Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov - The Fight for Fair Redistricting (ft. Texas Rep. James Talarico)
Episode Date: July 18, 2025Scott and Jessica sit down with Texas representative James Talarico, the lawmaker and devout Christian whose speeches from the state house floor have gone viral. They talk about how his faith inspires... his political views, and why he might be a role model for the future of the Democratic Party. Plus — Rep. Talarico discusses the looming threat of redistricting and the response to the recent devastating floods in his home state. Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov. Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Follow Raging Moderates, @RagingModeratesPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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In 2023, a 54-year-old man named William Woods told police that his identity had been stolen.
But there was a problem.
Another man said that he was the real William Woods and it was his identity that had been
stolen.
There's no way that two human beings could have the same name, the same date of birth,
the same social security number.
So someone clearly was not
telling the truth.
Listen to our latest episode on criminal, wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.
And I'm Jessica Tarloff.
We're joined today by Texas State Representative James Talarico.
James is a Democrat and a devout Christian, and he's incorporated tenets of his faith
into his impassioned opposition to several Republican-led bills in Texas, such as the
bill to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.
You may have seen him or seen a clip of him on TikTok.
I love the Ten Commandments. I've tried to build my life on the Ten Commandments.
But what does it mean to truly live out those Ten Commandments?
Love your neighbor as yourself. But if this bill passes, we're going to put a poster
on the wall of that classroom that says their faith
is not welcome here.
I'm voting no on this bill, not despite my faith, but because of it.
In 2018, he became the youngest member of the state legislature at age 29.
And despite an attempt by Republicans to redistrict him out of politics, he has been in the state
house ever since.
Representative Talerico, we are just
thrilled to have you with us today. Thanks for being here.
Well, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here.
So let's pass right into it. You became the youngest member of the Texas Legislature getting
sworn in in 2018 before you turned 30. And yet it doesn't seem like you always wanted to enter
politics. You were a middle school teacher and you have a graduate degree from Harvard in education
policy. You seem like a young man with a purpose. Talk to us a little bit
about your calling to enter public service. What was your calling here and when did you
decide to do this? Obviously, you would have had a very lucrative career in whatever you
decided to do and you entered public service. Talk about your calling.
Yeah. You know, before I was a politician, I was a middle school teacher, as you mentioned.
I taught on the west side of San Antonio, which is a beautiful, historic Mexican-American
neighborhood.
It's also the poorest zip code in the state of Texas.
My students struggled every day to not just be a kid, which is hard enough, but struggled
to overcome poverty and systems that were
designed to hold them back.
And I taught in an underfunded Title I school on the West Side.
I had one classroom where there were 45 kids in one classroom and not enough desks for
all 45 kids.
I had students sitting on the air conditioning unit.
And my first year teaching was in the fall
of 2011, which was right after the Texas legislature cut about $5 billion from Texas public schools.
This was in the wake of the Great Recession and there was a budget shortfall and the legislators
at that time made the decision to balance the books on the backs of students and teachers.
And so I was kind of in the breach. I was in the trenches when those cuts were made.
And I saw the real human consequences of those legislative and budgetary decisions at the
state capitol. And so when a seat opened up in my hometown, I threw my hat in the ring. I was
28 years old, had never run for anything before. And I ran primarily on being an educator and the
fact that there weren't enough teachers at the decision-making table at the state capital. It
was mostly lawyers and bankers and doctors. There weren't nearly enough educators making
these decisions. And so I ran on being a
teacher and fixing our school finance system. And I'm four terms in and happy to say I've been able
to pass, even in a Republican dominated legislature, some pretty major bills to reform that school
finance system and help students and families across Texas. So that's how I went from a
classroom teacher
to sitting here in the state Capitol talking to you.
Thanks for that.
It's a difficult segue,
but I wanna talk a little bit about the floods
in your state over the last two weeks.
More than 100 people dead and even more
are still unaccounted for at the time of this recording.
It has been, just from an outsider standpoint,
it's been so hard to discern the signal from the noise
because this got politicized so severely, so quickly.
Would love to just get your take on what happened,
where the government showed up, where it didn't,
what can be learned, and any observations around
the politics involved here,
and what's required to move forward such that,
if possible, we can avoid this type of thing happening
again in Texas or anywhere else?
Well, the segue is natural because I got in this
to help kids and help students like the ones that I taught.
And so a lot of the issues that I work on at the Capitol
are issues that deal with kids,
usually kids who are in trouble,
whether it's kids who dropped out of high school,
kids who are in the criminal justice system,
that's a lot of the work I do.
And so what happened over the 4th of July weekend
in Hill Country, an area of the state that means a lot to me,
my family and I, my whole extended family,
we go camping
not too far away from Camp Mystic every summer. It's a gorgeous part of the state, particularly
the Guadalupe. I mean, this is just one of the most peaceful parts of Texas. It's why so many
church camps like Camp Mystic are located in this particular region because it's so beautiful and peaceful.
But we also know that that region is flash flood alley. It's particularly vulnerable
to these kinds of disasters. And this is not the first time this has happened in the Hill Country.
I think hopefully over the next few weeks and months, particularly as we have a special
legislative session here at the Texas Capitol, I am hopeful
that we're going to have investigations and we're going to have some hard conversations about
what should have happened. I think there's already been some reporting about shortages at the
National Weather Service and particularly the San Antonio Austin office, which was responsible
for this area of the state. And they had more staffing than a lot of the regional offices around the country, given the cuts made in the Doge process.
But we were missing a key position, which is the person who is responsible for taking those forecasts and communicating that to emergency managers on the ground.
That's a very important position that's not filled right now because of these budget cuts,
and it may have made a difference.
But there were other factors and the local community
in Kerrville and in the Hill Country had made
requests to the state government to fund some of
these flood mitigation systems
that could have saved people's lives.
We passed a bill in the Texas House, the lower chamber in the legislature.
We passed a bill that would have funded some of these emergency management systems,
and it was held hostage in the state Senate by the Lieutenant Governor of Texas
over a political disagreement on THC and whether or not that should be banned.
Again, the kind of gamesmanship we've gotten used to
at the national capital and here at the state capital,
unfortunately, but this is another example
of why this kind of politics cost people their lives
because we desperately needed those emergency management
systems and flood mitigation systems in place.
And it got held up because of petty politics.
So hopefully we're gonna find out more in the coming weeks as these
investigations start, but this was unacceptable.
And the loss of those little girls at that camp, as well as, as many other
Texans in the region should be unacceptable.
And, and we need to find out how we prevent this from ever happening again.
Yeah, it's particularly harrowing stuff.
I have two little girls who are not at camp age yet,
but when you're watching the scenes of the dads
and the grandfathers searching for any remnants of their kids,
like a bedazzled thermos,
your heart breaks in a way that you didn't even think was possible.
And the details that have been leaking out
that you didn't even think was possible. And the details that have been leaking out
paint a very bleak picture of leadership in the state,
ranging from 72 hours later that FEMA
was actually authorized to go in
to the $54 billion that had been requested
and that the money was actually allocated
from the Biden administration,
but some right-leaning folks
didn't want to take Biden money, whatever that means, it's American money. And I do hope that you get
all the answers that you need, but unfortunately it doesn't bring back lives like this. And
then as a, maybe in my own strange segue, like what Scott just did, you know, I saw
that Governor Abbott is calling this special legislative session, but he wants to talk about gerrymandering.
So it's not about what happened necessarily in the floods.
He wants to redistrict ahead of 2026.
Um, I know that redistricting affected you directly in 2021.
I'd love for you to talk about that.
And then also what you think the democratic response to these kinds of moves should be.
I saw Governor Newsom in California basically saying,
you have to fight fire with fire.
I'll redistrict California up.
We have two-thirds control of the legislature here.
If you want to win,
you have to play by those rules.
But what's your feeling about whether we could ever move past those kinds of politics?
Yeah. I think you illustrated
how this style of politics has really infected every level
and has real-world consequences with these floods here
in Texas and the lives that were lost.
You talked about the special legislative session.
This may be confusing to folks who don't live in Texas
or don't follow state politics. We are required to come into session for five months every other year to kind of
attempt to solve all the major problems that a big complex state like Texas faces.
It's kind of a crazy way to run a state, to be honest with you, because it's this mad dash
in this limited amount of time to figure out really complex, thorny
problems. Anyway, that's what we're required to do as legislators by our state constitution.
But the governor of Texas has the unique authority to call us into a special legislative session.
This is supposed to be for emergency situations. Obviously, the floods in the Hill Country
certainly rise to that level, and calling
us into a special legislative session to talk about flood mitigation, to talk about emergency
management, to talk about climate change and how we prepare for more extreme weather, as
we've seen across our state over the last decade or so.
That would be a good use of that special session power. But as you mentioned, Greg Abbott has decided to use the tragedy in the Hill Country as
a mask to play more petty destructive politics.
So on the special session agenda, you do have these flood prevention and emergency management
issues at the top of the agenda, but then you read the rest of the agenda, and it is some of the worst parts of culture
war politics and power politics.
And the most alarming is this redistricting.
Your viewers probably know that every 10 years when a census comes out, we adjust the legislative
boundaries to make sure everybody gets roughly the same representation. And there are lots of problems with that system. But what's happening
here in Texas is that Donald Trump has demanded that Greg Abbott and the Republicans here in the
state Capitol redraw the lines in the middle of a decade, in the middle of the standard timetable.
It's a blatant naked power grab ahead of those 2026 midterm
elections. I mean, this could decide who actually holds power in Congress rather than the election
results next year. I mean, it could be these attempts to rig the game and to cheat. There's
no other way to describe it. They're trying to cheat by redrawing these
districts to give themselves an advantage because they think they're going to lose in the upcoming
midterms. So again, this is just politics at its worst. It is the perfect example of why the system
is so broken. We can talk about personalities. We can talk about electing new people, but until
we fix the broken political system, we're not going to see different results. Even if we put in new people into office, even if we put good people into office,
the system itself is deeply broken and not serving the people's interests.
LESLIE KENDRICK That's quite obvious. And there haven't been
many bright spots, I would say, for the Democrats, certainly since the election. It's been a lot of
self-flagellation, where do we go wrong? But you have stood out as a bright spot for the Democratic Party.
And I see a lot of threads on social media, you know,
who do you think are the best Democratic communicators?
And it's usually, you know, folks who've been around for a while.
We talk about Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom already mentioned,
and James Tallarico is popping up on those lists now.
And I'd love to hear what it feels like to be the it guy, to go viral like that.
You sat down with Joe Rogan while we're taping that interview isn't out yet.
But what has that all felt like?
And what are you looking forward to with your new democratic fame?
Well, I mean, again, you have to be pretty nerdy to be paying attention to state-level
politics.
This is a nerdy podcast, so you're completely in the right place.
Yes.
I'm very thankful to have nerds across the state and across the country pay attention
to the work we're doing.
And again, this is a team effort.
I work with some of the most talented young staff members here in the state capitol.
I am the front man
for the work that we do. But I think it reveals a hunger for a new generation of leaders in the
Democratic Party, people who are younger, people who know how to communicate in this new media
environment. I think it also reveals a hunger for people who come from non-traditional backgrounds.
So I mentioned to you that we usually get a lot of lawyers and business people,
which they deserve a seat at the table too.
But I think having a middle school teacher get into politics,
there are a lot of things about being a teacher that prepare you for this work.
You mentioned communication.
I mean, I learned how to boil down really complex things for my students to understand.
So I got pretty good at that.
And that has served me well in this position.
I often joke that teaching middle school is good preparation for politics, but it's also
true.
There are real advantages when you come from some of these different backgrounds.
I mean, I have one of the best legislators here in Texas, my colleague Donna Howard. She is so effective and she comes from nursing.
She's one of the only nurses to serve in this body.
And that I think does give you a different value set because you're coming from a service
background.
That's why I think you see veterans who are really successful if they can get elected
to office because they are servant leaders.
And anyway, so I do think that's, that's part of what people are looking
for is younger folks, but also people who are not coming from the typical kind of pipelines
into into politics.
Okay, let's take a quick break. Stay with us.
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Welcome back. Representative, talk to us about your view on school vouchers.
Yeah. So I led the fight against Greg Abbott's private school voucher scam. And I call it a
scam because just like any scam, it's something that sounds good. The slogans sound good. It
sounds appealing. But once you read the fine print, you realize that it's a ripoff, right?
Once you read the terms and conditions, you realize that this is actually going to do you
harm. And that's exactly what is the case
with this voucher program,
because what it does is it takes money
out of our underfunded neighborhood public schools
and sends that money to unaccountable,
oftentimes wealthier families
who already have their kids in private school.
Usually, you know, this is sold in terms of school choice,
which sounds good. I
think we're probably all for school choice. We need more flexibility in our system, more options
for parents within our system. We need to customize to meet a student's needs. So school choice is good
and we want more school choice. But this is not school choice. It's the school's choice,
because private schools are the ones who determine who gets in. So,
essentially, we are giving taxpayer dollars to institutions that can discriminate, can pick and
choose what students are let in. And oftentimes these private schools don't even have a lot of
open seats. So, what you're doing is just using taxpayer dollars to subsidize the private schooling
of the wealthy few, of people who
already can afford to do this.
And so unfortunately this passed here in Texas by a very narrow margin.
And once it's implemented, I think it will become a historic, grotesque transfer of wealth
from the bottom and the middle to the top.
It'll be taking the tax dollars of nurses and plumbers
and electricians and giving those tax dollars
to families who are making $300,000 a year,
$500,000 a year, a million dollars a year.
They're gonna get a coupon to save money
on their private school bills.
And so this is again, an example of public policy
that is not serving the interests
of most people, and instead only helping the wealthy and the well-connected.
So as a rabid atheist, I didn't think one of my favorite elected officials would be
a devout Christian. And I think that a lot of us become somewhat cynical about religion's
role in politics. It feels like on the right, whenever I hear
someone invoke the name of Jesus, they're about to recommend cutting food stamps for single mothers.
Yeah.
And I do think on the left, there is a hostility towards religion and an inability to see how
important 98% of the efforts or the community that religious institutions, you know, add to the fabric of America.
And you have made your faith central to your views and your rhetoric. Talk a little bit about how your faith informs
your decision-making and your political views.
Well, my my granddad was a Baptist preacher in Laredo, Texas, which is on the border between Texas and Mexico.
And at a very young age, he taught me that Christianity is a simple religion.
He always clarified that doesn't mean it's an easy religion, but it is a simple religion
because Jesus gave us two commandments as Christians, to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Those were the two commandments that when they're brought together are the greatest
commandment for Christians.
And so Christianity has this spiritual dimension in that first commandment to love God or that's
a very charged word, but whatever you call the ground of being, I use the term God, but
you may use another term,
but to love that and to have a relationship with that, that's the spiritual dimension.
And then Christianity has this political dimension because, you know, at its most
fundamental level, politics is just how do we treat our neighbors? How do we treat the people
we live together with in a city or a state or a country. And so both having this spiritual
and this political dimension is the faith I was raised on. It's why I became a public school
teacher. It's why I became a nonprofit leader. It's why I ran for office. It's why I do the
work I do in the state capital. I mean, through public policy, I'm trying to make life easier
for my neighbors. I've passed bills to fund schools,
to reduce prescription drug costs,
to expand access to childcare, reform our justice system.
I mean, all of these bills are an attempt to love my neighbor.
Obviously, loving my neighbor in a place
like the Texas legislature is not easy.
And when I begin to lose hope, which does happen quite a bit
in a place like this, I fall back on my faith. And in my second term, I thought about leaving public
service. I was kind of becoming worried that I wasn't making the impact, that this wasn't going
to be feasible to really do what I want to do in this broken system. And through a lot of
prayer and reflection, instead of leaving public service in that second term, I made the decision
to go to seminary. And so I am working right now to become a minister like my granddad.
And hopefully one day I'm doing that full time whenever I decide to eventually leave public
service. So as a seminary and an lawmaker, I'm at this intersection of faith and politics,
of loving God and loving neighbor.
And I'm just now starting to figure out
how these two commandments that we were given as Christians
by our teacher, how they sustain, challenge,
and enrich each other.
Because I do think you need both that inner life
and that outer life.
You need that balance to do
this kind of work. Anyway, that was a long answer about how my faith is really where my service and
my politics comes from. It wasn't a long answer, by the way. We've heard some really long answers
in life and I could listen to you talk about it for much longer. So I want to continue on this
trend and talk about how increasingly I see religion as being weaponized for whatever
you need that day.
Right?
Like Mike Pence is the devil.
Oh no, Mike Pence is the best Christian, right?
So we'll lean on that for that.
It seems like Pope Leo is taking a more overtly political role than perhaps past popes have, you know, early commands to
protect immigrants, right? Saying, you know, escort folks to their immigration hearings,
people saying you don't have to come to mass because ICE may show up to pick you up.
In those circumstances, those are inherently, you know, political doctrines that also relate to your
love thy neighbor.
How do you feel we could possibly inject some healthy
religion into our political discourse
that doesn't make it feel like a ping pong match, right?
Where it's just, you know, today I care, tomorrow I won't.
And I should expand this, Scott and I are both Jewish. Judaism and at least identifying with the Jewish faith has become
something that's also more prominent or in the discourse post-October 7th.
Pete Yeah, your last point is so important. You know, I've become an outspoken critic of
Christian nationalism, which we can get more into what that means and what that looks like,
but it is what I think of as an unhealthy relationship between Christianity and political
power. But that is not something that's unique to Christianity or unique to the United States.
We're seeing that in all kinds of faith traditions. I mean, we see Hindu nationalism in India. And so obviously with Islam
and Judaism and all of these beautiful faith traditions can be weaponized to protect people's
power and wealth. That is a tale of the oldest time of these traditions that are about love
and about justice and about mercy.
These beautiful traditions can be co-opted
by people in power.
It's important to remember
in the American civil rights movement
that Christianity was used by those defending Jim Crow,
but it was also used by those
who were trying to tear that system down.
Dr. King and Howard Thurman, Fannie Lou Hamer.
These people rooted their activism in their faith. them down. You know, Dr. King and Howard Thurman, you know, Fannie Lou Hamer. I mean, these people
rooted their activism in their faith. And that civil rights movement was explicitly Christian
in many ways, being rooted in the American South. So religion, just like politics, can be used to
help people and to love people, and it can also be used to hurt people. And that's why it's so
important, I think, to have these conversations about what healthy
religion looks like and what is a healthy relationship between church and state.
You know, as you all mentioned, progressives sometimes have this knee-jerk gut reaction
that we should just separate church and state, right?
And again, I'm a staunch defender of the separation of church and state in our First Amendment. I think it's a maybe the foundational freedom in this democracy. But
a separation of church and state in our constitution, legally, institutionally, is not the separation
of faith and politics. That's a very important distinction because we all bring our moralities
and our philosophies to our politics and faith is no different.
I mean, it's what motivated Dr. King and those civil rights leaders that I mentioned.
It motivated Cesar Chavez and Dorothy Day and Mr. Rogers.
I mean, all these people who made an impact in all kinds of sectors, politics included.
You know, we lost Jimmy Carter recently.
So people rooting their service and their activism and politics is not unusual and
it should be celebrated because hopefully we are rooting ourselves in something deeper,
whether it's a religious tradition or whether it's some ethical framework because, you know,
ethical humanists have done amazing work without any kind of theistic religion.
But we should be rooting our politics in something deeper. I think it's what people
are hungry for, honestly.
People don't want to see that you're loyal to your political party or you're not even
that you're loyal to a policy platform, but that you're loyal to something more timeless
and something deeper.
I do think that's what's missing in politics and we need more of that while we also need
to honor that institutional separation in our Constitution. Are you thinking of taking your approach to politics,
to the Senate race that's coming up?
These turns have been pretty hard.
Sorry. Yeah. No, we only have half an hour,
so we got to swerve quickly.
You're good. I am thinking about the Senate race. The legislative session, the regular session, just ended at
the beginning of June. We have this special session that I mentioned with some pretty
alarming things on the agenda coming up next week. So I have some kind of urgent business
before I can even start thinking about the next election. But I am having those conversations
about how I can best serve, whether it's continuing
the work I'm doing here or whether it's running for something else, including the Senate race.
I haven't made any decision on that front.
I'm a little distracted with what's coming down the pipe in the special session, but
I will make a decision this summer and I'll announce that whenever I, whenever I figured out myself.
Uh, representative, I saw, I read in your Wikipedia page.
I mean, someone looks at you, you look very healthy and strong.
Uh, that I think around the age of 30, you were diagnosed with type one diabetes.
And just given how much healthcare has been in the
news recently about so many people losing their Medicaid, just curious
your views on the healthcare portion
of this bill, looking at it from the other side.
When we tend to think about people who are not well
and need care, we think about seniors or people
who've had a really unfortunate health incident,
but you've experienced a healthcare system.
Share your thoughts with us about Medicaid and this bill.
You know, and this connects to the conversation we're just having about faith because when
you read the New Testament, you try to figure out like, what is Jesus spending most of his
time doing?
And it wasn't talking about religion, it wasn't teaching, it was healing people.
It was taking care of people who were sick.
And so that is central to my faith.
It's also central to most of the major faith traditions.
I mean, there is startling overlap, ethical overlap between the major world religions.
There is no major world religion that says when people get sick,
see how much money you can make off of them. That doesn't exist in any of our traditions.
It is very clear how we're supposed to take care of those who are sick or who are ill, who need our care. And as you mentioned, this is very
personal to me. So I was, I mentioned 28 years old when I first ran for the
Statehouse and I was running in a Republican district as a Democrat. It was
a district that hadn't voted for a Democrat in 30 years. Donald Trump had
won the district two years before I ran in it. And so I had to do some kind of unconventional things to win that district.
I had to reach people who normally wouldn't vote for a Democrat.
And so one of the things I did was I walked the entire length of my legislative district,
which is in Williamson County, Texas.
It was about 25 miles from Round Rock, Texas to Taylor, Texas.
And I walked the whole thing on foot.
I held town halls along the way.
I live streamed the whole thing on social media.
And so it was kind of this effort to get outside of the political bubbles, the consultants,
the whatever, and actually just be on the ground, talk to people in a very old fashioned
way.
And I wasn't worried about my ability to do the walk because I hike Big Bend every year,
and I love to run, to walk.
And so I felt pretty good about it.
Halfway through the walk, this was about 12 miles in,
I started to feel fatigued and nauseous.
I assumed I was dehydrated, so I chugged a bunch of water.
I kept going with
the walk because we were live streaming this thing and we had people waiting at the next
town hall. I threw up again on some train tracks outside of Taylor, Texas. I somehow
got through the last town hall, finished the walk. I got home and I fell asleep and I slept
for 36 hours straight. And my parents got concerned, they drove me to the ER
and the nurses checked my blood sugar.
I don't think I'd ever had my blood sugar tested before.
And they said a normal blood sugar is 100 or lower.
Mine was 900.
And they said, you're in a state of diabetic ketoacidosis
which leads to coma and death
if we don't get insulin into your body. And so they
rushed me to the ICU. I was in the ICU for four days. I was lucky to be alive because that's how
a lot of type 1 diabetics die. Got out of the ICU. I went to Walgreens to pick up my first 30-day
supply of this new medicine that I now needed to live every day. And it cost me $684 for that 30-day
supply of insulin. I put that on a credit card, honestly, because I didn't have that kind of money.
I still don't have that kind of money. But when I went on to win that seat, when I got elected,
I realized that this was not some free problem with me and my insurance. This was a problem that
diabetics were facing all over the state, all over the country.
And some of them were dying because they couldn't afford their insulin or they were
rationing their insulin. Again, in the wealthiest country in human history,
we had Texans who were dying because they didn't make enough money to buy this medication.
And then I realized that it was three companies that were controlling the entire insulin market and they were basically
Setting their prices together and they were price gouging people and so I put forward a bill to cap
Insulin at $25 per prescription. This really hadn't been done in many other places at that point. This was 2021 and
We got that bill passed with bipartisan support got assigned in law
And we got that bill passed with bipartisan support, got it signed into law. That eventually inspired the Biden administration to cap insulin for Medicare at $35.
And all of that together pressured the insulin companies to start slashing their prices,
which they've done over the last few years.
So it's just an example of, I think, what is possible when we center people's real needs,
whether they're Democrats or Republicans,
we push past the special interests because believe me, there were a lot of lobbyists
in that capital basement when I was testifying and putting my bill into the committee process.
It was just me standing up for all my constituents with this army of healthcare industry lobbyists.
I mean, all of them fought this tooth and nail but we got it through and
it is saving people lives in Texas and that's what you know gives me hope that there's still
good things that are possible in this system even though it is very deeply broken.
We talk a lot about struggling young men on the pod and I read that young men who are struggling
with some sort of mental health issue in Texas, somewhere between a half and
two thirds don't even seek treatment.
That's right.
And I would just love to hear your views on the
struggles that young men are facing in Texas and how
government can weigh in.
You know, and it's not just government.
I think government plays a role, but we've talked
about faith and there is really a dire need for,
I know some people have called it a third space,
where it's not the home and it's not work.
It needs to be something that's different
from all of those places,
where you can wrestle with these big questions
that I know that we all ask ourselves.
Sometimes it's late at night,
but it is, what does it mean to be a human being?
And what is this life all about?
And what is my purpose here?
And why am I here?
I mean, those are questions we all ask ourselves.
I do think that young men in particular
are asking those questions right now.
And there really is no, there aren't communities
for them to be able to do that
in a lot of parts of the state and the country
because our religious communities have atrophied
over the last few decades.
So I do hope young people, my fellow millennials, but also Gen Z, start to reclaim some of these
faith communities that are dying. There's churches on every street corner or mosques or synagogues
or temples that desperately need young people to come in and remake those institutions and their image. And I hope that happens in faith communities.
But to answer your question as an elected official, it's something I'm very concerned
about, particularly on the education front. When you look at the data, I worked with a
nonprofit called My Brother's Keeper, which is interested in helping young men of color,
young black men, Hispanic men. And I was working with that nonprofit a few years ago.
We were looking at the data and it turned out that it wasn't just black
and brown young men that were struggling.
It was also young white men.
And it was across all demographic groups, but it was young boys and young men who
were struggling academically and who were not making the jump from high school into
post-secondary,
whether that was a college or university or a technical school or whatever it is, young
boys and young men were not making that jump like their female counterparts.
And so I got interested through that nonprofit work.
And I actually just this past legislative session co-authored a bill with my Republican
colleague James Frank, who's very right-wing
conservative, but we have a productive collaboration. We've worked on a bunch of different issues,
and he and I are both concerned about this. And so we've put forward a bill that would
establish a state commission to study what policies can be changed to help young men
and young boys be able to succeed and fulfill their God-given
purpose. Because that is something I think the public sector, the private sector, faith
communities can all partner to help our young men achieve, is to realize what they're meant
to do and what that looks like in 2025. It's going to look different than what it looked like for our granddads
and our fathers. But there are also some things that connect us with men in our past. The ability
as a man to stand up for what's right, to protect people around you, particularly people who are
vulnerable, to speak truth to power. All of those values of masculinity, I think the things my dad taught me, I think
are still very relevant for young men in 2025. And so I hope this conversation continues.
And I hope elected officials start to play more of a role in seeing what public policies
can we change and adjust to help our young boys and young men.
Music to Scott's ears for sure. He said a lot of his buzzwords.
Professor, you've really put on this and I've learned a lot from you on this. So thank you
for your voice on this issue too. Thank you.
Thank you most of all for your time, Representative Talerico. It was great to meet you and we are
cheering you on and it's exciting to see a young Democrat that embodies so many of the lessons that
we are trying to learn from the last few elections.
So keep shining.
Well, and I thank you.
And I mentioned how Scott had influenced me, but I just want to tell you that you are so
fantastic on going into these places that Democrats don't go.
And people on my side of the aisle need to be more comfortable in these spaces.
And I've learned a lot from you and how you
navigate those conversations.
And I feel like all of us could learn a lot from, from
how you're doing this.
So anyway, thank you both.
Very generous.
Real quick, as we wrap up here, representative, can I
give you some advice on what I would do differently?
Scott.
Nothing.
Okay, good.
Nothing.
You are outstanding.
I forward TikTok reels of Cole Palmer,
the greatest Premier League football player in history,
dogs, jokes about being a dad,
and I send no joke clips of you to my sons.
You are a fantastic role model.
You are bringing religion and faith back into politics
in a healthy way.
You are outstanding.
I can't, I am so behind you,
so here for you. You are so important. You literally restore my faith in Texas
and democratic politics and the intersection between faith and public service. You are
outstanding and doing great work. Thank you so much.
outstanding and doing great work. Thank you so much.
Thank you all.
You're all too kind.
I really do appreciate it.
Okay.