The Fight for Fair Redistricting (ft. Texas Rep. James Talarico)

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Welcome to Raging Moderates.

I'm Scott Galloway.

And I'm Josica Tarlow.

We're joined today by Texas State Representative James Tallarico.

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 Tallarico, 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 bus 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 are 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?

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.

So, you know, my students struggled every day to not just, you know, be a kid, 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.

You know, 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, you know, I...

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 capitol.

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 severe way, but I want to talk a little bit about the floods in your state over the last two weeks.

More than 100 people died, 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 you know 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 um 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 the 4th of July weekend in the Hill Country, an area of the 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 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.

You know, 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, you know, 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 Capitol and here at the State Capitol, 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 going to 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 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 a 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

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.

That'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 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.

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.

You know, I'll redistrict California up.

You know, we have two-thirds control of the legislature here.

And 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, and 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 know, 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.

You know, 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 it 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 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 maybe 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, you know, 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 midterm.

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.

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 Buttigiege, Gavin Newsom, I 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, you know, 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.

Because I, 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, you know, 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 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 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, they can 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 in the middle to the top.

It'll be taking the tax dollars of of nurses and plumbers and electricians and giving those tax dollars to families who are making $300,000 a year, $500,000 a year, $1 million a year.

They're going to 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 have 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.

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 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 how your faith informs your decision-making and your political views.

Well,

my granddad was a Baptist preacher in Laredo, Texas, which is on the border between Texas and Mexico.

And, you know, 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 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 capitol.

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 child care, reform our justice system.

I mean, all of these bills are an attempt to love my neighbor.

Obviously, loving thy neighbor in a place like the Texas legislature is not easy.

And when I began 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 seminarian and a 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.

That's why I want to continue on this trend and talk about how, you know, increasingly I see religion as being weaponized for whatever you need that day.

Yes.

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.

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 as old as 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.

You know, Dr.

King and Howard Thurman, you know, Fannie Lou Hamer.

I mean, these are, 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 y'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 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 in 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 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 separation in our constitution are you thinking of taking your approach to politics to the senate race that's coming up

man y'all these turns have been pretty hard sorry yeah no we're we only have half an hour so we gotta we gotta swerve quickly

um you know i i i am thinking about the the senate race um the legislative session the regular session just ended at the beginning of june we have this special session that i mentioned with some 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 am 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 figure it out myself.

Representative, I saw, I read on your Wikipedia page.

I mean, someone looks at you, look very healthy and strong.

I think around the age of 30, you were diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

That's right.

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 were 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 are 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 or 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 state house.

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.

You know, 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 freak 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 that 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 it signed in 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 Capitol 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.

And I mean, all of them fought this tooth and nail, but we got it through.

It is saving people's lives in Texas.

And that's what 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 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, you know, 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 to reclaim some of these faith communities that are dying.

You know, 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 in 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 a 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.

You know, all of those values 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.

You said a lot of those buzzwords.

Professor, you've really got 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 Tallarico.

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 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 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.

Thank you.

I really do appreciate it.

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