Transcript: James Talarico Interview on Diary Of A CEO Podcast 

And he has certainly shaped me into the man that I am today.

From Aspiring Teacher to Lawmaker to Seminary Student

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:06:42 – 00:06:46) If I’d asked you at 16 years old, James, if I said, “What do you want to be when you’re older?” What would you have said?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:06:46 – 00:07:23) I had always been interested in education and being a teacher, particularly around social studies and history. My history teachers when I was growing up, they’re the ones who kept me on the straight and narrow. They got me interested in school. I was not the best student before then, and I struggled. To behave in class and be a good student. And I feel like it was my passion for social studies, for history, for reading that ultimately kept me on that track. And so from that point, I did want to go into being some kind of a teacher or a professor so I could do that for other people.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:07:23 – 00:07:27) I read that in high school you were voted most likely to become president.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:07:28 – 00:07:41) I think so. Yeah. When I was in school, I took on leadership roles. I was the president of our choir and the captain of our debate team. And so I think people saw that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:07:42 – 00:07:44) Are you interested in being president someday?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:07:45 – 00:08:17) I don’t think so. I struggled a lot with the decision to run for the US Senate. I had considered getting out of politics, I guess it was last summer. After my 4th term in the legislature was coming to a close. I finished the legislative session in May of last year, and I was really proud of the work that I had done in the legislature, but it is difficult work being in politics. And so you may know that I also made the decision to go to seminary.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:08:18 – 00:08:19) Which is Bible school?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:08:19 – 00:09:28) Yes. Yep. Studying to become a minister like my granddad. And this is something that I’d always kind of had in the back of my mind. And I remember meeting with my pastor who baptized me when I was 2 years old, has been my pastor since I was a little kid. And he told me that a campaign can also be a form of ministry if you’re giving people hope, if you’re bringing people together, if you’re helping folks see the image of God in each other and in themselves.

You can do that in a political context as well. And I had never really thought about that. I kind of kept these— these things felt very distinct to me. And he, of course, as a pastor, was helpful in getting me to reconcile these 2 vocations and see them as potentially one and the same. Given the state of our politics and our civic discourse, like the campaign that we’re building in Texas is giving people hope.

It’s bringing people into the process who haven’t been engaged before. It’s bringing people together across all the many divisions in our communities. And at its best moments, it does feel like that we’re doing something really special and important.

Why Talarico Says He Won’t Run for President

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:09:29 – 00:09:33) Why would that exclude you from someday also pursuing the role of presidency? It sounds like—

JAMES TALARICO: (00:09:33 – 00:11:09) It may not. I guess what I’m saying is that I think there’s a problem with people who are in politics for too long. I’ve already said that I’ll only be serving 2 terms if I’m blessed to get the opportunity to serve for 2 terms, because I do feel like when people hang on to these positions or are trying to reach for the next position, then everything becomes about self-preservation.

It becomes about accumulating power rather than serving people. And those are temptations, right, for every elected official between those 2 goals. And from what I’ve seen being in this now for 8 years is the longer you’re in this, the more you kind of get— the office and your identity become kind of merged. Into one thing, right? Where being a senator or being a state rep, which I am now, if you’re doing it for a really long time, it becomes who you are.

So it’s no longer a service. It is your identity, and you do whatever you can to protect that, right? Which means selling out your values. It means being susceptible to corruption. And so I guess starting out, I’m trying to always remember that this is a service. And I think we need more elected officials who have other interests. Besides politics and government and legislating. There are other things that I want to do, and there are other ways I want to serve, and I want to have a well-balanced life, I guess.

And so I want to do this because I think it’s important right now, but then I want to give the reins over to someone else, someone who has fresh energy and new ideas and a different perspective. I think that’s how this is supposed to work.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:11:09 – 00:11:13) Could you see yourself running someday for the highest office in the land, president?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:11:13 – 00:11:13) No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:11:14 – 00:11:14) You couldn’t?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:11:14 – 00:12:04) No, I really don’t. I’m surprised I’m doing this. I’m running for the US Senate, and I feel like there’s so much— I mean, I’m traveling the whole state of Texas, which is a giant state, a diverse state, complex state, and I’m constantly learning about the things I don’t know, right? And I feel like I’m just every day on the campaign trail cramming for a big test in January of next year to be the senator of this state.

And I’ve already seen over the course of this campaign how difficult it is, right? And the attacks that come your way, the attacks on people in your life, like your family, my girlfriend, people who didn’t sign up to be in office or run for office are also on the receiving end of these attacks. And so I can’t imagine doing this for longer than 2 terms.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:12:05 – 00:12:18) Do you think pressure and attacks are a reason not to do something that is worthy? I’m wondering, because even as a podcaster, you get lots of pressure. Sure. It’s a different type of pressure.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:12:19 – 00:12:19) No, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:12:19 – 00:12:32) It’s pressure, lots of attacks, lots of feedback, et cetera. But at the end of it, I think I love what I get to do, and I really hope that people benefit from it. So to me, that’s reason enough to continue to do it. Really irrespective of the pressure and the attacks.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:12:32 – 00:12:45) I think that’s true, but I think there are lots of people who want to be president. And so, we should give those people a shot if that’s the job they want. I honestly think that my skill set that I’ve developed is better suited for a legislative position.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:12:45 – 00:12:47) What’s a legislative position for us Brits?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:12:47 – 00:13:47) Oh yeah, yeah. So right now I’m a state rep in Texas. So I serve in the state house in the lower chamber. I would be, God willing, after this election, serving in the US Senate, which means I’m one member of a larger team of people. I am trying to build coalitions. I’m trying to bring people over to my side. I’m trying to change hearts and minds in a body.

And I feel like I’m really good at that. I mean, in the statehouse in Texas, even as a Democrat in a Republican-dominated body, I’ve passed 60 bipartisan bills over 4 terms. And they’re not just like symbolic, superficial pieces of legislation. These are major bills on housing and healthcare and early childhood education, teacher pay, property taxes, the things that are really affecting my neighbors. And that is a skillset.

Some people are better suited as an executive making decisions on their own, and some people are better working as part of a larger team to do something ambitious and big.

Looking Ahead to 2028 and the Case for Systemic Reform

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:13:47 – 00:14:14) You must have an opinion on who you think might be, because we head towards 2028. If you look at the polling data what’s going on geopolitically with Iran and lots of other issues like AI, it appears that there’s a, the polls are becoming a little bit more favorable for the Democrats. Do you have an opinion on who you think should be president in the next cycle? There’s Kamalas, there’s Gavins, there’s AOCs, there’s, I don’t know, Bernie’s probably going to run again. Pete Buttigieg is probably going to run again.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:14:14 – 00:15:29) Yeah. I mean, I don’t, given that I worked at the state level, I don’t know a lot of these people personally, but I honestly think a lot of the people that you just named have a lot of potential to be good leaders and to deliver for this country. And honestly, change is what we need most right now. So I’m excited for anyone who’s going to bring some change to this political system.

The only thing I would say is what I’m going to be looking for in the candidates as they start bubbling up is who’s talking about systemic reform? There’s lots of issues that I care about— education, healthcare, housing, all things that I care about. But I’ve done this now for 8 years, and I’ve seen that the system itself is what’s preventing us from making progress on all of those important issues.

And so when I’m kind of thinking about my criteria for evaluating who I’m going to vote for or who I’m going to support, it’s going to be who is, who is thinking and talking about comprehensive political reform, including getting big money out of our politics, banning gerrymandering, overhauling the Supreme Court, all these things that feel like inside baseball, that feel like process. It has to be the top priority because if we don’t fix the system itself, we’re not going to make progress on all the issues we care about.

Democratic Socialism, the Powell Memo and Trickle-Down Economics

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:15:29 – 00:15:56) There’s been this really interesting rise in democratic socialism over the last year or so. Obviously, Mayor Mamdani has been elected to office and people like AOC and just the broader democratic socialism narrative has been really popular. What’s your perspective on that? Because I think of the Democrats here, then I think of democratic socialism as being slightly different from typical, more centrist democratic philosophy.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:15:57 – 00:19:40) I certainly understand where the anger is coming from. I hear it everywhere I go across the state of Texas. Anger? Yeah. I mean, Everywhere I go, people are struggling to survive in this economy. And it’s not like people are buying nice clothes or nice cars or nice vacations. They’re struggling to afford necessities, groceries and gas and utilities, prescription drugs, the things that you need to survive every day.

And people are working harder than they’ve ever worked, right? Some of them are working multiple jobs. And they can’t make those ends meet. And this is especially pronounced among young people in my experience, my fellow millennials, but also Gen Z, because we were promised that if we worked hard, if we played by the rules, if we went to school, if we studied, that we could live the American dream.

And that was a lie because it is way too expensive to buy a home. It’s way too expensive to start a family, to have kids. It’s too expensive to retire comfortably. And it’s because the system itself has been rigged against working people. And I would say I would go back to the 1970s. In fact, you can, you can pinpoint this one document called the Powell Memo, 1971.

He was a corporate lawyer who later got appointed to the Supreme Court. But if you read this memo, it’s basically a blueprint for how corporate interests can start to dismantle the Great Society and the New Deal, which had come the decades before. And so there was a feeling that among corporate America that there needed to be a strategic plan, a political campaign to protect their power and amass more power.

And so the blueprint says that corporate interests are going to unite. They’re going to spend massive amounts of money in our politics, buying politicians in both parties, elevate corporate voices in media, appoint sympathetic judges. It goes through kind of a whole comprehensive strategy for how to reverse the gains made in the New Deal and the Great Society. And you start to see, starting in the late ’70s, early ’80s, trickle-down economics, right, of cutting taxes for the people at the very top and forgetting about the rest of us.

And that has really been the story of the last 50 years in this country, the last 5 decades. And that’s a major change from what we saw in the middle of the 20th century when our government invested in education and healthcare, in homes and highways. We grew together. We had the largest, strongest middle class in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. And now that, that middle class is disappearing all over Texas, all over this country.

And there’s a lot of anger about that. And it’s not just limited to Democrats or Democratic socialists. It really spans the political spectrum. And people are looking for— they’re looking for leaders who are going to take on that broken, corrupt system. Not nibble around the edges, not incremental improvements. People are looking for wholesale change. And they’re right to want that change because it is possible to build an economy that rewards work instead of wealth.

That’s very possible. I mean, the economy is just a collective, a collection of choices that we make, particularly policy choices. And we can make different choices than the ones that we’ve made for the last 5 decades. Trickle-down economics, in my view, is not a theory, it’s theft.

The Shrinking Middle Class and Crony Capitalism

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:19:41 – 00:20:34) In 1970, middle-class households held 62% of all US aggregate income, while upper-income households held 29%. Today, those roles have flipped. Upper-income households capture over 50% of total US income compared to just 42% held by the middle class. And if we look at lower-income families, there’s been a 5% increase since the 1970s in the cohort of people living in the low-income category. The middle-income category has reduced by 10%, and the upper-income class has increased by 5%.

So the direction of travel is that there’s less people in the middle class, there’s more people in the lower income, and there’s more people in higher income. How does one reverse that? Because whatever the economic system has been in the United States, it’s resulted in innovation and GDP growth and productivity. How do you reverse this change?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:20:35 – 00:21:33) Well, what I’m talking about is not a radical new vision for the economy. I’m talking about how do we get back to the economy of the 1950s and ’60s where we grew together as a nation? And in fact, the productivity, the innovation was, I think, more significant when we were growing together. I think the math and the past make it very clear that a country that invests in its people grows faster than a country that abandons them.

And so specifically, what am I talking about? I’m talking about raising the minimum wage, expanding overtime pay so that workers can actually benefit from the wealth they create. Capitalism was an innovation. We— I think we forget that now. The idea that you should be rewarded That you should be compensated for your time, for your work. That was a revolutionary idea. And that’s not what we have today. We don’t have capitalism, at least not in this country. We have crony capitalism.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:21:34 – 00:21:34) What is that?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:21:35 – 00:23:12) Where the gains in this economy go to those who can afford to buy access, who can afford to buy politicians for control. Dr. King said something similar. He said, “We have socialism for the rich, and we have rugged individualism for the poor.” You think about the bailout, right, in the Great Recession, right, when a lot of the people on Wall Street who got us into that mess, they got golden parachutes, right?

They got taken care of by the government. But you got single moms out there, you got construction workers, you got nurses and teachers who are barely surviving in this economy, and there’s no bailout for them, right? It’s rugged individualism for them. And so my only point is that we can create an economy where we all grow together, where corporations have a broader definition of shareholder, right? Because you think about GE, you think about GM, Ford, these great American companies from the 20th century, they believed that shareholders included their workers, the families of their workers, the communities in which they operated.

So they felt an obligation, a corporate ethos that was about much more than just their bottom line. And so that’s what I’m trying to get us back to. I’m trying to get us back to a point where we are investing in our people and we have growth, but it’s shared growth. We have competition, but it’s fair competition, not monopolies and consolidation like we see today. So I guess what I’m trying to get us back to is old-school capitalism where, again, people are compensated for their work. And it’s not a system that benefits the wealthy and the well-connected only.

Rebuilding the Middle Class: Unions, Debt and Families

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:23:13 – 00:23:17) And how do you think you can do that from a Senate position if you are to win in Texas?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:23:17 – 00:24:44) Yeah, so we talked about a few policies of minimum wage and overtime pay, but I also think we have to rebuild labor unions in this country. You can almost track the destruction of the middle class with the destruction of organized labor. And this is not a government solution, really. This is about empowering workers in the workplace to be able to negotiate with their bosses for better pay, for better benefits, for better working conditions.

I think we’ve got to do more to tackle the debt crisis, both personal household debt, which reached an all-time high in the first quarter of this year, whether it’s medical debt, whether it’s student debt, credit card debt. And we should also talk about the national debt because both are moral emergencies, in my opinion. I also think we got to do more on supporting families and children. I think investing in education.

The GI Bill was a game changer in the middle of the 20th century, and it’s what helped build that middle class. We haven’t seen an investment in higher education at that scale since the GI Bill. I think we got to expand the child tax credit, which cut child poverty in half just a few years ago, and then it was allowed to expire. New families who are having kids, they need extra support if they’re going to live that American dream.

And we can do that. And we can do all of this if we just were willing to tax the people at the very top and make them pay their fair share in taxes.

Big Money and Corruption in Texas Politics

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:24:44 – 00:24:54) Is that easier said than done in light of the forces that are opposed to what you’ve just said? There are big companies and individuals lobbying against what you’ve just said.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:24:54 – 00:26:21) Yes. And that’s the point. It is a broken political system, which leads to a broken economic system. That is the direction that I think this moves in. And it’s why I said earlier, I’m looking for comprehensive political reform first, because the only way to unrig the economy so that it benefits all of us again, so that we’re all growing together again, that work is rewarded, is if you clean up the corruption in our political system where corporate special interests, corporate PACs, super PACs, don’t have the same influence in our government as they do now.

Because right now, I mean, I think about in Texas, there was an out-of-state billionaire from Pennsylvania who gave our governor $12 million because we don’t have campaign contribution limits in Texas. He gave our governor $12 million to pass a private school voucher scam, which is taking money out of our underfunded public schools in Texas. We rank 43rd in the nation in per-student education funding. It’s giving those tax dollars to wealthy parents who already have their kids in private school.

So it is a— it is literally a transfer of wealth from the bottom and the middle to the people at the very top, all because of corruption in our political system. So I don’t think we’re going to unrig this economy until we get rid of corruption in our politics and in our government. We have to have a government of, by, and for the people. Instead of what we have now, which is a government of, by, and for corporate special interests.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:26:21 – 00:26:27) Is the Texas governor corrupt? Yes. That’s a strong thing to say.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:26:28 – 00:27:32) Yeah. I mean, again, the system itself is corrupt. The question is which politicians succumb to that and which ones don’t. And I’m less interested in the personalities in our politics. And I’m much more interested in the system because politicians are rational actors for the most part. Politicians are trying to get reelected for the most part. The question is, what incentives are put in front of them? What incentives is the system putting in front of them?

And right now, if you look at the influence of big money, Citizens United, if you look at gerrymandering and redistricting, if you look at the two-party system, All of these social media, traditional media, all of this whole ecosystem incentivizes extremism and corruption by design. And so you can get rid of the governor of Texas, you can get rid of whoever you want. Someone else is just going to take their place. And if you haven’t fixed the incentives, if you haven’t fixed the system, you’re going to get the same result.

Elon Musk and the World’s First Trillionaire

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:27:32 – 00:28:18) A lot of the great founders who happen to also be billionaires, have chosen Texas as their home increasingly. I think about Elon Musk building, I think both Tesla and SpaceX in your state. How do you sort of marry these 2 worlds together? Because Elon Musk is now a trillionaire, I think the world’s first trillionaire. You’re talking about inequality. I think he’s been held up by some as the sort of like poster child of inequality because he’s so rich on paper.

Again, it’s not like he has cash in the bank, but it’s not like he has a trillion in the bank, but his net worth is so high. So how do you attract someone like Elon Musk to the state to build his companies and to employ the people that he does while also pursuing equality in the state at the same time? How do you marry those things?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:28:18 – 00:29:04) Yeah, some people have asked me if I’m demonizing billionaires, and I’ve said that I think I’m humanizing billionaires. Because for one of our own residents to become the world’s first trillionaire while 1 in 5 Texas children live in poverty, to me, that is a spiritual sickness. I want people to be successful. I’m proud of Tesla. I’m proud of the great businesses across the state of Texas, across this country.

When businesses are successful, people are successful, and I’m all for that. But to accumulate more wealth than you could possibly spend in 100 lifetimes while we have people starving in this one, to me, that means we’re not fulfilling our full humanity.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:29:04 – 00:29:06) What would you have done to stop that happening?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:29:07 – 00:29:24) Well, I mean, at one point in this country, we had, I think it was in the 1950s, had a top marginal tax rate of 90%. I don’t think it needs to be that high, but we used to have a political system and an economic system that more fairly distributed the fruits of our labor.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:29:24 – 00:29:28) On that particular point, if there was a tax rate of 90%, Elon would still be a trillionaire.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:29:29 – 00:31:29) Yeah, well, I mean, this is the problem when you let so much concentrated wealth and power get so out of control. And I think the thing that really upsets people, particularly about the Elon example, is that Tesla was successful because of taxpayer dollars. Right? Tesla got investment from the federal government, which is why it has been so successful. And so if we’re all going to invest in Tesla, if we’re going to invest in Elon Musk or pick your billionaire, right?

Most of our billionaires, they went to schools that we funded. They drove on highways that we funded. They benefited from infrastructure that we all built together. And we’re not, we’re not saying they can’t be successful. All we’re saying is that make sure you give something back. To the country that made your success possible. Bring— make sure there’s a ladder for the next guy coming up, right? I mean, I think that we should be investing and taking a chance on the CEOs in their garage, not the CEOs on their mega yacht, because that’s where the next great American company is going to come from.

I’ve seen that when people talk about being pro-business, what that usually means is being pro-big business, right? Like all the tax breaks go to the giant multinational corporations. Walmart, we basically subsidize Walmart through Medicaid because they don’t give their employees quality healthcare. So we, the taxpayers, are giving Walmart employees quality healthcare. So again, socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the rest of us. And what I’m trying to get back to is an economy where the folks who work for Tesla, the folks who generate that wealth, are also getting to benefit from that prosperity.

And this is not a radical vision. It’s what we had before, and we had the most productive, innovative economy in the world. And I think we can rebuild that through better tax policy, better healthcare policy, better education policy. Public policy can help us unrig this system so that those productivity gains, the wealth that’s created is more evenly shared across people in our communities.

Tax Loopholes and the Wealth Tax Debate

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:31:29 – 00:31:56) Because in the case of Elon, his wealth is equity value in the companies that he owns. It’s not necessarily cash in a bank account. So I’m wondering what any governor or government or senator could do to redistribute that, which would’ve prevented him from becoming a trillionaire in the first place. When there isn’t necessarily a transaction taking place, it’s not like he’s necessarily sold down huge amounts of that equity.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:31:57 – 00:32:43) I mean, what we’ve talked about on this campaign is closing tax loopholes that benefit the wealthiest in this country. There’s, there’s crazy stuff in our tax code that says you can write off your private jet, your mega yacht as business expenses. Right. The carried interest loophole, capital gains. I mean, this whole tax system that we have now really allows the people at the very top to accumulate and amass more wealth without any taxation.

I mean, we— I was reading that if we just collected the taxes that the top 1% owes, no new taxes, just collecting what’s already owed, it would raise something like $172 billion every year. And that’s enough to end poverty in America.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:32:43 – 00:32:47) That they already owe. But if they hadn’t paid it, presumably they’re going to be in jail, aren’t they? If they—

JAMES TALARICO: (00:32:48 – 00:32:53) Well, no. I mean, one, there are no resources that actually go to cracking down on these tax cheats.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:32:53 – 00:32:56) So they’re using loopholes.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:32:56 – 00:32:56) Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:32:56 – 00:32:56) What you’re saying?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:32:57 – 00:34:00) Yeah. Loopholes in the system and people who are cheating the system, too. It’s both. It’s both the legalized loopholes that you can get away with, but it’s also people who just know they’re not going to get— no one’s going to crack down on them. And so I just say that as an example of how much this system benefits those who can afford to buy politicians, those who can afford to curry favor with elected officials, those who can write the rules of the game so that they’re the only ones who win.

And that’s what I think people are angry about. That’s what I think people are tired of across the political spectrum. This is— I don’t think this is a Democratic thing that I’m saying. I really do get the sense that most people in this country, they want success. They want businesses to thrive. They want business leaders to thrive. But they don’t want all the gains in our economy just to go to a few guys at the very top at our expense.

Right now it’s 3 men, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, who now own more wealth than the entire middle class. I mean, that’s crazy. And you’re not a socialist or a communist if you say that that’s crazy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:34:01 – 00:34:10) So what would you do about that though? At this point, historically you could have done something, but now this is where we are. So how would you redistribute that wealth?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:34:11 – 00:34:12) A fair tax system to start with.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:34:12 – 00:34:17) But they don’t, a lot of these guys don’t pay tax because then they’re taking loans against their equity.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:34:17 – 00:34:28) I mean, there’s all kinds of ideas for being able to tax not only income, but also wealth to make sure that those assets that you have are being taxed fairly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:34:28 – 00:34:30) So you’re pro-wealth tax?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:34:31 – 00:34:55) I’m interested in what kind of wealth taxes we could actually implement. I know there’s challenges on implementation, but I think we should explore every avenue. To make the wealthiest people in this country pay their fair share. I mean, just as a percentage of income, if we just want to talk about income, I mean, working Texans are paying more as a percentage of their, of their take-home pay than the wealthiest people in our state. And that just—

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:34:56 – 00:34:57) How come? What’s the tax rate?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:34:57 – 00:35:42) I mean, this is the problem, is that, is that the tax system has been, has been transformed by those who can afford to pay politicians for access and for control. And so it’s why I say we don’t have capitalism, we have crony capitalism, because it is rewarding those who can influence the political process. Because it’s elected officials who write those rules, right? Who create the tax code, who set education policy, who set healthcare policy.

And if you can buy off those elected officials so they no longer work for the people but work for their donors, then you get the rigged system that we have currently. And that’s what I think people are really disillusioned about. They just feel like the whole thing is hopelessly corrupt.

Will Billionaires Leave? Mark Cuban and Federal Policy

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:35:42 – 00:36:25) One of the rebuttals people have when they hear about wealth taxes or just raising taxes generally is that these successful people, these billionaires, will just move to a different state. And I think over the last couple of months, because California were threatening to do a wealth tax, there’s been a lot of the famous, well-known founders have departed California, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. I think a few others, I’ve got a long list of them here.

But is that something you think about as well in a world that is increasingly global, but also just where these founders can have their businesses online and on the internet, they can quite easily move their residence to a state that’s more preferential, whether it’s Florida or other places. Much of the reason why a lot of founders have moved to Texas is because there’s a, what is it, a 0% State tax.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:36:25 – 00:36:26) We don’t have a state income tax, yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:36:26 – 00:36:27) Yeah, so 0%.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:36:27 – 00:38:08) Which is a good thing. And I don’t want a state income tax. Our citizens are taxed enough with property and sales taxes. But this is the reason we need good federal policy, right? And it’s the reason why states can’t really tackle this problem on their own. And again, I had an event with Mark Cuban up in Dallas-Fort Worth. And the moderator interviewed both of us and it was a little awkward ’cause she’s like, “James, you’ve had some tough words for billionaires.

Got a billionaire sitting right next to you.” And I joked that Mark Cuban is one of the good ones, meaning Mark Cuban uses his wealth, his power, his influence to help working people. If you’ve seen the work he’s done on prescription drugs, Cost Plus Drugs is a great company that is actively making it easier for people to afford their medicine. And that’s true throughout American history. If I think of Franklin Roosevelt, I think of Bobby Kennedy.

These were political heroes of mine. They were trust fund babies. These were the billionaires of their day. But they used their power to take on these systems that are hurting people. And it wasn’t just through charity. Charity is important. But what’s more important is addressing the systems that make charity necessary. And that’s exactly what people like Mark Cuban are doing. So, again, I don’t mean to— I’m not interested in punishing success.

I’m not interested in banning billionaires. All I want is to ensure that we are, we’re acting like a community again as a country, that we have a responsibility to each other. And you can be successful while also paying your fair share and ensuring that we’re investing in young entrepreneurs. We got an education system that’s empowering the next great business leader.

Breaking Up Healthcare Monopolies

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:38:09 – 00:38:12) So you’re saying that the tax changes would need to happen on the federal level?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:38:12 – 00:40:11) Yes, along with a lot more. It’s not just tax. I mean, I’m talking about major changes in education and early childhood and in healthcare and blocking consolidation. One of the things that Mark Cuban and I laid out together was going after healthcare monopolies because you basically, you can now have one company that owns the health insurance company, the hospital, and the pharmacy all in one. And so there’s, again, when I say this is not capitalism, less competition means fewer choices.

Which means higher prices for people. So these monopolies in our healthcare system, that’s an example of crony capitalism. CVS owns one of the largest PBMs. They own a pharmacy benefit manager. It’s basically like a middleman between you and the prescription drugs you buy. But they own one of the big PBMs, they own one of the big health insurance companies, and they own the largest network of drugstores in the country.

So Mark Cuban and I were talking about a plan to actually break up those healthcare monopolies and create more choices, more competition, more capitalism so that we can lower prices. Because at the end of the day, if you can’t afford your prescription drugs, you get sick and sometimes you die because of it. The big ugly bill that passed last year in Washington made a lot of cuts to healthcare.

The nonpartisan estimates were that as a result of those cuts, 51,000 Americans are going to die needlessly every year. So I just want to ground us also in the, in the real-world ramifications of these policy decisions. It’s not just theoretical. We’re talking about our neighbors dying because we have a system that determines your healthcare based on how much money you make, based on how much money your parents make.

A lot of these are kids who don’t even work yet. And so there is a real urgency that I feel that a lot of Americans feel that we have to pursue wholesale transformational change in our political and economic system.

How AI Will Affect Texans

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:40:12 – 00:43:15) In terms of the economic system and we were talking there a little bit about average workers and their pay and their livelihoods. One of the big protagonists in this story is now artificial intelligence and how disruptive that’s going to be. And I’ve sat here with so many of the stakeholders in that industry and heard some of the most crazy predictions around robotics and generally around AI. I mean, one of the sort of big headlines at the moment is that there’ll be significant job disruption, and a lot of that value is going to accrue to the big technology companies that are the frontier labs and the Nvidias of the world.

It appears to me when I ask very, very smart people in technology, “What is the biggest concern at the moment for the US economy?” It is dealing with this AI challenge. Bernie Sanders has been very vocal about it recently. Donald Trump has said that we need to win against China. How are you thinking about AI and the impact it’s going to have on Texans?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:43:15 – 00:44:41) Yeah, I think when I travel around the state of Texas, get this question a lot. A lot of people are thinking about AI, and there’s competing reactions to it. A lot of us, including me, feel excited about some of the benefits of artificial intelligence. I met with an AI entrepreneur who’s talking about how he’s going to cure chronic diseases, maybe cure cancer. I mean, that’s exciting for me.

I think it’s exciting for most people. And then a lot of Texans, including me, feel a lot of anxiety. Because our leaders, those who are— who should be writing the rules of the game, have their head in the sand. I mean, it is shocking that our U.S. Senate, our Congress, our federal government has really been MIA as this technology has developed faster and faster and has done so in dangerous ways, as we saw with the recent hacking from OpenAI’s model.

And so I think what people are hungry for is a regulatory framework to ensure that we are developing these technologies, that we’re winning the AI race, and we’re doing it responsibly. We’re doing it safely. We’re doing it in a way that’s going to ensure AI works for us and not against us. And I think that is what I think most people want to see from their leaders, from their policymakers. Because right now it’s just no one is minding the store.

Three Priorities for Regulating AI

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:44:41 – 00:44:44) Do you know what does that mean specifically? Do you have any ideas what that means?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:44:45 – 00:46:45) Yeah, I think if I was in the US Senate helping develop this regulatory framework, there are 3 things I would prioritize. One is protecting our workers, protecting our economy, making sure that AI technologies are improving jobs, making jobs easier, allowing workers to spend less time on the job and more time doing the things they love with the people they love. The second thing I would prioritize is children.

We’ve seen how social media companies have preyed on our kids, have taken advantage of our kids, have led to a spike in self-harm and depression and anxiety among young people. I very much worry that without regulation, AI technologies may do the same thing. To young people, to future generations. You’ve seen the horror stories of kids going to AI for therapy, for counseling, and sometimes those AI chatbots have helped those kids harm themselves.

The third thing I would prioritize is our democracy, because we’ve already seen AI deepfake ads in political campaigns. We’ve seen it in this campaign in Texas for the US Senate. And I’ve always prided myself as a millennial on being able to differentiate between fact and fiction online, right? A lot of millennials like me will roll our eyes at our grandparents who get tricked by stuff on Facebook.

But I mean, I’m seeing it happen to me, right? I increasingly can’t tell the difference between AI deepfakes and reality. And I think a lot of people feel that alarm that these technologies are getting so good that you really can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction. And most of the time, there’s no disclaimer required. And so again, there’s a lot that needs to happen. But if I was developing a framework of regulation for AI, those would be the 3 things that I would prioritize.

A Billion Humanoid Robots and Who Writes the Rules

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:46:45 – 00:47:17) So Elon said that there will be, within the decade, over a billion humanoid robots. Over a billion humanoid robots, and that those robots will be at least 5 times the output of a human. And I think these robots are being built in your state, in Texas, at the Gigafactory there and at the other sort of Tesla factories that he has. But how is it possible to protect workers when there’s a billion humanoid robots in the world? Now, Elon’s timelines have sometimes missed a little bit.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:47:17 – 00:47:18) Yeah, sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:47:18 – 00:47:24) But generally, he, as an entrepreneur, and his companies have been able to do things that are almost indistinguishable from magic at times.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:47:25 – 00:49:18) Well, here’s the key, and connects to the conversation we were just having. We cannot let AI or robotics become yet another arena where billionaires are writing the rules for the rest of us. You think about, I try to always think about historical parallels, and the only parallels I can think of in modern history are the Manhattan Project, the development of nuclear weapons, the space race, and the development of the internet.

This AI probably will be more consequential than those 3 innovations. But the thing that’s different is that all 3 of those innovations were done as a public-private partnership, right? We as a country were deciding the rules of the game, and we were doing it in partnership with great private sector companies. This innovation is very different. This is being done in the hands of a very small number of people running for-profit corporations without input from any of the rest of us.

And we can’t allow that to happen. We’ve seen already, we talked about the last 50 years, when you let the richest people in this country, the most powerful people in this country write all the rules, all of the gains, all of the benefits, will flow to those at the top, and we’re all going to get screwed. I could see the same thing happening with AI. Working people in this country deserve a say and a share in that AI future.

And whether that looks like an AI dividend, some kind of policy to ensure that all of us are benefiting from the wealth that these technologies create, because they’re using our collective intellectual property. If they’re going to use our ideas, if they’re going to use our ingenuity, then we deserve to get compensated for the use of that intellectual property.

Self-Driving Cars and Job Disruption

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:49:18 – 00:50:21) If the technology plays out how they’re forecasting and how on the current direction of travel, then if you just think about driving as an occupation, we all watched those videos of these new Cybercabs rolling out around Texas where they have no steering wheel, no pedals at all, and 2 seats in the front, and the car just drives itself. Autonomously. From my rough estimates, approximately 400,000 people in Texas work as professional drivers as their primary payroll occupation.

But if you factor in gig workers that are on the Ubers, the DoorDashes, which by the way, the founder of— the CEO of Uber has sat there and told me those jobs are going away. It’s more than half a million people that rely on driving as an occupation. Texas is leading the charge towards autonomous vehicles where you need no driver. It would appear to me logically that on this direction of travel, there’s going to be significant job disruption.

This is even outside of humanoid robots and so on. And I wonder, how, there’s, okay, an AI dividend, but I just wonder how people like you are thinking about that level of disruption that theoretically could happen really, really quickly.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:50:21 – 00:50:43) And rejecting the false choices, right? Because it is possible to benefit from some of these technologies, some of these self-driving cars, will make us all safer on the roads, which is great. But the idea that that has to replace a human being, the idea that these technologies don’t need a human supervisor, to me, that’s a false choice.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:50:43 – 00:50:44) Why would it need a human supervisor?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:50:45 – 00:50:54) I mean, I would hope, especially if we’re talking about like 18-wheelers barreling down Texas highways, I would hope there’s a human being there to monitor these technologies. If you think about—

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:50:55 – 00:50:59) Even if the data suggests that it’s more safe without the human.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:50:59 – 00:51:40) You think I’m all for taking advantage of the safety features. I just think about airplanes, right? The fact that airplanes mostly fly themselves, I’m still very comforted by the fact that there is a trained professional behind the controls in case anything goes wrong. And so again, if we’re making these decisions together instead of just a few billionaire CEOs making the decisions for all of us, then we can reject some of these false choices that are presented to us.

And we can figure out a way to both take advantage of the benefits of these technologies, like making our roads safer, making cars safer, reducing fatalities, and ensuring that we are protecting human beings in the process. I just fundamentally reject the idea that we have to choose between those 2 things.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:51:42 – 00:52:31) I watched a video the other day of a factory, and they had the humanoid robot doing the packaging process and then a human next to them. And they were just demonstrating the productivity difference between this humanoid robot that was flipping the packages, versus a person who had to sleep and go to the toilet and all those kinds of things. And it’s a video by Figure AI, and the video concludes with the fact that the humanoid robot was more productive, essentially, and it didn’t need to sleep and obviously all those kinds of things.

So I think also about that level of work, and I don’t know, I’m in search of a good answer to this question of job disruption that seems to be logically on the way. The big frontier labs, their CEOs in AI have all forecasted job disruption. Increasingly. They change their tone a little bit when it becomes unpopular, but if you look through their writing since 2016, they’re saying that the economy’s going to have to drastically change in light of this technology.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:52:32 – 00:54:28) I spoke with an expert on AI because when you’re in these positions, when you’re in elected office, you suddenly realize all the things you don’t know. You’re having to make crucial decisions on things that you may not be an expert on yet. And so I’m trying to get smarter on this. Every day. And I was speaking to someone who’s done a lot of work in AI, and he said he’s worried that we are headed toward 5 trillionaires and 30% unemployment.

And that terrifies me, right? As someone who cares about the people in my state, that’s not the future I want. And there’s still time for us to make these decisions together. What kind of AI future do we want? This is not something we’re subjected to. Yes, we’re going to see disruption. We’ve seen disruption from past technologies. But if we’re making decisions together as a country, then we can both weather some of those disruptions and we can come out stronger on the other side.

I think about the need to invest and double down on what only human beings can do, doubling down on human creativity, on human ingenuity. I’ve talked about the need for entrepreneurship grants. If we’re taxing these AI companies, some of that revenue can go toward investing in folks who have a great idea for a business or an invention or a piece of art. But these people don’t know a bunch of wealthy investors.

And so we’re going to invest in the little guy, just like we did with Tesla, just like we did with the internet. And those innovations have more than paid for themselves. And so I want us to do more of that, finding out what is it that human beings alone can do and doubling down on that creativity, that ingenuity. Again, that’s just an example of if we all come together and we think seriously about this problem and decide that we’re going to make decisions together, the AI future can look very differently than the path that we’re headed on.

Learning from the Social Media Mistake

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:54:29 – 00:54:39) Do you have faith that elected officials can pass through this and arrive at a conclusion? Because if you think through, I don’t know, how social media was handled. We tend to handle it after the fact.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:54:39 – 00:55:41) That example, yeah, like that should be a negative example, right? Because we let social media companies run wild and they ended up preying on our children. They ended up hurting our kids. They ended up hurting all of us, not just kids. And so we should learn from that example and realize that if we’re going to do this and if this technology is coming, if this innovation is coming, Let’s figure out as a community, as a nation, how we’re going to respond and what policy frameworks we need to put in place to ensure that, again, AI is making our lives better and easier and less stressful and not hurting people.

This is a fundamental belief that I have, that the economy is for people. People aren’t for the economy, right? That is a guiding star for me. And so if we are headed down a path where people are going to get hurt, needlessly because a few guys in Silicon Valley say it’s necessary, I think we have to reject that. And our elected officials, who in a democracy are tasked with making these big decisions, they need to get in the game.

Wokeism and Performative Politics

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:55:42 – 00:56:01) Politics has shifted over the last couple of years. There was quite a distinct shift, I think, when Elon purchased Twitter. Yeah. It seemed like the world changed a lot. And one of the terms within politics was this word wokeism, and it predominantly seemed to exist— it was like a weapon that the right hit the left with.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:56:01 – 00:56:01) Sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:56:02 – 00:56:23) Recently, AOC came out and said that “woke 1.0 was crazy”, sort of distancing herself from the 2020 progressive political narratives, that I think maybe in hindsight have hurt the party a little bit, or at least hurt the perception of the party a little bit. Do you have a point of view on this idea of wokeism? And the sort of journey we’ve been on?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:56:24 – 00:57:19) Yeah, I mean, it’s hard because people define woke or wokeism very differently. I do think that there was a rise in performative politics, in people who were more concerned about using the right words, usually determined by academia, versus bringing people together around some common values like racism is wrong. That everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. Those are unifying values that we all agree on.

But when you start policing people’s language, when you start judging people because they’re not up on the right terminology, you’re no longer building a coalition to address those real problems that need addressing. Instead, you’re performing a kind of politics that’s about your own intellectual and emotional needs and not about actually making change.

Why Democrats Lost to Trump

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:57:19 – 00:57:21) Why did the Democrats lose to Trump in your view?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:57:22 – 00:57:24) In what year? Both years. The Democrats have lost to Trump twice now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:57:25 – 00:57:29) Yeah, I think really in both years, but I guess in the more recent election cycle.

JAMES TALARICO: (00:57:30 – 00:57:30) Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (00:57:30 – 00:57:31) What is the diagnosis?

JAMES TALARICO: (00:57:32 – 01:00:42) Well, everywhere I went across the state of Texas in 2024, people were struggling with the high cost of living. I talked with a lot of Texans who didn’t like the way Trump talked to people. They didn’t like January 6th. They had deep concerns about him as a leader, but they thought he could get the economy back on track. Because if you remember the economy of 2017, 2018, 2019, that’s a pretty good economy and costs were a lot lower and it was easier for middle-class people to get ahead.

I do think we have to separate, I’ve talked about the last 50 years of this trend toward consolidation of wealth and power at the top. All of that became more acute, more urgent after the pandemic and the rise of inflation. The increase in inflation was kind of like the straw that broke the camel’s back. You’d had 50 years of trickle-down economics, of stagnant wages for middle-class and working-class people, systematic attacks on education and healthcare.

You had all of that happening, but you had cheap goods. So there was, it felt like we were getting something, right? My income’s not going up, I’m not able to get ahead like maybe my grandparents were able to get ahead. It’s hard to start a business, but at least things are cheap. And then when that changed, suddenly people realized that we are all getting screwed by this system.

‘Cause not only is our pay going down or staying flat, but now the cost of living has gone up. So you’re getting squeezed from both ends. So when that happened, I think people were looking for someone who was going to help. And that’s not an unreasonable thing to look for when you’re hurting. And so people put their faith in President Trump for good reasons, right? They thought he was going to lower costs.

They thought he was going to end the forever wars that we were all sick and tired of. They thought he was going to release the Epstein files. They thought he was going to drain the swamp. I mean, I have members of my family who voted for President Trump. People that I love. And those are the reasons they voted for him. And those are pretty good reasons. I think, more than a year into this administration, those promises have not been kept.

Everything is now more expensive, largely because of tariffs. We have a new war in Iran that no one asked for. It’s costing us $1 billion a day. That’s driving up gas prices. The Epstein files have still not fully been released. And the swamp is bigger than it’s ever been before. And so people are feeling like they, like they’ve been conned. And our, my job as a, as a candidate, our job as a campaign is to, is to extend an open hand to our neighbors who are disillusioned, who misplaced their trust in a leader, and invite them to join this movement that we’re building in Texas, which is honestly bigger than Donald Trump.

It’s bigger than any one political party. It really is on the ground. It feels like a movement of working people across the spectrum who are ready to take on this broken, corrupt system. And God willing, as the next US senator from Texas, I will have the opportunity to work with President Trump to try to deliver for my constituents.

Talarico on Donald Trump as a Person

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:00:42 – 01:00:44) What do you think of him as a person?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:00:45 – 01:01:54) Well, I don’t know him, so it’s hard for me to judge. But I think all of us have strengths and weaknesses. I think the president does have clear strengths. I think he’s able to communicate in a way that’s clear and concise and powerful to people. He is willing to take action when there’s so much gridlock. He’s willing to just kind of bust through walls to deliver for people.

And he has a sense of humor, which I feel like is really missing in politics. He has a lighthearted way about him. Those are, I think, some of the redeeming qualities. I think all of us know his willingness to put his ego above everything else, his willingness to make chaotic decisions without much forethought, his penchant for corruption and self-enrichment for himself and his family, and his desire to be popular.

And all politicians have a desire to be popular, but he does seem to place that above almost any other principle or conviction that he may have. And so I think it’s important to consider both the good and the bad of any leader, and that includes the president.

Immigration and the Southern Border

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:01:55 – 01:02:07) What about immigration? That’s one of the issues that is both very relevant to Texas, but also that frankly helped him get elected by him talking about some of these stats around border crossings in Texas.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:02:07 – 01:04:07) Yeah. And he was right about this. The Biden administration failed us on our southern border. I remember talking with my colleagues in the statehouse who represented border communities, and they talked about the utter chaos on our border. And our border communities in Texas mean a lot to me. My mom is from Laredo, which is on our Texas-Mexico border. And so this system was out of control in the Biden era.

And you see it on this map. My worry is that we have replaced one extremism on immigration in the Biden years with a new extremism on immigration, with masked men in unmarked vehicles kidnapping people off the street, deporting small business owners who have been here for years and decades, taking children as young as 5 years old and throwing them in detention centers. So my sense is that most Texans, most Americans want the same thing.

When it comes to immigration. They want security and they want to welcome hardworking immigrants who want to live the American dream. And in our politics, those 2 things are pitted against each other. Again, back to false choices. Those are not mutually exclusive. You can have a secure border. You can— it is not racist to want to know who’s coming into this country, right? You can do all that while also building more legal pathways for folks to come here the right way.

Folks who want to start a business, who want to contribute to this economy, who want to live that American dream and make us richer and stronger in the process, as immigrants have always done. And so I’m trying to, on the trail, uphold both of those moral values. Safety, which public safety is the most important thing the government does, more important than public education, more important than public health.

Public safety is the most important thing. And we are a nation of immigrants. It is the lifeblood of our economy. It is what has made Texas and America so great. And so we can uphold both of those values at the same time and pass comprehensive immigration reform that can do both of those things simultaneously.

DACA Students and a Pathway to Citizenship

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:04:07 – 01:04:11) What would you do about the issue of undocumented young people that have come here?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:04:12 – 01:04:12) Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:04:12 – 01:04:18) That are in the country that maybe were brought here by no fault of their own, but now find themselves in the US without documents?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:04:18 – 01:05:05) Yeah, I taught a lot of DACA students, a lot of Dreamers, in Room 112 at Rhodes Middle School on the west side of San Antonio. My students who were undocumented, they loved this country in a profound way. It feels like they understand something about America that many of our leaders have forgotten, that this is supposed to be the land of opportunity. This is, this is supposed to be the place where dreams come true.

And so I would be very interested as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package, which includes border security, to create a pathway to citizenship for undocumented folks who have been here for years, for decades, for kids who were brought over as kids, so that they have an opportunity to come out of the shadows and fully join us as citizens of this country.

The War in Iran

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:05:08 – 01:06:56) One of the issues that I know is going to be front of mind for a lot of people at the moment, and one of the issues I think that’s going to result in the Republican Party struggling in the midterms, is this issue you mentioned earlier of Iran. If you are a US senator, you would be voting on foreign policy and war powers and military spending and things like that. Including in the Middle East. So I wanted to get your perspective on what the hell is going on.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:06:57 – 01:06:58) That’s a good question.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:06:58 – 01:07:03) How do you get out of this situation now? It seems like there’s no golden bridge out of this situation.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:07:04 – 01:07:08) Yeah. I mean, we shouldn’t have been in this situation to begin with. We should start with that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:07:08 – 01:07:09) How did we get in this situation?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:07:10 – 01:07:50) Again, this is just from an outsider perspective, but it seems like after the operation in Venezuela, there was a hubris, and overconfidence that toppling the leadership in Iran would be an easy thing and would be a quick fix to a problem that has long plagued the region and plagued the United States. And maybe a lack of foresight and consideration. I mean, it’s not that hard to predict that what Iran would do when they’re, when they’re cornered is take control of the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, previous administrations had played out these war games and had come to the same conclusion.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:07:51 – 01:07:53) So what do you do now? Because you’re going to vote on this stuff.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:07:54 – 01:08:57) Yeah, I mean, one, I think we need checks and balances. Right now we have something that the founders, I think, couldn’t have envisioned, which is parties— political parties, factions is what the founders would have called them— coordinating across branches of our government. So instead of the ambitions of the legislative branch checking the ambitions of the executive branch, you now have members of one party coordinating across those branches.

And what that looks like now is a legislative branch, which is supposed to be the most important branch in our government, right? It’s the first one listed in the Constitution. It has now become completely subservient to the executive branch, to the will of the president and his administration. And so one, I think you have to restore those checks and balances. And it doesn’t have to be in a hostile, unproductive way.

It can be in a healthy way where the legislative branch is asking questions about what is the military strategy? What are the military objectives that we’re trying to accomplish? Because we’ve seen over the course of this disastrous war, those objectives changed over time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:08:58 – 01:09:01) But this is the thing. It doesn’t appear that they know what the objectives are anymore. It appears—

JAMES TALARICO: (01:09:01 – 01:10:31) Well, and I think this is key. If we cannot clearly articulate an objective, then it is the responsibility of the legislative branch to intervene and to withhold funding for these operations until we can get a clear idea of why we are sending our brave young men and women into another forever war in the Middle East. I think ultimately how you untangle this is through regional partnerships. It has to involve— I mean, we kind of know the contours of what a deal would look like.

Free passage through the strait. We have to deal with the nuclear issue. I worry that we’ve actually lost ground on this, on this problem, because I don’t want to see Iran get a nuclear weapon. I don’t think anybody wants to see that. And I think we were on track to preventing that, through the nuclear deal we had. So trying to get back to that diplomacy, we had before this invasion, I think that’s probably going to be the ultimate objectives for how to salvage the situation.

But it is a mess from top to bottom. I came of age after 9/11. I was 12 years old when 9/11 happened. So I understand the importance of keeping this country safe. I also saw as a millennial how military disasters like the Iraq War robbed this nation of young lives, of billions of dollars, and of our moral standing in the world. I can’t believe that we are making the same mistakes just 20 years later in Iran.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:10:31 – 01:11:34) The proposal there sounds a little bit like the memorandum of understanding that was pitched to Iran that ultimately failed. Free passage of the Strait of Hormuz. There was a clause in there about nuclear weapons and a few other things, and it failed within a couple of days. Because I think Iran are playing to a different timeframe than Trump is able to considering this sort of 4-year election cycle.

It appears to me, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but it appears to me that Iran is saying, “We have the cards. You can drop as many bombs as you like. We’re decentralized in our nature.” They’re split into lots of these smaller factions that are weaponized in their own way. There’s not particular— I remember in one press conference, I think it was Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth saying that they’re not even necessarily sure who is in charge in Iran.

And he made a remark that it takes a while to get the carrier pigeons down to the front lines, i.e., the people they’re negotiating with might not even be connected with the people that are launching the missiles and the drones, et cetera. It just appears to be a total mess. And I just can’t—

JAMES TALARICO: (01:11:34 – 01:12:51) But I do believe that we still have economic leverage and there are still economic cards to play here. And so the key is I really don’t want this disastrous war to play on for the rest of the Trump administration. I pray that we can come to a resolution and a conclusion sooner than that. And I think that’s going to have to involve some of this economic pressure in addition to the regional partnerships, because we’re ultimately going to have to rely on regional partners in order to actually push through a final resolution.

So I’m not giving up hope that we can resolve this. We have to. I mean, We just lost one of our own, our fellow Texan, Isabella Gonzales lost her life because of an Iranian airstrike in Jordan, and she was 19 years old. She had just graduated from Hebron High School in Dallas, Texas. And the fact that we would send brave members of the armed services like Isabella off to die in another forever war without any exit strategy, without any clear military objective, to me is deeply immoral.

Isabella Gonzales died a patriot. She died a hero, and we are grateful for her sacrifice, but our gratitude for her sacrifice should not be mistaken for an acceptance of her death.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:12:53 – 01:13:02) In terms of what one can do about it, is there any specifics that you have in mind for a way out of this? Because I really, I mean, I’m in search of them.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:13:03 – 01:13:16) Well, again, this is why you need checks and balances, because we need the legislative branch to start exerting pressure on the executive branch so that we can start to see what the objectives are. We can come to a consensus about an exit strategy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:13:16 – 01:13:18) The US can’t afford to lose here.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:13:18 – 01:13:20) Agreed. Yeah, agreed.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:13:20 – 01:13:22) They can’t even afford to be seen as losing.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:13:22 – 01:13:22) That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:13:22 – 01:13:25) Because you’re going to embolden the Middle East. That’s right.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:13:25 – 01:13:35) And Iran is an adversary. We should not lose sight of that. A nuclear Iran would be a disaster for the region and for the world. So it’s imperative that we win.

What Advice Would He Give Trump?

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:13:35 – 01:13:49) If you had a phone call with Trump and you had an opportunity to— if he said, “Listen, James, I need some advice. This Iran situation’s got out of hand. I thought it would be like Venezuela. I thought I’d drop the bombs, there’d be an uprising, and then it would sort of correct itself, but it’s got out of hand. James, what advice have you got for me?”

JAMES TALARICO: (01:13:50 – 01:14:55) That’d be tough. I think that humility is good and that self-awareness is good and hopefully can help him and the administration avoid future mistakes. I would urge him to call the leadership in the legislative branch together, leadership of both parties, Democrats and Republicans, and work with them as well as our allies around the world to try to come to a consensus on a strategic direction. The president and his administration have not only pushed away Congress, they’ve also done everything they can to alienate our allies across the globe.

And there’s a reason that this country spent so much political and economic capital on these, on these partnerships and these allies. It’s because when you get in a jam, you need your friends. And so I would urge the president to start building that big coalition. I would, I would tell him frankly that he’s not going to get out of this on his own, and it’s going to require bipartisan collaboration at home and regional collaboration abroad.

Hope for the Midterms

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:14:55 – 01:14:57) Are you hopeful?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:14:57 – 01:14:58) Yes. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:14:59 – 01:15:00) You think Trump’s going to fix it?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:15:01 – 01:17:01) I don’t know if I’m hopeful about that, but, I— here’s what you want to know what I am hopeful about. In these midterms, if the people of Texas, if the people of this country elect leaders who are going to check the president, I think it could be a rebirth for his presidency. I think after these kinds of midterms, especially when you get walloped in the midterm, executives have kind of 2 reactions to it.

One is to kind of double down and retreat to their partisan corner. We saw on January 6th what that looks like for President Trump. The other path is to hear the response from the people, listen to the feedback that you’re getting, and adjust course. And I would love, as the next US senator from Texas, to work with Donald Trump to actually fulfill some of the promise of his political project, because the promise of MAGA was that we were going to transform this government so that it delivered for the people who have been left behind, the people who have been forgotten in this country.

And there’s still time to do that. There’s still time to do that on a bipartisan basis. If the president wants to work with me or with any Democrat to expand healthcare access, I’m there. If he wants to make sure that every single kid in this country gets high-quality, accessible childcare, I’m there. If he wants to tackle the housing problem, Donald Trump is a builder. If he wants us to slash the red tape in this country so we could build millions of new homes and ensure everyone in this country has a place to call home, that I’m there.

I’ll work with them to do it. I would love to do that. So my hope is that this midterm will be a wake-up call for the president, for his administration, and as a result, they will reverse course. They will decide to engage with leaders in both parties to actually deliver for the working people who sent him there.

Faith, the Bible and the Good Samaritan

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:17:03 – 01:17:04) I have this book here, the Bible.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:17:04 – 01:17:04) Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:17:06 – 01:17:14) And I also have some photos showing, I think you as a young boy here at 8 years old at St. Andrew’s Church.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:17:14 – 01:17:39) Yes, yes, yes. Yep. I was the acolyte. Usually the kids are tasked with lighting the candle at the beginning of the service and then putting it out. So basically this thing I’m holding here, this part has the flame where you light the candle and the other part’s not in this picture, it’s like a hood. And it covers the candle to put it out. And so this was my very important job at the service that day.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:17:39 – 01:17:43) So have you been religious since you were a young boy?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:17:43 – 01:18:08) Yes. Yeah, I mentioned that my granddad was a Baptist preacher. The church that I still attend to this day has been my church since I was 2 years old. And my faith has really been the foundation of my life. Home base for me. But the work I do, whether it’s as a public school teacher or as a public official, stems, grows out of my faith. My faith is kind of the soil.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:18:09 – 01:18:13) And what is your faith? I know there’s lots of different denominations in Christianity. What is your faith?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:18:14 – 01:19:47) My granddad, the Baptist preacher, told me that as Christians, we’re supposed to follow the 2 commandments that Jesus gave us, to love God and love neighbor. And that’s in the New Testament, when a lawyer— it’s always the lawyers— asked Jesus to define neighbor. And that’s when he tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, maybe one of Jesus’s most famous parables. And he tells the story of a man who is beaten and left for dead on the side of the road.

A priest walks by and does nothing. A religious man walks by and does nothing. And then a Samaritan walks by. And when we hear Samaritan in our Modern context, it doesn’t really mean a whole lot. Most people associate it with helping people on the side of the road. But in Jesus’s time, and for Jesus’s listeners, the Samaritans were not just a different religious group. They were their sworn enemies.

And so in Jesus’s story, the Samaritan is the one who stops and bandages the man’s wounds, nurses him back to health, takes him to an inn, pays the innkeeper to look after him until he comes back. And in Jesus’s story, the Samaritan is the ultimate example of loving thy neighbor as thyself. And it’s such a— it would’ve been a shocking story. I’m a Texas Longhorn football fan.

It’s as if Jesus was standing in the middle of Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium at the University of Texas and told a story called “The Good Aggie.” Right? People would be outraged by the story.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:19:47 – 01:19:48) Because they’re the opposing team.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:19:48 – 01:20:31) Right, they’re the rivals, right? But he’s reminding us that we’re not just called to love our neighbors who look like us or pray like us or vote like us. We’re called to actively love those who are the most different from us, maybe those we hate the most. And that, 2,000 years later, is still a radical teaching. And so I have tried, imperfectly, because we’re all imperfect Christians, I have tried to follow those 2 commandments, to love God and to love my neighbor as myself.

It’s why I decided to become a public school teacher. It’s why I ran for office. And the work that I do in the legislature, I think of as, again, as a form of ministry. I am trying to love my neighbor through public policy.

Loving His Opponent, Ken Paxton

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:20:32 – 01:20:33) So Ken Paxton is your—

JAMES TALARICO: (01:20:34 – 01:20:34) Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:20:34 – 01:20:38) I guess he’s your sort of adversary. He’s the Republican.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:20:38 – 01:20:40) My rival, yes. My Samaritan.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:20:40 – 01:20:42) He’s the candidate you’re running against.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:20:42 – 01:20:42) Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:20:43 – 01:20:46) You’ve said that Ken is one of the most corrupt politicians in America.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:20:46 – 01:20:47) Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:20:47 – 01:20:48) Do you love him?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:20:48 – 01:22:25) Yes. Ken Paxton is a child of God. He is my brother in Christ. It doesn’t mean there’s not accountability, right? Love requires accountability. We talked about the story of my mom and her love meant standing up to a bully. And if you think about when you’re out having a drink with your friends, and your friend grabs their car keys to drive home under the influence, your job as their friend is to take those keys away, to physically block them from getting in the car.

And that feels aggressive. It feels maybe even hostile, but it is done out of love. For that person and for everybody else, for all of your neighbors. Ken Paxton, from every— I don’t know Ken Paxton personally, but from everything I’ve been able to read and learn about his service and his life, he has clearly shown that he only cares about himself. He was indicted for investment fraud because he was defrauding his own friends.

He committed— he convinced his friends to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into a tech company, but he didn’t tell them that he was making a commission off those investments. So he got indicted because he was screwing over his own friends. He was reported to the FBI by his own staff. He was impeached by his own party. And of course his relationships with his own family have now become well-known and infamous. And so if I was to sit down with Ken Paxton, which I would love to do—

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:22:26 – 01:22:26) You’d grab the keys.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:22:27 – 01:23:08) I would grab the keys and I would urge him to get his own house in order before he tries to tell all of us how to— what to do with our own houses. And so I am trying both to protect the people of Texas from the most corrupt politician in our state, one of the most corrupt in the country. And in a weird way, I feel like I’m trying to protect Ken Paxton.

Because I hope if he loses this race, it will be an opportunity for him to take stock and to reevaluate some of his priorities. And I just want to— I am not saying that as a perfect person. I’m really not. What I’m trying to do is be honest about the clear choice in this race and about the ramifications of electing someone with Ken Paxton’s track record to the US Senate.

Why He Went to Seminary

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:23:09 – 01:23:11) At 31 years old, you went off to Bible school.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:23:12 – 01:27:28) Yeah. I had always I looked up to my grandfather, still do. Looked up to my pastor, still do. And I always kind of harbored this wish to one day preach and lead a church. I saw how my granddad and my pastor, I just really, I saw how they helped people, how they helped people make sense of their own lives, how they helped people ask some of the deepest questions: “Who am I?

What does it mean to be a human being? What is the purpose of life?” I saw them doing that on a, not on a big podcast, but, at a small neighborhood church in like a very intimate way with people. I saw them comfort people who were grieving. In our community, when someone loses a loved one, when someone is dying themselves, like their first call is to Dr.

Jim, my pastor. So I always had this idea that I may want to go into that line of work one day. And so I was in my second term in the statehouse, and my first term had been great. It was 2019. Democrats had flipped all these districts. There was a close, competitive election statewide that year in 2018. So the very next session in 2019, suddenly the Republican majority was ready to work on a bipartisan basis with us Democrats.

And it was great because we passed this historic school finance reform package that invested a lot of new money into our schools, and we provided property tax relief to working people. It was awesome. And I was like, I have the best job in the world. Fast forward to the next session in 2021, and it was one of the most partisan, one of the most unproductive legislative sessions in modern Texas history.

That’s when you saw the most extreme abortion ban, in the country go into effect. You saw permitless carry, one of these crazy gun laws that allows people to carry these weapons without any kind of background check, without any kind of license. You saw efforts to ban books and whitewash curriculum, voter suppression, trying to make it harder for people to vote in Texas. Texas is one of, one of the hardest places to vote in the country.

So it was a really difficult session, and I just started to doubt that I was really making an impact, that I was really doing what I was supposed to do. And after meeting with my pastor about it, sitting down with my granddad about it, both of them reminded me that Jesus gave us these 2 commandments for a reason, right? I had been so focused on that second commandment to love my neighbor in the classroom, in the halls of power, in serving my community, that despite going to church, on Sunday, I really wasn’t giving enough attention and time to that first commandment to love God, to love that, that sacred something that we are all an expression of.

And so I made the decision to go to seminary to follow that first commandment. And what I’ve discovered, because now I’m a seminarian and a lawmaker at the same time, And I’ve realized that these 2 commandments, again, given to us as a whole by Jesus, those 2 commandments, they sustain, they enrich, they challenge each other. They’re in relationship. And at least for me personally speaking, it helped balance me out.

Because if I’m being honest, if you’re devoting all of your energy to loving your neighbor, especially your neighbors who you disagree with, it’s really easy to burn out. And I think anyone who does, service work can tell you that. And it’s why we have to be in touch with the ground of our own being, the God that all of us express every day. To me, you need both the inner life and the outer life.

You need prayer and action. Those 2 things go hand in hand, and without it, you burn out. Or if you’re only focused on loving God and not loving our neighbors, which a lot of people do that too, you become self-centered, you become disconnected from the world. And so going to seminary was my way of trying to unite these 2 commandments in my own life. And honestly, it was— I think it’s the best decision I’ve ever made.

Faith as Trust

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:27:28 – 01:27:44) Where does your faith in a God, in Jesus, come from? What is the— faith is probably kind of maybe the answer to the question. But yeah, what makes you believe that there is a higher power, that Jesus is who he pledged to be back all those years ago?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:27:44 – 01:29:39) Yeah, as a seminary student, I had to learn Greek and Hebrew because in our, in our Christian Bible, the Hebrew scriptures are written in Hebrew and the New Testament’s written in Greek. And so we learn both original languages so that we don’t have to be reliant on translations, right? Because things get lost in translation. And so I was studying this word faith, and I realized that it can be translated both as belief, which is how it’s often translated, a commitment to some kind of value, some kind of concept, an idea, right?

That’s a belief. But it can also be translated as trust. And suddenly, this was like my first year of seminary, and I was already having like a light bulb moment. And I realized, that’s how my faith feels to me. It feels much more like trust than it does belief. It’s not a, it’s not a commitment to some abstract concept, some intellectual idea. It is a visceral bodily experience of almost like relaxing.

The best analogy I can think of, because when we talk about God, we’re always talking in analogies. I learned to swim at the Wells Branch Pool in the neighborhood where I grew up. And I remember when I was learning how to swim, my swim instructor, she told me, “Don’t fight the water. Don’t hold on to the water. Let the water hold on to you.” And it was a big moment for me in learning how to swim, but that’s exactly how my faith feels.

So much of our lives is trying to control our surroundings, right? Trying to control other people. And when you realize that we are an expression of something much deeper and much bigger, you’re suddenly able to let that hold you instead of trying to hold on to it.

Why Christianity?

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:29:39 – 01:29:43) And why this religion versus all the other available religions? Why are you trusting in this one?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:29:44 – 01:31:06) We all inherit, a religious tradition, and it is an inheritance that’s passed on from one generation to the next. And it’s such a gift. It’s such a gift that, that I feel like a lot of people nowadays are abandoning for understandable reasons. I mean, we have seen religious corruption in our religious institutions across this country, across the world, including in my home state of Texas. We’ve seen religious leaders abuse children.

We’ve seen them lie. We’ve seen them amass wealth and power for themselves at the expense of the people of God. And so I understand where that temptation to just reject the whole thing comes from. But there is a baby in that bathwater. I do worry that a lot of young people are growing up in an incoherent universe because we have discarded the traditions that have been passed down to us through the generations.

And whether it’s the Christian tradition, the Jewish tradition, the Hindu tradition, there is, I think, beauty and truth and love at the heart of these great faith traditions. And it’s up to all of us, it’s up to every new generation to reclaim that and to live it out. And that’s what I’m trying to do in my small corner of the world.

Podcasts as the New Town Square

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:31:08 – 01:31:15) James, what’s the most important thing we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about as it relates to your work, your mission, or anything else that the audience might find of value?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:31:15 – 01:31:17) Oh my gosh, that’s a good question.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:31:17 – 01:31:23) Just wondering if there’s anything at all that you wanted to, as a closing message for the audience, anyone listening.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:31:23 – 01:31:59) Oh, this has really been great. And grateful for what you do. I mean, I feel like we no longer have town squares like we once had, and for better or for worse, it is new media, social media, podcasts that have become our collective town squares where we have these conversations, these debates, this kind of discourse. And the way you and your team have structured these conversations and encouraged these conversations has been, I think, very important for the country, for the world. So very thankful.

How Is Talarico Different?

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:32:00 – 01:32:30) I think one of the questions that I think everybody’s always asking about politicians these days is like, how are you different? Because every politician will come here or when I speak to them, they’ll say that they are different. But then when you speak to people, one of the great grievances they have is that politics is the same in terms of, I mean, you’ve seen this probably on the doorstep, is everybody says it’s going to be different this time, but it ends up being kind of more of the same, broadly speaking. How are you different?

JAMES TALARICO: (01:32:31 – 01:34:25) The issue is not personalities. This, I think, is the central problem, is we think the reason this economy is off track, the reason I can’t get ahead, the reason that we see corruption is because of politician X, right? Or political party Y. When in reality, it is a system that traps all of us, no matter what good intentions we have going in. It’s partly why I told you I’ve put in place a self-imposed term limit, because I know that the system eventually, unless it’s reformed, will bring out the worst in all of us, including me.

And so what we need is to focus on systemic reform. Don’t focus on the personalities. Don’t focus on replacing the guy you don’t like or voting in the guy you do like. We have to focus on transforming this broken, corrupt system so that it’s bringing out the best in every elected official. Because in my experience, a lot of people run for office for the right reasons. They want to help people.

They want to improve their community that they love. And it is a broken, corrupt system that transforms them, transforms our public policy so that the system only benefits those at the top. And until we transform that system, you’re not going to see anything change. So I guess I would say we’re asking the wrong question. And it’s not, “How will I be different?” “How will the system be different if we remake it in our own image?”

And that’s hopefully an empowering message, because if you’re just focused on what you don’t like about certain politicians, you kind of take more of a passive role. I think it’s going to require a mass movement of working people in places like Texas joining together across all the divisions in our society to force that kind of systemic change.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:34:26 – 01:34:31) And hopefully that’s an empowering message and one that leaves people with a little bit of hope.

His Biggest Challenge: Winning Texas

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:34:33 – 01:34:36) James, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they’re leaving it for.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:34:36 – 01:34:37) Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:34:38 – 01:34:42) The question left for you is, “What is your biggest challenge and how are you working to fix it?”

JAMES TALARICO: (01:34:43 – 01:35:31) Oh, it’s a great, it’s a great question. Winning Texas is a challenge, to say the least. We got 18 million registered voters. We got 20 media markets. We got 2 time zones. Texas was once a nation, and it still very much feels like a nation. So trying to reach all of those Texans trying to make— trying to listen to them and their needs, trying to share my values and my vision.

It is a logistical and physical and spiritual challenge, to say the least. I’m thankful that I’m not doing this alone. We have 59,000 people who have signed up to volunteer for the campaign. We have more than a million people who have donated to the campaign. And I have many more people who are praying for me on a regular basis.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:35:31 – 01:35:34) And you’re winning. According to some of the polls that I saw, by a couple of points.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:35:34 – 01:36:25) The only poll that matters is on Election Day. So I do think that we are the underdogs until the last vote is counted. We talked about Elon Musk. He’s already committed to spending millions of dollars in our race to try to defeat us. And I have nothing against Elon Musk, so I don’t know why he’s trying to stop our campaign. But that if you’re speaking truth to power, if you’re going up against the world’s first trillionaire, you’re always going to be the underdog.

And so we’re campaigning like we are 5 points behind. And so I would ask anyone watching to spare a thought or a prayer for me. I really do believe that when you put energy out into the universe, it has a ripple effect. And so I hope wherever people are watching or listening, even if they don’t agree with my politics, even if they’re going to vote for the other candidate, I hope they’ll keep me in their thoughts and their prayers.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:36:26 – 01:36:26) Thank you.

JAMES TALARICO: (01:36:26 – 01:36:27) Thank you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: (01:36:27 – 01:36:46) We’re done. Thank you, James. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

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