Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico on inequality, AI, immigration, and faith
Steven Bartlett interviews James Talarico, Texas state representative and Democratic candidate for the US Senate.
Summary
James Talarico, an eighth-generation Texan and four-term state representative, joins Steven Bartlett to make the case for why he could become the first Democratic US senator from Texas since 1988. Talarico argues that the American economy has been systematically rigged against working people over the past fifty years through what he calls "crony capitalism" — a political system in which corporate interests buy access to elected officials and write the rules in their own favour. He contends that the Biden administration failed on the southern border and that Trump's promises on cost of living, the Epstein files, and ending forever wars have gone unfulfilled. He also discusses his Christian faith, his time in seminary, and his view that public service is a form of ministry — arguing that systemic political reform, not personality change, is the only path to meaningful progress. Note: the episode also covers the Iran conflict in depth, including specific claims about strategic objectives and civilian casualties, but those sections were not available for full verification in the supplied transcript.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Background and family history
Steven Bartlett: James Talarico, if the elections go your way this November, you're on the verge of potentially making history by becoming the first Democratic senator in Texas history — the first time since 1988 that a Democrat has won in Texas. People also tell me that you might be president someday because you have a lot of the attributes that people think it would take a Democratic candidate to become president of the United States. I want to figure out who you are, what you stand for, and where you've come from. What is that early context I need to understand to understand the man who sits in front of me today?
James Talarico: I'm an eighth-generation Texan. My family's been in the state since it was Mexico. I was born to a single mother who was a preacher's daughter from South Texas. She struck out on her own when she was 19 years old, moved up to the big city — Austin, Texas — and worked overtime to provide for me. She left a dangerous situation to provide a better life for me. She showed me what it means to stand up to bullies. She showed me what it means to fight for the people that you love. She was always making time for service. She worked a full-time job and had very limited time, but she always carved out time to fight for the causes she cared about — to volunteer, whether it was at my school, at the church, or in the community. My public service is inspired by her, and I would not be here without her.
Steven Bartlett: You said she taught you to stand up to bullies. She was in an abusive relationship with your biological father.
James Talarico: Yes. She met my birth father when he was 21 years old. He was a high school dropout and he had a drinking problem. When he drank, he became violent, became abusive. One night, shortly after I was born, he got physical again. That night her love for me rose to meet that abuse from him, and she packed all our stuff into her little Ford Escort and drove me to the hotel where she worked. She begged the manager to let us stay in one of the rooms until we found a little apartment in East Austin. This photo is taken in that apartment. There wasn't room for a nursery, so I slept in a crib in her closet. She always says she was very proud of that closet — she decorated it with toys and pictures. That fighting spirit, I feel like she passed that along to me. Whether it was in the classroom or in the state legislature, I have tried to fight for the people I love in the way that she fought for me.
Steven Bartlett: How do you feel about him?
James Talarico: When I was growing up, I felt a lot of anger toward him. As I've gotten older, I've tried to appreciate the things that got him to that point. My mom would tell me that he didn't know the months in order, so she thinks he may have had a learning disability that went undiagnosed. Things are very different now — as a former teacher, I know that we're able to catch these disabilities and serve students with special needs. But it sounds like he didn't get that, and that can derail someone. It can lead to substance abuse, it can lead to the bottle, and then that can lead to violence and abuse. So I try, as hard as it is, to recognise that I'm the person I am because of both him and my mom. That's a hard thing to wrestle with. A lot of people who've had abuse in their family struggle with the fact that they come from an abuser. I've tried to have more compassion for it as I've gotten older.
Steven Bartlett: Your mom then meets Mark Talarico, who's your adoptive father. He's the man who ultimately raised you. Very different from your birth father. What role has he played in your life?
James Talarico: I've said before that the luckiest thing that ever happened to me in my whole life was meeting Mark Talarico. I certainly would not be on this podcast without him. He gave me his last name. He raised me as his own. He is probably the best man that I know — honest, cares about other people, does what's right even when no one is watching. He has certainly shaped me into the man that I am today.
Steven Bartlett: If I'd asked you at 16 years old what you wanted to be when you were older, what would you have said?
James Talarico: 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 were the ones who kept me on the straight and narrow. They got me interested in school. I was not the best student before then. I struggled to behave in class and be a good student. I feel like it was my passion for social studies, for history, for reading that ultimately kept me on track. From that point, I did want to go into being some kind of teacher or professor so I could do that for other people.
Steven Bartlett: I read that in high school you were voted most likely to become president.
James Talarico: I think so, yes. When I was in school I took on leadership roles. I was the president of our choir and the captain of our debate team, so I think people saw that.
On running for Senate and the question of the presidency
Steven Bartlett: Are you interested in being president someday?
James Talarico: 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 after my fourth term in the legislature was coming to a close. I finished the legislative session in May of last year and was really proud of the work I had done, but it is difficult work being in politics. You may know that I also made the decision to go to seminary — studying to become a minister like my granddad. This is something I'd always kind of had in the back of my mind. I remember meeting with my pastor, who baptized me when I was two years old and has been my pastor since I was a little kid. 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. I had never really thought about that. I kind of kept these things very distinct. He was helpful in getting me to reconcile these two vocations and see them as potentially one and the same. 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 we're doing something really special and important.
Steven Bartlett: Why would that exclude you from someday also pursuing the role of presidency? It sounds like it may not.
James Talarico: 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 two terms if I'm blessed to get that opportunity, because I feel like when people hang on to these positions or are trying to reach for the next position, everything becomes about self-preservation. It becomes about accumulating power rather than serving people. Those are temptations for every elected official. From what I've seen being in this now for eight years, the longer you're in it, the more the office and your identity become merged into one thing. Being a senator or being a state rep — 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, which means selling out your values, being susceptible to corruption. Starting out, I'm trying to always remember that this is a service. I think we need more elected officials who have other interests besides politics and government and legislating. There are other things I want to do, other ways I want to serve. I want to have a well-balanced life. 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. That's how this is supposed to work.
Steven Bartlett: Could you see yourself running someday for the highest office in the land — president?
James Talarico: No, I really don't. I'm surprised I'm doing this — running for the US Senate. I'm travelling the whole state of Texas, which is a giant, diverse, complex state, and I'm constantly learning about the things I don't know. Every day on the campaign trail I'm cramming for a big test in January of next year to be the senator of this state. I've already seen over the course of this campaign how difficult it is — 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 run for office who are also on the receiving end of these attacks. I can't imagine doing this for longer than two terms.
Steven Bartlett: Do you think pressure and attacks are a reason not to do something that is worthy? Even as a podcaster, you get a different type of pressure — lots of attacks, lots of feedback. But at the end of it, I love what I get to do and I really hope people benefit from it. So to me, that's reason enough to continue, really irrespective of the pressure and the attacks.
James Talarico: I think that's true, but there are lots of people who want to be president, so we should give those people a shot if that's the job they want. I honestly think my skill set is better suited for a legislative position.
Steven Bartlett: What's a legislative position for us Brits?
James Talarico: Right now I'm a state rep in Texas, so I serve in the state house in the lower chamber. If elected, I would be serving in the US Senate, which means I'm one member of a larger team of people. I'm trying to build coalitions, bring people over to my side, change hearts and minds in a body — and I feel like I'm really good at that. In the state house in Texas, even as a Democrat in a Republican-dominated body, I've passed 60 bipartisan bills over four terms. These are not just symbolic, superficial pieces of legislation. These are major bills on housing, healthcare, early childhood education, teacher pay, property taxes — the things that are really affecting my neighbours. That is a skill set. 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.
On the 2028 Democratic field
Steven Bartlett: You must have an opinion on who you think might be the right candidate as we head toward 2028. If you look at the polling data and what's going on geopolitically — with Iran and AI and lots of other issues — the polls are becoming a little bit more favourable for the Democrats. Do you have an opinion on who should be president in the next cycle? There's Kamala, there's Gavin, there's AOC, Bernie's probably going to run again, Pete Buttigieg is probably going to run again.
James Talarico: I don't know a lot of these people personally, given that I've worked at the state level, but I honestly think a lot of the people you just named have a lot of potential to be good leaders and to deliver for this country. 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 that what I'm going to be looking for in the candidates as they start bubbling up is who is talking about systemic reform. There are lots of issues I care about — education, healthcare, housing — but I've done this now for eight years and I've seen that the system itself is what's preventing us from making progress on all of those important issues. So my criteria for evaluating who I'm going to vote for or support will be who is thinking and talking about comprehensive political reform: 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.
On democratic socialism and economic inequality
Steven Bartlett: There's been this really interesting rise in democratic socialism over the last year or so. Mayor Mamdani has been elected to office, and people like AOC and the broader democratic socialist narrative have been really popular. What's your perspective on that? I think of the Democrats and then I think of democratic socialism as being slightly different from more centrist Democratic philosophy.
James Talarico: I certainly understand where the anger is coming from. I hear it everywhere I go across the state of Texas. Everywhere I go, people are struggling to survive in this economy. 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 you need to survive every day. And people are working harder than they've ever worked. Some of them are working multiple jobs and they can't make ends meet. This is especially pronounced among young people — my fellow millennials, but also Gen Z — because we were promised that if we worked hard, played by the rules, went to school, and studied, we could live the American dream. And that was a lie, because it is way too expensive to buy a home, way too expensive to start a family, to have kids, too expensive to retire comfortably. It's because the system itself has been rigged against working people.
I would go back to the 1970s. You can pinpoint this one document called the Powell Memo — 1971. He was a corporate lawyer who later got appointed to the Supreme Court. 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 in the decades before. There was a feeling among corporate America that there needed to be a strategic plan, a political campaign to protect their power and amass more power. The blueprint says that corporate interests are going to unite, spend massive amounts of money in our politics buying politicians in both parties, elevate corporate voices in media, appoint sympathetic judges. It goes through 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 and early '80s, trickle-down economics — cutting taxes for the people at the very top and forgetting about the rest of us. That has really been the story of the last fifty years in this country.
That's a major change from what we saw in the middle of the twentieth century, when our government invested in education, healthcare, homes, and highways. We grew together. We had the largest, strongest middle class in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. Now that middle class is disappearing all over Texas, all over this country, and there's a lot of anger about that. It's not just limited to Democrats or Democratic socialists. It really spans the political spectrum. People are 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. The economy is just a collection of choices that we make, particularly policy choices, and we can make different choices than the ones we've made for the last five decades. Trickle-down economics, in my view, is not a theory — it's theft.
Steven Bartlett: 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. The middle-income category has reduced by 10%, the upper-income class has increased by 5%, and there's been a 5% increase in the cohort of people living in the low-income category. The direction of travel is that there are fewer people in the middle class, more people in the lower income bracket, and 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, GDP growth, and productivity. How do you reverse this change?
James Talarico: 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. The productivity and the innovation were, I think, more significant when we were growing together. 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. Specifically, 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 forget that now. The idea that you should be compensated for your time, for your work, 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: What is that?
James Talarico: It's 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 rugged individualism for the poor." Think about the bailout in the Great Recession. A lot of the people on Wall Street who got us into that mess got golden parachutes — they got taken care of by the government. But you've got single moms out there, construction workers, nurses and teachers who are barely surviving in this economy, and there's no bailout for them. It's rugged individualism for them.
My only point is that we can create an economy where we all grow together, where corporations have a broader definition of shareholder. Think about GE, GM, Ford — these great American companies from the twentieth century. They believed that shareholders included their workers, the families of their workers, the communities in which they operated. They felt an obligation, a corporate ethos that was about much more than just their bottom line. That's what 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. What I'm trying to get us back to is old-school capitalism where people are compensated for their work, and it's not a system that benefits the wealthy and the well-connected only.
Steven Bartlett: And how do you think you can do that from a Senate position if you are to win in Texas?
James Talarico: We talked about minimum wage and overtime pay, but I also think we have to rebuild labour unions in this country. You can almost track the destruction of the middle class with the destruction of organised labour. This is not really a government solution — it's about empowering workers in the workplace to be able to negotiate with their bosses for better pay, better benefits, 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, student debt, or credit card debt — and we should also talk about the national debt, because both are moral emergencies in my opinion.
I also think we've got to do more on supporting families and children. The GI Bill was a game-changer in the middle of the twentieth 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. We've got to expand the child tax credit, which cut child poverty in half just a few years ago and then was allowed to expire. New families who are having kids need extra support if they're going to live that American dream. And we can do all of this if we're willing to tax the people at the very top and make them pay their fair share.
Steven Bartlett: 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: Yes. And that's the point. It is a broken political system which leads to a broken economic system. That is the direction this moves in. 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, so that work is rewarded — is if you clean up the corruption in our political system, where corporate special interests and super PACs don't have the same influence in our government as they do now.
Right now 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 — to pass a private school voucher scheme, which is taking money out of our underfunded public schools. 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. 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. 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: Is the Texas governor corrupt?
James Talarico: Yes.
Steven Bartlett: That's a strong thing to say.
James Talarico: The system itself is corrupt. The question is which politicians succumb to that and which ones don't. I'm less interested in the personalities in our politics and much more interested in the system, because politicians are rational actors for the most part. Politicians are trying to get re-elected 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? Right now, if you look at the influence of big money, Citizens United, gerrymandering and redistricting, the two-party system, social media, traditional media — this whole ecosystem incentivises extremism and corruption by design. You can get rid of the governor of Texas, you can get rid of whoever you want, and someone else is just going to take their place. If you haven't fixed the incentives, if you haven't fixed the system, you're going to get the same result.
On Elon Musk, billionaires, and inequality in Texas
Steven Bartlett: 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 Tesla and SpaceX in your state. How do you marry these two worlds together? Because Elon Musk is now a trillionaire — the world's first trillionaire. You're talking about inequality. He's been held up by some as the poster child of inequality because he's so rich on paper. How do you attract someone like Elon Musk to the state to build his companies and employ the people that he does, while also pursuing equality at the same time?
James Talarico: Some people have asked me if I'm demonising billionaires, and I've said that I think I'm humanising billionaires, because for one of our own residents to become the world's first trillionaire while one in five 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 and 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 a hundred lifetimes while we have people starving in this one — to me, that means we're not fulfilling our full humanity.
Steven Bartlett: What would you have done to stop that happening?
James Talarico: At one point in this country, I think it was in the 1950s, we 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 labour.
Steven Bartlett: On that particular point — if there was a tax rate of 90%, Elon would still be a trillionaire.
James Talarico: Well, this is the problem when you let so much concentrated wealth and power get so out of control. The thing that really upsets people particularly about the Elon example is that Tesla was successful because of taxpayer dollars. Tesla got investment from the federal government, which is why it has been so successful. If we're all going to invest in Tesla, if we're going to invest in Elon Musk or pick your billionaire — most of our billionaires went to schools that we funded, drove on highways that we funded, benefited from infrastructure that we all built together. We're not saying they can't be successful. All we're saying is make sure you give something back to the country that made your success possible. Make sure there's a ladder for the next person coming up.
I think we should be investing in 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. When people talk about being pro-business, what that usually means is being pro-big business. All the tax breaks go to the giant multinational corporations. Walmart — we basically subsidise Walmart through Medicaid because they don't give their employees quality healthcare. So we the taxpayers are giving Walmart employees quality healthcare. Again, socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the rest of us. 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. This is not a radical vision. It's what we had before, and we had the most productive, innovative economy in the world. I think we can rebuild that through better tax policy, better healthcare policy, better education policy.
Steven Bartlett: 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 have 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: What we've talked about on this campaign is closing tax loopholes that benefit the wealthiest in this country. There's crazy stuff in our tax code that says you can write off your private jet, your mega yacht, as business expenses. The carried interest loophole, capital gains — this whole tax system really allows the people at the very top to accumulate and amass more wealth without any taxation. I was reading that if we just collected the taxes that the top 1% already 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: But if they hadn't paid it, presumably they're going to be in jail, aren't they?
James Talarico: There are no resources that actually go to cracking down on these tax cheats. It's loopholes in the system, and people who are cheating the system too. It's both the legalised loopholes you can get away with, and people who just know no one is going to crack down on them. I say that as an example of how much this system benefits those who can afford to buy politicians, those who can afford to curry favour with elected officials, those who can write the rules of the game so that they're the only ones who win. That's what I think people are angry about across the political spectrum. Most people in this country want success. They want businesses to thrive. They want business leaders to thrive. But they don't want all the gains in our economy to just go to a few guys at the very top at our expense. Right now, it's three men — Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos — who own more wealth than the entire middle class. That's crazy. And you're not a socialist or a communist if you say that.
Steven Bartlett: So what would you do about that at this point? Historically you could have done something, but now this is where we are. How would you redistribute that wealth?
James Talarico: A fair tax system, to start with.
Steven Bartlett: A lot of these guys don't pay tax because they're taking loans against their equity.
James Talarico: There are all kinds of ideas for being able to tax not only income but also wealth, to make sure that those assets are being taxed fairly.
Steven Bartlett: So you're pro-wealth tax?
James Talarico: I'm interested in what kind of wealth taxes we could actually implement. I know there are challenges on implementation, but I think we should explore every avenue to make the wealthiest people in this country pay their fair share. Just as a percentage of income — working Texans are paying more as a percentage of their take-home pay than the wealthiest people in our state. The tax system has been transformed by those who can afford to pay politicians for access and for control. 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. Elected officials write those rules — they create the tax code, set education policy, set healthcare policy. 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.
Steven Bartlett: One of the rebuttals people have when they hear about wealth taxes or raising taxes generally is that these successful people, these billionaires, will just move to a different state. We've seen this with California threatening a wealth tax — a lot of well-known founders have departed. Is that something you think about? These founders can have their businesses online and can quite easily move their residency to a more preferential state like Florida. Much of the reason founders have moved to Texas is the 0% state income tax.
James Talarico: We don't have a state income tax, and I don't want one. Our citizens are taxed enough with property and sales taxes. But this is the reason we need good federal policy, and it's the reason why states can't really tackle this problem on their own. I had an event with Mark Cuban up in Dallas-Fort Worth. The moderator interviewed both of us and it was a little awkward because she said, "James, you've had some tough words for billionaires and you've got a billionaire sitting right next to you." I joked that Mark Cuban is one of the good ones — meaning he 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.
That's true throughout American history. Franklin Roosevelt, Bobby Kennedy — these were political heroes of mine. They were trust fund babies, the billionaires of their day. But they used their power to take on 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. That's exactly what people like Mark Cuban are doing. I'm not interested in punishing success. I'm not interested in banning billionaires. All I want is to ensure that we're acting like a community again as a country, that we have a responsibility to each other. You can be successful while also paying your fair share and ensuring that we're investing in young entrepreneurs, that we have an education system empowering the next great business leader.
Steven Bartlett: So you're saying the tax changes would need to happen on the federal level.
James Talarico: Yes. Along with a lot more. It's not just tax. I'm talking about major changes in education, early childhood, healthcare, and blocking consolidation. One of the things Mark Cuban and I laid out together was going after healthcare monopolies, because you can now have one company that owns the health insurance company, the hospital, and the pharmacy all in one. When I say this is not capitalism — less competition means fewer choices, which means higher prices for people. CVS owns one of the largest pharmacy benefit managers, one of the big health insurance companies, and the largest network of drugstores in the country. 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. 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 were going to die needlessly every year. I want to ground us in the real-world ramifications of these policy decisions. It's not just theoretical. We're talking about our neighbours 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. 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.
On artificial intelligence and the future of work
Steven Bartlett: One of the big protagonists in this story is now artificial intelligence and how disruptive that's going to be. I've sat here with so many of the stakeholders in that industry and heard some of the most extraordinary predictions around robotics and AI generally. One of the 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 — the frontier labs and the Nvidias of the world. When I ask very smart people in technology what the biggest concern is for the US economy right now, it is dealing with this AI challenge. Bernie Sanders has been very vocal about it recently. Donald Trump has said we need to win against China. How are you thinking about AI and the impact it's going to have on Texans?
James Talarico: When I travel around the state of Texas, I get this question a lot. There are 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 — that's exciting for most people. And then a lot of Texans, including me, feel a lot of anxiety because our leaders — those who should be writing the rules of the game — have their head in the sand. It is shocking that our US Senate, our Congress, our federal government has really been missing in action 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. 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, safely, in a way that's going to ensure AI works for us and not against us. Right now, no one is minding the store.
Steven Bartlett: Do you have any ideas about what that means specifically?
James Talarico: If I was in the US Senate helping develop this regulatory framework, there are three things I would prioritise. One is protecting our workers and 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 prioritise is children. We've seen how social media companies have preyed on our kids, taken advantage of our kids, and led to a spike in self-harm, depression, and anxiety among young people. I very much worry that without regulation, AI technologies may do the same thing to future generations. You've seen the horror stories of kids going to AI for therapy and counselling, and sometimes those AI chatbots have helped those kids harm themselves. The third thing I would prioritise 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. I've always prided myself as a millennial on being able to differentiate between fact and fiction online, but I'm seeing it happen to me. I increasingly can't tell the difference between AI deepfakes and reality. And most of the time there's no disclaimer required. There's a lot that needs to happen, but those would be the three things I would prioritise.
Steven Bartlett: Elon has said that within a decade there will be over a billion humanoid robots, and that those robots will be at least five times the output of a human. These robots are being built in your state in Texas. How is it possible to protect workers when there's a billion humanoid robots in the world?
James Talarico: Here's the key, and it 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. I try to always think about historical parallels. 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. AI will probably be more consequential than those three innovations. But the thing that's different is that all three of those innovations were done as a public-private partnership. We as a country were deciding the rules of the game in partnership with great private sector companies. This innovation is very different. It's 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.
We can't allow that to happen. We've seen already — we talked about the last fifty years — when you let the richest, most powerful people in this country write all the rules, all of the gains and 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. 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, our ingenuity, then we deserve to be compensated for the use of that intellectual property.
Steven Bartlett: 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 on Uber and DoorDash — and by the way, the CEO of Uber told me those jobs are going away — it's more than half a million people who rely on driving as an occupation. Texas is leading the charge toward autonomous vehicles that need no driver. It would appear to me logically that on this direction of travel there's going to be significant job disruption, even outside of humanoid robots. How are people like you thinking about that level of disruption that could theoretically happen really quickly?
James Talarico: I think we need to reject the false choices. It is possible to benefit from some of these technologies — 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: Why would it need a human supervisor?
James Talarico: I would hope, especially if we're talking about 18-wheelers barrelling down Texas highways, that there's a human being there to monitor these technologies. I think about airplanes — 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. 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. We can figure out a way to both take advantage of the benefits of these technologies — making our roads safer, reducing fatalities — and ensuring that we are protecting human beings in the process. I fundamentally reject the idea that we have to choose between those two things.
Steven Bartlett: I watched a video the other day of a factory where they had a humanoid robot doing the packaging process next to a human, demonstrating the productivity difference. The video by Figure AI concludes with the fact that the humanoid robot was more productive and didn't need to sleep. The big frontier lab CEOs have all forecasted job disruption. They've changed their tone a little when it becomes unpopular, but if you look through their writing since 2016, they're saying the economy is going to have to drastically change in light of this technology. I'm in search of a good answer to this question of job disruption that seems logically to be on the way.
James Talarico: I spoke with an expert on AI — when you're in elected office, you suddenly realise all the things you don't know and you're having to make crucial decisions on things you may not be an expert on yet. I'm trying to get smarter on this every day. The person I spoke with said he's worried that we are headed toward five trillionaires and 30% unemployment. That terrifies me 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, we can both weather some of those disruptions and come out stronger on the other side.
I think about the need to invest and double down on what only human beings can do — human creativity, 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, an invention, or a piece of art — people who don't know a bunch of wealthy investors. We're going to invest in the little guy, just like we did with Tesla, just like we did with the internet. Those innovations have more than paid for themselves. Finding out what it is that human beings alone can do and doubling down on that creativity and ingenuity — that's just one example of how, if we all come together and think seriously about this problem and decide we're going to make decisions together, the AI future can look very differently than the path we're headed on.
Steven Bartlett: Do you have faith that elected officials can pass through this and arrive at a conclusion? Because if you think through how social media was handled, we tend to handle it after the fact.
James Talarico: Yeah, that should be a negative example, right? Because we let social media companies run wild and they ended up preying on our children, hurting our kids, hurting all of us. We should learn from that example and realise that 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 AI is making our lives better and easier and less stressful, and not hurting people. This is a fundamental belief I have: the economy is for people. People aren't for the economy. That is a guiding star for me. 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, we have to reject that. Our elected officials, who in a democracy are tasked with making these big decisions, need to get in the game.
On "wokeism" and the Democratic Party's losses
Steven Bartlett: Politics has shifted over the last couple of years. There was quite a distinct shift when Elon purchased Twitter. It seemed like the world changed a lot, and one of the terms within politics was this word "wokeism" — it was predominantly like a weapon that the right hit the left with. Recently AOC came out and said that "woke 1.0 was crazy," sort of distancing herself from the 2020 progressive political narratives that in hindsight may have hurt the party or at least hurt the perception of the party. Do you have a point of view on this idea of wokeism and the journey we've been on?
James Talarico: It's hard because people define "woke" or "wokeism" very differently. I do think there was a rise in performative politics — 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" or "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.
Steven Bartlett: Why did the Democrats lose to Trump in your view? Both times — the Democrats have lost to Trump twice now. What is the diagnosis?
James Talarico: 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, it was a pretty good economy and costs were a lot lower and it was easier for middle-class people to get ahead.
I've talked about the last fifty 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 fifty years of trickle-down economics, stagnant wages for middle-class and working-class people, systematic attacks on education and healthcare — but you had cheap goods. So it felt like we were getting something. My income's not going up, I'm not able to get ahead like maybe my grandparents were, it's hard to start a business, but at least things are cheap. And then when that changed, suddenly people realised that we are all getting screwed by this system, because not only is our pay going down or staying flat, but now the cost of living has gone up. You're getting squeezed from both ends.
When that happened, people were looking for someone who was going to help, and that's not an unreasonable thing to look for when you're hurting. People put their faith in President Trump for good reasons. 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 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.
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, costing us a billion dollars a day and driving up gas prices. The Epstein files have still not fully been released, and the swamp is bigger than it's ever been before. People are feeling like they've been conned. My job as a candidate, our job as a campaign, is to extend an open hand to our neighbours who are disillusioned, who misplaced their trust in a leader, and invite them to join this movement we're building in Texas — which is honestly bigger than Donald Trump. It's bigger than any one political party. On the ground, it feels like a movement of working people across the spectrum who are ready to take on this broken, corrupt system.
Steven Bartlett: What do you think of him as a person?
James Talarico: I don't know him, so it's hard for me to judge. I think all of us have strengths and weaknesses. The president does have clear strengths. 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 bust through walls to deliver for people. And he has a sense of humour, which I feel is really missing in politics — he has a light-hearted quality about him. Those are 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. All politicians have a desire to be popular, but he does seem to place that above almost any other principle or conviction he may have. I think it's important to consider both the good and the bad of any leader, and that includes the president.
On immigration and the southern border
Steven Bartlett: What about immigration? That's one of the issues that is both very relevant to Texas and that frankly helped him get elected.
James Talarico: He was right about this. The Biden administration failed us on our southern border. I remember talking with my colleagues in the state house who represented border communities, and they talked about the utter chaos on our border. Border communities in Texas mean a lot to me — my mom is from Laredo, which is on our Texas-Mexico border. This system was out of control in the Biden era.
My worry is that we have replaced one extremism on immigration in the Biden years with a new extremism on immigration — with masked men and unmarked vehicles kidnapping people off the street, deporting small business owners who have been here for years and decades, taking children as young as five years old and throwing them in detention centres. 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. In our politics, those two things are pitted against each other. Again, back to false choices. Those are not mutually exclusive. You can have a secure border. It is not racist to want to know who's coming into this country. 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, contribute to this economy, live that American dream and make us richer and stronger in the process, as immigrants have always done.
I'm trying on the trail to uphold both of those moral values. Public safety is the most important thing the government does — more important than public education, more important than public health. And we are a nation of immigrants. It is the lifeblood of our economy. It's what has made Texas and America so great. We can uphold both of those values at the same time and pass comprehensive immigration reform that does both of those things simultaneously.
Steven Bartlett: What would you do about the issue of undocumented young people who have come here, maybe brought here by no fault of their own, but now find themselves in the US without documents?
James Talarico: I taught a lot of DACA students, a lot of Dreamers, in room 112 at Roads Middle School on the west side of San Antonio. My students who were undocumented 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, the place where dreams come true. I would be very interested, as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package that includes border security, in creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented folks who have been here for years, for decades, for kids who were brought over as children, so they have an opportunity to come out of the shadows and fully join us as citizens of this country.
On the Iran conflict
Steven Bartlett: One of the issues I think is 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, war powers, and military spending, including in the Middle East. What is going on, and how do you get out of this situation?
James Talarico: We shouldn't have been in this situation to begin with. We should start with that.
Steven Bartlett: How did we get in this situation? 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 a quick fix to a problem that has long plagued the region and the United States. Maybe a lack of foresight — it's not that hard to predict that what Iran would do when cornered is take control of the Strait of Hormuz. Previous administrations had played out these war games and come to the same conclusion.
James Talarico: One, I think we need checks and balances. Right now we have something the founders couldn't have envisioned — political parties, factions as 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. What that looks like now is a legislative branch — which is supposed to be the most important branch in our government, the first one listed in the Constitution — that has become completely subservient to the executive branch, to the will of the president and his administration.
One, you have to restore those checks and balances. It doesn't have to be in a hostile, unproductive way. It can be healthy — the legislative branch asking questions about what the military strategy is, what the military objectives are that we're trying to accomplish. We've seen over the course of this disastrous war those objectives change over time. 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. We kind of know the contours of what a deal would look like — free passage through the strait, dealing with the nuclear issue. I worry that we've actually lost ground on this problem because I don't want to see Iran get a nuclear weapon, and I don't think anybody wants to see that. 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 is probably going to be the ultimate objective for how to salvage this situation. It is a mess from top to bottom.
I came of age after 9/11. I was 12 years old when 9/11 happened. 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, billions of dollars, and our moral standing in the world. I can't believe that we are making the same mistakes just twenty years later in Iran.
Steven Bartlett: 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, a clause about nuclear weapons. It failed within a couple of days. Iran is playing to a different time frame than Trump is able to, considering the four-year election cycle. It appears to me that Iran is saying they have the cards. I remember in one press conference I think it was Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth saying they're not even necessarily sure who is in charge in Iran — that it takes a while to get the carrier pigeons down to the front lines, meaning the people they're negotiating with might not even be connected with the people launching the missiles and drones. It just appears to be a total mess.
James Talarico: We do still have economic leverage, and there are still economic cards to play here. 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. 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. I'm not giving up hope that we can resolve this. We have to.
We just lost one of our own — our fellow Texan, Isabella Gonzalez, lost her life because of an Iranian airstrike in Jordan. She was 19 years old. She had just graduated from Hebron High School in Dallas, Texas. 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, that is deeply immoral. Isabella Gonzalez 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: Is there any specific way out of this that you have in mind?
James Talarico: This is why you need checks and balances — the legislative branch needs to start exerting pressure on the executive branch so that we can start to see what the objectives are, or come to a consensus about an exit strategy.
Steven Bartlett: The US can't afford to lose here.
James Talarico: Agreed. 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. It's imperative that we win.
Steven Bartlett: If you had a phone call with Trump and he said, "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 it would sort of correct itself. What advice have you got for me?"
James Talarico: That'd be tough. I think humility is good and self-awareness is good, and hopefully that 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. There's a reason this country spent so much political and economic capital on these partnerships and these allies — it's because when you get in a jam, you need your friends. I would urge the president to start building that big coalition. I would tell him frankly that he's not going to get out of this on his own. It's going to require bipartisan collaboration at home and regional collaboration abroad.
Steven Bartlett: Are you hopeful?
James Talarico: Yes.
Steven Bartlett: Do you think Trump's going to fix it?
James Talarico: I don't know if I'm hopeful about that specifically, but here's 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. After these kinds of midterms, especially when you get walloped, executives have kind of two reactions. One is to 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, and adjust course.
I would love, as the next US senator from Texas, to work with Donald Trump to actually fulfil 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. 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 to slash the red tape in this country so we can build millions of new homes and ensure everyone has a place to call home, I'm there. I'll work with him to do it. My hope is that this midterm will be a wake-up call for the president and his administration, and as a result they will reverse course and decide to engage with leaders in both parties to actually deliver for the working people who sent him there.
On faith, seminary, and public service as ministry
Steven Bartlett: I have this book here — the Bible. And I also have some photos showing you as a young boy at eight years old at St. Andrews Church. It looks like you're an acolyte?
James Talarico: Usually the kids are tasked with lighting the candle at the beginning of the service and then putting it out. This part I'm holding has the flame where you light the candle. The other part, which isn't in this picture, is like a hood that covers the candle to put it out. This was my very important job at the service that day.
Steven Bartlett: So you've been religious since you were a very young boy?
James Talarico: Yes. My granddad was a Baptist preacher. The church I still attend has been my church since I was two years old. My faith has really been the foundation of my life. It's home base for me. The work I do, whether as a public school teacher or a public official, grows out of my faith. My faith is kind of the soil.
Steven Bartlett: What is your faith? I know there are lots of different denominations in Christianity.
James Talarico: My granddad, the Baptist preacher, told me that as Christians we're supposed to follow the two commandments that Jesus gave us — to love God and love neighbour. That's in the New Testament, when a lawyer — it's always the lawyers — asked Jesus to define "neighbour." That's when he tells the parable of the Good Samaritan, maybe one of Jesus's most famous parables. 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.
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 enemy. 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. The Samaritan is the ultimate example of loving thy neighbour as thyself. It would have 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 Memorial Stadium at the University of Texas and told a story called "the Good Aggie." People would be outraged because those are rivals. But he's reminding us that we're not just called to love our neighbours 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. Two thousand years later, that is still a radical teaching.
I have tried, imperfectly — because we're all imperfect Christians — to follow those two commandments: to love God and to love my neighbour as myself. It's why I decided to become a public school teacher. It's why I ran for office. The work I do in the legislature I think of as a form of ministry. I am trying to love my neighbour through public policy.
Steven Bartlett: So Ken Paxton is your rival. He's the Republican you're running against. You said that Ken is one of the most corrupt politicians in America. Do you love him?
James Talarico: Yes. Ken Paxton is a child of God. He is my brother in Christ. It doesn't mean there's not accountability — love requires accountability. We talked about the story of my mom, and her love meant standing up to a bully. 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. That feels aggressive, maybe even hostile, but it is done out of love for that person and for everybody else, for all of your neighbours.
Ken Paxton, from everything I've been able to read and learn about his service and his life, has clearly shown that he only cares about himself. He was indicted for investment fraud because he was defrauding his own friends — he convinced his friends to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into a tech company but didn't tell them he was making a commission off those investments. 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.
If I was to sit down with Ken Paxton, which I would love to do, I would grab the keys. I would urge him to get his own house in order before he tries to tell all of us what to do with our own houses. I'm 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 re-evaluate some of his priorities. I am not saying that as a perfect person. 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.
Steven Bartlett: At 31 years old, you went off to Bible school.
James Talarico: I had always looked up to my grandfather, still do, and looked up to my pastor, still do. I always kind of harboured this wish to one day preach and lead a church. I saw how my granddad and my pastor helped people make sense of their own lives, 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 not on a big podcast, but at a small neighbourhood church in 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, their first call is to Dr. Jim, my pastor. I always had this idea that I may want to go into that line of work one day.
I was in my second term in the state house. My first term had been great — it was 2019. Democrats had flipped all these districts. There was a close, competitive election statewide in 2018, so in the very next session in 2019, suddenly the Republican majority was ready to work on a bipartisan basis with us Democrats. We passed a historic school finance reform package that invested a lot of new money into our schools and provided property tax relief to working people. It was awesome. I thought I had the best job in the world.
Fast forward to the next session in 2021, and it was one of the most partisan, 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 gun laws that allows people to carry weapons without any kind of background check, without any kind of licence. You saw efforts to ban books and whitewash curriculum. Voter suppression, trying to make it harder for people to vote in Texas, which is already one of the hardest places to vote in the country. It was a really difficult session, and I just started to doubt that I was really making an impact.
After meeting with my pastor about it and sitting down with my granddad about it, both of them reminded me that Jesus gave us these two commandments for a reason. I had been so focused on that second commandment — to love my neighbour 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 sacred something that we are all an expression of. So I made the decision to go to seminary to follow that first commandment.
What I've discovered — now I'm a seminarian and a lawmaker at the same time — is that these two commandments, given to us as a whole by Jesus, sustain, enrich, and challenge each other. They're in relationship. For me personally, it helped balance me out, because if you're devoting all of your energy to loving your neighbour, especially neighbours you disagree with, it's really easy to burn out. Anyone who does service work can tell you that. We have to be in touch with the ground of our own being, the God that all of us express every day. You need both the inner life and the outer life. You need prayer and action. Those two things go hand in hand. Without it, you burn out. Or if you're only focused on loving God and not loving your neighbours — which a lot of people do — you become self-centred, disconnected from the world. Going to seminary was my way of trying to unite these two commandments in my own life. I think it's the best decision I've ever made.
Steven Bartlett: Where does your faith in God, in Jesus, come from? 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: As a seminary student, I had to learn Greek and Hebrew, because in our Christian Bible the Hebrew scriptures are written in Hebrew and the New Testament is written in Greek. We learned both original languages so that we don't have to be reliant on translations, because things get lost in translation. I was studying this word "faith" and I realised that it can be translated both as "belief" — a commitment to some kind of value, some kind of concept, an idea — but it can also be translated as "trust." Suddenly, this was like my first year of seminary and I was already having a light-bulb moment. I realised that's how my faith feels to me. It feels much more like trust than it does belief. 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 — when we talk about God, we're always talking in analogies — I learned to swim at the Wells Branch Pool in the neighbourhood where I grew up. I remember when I was learning to swim, my swim instructor told me, "Don't fight the water. Don't hold on to the water. Let the water hold on to you." That 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, trying to control other people. When you realise 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.
Steven Bartlett: And why this religion versus all the other available religions? Why are you trusting in this one?
James Talarico: We all inherit a religious tradition. It is an inheritance that's passed on from one generation to the next, and it's such a gift — one that I feel like a lot of people nowadays are abandoning for understandable reasons. 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. I understand where that temptation to 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 through the generations. Whether it's the Christian tradition, the Jewish tradition, the Hindu tradition, there is beauty and truth and love at the heart of these great faith traditions. It's up to every new generation to reclaim that and live it out. That's what I'm trying to do in my small corner of the world.
Closing reflections on systemic change
Steven Bartlett: 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 the audience might find of value?
James Talarico: One of the questions that everybody is always asking about politicians these days is how are you different, because every politician will 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 — everybody says it's going to be different this time, but it ends up being more of the same broadly speaking. How are you different?
The issue is not personalities. This, I think, is the central problem. We think the reason this economy is off track, the reason I can't get ahead, the reason we see corruption, is because of politician X 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've put in place a self-imposed term limit — because I know that the system, unless it's reformed, will eventually bring out the worst in all of us, including me. 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.
In my experience, a lot of people run for office for the right reasons. They want to help people. They want to improve the community 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. Until we transform that system, you're not going to see anything change. We're asking the wrong question. It's not how will I be different — it's how will the system be different if we remake it in our own image. That's hopefully an empowering message, because if you're just focused on what you don't like about certain politicians, you 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. Hopefully that's an empowering message and one that leaves people with a little bit of hope.
Steven Bartlett: James, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is: what is your biggest challenge and how are you working to fix it?
James Talarico: That's a great question. Winning Texas is a challenge, to say the least. We've got 18 million registered voters, 20 media markets, two time zones. Texas was once a nation and it still very much feels like a nation. Trying to reach all of those Texans, trying to listen to them and their needs, trying to share my values and my vision — it is a logistical, physical, and spiritual challenge. 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: And you're winning according to some of the polls I saw, by a couple of points.
James Talarico: The only poll that matters is on election day. 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. I have nothing against Elon Musk, so I don't know why he's trying to stop our campaign. But 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. We're campaigning like we are five points behind. 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. 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.