Don't believe any disavowals. If someone acts or does not act, they want the likely consequences of their choices. Example, if you act in a way that imperils and dangers a long-held relationship, it is because you want this relationship over. You wish to extricate yourself from this relationship. You want out. This is your way of sabotaging the relationship. If you don't act in a certain way and it would mean that the relationship is endangered, the same, you want it over. The second tip I'm going to give you, what clients say in therapy matters far less than why they choose to say what they are saying. What content do the clients select? What do they elect to disclose? What do they omit and why? What words do they employ and why do they choose these words? Why do so disclose anything in a particular timing? The subtext, the hidden occult text matters much more than the overt text. Speech acts need to be deconstructed to teach us anything meaningful about the client. And one of the dominant features of deconstructing speech acts is isolating interpolations. The way other people's expectations, wishes, dreams, hopes, demands, weigh on us, penetrate our minds, fashion our choices and decisions and actions and ultimately become an integral part of our identity. This, by the way, is Lacan.


So, hi everyone, welcome to Madrid. Those of you who are coming from other parts of the globe. It's a great pleasure being here to try to spend this time joining this absolutely amazing event in Madrid. And I think this is a very, very important issue for the future of our region. So I'm just here to try to let you know about something that politicians are thinking in Madrid about this. I am not indeed a member of the government, but I am the leader of the Social Democratic Party here in Madrid region. So what I'm trying to do in my work is try to get Madrid where I think we should be. So this is not really easy because the politician now is very opposite. It's a lot of angry. And this is something we have to deal with. But... Can I continue in Spanish? Yes, you can. In total, the situation we have today in Spanish politics, which is very complicated and there is a lot of confrontation, it is assumed that many times we forget about the issues that are really important and interesting. And as for me, politics, which is an activity that I am going to dedicate a lifetime to, is basically to improve the quality of life. That people can live better, can share, enjoy and improve their living conditions. And I think Madrid has a huge potential to generate this and to achieve the three great goals that must be that quality of life, a sustainable economic growth and a good coexistence. That is what for me is ideal. It is about seeing the potentials that Madrid has and how to achieve it. And I think Madrid is a region that has a huge potential to really bet on the sectors of economic development with added value. And this has a lot to do with what you are discussing here today. How do we achieve this? Well, by putting the instruments that depend on the government, in this case of the Madrid community, to the service of the development of those productive sectors. Look at Madrid, which is a modern and innovative region of vanguard, because it has some data that make us reflect on what is the way in which that potential is being exploited. For example, only 5% of the new jobs that have been created in Madrid in the last year have to do with the industry. 90% have to do with the services sector, basically the hostility, restoration, the hotel sector, which I don't say are important sectors, of course it has a great weight in the Madrid economy, but clearly limiting 5% of the creation of jobs in the industry sector is an important limitation. Madrid, today, is the region number 79 of all Europe in investment, innovation and development, the 79. A region that is the capital of a great country like Spain and that should be breathing to be among the 10, 15 first without any doubt. We are also the region 93 in labor productivity. This has to do with the data that I gave you before. It has a great labor weight sectors that are not highly productive and with added value. We are the region 93 in the region 100 of Europe, for example, in registered patents, which also has a lot to do with the ecosystem that we have generated and with that ability to innovate and to put talent and knowledge to the service. How do I think that a government, a region like Madrid can influence and develop those sectors of added value in the future? Well, basically, through my obsession, which is education. I think there are many urgent problems, surely health, waiting lists that affect us a lot in the day-to-day, but seeing with perspective how to get all that potential in terms of quality of life, economic growth, sustainable social equation, I think that education is the key sector. And how to bet on education in the sector of which you are talking today? Well, trying to break a damn triangle that we have in Madrid. We are a region with 30% youth unemployment, 30%. We are a region in which this last year there were almost 40,000 young people who did not have access to the square that they wanted for professional training. And at the same time, we are a region where there are large, medium-sized companies, especially sectors of innovation and added value of sectors of the future that tell us that they are not professional, trained with sufficient technical skills in their area of development. How can it be? 30% of youth unemployment, many young people who want to train precisely in these sectors and cannot, and companies of all size, of sectors of the future that are not professional. How to break this triangle? There is only one way to break it, which is education. Education, education, education. How to break through the educational public system that instead of leaving young people without an FPP square that they have available, those professional training squares precisely in these sectors? How, through the public system, also investment is strategically bet by these sectors of the future? It seems absolutely key to me. And that's why I loved the invitation that you made me and to be able to participate here, more than to give you these three painted on perspective, also to learn and to be able to spend a while within the political debate that we have today in Spain with so much intensity, to be three quarters of an hour in this wonderful bubble in which you are really, I thank you very much. Therefore, we take decisions in educational matter. We take decisions that bet by the values that you represent here today with this initiative, which are, first, the economy of knowledge, second, the interconnectivity, third, sharing. How can you really grow in a collaborative way? Those are the keys, the skills that without any doubt, if we bet on them, they will allow us to generate that sustainable economic growth, that social issue and that quality of life that we talk about. So what I would ask you and forgive that you come here invited and above all, I ask you for things, is that you really learn a lot also at a political level. I feel that I try to go to almost everything that is invited to me, especially when it comes to things that come out of the political field of day to day. And honestly, I think that in the sector in which you work and in the sector in which you are studying and deepening, there is quite a distance with the day to day of public management and of political management. Sometimes it even seems to me that they were like two worlds separately, that politics is in charge of the things of the politicians, that the other path does not understand them very well and does not know why they waste time on that. And on the other hand, the development of these sectors of the future of innovation that are so generating and can generate well-being, they go through a lane that the politicians do not understand, nor interest us, nor worries us many times. That is why I ask you that just as you have done this and that you have invited me so that you can listen now this time that we can share and I can learn from you, that you do not stop doing it, you do not stop squeezing the politicians and making them see the importance that sectors like these have to develop. The importance that they have in the economy of knowledge, the importance that they have in the collaborative economy, the importance that they have in the power to put at the disposal of everyone what are advances that have generated human beings that with their illusion and their ambition what they want is that everything continues to grow and evolve on the right path. Without the systems with which you work and that you are studying today and deepening, there would never have been an advance in humanity. Of course, we have to have balance in the economic system in which we live, in the market economy, in which we have to also defend the interests of those who want to invest, to generate development and business, but an element with the power that this has for the growth absolutely democratized, horizontal and transversal, to me it really seems to me a luxury that there are so many people with so much talent, with so much illusion that you dedicate not only to this in the day to day, but also to organize seminars like these in which the politicians we can give three brushes in five minutes and above all we can listen and learn a lot from you. So I have said that it is a thousand thanks in the good time of the organization and that you continue to go ahead and press with strength. Thank you very much. I don't know if there are questions, I love them very much, let's go. I have especially come to... to that, I mean... Yes, no, I can be here up to six minus five. In fact, I'm going to be here up to six minus five, although I don't have any more questions. I will sit down and listen to what is there. I mean, don't cut for me. Okay. Well, I am president of a cooperative. The cooperative movement has been running for more than 100 years and I think it is quite aligned with the principles of the open source and all the free culture and all that. So beyond the political wills that may be in one moment or another, in the end, I mean, if all this is not transferred to the law, here we can be talking about it, but my question was in relation to why, despite the fact that now, in the new government, most of the parties are in favour of the open source, why not in the new cooperative law or in the public sector in universities, why is it not being strengthened and defending itself in the law? Yes, that's a very good question. And there is the state and the community area in Madrid. Precisely in the community of Madrid, we work in a cooperative law and social economy, which is a bit the name and the complete paragraph that was given to it, with the aim of powering institutionally that the cooperatives work and can operate. In the specific field of the open source, I think it is at the national level where a legislation should be set, as I say, that of course protects in a market economy to whom it wants to invest to get a performance without investment, I agree with that, I respect it and I form part of a market economy. But that does not take away, so that both legislatively and especially through the political action of a minister like the Ministry of Science, which I think has been taking and will have much more prominence in the coming years, can be established not only the legal system, but a system that allows all those who are through cooperatives or individually or through all the systems in which you want to contribute to that process of creation. Let's say, an open and institutionalized field in which to be able to contribute in a safe and organized way. And I think there is the Minister of Science Diana, who is also a woman who, apart from being young, was an mayor and she understands very well as anyone who has been mayor, as in my case, what a community means and what it means to share and to live in a community and that each one contributes to that community and that makes us all enjoy and grow. I think it goes in this line. All its strategy of innovation and development goes very well in the sense of trying to establish programs that allow the state to invest in supporting those cooperatives or let's say the community has something in return, which is precisely the concept of what you are working on. It has the limitations it has, and let's be honest, that the market economy has some protections that are supposed to be the obvious counterweight that you all know. But the key to get there is precisely the support of the public sector. If the public sector supports, participates and collaborates with the cooperatives and those who say this, let's say that the public sector happens to be, in terms of market economy, the owner of that collective knowledge generated and it happens to be an active capital of all Spanish society. I think that's the way to not only legislatively, but from the point of view of the development of action in the day to day, to be able to institutionalize participation in these types of initiatives and that is universalized thanks to the state that is part of it. It has its reticence, because there will be a lot of people who will say, I don't want to participate in an initiative in the state, I want to participate with other people in a system in which we advance together, but not in the lane you set me up. And that's where the state has to have the flexibility to do it as open as possible so that it can be integrated. I think that's the perspective that can help us to pass the legal limitation that the market economy establishes so that the one who invests and wants to bring income to its product. I think we should go there, the line in which we draw the paths. I don't say it's simple, but I do think it's the path. The participating state therefore collectives that knowledge and that creation. I have been involved in some processes of good, of discussion with parties, for example, to define laws related to technology, especially with free software, and it is always difficult to find interlocutors in the parties that understand the issue as sufficient as to really be able to find a joint solution. And I think that in the case of Clal, at least to a certain point, something similar is happening. In general, parties are not in economic issues, in legal issues, it is not difficult to find interlocutors, but not in technological issues. And especially when you are in technological issues, social implications, economic implications, how do you think you could improve this action? Because it happens to all parties, not only yours, I am aware of that, because I have found it, but it happens to everyone in general. It is very difficult to find people with enough knowledge or who have had time to form, or who have helped the party to form whatever, and I am now talking about the public administration, which also, especially the political parties. It is a very good question.  A political party is human beings, normal citizens, in this Spanish case, who join because they have values in common, because they have a horizon that they believe that it is the one that must walk together, and there they join lawyers, they join economists, they join, I don't know, administrators of the administration. Something is happening, so people are not joining the innovation of technology, because you are right. Let's say that in the sense of the political parties in Spain today, and I don't care practically what the party is, we have not managed as parties to seduce that they are incorporated with total naturalness, just like a lawyer or a teacher or a doctor is incorporated, because they have them in the parties that are incorporated into the world of technology. That is why my initial reflection is about the two paths. As I have the feeling that for politicians, technology is something very unknown and complex, and, as little as that, it will not influence us in our day to day of the things of the politicians. And that for the technological sector, politics is something that, if it is impossible to explain to them if they understand nothing, or that they are going to change anything, and do what they do, we are going to be able to continue working, as it is not seen by the importance and the potential that politics could have to put instruments there. I, from the malapidary phrases that I have heard, it is a meeting with start-ups, very dynamic and people who have moved a lot, one who told me, if I had to create my start-up again, I would never do it in Spain. That is the hardest thing I have heard in a... I don't know if it is the hardest, because I have already seen some things, but it generated a void and a gap, to say that if we are not understanding this, that is, if people who are in the innovation, in the avant-garde, creating what will undoubtedly be the future of our children, and we do not understand that that is what they are thinking, is that we are very lost. That is why the allegation that was said is that you should give us a hand, honestly. I, all the things that there are and forums and spaces in which I know that I am a strange creature, I mean, I am an lawyer, economist, doing business in the state or terror, you know, that this man who is going to know about technology, and he is going to worry about it. And one of the most curious things in which I participated is a forum that assembled Aspen, of technology and society, that they precisely tried to do that, led by Javier Solana, five, six, seven years ago, and in which I was the only politician who put me in that forum, and then they achieved all those startups, journalists of technology, always came from international people, sessions with a profile and a little bit more different. And it worked for me, I do not say that to learn, because I do not have the ability or the ability or the base to learn now about technology. But yes, at least to generate the doubts that I need to have when I am thinking about a political program, or who has to help me to define what Madrid we want within 15 years. And to be clear that I come here, not only because Dani is my good friend and invited me, but because as soon as he told me the subject, you said that I had to go there, listen, understand and understand that. Just as I come here and make an effort, you can ask questions that I have no idea of answering you, and that is always a brownie to talk about. I also ask you and I do it where I go, that you make the effort to give us a hand also when we ask for help, because the one we have both lawyer by square meter and neither technological innovator is above all our fault, but to solve it it is also necessary that in the moments in which we ask for you to give us a hand, you are there. And I have to admit that in this last electoral process I asked for a lot of help from many people and the sector responded. And the truth is that I am very happy of how some people involved helped me to expand perspective and also start to make pedagogy in politics about this. So this is the complexity we have, the limitations I have for today and the help I ask of you humbly, the truth. Hello, good afternoon. Well, a little bit on the line of what Jesus has said and from the perspective of a public employee who has been working on these issues for 20 years they are free and what has cost him the most, sometimes it was precisely to convince the layer, not the technique, but the policy, we invite you to participate in many activities of training that we do, those of us who promote free support, I am sure that later you could translate it to these political initiatives. Exactly, exactly. Well, I thank you very much. And of course, tell me to participate, to learn and to support it because I think it is a line in which we also have to do the pedagogical policies. I mean, this is not a topic. Look, in the Assembly I discuss what I know of the Mayan policy every Thursday with Isabelia Zayuso, who is the president. I do the control and I always talk to her about education, of industry, for example, I asked her today that although with what happened yesterday and this, at the end of the debate she has gone through the issues of, well, what happened yesterday, but I always try to put those issues, education, the professional training plan that we present that is precisely going to generate skills in this field to many young people and not so young people that we believe that they must have that opportunity. And I try to put it in public debate. And I think it is something that, although in the short term, it seems less sexy than insulting someone or telling him that it is such a thing. I think in the middle term it generates much more confidence and addiction in most of society. I mean, I think that most of the population does understand that the important thing for the future of their children goes here. It goes through education, because of the model of sustainable, productive economy we want to have in the region. I think they understand it. I'm not going to open up the pages of the newspapers talking about that tomorrow, because I haven't said, I don't know what word in the congress of the deputies. I also understand that and I assume it humbly. But I think that in the middle term also politics has to do pedagogy on this so that in the end it is a topic where people see that we work on it. Because if what is on one side and on the other are politicians who don't talk about this, of course people choose it, but we have to give them the opportunity to have someone talk about it. If you watched some of the last autonomic campaigns in Madrid in the electoral debate with the only one who talked about this, it was me. And sometimes it seemed to me an extraterrestrial because there are all the typical topics that everyone knows about. And when I was talking about technology, about innovation, that Madrid really has a potential to attract talent, this is a regional canyon. Here we have the climate, the connections of high speed, a first level airport, business schools, the three of the best in the world, public universities, which with a little investment would be a total international top. We have the climate, the language, a capital region of a country like Spain that has a connection with Europe, Africa, Europe with Latin America. So we have everything so that the decision of the location of talent is Madrid. So that people are bright, powerful, who really want to contribute, would come to Madrid the opportunity, would run. And that's where I think there is the challenge and the potential of Madrid. And speaking of that, it may seem like a political course, but I also do it trying to do pedagogy, that is, where you invite me, we are delighted to go there to learn and support you.