Bills & Business

Welcome back to Bills and Business. The show where we explore the intersection of policy and tech. I'm your host, Laura Davis, co-founder of the USLege. And today we're joined by Gavin Nicholson. He's the founder and CEO of the Tax Cap Policy Institute, a Nonpartisan think tank designing and advocating for private sector guided public interest policies. Their goal is to channel private capital into long term prosperity for all Texans through infrastructure, equitable tax structures, responsible governance all rooted in transparency, innovation and impact.

And our conversation today will explore his time inside the legislature, how bipartisanship can still work, and why private capital is such a critical part of building policy success.

I think it's great that you're, you're starting the same thing and that you have done it in such a you want to be bipartisan, right? And how how do you approach that?

How do you see that? Do you get any pushback having worked for, you know, Democrats in the state? What's that journey kind of been like?

No, I mean, it it's it's something that I have to it's like an ongoing battle, you know, battle, quote unquote. But I think the thing is, is that most people, when they talk to me at first they don't understand that I'm a Democrat.

They make assumptions based off of me. I think it's because the art of just having conversations lost. And most people try to insert politics in everything. But,

you know, when I was looking at what I wanted to do, I wanted to I sort of looked at the areas I knew was really important, but, like, not sexy.

Like no one ever does the policy on. And I wanted to get a board that sort of represented the best of those worlds in a bipartisan fashion. So we're like, we're split 5050, 50% Democrats, 50% Republicans. And we actually, in our bylaws, have a rule that says we have to have for every Republican, there has to be a Democrat like, you can't be can't be separated.

And so my board chairs, he's like, he's a moderate Republican. And have another board members are Republican. And I got two Democrats. But I think, like for me, it was really frustrating. And I'm sure you you've had this experience too. Working for Senator Paxton was like, there was really good policy that just got Partizan for no reason.

And what was supposed to be a slam dunk? Everyone agrees all of a sudden is now split 5050 record call, vote. You know, for no reason whatsoever. And so

it is sad when it does happen because I found the DC, I was so excited that state policy would be far more nonpartisan, right? Like both sides would talk about things because it's turf fights versus big headline issues like education funding is a nonpartisan issue, right?

You would think. Right, right. And so those types of things, I mean, we definitely, you know, from the outside, but when I, you know, looking in, people probably would say, oh, this was a really Republican policy or and it was like, actually this was 100% nonpartisan, and agreed upon in both chambers. Literally nobody opposed it. So that's kind of I think that that's like not looked at as well.

Yeah. Especially because of campaigns. Yeah. Right. You want to go to your audience and when you're campaigning they want to say, oh, I was the most Republican or the most Democratic. And really

it's a lot of you have to work together. And I don't know how healthy that, that even that system is in itself. Because then at that point you're not competing for the betterment of your constituents.

You're competing for who can get the most policy wins. And if that's all you're competing for,

there's no need to pass good policy because it's a it's a sort of like what happened when Nancy Pelosi passed the ACA. It's just passed now. We'll figure it out later. Which is awful way to do anything in politics. But, I mean, I'm with you, and it was so frustrating, I think sometimes because on the staff level, you know, you have your friends that are on both sides.

Yeah. And I'd have to have conversations with them where I'm like, hey, are you guys voting this way? This way. What are you recommending? And they'd be like, oh, you know, we're recommending against or we're recommending for because XYZ a reason. But it always boiled down to we always check if there's an R.D. next to the name.

That's the first thing. And like that's such a backwards way to do things. But I feel like that's becoming more and more prevalent as the legislature is getting more Partizan for sure. Actually got a real example of that. In the 88th legislative session, there was a bill that my boss had worked on. It was actually closing.

It was funny enough. It square like a full circle moment is closing a loophole that was accidentally created off a bill that I passed in the 87th legislature. And, simple bill, just, school resource officers got written out of the occupation or not occupation with the government code to get search warrants. Totally accidental. It was just the way a bill was written, kind of, you know, carve them out.

So the bill just fixed it. It just said, hey, you know, if you are a campus police officer, you can request a search warrant. My boss, a Democrat, filed the bill, and another member Republican filed the bill. Exact same bill, exact same language, line by line. When it went to the House floor, he went up there, gave like a ten, 15 second spiel about it, passed 100 and like 38 to 0.

No issue. My boss went up there the same day. By the way, why Boston up there, same bill, same everything. Not only did we have to delay the bill, we had to get multiple Republicans to speak in favor of the bill. I had to print out 151 pages, distribute them across the House floor, and even then it only passed like 78 to like 60.

And it was like at some point, like I get Partizanship has to, you know, come into play for certain core issues, but it's things like that. It's like, wow, that's crazy. So exact side by side, it will I be pointed out to a lot of the office, I'll just call them up. And I was like, hey, is your boss voting for or against this?

And the ones that were like, oh, we're voting against it. I'd like you realize you guys just voted for this exact same bill,

exact same language, not even ten minutes ago. And when I pointed that out to them, they're like, oh, we didn't realize. And I'm like, you're not doing your job.

Wow. I know that's the thing. That's just impossible to keep up with it.

So while that makes sense to many bills wait there's way too many bills. And then I do think that that's actually a negative with I like people are going to make way more bills. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's so much easier to adopt a bill. There's a couple states that actually limit the amount of bills you can do.

Oh I know that. There's great. We talked about that in our annual report. We did I think there's about 5 or 6 states. They limit the amount of bills you can do.

And if you're doing like, well, they'll do like a big tax bill, for instance. And that holds every single tax change in the state legislature.

So rather than, you know, how we do things where it's like 120 different, you know, tax bills and, you know, they get dragged out a long time. Other states, they just do one go. You tack on like 50 amendments and it's just tax day and that's it.

Do you know which states off top of your head

I think so I think Tennessee does something similar to this.

I don't think they limit it. Limited artificial like that. I think Colorado does it. California has a version of it. It's not that extreme. But they do have some limits. And then I know Nevada has limits as well. So it's definitely implemented across couple states. I hope the legislature considers it. That's really cool.

I know there's a lot of things you could potentially do, but who knows what will happen with all these.

Yeah. Specials. Right. I, I'm interested in talking to your grandmother about Nevada politics

because I just hear it's madness. It's crazy. It's you showing me some of the, during her primary, she sent me some of the, the science that people were, like, holding up, and they, like, had her, like, in a photoshopped, like, clown outfit that was like rhinos at the clown show or something like that.

And I'm like, this woman has voted for Republicans since, like, the 80s. Like, ever since she's been involved in politics. She's only ever worked for Republicans who voted for Republicans. And all of a sudden she's not a Republican. Makes no sense of infighting right on both sides. And it is, I don't think. I don't know how you fix that either.

I think online, like social media rhetoric, has a lot to do with it. People just pick up things and, you know, it's the Dunning-Kruger effect. They think they're experts in it. It just creates more problems. I think some people now sometimes,

and people not knowing how to have an open conversation about issues, is something I say all the time is nobody agrees 100% on anything or and so but nobody knows.

Now, I think probably the lockdown really didn't help because people weren't around each other. Yeah, the social media online rhetoric got really bad and people just started talking there more. And yeah, I definitely see that being just a huge problem. No one wants to talk politics anymore. So, well, I love what you are doing. Thank you. Well, yeah, making it more nonpartizan and talking about issues that that shouldn't have a Partizan line.

So tell me a little more about your personal journey. So, you were chief of staff in the house for three sessions? But how did you get into politics? How did it all set for you?

So I was the annoying kid in government class that was super involved and active that I think people got sick of. Honestly.

But I knew when to shut up, so I was like. I wasn't just, like, arguing to argue. But I was, sort of active in 2015 during those, you know, the presidential primaries and, 2016, I volunteered for my first campaign. And then not a lot of people know this, but, in 2017, I was super frustrated with just in with how the political landscape shaped out.

And I decided to run for city council. And I was like 19 years old, like just starting community college. And I'll never forget, I don't think I've shared this part with anyone, but it's so funny. I went to City Hall and I go, I want to run for city council. And the city secretary, like, looks down at me like glass is like drooping.

And she goes, okay, do you know what district you're in? And I was like, now I just know I want to run. Thankfully, the district, I decided to run and we had a retiring incumbent, so it wasn't like I was going to run against an incumbent. Well, that's. But it was a five person race, and I was the only candidate for like 29 out of the 30 days, like filing days.

And I was like, am I just going to get this? Like, it would have been crazy. But now the last day, all four other people filed. And, you know, I figured that's how it went. But that was sort of my start and then immediately started working on a lot of campaigns and,

did that for a couple years and was real quick.

Yeah, you win that race. So who who beat you? I knew a guy, a guy named Scott Elliott. Super nice guy. I mean, definitely deserved the seat. I definitely would have been a better option than me. But he actually won. And then he won again reelection. And now he's retired. But I got in a five person race.

I try to figure out what win I could take away from it. So the win that I got was I spent the least money per capita, per vote. I only got 4%. But, you know, hey, having the balls to do it is the most important thing. It was scary. It was. I had no idea what I was doing.

I all I did was show up to forums to that I didn't block, I didn't make phone calls into anything like that. I just put up road signs and went to forums. That was it.

And so I was like, you know, it's not that bad if I that's all I did, you know, that's super scary.

And I, I still think, though, that if I didn't do that, I would not have gotten as far as I did in politics, because that forces you to sort of justify your beliefs. It forces you to be confronted with a lot of uncomfortable conversations, of people going like, why are you leaving this? And, you know, it's you're like a young kid.

You're like, no, why do I believe in this? Yeah. And so I think that help those strengthen a lot of, you know, my personal beliefs. But then in 2020, I got the opportunity to work for rep Carl Sherman, who he represents, southern Dallas County, for Mayor De Soto. They gave me a remote internship, and I was sort of in this position of, you know, do I take it, you know, do I not?

So I had to take it. I was like, what's the worst that can happen? Worst that could happen was going to Storm Uri because that uplifted everything. And, all of a sudden, the session that was supposed to be focused on, you know, this the crisis of Covid then became Covid plus winter Storm Uri, you know, plus all the civil unrest in the country at the time.

And so that was, I think, a hell of a session to get introduced to,

and then when I left his office, I was sort of also on the side doing a lot of tech startup stuff and, elaborate on that. What were you doing? I so I was working on a company called Opolis and Opolis, you know, like the Greek word for city.

And the idea was, is that, because of the emerging tech space, a lot of people were contract developers, and, you know, they were just taking on projects and things like that. Well, they didn't really get good health care benefits, corporate benefits and things like that. So what we did is we basically served as an, an H.R.

Commons where they could be members of our Commons. They would get health insurance group rate benefits for the same rate that you would at a large corporation without sacrificing your autonomy. And it had a co-op model. They're still around. They're doing great. But they were actually the parent company of Ethereum, Denver, which is the largest Ethereum conference in North America.

And so we actually got the creator of Ethereum out of there, like their teams and stuff. Kimbal Musk was actually there. Jared Polis is all in Denver. We got Andrew Yang. I mean, it was all the all the tech guys, you know, so did that. And then I got an offer from, Ben Jones to join his team in June or July of 2023.

I want to say something like that. So, you know, from there was with, Rob Jones, and we decided to leave this legislative session. So very cool. Quite, quite the journey that was. No, I mean, that sets you up and having the real world experience and tech and politics is, I think, can be really helpful for you. I think the thing that I learned, and I've taken away from a lot of the tech stuff, is the ability to be flexible, that I think sometimes in politics is not the most prominent, you know, the ability to being able to say, I can get up and just do something until it's done.

I think sometimes in politics where there's not really that initiative, sometimes unless you really have to do something. But in AI, at least in my experience, the tech world is like, just get it done, you know? Because then I have more free time to do whatever the hell I want, you know? But it definitely I'll have a lot

in government.

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I think it does get a bad rap for having, you know, people doing 9 to 5ft politics. I would say, are you people do not sleep in that role. That's the difference. The politics in the government. I feel like the agency people you know, nothing bad about agencies, but that's okay, I love agencies. But yeah, I feel like they do have the 9 to 5 for the most part when they're not in the legislative season, but then the legislative season, that's when it's more of the you got to be on a call.

But, you know, at least for me, when I was the chief, it was like a 24 over seven. You're always on, you know, it was I remember actually, I was out drinking with friends one time in Dallas. It's like ten, 11:00 at night. We represented the district where Fair Park is. So the state fair is going on.

I'm. You know, I'm now drinking with friends, having a good time. All of a sudden, I get a news alert shooting at Fair Park,

and I'm. You were there. You were. I was I was running around the corner. But, you know, I'm like, immediately thinking I have to do a press release now because that's our district. So I'm trying to I tell my friends I'll be right back.

And they didn't they didn't get it. You know, they're like, dude, it's like Saturday, you know, why are you out working right now? I'm like, guys don't get it, don't have time to explain.

And so I'm literally in this park bathroom typing up a press release and sending it back and forth to my boss, making sure it makes sense because, you know, you can't not respond to it.

So you have to either. My mindset was, you either you can do it in the moment or you have to say you can't do it. But not doing something was never an option. Yep. You just couldn't not do it for sure. So

I think it's a really good experience to become an entrepreneur as well in in that space, because you're always going to have something to do.

And I get there's a lot of people who don't get it. Yeah. The work stuff and I mean my personal life has totally changed since starting my company. I can't do as much anymore.

It's the, the thing on Twitter that's trend right now. It's the 996 mindset which is you work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.

Which it's not healthy, but it's the I guess there's a study or something done that showed that, like all the new tech startup guys and all the tech startup founders and, you know, the developers and stuff, that's how they're living right now. And Silicon Valley is not at 9 p.m., six days a week. It's seven days.

So, yeah, I know I, I do that. My girl gets mad at me sometimes. She's like, it's the weekend, stop working. Yes, I'm like, I gotta work though. I just have that bug. I got that itch. I don't think my ADHD helps though, that, that that definitely causes me to fixate on stuff sometimes. The

quote so we just we had our A team offsite.

So everyone a company came in is really, really fun. And Ben what our CTO and co-founder he did kind of presentation and in it he had some funny memes and some fun quotes and oh, this one was, Mark Cuban, Mark Cuban work as if there's someone working 24 seven. Take it all away from you. Yeah. And that's what we do.

And honestly, everyone we hire has to be like that, too. Yeah. And I think obviously no one's ever going to work as hard as the founder. I personally get that, like, we're not going to expect everyone to work seven days a week, but you have to have that hustle. Because, I mean, long term, like at some point, what I'm excited about with some people in our company now, like, coach wants to start his own thing.

Yeah. And he's going to do that, you know, after long after we get acquired, whatever happens. But wouldn't that be cool if we can then go and invest in his right? And then he's learned so much in the startup world.

And I think that's so important passing the torch. And I think that's like something of like unites generation is the ability to pass the torch.

Because I think, yeah, you know, not not to disrespect our elders. You know, I think there is the, the people that started taking power in the 80s, in the 90s that had to work so hard just to get like that little bit of where they're at that it's sometimes it's hard for them to let go and pass the torch and define mentorship in the same way that they were given mentorship.

You know, I see some of the stuff on LinkedIn sometimes where it's like some guy that's clearly never, you know, he has not been in an entry level or like started started from scratch in a long time. And the advice I'm given or I seem given is like, that's not where LinkedIn thought leadership. It's so fun. So one of the funniest one with the I don't know if you ever saw there's one guy that was like, I have this idea with my friends, we're all going to get together and we're going to start a podcast, except it'll be different.

There's no microphones, no cameras, and we'll talk about topics and like the topic on it was, dude, you just invented hanging out. Like that's like, but he was so serious about it too. And it's so funny. I see this all the time. I love it so much. Are you doing LinkedIn thought leadership? Yeah, I, I want to I hate it, but I did it I did it one.

I did this my last post because that's how the algorithm catches it. And yeah I'm going to go with it. Awesome.

You know who's really good at it is really, really good at it. And here at Austin's Adam Lowy Adam. So Adam Lowy is probably one of the, biggest personal injury attorneys in Austin. Oh yes, I do know.

So he'll he'll do those thought leadership posts about cases he worked on. And it's the like one sentence line break, one sentence line break. And every single time I see it, I'm like, I've already seen this case. And then I'll read this one sentence and I'm like, okay, this is a different case. I got to read the rest of the thing now, and every single time it's like hundreds of likes.

And I'm like, clearly the algorithm is catching these somehow, some way. So I, I got to do it, but I, I hate it,

Any who did that, how did you go from being, you know, as to, in politics entrenched as a chief to starting about creating a think tank. I mean, this must have been brewing for a while for you. What it, what it was mean it was and I think I knew and my boss and I both knew that, you know, this year was probably the year that I was not going to be with his office.

Next session, I

it's if you haven't worked in the building, it is a grueling experience. And I think sometimes even for like the lobby that have never worked inside the building, it is so exhausting to be staff all the time. And so I knew what I wanted. I kind of do what I want to do.

I kind of knew that I didn't want to do, and I, I was looking at the lobby and I was like, you know, I could do this. I know how to not be partizan and how to push issues, but you don't really get to decide. It's sort of like, you know, your client and things like that.

So that didn't look, as appealing. But I did approach a couple people about it. Looked at some agency stuff. But, you know, the, the like with most thing, most things in government, salaries usually aren't the most competitive. And so, you know, I sort of looking at that sort of ruled some of that out. And really how the think tank started, because I was already I already had a lot of crazy ideas that I wanted to push through his bills.

But my boss, we had a rule where it had to be relevant to the district to file something. So we didn't really, didn't get a lot of those ideas, but, I, I knew talking with staff and even some members that there were some issues, that there was clearly an interest, but, they couldn't devote a whole bunch of time to it because it wasn't the a pressing issue.

And, you know, I'll never forget actually had one rep, tell me that whenever any tech bill comes up, you know, they don't even ask their staff to do a recommendation, because I'll just ask them another member on the floor, how they're voting for it, and that a lot of those things kept replaying in my mind as I was looking and figuring out what I wanted to do next.

And when I, you know, I went out drinking with two of my board members before they were my board members, and we were talking and one of them just sort of frustratingly said, I think it was he was talking about Carolyn fairly spill, and he didn't understand why I was being held up. He was like, this is a good bill.

Cell phone ban in schools, which I love. I think it's a great bill. And I had to explain to him, you know, look, sometimes these bills get caught up in Partizan politics in a way that makes absolutely no sense to an outside observer. And he was like, well, we have access to the capital. Why can't we change that capital, meaning the money?

Why can't we just hire some people to go change that? And I was like, well, it's not that simple. You know, because that requires thought leadership, that requires the ability to create research, create, you know, do all these things that it's not really being done in a nonpartizan way for these more forward looking issues. They're already some think tanks that approach things from either, you know, the conservative side of things, the progressive left wing side of things, you know, and they, nonpartisan ones usually focus on education, health care, energy, things like that.

So, you know, tech isn't really tech taxes and infrastructure things we were talking about. Not really the focus a lot of time. And he goes, well, you worked in there. Why can't you do it? And I was like, oh, that's a good question. Why can't I do it? And I think from there we start playing with the idea a bit.

And I was looking around at tools and I was like, you know, I don't have the power of a lobby shop. You know, like some of these people have eight associates. And, you know, for partners that I've been work in and they get their spreadsheets on track and everything. And, I was looking actually, that's how I discovered y'all is I was like, okay, well, there's this AI tool that, like, I actually know how to use er responsibly, which is not just copy and paste everything it sends me there.

Oh, my God, I got stories about. Oh, yeah. But I looked at that and I was like, this is exactly what I need. And so, you know, immediately reached out, got a free trial just to see if I liked it. And I was like, this is 100% what I need because it's better than the search engine.

The, Texas Legislature Online has because, I mean, you know, you you search a keyword and it gives you like 800 bills that all match that keyword. And it's all in numerical order. Maybe it's relevant, maybe it's not. Or they have their, matching strength index, which it's like you could put in like taxes or something like that.

And I'll say, well, this bill says taxes nine times, so that means it's 100% relevant. It's like yes or no, which is like what I like with y'all. It's I can say this specific taxation, you know, policy, you know, pull up all the bills with a bunch of different,

you know, results and contextual search. Exactly. It's really big.

That's super big. So, knowing I had all of those, you know, I had the backing of at least two people,

and I had this tool at my fingertips. I was like, there's no reason I can't do this. I have the ability to do it. I have the knowledge to do it. I know enough people will do it.

And I've had a lot of people, and I guess this sort of the frustrating thing sometimes a lot of people have been like, Gavin, this is so needed. We're so glad that you're doing it. And I be great. You know, I want to get you to support, you know, we're we're set up to be, you know, 501 C3 status pending have to say that, nonprofit think tank.

You know, we'd love to get you to join us. And they go, oh, you know, I don't know if I want to do that. You know, I just I want you to be around. And I think that's sort of the taboo in the room, you know, is if you if no one supports the research to do it, it never gets done.

And you're going to be just as frustrated next session.

So sorry. I'm. Yeah. No, this is so interesting. And thank you. I'm so happy to hear that. That was really helpful. When you're starting if I that's amazing. If I didn't have you guys this tool, I probably would not have started the think tank. And I'd be so serious.

It made sense for I liked how easy it was. And the two things was the bill searching and also the, going through committees and being able to search for keywords, because that was so critical because I remember, you know, in my annual report, I have little quotes from senators and, and members and, I had one from what was bugging me is the quote from, Comptroller Hagar.

And it was in appropriations and the House appropriations. Me this is like in February or something. And I remember him saying something about the budget, but I cannot remember it for the life of me I could not remember at the day. And, you know, the old days, you would have to go through search. Every little thing took hours, hours, and even then it was like, you may have found the part where he's at people.

And I got to go through this whole thing, which, you know the question for an hour. I have two hours and I just slap. So yummy. It's so easy. That's so great. But you came.

So, when you were going through that, you had two board members. What? What field were they? And they were in tech or

so.

The first one is actually a venture capitalist. And he's my board chair. He does a lot of dual use tech, so, you know, defense stuff, but also civilian application. There's a lot of energy. Spent a lot of his career in Dubai. And so he was like, there's a lot of, you know, he's been all over the world, and he's one of those guys that's like kind of pay attention to politics, kind of don't.

He's trying to get more into it. I guess a lot of his friends are trying to get more into it as well. Because of just, it doesn't look, landscape doesn't really make a lot of sense right now. And I think if you just get the news clips, it's like, what the hell is going on? The other one is actually currently in politics, still a very active.

He's actually worked for Trey Pac. So, you know, there's both of them. The person that, the other two people on the flip side that do work in tech, as my good buddy Joshua Pierce, he's actually was at Lyft pre IPO. And he was he has a bunch of stories that stories I don't think I could tell.

So, we'll have to have a drink. But, you know, he tell me stories about that. And then he worked. He works now, and, Web3, blockchain tech. And he's got, a super immersed in that world. But he worked at consensus, which is like one of the big, big, like, Web3 companies. That's like, you think about any of the tech that's actually useful now that people use.

That's not just some, like, random shit coin or meme coin that gets pumped on Twitter. That's the company that usually funds those projects. And now he has an accelerator that he's part of, and, you know, the things like that. And then, my other board member, she is a, she's director of government relations for a big lobby firm and then also the executive director of the Association of Water Companies.

So with all of those people, I was like, we're now anything we say. Theoretically, there is some level of authority and subject matter expertise, but we're also, you know, I run everything by my board before we publish it. So there's there's never like, oh, this is just Gavin. Give him, you know, usually a week I try, you know, week, asterisk.

But to give them opportunity to review, provide feedback. Change things and things definitely change when I, when I send things out, but, you know, that was sort of what I wanted to do with this is I didn't want it to be how I hear a lot of people say things are done in taxes, which is pay to play.

It is the, you know, claim to be nonpartisan, but you're not actually nonpartisan. You got some agenda, whether left or right, to push, or whether it's, you know, you're reading a report, you know, like, well, this is a really good report, only to find out, like at the very bottom and small little tax that it was paid for by a company that also has a vendor bill being, you know, moves through the legislature right now.

So all that to say, that's what really pushed me and drove me

to start the think tank, I love it. So now what does Tax Cap Policy Institute do? What's your mission? What are your goals?

So our mission is to the long or short of our mission is we want to drive private capital for public good.

And the there's a longer version of that on our website that makes more sense.

But the idea is, is that I think there's an aversion to capital sometimes. Both, on the left and even some parts of the right. Money is just sort of looked at as this corrupting factor. And I think that when you actually go into it, it's really easy to do that when you're only in the public sector and you only see it influencing negatively.

Sure. But I think when you actually go into the private sector, you find out there's actually a lot of people that want to do a lot of good. They just don't know how there's not really the framework, tax cap, I believe. And I look at it as sort of that connector. So, you know, we're able to take some of those emerging technologies, emerging policy areas.

I think, like, I don't know if you're familiar with ISP, but they are, a future based, innovative think tank that does federal policy. So they only do, I think it's like energy, energy and tech policy. Those are the only two things they do, but sort of same thing, you know, they're very nonpartisan, very, you know, pro build, pro developed, pro everything out there.

And I look at tax cap and I take on a lot of the same, same mantra and mindset, really is Texas is one of the wealthiest states in the country and by extension, the world. On top of that, we produce the most energy in the country, by extension, the world. There's no reason we can't come together to build solutions that makes sense from the nonpartisan lens.

Because even energy policy is starting to get Partizan now. And that is. That's scary. I was actually, before I was coming here. I was looking at some stats, but, you know, in, in 2023, when you look at the United States and China, China beat us in almost every single fuel mix except natural gas, nuclear and oil and gas and oil.

That's it. They beat us and everything else. So they beat us. And so they beat us. And when they beat us in geothermal, they beat us in all these other areas. And I think that, you know, if you're on it, depending on where you found the foreign policy spectrum, I don't think it matters. The idea should be that we need to make sure that we are building at the same rate and have the same capacity, especially in a state like Texas where energies can't you know, I don't I think it is very unproductive for anyone to try and curtail any energy production, whether that's oil and gas, whether that's solar.

I think there actually could be an argument made for wind. Now that we know it's not as efficient now that there's more studies, but we're only able to do those studies after it's being built and we can sort of evaluate. I think sometimes that gets lost is, you know, we make assumptions and we double down on those assumptions.

Even after the data comes out. And one thing that I can say that I do this as best as I can, so when I'm wrong, I'll say I'm wrong. I'll mess up and I'll try to adapt accordingly. But I think that's sometimes a struggle and a lost art, especially in this space. People, they don't like saying that they're wrong.

Okay.

And for those people who don't really know, what does a think tank do?

So we, we produce the policy research and the data for, the four topics I mentioned tax tech, energy, natural resources and infrastructure.

So we do it from a very futuristic lens though. So we're not going to necessarily talk about, you know, the issue of the day that's happening in energy, you know, like whether or not nuclear is good or bad, we take it that nuclear is good, we should build nuclear.

How do we get there? And what is it going to look like in ten, 20 years, and what are the costs associated? Both literally cost, but maybe the policy costs as well of not getting us there. And so one thing that we're actually doing as an example of this is there's some some research out there. It's a little experimental, but there's a company that's already doing this, and they're starting the pilot programs to turn us, they have the ability turn zombie wells and old oil wells into closed loop geothermal systems.

And, it's super, super new. The main prohibitive right now is cost, the CapEx. It doesn't really make a lot of sense right now. But like with anything, cost is is only a temporary prohibitive. You know, you look at computers and like, they're, you know, when they were first coming out, I mean, it was like five, ten grand for a computer, and you got the best when you went, like, 300 bucks.

You know, as the technology improves, things usually get cheaper. And so we approach that, things like that from a, you know, it's going to come in eight, ten years. Who cares? Why not build the policy framework for it now? So when it does come, not only is it easy, but it can expand rapidly and so with that particular one, you know, we're we're still working on a white paper.

Right. But how do you turn the zombie wells and West Texas into these closed loop geothermal systems? They don't produce a ton of energy, but there's about eight. No, there's 9000 now. 9000 zombie wells in West Texas. Even if you can only get 2000 of those to produce a little bit of energy, you're adding a pretty significant amount of baseload energy to the grid.

You're not going to make a ton of money off of it. But again, the idea shouldn't. I think sometimes when we say driving private capital for public good, that means taking a step back and saying it's okay if something doesn't make ten 1520 x the profit. Even if it means, hey, do we support this just a little bit?

So that way we can get off the ground running? I think that sometimes gets lost and that we always look at things from a dollars and cents and, you know, what's the return now? And good things take time, I think is the long and short of it.

A lot of our listeners are, startup founders and business owners, as well as on the policy side.

So I'm sure they'd be curious to know just kind of the process it took you from the idea, you know, talking to your board members at the bar, really to, you know, reality. So what did those months look like?

I think the, the main idea was it's it's always, you know, what's your what's our mission? You know, not like the mission vision statement, but like, what are we trying to do?

And you do your Swot analysis, you know, like who actually exists right now. How what are they doing. Good. What are they what can be improved. Where do the opportunities.

And I think we landed on three things. You know we wanted to produce white papers and research. We wanted to do training for both the private sector and the public sector.

One of the things I did, actually, the chief is I had a lot of newer chiefs would always come to me and ask me for advice. And I think the there's a not to sound, you know, woe is me. But, you know, there's not really a training manual for how to be a chief. There's not a training manual, even necessarily how to be, to work for a member.

And so, you know, you have to build those, those mentorship rails. And I was, really thankful that I both participated in a mentorship program by another chief where I got to help other chiefs. And then I also just had friends that come from up to come. For me. I cannot tell you how many times I had met chiefs from other members, both Democrats and Republicans, coming to my office break down in tears.

They were like, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. My boss is frustrated. I'm frustrated. I feel so lost. You know, trying to balance the, you know, making sure I'm getting my boss what he needs and, oh, my gosh, there's a person crying in my office, and, you know, I think that I, seeing that I see an opportunity to go, I don't ever want another person to have to go through what they went through, or even when I went through, that's the second thing.

And then I think the third thing is also hosting events that are worthwhile. I think there's too many events in politics across too many, whether it's a think tank, whether it's a, you know, a caucus, whether it's a, whatever it is, everyone gets together. Yeah, one keynote speaker up there, maybe panel, you get serve some rubber chicken that's maybe too hot or too cold.

Green beans, if you're lucky. And you walk away not knowing what the hell to do. There's no call to action. There's no nothing. It's. Everything's hunky dory. Everything's fine. Just business as usual. And it's not to say things are bad, but I think complacency is the worst thing that can happen to society. Because when you become complacent, you ignore real problems.

And then I think sometimes you ignore those problems. You. It's harder to swallow your pride. And so, those are really the three things that we looked at, we sat at and we said, these are what we want to do. These are the opportunities that we're seeing. And then it became a okay, now that's what we want to do.

How do we move on then? And from there, we developed the areas, issue areas that we wanted to do. We figured out who we wanted to be involved, and I did, I did some searching to figure out who I wanted on my board, and I picked who I thought I trusted enough to be nonpartizan trusted enough to be subject matter experts interested enough to actually believe in the mission, what we're doing.

And, I'm very thankful to have a board that's that's just as active as I am. So it's nice. It's it's a blessing, to say the least. That's awesome.

You've mentioned, you know, ways people can have private capital for public good. Do you have any, like, real world examples or kind of you said no call to action.

Is there a call to action you would give to people who say, hey, I want to help. This is something that really interests me, like, how can I put my dollars into helping this mission?

Sure. So I think the, the, I'll give you two answers to that. So an example of how private capital can build public good.

You, when you look at the internet, right. The internet started as mostly a government funded project, and now it is mostly owned by the private sector. Right. But that's an example of, I think, a public private partnership that works. And I'll actually give, another example here.

It's going to sound weird for, for my friends, they're Democrats.

But I think one thing that President Trump is getting criticized for a lot of, I think it's actually a pretty good thing, is his stake in Intel that he's taking, you know, the 10%. I think that's that's great. If the public dollars fund a private service, I don't think it's it's and it's a significant amount. I'm not talking like little teeny, you know, like the $100,000 grants and stuff like that that people get.

Yeah. For the United States, billions of dollars in research. I don't think it's that bad. If we say, hey, you know, we'd like to see some of that back as revenue to help fund certain programs. You know, that's not a bad thing. But it's so funny because that's an example of something where, I've noticed there's like a condemnation almost from, you know, the typical, I would say the there's always going to be the Democrats that anything you know, Trump does is just bad, just wrong.

It doesn't matter. You know, I don't listen to them. There's also the Republicans that, any time the government, you know, either proposes a new tax, either does anything that's not 100% free market, no government. Bad. And at some point, I think people have to take a step back and realize that we're not, funding things in nearly the way that we shared, both at the federal state, at the state level.

And that's driving up a lot of the costs at the local level, and why we're seeing some of those costs to skyrocket. I mean, you when you look at the city of Austin, you know, we have what I think is like a 25% tax increase or something like that. It's pretty significant. But I guarantee you a lot of the same people that are criticizing that 25% increase aren't listening to the concerns raised by the city council.

They're saying we're losing money from the federal level or losing money from the state level, and we're trying to increase our funding to accommodate the growing population, because the idea that you can just freeze your budget and have more people move in and still have the same infrastructure doesn't make sense. But, you know, a building that there's billions of dollars in private capital and a lot of them want that direction.

On how to help people. I think that people are inherently good. I don't I don't buy into the idea that people are inherently evil. And, you know, I think even when you look at the lobby, it's it's a perfect example of this. There is I think, just the session, it was like $800 million spent on lobbying and taxes.

Of that, only 100,000 that was taxpayer funded. The rest of it was all private. Right. You know, and that's an example of private capital trying to go into the public good. You know, we have you can think of, of the, whether what side you're on, if you think the session was the worst of the worst or if you think was the best of the best, the issues, they're normally talking about aren't about companies.

It's all social, cultural issues. And, you know, you think about how much of that 700 million of 800 million went to those cultural issues. It's really not that much. Most of it went to the things that we don't see the infrastructure funding, the tech funding, the water funding. And that's a big one. Those issues, they're not sexy.

No one wants to hear about desalinated water, you know, for two hours. Nobody wants to hear about the struggles of how do you upskill your oil and gas rig workers to fit in with the next generation of tech that's coming up? They'll criticize it and they'll say, why aren't we doing things better? But there has to be a vehicle and a mechanism to communicate those things.

So I love your outlook on lobbyists and lobbying. Right. Like, I definitely think most of our customers are lobbyists. And so they everyone gets a bad rep, right? Like when I was in DC, I had someone once introduce himself. They went, oh, I'm an evil lobbyist. And I like, laughed because I was like, what? What is this reputation?

But yeah, most of it is going, yeah, for the corporate kind of overall good. And I think the, the difference that I see is building for the these public private partnerships, I think there's a difference between a vendor bill, which I'm not a fan of, and building frameworks for a good competitive private market,

you know, and I think sometimes those two thing, it's easy to get them conflated.

But, you know, I mean, I've seen vendor bills in action. Those things are awful, you know, and we shouldn't support them. But any time and I and I think this is it's starting to rise now both on the, the further right and among, Democrats a little bit more now. But when you look at things like, I'll use Jedi agreements, that was like the big thing last session.

HB five Tidehunter. You know, I think that is chapter three and three and through 312 agreements were expiring. And, you know, we had to get this new framework. And that debate was, I mean, hours long and we I don't think they had the votes for it at first. And so it took a lot of, a lot of horse trading and deal making.

But, you know,

the I remember the criticism at the time was do you share what the bill was, HB five. What what it did. Oh I'm sorry. Sorry. Yeah. It's okay. So HP five essentially, it creates these I forget the what they stand for, but it's basically energy, energy and tech agreement to say, hey, if you're going to come into our community, that's fine.

You have to invest this amount of money, you have to create this amount of jobs. And in return, we'll give you, you know, these incentives, right?

The thing that I heard all the time and it's just not true, no matter what you look at, is. Well, you know, we're going to give all this money out, and we're not actually going to see the return back.

There is no data that I've seen that actually says that. And that's one of those things that's that's a feeling. Right? And sometimes it's hard to put our feelings back and look at the data. Here we are, two years later. You look at it, 160,000 jobs have been created, through all of our economic development, agreements.

I think it's something like $200 billion in infrastructure has been invested by these companies. And there's actually been a net positive of of whether it's tax revenue, or revenue that the companies have given the state through these agreements of like over $2 billion. But, you know, that is an example when you build these incentive programs that work, they can actually help people.

And I think the issue is we're always so worried about, well, what about the few that are out of compliance? You know, what if they take the money and we never get it back, we'll claw the money back then. You know, just because two people out of compliance doesn't mean you make the other 98, you know, lose their benefits.

That doesn't make any sense. And I think there's just this fear of of big capital, now capital in the corporate space. And, just because things are getting more expensive and people are looking for that, the enemy, I guess, you know,

it is sad that it is it is demonized and money is talked about in such a in a negative light.

I would say by many, not by everybody, by any means. It was I think it was at the center for Effective Altruism that did the research, that to actually be the most altruistic in the most, of like kind of give the most back is actually to make the most amount of money you could humanly possibly make and then use that for good.

Yeah. Like that would be actually be the better thing than you want individual going and donating your time to help, you know, kids that are at a charity now, that's not a terrible thing to do. The great thing to do. Love that. But use of time. What if you went and spent that making huge amount of money that you could then put back in the community and do something amazing?

What? That's a really cool way to look at it. Yeah, that's kind of how I look at, you know, making and growing wealth and doing that is like what I can do with it is going to be so great.

And that's so crucial because I think the thing is, is and I think sometimes people lose the forest for the trees, you know?

But it doesn't really matter what you talk about. I think most issues can boil down to lack of funding. You know, you think about the homelessness issue here in Austin. I mean, a lot of it has to do with lack of mental health funding. A lot of it has to do with lack of funding for the support services.

You know, I think that we all know that there's needs to be an analogy where it was like, you could go into a room and ask people who wants to volunteer their time to help, something everyone's hand would, you know, maybe have them, you know, raise it. And then it's, you know, you those same people. All right. Now, the people who have their hands raised, who wants to get five bucks while the hands go down, you know, and it's it's at some point whether that's through taxes, whether that's through the private, you know, private capital investing, you will have to understand when he has to leave that pockets it, because if you just hold

on to it, you just I mean, I'll just say, if you just hoard the wealth, you know, what's the point of having all that money if the infrastructure around you is crumbling? What's the point of having all of that if nothing is being done? You know, and I think that's gets lost. A lot of these conversations, you know, especially now at the capital where I don't think people understand how big the numbers get sometimes.

And so it's really hard to grasp, you know, you think about $1 billion, and people go, oh, you know that I've heard some staff say this where they're like, oh, you know, it's just 20 million. It's just 50 million.

And I'm like, that's a lot of money, you know, or someone call it budget does. I mean, that's insane to me, which is wild.

And I'm like, I what? I've always approached it, and I think sometimes a lot of Democrats will like, look at me and they'll be like, okay, Gavin, like, you're being a little like you're being funny when you say this, but I look at every dollar that the state government takes. I think, you know, we have to make sure that when we spend even a dollar, that's a better use of their money than that individual person would spend.

And if it's not, then why the hell do we take a dollar? And I think that drives a lot of the sentiment, too. We see with taxation. I don't think people don't mind paying taxes. I think the reason they hate paying taxes is because they don't see the value and the benefits that happens when they do pay their taxes.

So, you know, like, now that I'm here, I have my own business and a, my own thinktank, as I'm doing my, payroll, I'm like, I'm looking at the tax and I'm like, what the hell is this? You know, like, this is awful, you know, is your perspective, and money stuff and, you know, and but the reason I'm saying that is I'm thinking, okay, well, I'm spending this much in taxes that doesn't even include health insurance.

It doesn't even include the foreign. Okay, that doesn't even include these things. So what how is my taxes going to. Because I'm sure as hell not seeing the benefits right now. At least tangibly explained. You know, thankfully, like, I still have student loans, so thankfully, like, I'm seeing that with a low interest rate on my student loans, I can see that.

But I think it's harder sometimes for us to grasp the benefit which creates that sort of anti-tax sentiment. Which a good example in suburban cities you look at like a McKinney or, you know, any, any the DFW suburbs or Houston suburbs, you don't really hear a ton of anti-tax sentiment because the taxes are either low enough that it's affordable.

It's usually from the schools. Right. The schools are the ones in the suburbs that are raising taxes to account for the growth in population. But the cities, I mean, they try to keep them as low as possible. And you see the direct benefit, the return on that, you know, you have a nice infrastructure, you know, greenery everywhere.

Maybe you have a nice police system, a nice fire station just got built. You're seeing the benefits of your tax dollars built, which is why, you know, we see these crazy bonds pass that are like $1 billion bonds in a town of like 100,000 people or something like that. I think it's harder, though, you know, when you talk about taxes not seeing the value.

So I forgot how we got on that. But no, that makes so much sense. Because my grandma lives in Plano and that obviously everywhere in north of that, that used to be farmland is now, like, beautiful, manicured, you know, very affordable, beautiful homes and amenities. And, that can make sense. And then if you're in maybe, part of the city that the roads are terrible and you're like, where are my taxes going?

You're not getting the value. So I totally see or, you know, but I mean, but there's another thing that does not get talked about. We actually highlighted this in our annual report. People love talking about schools are the biggest driver of our taxes. You know, they're the ones they're making the largest increases. And that may be true and the dollar amount, but it's not true on the percent amount.

The percent amount the special districts have actually raised the most. And that's going to be like your MUDs, your MDS, your turf zones, things like that, where again, most people don't understand there's maybe 10,000 people, in the state of Texas that understand what the hell a ters district is. You know, but those districts are the ones raising money.

And, you know, not not to get political, but, I think that there does need to have a conversation about what we're doing with these MUDs, with these MDS, with these ters, because they are extracting value from business owners, mostly from homeowners sometimes. And there is a lot of conversations where it's not the local community like they're promised, but a company comes in and actually manages those.

And then it's taking all that money. And if it's if it's a for profit company coming in and taking in those tax dollars, they're going to approach it, running that ters district, that MD, like any other business, how do I increase revenue? How do I increase profit while keeping my expenses low? And I don't think that's the purpose of those districts.

The purpose is, is building infrastructure and getting infrastructure in correctly. But again boring tax conversation, not the point.

Well, jumping into another subject that's big on, you know, what you do is I, in tech policy. So I know you just released the AI white paper. Yeah. Tell us more about that. Yeah.

So, going back to kind of what we're just talking about.

Well, praise people really? Well, I think that one thing the Governor Abbott is doing really, really well is his friendliness towards tech AI policy in general. And I think even the legislature, again, one of the last areas, in our state government that's not politicized yet. So we we just passed a sort of omnibus. I, Bill, chairman, we own passed it and, it essentially creates guardrails for what both the state government and companies can and can't do.

And our white paper covers a lot of, you know, if you're a founder and you're like, you live in Texas, or maybe you're planning on deploying something in Texas and you're like, I don't have time to read every single AI policy, but I just sort of want the high level, what's going on? It's perfect for you.

Tells you what, generally what you can and can't do. Like an example. You know, the the government can't train on biometric data. Period. The law is a little more loosey goosey when it comes to what private companies can and can't do.

I'm personally on the end of I don't think companies should be able to do that unless they get your, like, explicit consent.

Consent? That's it, that's it. But, you know, right now, as far as I'm aware, a company can come in and they can train on biometric data. Easy, no questions asked. And there's nothing against the law about that.

Et with AV policies, autonomous vehicles there. We have a great framework and it just need to be improved a little bit.

I think there is a sort of a loophole that it just happens sometimes. But you could, essentially deploy an autonomous vehicle without having to let any authority know. And so that's what Tesla did as an example. They didn't they don't like the Austin City Council. Now they just deployed robot taxis, start testing them, which obviously created an uproar.

And so now as of Monday, if you watch any autonomous vehicle, you have to weigh, tech stock. Now and then tech start has certain standards that they can use to revoke or grant you a license, but they actually have a map.

This is a really cool thing. They have a map on their website where you can see the autonomous vehicles moving on the road.

No way. And you can see it live. You can see the autonomous trucks moving. That's so cool on tech. Start watching it. Yeah,

it's super, super, super cool. And I think I think they just pull samples though because like they're there I saw like five Waymo's on the map. I'm like there's like 500.

There's a million of them.

Yeah, yeah.

There's no way there's 500. Are just five. So I think it's just pull samples, but you can see that moving, on the map and it tells you what companies they are, what their route is. And that's the other interesting thing is they have to define an area of operation. So you can't have like a trucking company being like, yeah, we're just going to operate all over the state.

You got to go point A to point B, like there's not a, there's not a we're going to go from Dallas to El Paso to Austin, Houston, back to Dallas. I don't know the the intricate of how that process works, but I just know that they do have to register. That's another example. There's a lot of stuff.

And I think Texas is leading with this, and we caught this ahead of time actually, last year, too, with deepfakes is, sexually explicit content. There's criminal penalties associated with that. We made sure that you can't have an AI model create anything with children, which is fantastic. So, guys, some states are not I don't know if it's an intentional or unintentional.

I'm hoping it's unintentional, but they're leaving out the children aspect of it

and it's scary. It's going to cause a lot of problems in schools with bullying. Oh, you have that. Like we didn't have this tech when we were in high school and then gone like this here. I thought I had it bad because Snapchat was big and I thought like, oh my God, there's no way you get worse.

But it is like some of this stuff. I mean, I was showing my girlfriend that I just for, you know, shits and giggles. I was like, oh, let me show you how advanced this stuff is. Pulled a video of Speaker Burrows on the dias, and, and it would never post it, but it's him basically going.

I endorsed Democrats, and I'm switching parties from Republican to be Democrat. And like all of it, take is just a little bit of video editing and it would look legit, you know, but you think about both the criminal aspect of that with like, you know, children and stuff. I mean, it is abhorrent. Thankfully, Texas is ahead of the curve.

I made it very clear you cannot do anything, with children, in your I model Texas. And I think though, you know, I try not to wade into culture issues too much, but I think one thing that that does bug me a little bit is people are absolving a lot of their responsibilities as parents to the government and a lot of stuff.

And I think as an example, you know, like, I know you worked on the, like, the age verification like that, you know, and I had a lot of people. Right. Gavin, this bill is awful. I hate it. And I was like, I don't think it's that bad, actually, you know, makes sense for what we're trying to do.

But it can't stop there. And I think more strip clubs. Okay. Right. Exactly.

One can go into a strip club without showing an ID. Exactly. Right. And this was actually the bill that I was thinking of, about being nonpartisan. It was unanimously nonpartisan. Lee. Absolutely approved. Right. So, but there's been some pushback on, like, freedom of speech angle.

Like when you're under 18, you don't have it. And this is kind of where you have to consent. Right? This is kind of where I think there's so many parents who are super involved and doing their job as parents. But then the pushback I would give you is just there's only parents who don't know. Yeah, right.

And like, you want to safeguard those kids so that it's not disproportionately affecting those who just have parents who really care and are really involved. I every parent

and I think that's the thing is there has to and I think about when I was growing up in, in and you might have the same experience, I felt like there was a lot of education in general about kids being online or things like that.

And I think something that doesn't get talked about enough and I it's because it's maybe a little bit harder to talk about organically. But when I was growing up, there was online spaces for kids like. And then there is the stuff for kids that were under, like ten and there's the stuff for tweens. And then there was like the adult stuff, you know?

But now it's there's nothing in between. It's either stuff for like toddlers and then you're immediately thrown into the adult stuff, you know, like Roblox is the game that all the kids, kids love. But Roblox has been around since I was in, like, middle school. It's not a new game at all, but when I was playing Roblox as like, you know, little middle school Gavin, it was just kids.

They made it was a is meant for kids. It was meant like the graphics, the everything was meant for kids. No predators on there. Now you have predators now. Now there's a very clear appeal to people with money, to people. How do we get these adults in there and play these games as well? Because they have money to spend.

And I think that sometimes when you have those, you have those lack of spaces, there's a it's kind of like what you said. There's the okay, well, now the only alternative is we kind of have to hate this because

we don't want kids on these websites where, you know, especially Twitter like it is. It's it's it's bad.

I yeah, it's, you can get a lot of crazy stuff on Twitter. It's not really doesn't seem censored. And I going to what you said I agree. Like in when I was in high school we had, you know, a desktop computer and if I was messaging someone from school or someone, my mom was there watching me mess, like she was there for the hour that I was allowed to communicate or message someone like, every time she was in the room.

So. And now let's just not have it. Yeah, it and it's I think it's really unfortunate too. And I don't know, I think it's, it's symptomatic of a larger cultural thing that the United States has to figure out, because I don't think this is unique to Texas, but even think about the media that people are consuming. There is I was looking at a study, I forget what the name of it, but essentially it looked at what is the media that kids are consuming now.

And a decade ago, it was there was again, this sort of gradual tiers. There was, you know, you'd watch the, you know, Paw patrol at this age, then you'd maybe graduate, you know, like SpongeBob and then, you know, their baby boomer, the sort of young adult cartoons. And then you'd get into the adult stuff middle school kids now are going from, like, yeah, using the patrol thing like Paw Patrol to Love Island at 12.

Yeah. And it's and it's and you're right. And you know, and I think that the, the also the thing that is sort of become the easy thing to do is use children as a defense on both sides. And it is the, you know, think of the children, think of the think of the women, think of this. And it's like it is such a cop out to do, to just throw people up like that, as if they're monoliths and thinking about things in a really critical way of what are we doing and how does this actually impact people?

Is going back to, again, to what we're trying to do, have those really difficult, nuanced conversations in a respectful way, where I think we all agree most part on what the issue is. We just may disagree on what the solution is. But I think sometimes about these debates and arguments on the the floor and stuff like that, and it's the immediate accusations left and right and it's exhausting and not productive.

But anyway, so, you know, that's an example of, you know, going back to the I, I policies, you know, we also dispel a lot of myths and things like that. And, one of the big ones is about data centers. Everyone loves being an expert in data centers. Now. Everyone loves knowing everything.

There's like,

thanks for

for teaching everyone.

Oh, you know, and I think, I know a lot of the data center guys that actually operate these data centers. And, for context, there's about five different types of data centers. So it's not just one, one data center, period. And our white paper, we use the hyperscale data center, which is like it's the behemoth.

It's the stuff that like a Facebook would build. It's like usually million square feet. They consume a ton of energy. But, you know, that's the ones that are giant and use the most resources. Well, I was like, do they actually use a lot of energy? Do they actually use a lot of water? I hear, and I'm reading all these articles all the time saying they are, but are they actually and so just like I would expect any other, you know, person to do start out with my thesis, which was I don't think they use as much water, but I do think they use a good amount of energy.

Let me dive back into, dive in. And so the first thing I did was I, try to find out how much energy and water do these data centers use. And surprise, surprise, there's not a lot of not a lot of data. Not a lot of data on the data centers. And so I had to I found through, like, hours of searching this group that only does water, water infrastructure for data center companies.

And they have this aggregated report that I don't think it's supposed to be public, but it's hosted on WordPress. And, you know, sometimes those WordPress attachments get caught up in, in search filters. So I found this PDF that's it's talking about all this research they did and essentially found, a good starting point for what their average data center, hyperscale data center produces in terms of energy.

How power efficient are they and the water usage. And so I basically said, all right, well, I'm going to take those because that's all I can do is so the only publicly available data I have and apply that to the standards that we have in Texas. The thing that I think is really interesting about that, though, is also the methodology of of how data centers operate, because it's also clear people don't understand how they work.

I think they assume that water comes in and it just disappears like it never and never goes anywhere. The reality is, most of these data centers use a closed loop system. And, you know, I'm a big gamer. I have a PC, and so I have a close, closed loop water cooling system in my PC, too. It's the same concept, a little different on a larger scale, but it's the same concept.

So when the water comes in, they recycle it. It's not like it's it's just getting pumped in and out.

But that's a misconception for sure, because I have heard a lot of people argue that, like, oh, this is such a waste of water and what it needs to just, you know, type one character. But yes, it does need the water, but it's looped, it's looped and recycled.

And it's also I think the, the other sort of myth that I'll push back on is that it's always using fresh water. When you talk to a lot of the companies, it's not like they just stick a pump in the ground and they just start pumping out water. Yeah, they have to buy the water.

And they usually buy it from these big, municipal districts, and it's cheaper normally Dubai dirty gray water than it is to buy fresh water.

And if you are using fresh water, normally, it's actually for humidity control, not cooling. A lot of people don't know this, but you can't have your servers, too dry to dry. It actually creates static electricity. So you actually need a little bit of humidity in there to help dissipate some of that electricity. But going back to the numbers, you know, the average day, and, and I can't remember the exact water usage, but, the electricity usage is insane.

Like, and, I mean, it is scary. Yeah. There's tech. This is only has about 400 data centers. And there's only 700 hyperscale data centers in the world. I don't know how many in Texas are hyperscale, but one hyperscale data center in Texas uses 0.2% of our grid's energy. That's an issue that that is bad.

That there needs to be some incentive and alignment there where, in something I've thought about proposing is, you know, we as a state will we as a state will give you X amount of dollars to build your own generation for your data center. So that way you're not using the strain on the grid. The agreement that we'll do though is you have to sell the whatever excess energy you have back to the state, you know, to pay off the loan or whatever it might be.

So that way, you know, again, it's incentive alignment. You know, now, as a data center, I have an incentive to build my own power station. I may be getting this low cost, low interest loan from the state where I can build that. The agreement is I just have to pay them back. Why would I not take that and X amount of time it's going to pay itself back.

But I think, you know SB six by Senator Phil King. It's a fantastic bill. I think he does a lot of really good stuff. It ensures that at the long short of it is it ensures that, I think 75, 75, 75 megawatt hour gigawatt I I'm freaking out somewhere. I think it's gigawatt. Those facilities in cases of emergency can be disconnected from the grid.

Which going back to 2021, you know, seeing off the grid strain coming up in one time. I mean, I remember it was like, hold off for a minute so we can get, you know, just because power is on that does not mean start doing your laundry, turn on your dishwasher. You know, all those, energy intensive things.

Just hold on a second. I think it's the same kind of concept. Secondly, know on the water. Again, going back to the enumerate conversation, people don't understand how big numbers are. Texas is expected by 2030 to use 9 trillion gallons of water a year. Of that 9 trillion, or, I'm sorry, 6 trillion, 6 trillion gallons of water a year of that, 51% goes to agriculture.

And it's not the agriculture I think people think it is either. It's usually like alfalfa in the desert. It's, you know, like, why are we going, hey, in areas that have drought like conditions, it's not the the it's not the data centers coming in and draining water. On top of that, when you talk to any big water, even the water down the board or, you know, the association, water companies, whoever might be any person that knows water will tell you the biggest loss of water in the state is actually pipes.

We lose millions of gallons to pipes every year. It's whether they're leaky. Maybe they're old, but it is a real problem that, you know, when you talk about water policy, those two things alone, I mean, would save us millions, if not potentially billions in a decade. When you look at data centers in these hyperscale data centers, they use 0.002% of water.

Not even close to that aren't there. It's every single data center in Texas, which there not was a hyperscale data center. All of them combined would only use 0.79% of Texas is water that's in use. That's not available water that's the expected water usage. We have way more water available than that. I mean, way more. But the thing I have to say to be careful about is just because we have all that water doesn't mean you go and build your data center wherever the hell you want, because some parts of the state have more water in others.

So, you know, North Texas and northeast Texas, a ton of water, a lot of water. Makes more sense to build data centers there. I don't think it's responsible to build a data center in places like, you know, San Antonio, where they're under pretty big drought conditions. Right now. It's, you know, residents are under, you know, water usage warnings.

And I think it can't be responsible to build those data centers in areas like that. But again, they're not going to be the big contributors. So those two things combined, you know, we use those data centers, use a hell of a lot more energy than I think people understand, but so much less water than people use. And, the little fun thing that I did was I found research that figured out how much water energy use a ChatGPT query uses.

So yeah. And so I scaled it. I heard I scale it down, scaled it up to give an idea of how much, you know, like one, one query uses, how much you would need to be the equivalent of, like, a shower, the equivalent, you know, all these things and long short of it is your one queries is not going to do nothing.

Even if there's like 100,000 a day in Texas, it's still probably I can do much. It's for the older, less efficient models with 7.7.5 nine milliliters for every, query you send, you need, like, something like 500 to get to, like, a gallon of water. Which is like. And again, that's not why that just disappears.

That's the, the cooling usage of it. Yeah. So this water's already circulating. It's already flowing. It's not like you're pulling it out of anywhere.

There's just not I don't think that there's really a better way to measure it right now. So that's why we have to to use it like that. That makes me feel better. Yeah. What makes you feel so much?

Yeah, I don't I don't feel I feel bad I usage, so that's really good. Don't feel bad about it at all. Well we covered a ton today. Yeah. And thank you so much. You I've definitely learned a ton as well. So I'm excited to read more of your white papers as they come out. And do you have some I know you have some events coming up if you want to do some plug, share how people actually find out about them and what you're doing.

Sure.

So we actually we're doing our launch event on October 3rd. It's super exciting. As far as I'm aware, it's the only event of its kind where we're taking both a public sector and a part of the private sector that I don't think has been tapped yet. There's going to be a lot of tech, sort of tech founders there.

There's going to be a lot of venture capital folks there. Private equity. But we're also, we currently have the PC chairman, Thomas Gleason, is going to be there. It's talking about

some of, again, energy water usage stuff. We've confirmed, vice chair Senator Garcia Hernandez. She's going to talk a little bit about federal state relations. You know, how that money actually comes from the federal government down to the state government?

We have a moderator as well, Richard Saleen, who, his whole thing is energy, water infrastructure. And how do we create a more resilient future? He's going to be moderating one of the panels, and we have some guests that we're working with, their schedules, trying to figure out where they can come. But, you know, we we're expecting to have a few federal lawmakers and a couple of state lawmakers there as well.

That's on October 3rd here in Austin. That will be from 11:00 Am to about 1:30 p.m.. It's also day one of ACL,

so it's a good excuse to get out of work to go to a. Yeah, you got to go to a work event and then you can just leave our event, go to ACL. No.

But you know tickets they're starting at pretty cheap 25 bucks, for general admission, 125 for VIP. And, I mean, it's it's just a good time. It's not going to be like, you know, we were talking about earlier, there's events where you walk away with nothing. We're sending out an after action report talking about things that the private sector can do better to help public policy with the public.

Policymakers need to do better to help the private sector. So that'll be exciting. Very exciting. Yeah, I'm excited to come. And, how can people find you, your website, follow you.

So if you get a text cap.org, which, by the way, I'm surprised that was available. I thought tax cap like Texas Capital would have been, you know, taken.

It wasn't, but you get a text cap that org that is our website. That's where we host all of our, our research, our white papers, blog post,

interview, whatever it might be. You sign up for our email list, I'm very careful and consider about

how many emails we send out. So I'm not blowing people up.

Yeah. We usually only notify people whenever we have new research, whether it's events, things like that. Or, you know, you follow us on Twitter. It's tax cap policy, all platforms, not just Twitter I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Appreciate it. Thank you.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business, the show where we explore the intersection of policy and technology. I'm your host, Laura Davis, co-founder of USLedge. And today we're joined by someone I know really well, Senator Angela Paxton. She represents around a million people in Senate District eight, in the state of Texas. And she's not just a leader on issues like education, protection of children, and innovation.

She's also my former boss. She's got a background as an educator and has a deep interest in our technology, shaping our future. She's uniquely positioned to share her wisdom today. We're catching her in the middle of a special legislative session in Texas. So we're especially grateful she's taking time to talk with us. Enjoy the show.

When did you start teaching or what did you take a break at all?

But when you were with the little ones, so, you know, I, I majored in mathematical science, math and science. I went back to school, got my master's in education, and then got certified to teach. Right. And then I started teaching, kind of right off the bat then before we had kids or anything, can finish law school, we moved back to Texas.

And then I was, I was back to teaching and, then we, I  got pregnant with Tucker, our oldest, and I finished out that school year and then stayed home with the kids. And so we were actually homeschooled up until kind of middle elementary, with him. And then, he went back to school, and then the next one went back to school,

and I was home school and the little ones.

And then when the youngest one got to second grade, I think, I went back to teach, so. Okay. Yeah. So Tucker was 14, so I guess it, I kind of took a 14 year break from, I guess, professional teaching, but I kept teaching, at home with my kids. So it's been actually an interesting background for what I do legislatively now because I'm, as an educator.

Right. And a school counselor. I taught and also was a parent in all of those settings in a private school setting, in a homeschool setting, and in public schools. Oh, yeah. So so I get how different things work for different families and different kids in different families, and sometimes at different points in life. Right. And so, you know, what I love about Texas is no matter what you're after, you can find it here.

And I think we've done a lot of great things, to help make our public schools better, to help give homeschool families the support that they need and, and better options. And now with, of course, with school choice, giving more families the opportunity to do private schools if they're interested in that. And of course, charter schools are kind of in that sort of a hybrid right between public and and private as far as experience goes.

But but of course, it's so much more affordable than for a, for family. But it's going to really equalize things. And I think it's a, it's a great example of a rising tide lifts all boats. And it's going to be it's going to be great for families. It's going to be great for kids student achievement. And that means since children are literally the future, that means a better Texas and a better future Texas.

Well, I think you're so uniquely positioned with your background, like you said, to to handle education issues, having literally taught in every single type of education space. And then specifically with protecting children online, which is what we got to work together on, which was some of my favorite work I've ever done.

What initially kind of got you excited to help in that space and even know that that was a space that was needed.

You know, things have changed a lot with technology over the years. So when did you start to realize that kind of online safety for children was important?

Well, I think it started when I was kind of in that break of being home with my kids, between my, having taught being home with kids. And then I went back to teaching during that time when I was home with my kids, and, and homeschooling, the internet had come in.

And so, you know, I, I remember,

seeing things as the internet was kind of everybody was figuring it out. Right. And I remember, realizing I remember my son when he was ten years old, calling from the other room and going, mom, mom and I remember walking into, the room where we had a little, you know, desktop computer, a lot bigger and bulkier than the kind of things that we all have now that I mean, now we have these things in our pockets right?

Yeah. But it was in in the office. It was where I could see things. He and a friend were playing, and I walked in and his friend had said, hey, type this. And he did. And there were pictures, just scrolling and he couldn't make it stop. And, and he called to me. Now that was eye opening to me on, on many, many levels.

But, you know, the, the average age of first exposure for children to porn, for quite some time has been around the age of ten.

He was ten. Oh, wow. Which was way too early. I, I feel like it's getting earlier, though. Well, it is in the last in the last three years, I have seen studies that indicate that that that the, that the age has dropped to eight as the average age of first exposure.

And you know what that means. The average means that there are kids younger than that that are seeing porn for the first time. And of course, you know,

porn is just one element of the landscape of this, digital jungle that kids really are growing up in today. And just like the real jungle, jungles don't naturally grow fences or guardrails or warning signs.

And so that's why I think all of this is so important. So I had an awareness of it as a parent, but when I was teaching and I was I was watching all of this kind of evolve, in the classroom. And then, of course, I moved into a position as a guidance counselor, and I was constantly working with with the teachers about how we use this in good ways and not bad ways, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Regarding technology, in the classroom that I was also dealing with, parents and kids and social media came in during that period of time. So I had a lot of awareness just from real life. So when I came into the legislature and some of these ideas started popping up, like, what? What can we do about this?

And parents were coming to me and saying, you know what? There need to be some, there need to be some legal frameworks around some of these things. You know, we would love in a perfect world, everyone self-regulate, right? Every. Well, in fact, art form of government is built on the concept of self-governance, right at the individual level that that each of us is operating in a way that that has integrity, that, exhibits moral leadership.

Right. But we also know that whenever you have a lot of people, whenever you have a lot of kids, things are going to go wrong and people are going to make bad choices. Sometimes they make bad choices by accident. Sometimes they do it very deliberately. But we we need to, pay attention to this, as legislators. And the reason is because our kids are counting on us to do that like we do in the real world

all the time.

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And kids can't self-govern the way that an adult can. So that's what I, you know, learn so much about with you as the brain science behind what pornography actually does to the brain, because at first it's kind of like a moral, piece. You're like, everybody knows that children's pornography is wrong. I think most people agree with that.

But when you actually go into the brain science, you know, it's bad for adults for their, for their brain, but obviously it's, that's their individual choice over 18. But when you look at what it does to the child's development and all of that, and, you know, we were in a time where we didn't have access, I was about 16 before, we had a desktop computer at home.

And, had suspicions that my brother was looking at bad things as the older sister and he turns out he wasn't. I think I told you this silly story before, but I had told my parents he's doing bad stuff on that computer. You got to watch him. And my mom went into his computer one day and went into the photo folder, and there were a thousand pictures labeled cats, you know, cat.

And she went, Lori, you got to leave the room. I don't know what's in here. She opened it. It's thousands of pictures of kittens. So I'm sorry, Ryan, sorry about your bubble. They're down in here. Right. Well, they're hilarious and sorry right out of you, but, to this day, I still get him cat stuff, but it shows that we were aware of things like that.

But at that time, you know, it was still images. It wasn't the same as now we're knowing, which is, you know, there's communication in these different portals online leading to trafficking and grooming and, but really specifically what it does to the human brain to see all the super natural stimulus that they never would have gotten in any existing reality.

Exactly. That could never happen. That's exactly right. And and, you know, to your point of these were just still images or

even if they're, they're videos, movies, right now, what we're talking about are things that adapt to your preferences. Yeah. And so, you know, you bring up the brain science, which I think is an important thing for for people to pay attention to.

And we we have the ability we know a lot more about the brain than we ever have. And we understand a lot more about how the brain develops, particularly with children and so one of the things that we know from looking at how addiction is treated in adults, whether it's an addictive, behavior like porn use, if it is an addictive substance, like an, you know, an illegal drug or alcohol or tobacco, these things are addictive in different ways.

But addiction is addiction to the brain. Addiction work has a mechanism. And what happens is something. And a novel stimulus, triggers a release of dopamine. And it turns out, a lot of experts will say it this way. What you're really addicted to isn't the substance or the behavior. What you're really addicted to is the dopamine hit.

And so for different people that has different flavors. But but what it does is it rewires the brain. And so folks that treat adults with addictions, there are ways to kind of go back to like rewire the rewiring so that you can kind of get back to what was normal. Right? When you talk about a child, a child's brain is in the process of wiring.

So what's happening with the child when they are, exposed to, to things that are addictive algorithms, which is common in and probably typical there are, you know, these these things are addictive by design. So what you're ending up with is these kids don't even get to start out with a normal brain. So before they ever hit, you know, kind of adulthood, they are they have been wired differently.

And that brings up a lot of interesting implications as far as treatment goes. Because what do you do then? You're not you're not getting back to normal. This this was never normal for them. And and it you know, there's a lot there that you can kind of go on and on forever with. But it really does matter for a child's future that we do the things so they can have a healthy upbringing.

Right. And they can develop healthy emotional habits, mental habits, physical habits, spiritual habits, all of those things matter for a kid to have a healthy future. And so, yes, it really does does matter that we take care of kids. We've always known that. And there are a lot of things we do in, you know, the physical world.

And some of the legislation that I've carried has kind of been, around that direction that, you know, something like age gating, for example, or age verification, a couple of bills that, I've carried are in that direction. And, you know, you, you and I've worked on those, some of those together. And we've certainly talked about a lot of them together.

But, the idea that in the real world, a kid can't buy age restricted products, things we, we as a society have decided this is not good for kids. This is not healthy for kids. For whatever reason, alcohol, tobacco, just as starters. Pornography, right? A kid can't go in. It used to be it was a magazine, right?

It was a physical product. But. But you had to show an ID, and the person at the at the cash register had to check that ID, verify. And if they and if they didn't do that or they ignored what the age was on the ID, there were consequences for the vendor. Right? So these are the you know, kids have always had fake IDs and that kind of stuff.

We know that. But but that's a separate problem for the for the vast majority. This really does go a long way in preventing kids from being exposed to harmful substances. Or behaviors. So in the real world we do that and and people know it works. It creates transparency and it creates accountability. And those two things, you know, the thing about transparency is most of us, whether you're an adult or whether you're a little kid, most of us act better when we know people are watching.

Right. Sure. Even even a little kid knows that. So transparency goes a long way to helping us all learn how to self-govern. Right. And we do have to teach kids how to self-govern. That's why these things are important. They help us give our kids ways to do that. But

but a lot of this legislation that I've worked on has just extended those kinds of protections into the digital space.

So House Bill 1181, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, that was our bill. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about that. I am very excited that that passed and was flying success and was found that it was absolutely true and upheld. I hear you actually there in the Supreme Court that that how was that?

It was really interesting. You know, to get to be in, the room for oral arguments around a Supreme Court case is it's it's an amazing experience. And it's for your bill. Yeah. For your own bill. That's crazy. So, you know, one of the things that I felt, was very encouraging as I was there is all nine justices, and, you know, the justices kind of run the gamut from more liberal to more conservative.

Sure. Some of them, you never know exactly where they're going to land, but but, you know, as I was listening to their questions of, both parties, both, you know, counsel of both parties, state of Texas. And then, what was it? It was, you know, some kind of free speech, kind of a thing that represents the porn industry.

Okay. And we're talking about for kids, that's the thing for Congress. And this was passed completely, you know, almost unanimously, I think there was only one vote in the House that was against it. And it was completely bipartisan. Yeah. So I was I think that's really the main industry that would be opposing it. Right, right. And

the Free Speech Coalition, I think that that was, the, the party.

So, anyway, you know, that was their argument was this was restricting free speech and that I guess that requiring age verification would have a chilling effect on adults using this. And I and, you know, of course, the argument is we already do this. And, I mean, if you went to buy physical pornography, which I guess most people don't do anymore, but it that was all there was for a long time.

Did that have a chilling effect? Well, maybe it it maybe somebody doesn't want to go in and say I want to buy this, but it doesn't prevent them from doing what they want to do. Now I will tell you one of the things about online pornography, well, about addiction in general, they talk about the three A's of addiction, accessibility, affordability and anonymity.

So, so those three things together really do, push things toward being more addictive, in their, in their nature. Right. And so, you know, no doubt it was true that, you know, anonymity, I, I would imagine has,

an a word with regard to online porn, right? No one knows. I think of a phone immediately when I think of that.

That's all those things. Everybody has a phone. Yep. Most people in the country, including kids, kids have phones now, so it's very easily accessible. And you're anonymous when you're online and you're searching for things where you think you are anyway. Yeah, we're definitely not. We can go into that to the data privacy side. It's still a whole other thing.

Oh yeah, they're tracking. But but with all of that said, you know, the argument was this is infringing on adults, right. But the argument of the state of Texas was this is a common sense, time tested approach in the physical world for protecting kids from this very type of content, which has been demonstrated to be harmful to them.

It's defined in Texas law as harmful material, right? That's what it's called. Pornography is called harmful material because it is harmful for kids. So anyway, listening to the justices, ask questions of both, you know, both, sets of attorneys there, you could tell that everybody was pretty on board with, you know, it makes sense to protect kids.

The question is the mechanism for doing it right. And so, you know, I felt good about that. The, the concept of the law was going to be upheld. But, you know, were they going to let it be a verification? So of course. And, I guess it was in June, the, the, the, ruling came down and we were really pleased.

You know, they upheld the case. The the other thing that's important about that is when the Supreme Court rules on any issue, if they if they if they, support it, it encourages more of that from the states. Right, right. If they if they shut it down then it has a chilling effect. Right on that same kind of legislation from the state.

So that was one of the things that was really, I think in a deeper way than just the specific law that was upheld there. I think that's really important is because it indicated from the Supreme Court that they recognize that states have a responsibility and a duty to protect kids, and that this makes sense.

And there's so many parents that I met with constituents of yours that and around the country, in the state that were coming in and saying, this happened to my kid.

And I never expected that. And I think it's the parents that aren't necessarily watching or don't even know about it. So it's kind of protecting those people. But one thing that really got me when I was watching all the news around it was that it was really focused on the age verification piece, which is great, and this model legislation now.

But the piece that, you know, was unique, that you added was the warning sign that the pornography sites should disclose. I think there's a lot of people who don't know the damage it's doing, even as an adult, and having that medical health warning and an option to click a link for addiction, that's like a free option to help, that I think just makes a lot of sense to know.

Maybe it is bad. They have that on gambling sites. They have that on cigarets, on smoking, like a having a warning to alert people. I think that was a really unique way of, of adding that piece.

Well, and, and I don't know if you remember, the, you know, you were working in my office when we, when we came up with the idea.

I think you're the one that maybe even found the drug legislation from it was it was, it was built around a law that had been passed in Louisiana, and I remember, you know, we had talked as an office about as I just told everyone on staff, you know, if if you see anything, if you have ideas or we come across things that will help protect kids online, I want to know about them.

And you brought this idea to me and I'm like, that is a great idea. We should do this. And so we started moving in that direction.

But we also talked about what would make it better. And part of what we felt like would make the the law even more effective then the, the age verification, piece of it was a health warning, because this material is addictive.

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So to put a health warning on, the websites that the, the porn sites, in addition to requiring age verification to enter the portal, that they would also, display that warning and an addiction hotline. Right. So for help because we also know that lots and lots of people who are using porn secretly, they hate themselves for it.

Sure they are. They're hiding it. They don't want anyone to know, and they can't stop because they're addicted. And so it would also maybe give someone a way out somewhere to go. Unfortunately, the court had struck that part, both of those parts out. So that was not included in the Supreme Court decision because it wasn't part of the the law that went, to the Supreme Court.

That's that's a place that we have continued to talk, though, in my office, about finding a way to get back. Get back to that because, you know, it's.

Part of this bill is about, stopping certain kinds of things from happening, kids accessing this kind of material. But we also want to do something to help people who are struggling, who want to make a difference. So, you know, that's something we haven't quit on. And we've had multiple conversations, even with, you know,

the government relations folks over and, the lawyers in the, in the AG's office who, were very instrumental in this particular case being at the Supreme Court.

So we're still working on how we can go in that direction, because it's not enough to stop the bad. You have to help, support the good for sure.

So what other things have been working on from this last legislative session that are in this space now, because you're really a figurehead in the area of protecting kids?

Well, you know, you mentioned, a minute ago, Laura, about, how a lot of parents are just kind of not aware.

Right. You know, in my opinion, as, as, school counselor, as I was working with parents, you

know, one of the things I saw all the time, parents would come to me and they're like, we don't know what to do about this or this or this, right. And part of the reason they were come to me was I was the counselor at the school, but I was also a parent, and for the most part, my my kids were now older than most of the parents that I was working with.

So, you know, that kind of gave me, sort of a platform to speak to them as this person to person, mom to mom about, you know, this is something lots of kids go through. You might not know that with your oldest child, right? If you might just think, oh my gosh, this is the end of the world.

And it might be something that's actually really common or whatever. So I could kind of talk about things from that standpoint. But but a lot of what I was talking to parents about were things that none of us had been parented through ourselves. So you don't always even know what to look for. I think most parents now realize there's a lot out there, and I don't know what all of it is.

Right? So I think one of the important things that we did this last session was legislation to make sure that parents are put in a place where they really legally become the gatekeepers of their children's digital operations, and that was in the form of the App Store Accountability Act. It's a great bill. What it basically requires is that before a kid can a minor can download an app, or purchase an app, their parents have to give consent.

Right? So that's that's the bill in a nutshell. I think it's a very powerful tool, for parents because now any decision that their kid is making, is going to have to come through them. Right? So the app stores already know. They know how old every user is when you, when you, set up a new phone, a new device, an iPad or a laptop or whatever, all of the things that you have to go in and create the account, it's there your age.

Right. And so they know whether the user is a minor or an adult. And, you know, it makes sense to do this at the App Store level, not the the individual developer, the developer level. Doing it at the App Store level creates more continuity and uniformity in the way things are done. It requires age ratings and descriptions of, the apps so that parents can read.

What does this app do, you know, are the apps doing that yet or. That's a great oh, that's a great question. Some some have already been proactively doing that. And in fact, it was interesting. Some of the tech companies that were opposed to the bill came in and said, we don't need a law to do this.

We're already doing this. Okay. Interestingly enough, though,

there was also testimony from lots and lots of parents and users of different apps that came in and said, yeah, some some of these, developers do provide this kind of information. But what we realized that was that a lot of the descriptions were incredibly misleading, and the age ratings were in some, in some cases, just downright thoughts.

Inappropriate. I mean, there were there were, examples of parents who came in and talked about things that they went in and they were just, you know, they're being responsible for their kids. And they they would go in and kind of peruse and see what kind of things were on their phones or on their on their, tablets.

And they would find, you know, this app was 12 and it was, you know, designated for 12 and under. And, you know, it had a description about, you know, it's like you can make cartoons and stuff like that. And they go into it. And the 12 and under included, nude depictions and, you know, things like that.

I think most people would say, and certainly most parents, would say that they don't want 12 and under, they don't consider nude images appropriate for 12 and under. So what this is going to do, going back to, those kind of two pieces of transparency and accountability, the App Store ability, the App Store Accountability Act is going to give parents like a direct line of sight, into what their kids are doing, and they get to decide if that's good for their kid or not.

And if they say yes, and then they realize that this app has been deceptive in its description or inaccurate in its description, they have the ability to, through the, Deceptive Trade Practices Act to hold these, developers and app stores, accountable.

the thing that stood out to me with the App Store accountability Act of somebody that had, it was I think it was one of the very many stakeholders, that I was chatting with through the years when I was working with you.

And they said something that was really crazy with an app that was some apps have communication mechanisms where you can have strangers contact your kid, and it's happening more and more on, like, very innocent seeming gains. So

do you think there's even something that people can do other than just warn parents and educate them on what's going on?

Because how do you stop a chat room in a game? And that seems where, you know, children are getting groomed and trafficked. Is there anything that can be done on the legislative level for that?

Well, I think that, you know, we're we're figuring a lot of this out in real time, right? Because the technology is evolving in real time.

So, yes, you know, one of the one of the things that even with the age verification, Bill, that now has, you know, survived and thrived through Supreme Court street scrutiny, you know, there are there are, platforms that kids can go to to be coached on how to circumvent age verification. Sure. So, sure. You know, as soon as you fix one thing,

bad actors figure out a way to lure kids back, right?

To lure kids back. So, you know, as you were, as you were talking about, you know, an innocent seeming, application, a game or something like that. Where these evil people are, are grooming children and exploiting children, and, you know, that happens in the real world, too. And if you think about this, it is one of the reasons that you have pedophiles and sex offenders, who haven't gotten caught yet that embed themselves in places where, I mean, they're predators and they they go where the hunting is, they go where there is prey.

And, you know, I remember this, when my kids were little, we would go to Chuck E cheese, meet a friend. I'd meet a friend at Chuck E cheese. Kids would all play. And I remember from time to time I, you would kind of notice someone that was there. And it's like, why is a grown man by himself at Chuck E cheese on a Thursday at lunch?

That doesn't make sense. That's it. And, you know, I usually keep an eye on someone like that. Right? But but it happens in the digital space as well. And so, you know, I do I do know this we can pass laws all day long, but if we don't equip and educate parents, they really are the first and the last line of defense for their own children.

And they're it. It's why it's so important that as legislators, we always make sure that parents have all the tools, and that we're not keeping parents from having tools that they need. Because at the end of the day, again, in a, in a country that's founded on self-governance, in a family that looks like parents, looking out for their kids and, and doing their best to be aware and to, do the things that they need to do, which is incredibly challenging.

I think about it every day because now I have six little grandkids, right, that are four and under. And, you know, my kids are 26 to 32. They weren't parented through a lot of these things, right? They they kind of were just a little bit older than, all of this stuff kind of coming in. Right. And so a lot of it, they've kind of had to figure out themselves.

And, you know, I'm proud of my kids. My kids have pretty good North Stars. But, you know, we all make mistakes. And all you can really do is learn from a mistake. But there are some mistakes that are really hard to come back from. For example, you know, if you've got, now we're talking about chat bots that develop intimate relationships and, and are designed to create emotional dependency.

That's one thing when it's an adult, but that's another thing when it's a kid. And there are already reports, numerous reports of these kinds of things resulting in a suicide. And parents find after the fact that this is the result of technology, that they're that their kid was using. And so I think one of the things, one of the principles we always have to remember, you can't make a rule for everything as soon as you make if it's all about rules, then someone will find a way around the rules.

I think it's why we have to be thinking in terms of principles. And and I think three of those principles are transparency and accountability and parental consent.

I think the transparency piece really sticks to me for how I know Eric and I have talked about what we'll do with our kids and how we'll handle things. And I think having an open dialog with the kids is probably the most important thing, because there's going to be things that come up as technology evolves, like you've said, that are completely new, that we've never faced, you know, where we don't know some of the new slang and the new words out there.

We're like, so behind. So of course we're not going to know about some of these, these apps and things and even just new technology that will come out, but just having an open dialog conversation where they can talk to you and say, hey, this is happening and not be ashamed of it, I think is so big because, yeah, you are hearing about suicides and, and mental health issues with, with especially young girls and social media.

There's so many issues and I think everybody's aware of it. But having a conversation, making it public, talking about it with parents and in schools, and allowing the kids to just say something is wrong here and talk to you about it. I think it's probably the best thing people can do. It's it's really important. And it's not easy.

It's not easy. But I think that's important that what you're talking about as far as an open dialog and relationship with your children, it's important in so many ways. But for purposes of what we're talking about, I think,

I think in particularly two ways, you know, one is that number one, you need to have a real relationship with your child so that your child knows the difference between a real relationship and a counterfeit or unhealthy relationship.

You need to have a healthy relationship with your child, for that reason. Right. But but the second is you do have to, and this is, this is really hard and it is really hard, because, you know, as parents, we are tasked with teaching our kids. Right? And wrong. And, and part of that is accountability when they make bad choices.

Right. But but you really do have to think about how to navigate that in a healthy way. And, and not all of us had that modeled for us. So, you know, I'm thankful that there are a lot of resources for parents, on on this topic, which is really not about technology. It's about relationships, but it applies everywhere.

Again, back to principles, right? But, you know, when I was, a school counselor, I used to do, a quarterly meeting for moms, and we would talk about different parenting topics. And I remember addressing this in particular, and I said, you know, you you do want to teach your kids to learn from their mistakes, right? And and everyone makes mistakes.

Everyone has failures.

And if you're an adult, you know, this really the things you have learned the best, you probably learn because you screwed up right. It's our mistakes that we really go, whoa. And then we stop. Maybe right? You either gloss over it and then you don't learn from your mistakes at all. But but the best growth really probably comes from what you did wrong.

And figuring out I want to do better than that in the future. I'm not going to cover it up. I'm not going to ignore it. I want to be better. Right.

And if we don't foster an environment in our families where kids can say, mom, dad, I messed up. You know, I remember saying to parents, you know, I think everyone here would want your, child to come to you if something really bad happened, right?

I'll give you an example. A lady that I know told me the story of, And this is technology related. Her son had gotten into a chat room, and there was a period of time where this relationship developed. And at least his understanding was this was a girl. Okay. And so, you know, they were kind of becoming friends.

And then, he was kind of like, I think she likes me. And, you know, things go on. Well, it gets to a point where she needed money. She needed him to send her money. This is a common internet scam. That was many, many, many, versions. Right. But so was this even a girl? Probably not. It probably was not in any way, shape or form a teenage girl that he thought it was.

But it got to a point where, they needed money or someone was going to hurt them. Okay. And and the boy was like, I don't have any money. And he he didn't have access to whatever it was, $400, $500 or whatever. And then he basically had, you know, I don't know how they got it. And then the person was saying, you know, they're going to kill me or something, right?

Anyway, this kid, instead of like, kind of walking down and like going somewhere to try to address this, which was a scam. He actually went to his parents and he said, I don't know what to do. Here's what's happening. And it was embarrassing for him to do it because he had gone this far, but his parents were able to help him.

Good. Navigate it. Right. That that only happened because they had a relationship that already was in existence where he could go and say, I've gotten myself into a bad situation here. So the reality is all of us would want our kids to come to us if they were in a situation where they'd gotten themselves in a bad spot and something bad was going to happen or whatever.

But, you know, and this is what I was telling the moms, but if your kid can't come home with a C or forget their lunch or not, remember their uniform for basketball practice after school, it if they can't come to you with those kinds of things without you having a nuclear explosion in your head, right? What are the odds that they're going to come to you when they really have a problem that that they're embarrassed about?

And so, you know, it's not easy. It's it is not an easy thing. But it's so important for for those two reasons I think among many others. But, you know, kids need to have, healthy relationships in their families first. That helps them have healthy relationships in other places because then they know what it's like, right? They know how to ask for forgiveness.

They know how to forgive. They know how to say, I did this. And the shame is not there for because they've they're dealing with it, right. They're dealing with it. So there's that. And then I just I think it really does matter that we always have parents as the gatekeepers. When it comes to technology, we recognize that almost everywhere else.

Well, that was a great point about the scams. There's so many new, really sophisticated scams coming out with similar voices. And we're going through, you know, our Soc2 compliance audit right now, which is very in-depth. And so we've all gone through security training and now any email I get, I'm like, this is this is a scam. This is a scam because they just want you to click one button.

They have all of your passwords, all your information, all the companies banking well and crazy. And you have to be taught that right to tell you that because it's not intuitively obvious. Now they know again the neuroscience. Yeah. Yeah I've I've talked to parents about this before as well. You know, you may not really understand the neuroscience behind these algorithms that are sucking your kids in to scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and interacting with people that are not good people or that are not even people now.

Right? They're they're chat bots or whatever.

You may not understand the neuroscience behind that, but these tech companies do. And they weaponize it to suck your kids in. You know, kids are a very desirable, economic demographic. They're they're a huge consumer pool. And one of the things that makes them so desirable as a consumer pool is that almost all of kids spending is completely discretionary, right?

Yeah. I have to compete for if I want if I want you to spend money on something that I have right, I have to compete with you got a car payment and a house payment and you know all of these things, right? I don't have to compete with any of that with a kid. Do they want it or not?

Right. If they want it, then, you know, a lot of them have parents that are like, sure, whatever. That's fine. And they don't know that when they click and buy that, not only are they buying something, but they're giving all kinds of data, right? There's a lot of stuff there. They're not getting compensated for. They're creating a footprint where they can be tracked.

And,

you know, whether it's whether it's getting a kid addicted to compulsive spending or it's getting a kid addicted to pornography, when you get a kid addicted to these behaviors online and get them sucked in and and connected, you've got to you've got a customer for life. Yeah, well, you can see it so easily as an adult.

Like there's podcasts I listen to a lot, and a lot of the ads I've noticed, oh, I used that vitamin. Was that just inception into my brain? Because I keep hearing it all the time that this is the one to use, or this is the supplement of of choice. It's it's fascinating seeing how that works on you, but I'm aware of it.

Children are just not. And if they're seeing this kind of content to consume and that's what they want, they see other kids happy doing it, then they're going to want to do it too. They're more susceptible. Is that

what types of technology are you now seeing? Or I know you meet with so many people all the time that are telling you most up to date and technologically advanced things with AI and maybe, you know, things we should look out for on the horizon.

Are there any examples of new risks or technologies that are out there right now?

Well, I think, you know, AI is definitely the new frontier, right? And and again, I'll go back to something I said earlier. You know,

we really want to make sure that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. AI has tremendous, opportunities, for human flourishing.

Right. Totally. It's and for families as well. Right. I mean, you know, to the extent that we can kind of outsource, certain kinds of menial tasks or really complicated computational tasks and all kinds of different things, it's it's an unbelievable search engine. Right. One of my one of my kids, I know, you know, they've started using AI for when, you know, the kids look like they're kind of sick like this, and they'll just, you know, they'll Google.

We've all people have been doing this right for a long time. And, you know, it's if you can you have to be aware of your limitations, right? You're not a doctor. But all of us have gone online and and done a search on, you know, a symptom or something like that.

And, and it's a lot better at that in the offering I got, I got a new one.

Yep. It's so good. Well and it's only gives us a lot of a lot of things that, you know, metrics that we can use to improve our health and those kinds of things. Right.

So all of these things are great things, but there is a dark side, that is also there. And so we just can't stick our head in the sand, turn a blind eye to the perils.

Even as we do want to really take advantage of the great opportunities and, you know, you know, I know in, in the school space for quite some time, there have been, teachers have been having to deal with new kinds, cheating. Right. Plagiarism. You know, just outsourcing your homework, basically. And, and what does that do to a child?

Well, they're they're getting the grade better than ever. And they're not learning anything, right? They're they're missing out on the actual learning. And so, you know, those are some of the ways that we see it, turning up in schools. But I think, you know, a lot of the things, I think the, the chat bots are one of the things I'm, I'm really concerned about, I mentioned earlier, you know, these are designed to create emotional dependance.

There's an article I read recently that said, you know, from a chat bot, you will get empathy, but you're not going to get help. And again, this is not an actual relationship. I think that we, you know,

everybody talks about the mental health crisis, and having someone to talk to is really important. I would just say to someone, not something.

Right. And a child is not able to distinguish, between what's on the other side of that. A lot of adults aren't eager. I do think that that's where it can get very dangerous, where the lines are blurred. A this is not a real human. And it having people who are, you know, not leaving the house and having relationships in that way, it's just bad for society and the population to me, to be frank to when you have that type of is perfect.

You did mention a lot of the positives. I, I'm just curious how you're using it now in a, in a positive way, like in your life, how it's changed over the last year because it's everywhere.

It is everywhere. I imagine there are ways I'm using it that I don't even realize that's depending on AI, right? I, I do have to give a shameless plug for, for, you know, you guys know because we are definitely using your product in our office.

Thank you. And it's a great cycle. It has. Well, you know, I know when we first, started exploring it, I was like, you know what? I want to know what my staff say about this. And they. I asked them to test drive, and they were like, this is amazing. It saves us hours and hours and hours of work.

And, you know, I was a math teacher, so I remember, you know, as, as calculators have kind of evolved, right? And I haven't seen the calculator or whatever the latest calculator they're using in high schools and that sort of thing. But I know when I went back, into teaching after, my kids all got school age, the calculators were a lot more sophisticated than when I had been in school.

And when I, when I'd been teaching, you know, before the internet had come in and all of that kind of stuff. So, you know, and I remember the arguments around even just using a calculator versus doing it on pen and paper. Right. Oh for sure. And, and so, you know,

even then, this has always been, kind of the yin and yang of, technology, right?

Is you want to make sure, again, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. So on the one hand, you know, you need kids to know how to multiply and divide and add, subtract. They need to be able to do those things manually, because if they don't know how to do those things manually, they don't know how to really, when they're using a calculator to do those things and they get a really stupid answer because they, they miss kids.

Something right here. Well, you know, if you know how to do those things manually because your brain understands the concepts and the skills, then when then you catch those mistakes, right? You're like, oh, that's way out of range. I must have hit the wrong key or something like that. If you don't know the underlying principles, then you don't catch those things, right?

Yeah, but if you do, then the calculator does all the not time consuming number crunching that allows you to go do much more complex problem solving. Right. And so I think that's, that's the the same idea with AI is that you need to understand the basic principles of how things work, how people work. Those, those kinds of things.

But when, when you and how critical thinking skills. Right. Does that sound right? Does that make sense? Is that logical? Just because someone says something doesn't mean it's true. And so, you know, you you need to know how to do your own research, when you need to. And, you know, you need to know how to ask good questions.

So those kinds of things will never go out of style. And they'll they'll never really be, something that you can actually outsource safely, I think, without losing your agency.

And I think that's kind of at the center of all of this. Is that, you know, we want to maintain what it means to be human. Oh, 100%.

That's kind of the philosophy I have with our company.

So it's that I was doing so many manual, time consuming tasks in my workflow, and if I can cut that down by hours, but really, it's just a bunch of clicks on a computer, I can spend more time doing that and having meaningful conversations and, you know, moving the needle, having, you know, opportunities in new sites and being able to travel and go and meet these people in person, I think is so awesome and getting people's time back.

And so we're using it a ton in different ways. And I'm always trying to think of how can I use AI to optimize things that I don't like doing? Like, how can I save myself hours, right? I just had a really fun event.

We had a hackathon, so we had all all the team come together. We've got 18 staff now.

It's insane. That's amazing. Congratulations by the crazy. Thank you. It's so crazy. But I love our team. And we had, you know, all the developers, everybody in person. We put them all into groups mixed with like the business guys and, and marketing team and all that with the coders. And we said, okay, come up with the most efficient, tool or technology that you develop that we can use in the business.

That's going to help save us a lot of time. There's so many things that time consuming. And one of the most innovative ones was actually one that James is team built. He just met, they built. So we get feature requests all the time from Laura. From everyone from the home, from everybody who uses the root of the end users.

Yes. And then that's how it helps us develop product. But we have, like, huge fights and debates about what's next to be built because we're like, no, I talked to this person and they really want this. So we've, developed, there's a little chat bot that you can, like, answer the question. You can send questions to and then talk to a person.

But James developed an AI that would aggregate all of the requests, put them into one them. And then the highest ranked feature was at the top. Like this has been requested by 20 different people. This has been requested by ten and say, hey, this is where you should start next. This is the most interesting thing about that was an amazing, new use of it.

Yeah. Like that's crazy. That's interesting. Well, and, you know, even I talked about, you know, I know my kids, use it a lot as well. And actually, I have one of my one of my kids, my son is in the tech industry. Yes. And he he. Because he just loves this kind of stuff. He actually has incorporated it into his apartment.

So he has like, he's built all of this, stuff using AI where, you know, he gets home and he's like, you know, initiate, welcome home protocol. And all of these things happen, you know, in his apartment, you know, the curtains do this, the lights do this, the air does this. And so, you know, I think there's tremendous opportunity and tremendous creativity right there is, the potential of all of this.

And I think we just have to pay attention to, making sure, though, that we're not doing our beta testing on kids. I couldn't agree with you more

there's such a polarization divide right now with different schools, right? We're in the Texas triangle. So we're in some of the, you know, high tech areas of Texas. If we're raising our kids here, they can stay here.

But there's a lot of places in rural Texas that they might not be learning about some of this technology and might be behind, you know. So I was curious what you think about incorporating, you know, teaching about AI so that, you know, they're not behind when they get to that graduate level, and there's somebody who's way ahead, who's been in Austin or Plano or lived in a more tech forward, area.

What what do you think is important that they learn about, you know, that's that's a great question. And again, is something that is not only always has been constantly evolving, but will continue to constantly I have all right.

And so I think that it's it's something that we just have to kind of keep our finger on the pulse of what's happening in technology and make sure that we include it in the curriculum in our schools.

You know, one of the the good things is that we we tell our schools, you need to study this. You need to teach this, this, this, and that's right. And so we've done a lot around, not just the college readiness, but also the, the, career readiness, military readiness, for, you know, success doesn't look like college for every kid.

Sure. The trades and I mean, kids can make a good living doing a lot of things and never go to college, and it's just not the right fit for everyone. In fact, I think colleges are going to have to really pay attention to what is happening because I think degrees in some ways become are becoming less central to a person's ability to do tasks.

And, you know, I think about, again, I mentioned my son that is is, super techie and lives out in the Bay area. He's been doing this for a long time now. But you know, when when he has switched jobs or anything like that, they don't they they kind of screen his resume, but they don't hire based on his resume.

They bring him in and he's a coder. So they bring him in and they say, here's a problem program, a solution code, a solution in this language. And he can either do that or he can't do that. And they don't care what his degree is in. I know, you know, I had talked to him at one point because he's in the Bay area.

I'm like, what do you think about doing like a master's at Stanford or something while you're out there in the air or something?

And he's like, why would I do that? My work experience is more valuable than any degree I could ever get, and doing the degree would take away from the work experience and cost money and cost money.

And so, you know, I think that is what the future is looking more and more like for our young people. They can go online and learn anything they want on word, and they may be able to learn it in a format that works better for them, is more workable for their schedule. I mean, this is one of the exciting things about where we are for, adult learners, you know, folks that are wanting to improve their, their adults, their families, they can't quit their job and start putting food on the table so that they can go get another degree or do something like that.

But but because of all of the online opportunities, they can learn new things as they continue to do what they're doing now but improve their situation, improve their earning power and that sort of thing. So I think those are those are a lot of the things that we have to think about from an education policy standpoint, in Texas.

And I think I think it's it's great. I mean, one of the most important things and, you know, I, I loved this is one of the things that I, I think was important that I took from homeschooling my kids, was teaching my kids that you can learn your whole lifelong and finding the things that you're really interested in, you can follow that right?

And you can, navigate and set your course for what you want to learn, what you want to know, what you want to be. So, you know, that's almost limitless now. It's really exciting. And I know I never got taught personal finance in school. I never got taught about business. Even my friends who have done had gone and had MBAs are saying, okay, you have more experience in this than I do because you've literally started a business and I had to listen to a really good podcast I was with, I can't remember name, but Tony Robbins, one of his business partners, and, he started multiple businesses and been very successful.

And it was a similar, situation to what you were saying with, with Tucker not wanting to go get his MBA or another degree when it's unnecessary and it's work experience. This man said his daughter wanted to be an interior designer, and they said, okay, well, you're going to go to college for four years and have no real world experience and have to go find a job, said, here's what I want to do.

I'm going to propose. I will pay for you fully for two years. But what you need to do is direct message on Instagram, your absolute favorite designer in the world, and say, I will work for you for free for two years. And he said, and I will do that, I will pay for your life, and you can live with me, and I will pay for everything for two years, and then I will start your own business.

And what would that do? That would be amazing. 20 years old, have work experience from the best in the world and would be cheaper than college. I thought, wow, what an innovative, interesting way to look at, you know, new opportunities now. So I think obviously there's there's doctors and lawyers and positions that you need to go and get a degree that are absolutely required.

But there's so much that could be self-taught or you could learn, you know, from from doing. Yeah. So it's exciting. Yeah.

You know, that that really is true. And I think that, you know, the world is, you know, the world is my oyster for the person that understands how to teach themselves and how to go out and find what they need to know.

Right. The self-directed learner. I guess maybe that's the that's the the term I was trying to, to find again, that self-directed learner. That was that was a that's a big theme for a lot of, folks at home school, that they're teaching their kids that. Right. And, I think that's important. That goes back to also some of those core principles about just learning how to be a self-governing person, right?

And making good decisions. You know, all of those all of those things are important. And it matters that parents are the ones that are kind of helping their kids navigate those, those pathways as they grow up.

So as a former educator and counselor and seeing all this new tech and what parents are dealing with now, what types of things would you recommend they do to keep kids, you know, able to share with them? And, and out of some of these dangerous situations,

you know, I've, I've thought a lot of about those kinds of things.

And I'm thinking about it, you know, as I watch my kids raise their little ones. Right. And you know, that my oldest grandchild is four and a half now, and I just got my sixth one. That's amazing. Congratulate. But they're all they're all little bitty. And, you know, I, I look at them and I will tell you, as a grandmother, the thing that makes me happiest when I watch my kids and my grandkids is that I'm, I look at my grandkids, they're happy.

And why are they happy? I think they're happy because they feel safe. They don't know that they couldn't be safe. That doesn't mean they don't fall off the bed and hurt themselves or, you know, fall off their bike and skin their knee or whatever. I mean, things happen or their their brother hits on what I mean, things happen, right?

But for the most part, they're operating out of safety and security and love. Right? Not all kids get that. And I realize that. So it's it's just a gift to be able to watch my, my babies, my little ones. And growing up in an environment like that. But even so, with I think my kids are doing a great job parenting.

But even with that, all of the best intentions there are going to be things that happen, that are less than desirable. And so you always have to be prepared for those things.

But I actually, I, I kind of made this little list for myself. If you, if you don't mind me looking at I love that. But, but, you know, one of the things I thought about is when one of the most likely ways for a kid to die and a minor to die and adolescent to die is in a car accident.

For a lot of different reasons. Right. But most of us, don't say my kid's not ever going to be behind the wheel of the car, right? Most of us do our very best to teach our kids to to drive. We teach them to be responsible. We teach them you don't drink and get behind the wheel of a car.

You don't get in a car with someone who's been drinking. You don't drive at two in the morning when the rest of the people that are on the road probably have been drinking. I mean, there are things we teach our kids so they can do this dangerous thing that also has a lot of upside for them in a safe way, in a responsible way.

Right. So I think to me that's an analogy for what we have to think about when we're teaching our kids about technology. Tremendous opportunity, tremendous upsides. But also some dark sides and things they've got to to think about. And we also have to teach them to think well about things that don't exist yet. Right. So so some of the things that, you know, I,

I think it's important for parents to remember is, number one, pay attention to your kids tech use qualitatively and quantitatively.

It is not healthy for your kid to be on their device all the time. You know, Laura, we didn't talk about this, but one of the the laws that just went into effect in Texas is no cell phones at schools. Right. And I and I have heard reports from, administrators and teachers that for the first time in years, when they walk in the cafeteria, they hear laughter, and kids are bring in board games to lunch.

Wow. And they're talking and they're, they're playing and they're they're learning each other's names, you know, things like that. They're building real relationships. They used to be sitting on their phones. You know, no one really was exactly sure how this would play out, you know, would there be like this mass rebellion or whatever? Because I have to have my phone, you know.

But but the reality is, is that we're getting back to a better, I think, a better social normal with our kids by getting these out of, replacing. They take the place of something. They're not just an add on, they're replacing real relationships. And so I think that's something parents really need to pay attention to their kids.

The, the types of things you're using, the parental consent, even if there is something that involves your kid that doesn't legally require parental consent, you want to you're the parent, right? You're the parent. So that would be one thing. Another thing that, you know, I think kind of started I remember it kind of starting when I was a parent of young kids myself.

But it's really easy to use tech as a babysitter. And one of the things we've kind of talked about is, I mean, you wouldn't hire a stranger to babysit your kid. You need to understand that that using tech to babysit your kid is not safe. You don't know what's going to come in. So. So don't use tech as a babysitter.

It could be a pedophile. Yeah. And that's that's literally true. And so as easy as it is to just hand on the device, you can do better, right? I mean, even playing music or something like that. Right. There's a lot of benefits to kids brains listening to good music and that sort of thing. And there's a lot of educational music.

I mean, there are other things you can do go outside and play. You know, there's a lot you can do. Other than using tech as a babysitter. And it's not it really is not a safe bet for a babysitter. Totally. Model. Good character. And, good decision making for your kids. Teach. You teach them that.

You teach them how to make good decisions. You teach them what is good and what is not good. And, you know, like I've heard it said, you know, character is more often caught than taught, so you do need to say it to your kids, but you need to model it. They can't. Right? They catch from you your life.

And it's such an opportunity, and it's one of the best ways you can influence your kids. It's a real legacy, you know, just the life you live is the best thing you can give your kids. Make it the best. I, I talked a lot about this, but, you know, really focus on having genuinely healthy relationships in your family and with your kids.

Learn how to say, I'm sorry, learn how to, learn how to have boundaries, learn how to have a healthy, you know, and how to have a healthy. Yes. You know, I, I remember a lady taught me a long time ago, lady that went to my church, that was a real role model for me as a mom.

But she said, you know, you're you get asked to do things all the time. And a lot of the moms that might be listening, or, or dads, have kids. But, you know, if you're the kind of person that likes to get things done, people will notice that and they'll ask you to do things. And I mean, when you ask a person that's good at getting things done to get things done right, and they're the busiest people, and a lot of times we can out of guilt, we just keep saying yes and yes and yes.

And I remember a dear lady who's had such a powerful impact on my life. She said, Angela, don't ever forget the every yes is a no. In every no is a yes. Because when you say yes to something, it you cannot change the fact that now you'll have to say no to other things, and it may be to your kids, or your husband or your close friends or your, you know, other things that really it should be your priority.

So when you say yes to say to something, say yes on purpose, not out of guilt because it's totally it's what you should do, right? And every time you say no to something, you're also saying yes to other things. So you don't you can't. It's not so easy. Like, oh, I, I said yes, and then I get rid of the guilt.

When you said yes, you said no to other things.

So don't be afraid to say no when it's the healthy thing to do. Right. That's great advice. I'm trying to do it more because you can't do everything. No, and especially as a mom, you have other responsibilities. So you do. You have a lot of things you have to do.

And I guess, you know, the the other thing and we talked about this too, but be a parent who your child can come to, you know, when they failed and they still know you love them. And even though you don't approve of the behavior and the decision or whatever you're going to, you're going to walk with them into the healthiest next step and that they can count on you for that.

So, you know, I think it is probably harder to parent today than it ever has been, but kids have always been in the crosshairs, as kind of the low hanging fruit for, people who want to exploit, you know, there have always been predators in the jungle. And, you know, as parents, though, we're the grownups.

So be the parent and love your kid, be their safe place where they can can have standards. They can do it, and they'll want to do it. You know, if you're modeling that for them and love them when they make mistakes. Yeah, it was amazing. Wise words of wisdom here. And, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about all these things.

I know you're one of the the funnest people to sit down and talk to. If you're I always would see people come in, you know, from different companies and groups and they always would say, wow, she's so fun to talk to. And she knows so much about so many different subjects. And I think this was a really great peek into all the wisdom you have today.

So thank you. Thank you Laura. Well, you're you're a fun person to talk to eggs. And I love watching you operate in your element here and just wish you the best success. And, I think you're right where you're supposed to be. And it's fun to watch you just get better and better and better at being you.

You're so kind now. How can people keep up with everything that you're doing? I know you have a newsletter and some other things. Do you have any other shout outs? Yeah, they can follow. Follow me on social media or media. Angela Paxson talks, on my social media and, Angela Pax intercom is my website. People can go there and sign up for the newsletter and and everything, but I'd love to have people join us.

And, you know another thing I'm going to I'm working on right now is I'm actually working on a documentary podcast project myself. Cool. Aimed at parents and helping to equip and educate, parents so that they can raise their kids in this really difficult, environment that is often, you know, predatory for their children. And it's it's called the cost of innocence.

Okay. How big tech, big pharma and big others are targeting our kids for profit. So I know a lot of parents are becoming more and more aware of how many, forces there are that are looking at their kids, as just a, you know, a money machine and sure don't really care what happens to the kid. The kid is expendable.

It's just a way to make some money in the short term. And so, you know, again, parents are the ones who are invested in their children for the long run. And so I think it's really, really important that parents are engaged. And so I want to help educate, educate parents, encourage them, but equip them with practical tools so that they can make good decisions as parents to help their kids make good decisions as they grow up.

Amazing. And when and where can people find the cost? Well, they can actually go online and, you know, just do a search on Cost of Innocence. Angela Paxton but we're in the process right now with, production and, we're still doing interviews and that sort of thing, but it's going to be a great, podcast again, really hoping to, help parents have what they need, to raise their kids.

Awesome. Well, I can't wait to watch it. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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So tell me a little bit about where you're from.

So. Well, I from Van Den earlier, but I, I grew up in that area.

My family was given a land right there from the demand of us in the Republic of Texas. So that we go way back. Well, on that land game worth it. You know, it eventually had to get sold off just because my family, the longtime relatives or family member, then the money goes away. Also, he spoke about books. So we have it.

So but I've been there with the school and van and the school where and I joined the military in 1988, so I'm a little bit. But then I did 30 years there and retired in Abilene to Dyess Air Force Base, and that was my last assignment. We liked Abilene. So what's it? My wife. But I retired first and my wife retired the next year.

She retired out of Korea. So when I retired, they sent her to preach for the year without me. And then after that year, she decided, you know what? I want to be a florist because we we were apart quite a bit, you know, we, was three years in New Mexico. She was in Wichita Falls. That's our. And then I'm going back to Wichita Falls.

We were there for two years. They sent me to Korea for a year by myself. And then after I got my some career this semester at body, and then I retired four years later and they said, hurry, Korea. You know, it's just this, just

get out of this job. So be together. Yeah, yeah. So did you meet the.

No. We did. Yeah we did. We were both. We were both doing the same job. We were both aircraft armament specialist. So we were the we fixed the weapons systems on fighters and bombers and and we loaded with bombs, views of bombs. But all the planes. How cool. How risky is that? It's not as risky as you sound.

They're pretty safe, you know, it takes there's. It takes a lot to actually make one go. Offers lots of steps. So they're pretty foolproof. Yeah. So which side?

So then you both work from West Texas. But got there. Syndicate.

Is that right? Let me show you some Los Angeles nuts. So she's she came she met me and she's, such a boy from Texas.

And knows how to grow things and had his own food, raise cattle. She said she needed me for the zombie apocalypse, so she said that's my dream. So I moved to, to Texas from DC during, the Covid lockdowns. And I was seeking my doomsday apocalypse like helper. And so. So you have a little bit of grass out there, and we've been growing some veggies, but it's been my plan.

My goal. What does that do you grow. That's awesome. Well, right now I'm like the wrong thing. But wildflowers for bees because, sorry, I've recently got into being some beekeeper. That's amazing. I want to ask bees. And you could put a record in your list. And I'm very interested because, one of my best friends or husband has some reason, I mean, some amazing hobby.

And glad I'm not allergic, but I definitely want to do those. And chickens. You sure? Well, as many times I've. I've been is I've been stung in the last month in the house when I'm not. Let's see. Oh, no. It's good. Really? Yeah. He said it's been fine. But why do you want some so much? Well, the first time was, I did a bee removal at someone's house.

Okay. With the bees hive inside the wall. And so we had to go get them out. Uses fancy vacuum. This sucks. All the bees out. And even though I had a suit on, sometimes I get through and mainly in the gloves on the hand. So I got stung eight times that day on my hands. And then when I worked the bees at my house on me, sometimes they get through on it.

1 or 2 stings era, or they'll wait till I take the suit out and combine the done reported. Well, Commissioner Buckingham knows what she's hired a globe. You know, your land. That is very cool. And

how did you get involved in politics? If you want to tell our listeners, I'm sure they're interested from going through the military to your political trades over here.

I've been in some commercials. You guys are checking out this this man on the film here, he's been into TV shows here. So how did you get into, all this?

So I don't see. You remember Bobby Hanson still? She worked there in the district office. Is there an apple? Yes. So what I retired from

and from the year I had a luncheon.

Retirement. What was she? And her husband was on the military, the Senate. And after the luncheon, she was going to do a retirement. And that's that rule that, you know, I haven't really thought about it. I just want to enjoy her time for one. So how would you like to work for a congressman? And that was one of the reasons that celebration.

You always had an interest in politics. Yeah. So that would be very nice. And and then the district you're you're helping the constituents, which is very important to think. And Jody always said that. So here you know I said well hey you know your profit oriented because obviously people and I spent 30 years in service on service. So this was was a great transition from the military to go and to serve government and working to help constituents.

So interview with, Russell. Yes. And so, like I said, you know, I hired and, and, and they put me in charge of the position services time. So it worked out great. But 60% of our caseload was veterans. So that worked out awesome. And I was able to help. And welcome to the different organizations. So so

I love that.

Well, side note for the audience, Glenn reached out to me a little while ago saying most of my podcasts, and I heard that I work with Jody. So shout out to Jody, Erin, center for resource. I want to send a student with Russell. Yes, such a small world. And we definitely exchanged emails like 12 years ago,

probably about this show itself.

Yes. Right. It was. I was just that you were doing were you in charge? I wasn't just sure. I was in charge of the Texas lunch. Yes. The flags. We had ten interns one summer. Very fun. Some of them are now in Austin, which is really cool. One of them came and lobbied me, actually. I was like, you're all grown up.

And then one of them came, but we're going to be at one of the Senate, dinners. And he was a staff and Senate, you know. So it was a real small world. There's definitely some cool of that that come out. Yes, that. So I look and then what got you in with the GLA? We're in the position you're in now.

Let's talk more about what you're doing okay. So once I left the Joe reenters office I want to go help a friend with this plumbing company. For just a brief period. It was a temporary, Jeff.

Well, I thought as to where I would completely retire. You know, we can do anything, so I could just enjoy life. But, then maybe he was working in the Senate office for then Senator Bucky.

Tim reached out to you? Just he owned a business and said, hey, I just I've come to be her district reps. So can you interested in this? I would be yeah. I think you do that job. So then Adrian who you know reached out and unmet were Tim in the in the senator. So coffee and we had a discussion and I went to work for her part time handled that northern part of Senate district one for gas station services again.

And it just worked out one deal level with a lot of local leaders and voice their concerns. And to the to the senator, to her. We had both calls. We get together and talk about all the issues going on the district. We're just kind of eyes and ears for our boots on the ground. So that's an industry kid, and I enjoyed that.

And so then I when she writes or for land commission, she said, once you get what you say, you want to continue to work for me. I said, I do. I start on with Austin. She got not you can stay at my daughter's in college there. So I'm just and at the time my wife's like a job, just, retired.

Right. So we just weren't ready to move. So we were able to stay in, and I'm leaving, and I stayed with and, one of the glo, and she asked, what do you want to do the job? There's many departments. And I said, well, I did 30 years in the military, 15 of those years in Texas. You know, I'd never heard of the landlord.

I said, let me do something fabulous with that. I want to tell people about the veterans like has come know that a lot exists. So that's basically where I spend most of my time doing. I still meet with the local community leaders. And what's their concerns about, you know, they might need community grants for, for I guess you can get that from the jail.

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But most of my energy is focused on veterans issues.

That's amazing. Well, thank you for your service and their work. Now you're obviously, commissioner working and love to you because otherwise she wouldn't, like be out West Texas. So that's very, very impressive. So tell, people who don't know and aren't as familiar, what is the general dance?

Well, your sudden it has about 800 people on staff, well over 100. So it's a huge audience. And she managed 13.1 million acres of land. And this all over the state of Texas, the leasing of that land, even more rights to that land. The money we make off it goes into the permanent school fund, which currently is about $62 billion.

Yeah, the primary school fund was established, I think it was 1857. I forgot that we were right to fund public education and we can't spend the principal not. So we give the interest to the civil rights, or the same way to vocational education manages with the minds of residents. We get the, interest from your to fund public education through the 12.

And this year it'll be about 4.8 billion compared to 2.6 billion last year. Well, so we're doubling and and a lot of that has to do with the commissioner finding other revenue sources for the permanent short on such as covers. Mr.. Sequestration. She bought a 353,000 acre ranch in Ruther County that we lose out and then it can be used for calibration honey.

And we own them, you know? Right. So a lot of land we have. And so we set up for renewals, and we also are responsible for ten miles of the Gulf out into the Gulf. So we have that as well.

And are you involved, specifically the agency in regulating kind of the distance that we have, Texas, South Shore and all that, or is that just like set in stone?

It's ten miles. That's it. That's always interested me.

Well, I'm not sure how the ten miles came about. I'm sure that we did that. But ten miles is what we have. It's just considered. Yes, yes, but what one thing that that the commissioner has that's been in office is his idea of security, of water. And there was an island and he may have asked if we've made it medium nationally.

Last year there was an island in the Rio Grande that we really didn't know. Nobody really laid claim. I did see that other than a quarter. And the cartels had engaged on, on, on the island that most people don't know about.

And so, Commissioner, Mason, looking at the treaty between us and Mexico that we all increasing from the middle of the Rio Grande north well over the last couple of years, the water changes the path a little bit.

So when you read plot and show what's north of the middle, it turned out the island was on. Actually. So she went and cleaned it out with BP's out there. They cleaned it up, and we got rid of all that nastiness that the cartel had gone on the island.

So what she's she's making touch us a little bit about that.

Yeah, that's a pretty cool claim. They just said she was just done. What else? This is kind of the commissioner's role.

So, we also do a also clean ups, managed, the the erosion of beach erosion, not Great Barrier Reef restoration, you know, things such as that. We had about 50 folks, at least 50 folks down and five different areas along the coast and also refunds.

Right. So, we help also with the community grant. So a lot of the grants that come from federal funding, and things such as that will come into the geo open in July of disburse, such as after Hurricane Harvey. They were about 10,000 homes that the deal was helped through. These grants help distribute the money to rebuild these homes specifically for low to low income venues.

That's a very big job. And hurricanes disaster, you know that anything that affects when and specifically with these tragic floods that just recently happened, what's been the impact and, and your, role in helping it?

So in San Angelo, it's only about an hour and a half. So I've seen towards in my area. So after that I would be on, you know, wrap it somewhere, work with the chamber, trying to figure out ways to

help them.

So you think the Glo is not the first responder? Something like that. Sure. They can help with prevention, you know, before an event like now. So help with after the event. But there are other agencies out there that be a first responder or something like that. But if we can come up with a help them plan to various happy again in the future or help mitigate the damage that maybe they do some buyouts in some very flood prone areas, maybe they biosolids or going to make it look or flood the area or develop.

You get some grants to reroute the sewer system from the community to make sure to that

it. What would you say are some of the biggest misconceptions people have, you know, lawmakers have about the Glo and just the public in general? If you could explain it in the then

yeah, yes, it well, they I think what they don't they don't know what we do.

So they don't know how to act. You know where it's helping us. And so I think the commissioner Commission Buckingham has really done a great job in getting her, I the team out and letting people know whether they'd be the team here. And awesome to be able to happen on visits with legislators or people like me, visit with local and county officials and say, hey, this is who we are, you know, and this is what we do.

Because I just don't think lawmakers, if they don't know what we do, they don't know how to help us. And so I guess she, you know, they have to know what all we're responsible for. And people that land office, you know, the land office understand what's an 86 was

about predates the other by nine years. So what was the oldest agency overseas.

Well I did not know. That's right. Well, I was originally

mapping out the land, so we did military. We did the bounty grants, basically military grants where they eat or bounty military reward them, warrants where they gave out land to people in the upper sky for it to finish in Mexico. But we didn't have any money. So the promised land, well, somebody had to track what checks on every vehicle.

So I was the land officer. Did that was morphed into a lot more than that. Oh, ton of. And so we still do that for veterans since that after World War two. But the veterans name word came about to to help veterans buy land at a low interest rate. And, and, now it's expanded into now you buy land in my home.

Your improvement loans. We also run Penn State veterans nursing homes and at one five state their cemeteries. The money we make of the land loans and home loans on private loans goes towards funding those

homes and cemeteries. So we're a state agency all and we're very stable. That's their home. Rely on taxpayer funding. Wow. So Andrew people you pretty much cover right.

Yeah that's right. That's amazing.

So your when your role with the legislature specifically are sounds like you're educating them a lot on what you do and the different programs. You have an apartment. What, what have you had to do this past legislative session? And obviously I'm going we've got a lot of the disaster flood conversations happening, a lot of that through special.

But what was your role and Sheila's role through this legislative session specifically? Try align your priorities.

So the the jello stuff, which I didn't get involved with so much I'm on Austin, so I'm sure, I'll meet with our local rep, Stan Lambert, or we'll talk about the issue we have. Senator Charles Terry was also our son. It was before redistricting, sort of the prairie and and watching him share that what he had North Abilene she itself.

And so we we're actually very fortunate to have two votes in the Senate race and they, they they were in one set most of the time. So it was nice to have two votes in the Senate for an issue that we really used over it. But yeah,

anyway, we did get a new bill this, this legislative session that helped with so before we were capped at seven across the state.

So there's for state variance. And

what do you mean by that. We we weren't allowed to have more than seven. Oh we might why is that.

That was just what was how it was written down. The chat was and so we, we actually have a that bill passed and that was lifted that a cap to where we could build more than seven if we need to.

They, they removed the cap altogether and so you know, we how we get those cemeteries to know that people will want to do a survey, you know, has to be a certain letter of population, lots of different numbers that go into that. And the thing that we can't do is we can't purchase land to put it up. So the land is only donated.

So, for example, Tyler, Texas has been pushing to get a cemetery out there. So we all of our cemeteries, I think the one in Killeen is probably the furthest use.

So not to east. There's a lot more Texas on the ground, but it's pretty.

You're see, I feel like that's the furthest east cemetery. Yeah. And so and and if you check pits dot 87% of the population of Texas lives on the east side.

About 35. So. Wow. If, that means it's probably a lot of veterans over in that area as well. So there's probably a need. We do have a state where rhetorical. There is some you know, a lot of times the community is coming together or counties to say, hey, you or somebody will donate the land because it's that's, that's the first step.

You can get somebody to donate the land. It makes it makes it a whole lot easier to get some material,

you guys to do that and it's to get the land donated.

So, you know, if, if it was somebody, if there was and usually the county will work with that. And if I'm in, if it was in my county, for example, that I helped with, help them out and I would try to work with them and say, hey, what can we do to make this happen?

So can someone donate land to Texas? Is what you're not sure I can say? I have a thousand acres. I want to donate it to Texas. I want to donate it, I want to I want it to be. I want to donate for veterans. And I want to dummy for Veterans Home, which has, you know, something like that.

So, yeah, they could do that

sometimes. You know, the cities, especially economic development, you know, they own land, you know, that they want to help bring in, develop and you want to bring in businesses sometimes like that. So you apportionment in Fort Worth. We just opened up the our 10th, Texas State veterans or signal which, which, open in January and that land was donated.

So what's the latest donated. And so that's the first big step. And then then you work with the VA. Because of the case, the VA pays for the funding, the grants to help build that. So

I was going to say, what role does the federal government have versus, state and especially with the veterans issues the VA brought up.

So the VA will fund building our homes and building our cemetery. We also get inspected by the VA. So on in the five cemeteries we have in the news, the fifth one, it's not quite open. It'll be open to mission to Lubbock. Where do you go on. And so in that they'll come in and they'll so we recommend to one of our cemeteries and we finally do a national secretary and a all of people don't know the difference unless they see the name on the outside.

Yeah. What you want, would you pull into the cemetery? They look very, very similar because we have the same standards. The VA will come out your, your your headstone the this tall your grass needs to be needs and they'll come and inspect your records and says we are funded by the VA. And then once it's built, we take over.

And with our cemeteries, what we've done over the last year is we've given ownership, so you of operating the cemetery itself to either the city or county we had before that. And enameling was the most recent one, I believe. And we just we just did it, last year or the year before where we were running the cemeteries, but we were using a city agency to provide our report to get the importance to to run the cemetery.

Well, that's not a great hiring job for, you know, for people. So we've talked with the county commissioners and, and the city council and say, hey, while we make this one of your requirements, either, you know, if this county wanted it, that's fine that the city won in Abilene. The city took it just the the cemetery is actually within the city limits, but it's not within the county that exists.

So the county commissioners agreed. Not really. And argue the that the county was in was so small that it just didn't have the bandwidth to actually fund it and or keep up with the, the land store, but it still it would it was just very small cap Jones County. But we so we had the city that when we took over the cemetery and then we provide funding for.

So give them the funding actually you can give them a little extra for the Air Department to have the, you know, have to do all the employees. But the boys now have a job with benefits with their retirement plan, unlike this temp agency. So we had a high turnover. So now we have people already religious in the community that now have a vested interest in staying with us.

And hopefully, with a great story.

That's awesome. And obviously the veterans issues are near dear to your heart. You were just in you're also talking to people all the time. So what are some of the biggest problems, you know, as you state to people boots on the ground to our veterans that they're facing that you you're addressing just right now?

Well, so some of the things they bring up are not necessarily veterans, landlord related. But I know people, you know. Yeah. I worked in the federal for a while, so, I don't just say

it's not my role. I try to help them. You know, a lot of times it's. You are. I don't I can't get into the cemetery.

And I don't know why I or, you know, they want to preregister, and so I can't get preregister the center. So I'll try to help them with that. You know, or they have issues getting their landlord approved. And a lot of it has to do with this that the elderly veterans are maybe not used to the the technology that we use now to.

Sure. Application process. So I've sat down and I actually will sit down with them and help them walk through the application process. I mean, they can still call I just have an application, you know, it's just going to sort of process them through the app and LG it for sure. But what you going to do all your application process online.

I'm always available to help those that because those you know our veteran population, aging veteran population most of our what you guys are, are our Vietnam veterans are now our older generation and levels. Folks don't use technology. You're not actually, they might get may get online for something that they don't do a lot. So I'll go in and help them.

I mean, I'll go over the house. It's better than the staples if they want to. You pre-registered for the cemetery. We have we have on site records in each center. Cemeteries has a deal once deal. And they actually work for the deal. On site represented. Sorry. I turn to them or I'll respond to that one. Just because I felt you couldn't be buried there.

Your spouse can be buried there. So I don't star parents, you know. And then once you get there.

So you're saying we're the tech guru? I will say these folks out there won't come steal your way over here. But my grandson was not saying that that you're an elderly veteran might say I do. To each their own.

To each their.

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Well, I know that that's definitely the areas the most passionate about. But you do down so many different areas. So I'm, want to share a little bit about energy policy. And then you mentioned Jaguar Land Use leasing and you manage millions of acres. Right. Or than any other state. So, how does Texas change some of these, create opportunities from energy development?

I know that you mentioned the minerals and, you know, someone could lease those out. That's amazing. And really innovative. So what are there and kind of opportunities are coming from

so right then or okay. And just to some people ask what why does city touch a songbird in that. Just, you know, yeah. But so when we were accepted into the United States and we thought

we kept our, you know, we could they wouldn't take it as payment for our debt.

Right. So we used the land to generate revenue. And so that's how we ended up. And, we didn't inherit we didn't have 13 million. And it's it's ebbed and flowed like evictions is awesome. And they can buy commission. The Buckingham is on the market to sell anything. But she is in the marketplace. So she doesn't want to sell anymore event because the money generates revenue, which it's share.

So right now, out west, you know, you had the, you know, fracking more fracking in in the water that comes up with that. And so right now there's a program where we're taking that wastewater and looking for nothing. And your kid and there cleaning it and irrigating crops as a test for now to see how that works.

And so instead of just dumping that water, rainwater is a precious, precious resource based on Texas. That's that. Now, hey, we can now use a large or something else. So, that's probably the latest and greatest innovative thing that we've done when it comes to energy and absolute best and resources.

Interesting. That was Senator Perry's bill, right? When that occur, you know, I don't remember if I was just Bill, I didn't read the bill, but I should know, like since I'm in his district and I just forgot that.

So tell me more. Tell me more about that one. I did hear about that one, but I'm actually a skeptic of the bill. Really? Yes. Susan's. I think it was, environmental use of the water being. How could you tell that it wasn't,

Had anything wrong with the water and it was safe. She put on the crops.

Well, yeah. I mean, they said she was testing water and you showed up testing, you know, the contaminants in it. And as somebody who's lived in a place where in the public place where you throw a hose into a swamp and you say, I could do this machine and you drink it, whatever comes back up again, I know we have the technology to clean water.

This one, not where that hose was laying in the swamp. I think it's like every other days. And it came out of that. But once it came out the other end of that machine, it's good work. But by the time you're thirsty. But for sure.

So we had

the,

authorizing water reuse and desalinization. Honestly.

House Bill 2031 and House Bill 49 and so on on that one. We're all okay. We also found it

had to do with that. So industrious.

So Texas we have kind of a wild place gun host. We've got mountains. We've got, your country ain't got no forests.

Amazing plains. With, you know, coastal preservation and coastline worship things that the yellow in your audience

so that, you know, we do have the coastal Maine program.

And you know, they're the restoring the reefs oysters, scallop commercial oyster fishing.

And so restoring some of those reefs, some of the, some of the, some of that was destroyed by, remember, Deepwater Horizon. So that was, that was, you know, there's a there's a fund that came out of that that we also administers all those funds to help repair a lot of things along the coast doing erosion and beach erosion and, you know, building the reefs.

So some, there's lots of the new flood floodgates, you know? Yes. In, in, in Houston Bay. That's to help mitigate that storm surge from hurricanes. It is last year commissioner went to Europe because they have so like a some flood mitigation or for hurricanes over there. And she will kind of watch what they did. And looking at ways to lessen the impact of that storm surge or it comes into place, just like you said ago.

And then she there's one I believe it was Liberty City that she was missing while we were talking that there's actually sinking, you know, a sovereign and, you know, New York City sinking that that's not that.

But but, you know, I think I think she said leaders Liberty city that from the time she was a kid there in the now it said five feet. Oh, wow. She's not that old. So it's not that 101. And, how can you what technology can you use to set up some more sanctuary? This way you start building that beach line up and and, that was smart people.

A lot smarter than we know exactly what it is, but. And they think that part of that was just due to taking all that water, some other lease for drinking water and starting something that maybe called in some assembly floor and just and we end up drinking water from then, as they say, that whiskey's for drinking and water trying.

You know, that's what we're saying. West Texas I need to go out there or

Are there any kind of recent trends you're seeing or think developers or entrepreneurs should be watching in the space

So the so we've started to do a carbon sequestration. Yeah.

So that's and that's another fairly new revenue source that we have. The low carbon listing, recently put it back in there in motion feed forward and you can connection. Lisa. And we've got some big leases, some mobile and things such as that. So it's actually not it's something else.

It's an which is why our groups are permanent stuff on the ground. There's lots of,

you know, all the stuff we're using. I believe when she took office, we were at the principle. The balance was about 56 million. And I think now worry about 62, which is huge. And two and a half years. Yeah. To grow that much.

So what do you think that that's down to specifically just the commissioners? Yeah, I think it's, plans or what do you think it's down to you

gotta do, I think with the fact that she's totally engaged in focusing on, hey, how can we generate more revenue at the station? And that, you know, for example, the British Orange County were asset purchases last year, 300,000 acres.

Well, you know, there's a very, very small segment of the population that can afford to buy 53,000 acres, and it doesn't sell. They've been for sale for a long time. So that doesn't sell. What did people end up? No lender can't sell. They need to sell. They break it up you pieces. Right. Well, with all the dark sky in this year and you have all the, you have this observatory out there.

Hearst. We need to keep that. So know. Not likely. Should work. That is nice. And we can or, you know, just let just this natural thousand year. And so she was able to get the land office to buy often, you know, purchasing it. And there was already leases on there and there were three I think there were four lessees.

Only one of them didn't stay, but she allowed the other three to stay in their leasing land for cattle, in our office. And alpine basically tells them, hey, this is how many cattle we go run per section, 640 acres.

So many as a out there. It's about for how long? Animal units per section, if I remember. Right.

So which took about. You can only run four animals units per 640 acres. Because this desert or so we actually prevent overgrazing. Yeah. And so they'll start releasing, you know, on thousand acres or. Yeah, it's it's a lot of land. And to them that small place. But you know, we this is relative to where you live, the needs that are small a small place that are well I love it out there.

I spent much time as I can out there. We did a road trip for my birthday and, like Thanksgiving, and I love to go and just and go out to eat as and opinion. More of like the Marfa area was on June, which was very cool, but I went to Dark Skies Observatory and I did the star party.

Yes. Have you done that? You know, I've had it on my calendar a couple of times and then the back out, but, so is it worth the trip? It's really worth the trip. And only thing is, it got dark. Fully dark. So much lighter than I thought. Yeah. To actually get it was, you know, 11:00 at night and finally was dark.

So we were honestly past my bedtime. Well, well, last night, but it was great and I'm glad that we stayed up for it. It was beautiful. And I mean, I've never seen the sky so clear. Well, and

What are the biggest challenges with the like the federal government's

response time. So a lot of times it is 1 to 2 years after an event before we'll ever seen money from the government come in and help. And that's probably and and a way to say if we can something like it. So I took one that we went on with six is what can we do if that money starts to help our people, you know, and what I like, when I look at our social media followers on social media and that'll show you working in the Or they'll hand in the keys to some of you had their house rebuilt because they're low income.

And so we help with that a lot. And these people express live right. They're housed in the story and twist wall. We're still working on the walls or, you know, from art and, so I mean, it's it's been it's been a long process. And I'd say with the Senate bill would take so long to get that money to us, a sort of that when you have it.

as to what would you say is improved the most since you've seen it?

I well, I, I think advocacy from the state level. One of the things that I think a lot of people, the transparency from our agency, you know, one of the first things you see on your website is a full transparency. We want to be transparent in everything we do is we have a team that does, you know, that goes out and lets people know which I'm part of.

I'll do outreach as well, along with others outreach and letting people know, hey, we're here to help. And so the advocacy from our largest city and also working with state agencies and the folks that are here at Austin and our government relations, they're going to the Capitol and actually talking to lawmakers. Hey, it's all we did. Yeah, we have some money.

We hope you understand what I'm asking for because this is what we do. But there's so I think from the state level, the advocacy and just education, the awareness and then being transparent, what we did, you can you can view all of our releases on online, you can view and people that can go online and pay the world Service and of these rights.

And there's a lot of things that go on and the public has access to all that. Our landlord reach more is open to the public.

Right. So and vital. But yes, we we'll be watching those. So is this new technology that that the gloves kind of enforced. And what I,

I don't know if it's new, suit me.

Yeah. I've only been with them for, two and a half years. Yeah. So we do some the GIS lobbying and, and was, you know, the old are we also have the archives of records Division. So when we started looking at the boundaries of property and we have all the maps today, when we go back, the original notes from the surveyor, some 1800s.

And some people can do that online and socially, or they can go to our records division and they can go in and actually look at the notes. And so it's never you. Only they can land mad at the land. Many to go and check original land boundaries. And it was cool. It was to help with the always to look at our records and and while they're there they get hold the original letter received else first wrote to actually government way back when we have all that.

So

it's amazing what you've been able to that archive and the data that's out there from the government in general. So it sounds like you're bridge transparency.

Yes. And the and the digitization of those documents, that's the commissioner a lot degree is really worked hard. And then we one of the things we figured out when when she first took office is that the archives and records department and the state in the past, it really did not have the right or backup generator for the air conditioning.

You know, it has to be kept to a certain temperature to protect those documents first. So

she did spent quite a bit of money to get that. But it's important, you know, those documents hundreds of years ago that, last time I was the American to hold a letter of, like, hold a letter from you, not Sam Houston, then, you know, so it's just those documents are history, and we I was able to look at the document that my great great grandfather signed for the land grant that he used.

Yeah. And so, I mean, just people that are in the genealogy or. Yeah, checking out land speech or in schools. You know, the education for the the schools to bring your field go and field trips and go out there and look at Texas maps and archives and, you know, Alamo Falls under that. We also have the Alamo. And that would some huge revelation, probably right when

as we close, I mean, any kind of takeaways for businesses or people who want to get involved, with the work that you do or contact you directly, is there any way want to shout out, you can do that or.

Yeah, I mean, it's it's somebody that wants to, if you go to our website Zillow about texas.gov.

And there are ways you can apply for leasing land. You can see what land available. We you can you know, the airport that regional airport used to be a regional important Austin okay. Just now an acting studio. Oh I know that there is a it they they have it set up a different studios for movie sets.

What the globe. And so we recommend you set up and actually, I believe we still have a restaurant down on the coast that we, And that I said all that when it comes down to help public education. So if there's people are looking to lease land or lease something from the globe, you want their website and their there's a lease application.

You look at what if you want to lease raising cattle hunting or, you know, commercial real estate available, you can definitely, apply to lease it.

That's amazing. Wow. Well thank you. Thanks for sharing all that. And thank you for coming on the show. Appreciate it. Thank you so much.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business, Your go to podcast for the latest developments in Texas legislation and business. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLedge. And today we're excited to welcome Renzo Soto to the show. He is the executive director for Texas in the southeast at TechNet, the national network of technology CEOs and senior executives working to advance policies for faster innovation and economic growth.

Based in Austin, Renzo leads advocacy efforts across several states, including right here in Texas. In this episode, we'll talk about everything from state monetization to AI regulation. Also here runs his own inspiring story, from legislative staffer to tech sector advocate.

Very cool. So for those who don't know you, can you tell us a little bit more about what you do for TechNet and how you help them? Yeah, absolutely. So TechNet, like I said, is a trade association. We serve the tech industry, but it's not, you know, kind of the traditional old tech companies that you always think of.

We also have, you know, venture capital firms, we've got folks and energy folks in health care because technology is everywhere these days right here. And so if you fit along, one of our policy verticals, as we call it, it's long as it's within our legislative agenda, you know, our doors are open for membership and we give the full service.

I'm part of the 50 state team. I'm the executive director for Texas in the South, for all of the states that I cover. And so the services that we offer on the ground over at state levels is full on advocacy. If there's a bill that is within our policy agenda, we track it. We flag it from our members.

We identify what changes might be needed if we can support it. In some cases, we do oppose legislation. What fixes can we provide to make it so that it's workable for the industry and we make that happen? There's could be calls, those could be letters, testimony, visits to state legislatures, interim presentations, whatever it is that is needed of us.

We typically try to do that for our members. And we also offer federal level services. So we've got a comms team, we've got a federal advocacy team as well, who works the Congress as well as the executive offices over in Washington, DC. We do a lot of the same things that we do offer at the state level.

So very, very proud to have a full policy shop to be serving the tech industry.

So when are all your states back in session? Are you in the interim for a little bit preparing? I am technically I'm only in the interim for this month because I've got Puerto Rico coming in for their fall session in August.

Okay. They're not as busy as the rest of my states. There are a couple of headaches that we're dealing with over there, though, and there's such an interesting legislature there. They operate off of acquired uranium. And so anything that's that was filed this year is alive for four years, and there's no resets of anything. It's just the process is what the process is.

It's exactly the same as here. How send it all that. Well but you got four years to do it, so sometimes things just kind of happen in the blink of an eye. So, you know, that's why we've got lobbyists out there to help us monitor, because they don't really have a legislative tracking system. And when it's updated, it's updated extremely late.

So, you know, you'll learn, like, a week later, that something's already passed an entire chamber. Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico. All right. That's is what I looking to, so they'll benefit from some runners for sure. Okay. Wow, that is so crazy. I know each state we're talking about this is like a different country. Which states are you covering right now for tech?

Now? So I have New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Puerto Rico on top of Texas.

Okay. Wow. Yeah. And they are all extremely unique. And I feel like am I which states would you say are the most, in with tech policy right now? Like, what's the most legislation you've seen in the state?

Oh gosh, I mean, Texas, I think by far.

Right. I just by volume, by scope of the legislation, the things that we wanted to do definitely took the cake. There were some very creative ideas and some other states, though I think New Mexico and this was my first time covering New Mexico, and it was intentionally given to me when we hired our Florida person. So that would be a little bit less busy in the region.

And then they had their busiest year that they've ever seen in tech. But I had to handle. And so that was definitely eventful this year. Really. Everyone one took some kind of bite at the tech Apple this year. But in terms of busiest, I would probably say it was Texas, New Mexico, and a little bit between Arkansas and Mississippi.

So overall, you know, if you had to kind of summarize the categories of what policies are people trying to pass or those more like I focused, are they talking about agents yet? Are they trying to regulate? What have you seen? Most of all, I think AI is the like type of dishwasher every day for sure. Most states now, and it just depends.

You know, some folks are trying to take a bite of the comprehensive apple. Others are taking it more sectoral or identifying specific harms, like deepfakes, for example. Yeah. And then, you know, there's still the issue of data privacy. Not all states, have passed something along that, along the lines of what Texas and multiple other states take over 20 states.

Now, have passed in terms of a comprehensive data privacy framework. And we always advise from our perspective, you know, when you're talking about AI, you're really just talking about data, you're working with it. And so we want to be consistent with the way that we handle consumers data. And, you know, how we maintain their privacy. And so we think that data privacy comprehensive data privacy framework should always precede comprehensive AI regulations.

Not all states move in that direction. And, you know, we deal with it as we can. But, you know, I would say those two things are definitely still top of mind in several states. How are the companies you represent kind of keeping up with every single legislatures, different data privacy, restrictions and legislation? Yeah, that must be really challenging.

So that's what we're in the business for. We're the only trade association for the tech industry that serves, the, as much of the industry as we possibly can in every single state. Other associations kind of nitpick, right? They have their specific topic areas that they engage on, or maybe specific seats, that they're able to engage in, like I said, were the only ones that have that, you know, have full on lobbying presence in every single state in Puerto Rico.

And so we help to keep them, you know, apprized of the things that are going on, we, you know, we monitor the bills that are filed, we analyze them, we kind of compare them against, you know, the model framework that we've seen that's interoperable across several states. And so, you know, here's where it detracts. Here's where it's exactly similar.

And then from there they take the information that we give them. And of course that they get from their own resources on the ground or wherever it is that they're getting from. And then they run it up to their legal teams, who I'm sure are underwater all the time during Q1, when legislative sessions are. And so, you know, we make do, with the resources that we've got.

But, you know, we're proud to serve that kind of front light role for a lot of our companies.

Very cool. And obviously, your work expands so many different states. How are you seeing the states handling AI regulation and legislation? You mentioned the deepfake side of things compared to the federal level. What what are you saying? I think the states are doing what the states do right there, being the experimental labs, of policy, and they're trying to see what works.

Now, that being said, and we really like this trend that's happening right now, there's been an effort between state and state level policy makers, state legislators, state executive offices, economic development leaders to try and come up with an interoperable framework. As much as possible. We from our perspective, from the industry's perspective, do like and prefer the idea of a federal framework on this because it's such a complex issue, you know, it touches so many different industries.

There's so many different use cases for it. Billions of dollars are being invested into it. And so consistency, particularly for companies who are operating not only across state lines but across countries, is really, really necessary to have, you know, assurances that the investments that they're making, that the products that they're developing, the services that they're offering can continue without a hitch, no matter where they might be in the country.

Now, that being said, I think, you know, we've seen from the data privacy conversations that states are not, you know, asked to wait, when they don't need to. And so we've seen efforts like in Colorado, for example, where the state's first company or, sorry, the nation's first state level comprehensive policy framework for AI was passed into law.

It's not effective yet. They're still working through it. And there's a lot of fixes that are being discussed by industry as well as other stakeholders. But as that process has been happening, you've seen other states kind of borrow from what's being called the Colorado framework and fitting it around what they think is needed. And in a lot of cases, those states have, you know, before they even put the proposal out, they've put out studies, they've put out committees, they put out commissions in order to take a look at what is happening at the federal level, what's happening at the international level, what might they need over at the state level, and trying to come up

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with something that, you know, makes sense for for what they need, within that state, that has not gone kind of, you know, through all 50 states yet. A lot of states are still in their study phase, but they're not slowing down in terms of what we also think are important protections on things like deepfakes. Right, right.

When you're impersonating other people for harmful purposes, that's, you know, we've seen in many cases a legitimate gap, within within state laws and state legislatures are stepping up and, you know, providing those protections. And so we're there to act as a resource to legislators to kind of guide them and help make sure that they're achieving the protections that they want for their constituents and their citizens without unduly burdening or inadvertently stifling innovation.

Very cool. As a tech company myself, I was keeping track of just making sure we're, you know, complying and all that. Are you noticing that the very large states California, Texas, New York, Florida, if they do pass any like very large legislation that would impact a lot of industry that, you know, the companies are taking that as a standard and then moving forward with that, or are they kind of going, okay, this state, I'm going to modify our platform this way.

How how are you seeing companies react to this legislation from larger states. Yeah, yeah. So the conversation here in the US I think is very interesting. Right. Because the biggest, you know, piece of legislation on this, we saw from across the pond, over the when the EU AI act and that was a major and there's been a lot of I guess I'll say, consternation right from the industry about the concerns that they've got.

And that's why there's thousands of pages, you know, not only on the bill, but also guidance, what things mean over there. So they're still figuring that out largely here in the States. I think we've been left to innovate for quite some time. And that has been to the benefit of the technology. And, you know, really industry has been coming up with a lot of, you know, safety, security standards.

We've called it responsible AI development and deployment, which is a very real thing. You know, we've studied, for example, with the federal government here, what those standards should look like, not just for certain players, in the AI arena, but for everyone, because it's important, that we're doing this in a way that, you know, unlocks the potential of the technology, but does so in a way that protects the interest of people, protects privacy, protects government, like those kinds of things.

Right. And so states, I think, have been looking at those industry efforts and then identifying, you know, what are they hearing in terms from the news, from their constituents, from industry as things that they want to address and as those big states are offering, you know, kind of their ideas? We are seeing other states pick up, and push those ideas themselves.

I will candidly say not all of them are things that industry has full of endorsed. And so we're still working through kind of the details and the implications of some of these more consequential pieces of legislation. So I wouldn't say that we necessarily have a standard yet as far as, you know, a model bill or a very exact framework that we're operating from, that quote unquote works, to address everything that all of the stakeholders want to address in a bill.

Will they call this before the session in Texas? And it was probably gonna be the AI session. Definitely feel like it dealt it. Yes. No. Right. So you're busy. Yes. You testified a time. Yes. And we can see that in y'all's tool. Yeah. So we can actually we can show a clip if you like.

all, for the record, Renzo Soto, executive director for Texas in the South representing TechNet.

We are on the bill. And I do have written testimony here for y'all. I apologize for that.

I want to start by thanking Chairman Allen for the process that he's put out on this. On this particular issue. He's been graciously working with stakeholders, including industry, throughout the past year, hearing our concerns, hearing our feedback on this very important issue. And in the written testimony that's being, passed around there. We are highly, excited about the potential of AI responsible development and deployment here in Texas.

Our state in particular stands to benefit from a lot of the different applications and unique use cases of AI that are already being realized out in the field. These things include heightened cybersecurity processes, being able to solve some of the greatest medical challenges of our time, like earlier ways to detect, to to detect cancer. And with the burgeoning, industries here within the state, as well as the established ones like aerospace, medicine and biosciences and more, they're going to be leveraging these technologies, in conjunction with one of the largest, technology workforces in the country that's here in Texas.

So we appreciate that. House Bill 149 includes key components for striking the balance between safeguarding against legitimate harms and continuing to allow for innovation. These include aligning provisions with existing laws to ensure there is no conflict or burdensome overlaps, as well as providing flexibility to, AI developers and deploy ERS so that they can comply while continuing with innovation.

We are working with Chairman Kip Lee Leone to secure further improvements to the bill. Those are focused mostly on further, further alignment with existing statute securing necessary clarifications for compliance as well as other technical recommendations. For instance, we do share some of the, operational concerns that there might be included with the political viewpoints section that's within this bill.

And we've been grateful that the chairman has been very open to hearing our perspective on that, and we look forward to working with him on addressing that issue. So thank you again for the opportunity, and we're glad to be a resource on this issue, and we are grateful for the opportunity to have been engaged as a stakeholder and will continue to do so.

Happy to answer any questions.

So, yeah, you testified a lot. Yes. So what? Across all the states, the southeast Texas you were focused on, were you, working on the session? I think it goes back to I, it really is the the number one topic that state legislators in terms of tech, right, are very interested in and there's so many different ways to spin it.

And we actually like that. Right. I actually, you know, was asked during an interim committee hearing here in Texas, you know, should we be taking a look at this from a one size fits all type of policy or should we be looking at it kind of secondarily. And if you want to craft a good AI policy, we do think that you should take a look at it sector by sector, because there are so many rules and regulations that are on the books right now.

That impacts AI. All right. I think the Texas Department of Insurance commissioner has been on the record several times, is saying, you know, as far as reviewing, you know, AI models that is used for rate setting, for insurance. That's something that they can already oversee. They've released a rule on it. You know, if that's something that you want to do, you have to disclose that over to the, over to the agency, and they can ask you for your records, as far as, you know, what goes into those models that you're using.

So it's not such so much as a black box. And that exists for a lot of different sectors. And so got to be careful right, about introducing that one size fits all legislation, scoping into every single AI system under the sun and placing obligations on the folks who are using that. Because you could inadvertently upend a lot of efficiencies, some of them decades old, types of, you know, technology that's already being deployed in certain fields and so you're seeing kind of that approach from some states, and then you're seeing the one size fits all approach from other states.

And then like I said, you've got those, you know, one off identifying very, very specific harms that you want to address those types of bills. And so because the scope of the arena of what is AI and what could be captured under AI is so broad, that really is what kept me really busy this year, not just in Texas, but, you know, throughout the entirety of by region.

And are you seeing as a whole industry? You know, this is a bit of a general question. I'm sure there's a ton of nuance here. But, you know, I've seen in the US, we're typically more AI for technology forward. Let's have this race to AI ML to win it. Do you find that most the industries you're representing feel that way too, or are they more in the cautionary approach?

I think, you know, we're definitely trying to leverage the, open space for innovation, within within the US, to the advantage right up to the companies for our national security, to the benefit of American citizens.

And so, generally speaking, yes, you know, the current landscape allows for that. And we understand, right, the need for guardrails.

It's something that's in our policy principles, which is essentially our legislative agenda as to just guiding state lawmakers as to what those appropriate guardrails should be. And it is so nuanced. I'll give you an example. Whenever we were discussing House Bill 149, the Texas Responsible AI Governance Act, one of its iterations before was House Bill 149 involved something a little bit similar to the Colorado framework.

And that is a risk based framework, which essentially is taking different things that AI is able to do in different sectors, different applications, and labeling certain actions that are taken as low risk versus high risk. And if you're high risk, you got to do a little bit more to make sure that you're mitigating against, you know, things like bias, or dangers that those riskier models might wade into.

Right. And so as you do that, you got to take a look at who's in that arena. You've got, you know, what is typically understood as a developer, y'all, for example. Right. You're creating it. But y'all are also a deployer because you're putting the, you know, the product out there. Sure. People can be both. People can be one or the other, or you could be somewhere in the middle.

You could be like a distributor. You're just, you know, you package, an AI system and provide it to somebody else. And then you could, you know, then you're looking at, are you an upstream developer or are you a downstream developer or, you know, upstream deployer, downstream deployer. And so in our discussions, of this framework that affects everyone, we were having conversations of, well, what happens or who is responsible for, say, reviewing the data.

That is in an AI system if they are both a developer and a deployer, but they've got a downstream deployer who's then providing that to a distributor, who then provides it out to the consumer. And that is a very, very difficult conversation to have, even at the like at my level, for sure. That's just the trade association rep, because I don't have the insights as to the contract team, for example, between all of the different players that are involved in that one product before someone, even sees it.

And so that's kind of I would say, that that kind of environment, is really difficult to navigate. And so that that is kind of like some of the considerations that we're trying to give over to policymakers. In terms of, you know, like, is this actually going to work as, as you intended to work? And again, it's it's hard to have that conversation and it's hard to keep up because how can, with all the innovations about happening way faster than legislation as usual, which is good Innovation's amazing.

But with that, I mean, what you just mentioned with, all the different players, there's so many nuances to each use case and there's a million different use cases for AI, and there's a million more created every day. Right? So I can imagine that's really tough. How, how are companies? I guess everybody's kind of taking advantage of that innovate innovation period.

Right. But what do you think as far as, like the cautionary side we should be doing that you would that, you know, the people that you work with really think should be happening that nobody's talking about to protect, you know, companies and people using AI. Sure, sure. Yeah. Yeah. So so, for example, like I mentioned effects already, right?

One, one that is very obvious. And, you know, at least insofar as my region, for example, you know, some of the typical ones are that we've seen filed is on elections or intimate images of other folks that especially when they're nonconsensual. And absolutely, we should definitely be taking a look at that legislation, right. Passing it, making sure that those gaps are filled.

And like I said, we work to make sure that there's no, you know, inadvertent unintended consequence, that burdens the technology, particularly those who are working alongside,

legislators and making sure that those issues are addressed. Texas had a very unique one, also along the lines of deepfakes, where they're protecting, particularly elder folks, elder Texans from phishing attacks.

Right, right. I mean, and that can come in so many different ways. It could be a phone call, which I think is really hard. Right? And they sound exactly like, you know, you can mimic like someone's kid, which is, which is wild. So, yeah. But then there's, you know, the traditional more, I guess, more traditional ways of, of it happening before I was, you know, as large as it was, these days, like via email and that's just expanding more and more.

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And so Texas took some steps to make sure that there are some protections there from phishing attacks. But like I said, particularly for our older and more vulnerable population, and I think that's a good thing. Some other things that, you know, we were taking a look at include online impersonations, of, of individuals. And that was a little bit more technology neutral.

But because it's technology neutral, it would apply to AI in First Nations as well. So I think those capture I think some very, very obvious, very, very widespread, bad, you know, or mis some misuse. Right. The technologies are available. I had one come through last week and, our head of operations, it's just really good at cracking down on this type of thing.

Phishing, and can spot it from a mile away. But I got the first one that I saw that was very, very good. And luckily I had one pass the password protection manager that really triggered me to say, oh, this is, phishing. So I had a message from, friend and partner of ours come through that looked like a very standard normal contract from his email, with his email signature from his email.

Yeah. And it had a Google like, you know, log in to, hello sign or docu sign. Silence. So I clicked on it, took me to a Google login page, and then I realized the domain was not Google, and it was a really random one. And it was like one pass does not recognize this as an account.

And I said, oh no, this is phishing. Yeah. So I immediately reported it and then told him and he's like, I know it went out to everyone, I don't know what to do. And I was like, oh no. So everyone changed their passwords and everyone got secure. But it was a very sophisticated one that I'd never seen because it had his body signature.

That would be in a normal email. Right? So that was crazy. I know, I know, and it's like I said, it's becoming more and more widespread and, you know, technology's there. I mean, you know, people are using technology for these types of bad actions. But there's good technology out there too, like one pass, for example, that helps you catch these things.

And that's one of the considerations too, right? When we're talking to legislators about innovation, about that one size fits all policy, we're like, well, that also impacts these kinds of things. You know, like when you swipe your credit card that, you know, triggers something over at your financial institution to make sure that it's you that's actually doing that.

And so there's so many of so many good applications of AI, and we're really only seeing, right, like the very beginning of it. I can't remember who said this, but there's a famous quote out there about, you know, the AI you're interacting with now is the worst AI you'll ever interact with from through on. And I think it's true.

So really exciting about what that's going to bring about. And our role, like I said, is to just be there to educate policymakers and let them know, hey, you know, before we go down this road, let's open all of these rabbit holes. And it's a lot of rabbit holes. Oh, yeah, it's kind of fun to go down all the rounds of the what ifs.

There's a million. Yes,

but one bill that got significant attention, which you brought up now, is that HB 149? That did pass, and so had over 280 stakeholders, even more than the data privacy legislation from last year around. So, what was your role in that? And can you explain to anybody, you know, what the this bill did?

Sure, sure. So we were really proud to be a key stakeholder, like I said from the very beginning, even before it was officially announced, we knew that there was interest, from Representative Cooper Leo and as well as the legislature broadly to regulate AI. And so we wanted to make sure, like I said, that we're representing the perspective of industry and depending on the scope of it, will weigh in based on whatever is is captured by the bill.

And so kind of taking a little bit of a step back, what is the bill do? It does several things. There's a lot of very, very pro innovation, very, very pro economic development pieces in there. Things like clarifying existing statute in terms of the training data that may or may not be used for certain AI systems.

There's a sandbox program in there to allow, you know, especially smaller developers to work with the state to develop from the ground up, you know, and a concepts that they've got. And as long as it's not violating, you know, kind of existing state law or other law that was established within House Bill 149. And they're free to do so as long as they go through a certain process.

And I think that's going to give a lot of leeway, for especially entrepreneurs and smaller developers, to come into the state and want to build their products and be headquartered here. There's also good governance measures in terms of the state overseeing what, you know, AI systems are being used over in the public sector. Doing that on a periodic basis, which I think is going to be really, really instrumental in democratizing the benefits of AI.

To every Texan, because that, you know, it's it's, you know, the state agencies serve all of us, right? And if they're using AI and they're benefiting from it, we're going to field its impacts as well. So really, really exciting pieces there. I think the core component, though, of, of the bill, that everybody's talking about is kind of the outcomes based framework, as it's been called.

That's in there, which essentially identifies very, very specific harms, that essentially is outlawed. And it says, you know, things like if you're capturing biometric identifiers, people's faces or whatever, it might be specific with the intention of tracking them and identifying them, you can't do that, especially without consent. And that makes sense. And so it lists out, several of those and outlines them as things that AI systems should not result in.

And it leaves a lot of flexibility. And I think this is the good piece. Of the bill where it says. No matter how you get about to avoiding these very, very specific harms, that's all well and good documents. Right. And, and it's just a good business practice document. You know, your data, your practices have your audits, have your assessments, make sure you're testing all those things, but it doesn't mandate that.

And so I think that's a very, very good balance because a lot of that work, even if it's not in legislation right now in states or at the federal level, that has been done by industry, like I said, through study, through helping set some of the standards over at the national level that are now making their way, throughout the industry.

And people are adopting it. They're adopting it based on whatever their needs are, so they can continue to do that. They can continue to advance the responsible development and deployment. While Texas is filling in the gaps and saying, here are the absolute non-negotiable goals, the things that we want you guys to avoid. And it was a very, very productive conversation because at that point we could then home in on, okay, well, we can agree that these are harmful, you know, outcomes and we should work to avoid that.

And thank you for giving us the flexibility to make to, you know, developing and deploying our products so that we can achieve the outcome that you want us to achieve,

Very cool. And how are you, you know, involved in educating some of the legislators on I feel like it's a very it's a very detailed and, ever changing subject to go into as somebody.

So how do you approach it with like a legislator who doesn't know anything about AI?

So we start from the very beginning and I will say, I've done this quite a few times. I've not just in Texas, but in several of my states. And it's a, it's a good thing, right? Like I always, always welcome when a legislator or a committee invites us to, you know, educate them about what is AI, right?

What should we think about? And because a lot of people don't realize, that it's literally everywhere. It's on it's in your phones, you know, it's it's your, your spam filter, in your emails. It's those things that you don't think about every day, but, you know, it's it's just happening for you when you're listening to music on, you know, on your drive over to wherever it is that you're going and you're getting recommended songs that I do.

Right. And so we kind of cover the breadth and the scope and how wide it is of AI first so that they can understand, okay, we're talking about a lot of different things. They're here. And then we work to pare that down because, you know, they always have questions in terms of well what about this particular use or what about this particular harm.

And once we kind of work our way towards there, then we can have a much, much more, you know, tailored, direct and productive conversation. Because if I don't have the answer, then I guarantee you one of my members do, and I can always come back to them with it. But now we have a very, very specific thing, that we're discussing rather than we want to get AI under control.

Right. And it's like, what is that? What does that mean? Well, that's a great job that you're doing. What got you interested in AI and tech in the first place? Great question.

So I've always been kind of interested in tech myself. I build my own computers and it's really not that hard, actually. I just think about it as Legos, you know, you're just kind of slotting things in and making sure the parts work with each other.

And that's. I just like putting it together, kind of like a puzzle. And so that's how I got interested in technology is just, you know, building my own computer systems and having it work for me and having like, you know, like a strong one versus one that's more tailored to, like, my job now. It's just something that I've personally found interesting.

And then, I, you know, by happenstance, this opportunity popped up and I had to be with TechNet, and it was, you know, I was kind of shown to me as you get to be on the forefront of several, you know, groundbreaking pieces of technology and the policy that surrounds them. This is back in 2023. So obviously, right around the time when generative AI, these frontier models started becoming a thing.

And so the opportunity was just there. And, you know, I, I make this joke a lot with my fiance, where, back in 2019 when I was still a legislative staffer, that was public education reform. That was work in the budget. So that was a big issue that I got to work on 2021 as Covid work in the budget, lots of federal dollars that were coming in to say we needed to make sure the state recovered another big issue, 2023.

I worked on, community college finance reform is a $800 million, another big piece of legislation. And then in 2025, you know, obviously was the year of AI, big pieces of AI legislation. So I'm just like, what is a legislative session like the where I'm not working on a big issue? And it's, you know, seems like it would be nice, but I'm a little bit lying to myself because I know I just I love working on these things.

They're such massive, massive puzzles and they're for the benefit of Texas and for Texans. Like, at the end of the day, these policies that you're working on are going to impact someone in a positive way somewhere within the state. And now that I work a regional job somewhere in other states as well. And I love that, this is just something that I'm personally passionate about.

And so it was a perfect intersection of this opportunity was given to me. I've always had that interest in tech. Tech obviously applies to so many different industries. And so you're helping so many different people in so many different sectors. There are so many different walks of life. This is same thing that you do with policy. And I knew that I was going to be the big issue in the Texas was getting ready to do a comprehensive study.

So I just said, let's, let's do it. And I threw my name in the ring and I got the job, and here we are. And now I'm, you know, absolutely nerding out because I get to hear from some of the world's leading AI developers into the players and also some of the smartest and brightest and most innovative, like, you know, entrepreneurs, people who have these really, really amazing ideas, that just, you know, stem from, like grassroots engagement and learning from them.

What does it take to take it from concept all the way to, you know, something is developed, something can be deployed. And then how can we, from the industry perspective, make sure that our biggest players and our smallest players, all of them, are taking care of it. So it's a really, really interesting job to be in right now.

Well, congrats. I know I can tell you're so passionate about it. And they picked the right guy. I didn't know that you had, a background in building computers. What types of computers? Gaming computers. For the most part, you know, I mean, I think folks really just got into, like, higher and higher end computers over the latter half of, the last decade.

And, you know, and I'm totally nerding out here a little bit. Yeah, I love it. You know, esports became like a really, really big thing during that decade, too. And a lot of my friends got into it and I was like, yeah, I'll build your computers for you. And that was kind of like a good way while I was in college for me to make money over on the side now.

Yeah. Well, tell me your path, because I always knew you were in policy. Was this kind of side hustle of yours and interest? I was it was like a little bit of an interest. I just, you know, I'm like every, like, teenage and young, you know, adults. I was like, who's a guy? Like, I was in a video games growing up and all of that.

But, you know, public policy and tech and all of that. Yeah. It was more of like a side thing for me.

Kind of what undergirded all of this for me from the very beginning is really my family, my family over in the Philippines. All of them are like some type of public servant. Most of them are in, like, the medical field.

But, you know, some of them were like teachers or working government or entrepreneurs, those kinds of things. Yeah. And so when I was growing up, it was like I saw them constantly, constantly helping people. And so that was just something like a value that I developed. And so when I moved over here, it started growing up a little bit.

I was like, okay, I want to find my niche too. I thought I'd be medical. Then I realized I have very shaky hands, so people probably don't want me doing their healthcare for them. With very shaky. Yeah, we have robots now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And then also I did not like blood, so I was like, let's just, let's stay away from that.

Sure. And I got into public policy over in high school because I did speech and debate. And, you know, I've just always been curious, always a studious kid. And so there were so many different things that I could learn about in so many different fields. And I just, I loved it. And so that's how I kind of got into the public policy space, tailored it all around that.

And then when I landed my first internship over the Texas Capitol back in 2016 and work my first session back in 2017, I kind of just got the bug. And that was still when I was in college, building my computers, doing technology on the side and all of that. So really never would have guessed that those, you know, my side interests with my main interests was going to intersect in the way that it did.

How cool. Yeah, I felt like that too, with I was more of a just a sci fi nerd. I'm non-technical completely, but I'm always fascinated by it. Yeah, yeah. And Michio Kaku, if you ever read any of his buttons, I've not. He's like a futurist physicist and he can write things in really, like layman's terms of technical things.

And I just got really excited about the idea of AI. So his book, The Future of Humanity, if you want to borrow it, it's really good if you're interested in that kind of thing. Sounds great. He is amazing and he can just explain things so easily. And it's, you just got me thinking about tech really early on of, like, what would be possible in the next ten years, and I just thought that was the most fascinating.

So, yeah, it's fun to be in this role now. But yeah. Yeah. No, it's still when I was in college, I studied philosophy, you know, and so it was like a very, very, removed conversational. Everything was the discussion, right? Everything was ideas. And I thought that actually really helped me within this fields, because then you could think about, like, you know, we can always figure out the puzzle pieces.

There are all of those folks who are really good at implementation. They're the engineers. They know how to make things work. But you also need like ideas, people, right? And if you're not thinking about those ideas, I think, you know, you kind of lose out on, you know, the what ifs, right? Like, what is the next big thing that is going to have us take that like next leap forward?

So yeah, same here. I would not really say I'm really that technical that is not who I am building computers. Come on. That's pretty get like I said, they're like Legos. You know, that's pretty good. How are you using AI right now in your in your job and in your daily life? I feel like you kind of get to keep up with all these new innovative tools.

Yeah, yeah. So use your tool obviously. Yeah. It was fantastic. During the legislative session, it was the only way I could keep up with what was going on in Texas while I was out in my other states, because I'm like, yeah, I don't have time to spend two hours listening to this hearing, but I can control EFF this transcript.

Once again, that's great. So that was absolutely fantastic. Obviously we also use like general purpose generative AI tools. We have some folks who are definitely more technically knowledge that they're more knowledgeable about it than I am, but I've seen some really, really cool applications of this where they take, you know, various different bills, in different states, and they're able to come up with some kind of sheet, some kind of work product that shows you here are here's what each bill does.

Here are the different similarities here, the differences between all of them. And that was really, really helpful to me during the legislative session because, you know, like I said, in Texas, the volume of the legislation for I was just so, so broad. And sometimes they kind of did the same things and multiple, you know, pieces, of these bills were all moving at the same time.

And so I had to understand, okay, if this passes and this passes and they're doing the same thing and they're changing the same statute, but they're doing it a little bit differently, does it still work, or do we need to find some stage in the process where we need to marry them with one another so that we have something that's coherent?

So that was a really, really cool application of AI in this space. That I think is, you know, once I guess, like a little bit more developed and it gets more commonplace, I think is really going to change the game and we need it in the bill drafting process, because that's what I noticed last, the last couple sessions when I was in the legislature.

You're getting five different attorneys draft, five different the same bill. Right, right. And then they all affect things differently. So you can easily use AI to check and cross-reference that I you're easily absolutely. And then you know what? There's there's one great example of this out in one of my states, I was dealing with data privacy. And there were two comprehensive data privacy bills.

They were very different, and it was very obvious how they were different. And then this third bill popped up and it was specifically only on health care. Then I read it and I was like, this is so broad in its application that almost everything is classified as a health care product, which makes it a comprehensive data privacy bill.

And it took me three hours, you know, to get through that because I had to do it by hand. And now imagine if I could have just, you know, put that on in some kind of prompt. What state was that? We'll get that thing. So yeah. But but you know, that's like a great that would be a great, great application of this.

Because then you could have the drafters who were like overseas obviously underwater. And I don't fault them whatsoever about, you know, kind of the differences between these bills, because that's just what's happening when you have limited resources, but, you know, something to help them to and make our lives, over in the other in these buildings a little bit easier, for sure.

We're seeing, you know, AI being it's I would say, the most polarizing time for AI use because you've got, you know, I talked to lobbyists and government relations professionals all day, every day. 50% of them are using it for everything. Yeah. And 50% of them are dipping their toe in the water or have never used it. And some, even me in new states that I'm going to have are even maybe scared or fearful of it.

Right. And what I found that's so fascinating is just how people are doing their work. Like there's so many amazing use cases where I just think, like Otter AI for when you're in a meeting, and then they have the notes in the summaries for you. You don't have to write them down. You can be present. And, a lobbyist I know was telling me the other day, you know, he's sitting in a conference room and there are three different lobbyists in there.

And he had Otter AI going on the call and to record everything was sitting back in the meeting, another one taking notes frantically by paper handwritten, and another one typing them manually. Yeah, frantically. And it's just crazy. Now to see how different people are working. And I just encourage everyone to, like, find out ways they can automate and like, make their life more efficient because there's so many really cool tools.

Last week, for example, we had a hackathon with our team. Cool. So we had our whole team come in and we said, here's the prompt. You have to do two days, like literally 48 hours with the business team and the engineering team on three different group group teams and said, go build the most valuable tool for our customers.

It could be something on the roadmap or could be something completely new. And, they also the business team had a project to automate, something that we haven't done yet for the company and our business practices. That would be great with AI. And so the funniest thing that they came up with, I won't tell you which one won.

It's going to be released soon. Yeah. You take offline. I'm very excited about that. But the funniest one was we have a rotation right now for office. So at lunch, we feed everyone food, right? Every day everyone gets food. And we have a paper dissertation that says people's names of each day, and they have to unload the dishwasher that day.

That's it. That's what they have to do. But it gets really confusing, and it's actually the most of the thing we all get in fights about the most, which is so funny. I totally get that when I, when I was in the legislative office ordering lunch hardest thing. Yeah, it's always the hardest thing. It's those little things. So somebody came up with the best, most innovative idea.

It's a slack bot that literally messages you when it's your day, and you have to push a button when it's done, and then it tells everyone it's complete. So we're about to toss the paper dissertation. It's like, how efficient? Now we don't have to worry about that. No one's like, whose is it? Is it yours? Yeah. Yeah. So that's so great.

Hilarious. Yeah. But you're right. Right. Like, it's it's those little things that people don't think. Yeah. Take time. But they do take time. And it's annoying everyone. And it's like, what can we do to make this better? And there's probably, you know, we used to say there's an app for that, right. Like now there's AI for that. And so yeah, it's, it's just, it's, it's really exciting.

And, you know, and this was something that I talked about a lot too, during legislative session. And one of the things that we advise states to do is study the issue first, because it's so important that you get this right, because if you don't get it right, there could be so many unintended consequences down the line that prevent your state from being able to benefit from it.

And it could be really, really small things that just add up to so much, just to so many, you know, different consequences. And so I would like to democratize that. And that was something that I talked to a lot of legislative offices about is, you know, figure out one small thing, you know, something that's not scary, something that doesn't involve sensitive data, something that you can, you know, kind of have everyone, regardless of what their age or their technical know how might be in the office, just understand and be able to implement.

And if you can do like that, one thing and understand this is like what AI is there to do. It's not, you know, it's not the sci fi yet. I'm sure you know, as the technology develops, maybe we can start having those conversations. But, you know, it's like you can't do some certain math problems yet, right?

And just realizing that you can make it what you want it to be, I think is like the first step to getting people to not be so scared of it. And those have been, as I've seen, the really, really helpful conversations, especially in the policymaking scene, is just when someone comes in and says, look at this really, really cool application that is really relevant to you.

And that's what I use, I love that. Yeah, that is very helpful, showing them how it can impact them.

Very cool. Yeah. The last thing I was going to go into was

what are some ways that people can work with you and TechNet if are you looking out actively always for new, stakeholders and people like, say, there's a company that's listening that needs representation.

Would you want to look? Absolutely. Yeah. No, definitely. That is a conversation that we're always willing to have. Great. And if it works out, that is that is fantastic. Okay. But also, you know, the policy making side, I mean, you know, I, I enjoyed being a lead stakeholder on a lot of AI issues, but it was not always so great being the only stakeholder on some of them.

And it's not just, you know, AI issues, it's other technology issues as well. And so I think it's really important that our entrepreneurs, our small businesses or even our small, you know, like like small businesses who are not tech companies but want to leverage tech, understand, like here is kind of what the broader tech industry is thinking about and how can we partner up with one another to make sure that you can continue to use the products and the services that you need?

Without, you know, some kind of unintended consequence of ending that for you, I love that. So how can people get in touch with you or TechNet if they want to have some kind of representation or help in the future? Yeah, we've got a website, so it's TechNet, dawg. If you look over there on our Contact Us page, all of our emails are there and so feel free to just reach out to me like that.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And is there anything else you want to add before we, we finish up? No, no, I think this was a really, really amazing experience. And it's and it's, you know, I, I guess I will say it's really exciting, that we're having these types of very technology forward conversations, especially in the interim because the legislative sessions are way too hectic and way too busy and everyone is, you know, lacking sleep.

For us to be able to have conversations like this. So I'm really, really glad that we can talk about, you know, the impacts of these policies, how Texas is kind of leading the way, really, in these types of conversations. And whenever we see the like the benefits, because I am sure, that we're going to see a lot of benefits come from it here in the state of Texas.

And seeing how that evolves, throughout the rest of the country, you know, we can say, oh, I heard about that over on Bills and business. And now here we are a couple of years later and it's all over the place. You know, that's such an exciting thing, I think, to be a part of and definitely just encourage folks to jump on the train.

Now, I love that in the interim is the best time to place seed and start researching. So thanks for all your insight. I feel like I could talk to you forever, so thank you for coming on the show. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege, where we make government more efficient with technology. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by someone who truly operates at Mach speed in the world of public affairs and crisis communications, Katherine McLane. She's the founder and CEO of the Mach One Group. Katherine has built one of the nation's premier firms, serving clients who live on the front page, from major brands to high stakes nonprofits and public figures with deep experience in politics herself. 

She's worked in public service advocacy, from the Bush administration to lift Strong and Governor Schwarzenegger's team. Katherine brings a strategic and principled approach to communications when the stakes are high. We're going to talk about how smart messaging influences policy, how organizations can be ready for when a crisis hits, and what every founder needs to understand about their public narrative.

Let's dive in.

Tell me more about you.

Tell me about how you got started in all this political madness. Well, picture this Austin 2000 presidential campaign, right? I did a tiny, tiny bit of work. 

Okay, 

on the presidential, and I was.

Which once like this. 

Oh, President George W cool. Okay. And I met Mark McKinnon, who was President Bush, and then subsequently, Senator McCain's during his presidential, media director, media advisor, his ad man.

And he was on the fence about, do I take a job in the administration? Do I stay in Austin at Public Strategies, which he helped found. And I was very, very fortunate to get to work for him at Public Strategies, which at that point was just an amazing place to be. And many of the colleagues I see walking the halls of the Texas Capitol still today are, you know, fellow alumni of PSI.

It was just the best finishing school you could possibly ask for. So when I was there, Bob Bullock and then a little bit later, Governor Ann Richards were senior advisors. So it was just it was the most amazing thing to be, a kid starting your career and seeing these giants of Texas politics, walking the halls at PSI.

So I was it was super exciting. Great, great time to be there. And I know that you mentioned your time with Schwarzenegger. Did you go to California as well? Did you do some DC time? I all of the above. Okay, I did, so it's 2003, Schwarzenegger announces on The Tonight Show he has no staff. He has a few consultants and advisers.

And there's a gentleman named Marty Wilson who ran the Sacramento office for Public Strategies. And my boss was kind enough to call him and what he told me. Here's how he told me. The conversation went well. I talked to Marty. He really needs you out in Sacramento and in, you know, campaign headquarters in Santa Monica. Can you be out there by Thursday?

Years later, Marty shared with me that it was, hey, can you give Katherine a job on the campaign? She really wants to help, but who cares? I got a job on the craziest campaign and, probably one of the top five craziest campaigns in U.S. history, I think so, yeah. How would you say Texas and California? You know, politics differ.

It is also personal advice here because we're going out to Sacramento. A couple weeks next month. Oh, so fabulous out there. So I'm excited. Are you really first time in Sacramento? So. Oh, we'll have to talk. Yes, definitely. How are California and Texas politics different? Like, how long do we have? I know that there are very different top three things, if you like, think of it as Alice through the looking glass.

It is the mirror opposite. Okay. Right. The dominance of the political party. Right. You know, it's it's the same, but on the other side of the aisle. Yeah. And year round legislature. So, I remember my time in the governor's office there. The the silly bills that we would see. And it was a game for us in the press office.

Like, what are the silly bills we can make fun of? And they were there were like, bills outlawing Ferris bills that, you know, addressed just like this, these ridiculous, you know, minute details of daily life. But with a year round legislature, you have to prove yourself to your constituents. You know, you have to move bills. You have to show that you're working for them.

And it does sometimes lead to some silliness. How many do you know how many bills they have filed out there? Because that is we have a lot and we had the most months this time. I remember looking at stats, it was like eight, eight plus, you know, 8000 north of 8000, right? Which is, you know, a good bit more than previous couple of sessions.

So I don't know that. Well, I would know from 20 years ago, but not from recently. I know those sessions, 8 to 12,000 rotating in Texas. Oh, I'm not sure. Year round legislatures seem to have almost the same as us. I don't know for what we're doing these days. It's crazy. We're doing a lot to do it.

A lot. So how was your session? It was so interesting. You know, one of the things that we're seeing come up in the special, was a bill that every everybody at the Capitol, you know, whether you're working on the communication side, like we are, governance of government affairs, it was just like a hobby to watch SB three and how it was progressing.

And like, what's that thing going to do? Oh my gosh, it looks like it's going to pass. And then it did. And it was like, oh my gosh, is he going to veto. Is he gonna is he going to veto it? And sure enough I was refreshing my phone at 11:00 at night to see if there was any news and there was no news.

And then, yeah, I was intrigued too. Yeah. Everybody is. And now we're, like, popping the popcorn and, you know, pulling up the recliners to watch this special session. So it should be amazing. Well, for the listeners who don't know, can you tell us more about the Mark one group. You know, company founded, what you do and everything about it?

I have a lot of questions for you.

The work you have. Well, I this is my baby. I have two children, but this is my other baby. Yes. And the Mark one group, came about after I served in the Bush administration as press secretary for the U.S. Department of Education, when Margaret Spellings was secretary, who is the most amazing person I've ever had the good fortune of working with?

And then I came back to Austin towards the end of the Bush administration and served at what was then the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Okay, so this was when, Lance was a global icon and one of the most, if not the most effective cancer advocates on the planet. And so we did amazing work. And, this was during the time when the foundation really pushed the ballot initiative that created the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

That was the first thing I got to work on. Wow, designing a statewide campaign to promote that. And Texans voted for it overwhelmingly, like 60, 65%. I mean, just an amazing level of support throughout the state for that. And so I thought, you know, I'm going to get my feet wet in the Austin market again. It's been a long time.

I've been in California and Washington, and I want to settle back in and I'm going to hang out my own shingle, and I'm going to start my own public affairs and crisis consulting firm. But then matters took a different course at the what became the Live Strong Foundation. So this was, you know, ten plus years ago. But a lot of people remember there was a, you know, very, intense global media focus on Lance Armstrong that also began to encompass the foundation.

He created a sterling organization that does amazing work, really focusing on people affected by cancer. So lots of wonderful organizations raise funds for research this organization happens to focus on. You know, I'm diagnosed today. These are the challenges I face in understanding my diagnosis. This getting treatment, you know, figuring out what my insurance options are like.

They are amazingly helpful with that. And to see this wonderful organization getting pulled into this terrible crisis that they had nothing to do with, it broke my heart. You know, we were talking about, like, public health experts, oncologists, social workers who literally work one on one with cancer patients. Reporters were like, way laying them in the parking lot and asking about things that happened in France, in the cycling world, you know, ten years before that.

So I stayed and I ended up being, you know, along with our CEO and, some of our board members, the architect of, you know, how how do we navigate this organization successfully through this very, very intense, sustained, very critical media spotlight? And that's how I got my PhD in crisis communications. Amazing. And I know a lot of people who do this and have done that in DC.

And yeah, what is crisis communications in layman. Oh, it is you know, there are degrees, right? There's you know, sort of level one, level two, level three. But for the Livestrong Foundation in this case, if for two years, you know, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, USA today and various other outlets are hitting you on a weekly basis and coming up with story ideas like, that's a crisis that your organization may very well not survive if you're not incredibly agile and clever about the strategic decisions you make and then how you communicate them, and that can happen, obviously, you know, on a lot of different levels, you know, we all know

what keeps us up at night about our organization and where we're where we're vulnerable. You most CEOs can predict exactly like where these are the top five things that are terrible. And if they happen, you know, sure, it's going to hit the fire. Right. But what we've developed is and I don't think this is like, optional for organizations anymore, you have to plan ahead.

Crisis planning should be an annual exercise. It should go right along with your strategic planning. And it should encompass your sea level. It should encompass, you know, the folks who may be on the ground and who might be, accosted by reporters and find themselves in the line of fire in that way, too. I think it's really important to be prepared and to have a game plan and then also have a crisis protocol.

So you are specifically dealing with customers in the political world. Am I right? Your clients are mostly, who are they? Well, most of our clients turn to Mach one because they have a policy, regulatory or legislative goal. Either defense or offense like this can't pass, or we got to get this through and they realize that they need public opinion behind it in some form or fashion, whether it's in their district or statewide or strictly at the Capitol.

There has to be a communications ground game that helps push their goal across the finish line. And quite often we're pulled in by lobbyists and government affairs teams who recognize this. They're like, oh, you know, this can't just be a capital game. We have to broaden the net here, and we're going to need more, more muscle on this.

And that's where we come in. So are most of your clients kind of, very confidential. You keep this very locked up because this is some strategic stuff. We're talking here. Like every bill, this is, you know, lobbying adjacent. It seems like it's imperative for lobbyists and people in government relations. You want something to pass or not have some kind of strategy.

So, yeah, people kind of secretive about this sometimes. Sometimes. But then we do a lot of coalition work, which I love. That's fun orchestrating. And I'll give you a great example. So the session was the 88th. We worked on HB 1605, which was the high quality instructional materials bill. Yes, right. I don't know if you remember that, but it was a groundbreaking.

Oh yeah, I was so we had a natural advantage that session because all eyes were on the voucher bill. Right. So much attention around that. And we know what happened to it and what led to, you know, all led up to this session and passage. But we knew, okay, children in Texas, barely half are reading and doing math at grade level.

That's insane. Right. And it has so much to do with the instructional materials that are being used in the classroom. This has to change. And so it's always such a blessing when you're pulled in on a cause that you believe in 100%. And this was one of those, but what Mark one really excels in is we understand how the capital works.

We understand the nuances for that, and we're not going to run the same campaign play every time. You have to look at what are the natural advantages, what are the natural obstacles here? And in this case, it was that big blimp of a voucher bill is drawing all the fire, and we can sell our little bill underneath it until we can't.

Right. And then we have to be ready for that. So we built a stealth campaign that laid the groundwork for everything. I just said kids aren't reading, doing math at grade level. That's crazy. We have to put the tools in the hands of the teachers in the classroom and give districts you know, what they need in terms of incentives to encourage them to pick the right curriculum.

And so we yeah, we ran this stealth campaign and, the bill passed. And that kind of work is amazing to us because you really you are changing, ground level stuff in this state for the better. And that's the best feeling. That is fun. And I got the pleasure of meeting almost all of your team, I think, at our tiny dive party.

Right, right, right. And are you all female? Run. Is it pretty much there is. There is a gentleman on our roster who happens to be my husband, who's our chief financial officer. He runs, back of the house. You need that. You do. You do need to have one of those. Exactly. But client facing were all ladies.

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Very. Yeah. Well, I love that. Me too. So how long have you been running them off? One. We set up shop in 2013. Okay. And this was right after, you know, we sort of finished up the worst of live strong headwinds okay. And had them in a very good spot. And indeed today they still continue and serving patients and advocating for people affected by cancer.

So we started up, with just a couple of people in the basement of the Westgate Tower, and we focused on crisis and public affairs, plugging in with legislative campaigns. And we've been doing that ever since. And I still love it as much today as I did back in 2013. Well, everything's always changing. Yeah. Nothing that's ever boring in your world.

Are you more busy typically in the interim or during session specials? When slow time for you, is there any well, changing? Indeed. It used to be, a decade ago and more. After session, things would slow down and you could, you know, go to the beach and do nothing for a few weeks. And then that began to change in recent years, with special after special or just the amount of priorities that the legislature deals with means that smart clients recognize, like, I've got to use every advantage I have, and that means getting going after sunny Day in advance of the next session.

Right? So literally since signing day, that is exactly what we've been doing, which, you know, you're like, oh yeah, I can breathe as soon as, you know, you guys behind us. But then you, you know, you have like a couple of days and then you're right back at it and it, it seems also that with the, you know, shorter notice on these special sessions.

And now we have this upcoming special session. Right. Just very notable. So how are y'all preparing for that with your clients. It's interesting the agenda for the special is still iterative right. So there's a lot of well what about our thing. Could we could could it could it or like no let's not let this is better handled in a regular.

And we need the runway to frame the issue. So there are a lot of strategic conversations that happen in times like this. It could be a second chance when it's a broad special, it can become like a normal session. Right. And it's looking like a more inclusive agenda. Right. There's you know, it's not just 1 or 2 things.

There's a bit of a laundry list. So I think a lot of organizations are like, oh, maybe we yeah, try to get our foot in the door there. But I think in a lot of cases, you might be best served waiting and having the time to frame your issue, tell your story, build stakeholders, train your spokespeople.

People find the right ambassadors for your mission who can tell your story with power and with meaning.

I love that, and I think that's smart. You've seen it. You've seen it all. What do you think? And how do you think companies kind of should be thinking about their messaging like, oh, through the interim and what should they be, you know, preparing for?

If you could give any advice to these companies in the political sphere? Yeah. I see it in my mind. I picture a crowded room with everyone talking at once. That's the marketplace for us, right? Okay. So many priorities, especially, you know, once you get to a session, everyone is, you know, in your face talking about their priorities and why it's the most important thing.

And, you know, this needs to get done right. So having the time to thoughtfully layer messaging and share mission awareness and introduce yourself, you know, a lot of organizations wait until they need something. Yeah. Before they make an effort to introduce themselves to whether it's their stakeholders or folks at the Capitol. And, you know, that's that's a tragedy you have to have.

You can't wait till you're in the ditch to, you know, make the plan totally too late. Yeah, absolutely. That's how I felt in the lobbying world. You had to do all the prep. There's just so much to do before. Yeah. Getting back into session. Right. Even relationships. And, how do you, you know, work on campaigns or are you involved in the campaign world at all?

We do not do political. Okay. You know, occasionally we give advice to friends, I'll say that. And I love doing that because I did serve and, you know, a number of campaigns when I was much younger. And, you know, that's the kind of bug that doesn't leave your system. So we help candidates with stuff like, you know, let's let's work on, your presence.

Let's work on your stomp. Let's work on the way you communicate, how you communicate. And then sometimes we do that with spouses as well. If they're going to be actively involved with the campaign. And, you know, a lot of it is just confidence building and building the muscle. Right. You know, having that kind of practice is just invaluable in terms of feeling secure and confident when you're going into whatever it is, whether it's an interview or a speaking engagement or a speech.

And I just saw that you launched in Houston. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. So where are you based now? We have Austin in Houston is our home base, and I'm spending a lot more time in Houston with our clients. There, which is such a delight. I love Houston. If I didn't live in Austin, I might have to be a Houston girl.

It's just such an amazing, presence not only in our state, but such a hub of our national economy. It's just there's so much potential there. And then, you know, it's interesting to look at the patterns of how people, retain help their when they have a capital issue. They don't usually hire Houston folks they know, like, oh, no, we need an Austin government affairs team.

We need, you know, an awesome team that's experienced in capital communications who can, help us navigate that.

So how are you helping these clients, like, prepare in just in the interim, through the specials, through the campaigns. What are you guys working on? Mostly we're working a lot on, especially with newer organizations or organizations that are locating here from out of state.

A lot. Yeah. Yes. And that's so fun. And, you know, it's fun. I mean, we're we're seeing lots of growth from California still. Yeah. Right.

So there are usually like three things that we focus on at first and it's, you know, know your regional audience. You know, San Antonio has a far different style from Dallas.

You would never construct the same tone that you would, you know, in both of those regions. Right? So we focus with them on what matters in your market, what is really important to the people here, and how do you best communicate with them. And then we also work with if they if there are, you know, if there is a policy goal at the end of the rainbow we work on.

Okay. So we've got our regional okay. What's our capital. What does our capital outreach look like. How do we build awareness and presence there. Most often we're working with a fantastic lobby team or government affairs shop who can help orchestrate that and, you know, do a great job of making introductions, building relationships so that there is awareness. And, of the presence there.

And then this is my favorite one.

We always build in whether it's capital, regional or statewide communications plans, if you're especially if you're a California company, it's we weren't born here, but we got here as soon as we could. Yes. And we're so happy to be here. And we're grateful to be here. And Texas is the best. It's the, you know, best in which to do business.

And we're creating jobs. And here's how we're contributing to the community. And we're here to stay. Yep. Right. We're not just here to squeeze revenue out of, a state that happens to have possibly given us some incentives to be here. We want to give back, and we're doing it. And here's how I've noticed that messaging just with all my friends from California who live here, including my husband.

You know, that's true. They they do want to really be here. And they did get here as fast as they could. So it's good that you're giving out advice to the people in more welcoming that way. Timely, right? Absolutely. Are you seeing, so do you work with nonprofits as well? And okay, how does the strategy differ with, you know, nonprofits and charities compared to, say, the more political side?

Right. No, that's a brilliant question, because you do have to take a really different approach. You know, I mentioned the Live Strong Foundation. They were my first client in 2013. They're still a client today. Wow. And for them, you know, we look at what are advocacy goals that matter to their constituents, people affected by cancer in Texas and throughout the world, throughout the US.

And we prioritize, you know, so many nonprofits have just so much time, energy and funds they can devote to an advocacy effort in addition to their full time mission. Right? Sure. But, you know, for years, every nonprofit we work with, we tell, you know, it doesn't matter how much you can devote to your cause, if you change public policy, you're going to, you know, quadrillion your impact.

And so advocacy, we you know, we always for every nonprofit client, we always ask them to consider what are the policy changes that would really advantage your mission and help the people, or in some cases, animals that you're helping to save and serve? And I really enjoy that work. It's great. I mean, you're working with people who are in it because they care.

Their heart is devoted to it, and it's wonderful to work with people like that.

How do you keep kind of the messaging really authentic? Right. You've got a lot of different stories to tell. And I'm seeing now, you know, we can talk a little bit about how AI is impacting this, but you can see now when something is just ChatGPT totally or, you know, you're like, okay, yeah, try, try to make this more authentic.

How do you, you know, tell everybody's so unique. Each case. Yeah. It's so hard. I mean, it doesn't seem like it would be a really hard thing, but especially with, you know, we're talking about nonprofits and, you know, that kind of advocacy effort, you are often handed the gift of people who have amazing stories. And you get to work with them to help prep them and coach them to, you know, testify before a legislative committee or, you know, write an op ed or, you know, do an interview or, you know, help their story shine.

But you can't mess with them too much, right? You can't like, over style them. You have to let them speak from the heart. You can coach them with like, okay, you've got two minutes. How do we want what are the absolute essential things? Let's let's narrow out everything else. Right. But you don't want to make someone self-conscious. You want them to shine and be their authentic self.

And there's a really delicate balance that I think you really develop with experience. And so we our team is really, really good at helping people gain confidence without messing with them too much. I have friends who've said you've helped tremendously with their, testifying. So yeah, yeah, that's such a stressful thing. And, you know, so on the spot, I haven't done it yet.

And I might at some point. Right. On behalf of our company, but haven't needed to. And yeah, I can imagine I see people go up there and some people are terrified. Some people have been doing it forever. Oh, yeah. Like Glenn Hammer. He's he's there ten times a day. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's old hat to a lot of folks.

But yeah, for a lot of people who are representing a cause that really doesn't come up. Yeah. Every session it's a very, you know, kind of daunting experience. And then not only do you have to testify, sometimes you have to answer questions. And, you know, the scary part I know. Well, with a good lobby team, you probably know what questions you're going to have to answer.

Yeah. But quite often, you know, there are a few curveballs and you have to wing it. That's always a fun part to watch. Oh yeah.

Texas, you mentioned, you know, you bunch of companies moving in from California. We have a lot of listeners who are also, you know, founders and and the business side moving here. What advice would you give?

You know, not not selfishly, but you know, a startup founder. What what kind of advice would you give and their communications style and strategy. And, you know, coming into Texas, you said it's so different than, you know, just even regionally. But what would you kind of tell them? Basics. Well, I think a couple of things, you know, if they have any kind of intersection with, you know, the regulatory or policy legislative world, embrace the unknown.

You know, we work with a lot of founders who are, you know, they are experts in their industry, in their field, but that they have not had to work on the government affairs realm at all. And so we're like, embrace the unknown, get the experts. And most of them, there's there's no hard sell there. They're like, oh yeah, great.

Of course. Yeah, let's, let's get the best, you know, let's get a lobby team that has excelled in this industry or in this area. And let's tell our story with, you know, company like, like Mach one. But I think there's also, an important element of, as we were saying earlier, like the sincerity of why am I here and what do I contribute?

And what audiences do I care about? You know, at the very basic level, it's what are my goals, what audience do I need to achieve them? And let's build our messaging, you know, framework aimed at that audience and the secondary and tertiary audience around that, you know, with increasing or decreasing levels of prioritization and, and effort. But again, like, you can't wait to introduce yourself like make sure that you're telling your story from day one and having the conversations with the right people who can be in your corner if they know who you are.

What do you say is kind of changing the most? I know everything in communications is rapidly changing. So what's what are you saying in 2025 as the most kind of crazy thing?

Okay, I'm going to say this and then it's everything. Yeah. Right. In the Republic playbook and messaging and song sheet that throughout my career, my long career, it's it's kind of gone.

Right. You are seeing, elected officials and Republican Party stalwarts embracing issues that were traditionally embraced by the other side and the way, you know, the sort of muscle memory of how this is how we talk about that issue. You have to relearn that now. And there's a greater need for agility now than I've seen maybe in my entire career.

This I, I was thinking about this like I was trying to think of, like, how do you illustrate this moment in the political, you know, evolution. And it's sort of like in the late 80s, early 90s in Texas, when conservative Democrats migrated to the Republican Party. Now, you were probably not watching this because you were far too young.

I was not too young to watch. I think I was in the UK that is a piece of it, too. I mean, you probably weren't aware of 1989 when our governor, you know, to be governor, Rick Perry, switched sides from DDR. I feel like this moment is somewhat like that. People aren't switching parties, but they're switching issues that they care about.

And so if you've been on autopilot the last couple of sessions, you know it's time to put your hands back on the wheel pronto, right? You have to reinvent. And certainly, you know, for my team, we kind of have a day one approach with every client, but that has never been more valuable than, you know, this session and the 88, and I'm sure that that trend is going to continue.

How about technology? How are I know I've talked to so many people in marketing. Marketing become more like a data analytics. Yeah. Job. At this point, there's so many different factions of marketing. There's so many different types of, PR how is AI changing any of the work that you do or that you've seen? Yeah, it's so fun to watch this.

Yeah. You know, not just in PR but in media too, because, you know, we work so closely with press in the PR industry and, those poor guys, you know, we all know that media industry has been shrinking for the last two decades. It looks so different now than than it used to. And they have to rely. They have to, you know, be scrappy and rely on AI, more than most I think.

And sometimes it doesn't go so well, like my team was showing me this really hilarious piece about how the Chicago Sun-Times, they put together a summer reading list and put it out. The books don't exist. No way. Yeah, I mean, that's that's the kind of stuff that's happening, and it's hilarious, but it's sad but funny but sad, right?

So you absolutely can't have anything like that. And of course, our industry is very different. Yeah, right. We, the way I look at it for my firm is it is a convenience and for, you know, analysis and data gathering and analytics, it's fantastic. And, you know, if you can enhance your efficiency with a first draft of something great, but it will never, ever or ever, ever take the place of the experience and the perspective of somebody who has served in the Texas Capitol and understands the nuances of, you know, the inter-party relationships, the context of previous legislative attempts at something.

So it's it's great and it's convenient, but it's a support tool. It's not, you know, the big ball game.

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have you seen any issues? You deal with crisis communications? I'm sure you have. But with, deepfakes or any type of edited images or, I know that obviously Texas has really cracked down on that within political campaigns, which is great, but have you seen any issues arise kind of on the more on the lobbying side or, in grassroots even?

Yeah. No, we've seen, a lot of organizations and causes being affected by misinformation. Yes. Which is so much more rampant now. And it is so easy to lose the thread of, you know, a false fact that's planted either purposefully or, you know, with benign intent. But, you know, reporter got it wrong. Now it's in the public realm.

It gets picked up by five other outlets. And now the opposition or, you know, a lazy reporter has defined your issue for you. And it's wrong. And that is the worst feeling, for an organization to face. You feel powerless, right? Like, how am I how am I going to call, you know, ten different media outlets and go, like, that's not the case.

It's actually this, it's hard, but, you know that we love riding to the rescue in situations like that, right? That's when it's it's really helpful to have an organization like ours or one of the, you know, many wonderful organizations in Austin that do similar work who can make phone calls and go, Bob, are you taken the easy way out on that piece of data there?

Can I please show you three conflicting studies? And would you would you give it some attention? Right. So misinformation is something that I believe will continue to be a big problem for organizations as they promote their causes and tell their stories. That must be very difficult if people are just reading the headline. Yeah, you know, and they're not going to go back and look at the correction.

Yeah. All right. Very tricky. Yeah. So then you're like you're just mitigating right. You can't look the client in the eye and go, we're going to fix this. The best you can do is say we need to stop the proliferation where we can get the record corrected. We will so that, you know, moving forward, you know, any other reporters who look at what's been written about this, don't see that and don't draw from it.

But, yeah, it's tough. It's tough. And that's why proactivity is so important. Because if you're the first one shaping the narrative, you know it's right. That's good, that's good. I thought that was good. You did.

Have you seen people kind of going away from legacy media and more to independent media these days? Any clients specifically or what are you seeing with that change?

So much, you know, I mean, especially TV, right? When, you know, when I started my career, years ago, too many to mention there was TV. We did have TV then, but, you know, it's like a live, live shot crew was like 4 or 5 people, and I don't know if that's the case anymore.

You're probably lucky to have 1 or 2. Maybe two tops. And it's just so much harder to break through the competition for their attention. Right. And, you know, the reporters I talked to are like, I don't I can't even look at my inbox. I don't have any hope of ever clearing the decks because there are hundreds of emails competing for my attention every single day, and many of them are great.

Some of them are lousy and ill constructed, and they immediately go into the wastebasket. Right. But, you know, I think you have to fight harder for attention from traditional media, and that's what's spurring, greater utility for the newer tools social, digital, etc.. And that's not going to change anytime soon. I think that migration will continue to happen, and that balance is going to continue to shift.

What types of, you know, leaders or messages do you think will kind of cut through the noise? Mostly this next cycle. Oh my gosh, that is such a fascinating question because we all and I have feelings and thoughts. I have thoughts and feelings. We see the opinion polls that show us, you know, Americans are tired of the divisive stuff, right?

Tired of rhetoric. We want things to go a few notches down, but, you know, it works. It's effective in many cases. And so our, our politicians going to back off from that, not until it proves a detriment, in my opinion. Why would you if it works, you know, you're probably going to keep doing it. However, I think you'll also see, greater emphasis on the grassroots point of view.

Yeah. How voters are faring in the grocery store at the gas pump. You know, just this week we're, sort of splashing through conflict with Iran. Right. And, and, you know, our ally Israel involved with that. And so headlines all week have been, you know, what's going to happen to the price of gas. How are Americans going to fare at the gas pump moving forward?

So what we learned, I think, from the last presidential, was President Trump's sort of greater identity with folks who are struggling economically, was a big game game changer and helped push him across the finish line. And what was, you know, in many states, pretty tight race. So maybe we'll see more of that. Maybe we'll see more of an empathetic point of view, a more grassroots point of view, coming to the forefront and it'll be, it'll be a very interesting thing to watch.

But it's kind of hard to call at this point. It's kind of is it a no publicity, bad publicity situation a little bit. I mean, that is becoming more and more true, right? It really is in a in a marketplace where attention is so hard won if you get the spotlight, even if it starts off in a negative way, can you turn it to your advantage?

Maybe. Right. You have the audience. Yeah. That's wild. It's a wild time we're living. I know it is crazy, I got to say. Yeah,

well, tell me how you got involved with legislation this session, because I know there were a couple bills, that your teams mentioned. You worked on the Texas Doge bill. The life of the Mother Act.

That's right. Do you mind sharing more about both of those bills? That would be. I would love to hear your taken. So the Texas Doge bill was really, an effort and a much needed effort to reform the regulations that organizations have to abide by, which in many cases are outdated and antiquated. And so this was an effort to clean up, and it passed.

And we were so proud to have been able to contribute to that. And, you know, point out the, you know, pull look through all of the regulations and sort of processes that organizations have to abide by and then find the most ridiculous examples and, and highlight them. Right. Like facts. Your certification to this number. No. You know like facts.

Can you imagine somewhere in Texas there is a state agency with a fax machine waiting for people to like. It's insane. But we love that kind of stuff. Like we are willing we'll geek out on, you know, hours and hours of reviewing, statute and processes and regulations to find those things and, use them as sort of the banner for why this doesn't make sense and why it has to change.

So ridiculous things that are so ridiculous. Now, ten years ago, when I was in DC, we had fax machines, but I don't even think we were using that. Yeah. Like, you know, maybe when that, you know, ten years ago on the Hill could have been any day in time in the last hundred years. You would never know. Well that's true.

Maybe, maybe the phones just getting updated. Yeah. And hemlines changing. Yeah. I think you got no pantyhose now. Exactly. That's great. Yes. I'm all for that. I'm all for that. Oh, but you asked about life. For the life of the mother. Oh my gosh. Yes. This was something that I personally, was really honored to be a part of.

And, it was a very thoughtful campaign, and it was it is so grateful to Senator Hughes, who spearheaded this. And I don't know that anyone else could have done it with, sort of the inclusivity and the approach taken that led to, so much support for the bill and the bill itself, makes clear it clarifies the statute around when physicians are allowed to perform life saving, or health preserving, abortion procedures on patients.

And, you know, this is something that doctors had been complaining about like that the law wasn't clear. Their penalties were so stiff, you know, didn't they deserve more clarity? And, and, in the end, the legislature agreed. And, it's going to save lives and we're very, very proud of that. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Really big Bill. Yeah, we were thrilled on those those two.

How about this upcoming special? Do you have any big bills that you are personally involved in that you're gearing up for? A couple, but what I'm so excited to watch as we all are is SB three. And like what what comes next? And, you know, I think we, you know, throughout the session,

I know my team and I like oh, it was like the water cooler talk of like what's going to happen with SB three.

And then as it made its way through the legislature, we're like, oh my gosh, it's almost through. And then, you know, as we said, the big question was, was the governor going to be to it? So now, it's going to be interesting to watch the forces coming to bear, around shaping the regulatory structure. You know, this is an industry that a lot of Texans have become very fond of in the last few years.

But there are abuses. So how does this get cleaned up? And, how how intense are the fireworks going to be around it? We'll see how much everyone can agree. I know there's some very different perspectives on this and it's new, but it's you know, this is an entrenched industry now. So the business community I know is it's $1 billion industry here.

Exactly. So, we'll see. Yeah, we will watch the space. I will be watching with you, and I'll come and bring the popcorn out about it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Any final thoughts for our listeners like founders, lobbyists kind of staying sharp before we start on these potentially special specials, special sessions coming up and campaign season.

Yeah. I mean, you know, for some, there's another bite at the apple happening in a month. Yeah. And if you're in that zone, you don't have a minute to waste in terms of shaping your agenda and communicating it. So get to work, take your vitamins, wear your deodorant, and, you know, get yourself in front of the people who need to have, the conversations with you about the priorities for others, it's you.

You've got time to lay that groundwork in advance of the next session, and you have time to see, and recruit and hear stories. You know, so much of what we do is real people, real stories, right? And we're talking about authenticity. And there are so many people whose stories illustrate exactly why a piece of legislation is so critical to many, many Texans.

And those voices are often very hard to find. Right? It's a it's a big commitment for someone to serve as, you know, an ambassador for a cause like that. You know, all of us have jobs and lives, families and things that we're doing, and taking time away from them to push a cause is it's additive. Right.

But that's why the interim is so important. I think for a lot of organizations, they have the time to find and cultivate and prepare people to serve, as, you know, the carriers of their mission. And it's a lot of work being in that public facing role. And you're kind of in the it's in a really important position. But then you can also have a lot of you can get some flak in the public eye for sure.

No kidding. Yeah. There's there's always a price to pay. There's always a downside. Right. Or at least the risk thereof. Yep. For sure.

I was going to ask you, like, how does the USLedge utilize?

I mean,

with what you do. It has to be such an intense labor hour and it has to be so urgent. How do you use it? A lot of different ways. So we have you know, you've met most of our team. We've got 20 people on staff but ten developers. And so they're spread out all over and we have ten people here.

So for my position, I'm mostly on the kind of figure face for the company. So it's really that. But also then we have marketing got product, then we've got customer success, and sales and then the engineering side so that everybody uses it in a different way. And it's really for efficiency, I would say. So everyone's using it in some capacity.

If it can be used with AI to make you so much more efficient, 1,000,000% use it. So our engineering team has been using cursor AI. And so there's a lot of very technical pieces to this that they use. And I'm non-technical. So you know I'm telling you you're in good company. But the cool thing that is is coming is, you know, I have a lot of product ideas and okay, here's what I know.

The problem is because I faced it. Yeah. Here's what I hear from customers now, and here's what we need to build to do that. So I was a lot more involved in that. Now we have product manager who handles that mostly, but I'm very deep. So in product I can now type in a prompt to the software that can create an entire UI for a product for me.

So that's amazing. So instead of an engineer spending who's a, you know, front end UI engineer, we can have a back end developer now create beautiful, UI, UX, UI design, instantly. And now I can actually spec out product so much more efficiently so I could type in. Okay, I really need to make a build drafting feature that includes all the laws and regulations in Texas, all the sections of code, all the, legislation from the last 50 years, hundred years.

And I need to make it follow the council rules with, you know, this thousand page documents. Yeah. It will create me a UI template that I can send to an engineer and say, here's what I actually really want, and I can modify that. That's in say, this wasn't available six months ago. So now I can go in and actually spec things out for them where I could never before, like I can't go and draw like, oh, I was at the beginning of this, I would be like, okay, we need a box here in a box like this.

Oh my gosh. Yes. So that's amazing. They're able to code ten times faster so software can be developed so much faster. Now. Leaner teams are better because now we have you know, our CTO can manage ten people so much more efficiently than 20. And now they can get more work done. And so it's actually more efficient to keep it lean.

Yeah. Which is cool. For marketing I would say the data analytics like you were mentioning, it's amazing what all these different tools can do. Outreach sales sequences. So we're using Palo I tool, which does kind of so we're just starting new audiences. So California, Alabama, they've never heard of our company. Right. So we are doing, you know, founder led, messaging, one, I went to the University of Alabama.

So. Right. We're sending out, sequences from me.

And it's going up. Yeah. Thousands of our prospects. Right. That can be done so much faster. And then they respond directly to me. Yeah. So I have sent maybe a thousand emails to potential prospect, versus having to do any of that manually.

And then it does a follow up for me three days later. Hey, are you interested? Totally cool. If you're not, but, you know, would you want to chat? Yeah. Looking at to speak. So that's insane. That's fantastic. That's amazing. That's fantastic. You trying to find out all the new tools all the time. But yeah, these are just a few.

I mean, speaking of Alabama, yes. You worked on the other side of the blanket in the press, didn't you? As a reporter? Yeah. In school. Oh. Public school. What's entry stories like? I was literally I was a student reporter. Yeah. It was so fun when I was more on the political side, like, interested in student government and, like, I was in the college Republicans, very in into it.

And, so I then did some internships in, in Montgomery, like fun and in, DC. And so I would want to make my stories more about that. Like there was, I think some, you know, scandal. I mean, like, okay, can I write a story about this? But they're like, no, there's a cat in the tree that was covered in Tuscaloosa News.

Okay. So it was very fun. And I did get to then also deal with her, which I found was a lot harder than I was. It was so different where as an intern, it was so much more difficult because you have a picture of a sun, right? 80 degrees and sunny 90% of the year. Yeah. What do you say if how do you how do you how do you add to that.

Yeah man that's why everybody so much harder. That was so difficult. Oh man. They'd be like okay here's a sun. And you think you go up there and you're ready. And then you're like, what do I even say? Oh yeah. So no, that's what I did. Then.

And then I definitely thought at one time I would be a journalist.

Yeah. I preferred the political side. So I got some communications stuff when I was at the RNC. Right. And then it went more into policy.

Okay, wait, so you grew up in England? Yeah, I did, yeah. And then tell me about the culture shock of Alabama after England, because I have a similar experience.

But I want you you're older. Right. When you when you moved here 17 to. Oh my gosh 17. Is that like a good question. There were a few culture shocks actually. Yeah. So my first stint was not at Alabama. It was in Alabama at the Marine Military Institute. Oh, wow. I voluntarily I wanted to be in the Coast Guard.

Okay. As an officer. Yeah, it was my grandpa's dying wish. Oh, and I thought, you know what? If I'm an officer, it's just gonna help me with everything about it. Sure. And it'll probably help me in politics if you want to do that long term anyway. So this will be really cool experience, Hey, was it hate it?

Oh. It was. Oh, absolutely. Oh, good and bad. I made a best friend there for life. Oh. My roommate. Okay. She is. That makes it worse. Most people in the world. And she knew me when I was my little girl. You know, I have braces twice. So I started that school with braces. We were like little babies. Yeah, there was a lot of corruption.

No. Oh, and it was not female friendly. Yeah. So us girls were really stuck together. Right. And but it got me kind of more like an activist to that point. I was angry. Yeah. I was seeing injustice. They took away the women's electronics just because they could. There were a lot of hazing things that happened. It was not grace.

Creepy. Let's tell you over drink more story. Yeah I have like a scar. This one. Yeah. From being zip tied and like left in a dark room. Really not cool stuff. Wow. You just put me off. Yeah. Doing that. Understandably. My gosh. So. And there were just things that were very, I think, inhumane about what they did. But yeah, that was more of a culture shock than anything.

Yeah. And it was also a lot of, so it was a prep school for the academy. Yeah. So people that came in were from all over the US, but then half of it was also a junior college, people who wanted to go not be an officer, but just kind of go into the Army or go. Right.

So there were a lot of people from Alabama and that was a big culture shock. It was just new. And they'd be like, Where's England? Yeah. And I'm sure I was curious. Like they asked my dad at the gas station, are you German? And he's got a British accent. Right. So it was just like the culture shock was just funny, like, where are you from?

Like you're not from around here type of thing. But then going to the University of Alabama was a lot more, there were a lot of people from all over the country and the world that went on, and people were very welcoming. It was great. It was like night and day experience. Loved it, had an amazing time, wanted to stay in America.

But I would say the biggest culture shock was probably I said different phrases. Yes. And I didn't have also the context of being a child in the U.S. Yeah. And growing up in, you know, knowing the book, the show shows and yeah, I had no context. So I think sometimes also I didn't have a thick accent at all.

So they just did not a place. Me yeah. I really thought it was a bit strange, but I kind of just owned that for a while. How about you, when did you move? From Germany. We moved, from Germany to East Texas. Okay. Palestine. Oh, wow. In 1983. Okay. And like you, I was a fish out of water.

I had no, I had never seen Gilligan's Island or the Brady Bunch or any of the things that, you know, the Gen-X kids that, I went to school with, had grown up watching. And they like your experience. Like they couldn't figure out what, are you from out of town? Where? From where? And I would say Germany.

And they'd be like, is that in Texas? That's. No, not Germany, Texas. And it's a legit question. Yes. We've got Paris and Munster and you know all that. You know Italy, right? You burg. Yeah. We got, we got it all so legit. Yeah we do. At the time I didn't know that, but I was like, no, Germany is not in Texas.

Where am I? That's what it is. I'm so grateful because, you know, I made friends there who, you know, saw how lost I was and took me under their wing. That's awesome. And they're still my besties today. I love them, yeah. And how old were you when you moved? I was 12. That's really cool. That's a really cool age, actually, I think.

Yeah, it. Yeah, absolutely. If you're going to make that kind of shift, you know, 12 is probably a good you know, you're starting middle school or junior high or whatever. And you can adapt and but you come in with your own experiences and that's a really cool time. I think yeah 17 was tricky. I was so okay you finish high school at like 16 and then you do A-levels right.

I don't know if it's what they do in Germany. So my parents were like well you can't go to the US for university at 16. Yeah. And so you have to do A-levels. So I did a year. Hated it. Yeah. Didn't want to do it. And I said guys this doesn't even count now towards the US credit system and I need to get a GPA because they don't want me in my system.

So they did agree. But it was a sad process because my family are still there. So it's so at 17 you pack your bags and you move 17.5 across the water to Alabama, Dallas actually to okay, but without mom and dad. Oh thank God. So I did have some family there, which was great. So my grandparents German grandpa.

Yeah. And English, grandma. Wow. And they got my driver's license. I started getting college credits, so I had a GPA, and then, but it was a big culture shock for sure. Right? But I love it. I love the U.S., and it's been amazing. So much opportunity. And it's I, I love going home to visit, but I want them to come out here.

So yeah, I, I never knew they had that in common. I love that, I love that there's not a lot of folks who have, you know, sort of the perspective of here's what they think. And, right. You're seeing the news from that time was probably really interesting from the European perspective. Oh my gosh, so different. Yeah, I still look at German newspapers if I want to, you know like okay.

But what are they saying. Right. And I'm sure you do the same thing. Oh I want to know what is respective is in the UK. Totally. And when I go back it's it's fascinating to hear. And sometimes they have it similar. But a lot of times it's very very different. Yeah. Oh yeah

I was curious what. So what were your family military out of interest or what brought them to Germany. My dad was a Fulbright scholar. How cool. And he, was working on his PhD at the University of Kansas and then had an opportunity to teach English at a German school in, Münster, which is in Westphalia.

And, this is the early 70s. My parents just loved it and decided, you know, let's, you know, he was offered a job at that school to stay beyond his program. And they were like, let's stay another year. Wow. 12 years later, my brother, who today is a three star Navy admiral, had always wanted to attend one of the service academies.

And you know, the Naval Academy in particular. And, well, hard to do that if you're coming from overseas and your congressman has to make a decision with, between one of his own constituents, children and some kid, you know, who grew up in Germany, that's why I moved here at 17. Oh, of course, I needed up for the academy saying, oh my gosh.

Yeah. So GPA, they were like, yeah, well, who are you? And I'm like, I'm an American, right? Really? I don't even know how to read your transcript. Yeah, right. Yeah. How cool I know. Crazy. It's a small world. I know you got a really cool background. You. So what are you. I'm amazed. It's had no idea. No idea.

Well, see, that's the thing that you never know. This is why your podcast is so wonderful. You are so. You know, I really appreciate you coming on. Come on. Thank you. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

So how can people find you and the mock one and contact you if they're in need of some of the services that you do? We are at the Mark one group.com, and that's the number one purposely.

And, we are, easily found on social, with the same handle. And, we are very eager to help organizations that have important causes that mean a lot to them. If they want to put them in expert hands, who have all survived the capital in one form or another, whether it's the US Capitol or the white House or, the state capital, we're here to help ya.

Love it. Well, thank you for coming on and sharing your story, and I'm very excited for what you're working on. Thank you. Thank you.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of U.S. ledge. And today, we're diving deep into the digital frontier of politics. My guest today is William Hollis, CEO of Campaigns Inc.. And at a time when the media landscape is fractured, voters are fragmented and attention spans are fleeting. Williams' team is helping campaigns cut through the noise with hyper targeted digital strategy, creative partnerships and storytelling that moves the needle from grassroots movements, regulatory defense.

William understands how to connect mission driven organizations with their communities and how to do it ethically and effectively. So please welcome my guest, William Hollis.

So I'm curious, tell me, William, who you are. Tell everybody, what you do. And I love to get into it.

Yeah. So I'm the CEO of Campaigns Inc.. I previously ran a consulting company in Canada doing digital communications for politics. And, as previously a conservative staffer in Canada. And we've just relocated down to the US with campaigns Inc., and we're going a little bit more niche with campaigns Inc. focusing exclusively on social media. So we do digital advertising, we do influencer amplification, and then all of the creative stuff that goes into social media ads.

So short form video, vertical video, long form explainer videos and, all kinds of graphic design copywriting and, really focusing on mobilizing supporters to take action for issues. That's really interesting and cool. And you started this in Canada. How did it all come about? How did you start it? Yeah. So back in university, I took over the University of Toronto Conservatives, and at the time they were kind of a club that no one was really a member of.

There was like two people in it kind of feel wrote it off, and I was able to grow it into the largest conservative club in Canada using social media. And it got to the point where we were having events regularly with like hundreds of people showing up. And I kind of realized a lot of power in that for mobilizing supporters to come to events and a couple of years previous to that, I had worked for two city councilors, and at the time, I ran the first Facebook ad campaign at the municipal level in Canada to get awareness to those councilors during their reelection and to get people to turn up for events for them as

well. So that was kind of my first foray into the digital side of things. But then after, university, I went on to work as a staffer and, got that kind of high level communication lens and in high stakes politics as well. I'm working for the Ford government in Ontario. So that kind of all fused together. And then I kind of went out on my own with the consulting practice in Canada, and we were able to do some really cool, really big campaigns.

And, it led me here. So what is bringing you to Texas right now? I mean, it's amazing here. It's exciting. It's nice to be right. It's, it's a booming place. And honestly, I think I got I got a small taste of, the US political scene earlier this year when I did some work for some American clients in my Canadian company, and I did my research, and I saw that Texas was the place where it was all happening.

And a lot of exciting things are happening here, obviously with tech, with AI, like you guys are doing. And, you know, I looked at the political landscape and I saw a lot of kind of value based, you know, alignment in that sense. So the economy here is very exciting, very dynamic. And, it's a real powerhouse.

So it seemed like a natural fit. So it was definitely the, the first place that I kind of wanted to dive into. And are you scaling across the US and starting in Texas? Yeah. So we operate nationally already. So that's the beauty of social media is that you're able to kind of operate on different levels in different places at the same time, and that flexibility is actually kind of an enhancer in terms of your ability to perform because, you know, the internet is global, right?

Social media is global. You know, something that happens in Texas can certainly influence politics in DC or, you know, really anywhere in the country or even something that happens around the world can influence politics and public affairs here in the States. So we operate nationally. But, yeah, like I said, Texas is an exciting place. So we, wanted to have this as our launchpad here.

Very cool. And how do you decide? Like, I know you mentioned that you're mission driven and how do you decide which clients to take on and which campaigns to get involved in? Yeah. So, like I mentioned, my background is, as a conservative activist, but we handle clients from across the political spectrum. You know, things like trade associations, for example.

They're not going to have a neat ideological alignment, right? So we focus on giving them a voice. But we also operate within the paradigm of, traditional kind of Western values and, you know, things like a robust civil society helping to increase pluralism, give people a voice and contribute to democracy in general. So as long as were within that kind of broader ideological framework that values democracy and, you know, clients are operating ethically, we are happy to to lobby on their behalf.

But we have found in the past as well that that kind of conservative background and expertise, working with, conservative aligned clients has given some assurance as well to future clients that we do share their values and that we're in their corner 100%.

Very cool. Now let's dive into social media that you mentioned that's really your focus.

And I'm curious to see how you obviously with AI, there's so much you can do and more content you can create now with social for social media big time. But what I'm noticing is that you know, LinkedIn for me is a really great place to be. But definitely where getting leads and folks come in. I know Twitter for a lot of, politicians is big too.

I'm also noticing I can spot an AI written piece of content from a mile away. Yeah. Same here. So how are you? You know, using it, but also, you know, making it authentic and real, right. So the big thing with AI is using it in a way that is genuine and it's not forced. So previously before LMS developed, you know, a politician or an executive, an association would have a communications person write, you know, a speech for them or an op ed or, LinkedIn post like you mentioned.

Now you can have LMS do a lot of that. But the key is knowing what is good content, because that's the biggest thing with AI is knowing what is good and what is bad. And if you don't have the expertise in terms of being able to tell good from bad, you can't always produce content at the highest level.

So a lot of people, what they'll do is they'll go into ChatGPT and they'll just kind of say, make me a post on this, but the reason that falls short is, you ChatGPT know your brand. It doesn't know what your values are, doesn't know your audience. So the key here is building prompts that are actually fully informed and educated on the brands that you're working for, you know, giving them insights into the actual audience that you're communicating with.

And when you do that, you actually can communicate better with audiences oftentimes than you otherwise would be able to, because you can take things like sentiment responses to social media posts, feed them into an LMN, and it can optimize the content to better communicate with your audience, picking up on patterns that you yourself might have missed. But things like, you know, the dash is right.

They show up everywhere in AI generated content much more than people would use them themselves. So that's definitely thing to watch out for. But again, having that human lens, making sure it's organic, making sure that, you know, you're having someone go over it afterwards and make sure it's perfect. And when I say perfect, I don't mean perfect in the sense that it's just like perfectly scripted.

Humans love human generated content because it's perfectly imperfect. So, you know, having things like, you know, imperfect syntax is going to make it actually resonate more because it seems more grassroots, more native,

100%. I was going to ask like what the main things are that are really hitting in the political genre, obviously the things I'm writing or when you're like a founder writing any kind of content, it's very what's hitting now, it seems just authenticity, just being real.

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And yeah, not necessarily. People don't go, oh yeah, that ChatGPT wrote that. It's like genuine content that you are coming up with and spending time on what's hitting in the political realm. Well, video is big short form video, TikTok. We'll see how that goes in, in the US, whether or not, that'll stay legal. But TikTok's been huge and Instagram Reels in terms of the virality of content, where before you were posting more to your community, but now you're exposing yourself to a broader audience.

So if something picks up, I can just take off like a wildfire. Like, for example, I posted one thing on my TikTok a few months back and it got over a million views. And, you know, hundreds of thousands of likes and thousands upon thousands of comments. And once it takes off, it just goes. And it's kind of it compounds on itself.

So that's huge. Vertical video. You're seeing a lot of investment in that in the political sphere right now. Like if you look at, what the Democrats are doing, for example, right now, they realized there was a big kind of deficiency in terms of, a lot of the social media stuff. And they're investing very heavily in it right now to the point where most of their job postings right now are for vertical video.

So making content that resonates in that sense, that is quick, that is attention grabbing, that really gets people's attention immediately. Because if it just drags on, like people aren't going to listen, they're not going to care, and your message isn't going to get out. What was the post that went viral? It was actually a New York state senator.

She motioned to have New York join Canada, and I made a post asking people's thoughts on that, and it took off. And it was actually this massive love fest between Canada in the US that is everyone's say how much they like, love each other. And it was it was amazing. That's adorable. It was super cool. Yeah, I love that.

I feel like a lot of people try and do the, you know, clickbait, spicy stuff, but that's actually a really wholesome right? I know, I love that I a we had one that I thought was going to perform extremely well. That didn't it was a real from a podcast I had with my co-founder, and he had, I won't tell, like the full version of the story, because people probably just heard it.

It was in the last episode. But, my co-founder is the CTO, and so, you may have met him at the party Ben. But he I was asking him, just like, what the hardest thing with building that people wouldn't expect? And he said that essentially it's the human under data. So in New York, there is a committee called or commission called the Canal Commission.

Right and human entered data missed the sea on the commission name. Yeah. Not the C on commission to the C on Canal Commission. So we put a video up. Yeah. The anal commission. Yeah. I laughed so hard. I heard that in the podcast. Yeah I did, I did, so I completely cracked up and thought that is gold. I don't know if the algorithm had it up.

I like three likes. I was cracking up actually from that because I'm like, it's going to go one way or the other. Yeah, didn't perform. And I'm like, was it the algorithm that maybe said, oh, it's a bad word. We should put that down on there. I don't know. Yeah, I'm still learning that. Yeah. Still lots to learn.

That's the thing too, is like that's why consistency is so important. And you guys are doing a great job of getting out there. Like you guys are everywhere, which is fantastic. And it's exactly that. It's it's taking more shots on goal. The more you post, the more you post consistently. It's more opportunities for things to go viral. And like you said, you know, we're all human.

We get excited about certain things, right? And, you know, maybe our audience isn't as excited about that thing as we are, right? Yeah. And, you know, so when you post ten things, for example, you know, that one out of ten might be the one that goes viral and it might not be the one that you expect. So that's why it's like you have to be consistent.

You have to post, you know, frequently. And when you do, that gives you more opportunities for letting go viral because you know, God knows what it is, is that little X factor. Because by all technical measures, those ten posts can be identical. But there was something in that one post. You know, even the time of day you posted it, how people were feeling in your audience that did the trick.

And it just, you know what? Off the charts, obviously, right. And are you self-taught in this? Had a lot of great mentors, different politicians that I've worked for. I worked for another guy who had an agency as well. And, he had really pioneered a lot of this stuff in Canada, so I was able to learn a lot from him as well.

And, picked up a lot of it along the way myself. Just trying different things, trial and error. And, and that's the thing, right? It's like, you see what works over time and, people are able to help you along the way. But I found with social media, because it's newer, a lot of the kind of age old expertise that a lot of communications professionals had.

It's less relevant now because, you know, the press release isn't as useful as it was, you know, 20, 30 years ago. Right. An op ed in a publication isn't as useful as it was 20, 30 years ago. But I've had amazing mentors and they've been incredible and kind of teaching that fundamental political knowledge and acumen, which is, you know, as true today as it was 30 years ago, for sure.

And like you said, a lot of it because probably trial and error. Right. Are you noticing, more of a response from, you know, organic creators, influencers? How do you what kind of role do they play in political campaigns now that's new? Yeah. So that's the huge thing. I mean, we saw that with the 2024 election, right. The Trump campaign adopted a massively podcast based strategy.

And he went on Theo Van, he went on the full same podcast. He went on, you know, several different interest based got, like a golf podcast, for example. And then with the Kamala campaign, you saw a lot less of that. She's been on Call Her Daddy, which was a more niche kind of podcast and, and controversial.

Very controversial. Yeah, exactly. You know, and she refused to go on Rogan for example, we're in Austin, right round Rogan's hometown. Sure. And that was huge because he was a Democrat previously, right. He endorsed Bernie Sanders. And I think that the podcast, which is why this is such a great format, and it really caught my attention that you guys are doing this is it's such an authentic channel where you can have real conversations because you can't fake it for two hours, like, you just you can't.

I mean, I haven't met a person that that can. Right? So it brings out the authenticity in people. And you can kind of go off script and have real conversations about things that actually matter. And podcasts are everywhere, right? Like everyone's listening to them at the gym when they're falling, falling asleep at night, when they're in their car, commuting to work.

And people develop, you know, parabens. That's that's the germs called paraben, where you feel familiar with someone who you actually haven't met. And yet by podcasting, they're developing those relationships so that when someone then communicates that a product has value, you know, whether it's, you know, a cellular provider or a politician, they're endorsing that value is communicated and it's trusted to a degree that like a traditional ad wouldn't be.

And I think people have become very attuned to kind of, detecting sponsor content. So that's why native content is so good, is that it blends seamlessly in with everything else that person is espousing, which makes it very, very powerful. I have definitely experience that is called pair bonding. Pair bonding. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I have about three podcasts I listen to where I feel like I'm their friend, right?

And I wish they're my friend and I feel like they're my friend, right. So that is really, really cool. How interesting. And that's why often to like, people will meet a celebrity and they'll be like, hey, Joe, like they've met them, you know, a thousand times, like they're a friend. But the celebrities obviously never met them before.

And there's that, like false familiarity between the two people that kind of warps that interaction. That's cool. Yeah. How else do you think people are getting their news? You mentioned podcasting. Other than text, large news obviously. Yeah. At the back of newsletter, of course. How are people getting them news now. Yeah. So in 2024 a study came out, saying that over 54% of Americans have social media as their primary news source.

And significantly more than that, getting news from social media in some form or another, like in some combination with legacy media and social media. But I mean, X is huge, right? Because you can have conversations in real time. Events unfold on X before the mainstream media can even really cover it. Right. And there's that lag in mainstream media that you don't have on platforms like X, where it's raw, unfiltered content.

And I think people like seeing footage, for example. And often with mainstream media, there's a gatekeeper in the sense that there's an editorial standard, there's a delay. They're making sure that the claims, you know, are valid, that it meets their editorial standards. But on social media, as soon as something happens anywhere in the world, the whole world can see it right?

And people get that information without a filter, and they can make their own determinations for themselves or their opinion as well, which is why independent media has taken off so much on platforms like YouTube and acts as well. So how are you using all this knowledge for your clients right now? Like are you coaching them? Do you have a team that's, doing this for them?

How are you, helping your clients? Yeah. So the biggest thing we start off with is looking at their brand voice, their values, kind of the visual identity they have already. And then we're developing custom strategies for them based off of their issue that they're, that they're particularly working with to give them that voice in their content. So we work with trusted creative partners to develop, like super cutting edge content that is designed to resonate.

And then we're either amplifying that through traditional social media ads with ad spend or through influencer amplification, where we're working with trusted influencers to amplify that message that they themselves stand for. So we're looking for alignment between the influencer and the organization that we're working with to make sure it's a good fit, because if it's a bad fit, there's obviously, you know, the threat of damage, your reputation.

So it's a really delicate thing, actually. And, so we make sure that fit is perfect to begin with. And we work with influencers over and over again as well, so we know which ones are trustworthy and which ones are good. And then we're using, kind of the lens of that influencers audience to adapt the message of the organization to that particular influencers audience so that it resonates better and blends in with their other content.

And then in terms of digital advertising, we are hyper targeting the content to people in certain localities, in certain demographics. And it's gotten so nuanced that, like, you're able to target people exactly based on their interest, exactly based on their geography. We can take, for example, information from our client's website through a pixel, and we can then feed that information into ads, and we can target the exact people that are currently interacting with your brand.

Well, right. So stuff like that helps us find more of the right people that you want to talk to and communicate with them in the right way at the right time. Something that's a trend that I've been seeing is, for companies like employee led, marketing one, it's free. They can be your own influencers. You don't have to pay anybody to do it right.

I was thinking about that on the political side, and I haven't seen staffers coming out for their representatives or their senators or whoever it is that they work for yet. Right. I think that's just a tidbit, an idea for anyone listening. Like, have you seen that at all? Being used like a staffer led, marketing for their member?

I mean, 100%. I mean, you guys are fortunate and, in the US that staffers have a lot more autonomy in terms of being able to speak publicly. Right. You see a lot of staffers on on Fox News, for example, or on CNN commenting on policy, whereas in Canada and also the UK, you see that to a much lesser extent, whereas staffers are kind of behind the scenes.

Right? And they're supporting, behind closed doors. But I think it's terrific. You know, I, I always found difficult myself was staffers are by nature a political creature. Right. So it makes total sense. They should have a voice and should be able to communicate and that is something that is a huge, huge opportunity because if there's also dissent between what the spoken policy is from the representative and what the staffers are doing behind the scenes, and there's often a dissonance there.

Right. Staffers need to be able to be number one, be on board and have buy in with what the policy is that their representative is advocating for. So they need to be, you know, convince the policy themselves. But but to like staffers are in a lot of rooms that their representative might not be in, for example.

Right. So it gives that policy, that issue of voice when it otherwise wouldn't have had an opportunity to be to be spoken about. So it's incredible. Yeah, I think it's a newer thing. I know it single like you mentioned people on Fox News and yeah, when I was on the Hill, for instance, you know, ten years ago, or a little less everybody there was, okay, don't post on social media.

You don't have an opinion, right? Do not share what your views are on this. If it because if it differed anyway from the representative, it was just be quiet. So I was never on Twitter or any of those, platforms because of that. But I think, yeah, it's a missed opportunity if people aren't now, you know, just hire the right staff who, support your mission and then let them go at it.

I think it's a great tactic. Exactly. And that, that was the only to when I was a staffer as well. So right after October 7th, I held a vigil at the University of Toronto. Oh, wow. To kind of mark the lives lost and, you know, kind of raise awareness for, for the massacre that had happened on October 7th, and the media actually got wind of it.

And it went viral. Well, and I was on every single news channel in Canada. And I got a call from, my chief of staff when I was working as a staffer and said, you're on every single channel right now. You have more media attention than most of our members in the party have ever gotten. Awesome. It was awesome.

But as a staffer, it's kind of a no no. Right. So, I had to kind of, you know, walk it back and then remove myself from involvement in that kind of outspoken advocacy while I was staffing, which is also part of the reason that I wanted to go into business myself, so that you can have that voice so that you can speak independently.

But it's super interesting that you brought that up, because that was always something that kind of struck me as, as interesting because you need that communications by and and especially to when like a party or, you know, representative is speaking out and saying the same things like with the Israel thing. Right. Publicly the politicians were saying, you know, like condemning what happened on October 7th, but, you know, then you're being reprimanded for, you know, speaking publicly about it.

Right? That is a really crazy situation. Well, good for you for for sharing the business and, and going that route. Obviously your experience led you to now. But it is. Yeah, I definitely like being able to, represent myself. Right. My company so definitely different type now. Yeah. Yeah. So how does AI play into everything that you do.

And you said a lot of the really cool things that you're, you're focusing on and what you're doing for your clients, but how do you see AI and how it's evolving and constantly. Well, it's terrifying really. In a way, it's going to take over. Right. But I think the biggest thing right now is, is AI agents working with, for those who don't know, AI agents work until the job is done essentially.

So it's not just running one prompt, it's running until the task is completed. So one area that I've noticed it immensely helpful is with perplexity and perplexity, lets you research in depth very, very rapidly. And you can pull from sources that are, niche, but you can also tell them exactly to what you're looking for, and you can pull just reams and reams of data that back up your claims, and it cites all the sources and everything.

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So that would have taken somewhat a ton of time to do before. So you can use that information to strengthen your content and strengthen your claims and integrate that information into, into videos instead of, you know, spending hours kind of trolling websites looking for, you know, facts that are useful and making your case. So that was hugely helpful.

Kind of like we spoke about earlier LMNs as well, programing them to learn the voice of brands is very helpful as well. But even things as well like like Canva integrations, they're, they're huge and it's kind of just starting out, but it's, something that I think will take off in the future for sure. That really let you kind of produce more content more rapidly.

And anything that lets you produce more content and higher quality, that lets you communicate better with your audience is immensely valuable. And that's the thing too, is, is organizations that aren't using these tools and aren't communicating in the right way, they're going to get left behind and they're not going to get, you know, the funding from from people that are aggressively using these tools in their fundraising.

You know, they're not going to get the attention towards their issues that they're lobbying for. And that's why it's so important that we raise awareness for, you know, AI and social media to level the playing field and get the word out for these issues, because it's it's honestly the most important thing right now. I agree. And not wasting time, you know, for efficiency purposes.

Right? I am, you know, 20 times more effective. Oh my god. Yeah. In a day just because of using agents, creating our own. You know, we're building AI agents right now and we have our first one actually we just launched that, tracks the rulemaking process. Right. So it goes through and it's a very tedious, place where they put all the rules of the state agency's come out.

You know, once every week. And our agent is able to actually identify those and just alert you on them when there's no system that does that. Right. Agents are huge and will probably be doing more tutorials soon, too, on just how to become a prompt engineer for those who don't know. Or very cool, understand because it's like a constant learning.

You have to be a forever student trying to keep up with what's actually right happening and jail time. That's the thing too, is it moves so exponentially fast. So it's like before you could have learned something and it was useful for five years, but now you learn something and, you know, six weeks from now it's it's obsolete. So that's why it's so important to either like, you know, learn these things yourself if you're willing to invest the time or work, with someone like us, for example, that's obviously on top of this.

And, you know, living and breathing it every day, every person on our team, whether they're in product, whether they're in marketing, they're they're in sales, they're using AI. Right. And they have to for if they're not, I would ask, why. Why are you not right? Let's identify ways to make you way more efficient. So much easier to reach out to people or whatever it is that they're doing.

So yeah, it's a exciting time, but constantly learning. Yeah. So that was really interesting as well. There's a very popular podcast called diary of a CEO. Oh yeah, very interesting podcast. And it's one of the top in the world right now. And he got the same engagement on a podcast completely generated with AI. Then his usual podcast. Oh, wow.

Listening time remained consistent even without him actually producing it himself. So it was his voice, his voice, and then an AI avatar of him. I really want to check that out. That is kind of where gets a little squirrely for me. I agree, it's very scary. I know I said squirrely, but it's okay. Very. It is. Yeah.

It's really. Yeah.

What do you think about that when you're losing humans there? I mean, obviously from a technological standpoint it's incredible. Yeah. And I think in the short term, you know, there's and when I say short term, I mean, you know, the next ten, ten years probably is a huge window to really get ahead and to really make a mark where you wouldn't have been able to do it before.

And, you know, after that, there's there's a real risk that I could just take over. Right? It's, it's a genuine risk that a lot of scholars are looking at. And obviously, you know, I'm not an AI expert in that sense or studying it on an academic nature, but the tools that are available right now are game changing, and I have full confidence that they will continue to iterate them and, you know, get to the point where they're actually iterating themselves.

And, you know, I has already gotten to a point where humans can no longer understand the mechanics of how the AI is working in certain cases, because it develops these neural systems that interact in a in a non-human way. Right. Like an AI will beat a human at chess, and that's because it thinks in abstract, non-linear way. So a human can map out every single game play, but they're not going to think in the same way.

And I would but in terms of human generated content versus AI content, I think that'll be the last bastion is you can't beat human interaction. You simply cannot it, you know, things like talking to another person, you can't beat it. It's it's intuitive and, you know, there's there will always, in my opinion, be something to be said about sitting down and have a conversation with a person one on 1 or 1 too many.

And you feel that in the room when when that's happening, you feel the connection. You can feel the emotion of it. And, you know, I just, I just personally don't see that being the case, to the same extent with AI, but it's it's very, very interesting. And the other thing too, is anything that is process oriented.

So something like writing a book, for example, part of writing the book is the journey of writing the book. Right? The things you discover about yourself when writing it, the things you discover about what you're studying. And then that kind of sticks with you. And I can write a book for you. It could have been done in an hour from now.

But all the things, all the valuable things that came with that journey, you're not going to have. So it is imperative that we use AI to make ourselves better humans, more effective humans, without losing sense of our identity as people as well.

I agree, I think it's a deep philosophical conversation to have on how much, you know, control.

At the end of the day, we do give AI and what we want to do. And even like when I have children, what will they be doing in 20 years? Will they want to do is careers and what careers will open up? I think it gives a lot of new, exciting time for entrepreneurs to create things and do things so much faster and bigger.

You know, you're seeing the I think, is a prediction that the first startup, like a SAS startup, AI startup with one employee, one founder will come, you know, soon and be $1 billion company. Right. And that is really cool. So you're seeing these more lean teams doing more, and that's definitely what we're focused on too, is like lean, mean killer teams.

But you touched on the point of, you know, human interaction. And that's I say sometimes, you know, I can make you more human. Well, in our field it does. Right? Because I didn't like the boring process side of things. And some of the research side of things. That was taking a lot of time. And so a lot of our customers can go and do those influencing, talking to their legislators, discussing a topic and actually like moving the needle policy wide wise.

Nobody's going to be able to do that AI driven. Right? It's completely, completely the human interaction side of things. So, yeah, it's interesting to see where it's going to go. I'm excited for our customers that we can help them know do more of that in-person work. But I know that it's changing every field. Exactly. That's the thing too, is like, even if you look at ChatGPT, they have a very small, very lean staff, but at a point it will get to a point where by virtue of the advancements in AI, they won't even need their own employees, right?

So it's it's it's incredible really, when you think about it, will there be a lot more people creating new companies and finding ways to live and then figure out what the meaning, their meaning of and purpose in life is other than, you know, there's a lot of layoffs happening right now. Well, that's the thing, too, is, well, two points are actually.

So the first one is when the Wright brothers invented the aircraft, right. They thought it was only for military applications. They didn't know, you know, the booming aviation industry that would happen, right? Civil aviation, they didn't. They had no idea you'd have these massive aircraft flying through the skies carrying people all over the world. Right. So that's the first thing.

So the the major business of AI, you know, right now it's in the AI companies themselves, like ChatGPT, for example, open AI, who provide the actual AI that companies are using to operate their platforms. But it will be companies like USLege, large other companies, other startups that take the processing power of AI and convert them into businesses that achieve real business outcomes.

That's going to change the game, right? So it won't be companies, you know, like open AI, it'll be the people that are using it to get things done. And honestly, that's the thing too, is people that are high agency, who are go getters, that are going to use these to advocate more effectively to perform better at their job or in their business, that's going to be the game changer.

And, yeah, it's really incredible. I agree, vertical AI agents are very much trending. You know, that that's kind of that's what we're building, right? There's a lot of verticals that you can you can kind of go into. So it's cool. Yeah. What kind of mistakes just going back into, you know, what the work you do for your clients.

What mistakes are you seeing people making in this field right now? For sure. There's a lot. Yeah, there's a couple big ones. I mean, the first one is a mismatch between where your audience is and how you're communicating. And that was true even before social media. Right. So for example, if you're communicating to your membership or to people that are decision makers about a certain thing and you're talking on LinkedIn because executives are on LinkedIn, but you're trying to talk to, you know, 40 year old trades guys, right?

Like it's just not going to work. So, people often have a bias because they like using LinkedIn. I'm a professional. Obviously. I like using LinkedIn, I love it, you know, I use LinkedIn to market our stuff because we're talking to executives. But if you're talking to the general public, for example, or if you're talking to a subset of the public, you know, Facebook or Instagram or even TikTok, you're talking to a younger audience can really be the bread and butter there.

So number one, conquering that mismatch between platform and audience. The second one is that oftentimes organizations will run a super exciting campaign. They'll put big bucks behind it. They will be super active on social media. Their campaign deadline, you know, be it for a political campaign, you know, the election happens. It's over. They kind of disband or an organization that runs a time based campaign around, you know, an initiative or ballot initiative.

After it's over, they just start posting and they kind of, in a way, sacrifice the community they've built because they've put this massive ad spend behind building a brand for their campaign. But after the campaign's over, they kind of just disperse and their their followers go with them. And it's really you're building a community, right? You're building a community of people that you're calling upon and asking them to take an action.

Right? Whether that's that's something as simple as signing a petition or showing up to testify or, you know, volunteer or buy a membership or donate, that community is the asset. And by building a community, you're building asset value. And that's not something that you can just extract value from once. It's something that you can continuously go to and have a conversation with them and continue to provide value to them, and they will have your back and they will give to you as well.

And, you know, kind of throwing that out the window. It's it's insane, really, when you think about it. That makes so much sense. So you're seeing that they're literally abandoning every practice that they're doing once they get elected. Right?

Or they finish their campaign of the season if they're, you know, not a political,

represented.

Oh, that is crazy.

So are you teaching them to continue that cycle and keep them posting and keep them engaging their community?

So during campaign periods, whether for a PAC or a candidate or, you know, a corporation lobbying for a certain initiative, you see much higher ad spend.

But where you can see the consistency is in the content creation. Right? So with ads, you're speaking from yourself. Too many people that are not in your community, that's a good way of thinking about it, I find useful and they maybe haven't interacted with your brand, but they're primed to interact with your brand. And that's where you build the community and you bring them into the fold.

Then after that campaign, that critical period is over. You have all these new people in your community. So you can continually invest in the content because content is speaking one to many, but a speaking one to many within a warm audience. So among people that already know you and already interact with your content and already like you. So that's where you see the consistency.

You know, no one's saying you have to go out and spend massive ad dollars, just, you know, during normal business, you know, obviously we'd love to see that during campaign periods because that's what gets you the eyeballs, the clicks and the attention. But consistently showing up, talking to your people and, you know, having a conversation and getting them engaged, involved on a continuous basis is how you do it.

Well, I'm so glad you found me online. Right. Me such an interesting conversation. Okay, so how did you find me originally? You know LinkedIn? No, wait. It yeah, I love it. Yeah. The podcast. The podcast.

Because you guys have done something genius. And this is the this is the thing as well I want to touch on is the clipping strategy because that is everything at the moment is you build a podcast which has intrinsic value and it delivers for people that like long form content that are like your superfans, right?

Like they're going to sit there for an hour, for two hours, you know, for three hours maybe. And they're going to love your content. They're going to eat up every minute of it. But people are super busy too, right? Like I mentioned earlier, my favorite podcast is or of SEO. Their episodes are two three hours. It takes several sittings to get through it.

And that's why those clips, those key moments are the best is in 10s. You can have a laugh or you can, you know, learn something new. And they feed into the algorithms on reels on TikTok, even on LinkedIn. Like there's LinkedIn reels now, right? Like it's just it's amazing. And that clipping strategy is how I saw you guys.

I clicked on, one of the clips, came to the podcast. Watch the full episode. I was telling my girlfriend how amazing this podcast is because, gosh, that's amazing. It's the exact niche that I operate in, right? Which episode was it? It was the Craig episode. Oh, Craig. Yeah. Craig post about that a lot. Yeah, I think Craig helped with that algorithm.

Right, right. Well, that's the thing too is they're super shareable, right? You know, I can just DM my friend or my colleague or, you know, even your family, whatever. Like you send them a clip, they watch it. They have they have have a laugh. They get interested, they get engaged like more. They'll come back for more. And it's like, it's like a buffet, right?

Like you can just kind of sample and see what you likes if you don't like. And that's, that's the most effective strategy at the moment is, is, you know, having a big asset like a podcast and then clipping it up. And that's the thing too, is you can see which which clips perform better. Right? And you can use AI to optimize performance of those clips as well.

Right. Well, I'm so happy. Did you found me? And, you came to the party and met some some Texans, and I'm sure you'll be back for a lot of business now, which is great, 100%. Where do you see campaigns being in, you know, five years? Yeah. So my biggest thing is I want to increase the digital and social media literacy of organizations.

It actually upsets me when I see an organization with a great mission with, like an incredible, you know, stands for advocacy. And they aren't communicating effectively online. And then they're getting no traction. And it actually bothers me. So so my mission is to help these organizations and candidates build communities and communicate better with their audience so that they can actually do all the great things they want to do.

Right? So, you know, whether that's doing better with fundraising, doing better with communicating their issue, doing better with engaging with policymakers, I want to be part of that and help them do that so they can achieve things for their members and advance their industries going forward. And, you know, I'm really open minded with what that looks like specifically.

But, as long as I can help them do that, I will be a very happy man. Well, you're super passionate and obviously educated on this area, so, how can people listening find you if they want to work with you? Yeah. So I'll give my email address. They can send me a direct email if it's my personal email, it's William Dot Hollis at campaign's Inc.com.

And if you want to learn more, definitely check us out on LinkedIn or at our website. Campaigns inc.com. But yeah, I'd love to chat with anyone even just interested in having a great conversation about social media or where it's headed. But I would definitely love to help people advance their mission and and get it done. Well, I'm excited to watch where where you go to and excited to have you back in Austin.

So thanks so much for coming on. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege, where we make government more efficient with technology. And today, I'm bringing something a little different. We went live from the Texas Venture Forum in Austin, hosted by the Texas Venture Alliance. And it was more than just a gathering. It was a full on collision of ideas.

Industries influence. During the event, we sat down with seven bold voices who are actively shaping the future of innovation, policy and capital not just in Texas, but across the country. In this episode, you'll hear from Rodney Davis, the head of government affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Ted Townsend, president and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce.

Marcos Cervantes, founder and CEO of Q Branch. Danny Seiden, president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce. Jessika Calder, policy intern at the Texas AI Association. William Steele, CEO and co-founder of Supply Pay. And Mark Crumblish, the co-founder and CEO of Eagle Ventures Lab. From national security to AI to capital, we're going to be talking about it all.

And I hope you enjoy this really fun episode.

Cherie, I'm so excited to chat with you. Yeah. Nice. Beautiful to have you on. So tell everybody a little bit more about yourself. Well, my name is Cherie Werner, and I actually run a group called FIESTA. We started now for Covid. So many people are moving here to Austin, and I was meeting, on, platform called Lunch Club, and they all had the same story.

They could be anywhere, but they were chasing Austin and fascinated by that. And I would invite folks into the house for dinner because, I mean, everyone, we're all about connection. I mean, everybody wants to be seen, right? And and then it's like, oh, you need to meet this person. And since where ended, I'm like, you know, I'd rather die living, and I'm going to live fully, you know?

And so we invited everybody that I had their emails for to join us at, Easy Tiger June 4th years ago. And we had about 37 that showed up. And then in July, capital actually offered us their space downstairs and we had 73. And then I never stopped growing and growing. And it's thing can look like it's like, what are you doing?

Meetup reached out, said, how are you getting people to come? And I'm like, we're just creating this welcoming environment because, you know, it was lonely. I think a lot of people were dealing with loneliness, and it's lonely being a surrogate daughter at begin with. And then you walk into a place where people see you and you feel like, I'm one year round.

Yeah. So that was 40 years ago. That's amazing. And three years ago, I was just moving awesome myself. In the same boat as what you describe. I was looking at all the cities. I was looking just for a city before the job and for Dawson, and, be so happy I did. And the rest is kind of the streets.

My home now, for sure, is the place I'll be. So tell everybody what. Yesterday, it sure was so. So FIESTA is not the grocery store, and, And I am here in Austin, not San Antonio. It stands for founders, investors, lots of nerds, startups, techies, and also newcomers. But it ventures as we go beyond Austin. Which is what our desire is.

We are about helping founders navigate the ecosystem.

In particular, we want them to be seen and we do that by allowing founders an opportunity. It's twice a year they get a woman pitch, and then after they pitch, they can tell their founders story, which goes in our newsletter, the Fiesta Focus. And, that goes out to now about 7600 fish firm.

And then, I followed the journey like if, if you pitched, I want to follow what you're working on because yes, it is not about what we're doing. You're on a unique journey and you need to find the plugs. They're going to help you. So if you're CPG, I'm going to introduce you then CPG firms. I mean, I just let them sit gals and they're visiting from Dallas and I'm like, oh, you need to go to this event, this event, because they're all CPG focus, and that's where they're going to meet distributors and packagers and people who can help them.

But you can always come back to things that were consistent, which makes it easy.

Yeah. So sell out. The day I met you, that's that's fabulous. Yeah. So.

what was your background before starting FIESTA that got you interested in starting? I was mom, so I actually thought I would work in after I had my first child eons ago because she's now 36, 36, 34, and 24, all girls.

But when it came time to go back to work, something called hormones kicked in and I just said, I want to be a mom, I want to raise my kids. And and so I did that. And I love being a mom. And it's naturally qualify me for what I do because I'm known it's a startup. Mom, you're in Austin like several years.

And, but in that and then for women, we started a women's group, which I think that's where you. I was about Harris. Yes. And the founders is completely different than. Yes. The, women want to be seen. They want an up to you talk about, you know, what's really going on. And and that's very consistent. Also, we do it the same way.

The only thing that's not consistent is location, but it's a way for women to share one aspect, because I believe in that. We know what someone's need is, thing we're able to deliver, give it all at the end. And and so then we share that I started a newsletter for that called The Hero. And that's going out to about 700 women.

And we share all this assets in there. And I've had people find jobs. I've had women, you know, be invited to lunches and stuff because they're new to us and they want to meet people. Yeah, I looked that. What kind of resources are you offering founders. And. Yes. So we're working on the resources. When when I started FIESTA, one of the things that I saw that was missing was there's not a central hub here in Austin.

I mean, we have Capital Factory, which is it? Entrepreneur. You know, like the center of gravity for entrepreneurs. But the capital club focuses on the the members that they have there. I'm I'm I'm like focused again I'm unbiased. I want you as a founder to find what's going to benefit you, but you have to know what's available. And and so I created a directory of, the different accelerators and incubators we have.

I believe that the, meetup, we're not meetup organized, but event organizers, the people that serve the start founders are the unsung heroes. I mean, I know how much heart goes into doing any of that. It's a lot of work that you're passionate about. If you're focused on AI, you know, bringing in people together to talk about the latest and greatest trends in AI.

And so I have created a directory of all the different event organizers. And, and we just launched FIESTA that connect and, March of this year, and yes, connect is an online community platform that can go beyond Austin because we have so many folks, as I call them, flooding through the Austin ecosystem that can be from California and New York, even internationally.

And and so I've had from Amsterdam, Africa as like, hey, we don't have even like us. It can we do it? You know, like who? I really would love to, but there's only so many hours in the day, and then they're like, there's just, you know, my, my, the hardest part is that there's so much that can be done.

And, everything that I've been doing up to this point has been and out of the goodness of my heart now we're trying to figure out how to monetize this so that it can continue on beyond my husband and myself. Because like, my husband helps me a lot. He's my co-founder. And, and,

so we get to do like together, which I hear you, we get to do like together with your husband.

Yes. I was saying it's a really rewarding, actually. It's so much more fun than I thought it would be. I think a lot of people warned us about it before and like, no, it's actually great. Like, nobody would be able to understand this journey better than him and, understand where we are and celebrate the wins. Exactly. So and more importantly, when you're down, he's probably ending up and vice versa so that you're able I mean, and people I mean, like as a founder, you find a co-founder or and it's no different than a marriage.

I mean, you have to work on the relationship and you have to find the values and the things that you know are important to you. And then like, the other things and, you know, my husband and I have been celebrating 40 years, right. This weekend. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. So how did you two meet? We met in college.

That was nothing like dating. I feel you guys see that. That's the only thing I know. We actually did meet on a dating app, and I love that we did. Again, shout out to hinge. Eric just posted about it and said, I met my co-founder a dating app on Nathan and it went viral, so it was fun. Funny.

I'm looking for my older daughter and my younger kids. They're they're on the outs and stuff like that. People just don't eat out in in the wild. And I actually a fun one of my funny stories is I had a couple, two months ago, he proposed to her at Fiesta because they met  two years ago at Fiesta, that's the.

Yeah, it was it was adorable. I do love to hear the organic stories. Absolutely. But it is funny. I'll tell you a secret. My mom and grandma used to swipe for me on the apps because I was just like, I just. Yeah. And they I when I was living in D.C. and so they would just be like, oh no, no.

And I was like, this is great. Basically like them doing arrange arranging it for me. But I love that. Yeah, it was on one day, but I'm married, so I had to be okay. So I worked on it. Well, thank you for everything that you're doing for Fiesta. And what are the upcoming events that we can talk about it?

Sure. Yeah. So the yes the founders meets on the first tuesdays of every month. the, newsletter for the women's group goes out on that Friday, and then on the second Tuesday, fourth Tuesdays is the fiesta focused newsletter. And we meet on the third Tuesday, for. Fiesta So very, very consistent. Makes it easy for me, to remember what's coming up.

And it makes it easy for those that have come to be able to share with others when, when we make it and bring it. So he's. Well, I'm excited to hear the podcast with you connected as you scale. And, we're recruiting to the next fiesta. Yeah definitely will be great. I mean, what's really crazy is we've had over 10,000 people come through our events because typically we have 200 attendees plus at the event, which again, I can't tell you what the secret sauce is other than creating this warm, welcoming environment where everybody's kind of seeing.

So no better possible. Exactly. Thank you. Sure. Even saying, you know. Yeah.

Yeah. Danny, thanks for coming and chatting today. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah. Do you mind telling me a little bit more about you and how you made your way to the chamber?

Sure, sure. So, you know, this is my fourth year running the state chamber in Arizona, and, I got there in a very kind of fun way, because if you go back, it's very incestuous if you go back. When Glen Hamer first became president, CEO of the Arizona Chamber, which now is about 18 years ago, my then wife was his first vice president communications.

So she worked at the chamber. Then I was in law school. I graduated, you know, when I graduated law school, actually went to a law firm that represented the chamber. So then you could argue I was also Glenn's attorney. So there was all these connections back and forth to the chamber. But, you know, I have a very, you know, very long career that always dabbled in both the complete private sector and a lot of government as well.

Because I love solving problems. And government, you know, is a big, big problem. Sometimes it needs to be solved in a big tool. Can either be a weapon or a tool. You could argue, but yeah. So I've, I've been in and out, so yeah, going way back when I have worked in multiple state legislatures. I have, you know, spent some time in DC and really settled in Arizona, never thinking I would be there for very long because that's I was engaged to my now wife.

She was from Arizona. We met in DC. She was an intern at the Nrcc when I was working there. And we, so going to law school, I'm just going to be a lawyer. Done with politics really kind of burnt out. And, you know, it doesn't work out that way. I go to a law firm, they see my background, see that I work for state legislatures.

They're like, hey, you know, we do some lobbying, representing big Arizona companies like Freeport-McMoRan, our largest copper producer, you know, responsible for nearly 60% of the US copper that comes out. And so start doing a lot of environmental lobbying, a lot of permitting, air permits, things like that, administrative law, and just kind of got sucked right back into it.

Spent time with the legislature in Arizona before long, you know, getting called back to do campaign work. And, you know, at my law firm, the general counsel for what was cold Stone Creamery, you know, at the time, this great ice cream company, she left my law firm to go be the general counsel. And I had a very nice meeting with their then-CEO, a guy named Doug Ducey, who was kind of like the co-founder and CEO.

And he loved politics. He had this huge sense of civic responsibility, and he wanted to get back into it. And so we have these fun conversations about what you could do, what would be a good entrance point for him. And then, you know, one thing leads to another. And we kind of laid out a plan of how one day he could be governor.

And I have to tell you, he's one of the most disciplined people I've ever worked with. He, like, met the plan. He fought tax increases when he was state treasurer, all with the goal of one day being governor because he's an executive and want to be chief executive of the state. And so, yeah, I worked for Governor Ducey.

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I was his initial campaign manager then. I was his deputy chief of staff. I ran all ledge affairs, ran all federal issues, worked on economic development. So our Economic Development Authority reported up to me. And so, you know, did all of that. So it made sense one day, you know, years later, when Glenn leaves the Arizona Chamber, I get a call from the search committee asking me if I'm interested in the job.

So, wow, you have a very cool, extensive background. I've been actually very excited to meet you because you're Glenn's successor, and I know Glenn very well. So, very he's a tough act to follow. Glenn did when did amazing things when he took over the state chamber. It was in, you know, it was in the red. I mean, Glenn saved the state chamber.

He is a big vision guy. He's a big idea person. And so he helped grow the chamber back into being a major political force. And, you know, I've been able to build on that. But a lot of that blueprint came from Glenn. And your Arizona Chamber business news is tremendous. And that was a that's a Glenn vision, an idea.

We're having such a hard time getting our media to cover business news and just, I mean, really just basic good stories about what's happening in the Arizona economy. So Glenn found, you know, uses his foundation, creates Arizona. You know the the chamber business news CBN as we call it now as a digital network builds up a following. And you know they're still going today.

We've read about 3 or 4 stories a week. You know we publish columns. We have elected officials who publish columns. And it we do some digital work with it. Now I think the sky's the limit. Other chambers have copied Glenn on that. Kentucky has a very good one. You know, Kansas is doing one. So I think Glenn really set a standard with that.

That's very cool. Yeah. When he first told me about that, his vision. So I don't know if you know this, we do the text business with the, texts. He's been telling me about this, and we're interested. I think our CBN folks are like, we want to hear about how this works. You should chat a little more offline.

Yes. On some of that. But it's been a really great partnership. Absolutely with that. So very nice. So tell me more about the other states that you have served in and at the state level. Yeah, I know, so I'm from Florida. So it kind of all starts, kind of all starts in Florida. And you know, doing student government.

I went to Florida State University for, for my first year was actively, you know, involved at the time. They had a Hall of Fame governor, Governor Jeb Bush. So, you know, getting to intern in and around what Governor Bush was doing in Florida in terms of educational freedom, educational choice, he was building the Florida Enterprise model, a good Public-Private partnership for the economy.

That's where I learned a lot. You know, the Florida legislature has its own unique animal. As as they all are, we were talking about this earlier. You worked for one legislature. You've worked for one legislature, you know, so from from Florida. I ended up in California, went to Pepperdine and, you know, post graduate was offered a fellowship, this great fellowship program where you work for the legislature and you get a master's degree.

And at the time, a new leader emerged in the California Republican Party named Kevin McCarthy, who was the minority leader. So I got to be a fellow underneath. Then Assemblyman Kevin McCarthy, who was a great caucus politician and, you know, very ambitious and a lot of goal setting. So that was exciting times. Arnold had just one governor, so we're arguing was a mini Republican resurgence, but it quickly died out in California.

You couldn't overcome bad policy. And then, you know, there's, Texas, which is kind of like this little off off ramp. I was going to go to law school at SMU, but wanted to kind of like get a feel for what Texas was like. My wife had gone to Baylor. She had some connections here. So I moved to Dallas.

I went to go work for a gentleman named Dan Branch, who was, in the Texas House of Representatives and worked on his campaign. It was during redistricting since within like 2004. And he was, you know, drawn in a new district against a gentleman named Martin Frost. And so it was a fun little campaign. I got to come down to Austin and do some ledge work for him.

You know, he's very focused on property tax, on Robin Hood, how Texas funds. It's public school. So I learned a lot of public education then. And that was the moment where I was like, I'm done with politics. I'm just going to go to law school. My then fiance wanted to come home, so we went to Arizona. I thought I would just be there for a little bit.

And now the Arizona legislature, you know, having worked in the legislature for the governor and now as the leader of the state's largest business association. Wow.

And so, as far as kind of what you're doing at the Arizona Chamber, what would you say is your biggest win from the session? You heard me talk a little bit about it on stage a while ago.

We have, been witnessing across the country, but in Arizona in particular, you know, the business community just kind of like have a really good home and say the traditional Republican Party, you know, Republicans are known as pro-business Democrats. Not so much. That's not the case anymore. That's why we're fiercely nonpartisan these days. We have to build a new coalition that supports job creators wherever we can find them.

It's really issue by issue. But what we've seen in Arizona, you know, we're a high growth state, is this kind of rise of anti-growth on both sides, on the on the far left side. They don't want big business coming into the state. And on the far right they're like we don't want our state's, you know, demographics changing. We want them bringing in California.

You know Arizona was one of the leaders in net migration. More people are moving in and are moving out. We're winning that battle by far. And a lot of them come from California because of the harsh economic conditions they're leaving and they're afraid they're going to change the politics of the state. So we have this anti-growth movement. So this session, we have this great company called axion.

Most people notice Taser, they make tasers. They yeah, they make body cams. All the body cams. Just watch any cop show, real or fictional. And you'll see axon writing in the little corner. So great universal brand made right here in Arizona. They're headquartered there and they want to expand their global headquarters. It's a Rick Smith. He's a great president, great visionary leader.

He has a vision for what he wanted it to look like. Went through city council, passed there, put $70 million in there, were already building it. And then a new council comes in and they refer it because the unions didn't get an advance play from from Rick and the neighbors started complaining about apartments because you want to build a campus.

And so we had to fight to survive the referendum and then change the law at the state level to say that if you're building a global headquarters in a city of a certain size, that's not subject to being referred by zoning and so we were successful. Wow. Congratulations. Thank you. That was a big win for us.

Absolutely. And how long have you been at the chamber now this is my fourth year.

How has it changed? You said that Arizona was in the red when you came in. Were when Glenn came in, started improving, of course. But, how have you improved it since? Oh my gosh. I mean, again, it's always easier to make something better than to do a complete turnaround or start from scratch. So I've, I've done I've been really focused on best practices and sustainability.

Glenn was such a big idea person and we had all these big, huge fights that happened. You know, there was a move on our ballot. We have in Arizona a very progressive ballot. Anything can make it to the ballot more or less. You know, it's a signature requirement and that's it. Then you're then you're on. And we had teachers union put a massive income tax increase on our ballot, raising it to 8.5%.

And that would have put us in the top ten in the country. And the chamber led the fight against it. And so Glenn was always really good at taking on these big, huge fights. Now, what I want to do is make sure everything survives the big issues and the peaks and valleys. So we've been instituting a lot of best practices.

A lot of our growth is sustainable. All of our membership interactions are different now. You know, again, just incorporating best practices from around the country, you know, how do we measure ROI? I do quarterly reports. It's a very business minded approach I bring to them. And we've added Glenn had a lot of lobbyists come in and join the board.

And that's great. It's good to have they're the operators. They know how things work, but we need more C-suite people. So we've kind of changed our percentages. You know, right now, the chair of my board is the president, CEO of, Arizona Public Service, our state's largest utility. And so it's a huge deal to have a CEO like that, running our board right now.

And we're just focused on that best practices,

growth. Really? I've really moved so much more into economic development as well. We have a policy agreement. We do a lot of work with our state's commerce authority. We represent them. I'll be at the Paris Air show. We go to international trade shows with them. We present the policy environment for Arizona.

You know, we're you heard a little bit of on stage. So I'll go and I'll present to foreign companies like can you make a direct investment. And occasionally they'll say, well, what about we're also looking at Texas. We're also looking at, you know, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah. What do you think? And I'm happy to tell them, when I think about the regulatory environments and the struggles that each of the states have now, each other states have amazing things as well, and they're fun to compete with.

But yeah, no, I kind of Im the enforcer of wires. And what's the best way to do business in as opposed to Texas as opposed to, you know, Tennessee or North Carolina or any of the others are growing, and you do have the experience in all those states. I have a lot. But, you know, I mean, I know the pluses and minuses.

There's pluses and minuses to Arizona. But again, you know, Texas is a great state. I love it, I love this economic driver. I love what it stands for. But the power reliability issues are a huge problem for them. And I know they're working on that. And they have the money to invest in. That's important. But they're a good lesson for the rest of us too.

On they did you would call well what is known in the energy world d-rag you know, are they allowed more like entrance into the market in energy is one of those unique things where the infrastructure is so built out with these capital outlays, if you switch to d-rag, it's not really capitalist. It's not. It's allowing companies to come in and build off investments others have already made.

And it interferes with grid management, which is so complicated, so we kind of learn our lessons from the Texas being the newest state in the great 48, we were able to take all the best practices. And and that's why I love Arizona where this meritocracy, we're so new, it doesn't matter who your parents are, doesn't matter even where you went to school, 72% of Arizona is from somewhere else.

Or they come to Arizona and you can succeed based on talent alone. We're the kind of last bastion of being a meritocracy, and I love it. The American dream is very true to the US. I love it here. And yeah. Where'd you move from? The UK. You get nice. Okay. I grew up a little bit. My stepdad was in the Navy, so we were stationed over in Scotland, and my brother and I lived in England for a little bit too.

Right. What part? We were at the time was a secret sub base. Now it's not anymore, but it was Glasgow. There was a little town outside called Dunoon. That I lived in for many years, formative years of my childhood, which was a lot of fun. And then, into into London, kind of near the financial district, so near Whitechapel.

But yeah, it's the best humor. I think of any I love it. Yeah. It's hilarious when I wouldn't trade being able to say I've lived in another country for a long period of time. It helps you with the myopic view and understanding things. So yeah, well, keep up the good work in Arizona. I can't wait to come and visit and thank you for your support and anytime.

You're welcome. I want to talk more about what you do and what your company does. And we're very excited to see how we can incorporate that in Arizona. So we're a growth state. And you need to be in all the growth markets. So come out to Arizona. Thank you sir you guys for coming on it. Appreciate it

Rodney. Well, thank you for, coming on the show and chatting a little bit about why you're here in Austin and what you're up to at the US chamber. My former place of work.

Well, you mentioned Harold Kim. Harold's a great guy. Yes.

Oh, he was fantastic. I was there for two years and he's been very welcoming. When I go back and it's exciting now being on the business side and out of the policy world, really. So I kind of still am a little bit with what we're doing, but it's, it's always good to be back in DC. How long have you been out there?

You know, I actually was a congressional staffer for 16 years, but I was working in a district office in Illinois before I got elected to serve myself. So I went from District Stafford, a member of Congress, and I won the closest Republican victory in the nation in 2012 and then spent the next ten years representing a swing district, a very competitive district in central in southwestern Illinois.

Wow. And what made you want to go from staffer seeing everything behind the scenes of what actually happens in Congress to running for Congress?

Well, you know, you always have an interest when you become a staffer of what would it be like, you know, to be the principal or to be the member of Congress? But over my 16 years, I kind of enjoyed the staff side. I enjoyed the campaign side. I was able to go out and and work for others to help them get elected, and frankly, was able to put together good teams.

That made us all really good at it. Even in a state like Illinois, where we would overachieve as Republicans. But I got a call from my then boss guy named John Shimkus. And John, called me one day in 2020, 12, early 2012. He said, hey, did you see the news that one of his colleagues, a guy named Tim Johnson, was going to retire after he won the primary?

And that opened up a selection process to replace him on the ballot. And John, my mentor, my boss, I was with him from day one, said, I think you ought to do it. And then he said, I got to go bye. That was the recruitment that got me thinking about running for Congress. And then all my friends who I helped get elected all said, you need to do this.

Well, it does prepare you for being a staffer and seeing the campaign side, seeing the the dirty stuff, seeing the good stuff. Because I know whenever I was a staffer, I went into politics because I had so many opinions. But then I realized, oh, I work for Congressman Arrington. I represent his opinions. So how, what types of policy were you working on going from staff then into your own position and being able to voice your own opinions?

Well, I was lucky. My my boss, Mr. Shimkus, gave me a lot of latitude to do what I thought was best for him back in Illinois. So a lot of the same issues I worked on transportation issues, agriculture issues, and then I got to run the committee for the Republicans, called House administration, as that's every staffer's dream, because that's how the House operates.

And all the times the House, all the times the employees of the house told me, we can't do this because we've never done it that way. They quit telling me that when I became a member of Congress and had jurisdiction over their bosses. So we made a lot of internal changes that made the house operate better from when I got there in 1997, and then when I got on the committee and in 2013, and then when I left in 2023.

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So how long was that term?

I was there for ten years. So five terms.

Okay. Very exciting. What was your biggest win while you were on the hill?

I had a lot of wins. I mean, I was the type of legislator. And you can ask your old boss, Jody Arrington, who, you know, has some deficiencies mentally. Of course. Let him know I said that, please.

Also,

We can go through your entire delegation if you'd like. But I, you know, helped legislate on the front end. So a lot of my priorities would get put into the underlying legislation before it would go to the floor, before it was heard in the committee. But one, I mean, besides transportation reauthorization, FAA highway bills, farm bills that I can I can talk about putting my stamp on the tax bill for 2017.

I can talk about areas where we put our stamp on those. One issue that I promised to address that no one thought we would we would do was we created a tax incentive to help, employers help pay down the student debt of their employees. The irony is we got that tax law written in the CARES act during a pandemic when no one was thinking about hiring.

So a lot of folks didn't realize that that's actually law. And what it does, it takes it really takes the House student loan repayment program and makes it tax free for everyone, using it for up to $5,250. It mirrors tuition reimbursement. Now, here's the irony. That provision was set to expire at the end of 2025. And in the reconciliation bill that just passed, that provisions made permanent at a time where employers are looking to retain employees, hire new employees.

This is a voluntary, private sector approach to allow them to do that.

That is awesome. And you have a really impressive background. Tell us what you're up to now at the U.S. chamber.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce came to me one day after I'd left Congress already was enjoying being a contract lobbyist, had a great seven figure book of business, and they said, we want you to come run government affairs. And I said, no. And I gave them a list of names to call. And then we talked again and I said, you know what?

Tell me what it's going to be about. Tell me what I can do to actually change the culture and build a team that's going to be able to accomplish the goals that I know only the U.S. chamber can accomplish. And they laid out a great plan of action, accepted my plan of action. And then we got to work on finalizing, my, my rollover into to working at the chamber.

And at the same time, I was able to bring over three folks who worked for me on Capitol Hill, and they're just killing it on behalf of the chamber right now.

That's amazing. How big is your team right now?

Right now we have about eight people. We have less people in the Chambers Government Affairs Division now than when I started. And I believe if you ask anyone on Capitol Hill about our team, they, they will say we are better, we are more efficient, and we are we have a more business-like approach, which is exactly what the U.S. chamber is all about.

Right? I love it, efficiency. I'm all about efficiency, too. Are y'all using AI at all in your efficiency right now?

Well, you're talking to the old guy, the bunch, one of the old guys. We also also have the former House parliamentarian, Tom Wickham. So I'm not the oldest guy in our group, but I'm close. But, you know, I don't use as much AI because that's just not my specialty. Whereas I am sure a lot of members of our team are probably utilizing AI in the chamber ranks AI in the AI proposed regulatory regime as one of our top priorities, because we believe we don't want to hinder what AI can do for a wide range of issues throughout our economy.

Wealth can be used in every field. It's the most exciting kind of industrial revolution we've seen yet with AI. So certainly what are the biggest issues that you're lobbying on behalf of right now for the chamber?

Well, one of them actually intersects AI, and that is the tax bill reconciliation. I came to the chamber understanding that our number one priority was making sure that the reauthorization of the Trump tax cuts of 2017 was our top priority, because many of the pro-growth provisions that affect small businesses and tax rates, lower tax rates that affect every family in the country, they were set to expire in 2025.

And and really, it seemed like it was so far away when I helped craft the bill back in 2017, 2025. We'll never get here. Well, here it is. And now what you saw just a week and a half ago where the Republicans in the House, they came together, they passed that reauthorization. And in that reauthorization, here's that link to AI.

They have a ten year moratorium on state AI rules and regulations that could adversely impact what happens at the national level. We don't the U.S. chamber doesn't believe that there shouldn't be any rules and regulations over AI, but we have to make sure that we don't handle the next hit, hinder, handle, hinder the next generation of what we would have considered Google at the time.

When I was growing up, before internet search engines were invented, you know, of course, by Al Gore.

I love it. Will appreciate you doing supporting what we're doing as well in that. So, very pro what you're working on. What are you doing today here at the Venture Gala?

Well, I'm actually a sub, so Neil Bradley, he's the guy who recruited me to come to the chamber. Neil was Eric Cantor, our majority leader's policy director when I met him. When I got to Congress. And being a former staffer, I always knew before I went to my colleagues who were elected, like me, with an idea I'd run it by the staff members I trusted first.

And Neil was always my go to guy. I went to him one time. I had a veteran talk to me about an idea. Remember Obamacare? It punishes small business when a small business when they get to 30 employees, and then they have to cover every employee, regardless of whether these employees that they have are using their health coverage.

So I had a veterans advisory board, that veteran's advisory board. One member came to me and said, why don't you exempt veterans who don't use employer health care from counting towards that 30 employee limit? We I went to nail with that idea and I said, here's my idea, came from a veteran in my district. I'm calling it to hire more Heroes Act.

What do you think? And Neil looked at me and deadpanned, that's a great idea. Next thing I know, I'm debating it on the day I'm getting sworn into my second term, January 3rd of 2015, and the guy who's the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee at the time was none other than Paul Ryan. And he looked at me, said, how come you're doing these things?

You're not on the committee? I said, you know, good ideas just don't start at the committee level. They start anywhere. And that's why I'm glad to be part of great ideas at chambers of all levels. And and companies like yours.

Hire more heroes. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll all get this over to you and appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you sir.

Well, so tell me more about your background. I know you said, that the other chamber CEO was in pharmaceuticals, I think. Is that your background as well? Well, yes. I co-founded a biopharmaceutical company in Memphis in 2005, and, we, and licensed our technologies from founding science institutions that were based in Memphis.

So I partnered with the Southern College of Optometry on a dry eye product, as well as the University of Tennessee Health Science Center on a, product for autoimmune diseases. So amazing. And, of course, you know, we were seeing a lot of success, and then we were out raising capital. We closed a friends and family round of seed capital in the spring of 2008, and we were going to go out for a series A in the fall of eight.

But everything changed in the fall of eight with Lehman Brothers crash. And and we didn't know at the time we were entering a major recession. So raising capital became incredibly difficult to, to, to gather. So we we hunkered down, we got orphan drug status in the US and in the EU. We filed patents in 50 global markets, kind of waiting on the capital markets to return, but unfortunately they never really did.

So fast forward to 2010. Our largest investor told me about this new governor who had just been elected and was focusing on entrepreneurship and economic development, and he encouraged me to maybe pursue that, go pay the bills for a little while. And, and so I thought, well, why not? And I went to the Economic Club of Memphis, where the governor's new commissioner of Economic development, Bill Hagerty, was speaking.

And I introduced myself to Bill, who was also an entrepreneur, and, was part of a team that backed MapQuest and just told him about my background and that I was expressing interest in and their opportunities because they were decentralizing economic development. And he said, well, Ted, we'd be thrilled to have you on our team. So I did.

Got a lot of really exciting projects underway. Nike, had a major expansion. International paper had a major expansion of their global headquarters. And, and then Bill appointed me as assistant commissioner for Innovation and Strategy. So I had a lot of different platforms. I did business development, but also, had the federal programs, an innovation program for small businesses, rural program.

So I got to do pretty much everything else. And then, he appointed me as his chief of staff. So, and then he left after the, the, the reelection of Governor Haslam and went back into the private sector. Of course, he ended up becoming ambassador to Japan, and now he's now he's a US senator from Tennessee.

So it's been wonderful to see his trajectory. But both he and Governor Haslam really ran economic development like a private business. And, and so we we saw tremendous success. I mean, we were state of the year in economic development, you know, back to back years. So wow, like what Texas has experienced, we we did that as well.

And and I wanted to bring that back to my hometown, Memphis. I, I didn't move to Nashville. I served the governor, close to eight years. I commuted for five of that. What is that drive? It's three hours. Wow. 200 miles. Yeah. So I would go up on a Monday and that on Friday.

Okay. But I learned a lot of the principles of economic development in and regionalism and focusing on, you know, creating that, that highly curated concierge level service, to businesses and then business attraction was always a thrill to me. So, so when I left the administration in the governor's last year of his, term, he was term limited.

I came back to my alma mater, the University of Memphis, and they created a position for me. Actually, the president of the university did. So I became the first chief economic development officer. And I also handled all government relations for the university as well. So we were able to to elevate the profile of the university in Nashville.

And we ended up securing about 100 million in funding. We ended up getting our Carnegie R1, research designation, which was a tremendous accomplishment. And, and then I got back into pure economic development with the chamber and was part of the team working with the state of Tennessee on the recruitment of Ford and their largest investment ever in, all electric vehicle facility, right near Memphis.

And, and then I went full time with the chamber as chief economic development officer and then became president and CEO in 2022. And the rest is history gradually. Congratulations! So that was a long winded answer to that fantastic. My background. But I've got the, you know, the the private and public sector experience. And I think the intersection of that has afforded me the ability to see Memphis's economy grow well with perfect guests.

That's what we like to talk about all the time. I do see the intersection of business and and policy and private sector and public sector and how, yeah, your your backgrounds are very impressive, your entrepreneur at heart, which I think is perfect for this type of position to help economic development. That's right. How did you get into pharmaceuticals?

Yeah. So it was, kind of fortuitous. Honestly, I had been working in consulting, and I was matchmaking entrepreneurs, startups, founders with technology. And and so we were focused on tech commercialization. And, you know, I was putting these teams together. And then I thought, well, gosh, what am I doing? I could do this myself, and I want to be a part of this.

So we identified a technology and and I had been working with a couple of founders and, and one in particular. He approached me, he said, well, I'd love to license this and pursue this technology, but I will only do it with you if you come along with me. And I said, well, let's go, let's, let's go for it.

And, so, you know, we we were the first company that was, securing investment from a new fund that was created in Memphis called Inova. So we were fund one, investment one. We were the first company in the biotech accelerator there. So we had a lot of really interesting success early on. But unfortunately, the economic climate became very challenging.

What do you think about that climate now? I know a lot of people are saying it's very difficult for, getting funding and startups. What are you seeing? It is I think that landscape has not changed. And in fact, even then, back in, the, you know, 2008, 2009, era, the FDA was not approving a lot of new products.

And so the regulatory environment is fraught with, you know, challenges and barriers, which is why we were domiciled in the UK and we pursued our orphan drug designation in the EU because we felt like we could probably advance clinical trials easier there. But clinical trials are expensive and it takes capturing that capital to do it. We also partnered with potential strategic companies, alliances.

Nothing ever really formed because we were just too early stage. So, it was challenging. And I don't think that that has changed at all. We're hearing a lot of the same things. Yeah. So you're telling me a lot about some of the projects that you have coming to Tennessee and to Memphis, specifically? Lee. Yes.

So tell me what you're most excited about. Yeah. Well, you know, Memphis is known as a global logistics hub. Obviously, we're home to Fedex global headquarters. Many other transportation companies. In fact, we've got the highest concentration of the location quotient of logistics professionals in the US. Over 3600 companies. And so, there's a lot of specialty in that space.

We have the all the modalities of transportation, rare rail, river, road, runway, we call them the four hours. But I have been focused on that diversification of our economy. And we had identified tech. We had identified advanced manufacturing, we were tracking data. And in 2018, we were selected. Memphis was selected by Brookings to go through this economic inclusive indicators lab.

And out of that, we ended up with 31 indicators of our economy, that measured the strength or the lack thereof. And we took that and we compared ourselves with nine other cities that were similar to Memphis, kind of in the central spine of the US. So Milwaukee, Saint Louis, Nashville, New Orleans, Saint Louis. Yeah. So we wanted to compare ourselves and we did not fare very well.

We were kind of in the last quartile of, of the indicators with our cities. But there was one indicator that Memphis was number one, and that was the percentage of IT positions held by African Americans. So we had a high concentration of black tech talent. And and so I beg the question, what does that look like nationally?

And we looked at the top 53 markets in the US and looked at the same data point, and we were still number one. Atlanta was number two. And it wasn't even close. But Atlanta had really marketed themselves in that space. So we began targeting tech companies that were looking at diversifying their workforce. I mean, Apple at that time was less than 1% black in their workforce.

Wow. And and then you had the McKinsey report come out. You had the Wall Street Journal article that said, look, if you're a tech CEO and you want to diversify your workforce, you have to go to where that workforce is. And predominantly it's concentrated in the Southeast and Memphis being the largest metro area with the highest population of African-Americans, we felt like we were well suited.

So I went to all of the tech companies directly. I, I met with Microsoft and, at their headquarters, I toured their headquarters. I share with them the, the stats on our workforce. And they said, Ted, we love this. This is incredible. We had no idea we wished we had known this two years ago before we committed to Atlanta.

Wow. So it was a kind of a false victory. But it it did crystallize in my mind that we had something to build from. And in a conversation that I had with Fedex founder and chairman Mr. Fred Smith, he coined the phrase digital delta because so many other markets around the country were replicating Silicon Valley. You had New Orleans what, want to be the Silicon Bayou?

And he said, we're not that, but we are the digital delta. And so, with his permission, the chamber trademarked that, and we began using that as a platform to market Memphis in a new way. And fast forward to last year, when, we were approached by X, I, a startup, as we were told, you know, we had the opportunity to sell them on the same attributes.

And fortunately for them, they were focused on speed and power. You know, AI is a race and Elon is entering this race behind, because you had other much more mature platforms already out there. So they needed to build quickly and they wanted to do it at scale. So he wanted to build the world's largest supercomputer. Well, you've got to have a lot of space to do that.

You have to have a lot of power. And the chamber helped coordinate and quarterback all of that with all of our government partners, all levels. And we really expedited everything. We kind of vertically integrated the entire process. Economic development is usually a long cycle, and instead of doing things sequentially, we did them, you know, vertically, concurrently all at the same time.

And so they had a timeline and this was March of 2024, mind you, and they said they wanted to be with infrastructure in place and power turned on June 1st. That's the fastest anybody has ever moved. But the expectation was high. And fortunately, we had everyone buy into that belief system that Memphis could do this. This was no data center, right?

This was a computational cluster where they were going to be computing the data, not storing it, but but learning from it. And, and then, you know, generating a product platform from that which is called grok. G R O K. And they're on their third version of that. But they have built a super cluster computer that has 225,000 Nvidia chips, thousands and thousands of servers from Dell and Supermicro.

And, it's a phenomenon. They call it Colossus. Wow. That's now, based in Memphis, Tennessee, of all places. And we love it. And I'm sure that's a trickle effect. So congratulations on on getting that that deal and that partnership. Yeah. Having them come to your to your city and your hometown. Right. So why should other tech companies move to Memphis?

Well, I think we've proven that they can scale incredibly quickly. And with AI and any technology, I think power generation is going to be really at the epicenter of how they scale, what size of operation they can they can build. And in this case, we're talking not just megawatts, but but gigawatts of power. And so that that requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure to, to be built out.

And fortunately in Memphis, we were able to prove that that concept and, and build it scale. For instance, AI was able to build a, a substation right on site that now provides 150MW. They'll double that in size just in the next year. They'll they'll bring a second substation online. So that will be 300MW. And they have just acquired a new building.

It's 1,000,000ft². And this is part of their plan to, approach a million GPUs. So all of this requires a tremendous amount of power. And they are in the process now of looking at how they generate that power at 1.2GW. So that is why Memphis has placed itself in that position. And then last week we had Google announce a major data center.

They're going to invest 10 billion in, and I, for building a complex, in West Memphis, which is technically Arkansas, but it's literally right across the Mississippi River from us. And we were pleased to work with West Memphis on on recruiting Google there. So suddenly, you know, Memphis is known now, globally. And we're talking with companies like Nvidia, Dell and Supermicro on what it looks like to have a major presence there, because now they have a lot of their customers in close proximity.

Amazon is in the Jackson, Mississippi area building a major data center. There. I think that's close to 30 billion. X AI it was 12 billion. I think they're going to invest another 40 billion in Memphis this year. So we're seeing economic development at a scale that's unprecedented for Memphis. That's very exciting. And you mentioned some of the workforce that you have.

There are very, you know, high tech. Yes. Are those the people that are taking a lot of these jobs, or are you seeing that people are needing workforce training? What's that looking? Yeah. So all of the above. But what we know is that X AI currently has 300 folks working full time. 82% of those are Memphians. Wow. Which is what we love.

That's great. Obviously we want in-migration of new talent, data scientists, computational engineers. But the fact that the company is committed to Memphis and growing the Memphis economy and providing opportunities and, you know, they pay at Palo Alto rates. So everyone in that facility is earning six figures. And when you're in Memphis, that goes a long way.

So we have one of the lowest cost of living rates in the country. So people that are moving in go, wow, this is incredible. I can really provide for my family. I can raise a family, I can buy a really great place to live. And then Memphis is really cool. We've got a cool factor. So we've got the blues and barbecue and all of those things.

But culturally we're we're diverse and we have a lot to offer in terms of, of, living and, lifestyles. Exciting time. Yeah. I can't wait to talk, like, in a year to see where you guys are. I know, how has the regulatory environment been for you and and the state overall? Is it, you know, very business friendly.

Is that another reason you're seeing this influx of people? Yeah, Tennessee as a whole is business friendly. And I know Tennessee and Texas are very similar in many aspects. And so that business climate is very inviting to this kind of investment. We also do not have an income tax. So, that's good. So very appealing to, to corporations and executives as they consider where to domicile.

But but yeah, you know, in terms of the AI space, obviously power and generation is is critical, but X AI is coming in and they're actually investing $80 million in what will be the world's largest wastewater facility. Memphis sits on an aquifer, and we have some of the purest water in the country. That's amazing. We have, a 100 trillion gallons of water in our aquifer.

So that's a precious asset for us. We love drinking water straight from our tap. It doesn't have to be filtered. Wow, that's really great for for firms like, Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital where they're doing clinical development on on pharmaceuticals to treat childhood cancers, so they don't have to spend as much on filtering the water.

That's great for food manufacturing and beverage manufacturing. So, we have great beer. It tastes great because water is great. But that being said, you know, we have needed vital infrastructure. And so X AI, at their own cost, is coming in and building this wastewater facility that will actually save 4 to 5 billion gallons of our aquifer water every year.

That's tremendous. I haven't lived in I lived in Tennessee, as you know, for but it was about ten years ago. And I know it's it's changing a lot. If I was to come to Memphis today, where would you tell me to go first? Oh my gosh. Well, first, I would tell you to stay downtown. Okay? You know, we're we're home to the South Grand Hotel.

The Peabody. Yes. Where they have the ducks in the lobby. That's a spectacle in and of itself. They come, march down into the lobby every day. In the morning at 11, and they go back upstairs to their duck penthouse on the roof, at 5 p.m.. So you have to do that. We also have a really cool boutique hotels downtown.

But I would say, you know, your first stop has got to either be the National Civil Rights Museum, or Graceland, of course, the home of Elvis Presley. And I'm, you know, honoring, the king of rock and roll today with my shoes that nobody can see. They're amazing, by the way. Tell us more about that. Yeah.

So they say, it's embroidered with TCB and a lightning bolt and Elvis coin, taking care of business in a flash. And that's what we're doing in Memphis. We're taking care of business in a flash. And that's that's why we were able to win exci. So it seemed very poignant today to be here and tell our story, as, as to how we got here.

I love that. And what a note to leave on. So you will have to show these. But these are blue like navy blue, very tasteful blue suede shoes. We will show a picture after. So we're not going to get your feet up in there. But what a note. And I am very excited to come visit Memphis again soon.

So thank you so much for coming on. All right. Thank you.

Tell me who you are and why you're here today at the Texas Venture Forum.

Yes.

So my name is William Steele. I'm currently the CEO and one of the co-founders of a company called Supply Pay.

Cool.

Supply Pay. Man. We got started a.

Little over 16 months ago now. So pretty new.

It all started. My wife is also an incredible entrepreneur. We have a family restaurant down in an area in South Texas called the Rio Grande Valley.

That's awesome.

And somebody brought in my co-founder. We had a bowl of soup together.

And one thing led to another.

He was talking about interest rate environments, how much trade happens between Mexico and the United States. So I built a small little MVP. We started to test these ideas together. We kept pulling that ball of yarn. And here we are. Last year we we helped finance over $2.5 million in trade between Mexican exporters and buyers here in the US, mostly in the fresh produce space.

So like think cucumbers, avocados, bell peppers, tomatoes. We get a lot of fresh produce from Mexico that we consume here in the United States, roughly around like 20 to 25% of the produce we eat comes from Mexico, and a majority of that produce moves through a town here in Texas called McAllen. Pharr. So these are two different towns in the same area.

As an example, I think last year across the far Reynosa bridge, we crossed like two over $200 million worth of salary. Oh, wow. Just in salary. Yeah. And so as we continued, to help these clients, we realized that there were more areas to solve than just the financing. Right? We were initially solving what are called long or unstable cash flow conversion cycles in cross-border trade.

We come to find out that there's.

A lot of other issues.

Maybe knowing where the truck is, maybe having correct documentation when you get to the port.

So we started to build some other really cool.

Pieces of functionality for our users that we found have really helped to strengthen their businesses and helped to strengthen and stabilize that trade between Mexico and the United States. More particularly, our concentration of clients is all in the Texas region. Right. So we're a Texas company that started here, in the McAllen area. We work really closely with a lot of friends and partnerships and investors here in Austin.

And that's.

Kind of like where we're at.

Now. We're just continuing to build work with clients. And, you know, continue to understand how we can be more of a service to them and their businesses.

So did you meet your co-founder completely randomly at the restaurant?

Yeah, so that's a good question. It was actually.

We have a lot.

To thank to Miss Stephanie. So Miss Stephanie is one of the team members at the Center of Innovation and Commercialization, which is essentially a University of Texas, school system extension program.

Okay.

That is in a town called Weslaco, which.

It is really small.

Town. I'm familiar. I, I work for the, the governor a couple sessions back and we went down to the border all the time and, went to McAllen specifically and Weslaco. So I have that.

Yeah.

So Weslaco, well, that's good. Most people don't know it's down there.

It's far right.

Yes, yes.

There's a couple of times.

About five hours from Austin. Yeah. So you in Weslaco? Miss Stephanie saw Jorge what? Hey. He he comes from an extensive background in cross-border trade. He was an accountant for an exporting co-op in central Mexico.

They mostly did Roma tomatoes.

And then later was selected to become the CFO of a fresh produce importing company based in McAllen, which is again, if if you throw a stick in McAllen, you're going to hit like five fresh produce importers. It's, really high concentration of that particular, customers.

And Jorge was the CFO took of that company, helped them grow from ten to like 30 million a year, was doing his MBA program, created a concept called Veggie Ventures, which would one day become supply pay, after we teamed up. So Stepahnie saw his project, she knew me from building different things. I actually was in a quite similar space, building a civic media platform for a while.

And chat more about that.

Yes, I would, I could go on and on about that. I really have a sweet spot for helping people communicate information that happened in town hall hearings. Like, AI can really help in the spaces. I have listened to your conversation earlier. Like, you clearly understand the benefits and how you can communicate information. Multilingual information. In Texas, we have a lot of native Spanish speakers in Houston, a lot of Vietnamese speakers.

It's a cultural melting pot and it's good for everyone to see all that.

We thought we should team up, and we did. It was a really great interaction. Initially, I didn't think I was going to be building.

It.

Because I was very busy working on my civic media platform. But more and more of that Jorge talked. I was like, man, this is a really interesting problem set. And he's a really nice guy. So I just thought, like, I'll try to help him. Whether it's with someone else.

To partner with.

Or myself. Like I just want to help him be successful.

And in the process, I was like, you know what, let me ask my wife.

If this is a good idea.

And she has a really good business sense as well. So she was like, this sounds like a good idea. You should just like try to build something and see if it works.

So I took a few weeks, built the MVP, and it was a much quicker product market fit and a much quicker, and clearer business plan.

In the government space. It can be hard. Who do you sell to the government that you sell to the people? Do you you know.

You have a niche or it's too broad.

And I was yeah, two years of me wandering the wilderness trying to figure out that.

Certain.

There's a lot of users. Is it B2C? Is it, B2B which one do you do? We're B2B and we're specific to stakeholders. We can talk more offline about it, but I agree it is a you have to get to know your customer base. Yeah. So who is your current customer?

Right now it's a fresh produce importers okay. So that's who a lot of our software enhancements and kind of like operational enhancements and value adds are.

We also.

worked a lot with exporters in Mexico. They really need the financing.

Of what we do.

So.

Mostly fresh produce importers here.

In the United States. These are companies that sell to retailers like Walmart, H-e-b, Kroger, HelloFresh, Publix. I can go on and on. I actually just got back from a really interesting trip in Canada, in Ontario, there's only so.

You would never believe it, but.

There's like.

Probably over.

10,000 acres of commercial greenhouses in two towns in Ontario. And the towns are called Lamington and Kingsville. And it felt like I was in McAllen.

Why?

Because I would go.

To the grocery store and everybody was Latino. I was like, hey, what's up guys? Like asking them where they're from, but these are Latinos from all over the world.

I mean, they were there providing value to the economy.

Through all of the work that needs to be done.

Right. Like, these are massive, massive greenhouse operations. And these are, you know, skilled workers that know how to work in greenhouses.

It was really.

Interesting to see. It was.

Like, man, this is it's a border region right between.

Detroit and so Canada, US, just like McAllen, between, you know, Mexico, the United States. So it was really.

It was really.

Cool to see. But there were some really large importers there that I was meeting with. And, you know, you find that there are these kinds of pockets in different regions of like, large importing for whether it's automotive.

Or, fresh produce.

It could be medical supplies. But it's a roundabout way of answering your question. Importers, particularly in the fresh produce space. But, our software is sector agnostic. So we've actually been working with clients that do e-commerce. That is not just Mexico, the United States. Our software can apply over, ocean as well. So we do e-commerce from Vietnam to the United States.

You know, we're interested in in other sectors. We have one client right now who's working with us to do rubber tires from different parts of Southeast Asia to the United States. So anyone that's an import or export that sells to the United States, it can be a a really good fit. We can help, to streamline their businesses.

Well, I love to hear your founder story, first of all, because that's, I think, the basis of, you know, knowing where a company's going to be very successful is having a really good fountain co-founder relationship. That's how I felt. I met my co-founder on a Y Combinator matching program actually. And the other is my husband, so.

Oh, but.

That's the best.

It's great. Yeah. So, we all get along really well. I think that's like the biggest, most important thing that you can get through problems and like each other. But also seeing the problem in the, the market, that makes sense that where he found the problem in that there was some gap in what was going on, and that's where some of the best companies are built.

So that's very exciting.

Yeah, absolutely.

How have tariffs affected your recent work and the uncertainty in that level?

I think the biggest way it's funny enough, the biggest weight's impacted.

Our business is more from investors being uncertain. And you know, during our last round we raised a pre-seed round.

We were targeting a million.

We were oversubscribed to 2.1, which is like, you know, it was incredible to to find those partners. We found that like a really great group of investors during that time and a few that.

I really wanted to come in. They couldn't get over that uncertainty.

And it's okay because like you know, it was know nobody knew where up and down was going to be in a few months. Even now, it's still a little, uncertain on the horizon.

But from a customer perspective, it actually brought a lot more people. It brought a lot of

Potential uncertainty to the forefront of these operators. Right. So a lot of the exporters, a lot of the importers are like, man, like what happens if, you know, my commodity gets tariff an additional percent? You know, how am I preparing?

Of course, in the.

Supply chain, the retailers are hosting meetings and like Walmart and H-e-b, they're all communicating with their suppliers, as efficiently as they can.

But, you know, in several chains of communication, things get lost.

They get fragmented. Different departments need to be tracking different things. It's it's quite a, a lot of gears moving together. So what it did was when.

We come and talk to our.

Customers, we say, hey, like, we can help

consolidate some of that communication.

Make sure that.

Those documents.

Are.

Done.

Correctly.

Right. Especially when you're talking about like bills of lading or purchase orders. Right. So as tariff codes, that's the tariffs shift. And different commodities are essentially like taxed at different rates. You know, you need to reflect that accordingly in how you're pricing. Right. And that has to do with negotiation and procurement. And, you know, all the way upstream to the buyer.

What is their pricing? How does it change your contract and how does that change your suppliers contract.

So all of that needs to.

Be done at a low latency. And that's essentially what we've been working on. That's what we've been building. That's that's what we saw would be a way.

A way of.

Improving those business processes. And so the customers are actually like, hey, that sounds like a great solution. Can we talk more about that? They're they're reaching out. They're trying to to understand more on how we can help, ease that uncertainty and that anxiety, especially in the communication process and the supply chain. So it helped in that regard.

And then, of course, like, you know, in general, people are looking to be more strategic as operators like exporters are like, hey, you know, if if invoice sizes change and I need additional liquidity, you know, where, where can I find those options? So, you know, the uncertainty in uncertainty there's opportunity. You just have to be able to see like what that path is.

And then really get yourself in front of those right customers with the right messaging. So it's been it's been interesting.

I read it's an exciting time for you and congratulations on the race.

Thank you.

In an uncertain time as well. We're just talking about that, with, one of the chamber CEOs that it's a very, uncertain time for investors in general. So that's a very exciting. And, where can people find you if they're they're looking for you got a customer listening on the line here where?

Yeah, absolutely. If you're an operator and you're somebody who you think this can help with.

Yeah. Just reach out.

To me directly on LinkedIn. Just William Steele, straight on LinkedIn. I'm very responsive there. If you, you know, you can also go check out our website supply p.o. But I will get back to you the quickest, especially if you're messaging me on LinkedIn as a customer and we can connect. I can get you to the right person.

We can get on a call, and, you know, heck, I'll drive to you. You know, even if you're in Guanajuato, I'll come down. It doesn't.

Matter. I love that scrappy, honest start of life. Well, keep up the good work. And thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Yeah.

I did have a a buddy of mine who, I actually met playing hockey, who when he was in, fifth or sixth grade, he got he got a hold of his dad's magazine collection.

Oh. Which was would have been interesting to the young boys at that time. And he made a mint selling those magazines second hand at school until somebody found out and, brought it to his parents attention. That's hilarious. Yeah. How old were they? He was probably ten at the time. Dad. Is one really funny? Yeah. If my kid did that, I don't know what to do, because that's pretty.

He said he didn't make any money with the elementary school kids, but the middle school boys were his target market. Good, Mark. That's a good intro.

Who are you? What do you what do you do? Well, Mark crumbles, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Eagle Venture Lab, which is a venture studio in Fort Worth. And for those of you who don't know what a venture studio is, it's essentially it's a venture capital funded company that launches other companies.

And so we we ideate, found or co-found, launch, operate, grow and and detach. Eventually other companies, our venture studios are different from accelerators, incubators and venture funds. A venture venture fund is going to make it's going to raise money and do a little bit of diligence on a lot of different entities. And they're going to use portfolio theory to make a lot of bets and then deploy that capital and use what, is known as the power law, where one in about every ten of those companies will return the value of the entire investment.

And those those ten, they just don't know which one. And venture funds are usually not tremendously active in the in the diligence after a company launches, they might sit on the board, but they're not really operating a rolling up their sleeves every day. A venture studio is different in that we we are very narrowly focused and highly specialized.

So since my my co-founder partner Wade is, he's a former Army Ranger, I'm, I'm a Naval Academy grad and a former naval aviator. We bring a military discipline and kind of a special warfare mentality to what we do, where everybody is really good at their particular specialty. Everybody can do a little bit of everything, but we all have our particular niches and then our our business vertical that we focus on really are generally it's B2B, SAS, we do only B2B SAS with a concentration in fintech and business process improvement.

So extremely narrow focus, very tight. We use the same team on every launch. So if the same back office from accounting to finance other infrastructure, we use the same developer, same marketing team, same CTO, same engineering team. So we don't have any, the normal problems of, you know, forming, storming, norming, then performing. We go right to performing.

And to give you an example, the last two companies that we launched were actually we co-founded, which is unusual for us, we usually found exclusively, but we, we co-founded, each of them went from start to being fully branded in less than two weeks. And then they, completed their MVP in less than six weeks. And we're earning revenue in less than three months.

Wow. So that's a lot faster than you normally do because the the operators are not consumed with raising money. They don't have to bother doing that. We we essentially get them funded from day one and that they don't have to do things like finding attorney, find an accountant, get back office system, set up, build the tech stack. They don't have any of that.

It's just they go right to essentially marketing, developing their product and selling. That is really cool. And I have a ton of questions about the venture studio side. So first, thank you for your service. Well thank you. What did you do in the Navy? I flew jets off aircraft carriers and did some test flying, for about eight years.

So, love the flying. Love the people. Didn't like living on ship very much. I was away from home a lot. But, you know, I was happy to do that. This. I would say it's the most fun that you can have fully clothed. And then, but the the time away from home is extremely difficult. You spend a lot of time.

So even in my, my war was the first Gulf War. Even before that happened in, in a three, three year squadron tour, I was gone 22 months. And out of all the squadrons that flew the same airplane that I did, we were gone the least of anybody. So everybody else was gone more than 22 months out of a 36 month tour.

So it's very, very hard on the on the family life and you never really feel like you're grounded and rooted. But that's why they call it the service, right? You're right. You're out there serving and doing your thing. So very happy and proud to do that. Serve for 12 years. But it was it was time to do something different.

I was ready to have a different kind of lifestyle. And, I didn't want to just fly airplanes. I wanted to own them. You know, you're not you're not going to do that on a naval officer salary. You know, at the time I say land landing on aircraft carriers at night was probably the stupidest thing you could do for $38,000 a year, which is what about what I was earning at the time?

But boy, was fun. It was. It was a lot of fun doing that and amazing experience. I felt like that about the government working on Capitol Hill. I made less than that. And, it was brutal, but it was so fun and I was like, a master's degree. I'm gonna didn't go do that. I'm glad I went and took that time to do it, because the experience was everything.

It was very much. And, you know, as I recognized that I wasn't going to stay in the Navy, I knew, I knew I was kind of entrepreneurial and I knew I wanted to do something, but I didn't know the difference between a bed sheet and balance sheet. I didn't know anything. Yeah. And so, the obvious thing to do was to get an MBA, but, my, my grades at the Naval Academy, let's say, you know, were less than stellar.

I, I like to say I graduated in the top 5% of the bottom one third of my class. And so I had to I had to actually get a masters to get a transcript strong enough to get into a top tier program. And so I started a masters, I got got one from Tennessee and then got an MBA Kellogg.

And then I went into defense for a few years, spun off a technology. You know, they I kind of I was the guy going, hey, what can we do with this technology in the commercial market? And, you know, defenses. It's it's it's a very honorable industry, but it's not very creative. And, I remember one of the engineers in the room when I said that leaned over, his buddy said, oh, no, another blink.

An idea guy. Except he didn't say blinking. And, and I said, well, maybe you can just indulge me, you know, at some point and convince the team to do a brainstorming session. I brought I brought in pizza and Nerf guns. I mean, these were these were like, if you remember the comic strip Dilbert, you know, the Dilbert, the plastic pocket liners.

And if you can think of the most cloistered engineering culture that you can imagine, with a very stereotypical engineering group, that's what this team was like. And long story short, we ended up creating a, a few ideas and I reduced them to PowerPoint slides and wallpapered my office with this stuff and about, I don't know, eight months later, I came into the office one day and, my lead systems engineer, his name is Mike.

He's a principal investigator for a DARPA project. So DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. That that's where our customer was. But he he was he was, about my height. So, you know, only about five, eight new is about 280 pounds. And this was in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the middle of winter, and it's like three degrees outside.

But he's standing in my office at 730 looking at my office wall, and he's sweating like, profusely. I said, Mike, what's up? And he said, I think we can build this thing. And so we sat down and sketched out how to build it. And a couple years it took a while, but we we eventually spun that off and created a commercial company around it with, what turned out was another venture studio partner and, a three and a half years after we launched it, Motorola bought it for a quarter billion dollars.

And I kind of said, I think I want to do more of that. You know, that's that seems like a better business model than punching a clock in the paycheck. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

So in like layman's terms, people need a venture studio. Can you describe the full cycle of from, you know, founding ideas that you and your co-founder that come up with the ideas and then you have the team kind of full cycle do it?

Can you just tell us in sure version how that works? Sure, yes. Short as I can make it. There. So there's there's two models that we use. One is the self founded and the other is co-founded. Okay. So, the only difference between the two really is who spends most of the operating time on a day to day basis.

So obviously if we we self found is my partner and I, either one of us will start out as the as the CEO and we the team rallies around us and we build the model around around that. And the other model, it's the co-founder. And we're we're providing the same kind of role support, but not necessarily as the CEO would be, either the chairman or operations lead or something like that.

But we're filling a vital role in that. And then the cycle is we'll use a small amount of capital to start with very small. You're talking about 30, $40,000 to seed that that stage. And the first thing we're going to do is validate that there's a market. You're not going to build anything yet, not even going to sell anything.

You're just going to talk to a lot of people who are in your target market set, or also who are your potential exit acquirers. You want to talk to them first. Ideally, you want to go in to the venture beginning with the end in mind. How are you going to get out of this once it's validated? Then we're essentially going into an MVP phase where we're again, we're we're primarily a fintech or B2B SaaS app.

So we're going to start with clickable prototypes. And in the case of financial products, we don't engineer them. We actually will build them in Google Sheets or in an Excel and just build an interface behind it that's transparent to the customer. And oftentimes the output is a PDF. They don't really care whether it's amplified at some point is all you're trying to do is essentially your product market fit.

And we'll stay in that stage as long as we need to either shut shut it down, say there's nothing here, or to keep pivoting and adjusting until we validate that there's product market fit. In other words, what can you actually buy, right, when you're selling things, you go, okay, now we have something. At that point we'll do a minimum amount of engineering.

So we ended up we end up doing and doing a lot later in the cycle than most fintech app companies do. And some, some cases we've stayed in that stage for two years before I spent a penny on engineering.

So cool. So we keep our burn rates extremely low. And so, investors really like that. We keep track of that all the time, and we don't turn on that, that high spend rate.

Then, of course, you you scale from that point, as, you know, a normal a normal company right about it. At that point, if we are we don't have our own CEO. We have what we call an entrepreneur in residence program. So we we have a, a set of candidates for of other entrepreneurial CEOs who we know we can put in a position.

Dustin Logan, who runs one of our companies, Pro forma, is one of those. He actually was an angel investor in Eagle Venture Lab and all of our portfolio companies, and hung out with us for six months. And after a while, weighed and I decided, you know, he's the right guy to run run that company. And I was running it at that point.

Like, he's going to be better. Let's put him in that chair and free me up to do something else. And that was one of the greatest decisions that we've made, right? So that's how we do it and grow it, grow it from there. And ideally at about a series A will raise enough money for them to kind of detach from the mothership and they'll have their their own infrastructure and overhead.

They'll, they'll have the capital to go do that and grow on their own. So that's, that's the model. That is very cool. Last question. Most notable companies that have come out of this. Well, we're we're we've only been in business as a lab for three years. Okay, okay. And so we have we have seven in the port folio.

Three of them are fintech. One is pro forma which helps entrepreneurs, essentially raise capital. It's a fantastic tool set. Extremely cheap for entrepreneurs to overcome all those hurdles that you need to be attractive to a capital allocator. Second company is called Profit Inc. So that helps established companies, figure out what's going on their business and what are the top three things they can do right now to become substantially more profitable and double or triple their business value?

We can do what McKinsey or BCG does. They'll they'll charge you three quarters of $1 million in some cases and take six months. I can do that in 48 hours for a tiny fraction of the cost. Well, using software in other companies, in commercial real estate. So it's targeted at at repurposing commercial buildings, in major cities that are being underutilized and are likely going to be upside down on their their debt service and helping to find buyers and repurpose it, that's a huge discontinuity that's going to happen in the market to the other companies.

Are, using AI technology, an array of initiatives in for profit B2B applications to combat human trafficking. Oh, wow. That's amazing. It's it. And they're they're doing extremely well. That's my favorite policy area. So really, really cool. Launch of Venture Studio that's co-branded in in Singapore. Let's use the Eagle Venture Lab Asia. They're doing similar things to what we're doing, and we're about to launch an AI company that we're keeping kind of under the radar right now to others in the queue after that.

But I got to validate that there's a market first. Totally get it. Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. More offline okay. Appreciate it. Thanks.

Well, so, Jessica, you tell us a little bit more about yourself. Yeah. So my name is Jessica Colter. I'm going into my junior year at TCU. I'm 19, which I think shocks a lot of people.

But actually yeah. So I graduated high school in three years, decided it was not the place for me. I had like an entrepreneurial brain. I was like, I gotta go. Yeah. So then I spent a year, you and T, and then after deciding what I wanted to do, what I wanted to go into, which is more of that high finance role, I thought I wanted to go straight IB, I decided to transfer to TCU.

Thankfully with the support of my mom. She's great. So we're first gen Americans. My brother and I are first gen Americans. My mom and my dad immigrated from Australia, so we definitely have that background of like work hard, play hard, but like, you're going to work hard and you're going to work for everything you have and you're going to give it your all, which I think is proven really beneficial.

Now I'm getting into building my professional career where I started in marketing. And then I went into brand strategic growth. So I still do some of that.

I work at the tequila company, social media marketing firm and then to consumer goods like apparel stores. And I really just help them develop their brand image and their communications and their strategy with growth and launch and really just helping and serving as a brainstorming device, I guess, for those companies.

Then moving into now, I'm a policy intern with the Texas I associate. Yeah. And then I also do business strategy for a defense and security aviation firm out in Arlington. Very impressive. I love it and I know that's how we met was through Ben I Association. And I was very impressed with you right away.

And he told me the story of how you met.

And do you mind sharing how how you started working with the AI Association? Because to me,

just some hustle, I love it. Yeah. So the event that I met been at is a wealth tech fintech cohort hosted by the Founders Arena. And this was for their fall cohort. So I think only last semester and I guess a big selling point for myself there.

I had one of my other connections and he got me a student ticket to go because I had seen this event and I was like, oh my goodness, brag like, I want to go to this event so bad. And he said, let me text Pam. So we texted Pam, who's the founder and president of the Founders Arena out in Arlington.

She got me a ticket, so I am going at it this event, I love it. I'm listening to every speaker. I'm talking to every person. I have my student business cards, so they have my LinkedIn QR code on them. It has all my contact information and I'm just talking it up right. Yeah. And then I enjoy. All right.

I know it's a shocker.

Right. The beginning part of the event was amazing. And then I went to cocktail hour after and, you know, I'm just finding people to sit with. I find some music tech guys, and then I see Ben kind of just, you know, with his plate of food, like, wondering. I was like, oh my gosh.

You're like, do you need somewhere to sit? And he was like, yeah, I do actually. So here, come sit with me. Like and then we just hit it off and we just started talking. And he has become my absolute favorite person. He's just so funny and something that I know I really look for and appreciate people as people that are generous with their time and their knowledge.

And that is something that Ben was with like right off the bat. And we were talking and he said, oh, you know, there's this person here that I really want to meet.

Her name's Barbara. And I said, oh my gosh, I met Barbara earlier here, I'll go introduce you. So I brought Ben over and introduced him to Barbara, who I just met like ten hours earlier.

But that, I guess, kind of served as the starting point. And then he told me he did his due diligence on me, which I was not aware. He's like, oh, yeah, I went and talked to people and asked about you. I said, well, I guess I wouldn't expect any less, but that's kind of like scary like that. That kind of makes me nervous, because the first day of that event, I was 18, and then the second day of the event was my 19th birthday.

So yeah, he's only since I was like a baby. Well, I relate a lot because when I was 19, I was hanging out with, you know, people twice my age and they didn't know I was 19 and I was in college doing all the things. So definitely relate a lot. And,

I didn't know your

backstory of your family coming from Australia.

Yeah. So that's really cool. Mine from the UK. So was born and raised in the UK and the Commonwealth. You know, I know crazy. Well I came for the American Dream and I feel like those people, you know, you're not necessarily given anything or handed anything. So you really work for it. And

I think that's why that story really resonated with me.

I remember when I was 19, I wanted to work in DC, and I had absolutely no DC connections or family or anything to do it, but I love politics and wanted to do it. I was in student government, and one day I went over to the,

chief of staff for the senators said, hi, I want to come work for,

Senator Sessions.

And he's just like, are you smart? I was like, yes, sir. I was like

some of your resume. And I heard nothing back.

And,

I had met I went to every conference, met with every person, and one of my favorite contacts who I appreciate to this day was Joe Bonner, former congressman who I met,

at an event.

And I called her and said, I really want this job in DC. And ten minutes later, I get a call from Senator Sessions office saying, you got the job in DC. Come up the summer for the internship. And it was like, wow, this is crazy. Just making your own network

is so huge. And from then I've never like, applied to a job really.

It's really been through a network. And so I think you're just doing the exact right thing and it's really cool. Thanks. Yeah, it's definitely been. Oh, sorry. Do you have another question? I do, but keep going okay.

It's definitely been a process. I think that especially now, you know, with the Gen Z split into two groups. Right. It's the I don't know, I'm going to school like I'll figure it out later.

Like just having a degree will get me a job. And then there's the other side that like puts an insane amount of pressure on themselves. Like very much overachievers. And I feel like that's part of, you know, every generation. But it's like you don't know what you want to do by freshman year. Like you're lost, like you're not going to get a job, you're not going to get employed.

That's a huge trend that we've been seeing, especially socially with Gen Z, that we're, you know, terrified you're not going to be employed. You know, you see a lot of in the news of all the entry level jobs being taken or automated by AI,

which it's like, okay, just you got to shift your skill set to then adapt to AI being implemented.

So I think that really having that grit, but then also taking the time to figure out what you want to do, like knowing you want to do politics right off the bat. What a blessing. Definitely gave you the right path to like, just go in and go get it. I mean, I started marketing, I actually, at the end of high school thought I wanted to go into the military.

I thought, I want to go the Coast Guard. I wait, this is so weird. I went to,

military school and did officer training for the Coast Guard. Oh my gosh, that's insane. That's so weird. The Coast Guard. What made you want to leave the Coast Guard?

I wanted to be stationed in Alaska. Okay, I'm not going to lie, I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

I was like, I want to go and, like, keep eyes on Russia and China, and no one else wants to go to Alaska, so I know I'll get it. And how cool would that be to say that I worked in Alaska?

So yeah, that's initially what I wanted to do. And then I actually have my Eagle Scout, which is something that a lot of people don't know.

Cool.

Girls were allowed in Scouts BSA February of 2019. So I'm like, yeah. So I'm,

I'm a founding member of my troop,

in grapevine, but I actually got my Eagle Scout and through Scouts BSA, we turned in a merit badge college at Tarleton, which is like a weekend. You can get three merit badges. And I took an entrepreneurship class and I came back and I was like, mom, I'm not going to military.

I'm going to school. And she was like, Jessica, you're an idiot. How who is going to take you right now? Like, yeah, you graduate in three months. We got to figure this out fast and if that's what you want to do. So she was really supportive in the whole process that it took me to like, you know, find the path that I wanted to get on.

And there are a lot of twists and turns. And I find that if you're so rigid, like, yeah, the world is going to snap you, you know, you got to be like a fruit by the foot that like, well, you said that exactly. With AI and all the constant changes, I think it's really good that, you know, you're giving Gen-Z a really good representation right now, and it's really good to hear those types of things.

But that's a really small world about the Coast Guard stuff. We should chat offline about it. Yeah.

Well, before we wrap what is next for you, what are you going to do? What? Do you know what you are ready to do next? I mean,

what a loaded question. I think that honestly, if I have learned anything from my humble 19 years of being on this earth, it is to go with the flow.

You know, I put myself 100% into everything that I do. I love learning, I think that's a big trait and really a hobby. Wanting to learn is a hobby that Gen Z has lost for the most part. So I think that real love of learning just introduces you to so many new opportunities in people, in sectors of business that, well, right now I would love to go into venture capital focused in like defense infrastructure.

I think that would be amazing.

Defense industrials, because I really love that part of my job right now and definitely venture. I love working with founders, but at the same time, I know that if I'm just like tunnel vision, this is all I want to do. I could, you know, take the long way to getting where I'm supposed to be.

So trying to keep my options open. But definitely VC is where we're headed right now. Well, thank you for coming on the podcast. Come back to come on soon again, and we'll watch the space and see where you land 100%. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

You are full of stories here. So tell me you grew up in Alabama for a little bit.

You were military family. Tell me more.

First, my name is Mark. Savannah. Hello, Mark. Very nice to meet you. Flowing into this. That's it. Let's go. Life flowing in. I'm a first generation American. Okay. Meaning second generation veteran and a third generation entrepreneur. Oh, so you just got the one, two, three of me, and I love it. I got so many stories.

You name it, I can go for hours. So wave the flag. We can. I know she's going to be waving it. Also probably going to get to one. It's like I want to have you on the. You're in Austin though, right? I'm in Austin so we can chat more. Have you on a full length feature episode here? I'd love it.

Yeah. The Alabama Auburn. Fan base as well. Have you been to a game? Oh come on. Yes, of course. Tuck in Tuscaloosa. Yes, I snuck in, actually, in Tuscaloosa. A buddy of mine. Really? Man, it's the wildest experience. Love it. Well, the reason I was bringing up, my, my family in the UK is they're obviously big into soccer.

But when they came to visit Alabama, you know, my dad was a former soccer hooligan before my mom. So he's very into the rivalry, very into it and brought my grandparents to the football game. And they just could not believe they'd never seen anything like it. And they were people who've gone to games and my grandparents were into rugby.

But they said that was the most amazing sporting experience. What I love about the rivalry is it doesn't matter what their records are like, the coaches, that's their only mandate is beat Auburn or beat Alabama. Yep. Like that's probably the interview right there. And can you do that? I know it's it's very fun to see the kind of friendliness of it as well.

Like, there's a lot of couples who get married. Who are Albert and Allen? Yeah, they split the outfits or license, but, it's quite sweet, I would say, when I, you know, given my background, it's. I've lived everywhere from California to Washington, DC, Florida, Alabama has a special place in my heart. And when we first heard we were going there, we're like, oh my gosh, you hear the burning?

Or, you know, the background, all the stigma that comes along with it. But where we lived was really impactful for the history of the nation. You know, being there in Huntsville, Alabama. Wernher von Braun was there. Later on, you find out about the per capita of PhDs that were there. So that really kind of shaped me as an individual, but also the warmth of the community.

I was I was hooked immediately. I was like, this is the place. And the next closest place for me as I retired four years ago was was Austin. So I'm a Texan. And so I said, okay, but I never forgot Alabama or Huntsville and how it shaped me. So I said, what's going on here in Texas is very unique and I'm happy to be here now, I really am.

I am too, and I did the same journey, Alabama, DC for a little bit. Right. And Texas. But I did feel that it was a melting pot, especially the University of Alabama was very welcoming to everybody. Right. And people from all over the world who'd moved there. And, but Texas is is my spot, right? It's that special place in my heart, too.

So tell me, Mark, tell me a little bit more about what you do here. And you said you said you retired, but you've got a lot of stories and I can see. Yeah. So, spent 23 years in, military, the Army specifically doing some cool stuff. And towards the latter. Thank you. I appreciate that, weapon system development.

So I designed and really was on that side of the military where they call it the acquisition community. My dad did that. And so I kind of grew up in that and then did that in my professional career. And so I kind of had that knowledge base, which I think helped me compound those perfect jobs. Yes. And I retired out of the special ops community doing some really, really cool things.

And at that time, I was given a large amount of money to manage innovation in the BES, not the MPs. And I did it for a very unique community that needed it. Today, not tomorrow. And I enjoyed it, but it gave me a global perspective. It gave me an understanding of government. You know, I was stationed in the Pentagon for five years, and so that was great in itself.

But to see it actually apply in a real time environment was fascinating to me. And, you know, careers go a different way. Your family goes a different way. So, you know, this is the time for me to leave here in Austin. Army Futures Command was was already established. But when I was in the Pentagon, you know, you do.

You're very successful and you get an email at 11:00 at night saying, show up to this office and you walk in and you're like, wait, this is the secretary of the Army's office. Let me check this email. That's the right number. And then the guy that comes out is the newly confirmed secretary of the Army's, like, are you Mark?

Yes, sir, I am. Come on in here and you get read on immediately saying, hey, we're going to set up this Army Futures command. How can we leverage that? So I was read on very early to what was coming to a state, and my state was on the list of, of, applicants. And it landed here. So I said, this is perfect.

I'm coming back home. I'm in the sector now. I'm the CEO of Q branch, which is a global dual use, business accelerator. And we're a defense firm. And so what we look at is bringing in international businesses and to New Market, which is Texas or the United States, but also introduce them into the government opportunities. The government U.S. government is a big, huge buyer.

Oh, absolutely. Right. And sometimes it's well, I don't know how to do that right to the web page. And it's so complicated. And so we really help them look and explore those duplicative opportunities. And I'm having so much fun at this. And it requires people like you and the new platform that you just developed. Thank you for telling me that, because I have a place for that that's so important, to really bring innovation across the line.

And it's a team sport and for government because I feel there's a lot of, kind of missed opportunity that now is kind of with AI and a lot of expansion and new innovation is really there's a lot of ways government can improve and efficiency or all these things, but you're in the defense space and have that experience.

So I yeah. And the thing I look at is as much as innovation is happening, you have to look at the effect at an enterprise level. And so when you say government, immediately you're at the enterprise level there is a huge divide. And so you have to manage risk. And that's part of telling not just the government about this opportunity, but the innovators about that.

And understand that this is a long game. And so you really have to keep your eye on the dollar. You have to plan effectively your growth and opportunities. And sometimes, you know, I looked at an earlier statistic, when I was a government venture capitalist, at 6% of investments pay back the other 94% of failures. And I always was drawn to that, like, what is that?

And so when I retired, I came to a venture capital ecosystem, and I found it's almost sheer execution. And the management of that execution sometimes is difficult. Like I, you know, that room and Men in Black were that balls flying everywhere? I've been in a room similar to that, and I always use that as an example, because it doesn't matter how exquisite the technology is, you have to bring that to market.

And that's actually what my co-founder, Eric, you just met says all the time. He's like, ideas are cheap, execution is everything. It really is. And the United States military executes extremely well. So a lot of those practices and methodologies that I've learned over years, this is not just marks instantiation of being in that. This is years of best practices.

And I'm bringing it into this ecosystem. And it's really neat because these are fundamentals that are missing, but also very much fundamentals that people are willing to learn and curious to adapt. I love it now, you alluded to some special projects you were working on. Are there any you can tell us about? Because I know in the military there's a lot of top secret stuff.

Yeah, I mean, that's a different conversation. We have to go into a different room for, no, those are in the past. But, a lot of that just came down to immediate need and solving a problem for large scale problem. And so what we do at Q branches, we don't do that now. We really have those that level of understanding to find that opportunity.

And we can kind of translate amongst enterprise level commercial innovator, those that need that level of innovation and even the Department of Defense or Department of Agriculture or Department of Transportation. So we look at government, whether it's federal, state or local. What types of companies are you working with now? Oh my gosh. So we've run and we haven't even hit two years.

We've run six international accelerators. Three from Japan went from Singapore, one from Spain. We're launching our own dual use one Western Australia. And so the range is really those in the critical infrastructure space from they've gotten some level of, MVP. But also I've had Japanese companies already on IPO that are looking to expand here. But each one needs fundamentals as a startup because they're entering into a new market.

For those who don't know, we've listeners across the board from, you know, government relations folks and staff to business leaders. For those who don't know, what is an accelerator,

it's the word itself, right? I mean, you know, if you look at three levels, or multiple levels, it's kind of the idea all the way to delivering that idea and then the support behind it.

So you have like an incubator, and then the next one is probably a venture studio, which really puts everything around them. And then you have an accelerator and accelerator really rolls up your sleeves and starts to get to those things that you need to do beyond just the core development of your product or service. How can we shape it as a business?

Something in the fourth. But we are kind of an accelerator. Plus, and I kind of mentioned or excuse me, I think of us as a integrator in that way because these already proven products internationally coming into a marketplace. And so we really look at what are those obstacles and try and set conditions for that to really manage time, because that's what we're all up against the time and the technology and transitioning that into profitability or economic stimulation in a in a positive way.

And with the defense startups you work for, work with, and help accelerate them. Do you they typically have a similar background to you or what are you seeing, as far as I've actually seen a legislator that's now running a missile company, I mean, that's like there's the correlation is not there. It's quite fascinating. So I would love to tell you, yes, there's there's a little bit of understanding the problem.

And I'm seeing more of that. Those technologists that have seen a gap and they leverage that. And a lot of those veterans that are out there very much entrepreneurial. And so they want to go tackle a hard problem. They've done it in the military. So it's really a range. But I have a special place in my heart for entrepreneurs.

Why? Because they demonstrate a lot of the similar qualities as a veteran. I mean, they volunteered to embark and it's somewhat of an unknown environment that they're not necessarily accustomed to with all the challenges that come with that biggest risk ever. Right, exactly. Yeah. You're like, you're a veteran in my mind too. You know, you're you have the same qualities.

You're like, you know what? This is a problem. I want to stand up and go tackle. I did go to military school. I had off line about that was a bad experience for me. Okay. Yeah. Yes. But, any standout companies that you think, you want to talk about or share? There's one I'm really excited about. I cannot say the name because they're really starting to shape, opportunity at the raw material level in multiple states simultaneously.

And if we look at our near peer adversary, which is China, it's the fight. If there is a fight, the tested environment is at the raw material level, and you're seeing this, support coming from the federal government in a very deliberate way for raw materials coming in. So this is a company that is launched, IPO in another country, but it requires all legislators, your congressmen, your local edcs, your universities.

And that is a huge problem that we love. And we get to tackle that. Sure. Well, thank you for coming on the show. How could the, startups reach out to you and and find you if they're wanting your some of your help? Oh, Q branch, it's as simple as a Google. And, you can find me on LinkedIn.

I answer my LinkedIn. I'm extremely accessible. And the way I look at it is the federal government pays me a nice retirement. And so I'm actually giving back to to those taxpayers in any way I can. I can help them. That's awesome. Well, keep up the good work I appreciate it. Thank you for inviting me on on the the podcast.

Yes. Great one. Thank you sir. And we'll chat more about the military school.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business. I'm your host, Laura Carr. And today we're diving into the policy fight shaping Texas's fuel and convenience store industries from the push to allow spirit based, ready to drink cocktails in your grocery store to concerns about motor fuel theft and spike fees. Joining me today is Desiree Castro, director of government relations for the Texas Food and Fuel Association.

She brings more than a decade of experience in the Texas legislature, including senior roles for Senators Hinojosa and Senator Cesar Blanco. She knows the capital inside out, and today she's here to break down the big issues playing out for retailers, consumers and policy makers.

any fun thing stories you want to start with?

so I was working ten years in the

Senate. Okay. And I actually found your old business card when you were with Senator Paxton. So apparently we met before when you were on staff. I think that you came and lobbied me probably.

I know was it about rtds? Maybe because I was looking through my desk and I saw I was like. I was like, what? Apparently we met before. I think that's really cute. Yeah. And then we don't have it mean I saved it because I needed it to take a picture and send to you. But I was that. I know it's so, so many of those people meeting you till you started.

Yeah. Was

your USLege so. Right. I think we met at the happy hour for the arena. Yeah. Such a connector. Yeah, I love that. But,

But, yeah, I guess just a little fun story. So after ten years in the Senate

I was not sure if I wanted to stick around with politics.

I kind of wanted to do something completely different. And so I left, okay. And I ended up working for my dad, who is,

he's a retired from the state comptroller's office as an auditor. Cool. So he has his own business. And my two brothers also were former auditors at the controllers. And so,

they're tax consultants. And so I just work with them for a little bit doing sales.

And then I took off to Switzerland and I ended I did not know that. Yeah, I ended up just going just to visit a friend. And I ended up extending my stay. And everyone's like, are you coming back? And like, as soon as I got back, I would say that day probably I got two calls about

Texas Food and Fuel Association that they needed somebody.

And I'm like,

I'm timing this. Yeah. And then I found out who the external lobbyist is, Billy Phoenix, I adore him. I worked with him when I was in the Senate. And so I was just like, I think he's like a ray of sunshine. So I was like, okay, that was number one. Like a that kind of was exciting to hear about.

And so I just look them up and I was like, okay, what? It won't hurt. Let me go in and interview and see what they're about.

And so yeah, I met with Paul and our president CEO and he was just amazing. And so I was really excited. And they told me about their priorities.

And I thought that would be something I'm interested in. Was that part of your portfolio when you were in the Senate?

You know,

I wouldn't. Cool. I don't think so. No. How long were you in Switzerland for? I like two and a half weeks. Okay. Awesome. It's so pretty. It's beautiful. I've just been in the winter,

skiing when I was a lot younger, but it is so beautiful.

Yeah, I went twice. Summer and,

winter, but that's so cool. Yeah. That's beautiful. So what was the moment that you thought I should get out of politics? It's just. I was just ready for change. Yeah.

I was in the Senate for ten years, and so I just kind of felt like I was ready for a new challenge.

And so that's why I decided to take the next step. And,

unfortunately, I heard about Texas food of your association. How long have you been there now? Two years. Okay.

Two years. So for those who don't know, what,

does Texas Food Travel Association do? Yeah. So we represent the wholesale and retail sector of the oil and gas industry in Texas.

And

what I'll say was what drew me to Texas Food and Fuel Association is we have fuel distributors and then the retail sector. And so that's really the backbone of everything. And our slogan is we fuel Texas. So we have,

our fuel distributors. They bring the fuel to your neighborhood gas station. They provide fuel for,

industrial use, aviation, agriculture, construction.

They'll provide fuel for trucking companies,

state agencies. And so I was really just impressed with the diverse,

the diversity of our membership because it's not only,

fuel distributors. We have,

retail, we have grocery stores, convenience stores,

we have suppliers. And so,

equipment manufacturers. So we just have a wide range of issues that we work on.

And,

‍

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it's just,

every day there's a new challenge or opportunity that's around the corner.

We have with all our diversity in our membership, we have different challenges,

whether that be regulatory or regional, different,

regional issues. And so I just really enjoy,

you know, having the opportunity to

be able to advocate on behalf of our industry.

I think it's very,

I think to see that impact,

a policy shift or,

a new partnership. I think that's incredibly rewarding. That's really cool. Well, it's a fun group and diverse group. Yeah, it really is. And you have a lot of hot button issues this session. We do, we do. So tell us more about Rtds.

Ready to drink cocktails. Yeah. That's a big bill that you ran with a few other stakeholders. But yeah tell us more about that. Yeah. So,

the legislation would allow,

spirits based ready to drink products to be sold in convenience and grocery stores. And so what they are is they're a single serve portable,

products that are,

spirits based.

It's basically canned cocktails, since we call them Rtds, and they come in a variety of flavors. You have vodka based, tequila based products.

Some of the most popular products are High Noon.

They have vodka base, tequila base.

Flavors are grapefruit. You have mango. Peach.

And then you have a long drink, which is gin based.

And so, currently in Texas law,

these products are only allowed to be sold in package stores. And so,

the same alcohol content as what you'll find in beer and wine and other seltzers that convenience and grocery stores are already sell. And so,

it's just a booming industry. It's a $2 billion market. And so our members want to be able to sell these products, and they tell us that they hear from consumers that,

they don't understand why they can't purchase

these, these beverages.

And what's different between a White Claw and a high noon. And so,

for us, it's basically about consumer access, convenience and the free market. So very cool. What is the difference between a high noon and a White Claw? Yeah. So,

a White Claw is malt based. And so it's basically how the alcohol is,

the alcohol source, how it's derived.

So,

for a White Claw, since it's malt base, it's brewed similar to a beer. And so,

it's,

alcohol based is fermented grain. The spirit base rtds. It's,

distilled alcohol. So it's legally classified as a liquor product, but they have the same alcohol content. It's typically 4 to 10%, and most of the most popular products are about 5%.

A-B, alcohol by volume. And just to point out, convenience stores and grocery stores can already sell, up to 17%. So that's why you're able to go into your local convenience store and buy a bottle of wine.

But again, these products,

they're restricted right now to, package stores. So what is the history of this if, you know,

and where has this how is this progressed as far as kind of the selling of alcohol throughout the state of Texas?

Yeah. So it's,

I think it's it's a it's a booming industry.

There's,

about 29 other states that allow these products to be sold in their grocery stores and convenience stores. And so,

we want to be able to do the same in Texas.

well, I think just the history it's always been. They can only sell the malt based products, not,

distilled spirits is only allowed to be sold in package store.

That's just the history. And I think with these products as they've evolved,

it's a new product. So we're kind of, I think relying on outdated

regulations. Sure. Does having a two session,

two year, biannual kind of legislature impacts the the changes in this industry? Are there a lot of new drinks coming out? Yes, they really are.

I think we're starting to hear more from RTD producers as well.

You know, I think right now it's,

an unfair market advantage. Convenience stores and grocery stores want to be able to sell these products,

because, you know, there's the consumer demand as well. But you also hear from the RTD producers that they also want to expand their market.

And when you look at, like I said, 29 other states, they're allowed to be able to do that. And so,

we're hoping that we could, you know, modernize, our alcohol laws here in Texas. Wow. So,

SB two two, two five is the bill that you all been supporting. Who are the other stakeholders you've been working with on this bill?

Yes.

The Texas Retailers Association, as well as the Distilled Spirits Council and the consumer, a consumer coalition.

So what are kind of the,

labeling and licensing limitations? I know that some people get confused on some of those, too.

basically it's just

one is fermented and the other is distilled.

So again, it's an outdated and inconsistent regulatory approach. So it really undermines,

competition.

We we did a,

a survey and it revealed that about 86 to 87% of Texans support, having these products sold in grocery stores and convenience stores.

And we have a grassroots website,

where nearly 2000 letters were sent to lawmakers to support this legislation.

So,

we want to,

you know, we want to be able to do this here in Texas.

And I think, I think that consumer demand is there, too. Wow. And so what has been the legislature's response so far to this bill?

Well, it it it passed the Senate. So we're really excited about that. That's a big step because last session,

we didn't get a hearing in the Senate. And so this time,

it, it moved through,

the committee and passed that the full Senate. And so we applaud them,

the Senate on,

passing this legislation.

For sure. So what kind of opposition have you faced in the past? And now?

So right now in Texas, you have 3000 package stores and about 30,000 to 32,000 grocery stores and convenience stores. So I would say it's rooted in maintaining a protected market. I think,

I don't think there's a valid rationale for,

maintaining unequal access to products, based solely on how the, the source of the alcohol or how it's derived.

I think,

you know, these are products,

have the same alcohol content. And so I think we're really right now limiting competition and consumer access, and consumer choice, for sure. Well, it's been a fascinating debate. And you run the pack as well? Yes, I do. So what does that entail? Rallying the grassroots. Yeah. So we actually with the association, we have our political action committee.

And so,

we have a council that meets,

an obsession and we make political contribution to elected officials here in Texas. So,

it's raising funds and,

distributing those funds to our,

elected officials. And usually we'll have several golf tournaments a year that help us raise raise that. But those campaign contributions. I've never golfed with you before, but we should.

Yeah, I actually don't golf. I just ride around in the cart, but I do. I do need to learn. I golf badly, I'm really good at

it. Yeah,

I am too. I've gotten better. I did a glow in the dark putt putt recently. Yeah, eventually I need to

take some lessons because I do want to participate now that we've had like we have about three golf tournaments a year or so.

Wow. I do need to get on that. And it's one of those skills that everybody who does it well, I think practices like three times a week. It's just it's so difficult. Everyone

I've ever golf with, I said, you need to do this three times a week until you're, you know, 50. So we'll see. Maybe in the fall we'll do that.

Maybe the weather's decent. Get a group together to Houghton. It'll be good. Well, I saw you testify. You've been out there, you know, doing your work in the Capitol and testified on SB 1499. So I want to show a little clip of that. And if you want to talk a little bit more about it. But here is, does raise,

testimony

Hi. Good morning, chairman and members. I'm Desiree Goss from the director of government relations for the Texas Food and Fuel Association. Here to testify in support of SB 1499. The Texas Food and Fuel Association. Our members, own, operate and supply over 16,000 convenience stores, grocery stores and travel centers throughout the state. And over the last several years, we have worked to combat fuel theft.

And this effort started with addressing card skimming at gas pumps and the Texas Financial Crimes Intelligence Center. They've been a valuable partner. The work they do, the investigative work is commendable. Like Senator Nickel said. And if you haven't toured the facility, we recommend you do that. We took a tour a year ago, and it was just fascinating to see what they do.

They have highly trained, agents and analysts. They keep our members informed. They provide industry trends, training. Other critical information to help prevent and respond to, theft and fraud schemes. So we, support this piece of legislation and we support expanding their scope beyond, card skimming, to include payment fraud. This will support, industry Texans and the economy.

So, thank you to, Senator Nichols for working on this.

So there's another big topic which is motor fuel theft. And I know a lot of people would be interested in this because it impacts so many people. So the

establishment of the Financial Crimes Intelligence Center,

a couple sessions back and now,

trying you're trying to help aid in kind of helping against fraudulent payments and skimming.

Can you tell us more about what that is? Yeah. So just to give you some background,

on the issue, the,

Texas Food and Fuel Association has,

worked on combating fuel theft for the last several years.

And it started with card skimmers at gas pumps. And so the association,

had several skimmer related bills to stiffen penalties.

But these criminal organization, they continue to evolve and come up with and develop new technology that,

you know, they'll counter law enforcement techniques, they'll,

counter the latest security measures that the industry is implementing. And so they just,

are very sophisticated.

you know, there's still card skimming happening at the gas pumps, but now you're starting to see them use new devices like pulsar manipulation devices.

So they'll,

it's a device that manipulates the,

the counter and the pump so that it's not accurately measuring how much fuel is being dispensed. Wow. So,

you have that issue. You have diesel theft,

ATM skimming.

Now, we heard there's a new,

tactic where they're manipulating the control valve and the dispensers.

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‍

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So,

it's a really big economic impact to our members. There's product loss. I know there was in 2023, one retailer lost about $90 million. Wow.

In,

in fuel. And so,

there's cost to security,

updating their security costs, insurance risk. So,

like I said, the,

they're they're very sophisticated criminals.

So we're just trying to stay on top of that. And,

the last couple of sessions we've been working on,

several fuel theft prevention bills. Wow. Yeah, that would definitely impact your members. Is this kind of a, you know, a petty theft,

situation, or is this, like, more of an organized crime ring that's doing this? Yeah.

So these are actually organized criminals.

They're committed by foreign national crime groups. And so they,

are not located in a specific region of Texas or the United States. They move around. So it's very hard to investigate. But fortunately for Texas, we have the,

Texas Financial Crimes Intelligence Center.

It's the statewide fusion center that investigates organized financial crime.

And so,

they're a valuable partner for our association. They keep us up to date on industry trends,

training. And they'll keep us updated on the the new technology and the new,

devices that these criminals are coming up with. Wow. What is making it so difficult to police,

do you think?

Well, they're doing actually a really great job.

I would say,

the FDIC, the Financial Crime Center,

since it became operational in,

2022, that was just three years ago. They've already stopped,

over 300 million in fraud. Well, just in three, three years. And so that really highlights the scale of this issue. And,

I'll say that some of our champions on this issue is,

Representative Marianne Perez from Houston.

Senator Nichols,

and as well as Senator Rainey, they worked on this legislation that created this,

Financial Crime Center.

And so that's really beneficial for our members and that partnership that we have with with the center.

Cool. So with this new piece of legislation help solve. So right now the scope of Fcas is limited.

So,

this new legislation would expand their scope to include payment fraud.

And so today it was actually signed by the governor. So we're really excited about that. And congrats I feel like that's a

great step for business. Yes it is. It is

then another big,

issue that I know you're working on is swipe fees.

So tell us more about that. So

swipe fees is one of the top priorities for our members.

It's the second highest operating cost

for our members after

labor cost.

Every time a card

is used,

a retail, the retailer is charged,

2 to 4% on every transaction.

our members, they have no ability to negotiate.

And these card networks control over 80% of,

of the market. And so retailers have no choice but to accept these cards. And so it's,

these white fees,

it's money that these businesses, are not able to reinvest back into their employees, into their business, into their community.

it's an issue it's very costly for our members.

And so we would like to see some type of competition and transparency. So we've been working on that,

the last couple of sessions with a variety of different,

business groups.

How big of an issue is it from, you know, smaller retailers to the larger ones? Does it differ or is it pretty much impacting them the same way?

Yes, it's impacting all of them.

Like I said, we've talked to several members and all of them tell us it's it's their top

issue, their top concern, and it's the second highest operating cost for them. Wow.

And do you do anything at the national level on this issue? Yes.

There is movement at the federal level. There is bipartisan legislation. It's the credit card Competition Act.

And

representative

Lance Gooden is one of the,

the coauthors on that legislation.

There's a lot of things you mentioned today that are specific to Texas. Are you seeing that Texas is, you know,

following other states legislation, model legislation, or is some of this really unique to Texas, do you think?

We had several,

to related swipe fee legislation.

One of them is, I think, new for Texas. There's a competition transparency bill. I don't think we've seen that in any other states.

And then we had another bill that focused on prohibiting,

the fees on the taxes that our merchants are required to collect.

And that's something we've seen,

and other states as well.

But this was something we had worked on,

prior to this session as well.

Do you go to DC at all then?

Maybe like twice a year? Okay. Am I calling there? Actually,

and some of our members are actually in DC right now for a day on the Hill. That's it. We're in legislative session. So I stayed back last time.

That's super fun. It's always good to go up to DC.

I love living in Texas, but it's fun to visit. Yes, I think so. Especially right now. Yes. Yeah. Is there anything else you want to add about swipe fees?

we're just hoping that we can move forward. Right now, there's a lack of competition and transparency and,

you know, a single bill,

it will contain over 100 different types of fees.

And so,

our, you know, we just want to make sure that our,

merchants understand what these fees are. And we're hoping that this would be a vehicle for competition.

For sure.

You're tracking a lot this session. I know you're in the capital all the time. How are you keeping your members updated with all of this?

You received U.S. legislation

that was actually not. That was not a leading question. Y'all have been so helpful because I know

I was about to hear. Yeah, that's true. Well, are you doing newsletters like how do you keep them posted on all of this? Like, other than that? Yes. So I,

I'll do weekly updates to our members about,

Yeah. It's been very helpful.

before was very time consuming,

having to take notes,

running from different committee hearings, monitoring the different chambers, and then,

now I'm able to just log on if there's a certain committee that I need to go back and watch if I'm looking for, say, for instance, our president,

Paul Hardin, was testifying.

I just type in his name or one of our members, and it takes me right to their testimony, and I can just go back and watch that and save some time. And I love the transcripts that it provides as well. That's very helpful. And so I, I enjoy it, I love it, and I'm so glad you came up with this.

I'm so glad you've been a great partner. Your team has been so helpful as well, helping us with the rulemaking tracking feature, because I know that you're you know, when session ends, you don't stop. How are you keeping up with all of that now? Soon it will be different. But,

with the rulemaking process. Yeah, yeah, that's especially,

I think my colleague covers our regulatory issues.

So that would be something that would be very helpful for her to,

keep track if we're able to add that to the U.S. ledger for sure. Yeah, that that'll come out very soon so that you can keep up in the interim because I know

there's great I can now I can give you a little preview actually. Okay.

I'll give you a little preview.

It's crazy. I was going to I was like, is that happening? Yeah. It's actually one of the more advanced pieces.

That's like an AI automation, like an AI agent that's able to go and search things for you and then pull it all together, because I think some people don't know that things change in the rule, and

you can't lobby anything to do with that.

You just have to know what's happening and follow it. Right? Yeah I agree crazy. Yeah. That's that's exciting. Yeah, I'm very excited. I'll give you a little preview after this. Yeah. I'd love to see that.

Yeah. How's the rest of the session been, though, for you? Got a lot. You working on your plate? Yeah, it's been great.

Like I said, it's a variety of issues. From lottery, fuel theft,

swipe fees. I rtds,

that's what I really love about this association. So,

just a few more weeks. So hanging in there and stuff, I know, is it pretty much nonpartisan legislation as well that you're working on? I think so

that's always handy. I think so,

friends with all the folks.

Yes, I think so. Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking more about your issues. You've got just a wealth of knowledge. They're so they're lucky to have you. Yes. Or I'm happy to be a part of a great organization. Thank you.

I appreciate you for having me. Yeah. Of course.

Anything else you want to add before we eat out?

No, absolutely. Just everyone use us

if you don't use it already.

Thank you. Does it thank you for coming on this. Of course. Thank you.

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Hey everyone. Welcome back to Bills and Business, the podcast for government, Innovation and Entrepreneurship collide. I'm your host Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege, where we make government more efficient with technology. Joining me today is my CTO and co-founder Ben Brewer. The engineering mind behind USLege, Ben built software across cybersecurity, health care, AI for energy. And now is really passionate about bringing smart tech to the policy world.

Today, we're breaking down AI, especially from our political pros who still see it as a black box. Spoiler alert it's not. It's not here to replace you, it's here to make you more human. Let's get into it.

We're saying you've been more behind the scenes. You're a CTO. You're building all day. So for those who haven't, you know, read your bio on your web on the website. Can you tell everybody a little bit more about you and how you came to USLege.

Yeah, absolutely. So everyone I'm the I'm Ben Brewer, I'm the CTO of USLege. I've worked for a series of startups and other software companies over the past few years. I've actually tried to start my own venture. During Covid, I actually did as a solo founder, and it was brutal. I don't think I'll ever do that ever again.

It was hard working or managing in every single department, and you end up doing everything very quietly. So I actually tried to do that, twice and realized that, no, I'm, I really I really want co-founders. I want someone's business. So, we met through YC. I see, and it was love at first sight.

What is like YC for those who don't.

YC Combinator is. So they're their startup accelerator, but they're also a VC firm as well. And they, essentially have a platform for co-founder matching. And I'm not sure, you know, at some point you decided to go in there too. And I decided as well. And we just matched it. It's almost like online dating.

It's a dating app for finder for sense.

Oh, yeah.

So yeah.

Well, so share a little bit about your experience on YC. I know you were on there for months taking your time. Looking. And I was on there for two months I mean, interviewing every day, I think. Pretty similar to you. We got so lucky finding you. I really see it similar to online dating because I saw your profile and I said to Eric, that's the guy.

And I swear before meeting you. And it was because you said a few things that were different to other people, and one that really struck my attention was, you said nobody I have ever managed has left my team when. And that stood out to me because the big thing that in addition to technical competency, I wanted to see somebody who was a good person and I knew would work well with the team.

And so that was a huge factor for me. And I said that that Eric met you and like, okay.

Yeah, this is the guy. And then we definitely try to, you

know.

Because you had a lot of offers. Tell us about that experience.

Awesome. Yeah. It's that's great. It's great that I have a lot of suitors.

Here you did.

No, but yeah. So so we met on YC, first of all, thank you for the compliment. So that's, sure does a very high regard, of course. Yeah. So I signed up for YC initially because I was really I wanted to start a venture. It's just it was just that time I was hungry for it. I worked at a previous, company where where I've done that.

I've worked for, a couple different startups now, and I was just ready for summer adventure. I felt like I saw how it worked. And there's something that's extremely invigorating about it that you just don't yet actually, being a novice out there. I mean, you probably see it now, right?

Yeah, it's it's like totally.

Totally different. So I really just wanted to take the plunge. I had done a lot of reading. I felt like I'd kind of observed it from the outside, but I just was right, was ready to go for it. So, I actually started on Reddit, just kind of scrolling through and reading about some opportunities, and I saw one discussing.

They were saying, anybody actually met their co-founder on Y Combinator? And, and so I was it kind of intrigued me a little bit. And I read some more and there were very mixed reviews. There was, oh, no, this is a terrible platform. And then there were a lot of like, oh yeah, like I'm working with my co-founder. We actually raised funds.

So, I signed up. I didn't really know what I was getting into there. It's like, you know, I'll give it a shot. And it actually kind of blew me away because, yeah, I've, I've actually never done any online dating, but I imagine if you sign up on, you know, Tinder ends or some sort of dating platform, you could probably enter pretty quick bio and get started.

But this was very in-depth. This is story. This was I had to enter a lot of information and I kind of entered outside the bare minimum just to see who was out there. And there's some serious topic out there. I found I found some, some pretty big names from some, some large tech who were working on some really interesting stuff.

And yeah, it was, it was, it was quite an experience. So I decided I was like, wow, this is actually a legit platform. Like I can find someone really good out here nearby. And so, yeah, I tried to make a really good bios. I feel like that's that's going to increase your chances, more than anything. Sure.

And, yeah, we ended up finding each other partner we had. We actually had a lot of conversations beforehand, too. Yeah. And I feel like we took our time well enough to establish that we would we would be a good family pair. I remember one time, actually, towards the end, we actually had a two hour long conversation, and you and Eric were both just chatting with me.

I was sitting outside on my porch and we were just talking about life, getting to know each other because we spent so much time also just discussing business opportunity and technicals that we. But I actually don't feel like we like had that or I didn't, I didn't know how it would be. But after just sitting down and spending some time with you got I walked away and I knew that that's what I

it was like it was true.

It's it's true now.

I know it's been fun having you here. Like living in Austin, I think. Yeah, it just feels very right. Part of the team, which is really cool.

Yeah, it feels right.

It does.

What kind of stuff were you seeing out there? From the business world. What were people looking to found?

Oh, wow. I mean, it was it was everything. I don't even know if I could begin to start on that, because I probably scroll through thousands of profiles. So maybe this is kind of interesting, but, I would describe myself as someone who tries to really put statistics on the things and not, perceive life as an outlier.

That sucks. I mean, a great example is so startups actually have a very low percentage chance of being successful.

Right?

And even at some point when you feel like you're at a stage of success, that that could all be taken away from you as well. Right? Right. It's it's you're it's it's pretty challenging. So I was really trying to look for what I thought would be, you know, that that small percentage chance of a success. But then there's a whole, a whole nother set of factors with it as well, in terms of just viability of co-founders.

Because I saw I saw a lot of opportunities that were pretty intriguing to me. Some actually in the electrical vehicle industry. I remember I saw one that I thought was pretty interesting there, but the, you know, maybe after talking with the initial having an initial call it the founder or kind of reading their bio or doing a little bit of research, I just felt like it wasn't the right opportunity for me.

So, so there's so many factors that come into play in terms of, you know, you, you want to be set up for success. I would say at least a, like an initial viable sort of, business business model or, or plan of action. And then something else I was looking for as well was what's have they done the research?

That was a big one. I saw a lot of a lot of founders on wiki that I just felt they were still at that stage where they hadn't actually proven their, their their product or their market or their business. Sure. So that's actually something that that I really, really like about, you know, USLege was that I think you had done the work.

You did a.

Lot of research.

You're already.

Yeah. I felt like our subject matter expert in the area, you you knew a lot about, the customer base, sort of I mean, you you lived a lot of the problems we're solving now.

Sure.

I think. Is that what, at the end of the day, drew you in the most to USLege. Obviously, it's a combination of everything of of the relationship. Trust in your founder, but also believe in them. Trust in the concept and believe in it. What are you into it like the final closer?

Absolutely. I mean, I would say it was a couple of things. One is, I really like it. In a lot of ways it was it was what I was looking for. I really like the founding team, so. Thank you. Yeah. I feel like we understand.

Yeah.

Even on the worst days, I usually get. Well, I'm going on a tangent. I actually do not think I could pick a single day. I was like, I was fuming mad, was very upset or anything.

Like saying.

Right, like, yeah, that's that's I don't think there's many family teams would say that. I think we, we resolve differences very well. And even if we're opposing sides, we're, we're working through.

So that's really true I love that.

Yeah. Yeah I.

Know.

And there's disagreements all the time, but none that are we do things.

Well. Yeah.

Good mediator I think best.

Yeah. So I really like the family team. I really I was interested in the market as well because, political talk, it's not something that I did, really. I didn't know much about it. And I also think there's sort of these niche or different opportunities for very interesting to me. And when you kind of explain the problem, and I did some more research into it, I also just thought it was a very challenging problem set to solve, because there were other interesting opportunities that that I was entertaining and evaluating at the time.

But something I saw that was really special and, the opportunity here is that that there were multiple, you know, ideas and thoughts ran through my head and I was like, oh, these are these are hard problems to solve. These are not going to be easy. So that that challenging aspect to it really drew me in as well because I want to push myself, and some of the other ones, I didn't know if I would actually end up getting to a point where, you know, it would actually challenge me that much.

I was going to ask, how complex is it to build what I dream of building? Because, you know, I have so many ideas.

Yeah.

And you know, my dream, the baby AI robot, right, just does all the things for you. How challenging is that to build with all the data and the political data threats.

Yeah. So I would, I would say as far as challenging as the the entire ecosystem is a mix of very challenging things and not so challenging things. And that's kind of how software is in general build it, building software. But as a whole it's I would consider it on the higher level of complexity in terms of a lot of software, for sure.

what listeners are more on the policy side potentially the business side. But they're not on the engineering side. So can you help break it down of what is engineering?

What is engineering? So engineering can be a lot of things. But with regards to how we're essentially fixing engineering, engineering is essentially I would kind of describe it as all of the efforts involved in actually building the goals surrounding the platform, the political platform that we are delivering to customers. So from a high level, it's essentially a lot of data aggregation.

So pulling in data from various sources, normally they're, they're they're, a selection of government, publicly available data that's presented in a way that's either hard to access or possibly unlinked together. So we're ingesting a lot of that data behind the scenes, and we are organizing it and building relationships. And that kind of gets into actually the core problem that or one of the core problems we're trying to solve, which is the, the, the way the government displays a lot of the data, it's all segregated between different operations or different systems all over the place.

That actually, in a lot of ways, how they're structured, they can't bring it together because one agency is over here and another agency is over here and legislatures over here. And some of that data, it's all linked together. And so what we're one of the things we're doing right now is we're taking all of the state and aggregating it and essentially ingesting it in a way that then makes it queryable through our platform.

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And through AI

very cool.

And I know when I first started working with you, I had a lot to learn on the engineering side. Like things take time and they're so complex. And I would have a great idea of like all the I think this is the best idea ever. But then it would be like, okay, yeah, that will take six months to build.

And so spending.

It out is always really hard. So sure.

Sure.

so a lot of people who are listening are on the policy side, as I mentioned. And, a lot of our customers to get really excited, like me with different ideas for platforms and software and what they could, you could potentially create, but it sometimes takes so much more time than ever expected. So what is something that's typically, you know, people who are not engineers would not think that this is hard but is surprisingly really challenging to build or do.

Yeah. So actually the hardest thing. So so I will actually the some of the bigger challenges we run into would actually be around human entered data because if you think about it, a lot of government data is actually manually entered by humans. Okay. Fake humans you can't trust humans, you know, but it's manually entered by humans. And humans make mistakes all the time.

So you end up with systems. And I mean, a great example is actually our witnesses directory, I would say the number of individuals that that show up to testify that misspell their name or misspell their organization or just enter something crazy, it's it's all over the place and it's very hard to actually link them together because if you testify on behalf of organization X, Y, Z, and your name is John Smith, and then there's another John Smith, how do you know if they're the same John Smith or not.

Right.

And sometimes they misspelled their name or change. And so actually leaking some of the data is very difficult just because of, of human error. And actually we had something crazy happened the other week, but

Was.

It was really funny. But, we had, we had so, so part of our platform that we track, we track legislative videos. Right. And agency videos. So we were, we pulled in an agency video, on the, the Canal Commission, some sort of canal commission, and whoever entered the data in the system forgot to see and not the C commission.

So, so the video that was posted was the anal commission. And so it makes us kind of look crazy when we end up posting a video that says commission. And then and then a user, they go and they, they're like anal commission. And then they go and look on the government website and it's been corrected on that end, but we haven't corrected it because we just pulled it in that first time.

And then they say, hey, just so you know, yeah, you posted a video on the anal commission and.

That.

Makes sense, you know, don't know under the wrong bill. And then they'll undo it. And then we have arena bill floating in the system that doesn't exist. Or it's just and then our system starts breaking or something. It's just like, well, still doesn't exist. I can't get any more information from them. So part of this like manual data entry, I mean, it's it's actually step by step and it comes in a different time set.

So we have there's a lot of timing involved with that. Where as a legislative professional you really timing is actually a huge aspect and actually one of the hard problems. So you also have like swats and I mean giant sets of government data that you want to pull it in and get people as much information as possible within a certain time, actually running through and pulling in that data as fast as you can, and efficiently requires a lot of essentially mapping things out and saying, okay, well, this comes in at this time and this comes in at this time, you know, how can you how can you decrease you decrease that part.

And combined with just human error, it's it's pretty challenging actually built, you know, a really solid core data set because that's what that's what powers the entire ecosystem. And and the vision you were you're seeing that as well.

Now that's it's crazy. But it makes so much sense because just one misspelling on human error can change the entire meaning of a word. And that would confuse the AI to like if we're giving eye context and it missed Canal.

It can't understand.

Like you, you have a shipping company and you need to know about this canal. Well, you wouldn't get flagged for that information because it's completely changed the meaning now. So that makes sense that the AI wouldn't even be able to understand it because it's not.

Those are two different commissions

Very different commissions, I love that so much. 

Ben, what’s your favorite thing to build at USLege

So far? You built, like I say, 90% of the app, but how much of the app..

Is less than that now? It was at one point, but we have a we have a great engineering team at this point.

Yeah.

And I rely on I rely on them for everything. And they're awesome. They're awesome. Even you even to you know, we actually have one of these other sites available right now. We're we're anxiously anticipating Eric.

She needs to come back.

Rachel's the best I know. I know we miss Rachel. We're anxiously testing her. Sure. Yeah. So, man, there's there's so many interesting things. I almost think, you know, I don't think the science you're looking for, but I would almost say I'm more interested in what's coming next, okay, than what we've built so far. Sure. And here's why. And in the first stage, kind of what I've been talking about is we're we're collecting massive amounts of data.

Correct?

Yes.

So that is the first stage or where it really gets interesting is when you start building this map and start mapping data together and start building relationships, and you almost end up with some sort of graph type model where you see, you know, this data over here is linked to this data because the number of data points around a single bill are absolutely extraordinaire.

Right.

And all this data is publicly available. And a lot of times I think it's very easy to see them as separate entities. It's like, okay, you know, I'm, I'm tracking bills or this, this bill has text. It has an author or it also has stuff, but it also has a lot of data points around what different individuals said about it, what different individuals, how they how they, you know, reacted to even different statements, how how the public feels about who came out to actually testify against it.

What sort of organizations, you know, we track, we track, lobbyists as well for, for the Texas Ethics Commission. And, you know, using AI, you can make a lot of really interesting inferences around that and say, you know, if if you can pull up bills and actually extract the industries that they affect based off of the text and, and look at that sort of reasoning, you start building out a very interesting map of who's likely to track what, which actually gets into predictive analysis with a lot of they are, and another one that's actually AI workflows, which where I would say we're just getting started.

We we haven't even really hit this hard yet. But we're building on a lot of a lot of really interesting tooling and I think helpful tooling at the core. But when we start really building up like an entire workflow to where you don't have to, you know, go in the application like a bunch of buttons every single day where it just delivers what you want to you without you having to.

Let's go through the 98% of text that you don't care about. That's where it gets really interesting. And that's right around the corner for us.

It is really exciting. Do you think lobbyists and engineers have any similarities because you mentioned something that really struck me just now. You know, we're building these workflows and it's data analysis. That's what all these always have been doing for years on top of their normal job, which is meeting with people and influencing, and debating things. So is there a parallel you can draw between engineers and lobbyists?.

Engineers and lobbyists? Well, I would say lobbyists are almost two political engineers.

That's good.

So they're building some sort of workflow or some sort of I mean, engineering doesn't actually have to be. I said of my computer, you know, write, write code. It can be, okay, this is I track bills so I can do this. It's it's it's a, it's an outcome or perceived outcome. And then you're working backwards to get that perceived outcome.

So if you're if you're targeting you maybe maybe you're, you want a certain bill to send up, you know, passing through or maybe you don't go faster. There's many different, different opportunities on how to get that bill, you know, passed through. And I'm still learning a lot about it. So in no way, shape or form and why what an absolute lobbying expert.

But, I would imagine that with my analogy that, you know, the, the outcome that you want to have happen, you have a lot of different opportunities or different methods in order of how to achieve maximum success. What about. So I would say lobbying is essentially political engineering in a lot of ways to where you're trying to get that outcome and you're trying to figure out your best course of action and what levers pull or what sort of systems you want to play.

So if I do this, then this lap and then this laugh. And so that's that's maybe the highest parallel draw.

That's cool.

What is your day like these days? A you're managing a big team now. You're doing a phenomenal job of that while still also developing. So what is your day to day look like with the team?

Yeah, sure sure. So right now so it's certainly adults I mean 100% of the app. And then as we added more and more teammates that that time, that time decreased. I think at this point probably maybe 50% of the codebase has my name on it, but it's it's getting less and less and it should be. Right. So I would say my day to day, what's like a mix of 2 to 3 things are happening?

I'm planning a lot of projects at this point, so, I'm, we're collaborating some. I'm collaborating with other stakeholders at this point, really where we have stakeholders, the stage.

Right. You know.

Seems like it was just the stuff was like, yeah, but I'm collaborating with different departments to actually take a lot of their requirements stolen down into into projects. I'm also working in product a lot to, help us prioritize those endeavors and figure out what what we should build, how we should build it, when it should be built, that sort of questions.

And I'm delivering a lot of this requirements to in charity. So actually doing some preliminary scoping, trying to set the team up for success. So, so we build the right things and, it's very hard as an engineer, I would say, to always have an entire idea of how the business, how something they're building impacts the entire business or game up.

And similarly, it's very easy, I would say, to get tunnel vision. So as much as possible, I'm trying to really convey the impact to them. And a lot of the the features and the endeavors that we're building to say, hey, this is why we're building it. And I think that actually makes you a better engineer if you also know where you're building it.

Because in the past I've done projects and I knew what I was building, but I had no idea what. So I think that actually built a lot of, that helps us build more of a cohesive product. And, I mean, it surprises me a lot of times, but I will I will deliver essentially kind of like a project to engineer and say, hey, this is what we want done, this is why we want it.

And I would say more often than not, now there's pieces of the project or pieces of the feature or requests that come back that are better than I anticipated, or something I think about because engineers understand why they're actually building at this level. So they, they, they find things that, that, you know, on a surface level, you might invest or something that you didn't quite see.

But since they're actually the ones, engineering and building it, they'll come back with something better than linear. So so I'm doing that and then, I'm trying as much as possible to, let's say firefight or, there's, there's any sort of requests where customers are very frustrated with something going on, maybe, you know, it's like, oh, I can't, I can't do this.

I try as much as possible to turn things around very, very quickly for customers. If something's not going, as long as.

You know, you've done a great job on that. And you, I also find it really interesting that which is just a great thing that you've done. Everybody who's new, an engineer coming on, you've requested to be on a sales call so they can meet with the customer and hear their questions and their requests and their excitement. I think that's so key in what we're what we're building and having that as part of the flow.

Absolutely, absolutely. I think, you know, engineering is a small component of the entire ecosystem of what we're building.

Right?

We could take the entire engineering team and throw them the problems that are perceived problems. You know, it's it's a work smart, not hearts or that built in a lot of ways. You can also get really far with smaller, easier and concerns. I mean, you know, from your from your perspective, I mean, it's, you know, we've grown a lot since it was just me, but we also still have a really small team, that's very knowledgeable on what we're going to do.

And I think that helps us move incredibly fast and, and deliver on, our roadmap as well.

How do you source and choose the people that we hire at USLege? What's your process?

Yes.

So we have to give away the secret sauce. But what's your requirements? Don't give away the crowd.

Oh, okay. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a couple traits at the core. You know, I think for, for, for a lot of engineering. First of all, you have to really figure out, I think, what you're looking for. So with engineering, it's like hiring any position. There's always varied skillsets. And at some point you want a bit of a layered skillset, I would say.

So we have engineers like I would say, you know, various time in the field, you know, we have some seniors and some newer engineers as well. There's but one of the things I look for is really are they hungry for it? I think with what we're building, especially at a startup stage, you've really got to be hungry.

You have to be excited. You have to be extremely motivated. This is, in a lot of ways to sort of show up 9 to 5 sort of job like. Sure, you have to you have to you have to be a driver. And especially I would say with a lot of the advancements and AI to do, you know, you kind of now also have to be a manager, I would say, and a good communicator because something that I'm seeing more and more, it's with AI that's a great tool if you're, if you're a good communicator and a good engineer.

Oh, yeah. You're you're dangerous. You're dangerous because you can you can, you know, crop the AI and help, help orchestrate. And I actually write a lot of solution for you. So communication I would say competency. And then finally I would say some sort of diverse aspect. The engineers we have in the team, I would say that each brings something a little bit different to the table.

And I don't know, it's just kind of like, I would say a special that's kind of the secret sauce that.

We want to talk about it that's frozen secure, something unique. Or is it.

Anyway. But but yeah. So I would say like something a little bit different to the table, like having having diversity, I would say on some of some capacity brings, brings, you know, it brings a unique flavor to the team, like on the data and AI side, we have engineers who who worked in healthcare and healthcare data is some of the hardest data right there, you know, so bringing that sort of experience, I would say, into the field that they all the time like they'll find things even even things like I would go back and think like, yeah, this is this, this shouldn't be built this way.

I'm like, great.

Fix this. That's perfect.

So, so that's what I'm saying. Like, I think that that's sort of the unique flavor that everybody brings to that to the team is like, we're really mates and and roots are all of our edges.

I love it. You've been doing a great job on it.

So praise.

The.

The team is great. I'm excited to see everybody this summer coming together.

So absolutely.

Let's jump in a little bit more to some of what our customers are dying to know. So we talk about AI, what they really are. And a lot of them told me before this episode of Things to Ask You and Things They Want to Know from you. And oh.

Okay.

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One thing we talk about all the time, it's just AI. What is it? How is it changing the game? And there's a lot we don't know. But in my eyes, I say AI is making you more human. I love to say that. And I really see it because it helps me do my job more efficiently and better. It presents me with more information than I ever could collect on my own, even with a huge team, you know, being able to delegate that or being able to prompt something seems me so much time.

So how do you see it? Do you agree with that statement?

Yeah. You know, I mean, it is it is it's a little bit of a spicy opinion, I know. So you unpack this. I actually came to you and I said, I mean, I kind of imagine what, what your take what's on that. But you actually just I give your take what you're saying when you say, sure, AI is making us some work.

You mean what is what is what is your opinion?

Okay. Sorry.

So if you're sitting behind a computer doing data analysis for your more, relationship building profession. Okay, that to me seems like a waste of your capabilities and your potential and your skill set. So for me, it really was because, like you mentioned, there's disparate pieces of data all over the place that I would have to go and try and analyze.

And then what was that for? Just so I had that information so that I could go and lobby something or someone. But I needed all that information before. So, for example, say I am lobbying on an issue I need to I've done my homework. I need to have known every single thing that happened in the past. Has this bill come up before me?

Is this a brand new bill? It's brand new. What's similar? What's happened in the past that I can look at to know how people would even react to this type of legislation, what's my possibility or probability of passing it? There's so many things that I have to go and look at to find from like witnesses, who's going to be against it.

The first thing when someone's trying to pass a bill is like, well, who opposes it as a staffer? That was something I asked every lobbyist that I met with, you know, who was in opposition to this bill, so I can kind of build a data point of, okay, this is going to be easy to pass or this is going to be really tough to pass.

And do I even want to pass it? Or the stakeholders in this going to be too angry? Is it worth my time to do? There's so much strategy there and what I feel like I can do in the future, because can do a lot now, but what we are building will be able to do a lot more of that, bringing things right to you of considerations you may never have even had on something.

So a little bit a long winded way of saying how it would really help me and how it is helping me in this job, but really how it would have helped me in the policy group.

I see, I see, so essentially your point of view is that AI is taking all of those picks this up, move it across, put it over here. Tertiary job functions from your day to day or your role, and extracting this away from you so you can perform your primary responsibilities at your job and not spend time being a manual data entry.

Exactly. If I manual data entry is my absolute, just the worst thing I could ever be utilized for is I'm part of it, then I'm part of it. There were so many times I had to format a document in my past, or type up a transcription, and it was terrible. For one, it took me so much time and it wasn't motivating for me.

It wasn't exciting. So I think there's a lot of people who feel that way similarly, but I know it's spicy one, so you're just curious. Yeah.

That's a that's a spicy take. Yeah, I think so. So yeah, what I would say I would largely agree with that statement. So okay, so basically as, as humans, it's, there's kind of almost like this big humanity aspect to it, to where in some regards, since the beginning of time, we've always had some sort of roboticist involved.

I would say.

How so?

So let's say way back in the day, hunting and gathering, or if you're gathering, you're picking crops or picking some sort of agriculture over and over and over and over. But that also might be like your entire job, too. And as time has gone on, we've continuously abstracted things here. And this is actually what I think is really fascinating about AI.

But as, as humans, we're, we're there's something, I think, innate in all of us to endlessly innovate and constantly explore. Sure. And at some point, I feel like, you know, at some point, so many different individuals out there, I've been standing at the edge of a body of water and just wonder what's out there. I think we're explorers.

So I think actually AI is very human and that it is just the next stage of evolution of humanity because we just consciously innovate. And I don't think it's something like we're dissatisfied with reality, but it's more like we we're always looking forward and we're always, you know, taking something and we're we're building something else on top of that.

We're we're builders and we're innovators and we're explorers. That AI is it's in a lot of ways just that next on that stage and.

I definitely agree to a certain extent, I know some it's been very surprising, actually, how open and excited majority of people are about AI heard a lot of use cases, right. There's obviously really bad use cases for it. And can be used for evil, literally, I think, but for, you know what? We're doing great. And I've literally I met one person, literally one person in my entire time of talking to customers or last year, okay.

Who was very skeptical of it.

Okay.

And she turned around. Actually.

The.

By the end of the meeting, she turned around, which was really cool. And so I do, and now she's a customer. And so I found that good to see. Okay. What types of things do you think AI will never be able to do and have capability of doing? Wow.

I,  so I think, I think the things that I could actually never do are, are really around human human based interaction.

Is that it? Not me. Yeah. Yeah.

It's true. So if AI is taking a lot of that off of our plates, we should have more time to do that. So I do, I do agree with what you're saying.

Yeah, I do, because I really think that it's giving me so much more time to do that.

Like if I'm sending.

An invitation to something, for instance, something I'm doing today.

Right?

I mean, that just took me way less time using AI than it would have a couple of years ago. But manually having to do all the different iterations of the invitation and the versions for each individual and sending it, and it would have taken.

Me so much more.

So I think that's good. Now, another thing that is kind of very hot right now, but not as many people on the policy side talked about is AI agents.

Yeah, agents.

And, can you dumb that down for everybody, for us and explain what that is.

Sure, sure. I'll try out culture. So, I'll kind of also talk about what it actually means when people are talking about AI.

Sure, that'd be great.

So when you say AI, what people are actually talking about today, most of the time it's in LA. All right. So it's kind of a misnomer in a way, but like we've had AI for years and years and years to some degree. Yeah. I mean I remember when Siri first came out, I was kind of one way, a little bit, oh wait, I can send a text by talking to my client.

Right. And now it doesn't seem like that's AI comparatively. Sure. So what people are referring to are looms, large language models, which essentially are these, these massive, AI ecosystems which basically have billions or trillions of parameters and they are doing the best they can to essentially syntactically respond to a question in a nutshell. So that's kind of what people mean when they say AI nowadays.

And then with the AI agents, that's something that's really just brilliant. That hasn't even actually been a concept until, until I'd say like in the past year.

Right.

It's, it's brand new. It's something I'm still learning a lot about. I think we all are. But essentially an AI agent, it has an autonomy associated with it as well. So a lot of people are familiar with ChatGPT or at this point, even Gemini. If you ask the question on Google, I have time to get that that I wrote lots of at the top, having even scroll right that that's a lot like responding again.

What differentiates an AI agent from an element is an element could be part of an AI agent, but the AI agent has some autonomy around it. If you search on Google, search on ChatGPT, you're the one essentially making the request, and all it's doing is processing your request and, you know, distributing or slots back to you, right?

So they can but with an AI agent, that's there's that level of autonomy. So you essentially have a decision maker, which is like AI. That is then prompting some sort of set of tools and a set of tools to be your mouse, your keyboard. It could be that the browser. And so a good example of an agent is you could basically have an agent that goes and looks at your calendar every single day and does XYZ for you, and it may run into situations where you have something new on your calendar or something it hasn't seen before, and has to autonomously figure out what should I do with this at that?

So maybe with your wedding invitation, an AI agent that was watching your calendar may see that you have a wedding coming up in a month, and it may anticipate and say, hey, you know, you need to send out this wedding invitation. It's you need this amount of time to send this out. No one's going to show up at your wedding, you know, so that invitations like at this time and it may on its own, accordingly send out an invitation to all of your guests.

That would be an AI agent. So it's actually making the decisions behind it and in an autonomous way. And that's something actually we're just starting to see and something we're going to see more and more and more in practically every single capacity.

Right. And it's going to be starting with those really easy, simple tasks that no one wants to do. I think. Right, booking flights.

Booking flights is a great thing. That's actually that's actually another one of.

That one I found that's a really cool agent. Just.

Yep.

Go to one button, book the flight, put it on the calendar. Yep. Cheapest, easiest, quickest. All the parameters and know everything you like. That is really cool. I've had to book flights in my day, so I love that.

Now they've worked.

I know.

How do you see and predict AI impacting lobbying and agents impacting lobbying?

Yeah, absolutely. So in a lot of ways I think things are going to look vastly different than they do now. So my expectation is that you're going to see a lot of AI bills in the future. We're just in my guess. And really it comes down to I think, the sort of level of autonomy associated with agents.

And I think you're going to see endeavors to, to heavily regulate this or, or at least figure out how much regulation we should have involved. It's okay. And the real reason is that an AI agent or something can that can if we're saying the definition of an agent or something that has some level of autonomy, it's essentially making decisions on its own, right?

We get the calendar example. It's going to look at and say, hey, this is happening at this stage. And so what happens if that AI agent does something illegal, for example?

Right.

I don't know how our current set of laws are currently structured to hold anyone accountable. Like do you go and hold the person that designed it because they actually designed it to be like autonomous? So do you kind of go after them? Do you, do you need like some sort of protections in place over that? Do you. Right.

It's it's a hard question that it's an answer. And I don't think it's one where it's like, oh yes, we should heavily regulate or we should. It's not that. It's more just that in the future I think you're going to see more and more AI bills, and it's going to be a really heavy subject for the next legislative session.

It's my prediction.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Because people have different ideas on how much regulation it's good or not. Right. Like everybody has a different opinion depending on where you see. And I don't think it's even so much how much it should be regulated. It's more just that this is common. Like, I see, I see a lot of bills in the future related to AI and specifically agents coming down the pipeline in the coming years a lot.

I actually don't think there's been very many bills that even talk about AI agents yet. And there was one bill recently that's moving through as, House Bill 149, which is the big AI bill from Chairman Cooper cloning and one actually cool thing that's in there is an AI sandbox kind of program that you can apply to as a company to have a safe space to start playing around with certain systems so that the government is actually monitoring and checking out.

So it's actually really interesting for industry and, different companies to apply for that. If this bill passes, September 1st. So that's just an interesting one to look into. But I do agree, the legality of who's at fault kind of makes me look back onto the self-driving cars era.

So sure.

You know, that they were the technology is there and has been for ten years. Like when I was a baby on Capitol Hill, 19 years old, as an intern, I was going to autonomous vehicle hearings. But the hearings were this technology. We could really do this now it's expensive, but we can do it. But who's at fault when the car is deciding, you know, in a catastrophic situation, there's a crowd or there's a mother and a baby who does the car have to hit?

You know, that question is who's at fault? And that is just I think the actual reason that we're seeing not enough of it and people still having those roadblocks because legally we saw them figure it out. So I think it's also that, you know, intersection of innovation and then regulation because everybody wants to innovate. And there's so many amazing things like agents, so many use cases for this.

Now, there's going to be so many new startups and cool companies that come out that are game changing, that will be using this tech. So it's a, it's a really tough one.

You're, you're, you're completely right. You're completely right. It's really the question of like how much I think one. Right. Because like Texas fully believe this wholeheartedly hands down has the opportunity to be the leader, not just in the US, but actually in the world, right? Or AI.

Right?

We're, we're in a great position there. Right? Right. I think, I think a lot of people see that. And because that's the case, if you overregulate it, you're going to really just miss the opportunity. But also I don't think anybody is pro evil eye out there that's making autonomous evil, that there might.

Be some people, but most.

People are not. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But like, I mean that's just like the whole reason we have laws in there. Right? It's to, it's to, you know, enforce ideally a reasonable amount of regulation that, you know, offers protections and other things in place, but also does not crush innovation and industry. And in a lot of ways, you could actually probably regulate it in a way where, you know, you, you might even support that without and you're also putting protections in place.

So like there are regulations that are also like I would say pro AI, but also protect it as well from, from officers. Right. So that's that's all I know is that's coming. I seriously see a lot of AI bills coming in the future I think. So, yeah.

You mentioned just AI being autonomous. I think with decision making this is where more people will get involved in decision making. Like I should not be making these government decisions or these legislative decisions ever. And that's where I do see, you know, a lot of our customers on the advocacy side, the on the inside in the building and the lobby side, there's no replacement for that because nobody is for a decision maker that is not a human at this point in time.

I just don't see it happening.

So that's so that's where it's actually a really safe industry to serve as well for a lot of purposes because our customer base is not going anywhere. Right? They're, they're not being replaced anytime soon.

So, I mean, they have. Yeah. Girlfriends now and they have boyfriends.

That is a strange. That's a whole other tangent. Their goodness me. But it's not like it's.

The same thing. It's it's not. It's not the real thing. It's not even close.

Well, what excites you most about where all this is going.

For me and what excites me the most about where all this is going is I think there is an absolute world of opportunity to maximize your lifestyle around the things that you want to be doing without all of the noise around it, which is kind of what you're saying. And I think actually it empowers a lot of individuals to do things that they they never thought possible.

If you want to make a feature film, maybe as an individual, it's pretty it's pretty difficult to break into the there's so many different obstacles around getting into the movie industry. You need a lot of capital. It's like, you know, SEO and with I mean, I see opportunities for, you know, you can have like a small production team or, you know, like you're just getting started and you could produce some absolutely beautiful movie.

That is very.

Cool like that, that sort of thing. I think it's like very, very exciting for me. And I think it can really, I don't know, I feel like actually, since I started, I feel much more creative because I don't have to actually spend as much time, you know, tightening that ball or hitting on that. You know, I'm spending much more time orchestrating things.

I feel like I, I've actually looked at code, for example, I've written way back in the day, like even at the start of even at the start of our company, before I was using as much I and I was like, who? Who wrote?

So really?

Oh yeah. Like even months and months ago. Yeah. Of course I'm like, what was who though who started this is is terrible. Oh it's all me.

What has shifted I mean it's just sounds like growth. But what has been the biggest change.

The biggest change and whether.

It's.

For you seeing your transformation now, you're so much better at coding.

I mean, it's just kind of like, I don't know, have you ever every single morning you wake up and you look in the mirror, you don't like, that's over. But then you look at that picture of you a year ago or two years ago, 30, and you're like, wow, I'm a little bit older. And then it's kind of like that, I would say a little bit.

So I don't know if you notice that day to day, but you'll go back and like, even sometimes I'll, you know, if you don't have your phone and you're in a new city, you're so dependent on that. Maybe for Google Apps or for Apple Maps, you know, you kind of don't know what to do with itself a little bit.

And those are kind of the moments I would say that you really realize that, hey, you know, this is this, this is really impacted me a lot, but actually just, you know, having this conversation and think up through this stuff a little bit, yeah, I spend almost all my time at this point thinking about high level. I don't need to, you know, go and read, a manual on how to fix something on my car.

I can just, like, sort of type it in and get an answer some, you know, and stuff like, so and also having you perform this task that I, but I just don't want to do every single day, like, I don't want to send out a million wedding invites. Right. The fun part is planning the wedding and. Right, you know, the the celebration with all of your friends and failing the honeymoon.

You want to enjoy that. But the fun part is probably not sending every single little invitation and then, like, remembering to go and, like, pay this bill and filing your taxes, all right. But like, those are the parts that are really not very enjoyable cents. So I see a lot of potential to spend because we have very fixed like our time here is elastic.

It doesn't change. And so if we can maximize that as much as possible, you're you're living life to the fullest. At that point.

You have the same mission as me in life. I think we can maximize time and save time, you know, working smarter.

So I like this. I know exactly.

Well what you said to really resonates with a lot of growth that you've done. When I look back on things I've done in the past, I cringe. And so I think, okay, great. That means in growing your life.

So like, dang, what.

Was I thinking? So I think that that's always good. It's a sign of growth for sure.

That's all you can say.

So if somebody wants to going to dip their toe into AI, they're kind of new to it. Where what kind of workflows would you recommend and where would they start?

Yeah, so probably depends who you are. If you're a legislative professional, you know, you you could you could use us lives. But I might be a good spot to start. But, if you're if you're just looking to kind of get started, probably the easiest thing is just ChatGPT. Or you can give Google or you search something on Google, you kind of get their response.

But, I mean, actually, YouTube is a great creator source as well. How to do things or I, I listen to YouTube religiously like I will actually on Mr. YouTube as a podcast, I'll be cooking or I'll be, you know, driving, not watching a video, but I'll be driving and sort of press play and just listen to it.

And there's a lot of, there's a lot there's so much information and so many opportunities out there to make it easily digestible. You know, you really just getting started with ChatGPT will help download stuff down for you.

And by that you mean prompting and asking you to do things, what the capabilities are.

Yeah. I mean, if you don't quite understand what AI is and you're like, you know what? And I will learn that quite that doesn't quite make sense to me. What is this? If you open up ChatGPT, which is an application by the company open AI, that's the easiest stop. You get started, you can just ask it and you can start conversing with it.

That's, that's actually the, the easiest part when you should start. From there, you can just kind of snowball to figure out what you want to do. I mean, my, my, my advice would just be, you know, take a little bit of time to figure it out because this is totally a compounding. In fact, it's using like you're if you had to okay.

Just let's, let's, let's get Laura from 2 or 3 years ago versus Laura today. What percentage increase in effectiveness or efficiency do you think you're operating at now?

I mean.

It's got to be or it's got to be triple digits.

Like, 1,000%.

1,000%. Right? So yeah, if you had never started with AI, you would still be doing all this things and you actually in the path still, you wouldn't be where you are today for sure.

Actually, that is so true. Another big piece to it is I've changed my lifestyle completely to completely.

Also.

To focus on the business. When I was in DC, it was, it was an amazing time, but it was very much there's a party every night. I went to every party. I got home that night, every night I woke up at five, 6 a.m. was not sustainable. And, but it was really wonderful for my network. And I learned a lot from the people I met and how the process works, how the sausage is made in the castle.

That's like.

Absolutely what I learned. And then now my life is so different. I am maximizing my efficiency at work, doing what I'm doing. My social life is nowhere near as fun. I would say it was crazy, but I like it a lot more. And also being married and in a really steady relationship is really changed my life too, because I don't even have any distraction or anything to think about.

So I feel like I'm so much more efficient for those reasons. In addition to AI, which has completely changed my life, and now having a team who are so competent and amazing, and.

The team and staff.

And the teams area, I. So I feel like.

We're just going Couche.

He is he I.

Will find out. Maybe he'll come on the show one day. Maybe you'll see that he could be.

Signing at the South.

We could make an AI generated image of him, but now he'll get out. You guys will meet cute at some point. But I do think a combination of all these things, the team, the business, AI. Everybody's using AI in some capacity. We're supercharged. This is a supercharged business. Going faster than I think any business can go.

Not doing all these different things or utilizing these tools that are available.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you tell someone you're like, hey, in a year from now, we can ten times your money, you can a thousand times your money, all of your own. All you have to do is get started doing this thing and, you know, keep, keep using it. I mean, these are at this stage too, you know, it's it's things you don't want to be doing, like you said.

Like I don't want to write stuff like Tim, which, you know, paper or email or whatever. You know, I care about things at a higher level, like I want to, you know, it and say like, hey, you know, I need to do this, but, yeah, it's just absolute time saver. I think it, I think if you're not using it at this point in some capacity, you're really just doing a disservice for yourself.

And I think there's a lot of I mean, unfortunately, I think there's a lot of, like, doom and gloom sometimes. And I, I mean, I see it the thing that actually drives me the craziest as there's like swarms of AI influencers on LinkedIn and I really don't like their coming to it. I think it's either, you know, it kind of like freaks me out a bit or something or it's very clickbaity.

So I think also with AI you have AI generated content that's like by a lot of these, these individuals too. And it's just not it's it doesn't have to be like a doom and gloom. It's just like any other tool in a way. It's, you know, looking back at, the early 2000 zero, everything's moving online. And I even remember back in the day, there were a lot of people that were like, really scared of computers.

I actually remember there was a time where people were scared. Smartphones, it's their years, all these things. And all that does is prolog. You coming into the, you know, the the modern day of society, if you will. I guess, like you're actually setting yourself up for disservice. I'd say if you don't just jump into it and get started somewhere with it.

And it's just such a big productivity booster, like you said, where you know that some you can't afford not to be. I would say to stay to stay competitive and that's where.

I.

Feel like that with students, too. And like you said, I remember when it was scary to buy things online, to shop online. That was something that's totally frowned upon. Now, most people do it for everything. I have so many subscriptions automated. Oh, my videos come on time. I don't even worry about it. It's amazing. And yeah, that's just automation.

And that lets me go and water recording all that. The dinner, go do things with friends and be like, that's weird. So I just think that that is a piece uploaded on there's definitely bad cases.

And you.

Well, well, you saw me the other day, but, I, I use, I use an AI agent. Help me write code and so sometimes I subprocess things a little bit. I had this wave right next to me, and I was getting a workout session while I was, while I was, like, building a new feature because I have to, you know, promise.

All right. You'll go and do this. That's like running. I could sit there and watch paint dry, or I could pick up that way and start doing some curls and some push ups. And so it's it's wild now, but I can code for the first time ever. I can code while I can. I can code while I'm cleaning up after clean my room coding.

And now the next time you see me in a year, I'm going to be I'm going to have 40 more pounds of muscle just from coding.

I'm excited to see it be seeing and coding. Yeah, that's going to be a big one. Oh my gosh, that's a good one though.

That one might be a stretch but I can try it. I know it's a challenge.

Like walking treadmill does change my life already. I'm walking and.

I've seen you.

Yeah is next up. That is some serious.

Efficiency right there. So all right got some cardio. And then it's been such a pleasure having you on. Any final thoughts or things you want to share with our audience or customer base. And, and you may even have a thank you for, for everything that they've done.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's been absolutely a blast building. So, I mean, you know, I, I shout, I shout yours, our our praises, the me and my you and Eric. Fantastic. Lots of team. There's really there's really nothing I can, you know, pinpoint and say like oh like this is the best. Like, I, I'm actually let's I'm happier than I, I would say I've ever been for like a number of reasons.

Me too.

Like, and part of that too, is, you know, working with our, with working with our customer base and building something that I think really has the ability to be extremely impactful to, legislation, legislative professionals. Because also, I mean, you know, I've heard some horror stories about session as well. It's like, you know, it's a lot. It's you get beat down and it's like and part of part of why you just get beat down, I would say, is because there is that level of you know, manual.

I have to constantly, you know, check this on, you know, I have to constantly go and do this and a lot of it. It's not even the core functionality of your role. It's the things surrounding it. I have to file I have to file this report up. I have to go, you know, do that. So, so I mean that that's, you know what?

I'm what I'm really, really committed to is for, legislative professionals, anyone who's, who's involved, with any sort of legislative tracking, all to make their, their lots of briefs. I want them to go and do the primary functions of their job without getting frustrated. And we are we are working very hard. I've been I've, I've had multiple late nights long weekend series session but so stick around some things out.

So we're working extremely hard. And you know I'm extremely committed to the cause. And it's been an absolute blast to learn that industry learn. I learned a lot about, legislation that I never knew before either. Like I thought I had a little bit of a groundswell, but I and I think about, and there's still so much, so much law.

And so it's just an absolute.

Blessing that's.

To work here and.

To work on the product.

That's so beautiful to hear. And I love it. And it's so good for you guys to meet some of our customers. And in real life, I think it's so important that I've seen you grinding been and really appreciate it when our customers are up one, you're up one. You know, I've seen you up super late and, just really appreciate everything done to make sure it's that's it.

That's great work. And thanks for coming on and shared more. Thank you for.

Having me.

On inside.

Yeah. You know, that was a fun.

Conversation for me. Thanks. You know

‍

‍

Welcome back to bills and business where policy meets innovation. I'm your host, Laura Carr, and today we're diving into the world of Fencetech, Venture Capital. And the bridge between Israel and Texas. My guest today is Tal Shmueli, managing partner at Texas Venture Partners, a $50 million fund backing Israeli startups with battlefield borne innovations and helping them scale to the US.

We'll talk about why Texas is becoming a landing zone for defense tech, how wars reshaping innovation, and why Tal believes now is the moment to invest in solutions that protect lives and transform security. Let's get into it.

So Tal. Tell us a little about yourself and how you found yourself coming from the Israel to Austin. Start from the end, Currently, I'm a partner co-founder, a over fund called Texas Venture Partners.

We were founded shortly after October 7th. It's a defense tech fund with a $50 million fund. We invest in Israeli defense technologies, and we help them scale in the US through Texas. In addition to that, I'm the executive director of the Texas Israel Alliance. We have A501C3, basically the Chamber of Commerce connecting Texas and Israel, promoting trade between the two territories.

And we were endorsed by Governor Rick Perry in 2007. I've recently taken this appointment after the former CEO had left. So these are the two things that are keeping me busy. A father to be 40 days, give or take, until until the baby comes. And I think it's inescapable. I mean an Israel, for better or worse. It's a very predominant quality.

And what can I say beyond that? I think I am my business partner, he jokes that I keep trying to do those their ancestry test and DNA test to see maybe I can find a lineage that traces me back to the Alamo, because

I'm such a big Texas

fan. So, so far I haven't. I thought I'm from Libya and and Iraq and a few a few years ago I learned they did a

kind of like an update to the data.

And, and I get a defecation saying, go check your data. We've updated what can be updated. And I go in and it says that I'm 24% Southern Italian. Cool. I'm like mom. So the genetic test, it says I'm 24% southern Italian. Do you know anything about that? She goes, I don't, but I always had the feeling grandma didn't tell us everything.

Oh, that's always so. Well, that's how you find that stuff out. So I think I'm like

two, two percentage points for getting an Italian passport I think

right now. And is your grandma around to talk to her about this? Unfortunately, no I haven't. Even if she was around, I don't think she'd give the secrets. She wouldn't tell the secrets.

That's amazing. Well, like you, a lot of people I know in Austin who are the biggest Texans are moved here as fast as they could. They're not from Texas originally,

myself included.

So,

I relate there.

So first time I was in Texas is 2010. It's very different from the circumstances that brought me back here. But 2010. I have a cousin.

He lives in Houston. He has a big coffee roasting factory in the back. Then I was living in the desert. I was doing a youth leadership program, so I was surrounded by 40 teens and, and at some point it just got too much. I needed a break and I came to Texas. I just crashed with him for a month and it one day he just like, dude, I can babysit you today, but I'm going to go to a cool little town.

It's called Austin. I think you're going to like it. So take a long and we get here and he drops me off on 62 and Red River. It's like 10 a.m.. Went out on a Tuesday morning in August. And he goes, am I'm going to my meetings. I'll come pick you from this spot exactly in like five hours.

Don't do anything stupid and don't cross the I-35 east. So in fact, this is 2010. He comes back and in the space of five hours I got there inexplicably drunk and he looked at my arm and he goes, you're not only drunk, you also got a tattoo. I'm like, no, no, I did not know. And he, of course twisted my arm and he saw I did get

a tattoo on a walk in followed him Red River in sixth street.

So this was my first day in Austin, and I've been chasing that high ever since.

Nothing can beat that day. How can you ever beat that day? That's amazing. What was the tattoo up?

Oh, actually, I don't think that's the topic of today's conversation.

I would people want to know. People want

to know people can

the me on LinkedIn you'll tell people like do no,

no.

But it's more

convenient to ignore them on LinkedIn.

I'll be asking later. I guess it's one you can easily hide. And these things like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I'm really curious to know what kind of constitutes a defense tech company.

There's a lot of different companies, I'm sure, in the space, but what types of industries are you,

in?

The way we look at it is is your customer define what kind of a company you are so you can call yourself a defense tech as long as you want. But if you're selling to small mom and pop shops or to consumers, you know, a defense tech,

A defense tech is someone who is selling to defense organizations, to a government agencies, to law enforcement, to a defense primes to manufacture in that area.

But that's the that's the classification we would use. Tell me, who are your clients? And I'll tell you what company you are. Were you always in the VC world?

What were you doing before you started Texas Venture Partners? I most definitely not a VC before that. I'm a high school dropout, am I so? So no, no higher education.

My highest diploma is a bartending course that I. I paid for with the deposit I got when I was discharged from from the ATF Special Forces. So not a VC. I was an entrepreneur, so I worked for LinkedIn. I was one of the first Israelis in Europe. A I did a bunch of stuff, but none of them was VC.

The day Am October 7th, when the war broke out, I was running my own startup here in Austin. It was an AIHR startup and I was doing that full time. This is a am. I can say this is how I pay the bills, because I wasn't making any money and the bills weren't being paid, but this is what I was doing full time.

But the war breaks out and I felt that it will be,

borderline betrayal to keep doing B2B sales in a time where Jewish babies are being burnt alive, full stop. It felt very long at this point. We had a very large community here of Jewish and Israeli entrepreneurs who takes us allies, and we do everything we can to support these, form here.

We raised money, we hosted gala dinners for the Israeli Children's Fund and whatnot. But it wasn't enough. It simply wasn't enough. Thankfully, it was my friend back then and now, business partner, longevity, Canadian businessman, almost $3 billion in assets. He felt the same. And he donated a lifetime to a charity in Hebrew. And over the first few weeks of October 7th.

And he calls and he goes, man, what are we going to do? We can't donate ourselves out of this situation. The soldiers are scrambling for equipment. The government is trying to figure out what to do. We have hundreds of orphans. What are we going to do? And together we thought of, of a way to kind of solve a few things that matter to us, so long as a private market and public public markets guy.

So very, very, very savvy. And he asked for,

an idea that will solve for the next three things. He says, I want to funnel as much resources I as I can to the hands of Israeli entrepreneurs, because everyone else had to end up back on them, which is 100% the case. Second, I want to help rebuild them, restore the Western deterrence.

I want to make sure that the West is strong, easily strong, that the US is strong. And lastly, anyone who's trusting me with money in a period like this, I want to make sure that they warded for the trust and the appetite for risk. What do you have to offer that can solve all of these things? And I came back to him and I said, I think it's a Texas Israel fund.

I don't know what the fund is going to do. And there he goes, okay, let's figure it out. We started off by saying, maybe we can do something that kind of copies the American doctrine of a heart in mind so we can do foods and fridges, basically basically changing the perception of Israel through technology that can be found in any, any, any home.

And we realize that this is a little too abstract for people to, to, to get involved in. And we narrow down the scope. As we were doing that, we started seeing some deal flow. We let people know we're going to do something. And the most impressive entrepreneur or the most heart or gut wrenching stories we had are for Israeli entrepreneurs coming back on the wall, stopping everything they did to start a defense tech startup.

And we realized we're going to be a defense tech fund. And it was very early on to the game. The hype cycle hasn't really started yet, but we will we will dead set on making it happen. And thankfully we are.

Wow.

Well, that's an amazing story and I'm so intrigued. If you know, so far starting this fund, I know that you started it on July 10th, so 710, can you share some of the kind of significance behind that and what that means for you?

So, so we had we had ten, seven and this was

a moment that will, will, will just etched into the, into time and into history. And we were so frustrated and so hard and so still grieving, still trying to to understand the trauma. And we still do to this day. But we felt we need to go on offense.

And, you know, Israel was already dominating the news in a way that's hard to get anything in. So we figured we need to weave our story into. Into the general context. And the idea was form ten seven, flip the script 710 and basically we're going on offense. The Jews are fighting back. And I think what it did for our investors, it made them realize that we're serious about our commitment to Israel.

It also made them proud to be able to support a cause like that. And I think PR wise, it also made some maybe bored journalists who had nothing to write about. You know, how to July day in the war, titled The War. We give them something else to report on.

And how many of these companies you're working with right now have been impacted by all of the attacks?

How many so far? So we were lucky to find nine companies to date, maybe ten by by the end of the month. There are many more. Our remit is in scope is very narrow. We invest, give or take $1 million into very early stage companies. Some companies,

are too early summer to invest, but within our niche, we've invested in ten companies.

We'll try to help as many as we can. There are tens, if not hundreds of of companies operating in that space. And he's got a long. And what,

Can you share some of the companies that have invested so far in what they're doing?

So in a nutshell, how do we choose our companies?

We try to overlay what Israel is good at producing with what we're good at investing in, which means software based, very small hardware components. A lot of AI stuff,

things that can benefit from real combat experience. And we try and overlay that with what the DoD is looking to purchase or develop. So the critical technology areas, if you take that Venn diagram right in the center of it, you'll find what we invest in.

And I could give a few examples. Some companies that we're especially proud of what is called one EU. It was founded by a UT student here in Austin. And they're developing performance coating for optical components, basically enabling directed energy weapons. So how do you get a high powered laser to not melt the machine? It's fired form. So that's what they're doing.

‍

‍

Wow. It's,

it's bordering on a moonshot. It has a huge defense application because we need to get it right to intercept hypersonic missiles that are there, threatening us from a bunch of places. So that's one company from another company. We're especially proud of the cold specters they are doing cyber intelligence for the dark web. And what they realized throughout October 7th.

And everything that happened after is that traditional intelligence agencies are limited in their technological abilities in the, in the, in the headcount. And unfortunately, some places don't get the same attention as you think. Two instances I can name one is a an Israeli airplane landing in Dagestan in Russia, almost being being lynched to death by by,

an angry Moslem mob that was there to get them.

So these guys x Mossad guys, they're asking themselves like, how could it be the 300 people organized a meeting to hurt the Jews, and no one knows about it. And who's not prepared? They figured as a way to to to address that. And,

That's all I'll say publicly. So that's another company. I can also say that someone the technology has been used in trying to prosecute the people who had to organize the Amsterdam pogrom, basically the attacking of Israeli soccer fans.

A few months back. So they're pretty advanced and they're doing actual life changing work. Some people would say that if we had them before October 7th, October 7th wouldn't have looked quite the same. And maybe the last one I would mention is a company called Infinidome, and this is a guy, an entrepreneur, a one of those guys who was the, once he locks his teeth on something, you can't get him out.

His name is Omar, and he learned at some point 5 or 10 years ago that why the Iranians are threatening to annihilate Israel if we can't really respond back or do any type of a proactive attack because there's all sorts of limiting factors. One of them was GPS continuity. What can you do to protect the mission once it's already in motion?

And how do you how do you fend off electronic warfare itself? So he started this company that's basically allowing full spectrum dominance, full anti GPS scrambling that would allow our fighter jets to get to wherever they need to go and do what they need to do to keep our people safe.

Amazing. And I love that you're very mission driven as well.

What would make a company for you stand out to any entrepreneurs listening?

The number one thing that I, I can't teach is, is how to be teachable, how to be coachable.

And if you approach the defense tech game thinking you have it figured out, it's going to be very hard to work with you. So I can take a really bad idea and make it better. I can make a very bad plan and make it work.

We can take very green entrepreneurs and help them become very successful, but we can't do any of that. If you're not open to learning,

How are you working with the U.S. Department of Defense? And,

just working in the U.S. and in Texas in that space,

Texas is wonderful to us in so many ways, which I'm sure we'll get into the DoD.

It's such a it's such a huge organization with so many different prongs and branches and programs that it's hard to talk about in, in, in one fell swoop. But I can say this

there's no place friendlier and more accommodating for business and for Israelis than Texas. Once they come here, they fall in love with it, and they understand, and they see the upside of walking and operating out of here.

We can get them to almost every every office we want to because people are open and receptive and support the cause. Did you did is there a variety of ways to to go and work? It depends on the company and the stage there at the oddly streamlined ways for us to collaborate. But I can mention one thing we've started doing recently.

Just just last month. We are in April. So two months ago we launched something we called the DoD Readiness Program because this path hasn't been charted. And after seeing about 300 deals, we started seeing some patterns, things that entrepreneurs get too long when trying to break into the US defense market. So we developed a program that means that even if we don't invest in you directly, we're going to try and get you prepared and ready to start selling in the US and collaborating with the DoD, I could go into some details of how the program is structured, but in a nutshell, we're trying to streamline and guide the playbook for something that hasn't been done

before.

Okay, so you are actually starting that

program. How are you helping the founders navigate that right now?

So founders are remarkable species of of humans. They'll figure everything out everything. And it doesn't matter how hard or how complicated, but some things take too much time or too much money to do. And that's what we're hoping to solve

everything that we're going to do for them.

They could probably do on the what if they had two more years of of running it. I'm setting this up for most things now. We want to shorten the timeline because we are working to solve challenges that are costing lives today. So how do we do that? We broke the program full into four modules. Module number one is due the understanding.

This is a huge organization. How do you interact with what programs are available? How do they work? How do you approach what is the congressional appropriations process? Do I need or don't I need a federal lobbying? There's a whole lot to know. So this is module number one. The second is called operational compliance. How do we take an Israeli domicile, a business entity, and turn it into an organization that can sell in the US under security clearance to the most scrutinizing organizations out there?

And that takes a whole lot of work to do in the back end. So we help them with that, and they end up with a cap table and a board and a, you know, a company formation that's aligned with what the US needs and asks for two other things we do. One is called market access. So you are an entrepreneur.

So you just finished your term in Gaza or in Lebanon. And, and you want to go back and you want to start working on this defense tech startup. What do you know about hiring in the US? Cultural differences and people, and how do you get to the right programs, etc.? It's a huge gap for any company, let alone in defense.

So we offer market access, anything from helping them apply and receive SBIR and Start grants to matching them to veterans with a designation that can help them start the US entities and streamline some of that sales process. And the last part, which we kind of touched on, it's called founder skills. Telling a story in Hebrew to your friends over a beer is one thing, but being able to sell, a critical technology component in our Pentagon bottle is a completely different skill.

So we're going to try and uplevel you to to the level of an American executive rather than just an Israeli founder. That's an amazing program. That's we're going to just go home now hopefully, hopefully, hopefully we live up to where to to what we what we're promoting. There's a lot to do. It's not easy. And they're building their company.

We're building our fund. So we thank the people who supported us. And we're going to we're going to do everything we can to make them successful. And you touched on this a little, but why Texas and why does it make it so appealing to be here for Israeli defense? I think you can look at it from from a few of you in a few ways.

If you look at Texas, everyone I know, no state, income tax and business, family environment and I think it's fine and very easy to say what I've learned from working in Texas and with Texas. There's something else that's much more looking and you can't find anywhere else, at least not in the traditional tech hubs, unlike Silicon Valley or New York, where they sometimes feel like a zero sum game, Texas does not feel like a zero sum game.

Texas feels like an open sum game where people aren't afraid to take their their, their, their meal, or their client and genuinely interested in helping you. I don't know if this is a frontier mentality that resonates through the through the decades or what, but people are genuinely and and honestly helpful. They care. They give a shit. They want to see you succeed.

And if they don't, don't tell you to your face and you know where you stand, which is something that Israelis, I think, appreciate more, more than more than they can understand. Having lived and worked in Ireland and London, both for places to be and and walking. But I would go out of a meeting in, in London and I, I wouldn't know if it was a good or bad meeting.

I just had no tools to assess it. Very, very frustrating. In Texas, you know, where you stand and more often than not, people will go out of their way to help you. Maybe lasting. I will say post October 7th. If you are an Israeli entrepreneur or your mom, you want to be your kid somewhere your career requires it.

I wouldn't feel comfortable putting my kid in a school where he would face boycotts or walkouts or whatnot just because he's Jewish or an Israeli, and we have none of that in Texas. And I think it helps the people who are still on the fence come here and make Texas their home and go to the here. Oh, that's I'm so happy to hear that because you hear all those typical things.

But those are some unique ones. And I also feel the same people are pretty to your face and up front, the culture is is awesome, and a lot of people here are also moving here like we talked about. They're not necessarily from Austin originally or from Texas originally. Yeah. And there's an appetite for risk here. Does this entrepreneurial spirit of of you have to go and make it happen.

No one's going to do it for you. Yeah. So I think that appetite for risk is very appealing to Israelis. And does it comes with a tolerance for failure, which is which is, you know, part and parcel of what we do now, some of the reservists and startup founders that you're talking to, you like post October 7th, what is kind of their what's been influencing the innovation that you've been seeing from that shift?

Would you say

I think there's I if you if you really broaden the scope, there's there's

a lack of meaning in many people's life in the, in the secular West. And no organized religion. They don't go to church or synagogue. And, you know, all of a sudden we are identified by our choices as consumers. And it's very, very superficial.

October 7th is exacerbated that for Israelis, it's an existential necessity. If we don't figure out how to protect our borders, no one's going to figure it out for us if we don't figure out how to stop missiles. Meteor like, guess what? Like we're going to meet those missiles, do we? We don't want to. So what? That created is a drive for people to reconsider their jobs.

With Google and Facebooks, it could be making hundreds of thousands of dollars selling ads or developing features for algorithm optimization and realize, well, I, I served 3 or 4 years in the Army. I have a skillset. I can put that skillset to work for my people. I could probably still make good money doing that because these these skills are needed more than just in the state of Israel.

So we're seeing that people walk away from jobs in the most lucrative and sought after companies to start to join defense tech startups. So that's one there's an opportunity there. I think the second part is people who have been personally affected by the war. One of the other companies we've invested in the called uniquely, they are doing battlefield AI, and what they do is, is very cool.

They basically take hundreds of thousands of different variables and they're able to compile them and giving you an output so you can plan and execute operations. That's lovely, but more impressive than the software is the reason they started doing that. The folks who founded it are X shell, which is the Israeli Air Force Commando, one of the most elite units in the Israeli army with a stellar track record of activity that so far up until October 7th had zero casualties.

They will in and out. No one would know. Since October 7th there's been at least 11 people that day, and soldiers that have have lost their lives to the conflict, to the war. And the CEO of the company, Nadav, he's like, I'm I'm doing this because my friends and in the house, they deserve better tools than what we could offer them when the war broke out.

I don't care about selling to the US. I don't care about selling to NATO. I care about putting the right tools in the hands of my comrades so that when they go out and fight for our people, they do it with the best technology, most cutting edge tool, because we can use everything we have in order to, to be successful in our fight.

Well, and you're,

are you seeing an organic movement of,

founders moving to Texas, or is this something that you're marketing or sharing that your your mission?

when I first got here, July July 10th, 2022, 2021. And that's my Texas velocity every, every year on July 10th,

same

year, same year, I go to, I go to the Texas Chile Palo

under

way.

Yeah. And then I go to the cloakroom

and that's how I celebrate. Like, it takes this very seriously. You. And who wants to eat chili in July in Texas? I mean, anyway, so, so, so ever since I got here, I show up and I'm looking for other people with a similar, similar story. And and to my surprise, they were already about at least a dozen here.

Some of them are very successful. And they came. His son came here to pop the money post exit. Some of them came here because they had enough of the Silicon Valley. Anyway, we started meeting and it felt very organic. Years go by, our community grows, we become the official chamber of commerce. And now we realized there's a lot of interest.

How do we capitalize on that interest? How do we make people who need a little bit more in order to come here? So we announced our vision, which is to bring 100 Israeli tech companies to Texas in the next ten years. And we launched it under an initiative we call Conceito Texas. That's all we ask people to do, because I believe that if you put Texas side by side to anywhere else in the world, more often than not, Texas will win.

So we're making it easy. If you consider Texas and the Alliance for people to make the decision to come here, we connect them to the people who can help them relocation support, even immigration support if needed for their companies or organization. Legal support, financial services, everything they need now we have here any one form post exit, post IPO entrepreneurs to small business owners who are making a Bobcats, which is,

that that delightful Jewish pastry, all happening in Austin.

So we're very proud to be a part of the the Texas Cultural Mosaic and contribute to it and try and keep Austin, Austin all in our own little way. And maybe just to to finish that, I'll say that many of the people who come come to Austin and we consider it our job as the Chamber of Commerce to tell them, guys, you may be living in, you know, in Austin, but you came to Texas.

So like, Austin is just a part of it. And so we consider it our job to expose them to, to the the greater Texas ecosystem and business environment and make sure that we are we are an active and contributing part of it. How is,

Austin different to the rest of Texas, to you in your eyes?

I'll say this, I think I think every part in Texas gives you a different flavor of what it is.

I think Austin caters for people from the outside. It's like the gateway drug that makes you fall in love with Texas. And for some people, that's enough. They're like, all I need is is, is the Austin flavor. Texas. And that's all I can handle is for some people, like me, I just want more and more and more. Who else read all four Lonesome Dove books?

I mean, me, it's also like for some people that's enough. For others, they they they need more. I think one of the most wonderful parts in Texas is that there's always more to discover. After two years in Austin and going to all the old Austin places and the new Austin places and doing all the things, you get to discover that there's Houston and it's a powerhouse of a city.

And if you're curious enough, you will find yourself in Dallas and in El Paso and in Midland and in Marfa. So there's there and and in Galveston and like the list goes on. And my bucket list for Texas is still is still long, but there's so much going on and it has so much to offer. Yeah, my advice to everyone is like Enjoy Austin for what it has, but great work life balance, great dating scene, great food scene.

But it doesn't even begin to tell the story and magic of Texas as a whole. Oh, I love that. And you said you were working with,

Rick Perry. So years ago. How did that happen? So when when the organization, the Texas Chamber started, the guy who started these initially businessmen called Doody Wiseman, David Wiseman, he's,

he's an NGO in Israel.

And at one point, he was also one of the biggest employers in Midland. He had a refinery there and all sorts of things. And he realized that the, the connotation to Israel is mostly religious, mostly philanthropic. And it was his vision to also create a business path, not just a religious path between Texas and Israel. So he, he founded the organization as the Texas Israel Chamber of Commerce.

Governor Rick Perry endorsed the, the organization. I still have the same diploma. It's hanging in my office. And the organization had many, many phases in its life. At one point, they flew over the entire Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra to Dallas, which was lovely.

And now we're trying to take it into the economic developed ment promoting trade between the two nations.

And I think that,

of a specific importance in this point in time, you mentioned all the amazing things that you're doing and outside of just capital for your founders, are you doing,

a lot of this mentorship as well, or do you have a big team that's helping with all of that? We do not have a big team, and everyone who's still waiting on a WhatsApp message for me knows that.

Okay, so so we're not,

we're not a big team. We do all of our own stunts, and it's law and my serve with a wonderful chief of staff and some more people who are helping on the lines. We have very committed venture partners and limited partners who are all part of the mix. Okay. But there's very little room to delegate anything.

And

what we try and do is put companies on on the right projects. We and sometimes it's not really nice because they're getting to hear a lot of hard truths from us very early on in our relationship. And it could be a little tricky because the does the courting phase of of an investment, you want to get to know you.

We love you. We everything you say is amazing to us, right? And then there's the you lift the hood and you realize, oh, or things start to go wrong. This person leaves, this Quantic falls apart. This technology didn't mature the right way. And and we we offer an aggressive corrections. Let's say let's call it that because we know these companies don't have a lot of time to a lot of time to lose game.

So mentorship with us, you can expect an hour or two a week with us. We're going to help you put a structure of of board meetings and reporting cadences and metrics that you can report and be accountable to, and we can make a lot of things much shorter for you in terms of a hiring in some sense, development stuff.

But we probably can't teach you how to be a founder. So. So we're not that kind of,

kind of a fund, but because we, we don't want to just because we have to select how we spend our time and it's it's not teach you the robo founding. It's helping you execute. What do you think prepares founders for that?

As a founder myself, I would say nothing can prepare you for it. You know, in a way, the less prepared you are, the better. I mean, think of everything you know about about getting the company up and running. Now, if you would have known that, like how much it's going to take, how much longer it is going to take, how much less money you're going to see from the beginning that at at it, I don't know that you you would have made the same choice way back when.

I wouldn't have left LinkedIn if I knew how hard it and grateful it will be to be a founder for a while. Like, I mean, you either are able to fall in love with it, and once you realize your your you're an entrepreneur in the closet, then then you come out. Okay, I guess that's my life. That's that's the work I have to push.

Fair enough. But I don't think preparation helps. I'd say this I kept waiting. Personally. I've read all the articles and read all the programs. I waited to a point where I would feel prepared, and I and I was not. The one thing that helped me was when someone who I was working with, he told me to do it.

I know there's no job in this company. I can offer you, because you're going to end up starting your own company and it's going to do better than mine. And it was a very vulnerable thing of him to say. I took it to believe him because. Because it's I didn't think that of myself back then. But then I'm like, well, like Tommy are you?

He goes, yeah, man. Like, you got this. I see you work, you got this. You know, you can walk in for as long as you want, but the next thing you got to do is start a company. And then and I did so. So be unprepared, but find people who who believe you are and they'll they'll need you anyway.

Oh, I relate I because I also didn't feel like I was prepared and I had a boss say to me, you're just going to do so much better than I ever have. And he was so successful. Like saying that to me. I thought, well, thanks for believing in me so much because that's what helped me. Yeah, just but now I wouldn't have it any other way.

I love it so much. Being a founder is great. I mean, some people see things in us that we can't. And and when that happens, it's a it takes a second to, to sometimes I'm like, I wish I could love myself the way these people love, love me. It's it's, point in time, which is a humbling.

Self-love is great that, you know,

well, that's very cool where you're spending a lot of time with your folks. Tell me a little bit more about, you know, what, you see the Israel, Texas relationship becoming over the next five years. Obviously, it's been growing so much, but what do you see it changing into?

I mean, we're already off to a to a great start.

And Governor Abbott had done more for Israel than than any leader I can think of honestly. You know, people are incredibly grateful. We've actually recorded a video that I need to send to his chamber of of our people saying, thanks for making Texas feel like home for them.

and so so we're already off to a good start.

I think both companies have their own their own challenges coming up for Israel. We're going to have to economically restore ourselves politically, restore ourselves regardless of where you are on the spectrum, like the country is wounded, I think Texas is holding the flag for a certain type of America and trying to fight off or fend off many people who have a different vision for it.

So I think there's an existential threat to, to the way of lives in, in both in both countries and in a way, Israel and Israelis, we always knew the US has our back. And there was always a sense that if when push comes to shove, the US has our back in in in many ways, this is still the case.

In some ways, this was challenged and this was challenges that he was exposed in, in, in ways that we weren't planning on. And and, and now we have and we relied on the US and we're grateful for all the help we've received. And now these a has a unique opportunity, I think, to give back and and reciprocate.

Because today you see our highest pedigree, smartest, most ambitious entrepreneurs and founders building technologies that that are fed with real life combat experience literally paid with, with, with the blood of our comrade. And just saying, guys, there's a lot coming your way, whether it's a whether it's a China or North Korea, like people are.

I have to get you.

We're here to help. We're here to share everything we know and have in order to make the US successful and resilient and strong in and and I think that's a precious moment in time. We are very fortunate to be able to facilitate some of that through the chamber and for the fund. So to answer your question more directly, what do I see this relationship going?

I think that as soon as we figured out the whole direct flight from Texas to Israel, it's going to make it so much easier for people to spend more time here. Yeah, increase trade exponentially. On top of that, if Texas will will make a slight adjustment to the the law book and will allow Israeli doctors to practice medicine in in Texas, it does

whole host of of combat trained doctors that are that want to share what they've learned and see in Texas.

So we can expect a,

two way migration. I think even if people don't come here for life, but come here for a few years, I think there's a lot of exchange that can be that can be done. And I say this, if you are an Israeli entrepreneur that started manufacturing the whole wave of industrialization or new shoring or whatever on shoring, and you think about where to set up your supply chain, your factory, what better place than Texas?

So hopefully in the next 3 to 5 years, we don't just see the software guys that come in here and walk from Proud Mary on, on on the on South Congress, on the on the laptops. We see people who are here to set up factories. So and they create jobs and they offer jobs and to become a productive role in, in hugely contributing part of the Texas economy.

So that's what I think we have in store. I would love to see more Texans visit Israel and experience the magic of Israel. Everyone who I've taken from Texas to Israel and from other places mentioned it is one of the most profound experience they've ever had. And so. So I had the the pleasure of seeing Israel for the first time through the eyes of all of these people.

And I think with Texas, it was an 89, a whole different way.

Oh, that's all my friends say, who visited on, you know, work trips and with TV or any of those, they've all said said that. So I would love to go. I haven't had the pleasure of going yet. So soon as this baby can look after himself, we can go.

Let me know. I know the next. Like, yeah, nine months or so when you guys are all settled,

what policies are you working on right now? I know you mentioned they've been the capital a few days.

What are you working on trying to get done this session. So I think this session was a particularly weird because so many plans have never even saw the starting line of the legislative process because of the the overflow of bills and proposals.

So the one thing we're hanging our head on and which we're working on in collaboration with Texas Association of Businesses, Senator King is the and name and then Representative Leon who's leading that which is the Texas Israel Trade Office. So Texas has a trade office in Mexico and in Taipei, Taiwan. And hopefully the third one will open in Jerusalem.

And, you know, the sooner the better. I think it'll go a long way in facilitating that two way corridor between Texas and Israel, help our people see why we fell in love with Texas and the opportunities that are that are there. This is the number one priority for us. Everything else, you know, the legislators have done a remarkable job of making this place a home floor for everyone who wants to participate the right way.

And we're humbled and grateful for that.

You mentioned,

easier flight, having more,

having the approval of doctors from,

from Israel to come to Texas. What other things would make it easier for,

people to move here? Do you think? You know, I don't think it should get much easier than that, to be honest with you.

And maybe there's stuff to talk about on the defense side and how to facilitate business. Maybe that's that's a different topic. But I think I think you need to,

being here just a little bit, it can be like just a little. You're such a Texan, right? People. People need to want to be here. I don't I think you'll end up taking things for granted.

Yeah. I lived in Europe. People migrated from Netherlands to Dublin for the company or from London to France, and it just gave it a very transient lifestyle. It can be here, I can be there, I can I can still have a relationship 1500 miles away is like, does it really matter? So you don't really plant roots. And if you really want to enjoy what's what Texas has to offer, you need to plant roots.

You need to, immerse yourself in a similar to an extent. So let's not make it too easy. No, but we'll have to go to the cloakroom. Yeah, that's. You're such a local that

I love it.

What's your vision for your fund over the next ten years? So I think we, we we really hit a nerve with these really early stage tech fund.

And we're seeing incredible entrepreneurs building wildly, wildly ambitious companies. And that's great. I think we should, as a fund, accommodate with the experience we've gained also founders from outside of visa. So we already have one in Austin. Hopefully with fund two we can start growing our influence outside of Israel and maybe later on outside of the fence. So if you're doing defense, you care about where your products are being made.

So maybe fund 2 or 3 will have some some angle of industry 4.0, whatever the name will be back when it happens. Maybe after that when you start thinking about geopolitical challenges and you're starting to think about world supply chains and manufacturing, that comes down to metals and resources. So what does that look? If we look at the team, if we look at rare earth minerals and the likes, does that mean we need to spend more time in space?

Does that mean we need to create more alternatives on Earth, but maybe farther down the line? This is something we're focusing on, maybe a little bit of both. We had,

Norman Garza, the head of the Space Commission on recently. And,

there's so much innovation and in space coming here, it's so exciting. Feels like, you know, like like, like how Shopify made e-commerce possible.

It feels like space is becoming more and more accessible. You know, people like, you know, if as a kid, your dream was to be an astronaut, then you would be wanting to. 500 million people is an astronaut. Now. It's like, actually there's more paths to space. And that's exciting. So we talk a lot about like, business policy intersections.

What's like a policy or mindset shift? You think,

we kind of unlock this new wave of innovation for defense tech?

There's it's so broken the you can probably pick on a whole host of things in, in defense innovation. One thing I would say, and this ties back to the point of being a CFO, Carl, and helping us to promoting each interests make it easy to sell to you. For example, our entrepreneurs, they go on LinkedIn, they research, they send cold emails and, and and in a way, I get it because no one likes to be sold to it.

That's that's fair. But I think there's room for a much more collaborative process in that in a week's time, I could probably fill an airplane with easily entrepreneurs, the more successful advanced, etc. etc. and have them. He'll meet with anyone and they'll sit with you and Laura. What's important to you? This is what we have. How can we make this useful to you?

And together you will define and refine and create a spec and work to build what you need. They would want to lend themselves in that technology to the to the US at large. And I think that's something that needs to be facilitated, make it easier for people to come and work here and not necessarily come here and work, but come and work on your behalf.

And this is one thing would be would be good to see changing in the next couple of years. What's kind of a call to action you'd have for any founder listening right now?

We talked a little bit about coach ability, and I'm going to repeat that in a slightly different way because it's,

it's a huge one.

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If you're a founder, you're probably familiar with the term degrees of freedom. Let's say when I walked in, when I moved to LinkedIn, I was living in Tel Aviv at the time, and I knew country, new company, new or new industry, not my language.

I had almost nothing to go on. Everything was new. So as a founder, I think you should try and preserve as many degrees of freedom as you can, and this will allow you to play to your strengths and kind of make sure that your learning curve is is focused on the areas that are it's not everywhere in your life, right?

It's not the language, the company, the it's more specific. One part of that is selecting the right partners to work with and letting them take you through that journey. We want to think ourselves, this is is one such partnership, and it entails two things. It means just like, okay, maybe you're saying things that are hard. Maybe you're saying things that I did kind of go against my assumptions.

But with embrace and and so trust us then we this I learned when I was here it began genius founders sometimes hold their cards very close to their chest. And I think generosity in our space goes a long way. It's for granted no one's going to work harder when you own your company. No one expecting people to do that is unrealistic.

If you can adopt that and say, okay, this is my company, it's not employee number two, and I'm a free company, it's my company, and you can be generous to them. It'll go a very long way. So because I have some freedoms, when you become a founder, partner with the people who can or can help you preserve those feelings in one thing, and the other is be generous and understand no one is going to love your company more than you.

No one is going to walk out and edit. This is a given. Now you have to be generous to the ones who are taking a chance on you and and and let them do their thing. That's great advice, and I, I feel that too, with hiring a new team and bringing them on. It's new challenges every day, and I just want to make sure that they're happy and enjoying it and in the right spot.

And this advice I know will probably finish soon. But this advice I got here locally am a guy who invested in my previous company, and the story goes like this. We left an event together and on the way to the car he asked me, so how are you doing and what do I do? I start selling,

pictures by the

clients.

And he goes, stop, stop, stop, stop. What did I ask? You said you asked me how I'm doing. Because. And what are you doing? I'm going. Got. Yeah, I'm telling you how I'm doing. It goes. No, you're selling. You already have my money. Like stop selling. I asked you a personal question. How are you doing? And the.

And then he kind of wove in a few, a few of those, those goals and generosity was was right. There they go. This is the guy whose company was valued at a time of $1 billion. And he goes, If I'm leaving you with one thing is your mentor is be generous to the people you bring on board.

I just learned that for me, which I found, I found a helpful. The other thing he said is stuck with a is single guy in Austin bullshit.

Okay. Yeah, it's anywhere you go. It might be a whole lot of fun, but. But if they're going to help, your company are like, are you serious?

How can I love a person and build a company at the same time?

And fast forward two and a half, two years. I love a person who, expecting a little baby boy and I'm building two companies at the same time. So? So he was I stand there and he hears me taking my own advice, which is which is listening to someone else when they have something wise to say. I love that.

Yeah. Eric,

always says, I want to make sure everyone who ever works with us has a pot of gold at the end of whatever it is we have an interaction with, you know, make sure they're both feel rewarded. So I like that a lot. Yeah. It's something to aspire to. If you have the privilege of having other people work with you, all for you.

And that's the last thing you with like a period of their life. It's,

that it's a big commitment. That's cool. Way to put it. Do you have a lot you're working on right now? And you have a little boy coming? You said very soon. So what's keeping you most, like, inspired right now?

I am inspiration is very fleeting.

I am so, so I don't need to be inspired to, to get up and go. I need coffee and wifi. So I'll put that aside.

But for the first time, walking towards something that is a secure and not just my own well-being, which, you know, as a dude, I've lived in some really slimy places and I have a foods that I should not have eaten, and I lived on very little.

But now having to walk to sustain a family and wanting to offer them the best that they eat adds a dimension of pressure that I didn't expect. And so so there's that. And wanting to to do well and be successful for them while also giving them the ultimate luxury. And I'm sorry if it sounds not modest, but, you know, outside of the material things, there's what I lacked is the availability of my parents.

I think they we never lacked anything even though we grew up pretty poor. But we to them in a way, because they will be providing a sustaining. So if I can get the balance right between doing what I need for the material aspect, but also having enough of me to give, I think I would have done, I would have done well.

I am, you know, I I'll say this to finish that part, which is, when we grow up. I was money was always an issue and we grew up poor. My parents our third generation is that is my father grew up in a, you know, you know, refugee camp for for Middle Eastern Jews. He contracted polio when he was there.

And my sister grew up with five brothers and sisters in the same room. So they came from for practically nothing. And so we grew up with I never felt shortage, but I also knew we were not rich. I learned English because when they wanted to talk about money and there was nowhere to hide in the small apartment we were living in, they spoke in English.

So when they started speak English, I'm like, oh, they're talking about money. I better learn English if I want to know what's what's really going on. Wow. So, so yeah, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully my kid won't make fun of my accent and and Irish and I'll be around to speak about things that are not money. Always been such a pleasure having you on the podcast.

And how can people reach out to you and see all the different things that like go plug yourself? Where? Where can people see you? LinkedIn is the best, worst place to get in touch. And so I would say that I'm not on social media. I'm also not selling anything in particular. So, so so that's that's a nice feeling to have if you are building it in, in defense tech, then by all means reach out.

And even if we can't invest will it will be helpful. If you're interested in promoting Texas Israel trade, you can go to the Texas israel.org and see everything that we are up to. And we host quarterly events, and we bring business luminaries to speak and meet the community. And there's investment opportunity. There's employment opportunity, and there's a whole whole bunch going on.

And if you don't want to do any of that, just keep doing your Texas thing and keep keep keeping Texas is such a wonderful place to be in and walk in. And if that alone happens, we're we're grateful. I'm happy. I'm sure a lot of people here are fans of the chili parlor, so I'm sure they'll see

you as so.

Thank you again for your time and for

telling us what you're doing. That's awesome, I appreciate it. Your gracious interview. Thank you.

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Hello and welcome back to Bills and Business. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege, where we dive into the intersections of business, government and innovation.

Today's episode we're talking about one of the biggest moves in the Texas innovation economy. The Texas Venture Alliance and what's brewing this may, I think, Texas Venture Gala, bringing together business leaders, investors, policymakers to drive the Lone Star State innovation future.

So first up, I am thrilled to welcome back a familiar face, Glenn Hamer, the CEO of the Texas Association of Business. He is a fierce advocate for Texas entrepreneurs and economic leadership. And then later we will sit down with the powerhouse herself, CS Freeland, the founder of the Texas Venture Alliance. So we're going to dive deep into her work championing innovation across Texas.

Let's jump right in.

Glenn, it is lovely to have you back on. Always a pleasure. I love being on your podcast, Laura. You're the best. Yeah, you're the best.

No, I told you about this before, but my grandma says that you are just her favorite guest, and she wants to know your podcast. So actually, I want to say hi to grandma. I will, she'll be at our Sine die party if you're able to make it. I'm there. Okay. Awesome. Thank you for being a sponsor, actually. Well, our pleasure.

I'm very, very grateful for that at the party, so. Well, I'll tell grandma what a great product you put together. I live on it, testified a number of times today and boom, we use your product and we get it out,

to the universe. Thank you for sure. You're always up on the screen, so I'm impressed, thanks for being here.

Now, in your busy time of session and you're in the midst of,

helping coordinate this gala and this event with CS. So I would love to know more about your involvement and how you're tied in. Well, first of all, CS Freeland is a visionary. And,

what she has done is she has put together the state's largest innovation network.

And for us, as a chamber for us to be successful in terms of advocacy and stitching the entire state of Texas together. It's very important that we reach these different chambers, that economic development corporation owns and CS through the Texas Venture Alliance is now part of the DNA of our chambers. In fact, she is going to be speaking at the next big Texas Chamber of Commerce executive event in Denton in June.

This will be yeah, this will be her third time in a row. Now, Laura, I have to say I'm a little bit jealous. They skipped me last year. I'll be back this year, but they skipped me last year. How could they do that though? But she's one of the few speakers that back to back to back. And it's.

And the reason why is all the chambers across the state want to figure out how they can help their members innovate. And that's where CS Freeland's,

incredible network comes in. So how did you and CS get connected originally, I believe it was at a,

It was at an Austin Venture Alliance event. I believe there's some dispute whether or not it was at the Texas Association of Business on our rooftop, where we met a lot of people.

Or it was on a boat.

It must have been some kind of boat. So there's. We're still not. We're still not sure, but. But she had,

CS had a great reputation in terms of what she, what she put together. And in fact, one of the one of the events she, she put together,

included the current mayor of Austin.

So, you know, she has a knack also just attracting A-list speakers. And the gala coming up is no exception. This will probably be the first major event that I can think of in terms of from a business organization in the state of Texas that will be hosting a cabinet member from the Trump administration. So it's it's a huge deal that,

Kelly Loeffler, the, the new administrator for the SBA, will will be, a keynote speaker.

And, Glenn, correct me, you're the founding chairman of the Texas Venture Alliance. I don't know if I'm the founding chairman.

I'm the chairman right now.

And it's a great honor to serve as the chair. But, Laura, this this gala better go well because she she runs a tight ship, or I will be out like you can't believe.

Wow. Well, I get to use the next year very well. I'm hearing it going very well. It's going. It's going really well. You know, the the the quality, the speakers, the the great VC’s throughout,

Texas and the Texas Venture Fest was awesome. I mean, I did, you know, 20 cities,

to 20 venues, including, an international venue, Mexico City.

Yeah. So I was in Mexico City and we hosted a Texas Venture fest. And Laura, we had Mayor Cowan from Brownsville there. We had international dignitaries from Mexico and Canada. It was packed to the gills. So, you know, I, I know that CS has ambitions, perhaps to go beyond Texas.

Who knows? You may also see more international activity as well.

We will be watching this space. And we're talking in a different capacity to usual. And your usual, you know, CEO,

capacity. So can you tell us a little bit more just what the Venture Alliance is and what it really means for Texas? Well, what why this is so important? Texas is ahead of the curve on so many different things.

You know, we've won the Governor's Cup for economic development 13 years in a row. CEO magazine has ranked us the top place for business 20 straight years.

Adriana Cruz,

who runs Governor Abbott's economic development platform, does a brilliant job bringing the whole state together.

But an area where Texas,

has some work to do is in the venture side.

You know, the fact is, right now,

Silicon Valley is number one, and I'm a competitive guy.

New York might arguably be, too. And and and Massachusetts might be number three. Laura. We're going to smash them.

I'm I'm a native New Yorker, and I spent a long time and,

I call it really West Texas. That's Arizona.

All right, all right. It was really far west Texas. I don't want my Arizona friends to get upset, but

It's very important that in some of the areas that are emerging, like, AI like defense tech, like semiconductors, like cyber, there's a real opportunity for Texas to to to lead. And, you know, any market that California, New York or Massachusetts or Illinois or ahead of us in

I want to help be part of the the team that changes that.

And Laura, I'm I'm excited. You know, as we speak, you know there's going to be I would expect massive new investment in the film industry in the state of Texas. And that's because our competitive juices get going when we hear about Hollywood. Let's have more,

shows and commercials and movies,

filmed here. Yeah. I saw Matthew McConaughey testify here weeks back.

That was a big hit at the Capitol. He's,

I missed that one. And I'm sort of disappointed as as as as a big fan, but but what I love in terms of what,

CS has put together is that you know, she's building this network. So maybe we're still not where,

California is in total venture, but where I would argue we're ahead right now is bringing the innovation community together on a statewide basis.

Laura, no other state has done this. And I have a pretty good line of sight on this because,

for many years, not many years, but about four years. I chaired the U.S. Chambers Committee 100. That's that's the top hundred chambers right across the country. Also been very active with my chamber brothers and sisters. And another group that brings together chamber CEOs.

And no state has what CS has put together. In fact, if you really Google it, Arizona has more or less copied what she has put together in an attempt to bring together the innovation network. And I'll just pull you know, we're we're all proud Texans. And yeah, I got here as fast as I can,

from from Arizona.

And people know me, you know, I'm just a Jewish guy from the Bronx who had a bad sense of direction and wound up in Arizona instead of Florida. And now I'm in Texas and blessed, blessed to be here. But

We're all Americans. And you think about the great power competition as the United States versus China. And for the United States to win, we need the entire country, to be joined together.

And CS uses this word more often than I do. But to re-industrialize and to innovate, and I really believe that the model that's CS Freeland has put together is the model for the whole country. And I'm really delighted that she's now a US chamber fellow, because I know that they're looking at this model and thinking about,

how how it could potentially be scaled.

That's exciting. And I totally agree with you on competition. It's it's what keeps it going here. And in the US. Yeah. I mean, while we want to be competitive, obviously with New York, Illinois and Massachusetts, look, it's not that difficult because those those states as you know, do such a great job of destroying their business environment. So, you know, as we improve,

they do things that deteriorate, their ability to compete.

But I want them to a state to, to, to basically model the Texas model

simply for the United States to be a healthier country. And,

you know, and in all seriousness, we all have, you know, we we live in a great country. There's 50 great states. We all have things to learn from each other. And, you know, they have the chance to chair something that I believe is best in class.

And the Texas Venture Alliance. It's it's it's a point of pride. So,

I'm excited about the the next gala. It has a less speakers and,

it's going to be a great show. And last thing I'll say about the CS has something I don't have this. She has test Steve Jobs. This case I have zero taste. So you know, I have zero taste.

And it's it's fun to be at her events because there's always something special and she puts her own DNA in it. So I'm, I'm, I I'll also enjoy it in a human capacity. And I know all the people that are joining well have that same experience. Oh I get that that as well from her. Now, this may be a silly question.

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How does the

Venture Alliance

differ from a chamber or a specific city chamber or state chamber? Yeah, it's a great it's a great question. So I would say that it's a it's it's the Chamber of Innovation. So you know chambers really good chambers with permission mix and match and steal good programs.

From one another. You know would with CS has been able to do with her

with her venture fast is a number of chambers and economic development corporations have basically taken her blueprint and they use it, and they get a lot of,

good feedback from the from the public, the media and their members the other way.

Laura. And this is really important for us because as a state chamber, what are we really? We're an advocacy group. At the end of the day, and as the chair, I've been able to testify on a number of very important bills.

To say that the innovation community in Texas is behind them, for example, continuing the R&D tax credit, which is absolutely essential for Texas to be a leading state in innovation, the Texas Venture Alliance supports and has,

helped get the word out to its members, artificial intelligence.

So, by the way, all of my comments were prepared by me, by me, not by my new best friend,

forever Rock three. But, you know, CS has been really good. And using her network, her amazing network, her newsletter, her LinkedIn to get out important information about artificial intelligence legislation. And Laura, I, I do believe in part because of her efforts, we're going to have a good bill that gets through that will encourage acceleration, innovation and the expansion of energy.

We need to be the leading state for AI. And we're seeing, you know, money getting pumped into a lot of industries from this. I had,

Norman Garza from the Space Commission on the other week, and they have got this huge new initiative and fund for these, you know, space companies. So are you seeing anything on the political side mixed with the VC?

And you know, startups at all? Absolutely. Spaces incredibly,

important piece of this. And Norman Garza has done a great job and and I'll get to the fact is, is

it's not yet,

functional in terms of,

a place for an actual venture fest. But she did start the Texas Venture Association. And, you know, again, it's it's really bringing together the innovation community around these areas that Texas is, is putting a stake in the ground space is one semiconductors, AI,

cyber.

So,

you know, in terms of, in terms of space, I think that this is going to be a really good one for the innovators in Texas. I mean, obviously we have,

incredible legacy in terms of NASA and now a space X,

and Starbase, the, the newest Texas town,

being the gateway to Mars, that's awesome.

We have Firefly and the round Rock area. So,

this is an area where innovation and I would argue the Texas, venture,

alliance will play a very big role in in the years to come.

I love it. Well, thank you for joining, Glenn. Is there anything else you want to add about the Texas Venture Alliance or the gala coming up?

Well, I, I would again encourage all,

viewers to attend. Laura, I really appreciate your support and your sponsorship. And it will be,

it will enrich us,

in terms of our, our knowledge of venture and innovation in Texas. And at the same time,

we're going to have a great time. It's going to be fun. I can't wait to,

to hang out with everybody.

Good group you put together. I'll wear boots and I'll try to put on the cowboy hat the right way this time. Awesome. That's.

Thanks again for coming on the show, Glenn. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, for those who don't know, CS,

would love to know a little bit more about you and your background.

Have you been doing anything during session that would impact you with your work. Because I know government and tech overlapping. So yeah, we thought that that was a really important piece with Texas Venture Alliance just to be an open door between,

our government friends, startup investors, startups and that that was the first thing that we launched with,

a couple of years ago is even just having a newsletter that highlights if there's a letter of support, something that we sign and stick our logo on.

Even having the legislators know that we're here and, you know, we do a big gala and events and stuff like that. And so there's definitely a couple bills going on right now, which are very exciting. And,

to stay plugged into it. You know, we have a website, Texas Venture Alliance. And

yeah, even at the federal level, there's stuff that we get involved with even more now.

So yeah. So tell us more. Yeah, about the Texas Venture Alliance. What is it? Yeah, it really it got founded because I started in a hyper local capacity at a venture association here in Austin.

Just kind of convening the community,

being supportive for entrepreneurs and investors. The context is that so many new startup investors came to Austin, and we really see that all over Texas.

So I ran the local organization for about a year and a half as their founding executive director. And then after that, you know, we saw the,

the opportunity to go statewide and be a resource for, you know, the very massive surface area that Texas has connecting,

you know, Brownsville and El Paso,

not just Houston and Dallas and Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio.

And so,

yeah, that's pretty much the premise of it. And again, being an open door,

and, and seeing our government friends as,

an ecosystem of startup support to

what's so exciting and so entrepreneurial of you that you started this thing.

What is your story and your background before starting this venture? Well, I spent the majority of last decade at a venture studio, and so,

helped to do the go to market launch plans for,

the early stage, mostly tech companies and I did that for,

for about seven years.

And then again, since pandemic, there's just been so many new startup investors. I spent some time at a an accelerator. I've been an angel network. And,

now, I guess to venture associations and, you know, in one long breath that's pretty much my background, mostly in startups and venture and government as well. Do you mind adding a little color to that?

I know yeah. Yeah, definitely. Thank you. That's a that's a great point.

And I think that's the opportunity in the market to,

you know, not just here in Austin or growing across the state, but really the country to being some connective tissue. I think that we see this at the highest levels of government now, which is,

exciting for, again, this ecosystem of startup support.

So,

I just became a US chamber fellow and yeah, learning from,

you know, chambers of all sizes and,

how how do we help,

these business hubs all across the state to be supportive of entrepreneurship and these really special types of small businesses. So, yeah,

That's exciting. And you started with the newsletter and an event.

Do you mind sharing about all of the great events you're hosting across Texas? And the big one that's coming up, your big gala?

yeah, you know, investors, accelerators, incubators, angel networks, family offices,

even startups themselves, we have a lot of networking events. And so just having a resource every month, basically the Texas Venture newsletter,

to show who else here, who's investing in what.

There's so many events and,

you know, a lot of great, you know, podcasts and,

blogs and other newsletters and just so much information, which is really great. We've never seen this, you know, really in Texas history or Austin,

for that matter. And so,

scaling that newsletter across the state was really important because we can get to a lot of these major metros and a couple hours and,

you know, we're all under the Texas family.

So I think the, the highest, the high level vision of Texas Venture Alliance was that we're all Texas. So we had basically,

we've always had sort of like a startup crawl in Austin, Texas, which really takes up a little bit more than half the venture capital activity that the whole state does.

So we,

with all the new investors, I thought that it would be important to have,

like a venture crawl.

And we started with all the, the prominent and the kind of like OG Texas venture capital firms and ask you a question real quick is a bar crawl.

It is like a bar crawl. You're saying we're speaking the same language?

Yeah. So there's a bar crawl. And,

then we started doing that for startups, and startups would basically host all these events and like, and one big area.

And then I was like, wait, we should make the VCs pay for it,

because now we actually have a lot more VCs and more venture folks, this whole ecosystem. And so we turned it into a venture crawl in Austin. And then I just kind of went across the city and I went to our friends in Houston and Dallas everywhere.

And I was like, we are going to continue having this in Austin. But if you want to have, you know, something on the same day, we can actually make this a thing and we'll rebrand it Texas. So that's kind of how it got started the next year after that. And so long story short, the last Texas Venture Fest, we ended up calling it a fest because it was mostly just a crawl in Austin.

Ended up being almost 20 different venues and then 15 different cities. So,

it's a big Texas moment. It's a celebration of entrepreneurship. And,

it's,

it kind of felt like,

you know, really inspirational to because we're all Texas. So six months from that, we basically have,

everyone convene under one roof, which is the Texas Venture Gala, and there's a forum during the day and we highlight,

some of the more prominent gala guests.

And it'll be our second annual one coming up pretty soon on May 29th. So yeah, it's really exciting. And that's about 300 or so people. And Texas Venture Fest is usually around three. So we're going to have definitely over 3000 people.

And in October it'll be October 2nd, 2022, 25. I like which fest or what you're we right now 2025 crazy.

We've had a lot of progress and,

we're really excited to come to the event and sponsor. And thank you for sponsoring. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having us a lot of fun with it. We're definitely has fun. I'm excited to chat more about,

speaking and who's going to be there and what we can talk about. And getting people like minded people together.

You you're Texan. So you've seen Texas change a lot, almost Texan. I was born in Dallas, San Jose, California. Okay, I don't know. I thought Dallas grew up in Dallas and yeah, I mostly grew up in Dallas. Yeah. I went, you know, from basically first grade up into high school, then went to Texas State University in San Marcos.

But yeah, I'm I'm pretty Texan. I wear the boots. And, you know, I say you all a lot. So amazing. Well, you're the perfect blend. And California. Texas. Yeah. Yeah, I got here as soon as I could.

Yeah. They all say that's perfect. It's like my husband, he's in the same boat. It's very welcomed. So how have you seen it change?

Across the state as far as, like, the community,

the investor community specifically.

Man. Well, we'll two parts. It's kind of interesting because we talk about, like, growing up in Dallas, I now work with Arlington EDC and the, you know, friends with Fort Worth Chamber. And like all these, like, cities in the metroplex area, they call it that, like Dallas, Fort Worth, North Texas region.

And so it's really interesting. I just thought about that, like right now, you just even having meetings and stuff with,

it was I grew up in a small town, so it's actually kind of crazy that we, we work with a lot of these folks. Now, from the venture capital perspective, we have been seen as,

like, you know, Austin included,

in Texas, sort of like a flyover region.

And most of the venture capital activity just overlooks Texas,

which is the opportunity for an organization like Texas Venture Alliance to,

and this is how I personally feel like if you want something, if you want to attract more of something, you should already,

be positive and accentuate the good that you already have. And so it will be easier to attract.

So I mean, we have to think about we have

started to attract a lot more venture capital and startups too. It's a it's both. We need both obviously.

And culturally it's changed so much. It really felt like a sleepy town maybe five years ago. Oh wait, we're in 2025. So like six years ago, starting to feel like a sleepy town.

But yeah, I mean, that's just that's how it felt. And that's kind of, you know, where we're at right now. It's been happening super fast. And I think that,

Texas will continue to attract a lot more venture capital. And you know what?

because I see and hear all this stuff and we put this in the newsletter. Actually, this quarter, every single major metro in Texas has seen a little bit of an uptick of venture capital activity. I just I put this together newsletter today.

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Houston, Dallas and Austin Austin had a great quarter. So that's good. You know, in comparison with the country, do you know where that is?

I think we're just behind. Oh, I should have ran my numbers, but we're just behind. We're just behind Boston. No goes a Silicon Valley does like Texas. The amount of venture capital.

Surprisingly New York and it's really New York City, like the city actually still does a couple more billion in venture capital than the entire state.

Right. Well, let me just check the numbers on it. But it's it's really interesting,

that this this shift is happening. So. Yeah. So we're third

now. We would be third. No way we would be fourth

is Miami would be no. Miami is actually just under Austin

because it goes it basically goes interesting. But what what's going on here is, is, is this what's happening.

Like we kind of compare silicon Valley to Silicon Valley is a bunch of cities. Two, by the way, to New York City mostly. I mean, of course, New York State, but we're mostly talking about New York City. And then when we talk about we'll talk about Austin. But,

we're just kind of we're actually comparing apples and oranges here.

And then Boston does more than Austin does, just barely.

And that's a lot of like life sciences, the R&D. So but we get we're starting to attract some of that here.

And then Miami comes next. Actually, I think it kind of fell off a little bit.

But, you know, these numbers are it just feels like time.

We're just we're actually just talking about a couple of years here. So in hindsight, it'll just be like, oh, yeah, things were just really crazy. But we're just, like, living it. We're thinking about it every quarter and we'll just kind of disappear. And when we when we back out, we'll see like, no, Austin and Texas has grown substantially.

So yeah. Oh yeah. And we can feel it. There's a buzz there. Everybody's moving here. Yeah. There's more energy to it.

Do you feel it's just a, you know, your hot take? But Austin's becoming the next Silicon Valley.

It would never be. It just won't be. We don't,

maybe in a long, long time.

Yeah.

It's just it's just completely apples and oranges in, you know, it's it's kind of like different money.

It's different mindset too. And I'll just put it like that. It's different. Money is different. Mind. So

but one of the biggest trends and trends in venture capital that we're seeing and what we're going to speak about a lot, the gala is this re industrialization and we call it American dynamism. And like a Texas flavor of that.

And you know that space that's defense tech. It's advanced manufacturing.

It's all very exciting. And Texas has naturally organic stories of this state.

That's just conducive to building that type of,

new technology in those industries here. So. Oh, yeah, it's so exciting to see from across the state. And are you traveling around a lot these different cities and learning?

Yeah. You know, luckily I got most of it did I did a lot of it last summer. Two summers ago I was like all over the state. And man, you know, I've always considered myself pretty Texan.

But really, you're not Texas. And probably you're not as Texan if you don't go see, like this, I call it like a country, like this big, beautiful country of Texas, like, you know, going out to Odessa,

going to,

you know, which is very, very different from Austin, which is very different from Dallas, is very different from Houston and the Hill Country.

And, you know, the border, El Paso and Brownsville. And I'm like, man, you could fit so many different states. You can kind of fit different countries to inside of Texas.

And so it was really it was an awesome summer. I would say it's I put a lot of mileage on car like literally, figuratively, just a lot of mileage.

But it was,

it was really great to be Texan. Yeah. It's a it's an amazing place. I mean, not growing up here, getting here as fast as I could is a lot of people say, yeah, where are you from? Okay, so I was born and raised in England. Oh, yeah. I could tell by the accent, I know, I obviously sorry to disappoint, I know I do.

I get that the what we're saying today. I know my mother's from Dallas and my father is from the UK, so my dad's got, like, a Cockney accent. He's our London guy. Interesting Welsh grandparents. And then my mom grew up in Dallas but was born in Canada. And,

her parents, my grandparents are from Germany and England. So we're all just mutts.

And we love we love the USA here too. Yeah, yeah, we just want to. Cool. Wanted to come here as soon as I could so my kids will be technically first generation American.

I see yes. First people born in the US. So kind of. That's exciting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I did a similar,

trek to you in.

We,

my old lobby firm, and I worked out with my boss. We did a worldwide tour of Texas, and it was to go and meet all the candidates on the campaign trail. Two sessions or a couple sessions ago. Yeah. And it was awesome to see because they're so different. Yeah. And it's each state. Each city is like a different.

Yeah, country. When I went to Texas State University, I mean, there's this beautiful river that goes through the campus and then visiting the Permian Basin, which does more oil,

right. Oil refinery. And we're manufacture something out there. Yeah. More than like Saudi Arabia, like more than Russia and even Texas don't really know about that. I'm like, man, this is where it's all happening.

Yeah. So good. Cool. Yeah. I would highly recommend the road trip. It's going to be a road tripping season pretty soon. So far, West Texas is my favorite, but it takes so long to get out there eight hours. But I love, like. Oh, he does.

Terlingua. Oh, yeah. I love that part of the world. Yeah. Big Bend magic don't go in July.

But I did that. I made that mistake. Oh, yeah. Oh. Me too, as a big mistake,

but made it out alive.

Yeah. And and people don't know, but El Paso is basically is it is in a different time zone. So when we do the Texas Venture Fest, that's the only one that's like a different time because they're usually all at the same time in one big celebration.

But we know it's a little bit different for them for sure. Well, going into the gala, what can we expect? You said there's going to be a forum. There'll be the gala itself. So who's going, what's the the atmosphere going to be like? Well,

you know, in Texas we call it a gala.

Okay.

So anyways, so anyways,

but,

yeah, the the Texas Venture Gala forum will be,

at the W downtown Austin,

which is really great because they just renovated and it's really it's very, you know,

sophisticated.

And the renovations are incredible. So it's great to bring everyone under one roof.

It'll be around 300 people. And, you know, in the light of,

what? Right? Today is actually sort of the kickoff of Small Business Week.

So tell me more about the speakers.

At the gala. Yeah, it's going to be coming. Really exciting.

The Small Business Administration,

administrator Loffler is going to be speaking, and she's our headline keynote for that. And,

we have the Senator, Ted Cruz, who,

we're super appreciative.

He'll he'll be interviewed by Glenn Hammer from Tab. And,

yeah, a lot of other speakers,

really phenomenal investor entrepreneurs like Clayton Christopher, who's,

he started Waterloo Sparkling Water Deep vodka,

Sweet Leaf tea and,

has amazing success with that. And he'll be,

a really great speaker as well. Tyson Tuttle, who's the former CEO of Silicon Labs, which is an incredible,

Austin success story.

Or really, they brought the headquarters from California. So that's another great story.

And,

the former mayor of Austin, Steve Adler, he is

he'll be speaking as well. And he's,

he's an investor, too, so and there's a lot more. And we'll be continuing continually updating the website on that. So stay tuned.

I know you said there were a lot of media coming and podcasts. Who can we expect to see or listen to? You will be. We can expect you.

I will definitely be there. We'll be there. The sign will be. There will be filming some sessions with folks will be. Yeah. It's,

it's important to have the traditional and new media friends there.

And so having a partnership, being and doing press passes is, is just a part of what we are. Our mission is basically to amplify this ecosystem of entrepreneurs support. And so the media is a big part of that too. And so yeah, once again, thank you for your sponsorship. Thank you for your help there. And thank you for helping to amplify,

an event like that.

So be really efficient use of time. It'll be so much fun. So yeah, I'm very excited. I always love to help,

friends and, you know, fellow female founders, I love that. And of course, Glenn. So,

yeah, we're very excited to partner.

So kind of lastly, I guess, what do you see the future of the Texas Venture Alliance becoming, if you can say,

yeah, the future could be in two parts,

you can come back.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

The future is going to be really great. It's,

it's it's easy to scale.

It has been easy to scale across Texas because Texans are pretty wonderful to work with, you know, in terms of our community and they have just such big hearts and they they're able to do big things and we're able to do big things together, amplified,

across our network because of them.

And so,

taking that model and using that as a blueprint for the future,

is what the gala theme is. And so I am just,

you know, excited to use,

it was basically our governor's,

theme of the state of the state,

which,

we're very lucky to have,

the executive director of his office do a breakfast keynote kickoff again.

So she's coming back. That's a good sign. That's awesome. Yeah. She's great, she's great, and she's excited about it. And there's a new report,

the economic development,

report that the governor issued for the next five years. And we're the only statewide innovation network that was mentioned in it. Oh, wow. And so she'll come talk about that.

Yeah. Thank you. And,

she'll be able to to talk about that report and,

give a high level at the very beginning of the day to talk about, you know, entrepreneurs and small business and innovation.

And have a special message from the governor on on that. Yeah.

I'm excited to hear

from Senator Cruz.

I know he's been pretty, you know, vocal about supporting,

innovation

and AI specifically. So how many companies would you say were more on the tech side that are in attendance? I know you mentioned a lot of,

folks on the beverage side, but. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Interested actually, way more of the more software,

software and now some hardware because of the re industrialization.

But,

I would say it's a, it's about half founders, half investors. And from the types of investors, just a full spectrum.

Angel investors,

limited partners or potential LPs,

in venture capital funds,

venture capital firms will have some growth equity and,

the M&A market will we'll talk about that and what that's like right now.

I think that it's important to include university innovation. Sure. There are some economic development corporations and some chambers that have non dilutive grant money, and they see it as

a marketing tool to attract the type of companies,

to their regions. So it'll be a really fun day. And again, full spectrum of types of investors.

Well I guess that I'll have to have you on after the gala, see how everything went and talk about your next steps, because I'm really excited. I want to watch this space. But anything you want to share with the listeners today on how to find you, how to register. And we do have a promo code for anybody listening.

That's us. Pledge 25. If they subscribe, we'll put it in the show notes. But anything else you want to add there? That's good. Yes.

Yeah. It's just a really fantastic moment to have everyone all under one roof. There is a sense of Texas magic that goes on, and,

really, you'll see it for yourself. There's nothing like it.

And we do have some Texans for a day who are spies. You know, we we and we learn from each other and,

Yeah, it's just it's really great to to have your support and others to co-create this experience. So thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. See you soon. See you soon.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business. I'm Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege, where we focus on making government more transparent and efficient through technology. On this podcast, we dive deep into the intersection of policy, business and innovation with leaders who are making ends meet. And today, I'm honored to be sitting down with a woman who is more in many hats.

Business owner, grassroots activists, state senator and now media entrepreneur. She's a lifelong political advocate, and after serving in the Texas Senate, she launched the Texan news and news outlet dedicated to factual and straightforward reporting. Welcome State Senator Konni Britton.

so yeah Konni that is you don't know you.

Would you mind telling us a little bit about your background and,

a little bit of your story from your story is, is you have a lot to tell. So maybe you wanted to start from the beginning where you started.

I was a small child.

Yes. Sorry.

Yeah. I just, you know, I'll kind of start from,

and just skip up. But, you know, I graduated from the University of North Texas with the marketing degree. It was a very, very, very long time ago. So I've talked a lot about that lately because marketing then and marketing today are two very different things. And while I can still help our company in that regard, it's so different with technology and social media, you know, than what we study.

But, I mean, the basics are still the same. But anyway, that's what brought me up to you,

North Texas area.

I was born in South Texas, little tiny town outside of Corpus Christi. My dad was the principal of the school. My mom was a school secretary. Was great. You know, the from first grade, we don't even have kindergarten.

That's how old I am.

That we were.

We we had first grade through,

12th. And then I went to University of Texas.

Married my husband, Phil.

We met there.

And let's see, we ended up, you know, we, you know,

I went to work for Olmsted paper Company. Olmsted. Kirch Paper Company was a sales rep for them for a while.

And,

I think we had a little apartment in Irving, and.

And then we,

settled in a suburb of Fort Worth.

We are then we moved to Colleyville, where we lived for 30 something years.

And that's where I. Well, first I'll back up a little bit. So when I was working for Olmsted  Kirch Paper Company, you know, I realized that I didn't really like to work for somebody else very much.

I, I yeah, I, I got you there. Yeah.

I mean I enjoyed the job and everything, but it was like, I didn't really like this. And I started,

actually, at the time, Silk flowers were kind of in vogue. It's so funny how things, you know,

because it was fresh flowers before that all the time. And then all of a sudden, silk flowers started coming, you know, and everybody's like, wow, this is so cool.

We can actually keep our bouquets, which, you know, nobody.

Kept their bouquets. But anyway.

You know, so they, you know, that was kind of something. And I got I don't even really know why I got an interest in that. I think I, you know, got a lot of books and, you know, we didn't have

YouTube then either to and we went, this isn't all that long ago. You know, I don't want

you all to think that, you know, this was

‍

‍

70 years ago or anything.

You know, it's just amazing how technology has evolved in such a short period of time. But, you know, I got books and things and, and,

started playing with, making flower arrangements. Then it moved into wedding bouquets and things like that. And I had, you know, friends just like this is how businesses usually start. You have friends say, hey, can you do that for me?

And, you know, I'd,

you know,

minimal amount of money, you know, just to cover the costs. And it was fun. And then I started,

I was doing more and more for the weddings and decided that, you know what? I need to be a a wedding consultant.

Because that's the part that I really, really loved was going to the wedding and helping, you know, the bride and the groom and the family through it.

And this was also before Bridezillas.

It was a time before that. My best friend does wedding consulting like this does just. And Saturdays are really busy time for her and she loves it. Even know long.

Hours. Yeah, most.

Are not regulars, but she's had.

A couple. Yeah, and I always say that because everybody always asks.

Because I never even watched brides. It was a show, right?

I was at work. I never watched.

It. I knew there was a show, but guys, I have not seen it though. So you had all mostly nice, right?

Yes.

They were all so sweet. Oh, so sweet and just, you know, just needed somebody, you know, they just needed somebody. And a lot of times, you know, the moms and the daughters might be kind of, you know, little at each other's throats. So it's always good to have somebody else there as the kind of mediator. Not that I had to do any of that, but it just prevented it.

Really? Yeah. Right. So I,

you decided I wanted to do that full time. And so I started my own wedding consulting business. I, I, you know, resigned from Olmsted-Kirk Paper Company  and at the same time,

my husband and I were wanting to start a family, and we were unable to start a family. And so that was another reason why I just kind of wanted to get on, on my own, because we began to realize that the adoption process is very,

involved, lengthy.

I don't know what it's like today. I will tell you, my oldest daughter is 30 something. Okay. Early 30s. So that's how long ago that I'm talking about because, you know, adoption has also changed. So much,

throughout the years, the process and all that kind of thing. But at that time, you know, it was there were more parents wanting to adopt than there were babies available to adopt.

So, you know, somewhat I don't I don't want to use the word competitive because, you know, that's not but it's just, you know, you have to you have to put a lot of work into it.

Get yourself known, get yourself out there, talk to different, you know,

adoption agencies. And we

ended up with,

Gladney, which is a very well known adoption agency in Fort Worth.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful place. And I did a lot of volunteer work for them.

You know, just was there a lot and,

you know, became a part of the parent group before we actually adopted,

just to kind of, you know, just help things and again, kind of.

Hello. Yes.

Anyway, so,

we, I think about 2 or 3 years in,

on that process, we Tori came to us,

and,

after she came, and I had been a wedding consultant during this time,

you know,

after they placed her in our arms, I said, you know what? I'm done with the wedding consulting business. I'm ready to be a full time mom.

So,

I became a full time mom, and then Faith came along about four and a half years later. So I was really a stay at home mom for, however many years.

I started getting very, very involved in politics. George W’s second term.

Okay. And what got you motivated? Was it.

You know, it's interesting because, you know, I'd always been a Republican voter, always been a conservative. And, you know, I'm one of those that many people could probably relate to this. You know, you vote and you go home and you think everything's great, right? I'm voting for these people who are fiscal conservatives, you know, limited government, pro liberty people, all the things that, you know, they claim.

And then all of a sudden, you know, it's like, what? And I love George W, don't get me wrong, I love him. But at the same time, particularly during his second

term, you know, he was expanding Medicaid part D, we were bailing out private. I think it was auto companies at the time, you know, with taxpayer money,

doing all these things that I was like, what are we doing?

And obviously my youngest daughter, who was still at home,

you know, is more on her own. So I think that has a lot to do with it, too. Right? It's like, it's not like I have these toddlers running around. I can't pay attention, can't look at anything in depth like you normally are as a stay at home mom with kids.

So my first daughter was out of the house and my second daughter was, you know,

much more on her own, even though she obviously still live with us and was in high school,

or maybe even middle school. I don't remember now. I can't put the years together. But anyway,

that's really more of what it was.

I could pay attention to the outside world more. And I started realizing that. And, you know,

people, when they hear this phrase may go,

they may roll their eyes because the media and this will lead to later the media and,

many people, many elected officials, I will have to say on the left, Democratic

elected officials really, really, really did, disservice.

And, and, you know, pushed a narrative. But during this time, apparently the things that I was feeling was going across the nation,

and,

He did the famous rant.

Santelli. Santelli. He did a famous rant, and he said, you know, what we need is another tea party.

And that started this tea Party movement of people who were conservative. But we're seeing that, you know, those that we voted for are not being conservative while they're in office. And it was a very I got to tell you again what you probably read in,

in the newspapers at the time,

and heard from people is very different than what it actually is.

It was a very organic across the country movement of just regular people that just started going,

what the heck?

This is really interesting to me because I grew up in the UK, like I was mentioning, and I that time in my life, I'd visit Texas every summer and I was always coming, here. But the media in the UK.

How did it portray it?

I mean, it was Satan reincarnate.

Yes.

So

‍

‍

‍

I'm curious to know if you see if you could explain what what that movement was back then, but also if you see any similarities between what's happening now. Absolutely.

So absolutely.

So so I will never forget Nancy Pelosi said, oh, it's just an astroturf. It's just astroturf. And I remember turning to my husband and saying, what does she mean by that? I didn't even understand what that term meant. That's how little I knew about politics at the time, he says. Well, she just it's like a, you know, it's like a fake movement.

It's not really people. It's just like,

what? Probably groups, you know, behind the scenes,

that have already existed, kind of creating this look to be this movement of people. And it was.

Not.

It absolutely wasn't. I was I remember going, this is wild. You know,

social media was very different than to,

it was not the cesspool that I consider it to be these days. It was not that it was, you know, it was really, you know, started with Facebook.

And then it kind of moved to Twitter. But Facebook, you know, we just kind of found each other all over the country.

I can't even really remember how maybe it was because, you know, I would read,

you know, this local group is kind of forming. And so, you know, I would go to the meetings and they knew somebody and I'd get on Facebook and I'd find them and they'd find me. And it was just this very wild, organic movement across the country of people that were like, yeah, I'm kind of done with this.

What the heck is going on? So even though you will be told that it was a movement that started under Obama, it was not. It started with George W, and there was just this kind of percolation of what are we doing here? Then of course, Obama got into office and everything went into overdrive. I mean, he was, you know, Obamacare was the thing that he wanted, that it was his legislation.

We're going to get this done. We're going to push it through. We don't care. And we just went, Holy cow, it's really bad. And you know, more groups were formed, more communications. You know, between us we did rallies, you know, against Obamacare.

You know, it was just very it was it was so fun. I never I never made a sign.

In my life. So you were campaigning actively at this point?

I would say. Well, yeah, I guess you could tell, I think of campaign with,

running for office. Okay. It was more,

what do you eat?

Activist.

You activist? Yeah. Activism. Right. I mean, I literally made homemade signs. Wow. Never had done such a thing in my life. It was exhilarating because everybody was there, you know, doing it. But one thing that was beautiful about the Tea Party movement is that there was a lot of people within it that said, you know, we can't just, you know, protest.

That's what that's the word I was looking for a minute ago. It's so we can't just protest, you know, I mean, this is good. We need to let them know, but we need to do more.

We need to find people to run for office.

And, and and, you know, not only nationally but at the state and local levels as well, because what we suit, what I particularly realized is, you know, D.C. and we know this even better now with what's going on and what they're finding with those and things like that and how bureaucratic mess it is.

And you realize that, you know, the the when you're looking at that is like, how can I make a difference? It's it's a mess up there. At the time, I think

It was $16 trillion in debt. I don't even know where we are right now. It's it's it's astronomical. It's like, I don't even.

I can't remember it just it increases every day, you know? So so we quickly realized that, okay, we really need to focus on Texas. And while we can certainly look to find people to run for office for, you know, U.S. Senate and for Congress,

what would our, you know, our state legislators doing started looking at that was like, that's a mess, too, you know, and we have Republicans in charge.

And yet we're kind of we're doing things we shouldn't be doing, you know? So,

that really started my, you know, and are people that were involved in this movement looking for people that could run for office,

that could, you know, that really stood for conservative values,

limited government, fiscal responsibility, personal liberty,

you know, national sovereignty.

Those were the kinds of things that we were looking for people with those kinds of, values.

And did you throw your hat in the ring or did someone say, you need to do this, Connie?

So I was perfectly happy being an activist. It was fun, exhilarating finding the people, helping them get elected, donating money. I knock doors for people, and that was really fun. If you've never done it, it's a fun thing.

You know, because people are just they're they're hungry for knowledge, you know, they just it's like, can you just tell me what's going on?

Some of them. Right. You know, I don't blame them. That's how I was only a few years before that. You know.

I love talking to people, too, because

Doorknocking I did this when I was in the lobby, most of all, just to kind of get a consensus of what was going on boots on the ground in the areas and then see what the constituents actually thought of their legislator was interesting too. Yes. So we talk to people. That's boots on the ground.

Doorknocking is probably the best way to find out what's actually going on.

It absolutely is. And I loved it, I loved it,

so I was perfectly happy doing that. Then I had,

which is really odd. It was in Tarrant County. I don't know if I got there.

Colleyville did I already mentioned that I lived in Colleyville at the time, and my senator, state senator was Wendy Davis.

Have you ever heard of Wendy Davis? Okay,

so Wendy Davis was a Fort Worth.

City council member, sorry, city council member. And she was well-liked. And, you know, I'll never forget you know, when I was talking later to people, she would send out very pro-military,

mail, you know, for her campaign.

And so everybody thought, you know, she's a I like her.

She's great. Pro-military.

And they voted for that.

This was during, you know,

city council, and I think actually, she might have done that as well when she ran for probably more so obviously. Why would you send that kind of mail out for city Council? Was when it her first run for,

being a state senator, she sent out that kind of mail and,

you know, she's a Democrat.

But, you know, we like her. She's pro-military. Vote for her. That's the comment I would get from a lot of people. Okay. So, once she was in,

the Senate,

you start to see because she's got votes,

to take,

and you saw more and more and more how she was left of center.

And,

I obviously did, because, again, I was an activist, so I was paying close attention.

Whereas a lot of us, again, you know, don't really write, you don't sit there and look at everybody's vote.

Oh, I do now. Yes. On my right where. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. We didn't know.

Yes. But the average person doesn't. And I don't have time to

and I don't blame them for that.

Not faulting anybody for that cause you've got lives to live. I wish more than anything we didn't have to pay so much attention to to government.

But there was a famous,

she did this famous,

filibuster on the Senate floor.

And I will tell you,

so up to that time, I said, yeah, this this gal is not, you know, she's she's liberal and and why on earth is she representing me even though I was in Colleyville? Because it goes out into some of the suburbs. Why is this gal representing me and and Tarrant County, and she's a Democrat and and a fairly liberal one.

And so I was actively then looking for somebody to run against her in the next go round. So,

I think let's see. So I couldn't find anybody. I'm going to get back to the filibuster in a minute. I've got my timeline a little bit off yet here, but,

I was actively looking for somebody, and then that's when somebody said, why don't you run?

I was like, what? You know, now, I had previous to that helped Ted Cruz

on his campaign.

He was a little known, you know, he was very well known in a lot of circles, but he had never run for office before. And,

David de Hurst was the lieutenant governor at the time of the state of Texas.

And so he was kind of the next in line to run for the U.S. Senate seat.

And, you know, I knew because, again, I was an activist that Governor David Do, hers was not the conservative that I wanted. And so Ted Cruz, there was many people who got in that,

think it was Kay Bailey Hutchison who had retired, and there was many people who had gotten in the race.

And,

so he he epitomized exactly what I believed in Ted Cruz did when he came around. And, you know, on his campaign trail, I was like, I'm going to help this guy get elected. And Ted actually uses it a lot. He'll say, you know,

Connie and others,

you know, when I was 2% in the polls, believed in me, you know, and we helped him, and we were boots on the ground and we got, you know,

yard signs distributed.

And we were there on the stump with them and, you know,

and eventually he run. He won. So I had a little bit more,

people that were involved in campaigns, whereas before I was just helping, you know, people get elected with a Ted Cruz campaign. It really, really helped me to see how a campaign is run, kind of see strategy.

I knew consultants, I knew his consultants. I knew a lot more people because I'd been all over the state helping Ted. Sure. So when somebody said, hey, you should run, even though I was shocked, like, you know, and and at that time, it was very much still a Tea Party wave. We were still in that Tea Party wave of we need to get fiscal conservatives in office.

And so I called for a consultant that I knew and said, is this, you know, is this even something I should think about? And, you know, he he immediately said, absolutely. It is because you know, this these are the numbers that Ted did in Tarrant County. You know, Tarrant County is ripe for picking up a,

a Republican seat,

particularly somebody in the Tea Party movement.

And I'll have to say that,

that district at the time was 5050, Senate. Excuse me, Republican versus Democrat. And for people who don't know,

most of the Senate seats and House seats are district ID, Republican are Democrats. There's just, you know, there's very few that are like that that are close. In other words, there's going to be a Democrat seat that's 60% Democrats live in that district.

It's not.

Worth a.

Seat. It's a safety. It's not worth running a Republican in that seat because they're not going to win. There's not enough Republicans to vote for them. Sad. You know, but this one was a 5050 seat. So it was definitely,

something that could be picked up. And so,

I had already thought, okay, so I've got the wheels.

You know, I think maybe I'm going to do this was kind of getting some stuff ready then. Apologies for bringing it up too soon. That's when Wendy Davis did the famous filibuster on the Senate floor. And it was a bipartisan piece of legislation that said, I think,

was that when it was the,

you can't have an abortion after I think it was five months of pregnancy, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly.

I mean, that's pigments. So it's kind of interesting now because it's, you know, since then we've had so many pieces of legislation that have even scaled back more to for me to even think, oh my God, that was just by I mean five months of pregnancy is is very pregnant, you know, and I'm very pro-life, obviously, not only because it's really not even because we adopted, I mean, obviously, you know, I, you know, I'm pro-life,

but, you know,

and obviously, I see, you know, how beautiful it is, and I understand how terrifically,

hard it must be for any woman to place her child for for adoption.

It cannot be easy. Right.

You know, and yet, you know, there's so many families that are, you know, awaiting a child to give love in a in a forever family, too. So,

I had really just gotten everything in order to run. And then she did this filibuster, and it was a big, big, big deal at the Capitol.

And again, it wasn't all that long ago. And yet, you know, I mean, it brought in people all over Texas, all over the country.

I, you know, had moved from Facebook to Twitter, realizing, oh, Twitter is much more of a political,

social media site than Facebook is much faster. You know, information just goes like that.

And I had already moved to that, but it still wasn't near the scale that it is now with people.

And so when she was doing the filibuster, people were asking on Twitter, who's running against this woman? You know,

and I was able to say, I am.

That's when you went down.

Yeah. And I mean, it was phenomenal. It was phenomenal. You know, people were helping me all over the country because I was pro-life. You know, and I'm pro-life. I disagree with her trying to kill this legislation that, you know, she doesn't even want, you know, she,

didn't what? She wouldn't,

didn't want women to be able to abort, you know, till,

up to five months of pregnancy.

I was like, oh, my gosh, this is ridiculous. And people all over the country were incensed and and so I came down to the Capitol then to, you know,

for rallies and, and spoke. And that was really the impetus, you know, that that got me even wider recognition.

So, we like to say, I like to say,

soon after that, after it all, she failed.

No. Excuse me. She did as she was. She got to it to be killed. She got the bill to be killed on the floor. But at the time, Governor Perry called a,

a,

a session and,

emergency session. And, you know, they got the bill passed, right? So it was like,

It was not long after that that she decided to run for governor. We like to say that we scared her out of the race because, you know, it was. It was pretty obvious. Again, it was a 5050 district. You know, odds were not in her favor after that filibuster. You know, probably she already had, you know, designed to run for governor.

But what her people were telling her is now you this this got you so much attention, so much recognition. You need to,

strike while the iron is hot

and run for governor. It didn't work that way in Texas. You know,

how.

How different was it going from, you know, grassroots activism to then running for office on your own? How different were.

Those? It would have been incredibly different had I not had that experience with Ted Cruz.

I always think that I remember when we were doing things that, because I will say that another Democrat got in the race after Wendy Davis had the same,

everything was the same, her principle, everything that she believed in. But she did not have the gravitas that Wendy Davis had.

And but I would see them do things that I thought, I can't believe they're doing that. That's a big, huge mistake. And I was I remember thinking, wow, I know something, right? You know, I wouldn't have known that had I not been as intimately involved in Ted's campaign. Known the consultants that, you know, I just I didn't I wasn't trying to learn how to run a campaign at all.

I was just trying to get Ted elected. But I knew the consultants we talked daily about how you need to be here. We want to do this because of this, you know, so that teaches you strategy. So it really wasn't hard for me, but I think it would have been hard had I not had that experience. Because you do know.

Oh, okay. I see now, you know, the kind of strategies just even things like signs, yard signs and mails and mailers and,

slogans and things like that, that others kind of have to start from the beginning, you know.

What was it like to win?

Oh my God, it was so awesome. Oh my. Oh I bet.

Well, was it close to was it a close race considering it was 5050 district?

Yeah, I can't remember. It wasn't I we, I can't remember the percentages right now, but it wasn't that close. We won pretty, you know,

what's the word I'm looking for? It wasn't, you know, it wasn't overwhelming, but it was enough of a victory that there was no, you know, like, oh, you know, kind of a thing.

So

we had a big thing in the,

stockyards. We had. And we we had,

you know,

somebody that was obviously watching the numbers and, and we had a pretty good idea that we were going to win,

which was awesome. But you never know. And,

again, it's what voters come out.

Right? Who's motivated.

To run? I mean, to to vote.

And so we had a big thing in the stockyards ready to go. And, you know, I was behind the scenes. I didn't come out because I was too nervous.

And, you know, then when they called it, you know, for us, you know, walked out and it was just cheers from everybody.

It just gives me chill bumps now because it was so important. It wasn't. You know, people say this all the time, but it's the truth. It wasn't about me winning. It was about getting rid of and not having another pro abortion. And I know people, you know, don't like that term. But at the end of.

The day, you know.

They didn't want somebody that supported abortion in that seat. It was these were people that voted, and they were shocked and horrified that they had some of them. A lot of them were shocked and horrified that they had voted for Wendy, not knowing where she stood on that issue. And when they saw what she did on the Senate floor.

And we're just like, horrified and it was a for a lot of people, it was just I mean, they told me, say, thank God you came along. Thank God I could. It was kind of like it redeemed them from that vote that they had made previously. So it was more about thank the Lord. You know, we don't have somebody like that representing somebody in Tarrant County, which is, you know, the reddest county in the country.

Why don't we have this woman? Right? So anyway, it was wonderful. It was great out, you know, it was it was great. And it was time to get to work. Then, you know, what.

Was the climate like in Austin when you came down here to start a session?

Yeah.

I, you know, something that I did not think about at all in some of the senators, it might have even been,

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. And I hadn't really thought of this. And I now, having served on the Senate, I get it. And I don't think I would have understood that, you know, the climate within the legislature is very different than the activists climate.

Not that people not to say that,

elected officials don't go down there to do what they were sent to do. I'm not saying that at all. But, you know, it is a very there's decorum, there's decorum. And frankly, I love that.

I love that a.

Lot of activists don't write. They don't like that. They want you to punch and shout and scream. And I get it. That's probably there. Once upon a time.

Or at the activist level, I don't know. I don't know if I

don't know, but, you know, there's decorum and and,

you know, I, I know that I remember I believe it was Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick that said, you know, when sessions started, he was very, very worried about, the toxicity that,

had happened, the, the previous session, you know, when the filibuster happened and then all these people came from all over the country, and it was just nasty, you know, it was

whoring. I heard from a lot of people that it was a dark place.

Literally, like in the Capitol, that. Yes, time or that day.

That during the filibuster, not

all those hours, however many hours she was on the floor filibustering.

It was people said it was a really dark place because of what, you know,

they were fighting for and what they were fighting against, you know. Yes. And it didn't feel good to them. And this were activists who said this. And then,

Dan Patrick said, you know, he worried because it was so toxic, so toxic.

And again, you know, something that I hadn't thought about is because in the Senate and the in the House, let's say within the.

House.

But there is decorum, you know, and, and so.

You, you know, what I'm talking.

About for sure. I mean, the Senate definitely there's fewer members and even people who are of an opposite party, you will get along and you'll be the same room and you will. That's right. And I love that. That's right. It's respectful. You listen each other.

That's right. And and those of you who may be listening or watching and thinking,

it it is a good thing, trust me.

Because,

you, I mean, you have to work with each other every day. This is what this is what I use to kind of explain it to people who who are activists who don't like decorum, like, okay, in your work every single solitary day, you know,

if you were tweeting out something about your coworker that you have to work with in some

capacity, either whatever that work, you know, I mean, you have to sit next to each other, you've got to work together, and yet you're tweeting out what a

jerk they are.

That's awkward.

And weird. Yes. And not productive.

And and you're not. Yeah. And like it or not. And and people may say, and I didn't like it. You know, grudges are held. And so people kill each other's bills because, you know, somebody said something about somebody. So in one way it's very middle school ish. Yes, yes that exists. But also you can't blame somebody if they're tweeting out, you're a jerk.

Yes. Right. I'm going to be like, I'm not helping you. I'm, you know, I'm not signing on to your bills. Matter of fact, I'm going to try to kill it. That's human nature. And that's what I try to explain to people. There is human nature in this. And so particularly with the senators,

we get out on the floor and not fight like the House does, but we do, you know, fight with each other on legislation and say, you know, I don't like this, you know, but of course, then you say respectfully.

You know, I know it's always funny, right, right. You know.

But but we also in the Senate and I think the House has this too, I don't know,

particularly, but we have a little room where we all go and we eat lunch because you're on the floor all day. And so we have a little room. We eat lunch together, sometimes up dinner together because we're there all day.

And so we're asking each other how they're how your family is. How's your family? You get to know their wives, their husbands, their children, you know, and it doesn't seem you can still remain conservative. I did, I, you know,

I can still that does it just because I'm friends with them or want to know how you know that we are,

you know, nice to each other and we care about each other.

Doesn't mean that I'm going to go out on the floor and vote for their bill. You know, I think that does happen. I think people do get swayed because they've become friends with somebody. You know, I do think that happens. You know, the funniest thing I just loved it to death. Kirk Watson was at the time I served with him.

He's now the Austin mayor.

Senator Whitmire, who is now the Houston mayor, was,

in the Senate. These are both Democrats and,

and Senator West, who's still there. He's a Democrat. And but mostly it was Kirk that would come by. He come by with piece of legislation. You know, you're.

Not going to want to do this, that they.

Knew. They knew. So they just didn't ask me. They knew where I stood, you know, and in and so that was great. I loved it. And that's, you know, but we were still friends. We'd laugh about it, you know.

But there's a there's also a lot of stuff. What a lot of people don't realize either is there's a lot of stuff that does not fall down on party lines, just doesn't.

I found that so awesome when I came to Texas from DC because it was very polarized in the suburbs. Yes. Capitol. And

in Texas, I was finding most bills were passed like bipartisan support.

I think about that. Think about it. Roads, water. You know,

a lot of times the lines fall between urban and rural. As you can see on the school choice stuff. You know, that's a huge,

you know, that's where the the lines fell. So a lot of times there's that. Now, of course, with abortion, you know, trans,

gender type of legislation, you're going to fall on party lines,

you know, so but there's a lot of stuff that doesn't fall on party lines and, and so,

you know, you can go down there,

stick to your values, be friends with people that are diametrically opposed.

It works. It works. You don't. And you know, you're not making them an enemy for no reason. You know.

I love that.

So who was your best friend in the

Senate?

What's your desire?

I don't.

I did not have a best friend, but we.

Had a class.

That came in,

so, you know, I was. Let's see. I'm going to forget him now. And Bob Hall, Lois called. Course.

Brandon Creighton,

a Paul Bettencourt. Charles Perry,

Oh.

Don Huffines.

So we were very close,

because and that's apparently how it

always happens, who you come in with into the Senate or probably even the House. You're very close because you're kind of learning together. Not that,

brandy. Creighton. Charles. Perry. Lois. Coal. Course, they all came over from the house, so they were very well versed in this, you know, already, but you just kind of have a kinship there.

So, yeah, they were all kind of my pals.

A lot of them still there.

Yes, they are a lot of them. Yes. We were I was just watching Bob this morning on the,

lottery. It was on Texas Lottery.

Like so long.

Here it was.

It. This was on the floor. They suspended? Yes. They suspended,

the rules, of course, because the Senate.

Okay. Yes. People don't realize that either.

The Senate can suspend rules all the time. That's why the House and I don't know I don't know all the the rules of the house, but the house can't do it like the Senate does.

And so that's why the Senate can get to work a lot faster. So, you know, there's a lot of complaints about that. And there might be valid reasons for it, too, because I don't know, you know, all the rules and everything, but they're but they absolutely do not have it, like the Senate where we just suspend rules because we've got a majority.

And,

Dan Patrick, you know, changed the rules when he came in. So that we can do this and good for him and good for us. Right. But it's different. It's a different.

Chamber.

It's speedy. Yeah. What were your top priorities in things that you did during your time in the Senate?

So I did a lot of killing of Bill because as a freshman you can't do too much. You know, you're kind of a you are kind of, you know, watch, listen, learn, you know, kind of a thing. And,

so I did a lot of killing of bills.

I was on the,

criminal Justice Committee, and I found I'm a fiscal conservative first and foremost pro liberty, you know, all those kinds of things.

So what I, you know, our office read the bills, which, anyway. Yeah, we read the bills. And if there was stuff in there, you know, I'd be like.

I'd either, you know, kill it in committee or talk to the author, you know, and say, can we take this out if we can't, I'm not voting for it.

You know, those kinds of things. You do a lot of work behind the scenes, but I,

so,

I was on the criminal justice,

committee, and, and I got to say that criminal justice reform cash, even however many years later, was very different than than it is now. So I don't want people to think because it kind of got to a point, you know, criminal justice reform on the left was, you know, letting people out on bail, you know,

violent crime, a criminal out

with no bail.

You know, I mean, it became ridiculous, right? I was,

you know, criminal justice reform. Let's let's make sure that people have committed, you know, done their time, and then let's make sure that government isn't in the way for them to then get a job and be a productive citizen in society. Trust me, government does a lot of things that causes them not to be able to to get work afterwards, you know?

And so I did a lot of,

working on legislation that, you know, wait a minute, look at this, how you've written this. If somebody accidentally does this, you're saying they committed a felony. That's not a felony, you know? So I did a lot of work. People would come at my second session. It was so beautiful.

Senators will come to me and say, okay, Connie, is this okay?

Me,

you become an expert in it?

Yes, yes. And it was wonderful. I was and thank you. Let's let's change this. Let's, you know, if yes, it's a crime, but does that does the crime does the time match the crime? You know, it's ridiculous.

And so I did a lot of that kind of thing. I did a lot of amendments to bills to,

let's get this in here to make it better, you know, those kinds of things.

So, you know, one little teeny tiny. But it's important.

I, you know, I had my name on a lot of bills. You coauthored, yadda yadda yadda, but one little teeny tiny thing,

that I did was,

there was a group in, in my district,

very much for, you know, medical freedom, those kinds of things, and said that,

when you go and have a baby immediately after the baby's born, the baby is swabbed with,

ointment on their eyes, and for good reason.

This is, you know, it could it could potentially,

prevent something that could potentially blind the baby.

And, you know, it's a good thing, but what was happening is, you know, there were. I think I may be remembering this wrong is only with vaginal births or something. Maybe, you know, and so women who were having C-sections were saying, I don't want that.

You know, I'm more you know, I don't really want that stuff on my baby's eyes. There's no it's just not necessary.

Right? Right, sir.

But they couldn't say no. The doctor wouldn't let them make that decision. Isn't that kind of bizarre?

Yes. Yeah.

And so I got that through. But now the mom can say no way.

Yeah. And isn't that. I mean.

But I've heard from so many women since then, it's like, thank you for doing that. So there's all sorts. See that now that doesn't fall on party lines.

Well, I was going to say a lot of the criminal justice work you did too.

Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I actually had to fight more with Republicans on that because there's a lot there were at that time. There were a lot more. Lock them up and throw.

Away the key. You know, you know, the old school Republicans.

And they weren't realize I said, I'm not trying to let out violent, violent criminals. I want them put away like you do. But let's not, you know, I mean, there were like, rules in place where they somebody couldn't get a barber's license because they were they couldn't,

do work with scissors, but they weren't a violent criminal. Oh, yes.

There's all sorts of, you know, government. It's crazy.

Yeah. I love to hear. That was when I worked in government.

I think I worked in government.

Say that I.

Yeah.

I

just don't like it. Yeah. Because rules are just. They just become these stupid rules. So somebody who had been in prison for something that had nothing to do with any kind of, you know, violence or scissors or anything that couldn't become a what are most of these people going to do? They're going to do these kinds of, you know, there were things that that prevented them from being a plumber.

I can't even remember now. So those are the kinds of things that I tried to undo.

Interesting. Yeah. Before the heartbeat bill. Yes. Was when you were in office. Is that correct? Was before.

Yes.

So what work were. Because I'm curious. You're obviously very passionately pro-life. Yeah. And that's something important to you. What were you working on then?

Before the heartbeat bill that was pro-life legislation. Was there any work that you did? Yeah.

So I didn't I didn't actually obviously, I am passionate about it, but when I came in, there were already people that sure, I know, I knew I'm not going to get this pro-life bill passed. Right.

Sure.

So even though, you know, I actually with my,

you know, team, I said, let's get this in there. Like, you know, Senator, such and such has got that was like, I'll sign on to the is because sure they're going to but yet they're, they've got the you know

what the longevity the know how the you know. And so I didn't, I didn't, you know,

author that kind of stuff actually, because I knew I wasn't going to get mine pass.

They're going to get their pass.

That makes so much sense. When I was in the Senate last session, I was with Senator Paxton. Oh, yes.

Yes. Yeah.

And so there were certain bills that just weren't in our wheelhouse, right. To file, even though it was a passion. Exactly.

Just. Or if.

Somebody else is doing it, then let them do it because you only had this, you know, you only have so much.

Bandwidth.

To get the bills that you want to get through through.

And you want to be the right person with the staff that knows their stuff about this issue. And so that's right. That makes that makes so much sense. Yep.

You did some work on civil asset forfeiture as well.

That was something I was

very passionate about. Yeah. Very passionate

that I feel that that's going to come back to the Supreme Court. I know,

Justice Thomas has talked about that, I don't know. And, you know, I just think it's unconstitutional. I just think it is unconstitutional.

We've got some safeguards in place here in Texas, but I'd like to take those.

I'd like to get rid of civil asset forfeiture.

You know, law enforcement wants it. Of course.

And I get it right.

This isn't anything against law enforcement. It's against the. It's something that I believe goes against the Constitution.

But there are forces there, you know,

that are,

you know, it kind of pitted me against law enforcement, which I hate because, you know, I believe in law enforcement.

Right.

But,

you know, you could there is civil asset forfeiture, you know, a,

policeman can pull over somebody for something. And if they see some cash laying there on their,

car seat in an envelope, and I get it, you know, like, they can immediately think drugs or something like that, they can confiscate that if they feel like they have.

Yeah. Yeah. And and I know that good reason.

Confiscate that. And basically what civil asset forfeiture does is it causes that person to have to prove that they weren't selling drugs. Well, how do you prove a negative? That's not how our system works, right? You're innocent until proven guilty. You're not guilty until you,

try to find yourself.

Try to prove yourself innocent. That's not how we work. And a lot of times, this stuff,

you know, gets confiscated. And then even years later, when they find that this person wasn't doing that, they don't get their, you know, either the money or their, you know, sometimes they'll take their car,

you know, it's it's really, really something that we need to get rid of.

And but again, police officers for good, you know, I mean, of course, somebody who's dealing in drugs is probably going to have cash laying there. Right? But it's not a lot of people like I just sold and particularly those of us probably, you know, Facebook Marketplace.

I just went to the holy cow. Right. Yeah.

Oh, right. You know, we just bought. Yeah.

That armoire you saw down there.

Exactly. I mean,

you know, so, so there's good reasons to have cash and yes, drug dealers are going to have cash, but, you know, so so there's there's a real tension there between anybody who wants to try to get rid of civil asset forfeiture and police who want to use that to capture bad people. You know, I believe that the Constitution comes.

First.

And our constitutional,

safeguards should be first. And there's a lot of people on both sides of the alley due to.

Your very passionate. I love it so much.

And I know that what kind of started the transition from wanting to start the tech center? The CEO and founder of the Texan News.

Were you in the Senate when you were thinking about starting this?

You know, how.

Did that transition out of.

Politics come? Well, I say no for that, particularly my husband and I have always been frustrated with the media. And of course, you know, even like back 100 years ago when we were reading the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

You know.

And we weren't even I wasn't even activist that I was like, I get frustrated because of the like, you know, it were telling the story. It was kind of offensive. The the point of view that I was having to read the story from political stories, and I don't even think I understood it at the time. I just know it made me mad.

You know? I don't know that I could have put in words why? So we'd always been frustrated. As a matter of fact, I remember canceling the four star telegram because I'm like, I told them, this poor person on the phone. Yeah, you don't, you know,

you don't respect my point of view. I want to cancel it. So we did.

And then, of course, when I became an activist and, you know, we'd go to these rallies, these Tea Party rallies were nothing with a bunch of people with signs saying we don't want Obamacare. And then I read an article the next day and be like, they talked about us. Like we were some sort of satanic force. And I was like, we were just some people.

What? This is how our country exists, you know, you protest, you show people you're not for this kind of stuff.

And I started it was like even more because it was personal. I was there and this is how you're reporting this, you know,

and then of course, when I was running my campaign, because I'm a conservative Republican, you know,

Wendy Davis always got glowing articles about her when she was,

in office.

This for senator. And, you know, the articles were not so glowing about me.

When I was running and certainly not when I was in office.

You know, it's just you could see it. You could just see the difference in how much you were written about or little. You were written about how you were written about the words they were use.

It was just incredible. And,

my husband always said getting to that, my husband always said, why in Texas, which is a majority Republican state based on elections, right? We're talking about elections. Why do we have a media that speaks from a left of center viewpoint? That was

you know, we like they don't they don't. It's like they don't understand our issues.

For instance, okay. We have people who are concerned about the border. They're concerned about illegal immigration. But stories would always focus on people on the right because we're racist. Like I grew up in South Texas. What are you talking about? You know,

we're concerned about human trafficking, drug trafficking,

national sovereignty. You know, we have a system that people are abusing.

They're coming over illegally.

You know, but that's not where the story's focus is. It's more about racist, you know, you're a racist. What? And of course, we've seen that evolve, you know, over time to just be a we're finally kind of overcoming that, you know, with Trump now in and people are like sick of it. You know, we're just sick of it because it had gotten to such a level.

But at that time we were like, this is frustrating. And so Phil was always say that, you know, gosh, why doesn't somebody start a news organization, not a right of center organization that does what they do, but on the right? That's not what we wanted to do, ever. Not what I wanted to do, ever. I said, you know, and then I lost in my when I was running for reelection, that was the year of the Beto wave.

Yeah.

Beto was running against Ted Cruz. And it was. And that was another reason media was un believable. You to thought Beto was the next best thing since sliced bread. I mean, the Dallas Morning News was showing him on a skateboard, you know, I mean, it's like this is some really hard hitting news.

You know, I mean, it was glowing coverage.

You know, it was all over the country.

I had somebody that later moved in from another state that said when, when Beto ran for the presidential and the Democratic person was there, that's who. That's who almost beat Ted Cruz. I said, yeah, because it was it was unbelievable. The media was unbelievable. I mean, he was just this wonderful golden boy.

Shows with power to say.

Yes. And so we outperformed. I actually outperformed Ted Cruz in our district.

I think it was only Governor Abbott.

Yes, yes. I mean, we actually had Beto voters and plenty of certain voters. And we were running against somebody that had no name idea, but we were still name. I'd excuse me, we were still a 5050 district and with better on the ticket, it just brought out people that we were like, who are these people?

We had no idea who these people were. No idea. I mean, they just came out out of the blue because they saw Beto and they voted straight ticket. So,

we lost. Sorry. And that's sorry. I forgot what my whole point was.

So we lost. And that's when my husband turned to me and said, we got to do this news organization, we've got to do it.

And I was like, are you sure?

Up.

So we did it. And just as quickly as I do, we're running out of time.

I don't want to be again what I never wanted to be. And we are not we are not a right wing news site. We are not what I,

my goal has been, always has been. And I've got the best team. The best team that understands,

what?

You know, our vision is. And they stand by it, and they're so awesome. And, you know, we are not competing against,

you know, the left wing.

I don't know, just kind of. I don't know how to describe them,

activist sites. That's what it is, you know, because we've got them, you know,

in this state, we've got left wing activist sites, we've got right wing activist sites who who do kind of media hits, you know,

we are competing with,

the Texas Tribune, which is based here in Austin.

We are competing with,

the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, and I say competing with because that's the way I see it. I don't think they, you know,

media is an interesting sphere, I gotta tell you.

I think they think we're all kind of one big, you know, arena, one big, happy family.

And I'm like, I'm competitive. Yeah. Me too. And and so I'm doing what I consider them no longer doing. And that is,

you know, we're different, though, because we're only political news, which is the Texas Tribune is too. They're only political news. But of course, the Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, they do all sorts of things. Right.

So we're just a political,

organization. We are statewide.

But we report,

factual happenings in Texas politics without pushing any narratives, without telling you what or how to think, without coming at it from a right wing point of view. Now, perhaps that's,

some of that. What? Some people may see it in some of the stories that we do ride on, because one of the things that I always got frustrated with was when, you know,

the media would write about abortion,

it, it it wasn't very often, you know, because they have issues that are very important to those on the left.

You know, it's and and we wouldn't see stories of issues that were important to us. So if people see that, you know,

anything with us that might,

make them think they're more right minded, it's because of the kind of stories that we write on. Because you don't you don't see them in the other media because the issues that are important to writers, and frankly, they should be important to left of center people do because it helps them to determine, hey, I don't like this.

I'm going to I'm going to work against this. Right? But we're not we're not portraying that way in our articles. We're just giving people the facts.

And so, you know, I just think that's what media is supposed to quit being activists. Media is not supposed to be an activist.

And to me, that's all they are anymore.

And so that's that's what we do.

What would you say to somebody who,

comes in for an interview and wants to know what the mission is to follow? What is the mission of the Texan?

Yeah,

to factually report Texas political news. That's really it.

Now we only stick with Texas like we report national, state and local.

I always say I talk about the Texan, I go around the state, get invited to talk, and and I always say, you know, we're not going to write about Aoki's latest tweet because we don't care now.

It's great fodder. And I like to, you know, I, I pay attention on Twitter too. Right. But it's not going to

so another part, I guess I will add is another. What I always say is what we want to make is people more educated,

at the ballot box so that they can make an educated decision at the ballot box, regardless of where they fall on that information.

And so that's why we don't write about, you know,

AOC tweet. We don't care. It doesn't have anything to do with Texas. And while it's again, like I said,

fodder, you know, we only,

you know, we'll talk about issues or anything on the national level that will affect us here, or it has something to do with voting at the, at the ballot box.

And if it had a lot of success in starting. Yeah.

Yeah, it's been great. We have gotten such,

respect. This is interesting. This is what I did not expect. So I'm much more concerned about people out in Texas. That's my concern because people I was there once, like I said earlier, people just don't know, you know, and they want to know, but they don't know where to go.

And,

you know, and and so I, I've always envisioned the Texan more about people outside of Austin reading and understanding and helping them. What I did not expect is the amount of respect and need of people here in, in Austin.

And it's just it's been wonderful. And and of course, that helps, you know, the,

ripple effect out from there has also been very helpful.

And I don't mean, I mean that, you know, people in Austin want to also get their news. People who are involved in politics also just want to, you know, they don't want to read the narratives, the rhetoric, the you know, I mean, there's certainly gossip, but you know, that they want to read. We all want to read. And there's those sites.

Do we really don't get into that?

And but I just did not

I did not realize how important it was to the Texan in our mission.

And it it really has been wonderful because here's the deal. You know,

This is what people have said. Wow. You know, you said that's what you were going to do.

But you really have done that.

Yeah, that's our mission, you know? And so when we need, you know, when we want to get somebody to interview, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, they say, yes, you know, and that's what I mean, how important it was in Austin. And we're not doing anything for them. They're not doing anything for us. They just appreciate us because we're not twisting things.

We're not putting words in their mouths. We're just letting them, you know, give the information and we're reporting it to people. So it's been very important. You know, we got, you know, the speaker,

I think it was his first,

public interview for our event that we just had,

our 89th legislative session, kickoff event. We got Speaker Dustin Burrows.

I think it was his first time out. We got the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick. We had him on our last legislative event. And then a few of, you know, a little while later, the governor's office said, hey, would you like to do an interview with the governor? We're like, yes, we would. Thank you very much.

That's great. People

coming to you.

Yes, yes, yes. And so Brad went up to the Capitol and got an interview with the governor. And,

it's just because there's respect there, and we can't give the news if we can't get to the people who are making the laws, authoring the laws, you know,

and

literally they're,

talking to them.

So that's been just phenomenal. And I just I so appreciate it so much. The staff, I mean, they're just they're the ones that have done that, you know, they have they have garnered all that respect. And it's just been phenomenal.

You have an amazing team.

Yes we do, we do.

And I really do. Our team in the capital sees them all the time. And that's awesome. Rave review I think Brad retweeted our

our tweet yesterday and was like, hey, just sharing that. We

oh. He shouted out that he's using our transcripts. Oh. So

good.

Yes, I was going to tell you that too. Okay, I have not asked so only because I have Cameron as a. Doesn't mean that nobody else uses this. But I think it was at the event and I said something about, oh, that's the guy with your sledge. And he goes, oh, he's. And he might have told you this, but he goes, I use them all the time.

I said.

Really?

Because I forget to ask them, you know, because you're running.

A business, right? You forget all these details.

And I said, you do because abs solutely because it's so dense. And sometimes it just he said he uses it all the time. So that's not to say that the others don't. I just happened to talk to Cameron about that. So it's been very beneficial to our team as well.

I'm so glad because it's the live transcription that is.

Yes.

Huge. Yes. That was what

Brad was using it for. But you know, the great team. What was it?

What was the journey from bootstrapping? Right. We talked about this when I first met you talking about our startup. And you're like, hey, we relate a lot because we'll start up and,

what was it like from your husband starting this company to now?

You're grown. You're huge. Everybody knows you. Yeah.

It's it's, you know, it's still. I mean, running a media company is not easy. And I will say we are privately held.

We went through a lot of different,

we thought through. I talk to people all over the country.

People is like, how do we do this? Because, as you know, and we all know a lot of media companies are going under.

And here we're starting this business in a not particularly,

great time. Right.

And yet we knew that we were needed,

and we forged. So we're privately held. My husband and I are the only ones who fund this operation. And the only reason I say that is because I want to. I want people to understand. Because I'm about to say this.

It's not. We're, you know, everybody sacrifices when they start their own business. But there's a lot of media companies that, get money, big money donors.

We don't have that. We have my husband and I, and that's why we are a subscription based service.

Because we decided that this is the business model that will work.

And so we,

we fund it and we have subscriptions. So everything you can get one free article, everybody can get one free article per month, but after that one free article you hit a paywall. And so I want people to understand we're sacrificing to you. I know that it's hard to subscribe. I'm not a subscriber.

Yeah.

You know, you young kids are probably more apt to do it because everything is subscription, but people get tired of it, all right? And I hate it. But at the same time, you know, this is the path forward that we could see. So,

so we are subscription based and it's like, I think nine bucks a month, you know, it's pretty darn good, you know,

value for your money, I think,

for the information you get, we have podcasts.

We have so many podcasts now.

Everybody loves the podcast.

Those are free. So if you want to dip your toe and,

you know, before you subscribe, absolutely. Listen to our podcast. But we hope that people do because, you know, we want to grow

our subscriptions will help us to grow and be more you know, we want to grow. We want to do more. We want to, you know, be in more parts of Texas.

Texas is a big state, you know,

it's absolutely wonderful.

You know, the Trib was the, the, the guy in town, and now

it's kind of a Texan as the guy in town. And that's pretty.

Phenomenal.

You know, it's pretty phenomenal.

In turning it essentially family business. Right. How have you been working with your husband?

Well, he's got a full time job. Bless his heart. Okay. Yeah. We I, I'm the you know, I'm the one over the Texan.

But he's kind of my money guy.

It's not.

Kind of my money guy. He is my money guy. But I mean to say that he's, you know, kind of the guy that keeps all the that,

straight and, you know, the financials and that kind of thing. So bless his heart, he's got a full time job.

You know, but,

you know, he does,

you know, help out as much as he can.

On that side of things, you know? Okay, this is what we're thinking about doing. Matt McKinsey and I, my senior editor. You know, we we kind of get together and like, okay, this we want to hire this or this or, you know, then we go to our, you know, the fill the money guy.

Yeah. My husband's my money guy is. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Well, he's the CEO, but he's also.

The financial the

CFO.

The CFO is that I'm the CPA. Yeah.

Chief business officer. And he is? Oh, yeah. He's he's great with that.

Yeah. So that's kind of, you know, so,

yeah, it's been.

But it's been great. It's been wonderful.

He came down. I was really excited because sometimes, you know, he doesn't get to see how awesome things have become, right? Because he's got his own full time job. We're just talking, like, you know, things here and there. And of course, he loves the text.

And of course, he reads the tax. And of course he listens to the podcast. But, you know, coming down here and seeing the event that he wasn't able to come to our our first one during the 88. But he came down for the 89th and he was like, yeah, Lee, you know, he really got to see the people that we had at the event, the legislators that we had on both sides of the aisle.

You know,

saw the how great they were at their interviewing, their skills, you know,

from greeting people, you know, to, to,

having lunches for everybody. I mean, it takes, you probably know, events take a lot of work,

you know, and we're a small team. And,

they pulled it off and had these, you know, great legislators talking about issues that are important to Texas.

It was pretty good. And it really made an impression on him. And I was really glad that he got to see it in person and realized men are kind of a big deal. Like, yeah, I've been trying to tell you that.

I saw.

What does he do?

So he works for Simpson. Strong tie. They're,

they build connectors for the building industry. Okay. It's a very niche type market.

But he's been with them for a long time, which is. Which is amazing, because I don't think we always thought we would each own or together own our own company. But it's been a very good, very generous, very good company to work for.

And he's, you know, still loving it. And so he kind of lives, you know,

vicariously for the, you know, independent,

business, I think through us. But,

yeah. Yeah, he's very happy doing that. I'm very happy doing this.

So. Well, you've always been an entrepreneur, and I love that since the beginning.

I.

Feel that.

Spirit in you, Texas spirit as well. Right. So,

but what advice would you give to anybody, like looking to be an entrepreneur? Obviously you're passionate. So passionate. Which I think is what people should do. Yes. What

would you advise you give?

Yeah, I think, you know, I was talking to my son in law,

my younger daughter's husband. And, you know, I think he wants to do something too. And I, we, you know, it usually happens kind of. It just kind of happens, right? I say, don't try to force something. Don't try to force with the round peg and square.

Hole or whatever.

You know,

think about what you love to do.

It's not going to instantly happen even from that though, right? You know, just always be thinking in that direction, you know, and then I mean, like the, you know, I was talking earlier about

was just like, flowers kind of fun.

Yeah. Hey, I think I'm in the wedding. Yeah.

Business, you know.

And,

you know,

I certainly never wanted to start a media company, but I think because I had been,

you know, because more ish. That's my love.

That it's, you know,

it seemed logical, you know, and because I was so passionate about what they're doing badly. So I, you know, tell him. And that's what I would tell everybody else.

Let's see, you know, what are you good at? What do you like to do? What do you, you know, just always think in that direction because I think it just normally happens naturally. And don't be afraid to, you know, you start on the side somehow if you can, you know, for family, for friends. And then it just kind of works itself up to, you know what, I think I can do this full time.

I can, you know, it's easier than ever now because of technology. I mean, back in the day, I was going to a printer, right. You know, how can I you help me to, you know, now you can do all this stuff on your computer and, you know, I it's just so much easier, starting. I mean, the business itself is not easier.

I don't mean to. I'm not saying that, but to start it, you know, all the details like that are so much easier.

But just think about what you love. Let it cook.

Always think in that direction, and it'll happen, you know? And don't be afraid when that when the time is right, do it, do it.

Do it. Great advice. Yes, yes. The I was,

reading something that there's going to be the first, like startup billion dollar startup that's from one founder, one employee soon. And it's from all the automation and technology that's out there. So we'll see when that happens, which I think is incredible, if you can. I mean, we have three co-founders,

and we're dream team.

Love it. Don't know how people do it. One man show I think it's a really impressive so but yeah, I totally agree. My my story was was natural to I knew I would want to do something I thought might be my own lobby shop. I thought, oh, I mean, I'm my own lobby firm. And I was working in the Senate and was so frustrated also lobbying, looking through all these campaign finance reports, trying to match the vote records with the campaign finance numbers.

Yeah. If you see that there's like, you're wanting something and it doesn't exist. Yes. Think about doing it yourself.

it falls into your wheelhouse. Of course. Right. That's that's the other thing that I told him. Yes. You know,

because he was talking about cuz he was talking, I was saying that and then he was saying, but you know what I'm doing right now, what I'm currently doing.

Right. And what we're having a trouble finding is blah, blah, blah. We see right there you're having trouble finding it. Think about doing it right. That's exactly it. So your description there were you found that there was this problem, this, you know, that, problem that needed to be solved or could be made easier?

Yes, perhaps.

And then boom, did it.

Businesses start usually from some kind of frustration. That's right. Change it because it's new. That's right.

And if the market wants it, the market will, you know, buy it.

Yep. That's that's the hardest part I think it is making sure you product market fit because there's definitely ideas I've heard there like oh that sounds great. But is there a market for it? I think that's the piece. And we got really, you know, lucky with just talking to people. It was all money. Awesome. But it was just for my frustration.

Turned out to be a lot of other people's frustrations because like I was saying.

What I touched on earlier about marketing back then, you know, you talked about, I mean, you know, you did it was very different. Now it's, you know, social media. And then for us as a newspaper and then all that,

garbage that we all had to go through of the social media people, you know, saying, oh, yeah,

now you can't all of a sudden advertise any kind of,

political stuff.

All right. Well, we're a political news organization.

I mean, we could not we when we first launched, we were all over social media, advertising, advertising, and it was fantastic. Then all of a sudden, boom, we couldn't we couldn't do anything anymore. And I, I think it was all wrong. But you can't get through to anybody to make your case half the time, you know, at least for us who were novice is in,

you know, working through that social media

sphere of trying to say, listen, we are a media organization, you know, advertising.

We couldn't now we can again, because they've lifted a lot of that. And of course, now with Trump and all the social media.

Guys and then, you know, everything's kind of switched off.

It's all so bizarre in such a short period of time. But yeah, I mean,

so it's it's still not what it was when we first launched. But yeah, I mean, it's just,

it's just so different, you know,

marketing these days than it was a long time ago when you sent mailers to people.

Oh, yeah. They have to constantly learn all the new.

Yeah, like.

We're hiring a marketer now. Are you? It's it's hard. Well, it's a lot of stuff. I need help with that. I don't know how to do it. And I'm not a marketer, so I need someone who's good at.

But then again, it's not even. I mean, I guess it's what they're called now a marketer, but it's, it's it's technical stuff more than right. It's how, you know, to figure it all out. And yeah, it's and I know it's the audience. It's all that kind of basic stuff too. But it's it's a lot more it in my mind.

Maybe I'm saying.

That wrong it because SEO yes. Search engines, all.

Of that, all of that. And let's try these maybe you know.

Oh yeah. Yeah, all of that stuff. And I'm like, what?

What are you talking about?

You're a great team that.

Does it, I love it. I'm so glad you do. But yeah it's.

Changed. Yeah it's changed a lot.

So anyway. But it's it's fun. It's great.

We're very happy to have partnered with y'all. I was very happy to, you know, Mitchell. And what you do and and,

use your,

technology. Would that be the correct word?

Yes, ma'am. Yes. Y'all do a fantastic job.

And. Yeah. Yeah, we'll just see what tomorrow brings. Right? That's the,

thing of a,

small business owner. We'll just see what tomorrow brings.

Oh, every day is different, and I love it. Yeah.

But it's been amazing having on the show.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me here.

It's been fun. Of course. How can people find you the Texan? Yeah. Shameless plug away.

Yeah, absolutely.

The the Texans news is our URL, so please go to the Texan Dot news. I don't really know what fake camera to look at. I should have asked before.

That's okay. But,

Please go to the Texan Dot news and take a look and please subscribe. We would really appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Absolutely.

‍

‍

Welcome back to Bills and Business. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege. And today we're tackling a topic that's urgent, deeply personal and absolutely solvable. Child exploitation in the digital age. Our guest is someone who's been leading the charge in Texas for decades, Andrea Sparks. She's a co-founder of Not on Our Watch, a new movement rallying women in business to confront online abuse.

She's also served as director of governor's child sex trafficking team, and now she brings her talents to Buckner International as our director of government relations. Here's our conversation.

Well, let's go back to the beginning. Okay. Where did your interest in, you know, protecting children online all really begin from, you know, early days. Tell us about how you got early days. You know, this is funny, and it makes me have to say it, but I was obsessed with the musical Annie.

Okay. I was a kid, and I don't. It really hit me like I had never heard of an orphanage or that there were orphans. I came from a big, close Cajun family. Yeah. And it just. It was. I loved the musical. And I also loved the storyline. And it broke my heart. And so, honestly, that's when the, like it started clicking for me like

And I remember dating myself. But Sally Struthers had this, you know Christian Childhood Fund or something where you could quote adopt an orphan overseas and send in money and whatever. So I took my allowance and I started doing that with this girl in Uganda. And it turns out she was older than me, but still, it was a very meaningful thing to me.

And like, so it's just kind of always been there from early ages. And then, you know, you get distracted with life and oh, I'm going to be a political science major and I'm going to go to DC and then I'm going to, well, I guess I got to go to law school or really don't want to go to law school.

But when you get good grades, what do you do? I go to law school. I'm not good at math or science, and I went to law school and was very involved in public interest there and did the Juvenile Justice Clinic, worked at the DA's office in child protection, and also got kind of sucked into, you know, hey, you're going to you have to interview with the law firms.

You have to do a clerkship at the Texas Supreme Court. Like, this is what you have to do. And I was going down that route pretty much kicking and screaming. I mean, I loved the judge I worked for at the Texas Supreme Court, ended up staying there three years. I had two babies while I was there because he was just such a supportive boss, and it was just like a good time in my life to do that.

You know? I just gotten married and we wanted kids, and I was in my late 20s, early 30s. But I tell my daughter this all the time. I was like, you realize you saved my life. Because when I found out I was pregnant, I immediately thought, I can't go to that law firm. But you know, I just knew, you know, for me it just wasn't a choice.

And so, I went and talked to the managing partner of this big law firm who had given me an offer and surprisingly, he was completely on board and said, you're doing the right thing. And he was very honest and open with me. He said, no. Bridges burned. Keep the barberry bonus and all that stuff, you know, just wow, you take care of your daughter.

And, you know, I he had just had a grandchild. And then when I had to go back to work after a year or so, I was like, okay, if I'm going to drop off my kiddo at a daycare and pick her up several hours later, right. And my son to, I want to do something that is so meaningful that I'm willing to do that, right.

Like, it's got to be really meaningful. Sure. And the first thing that came in my mind when I started, like, praying about it and thinking about it, was child protection. Going back to, you know, that origin of what I was meant to do and my work at the DA's office. And so I started getting appointed to child welfare cases, CPS cases representing kids and loved it.

You, I know, have a huge heart, but that I know is not an easy job to see. Yeah. How did you handle seeing all of that fairly? You know, it was really hard because my husband at the time was doing, child exploitation cases for then Attorney General Cornyn and then Attorney General Abbott.

And so, like, we were like, what is wrong with us?

Like facts and stuff. And whenever I have represented a kiddo or, you know, a child who's my kid's age, it really made me realize how vulnerable they were, you know? And so I was one of those attorneys who had lied. I'm probably going to get in trouble any day with the Texas bar, because I did want to take them all home.

I did, you know, I did take them to the Trail of Lights with my kids. You know, like I did stuff like that. I just it was really hard. And it but it also was just such the basis for the rest of my career. And I'm still in touch with a lot of those kids who are in their 30s.

Wow. That's amazing. And have their own children who call me. Yaya. Can you, you know, like they're like my so cute. Yeah. Yeah. It was it's really hard. I did that for a few years, and then I went to Mexico to spend some time with my family and just try to get some in Spanish, thinking I was going to do Spanish speaking clients.

And I had this epiphany in the middle of the night that I was getting burned out, that I felt like I was beating my head against a brick wall and that I needed to to back up and do more policy work. And that's how I got into the whole policy framework. And it started doing that instead of individual cases.

And when did you kind of have the I need to start something of my own and start not on how much?

Well, that wasn't until much later. I had started nonprofits before I'd been part of that. And I love that work. I love starting things. But, you know, after years of child welfare work and really, this before my current position at Buckner, I was at the governor's office, running the child sex trafficking team.

And that was like a start up, too. I mean, we were just trying to create systems that helped these kids, you know, that prevented child sex trafficking, that identified victims, that recovered the victims and, empowered survivors and then brought justice. Right. And that was just so exciting. And it was very pioneering work in a way. You know, were you the first, boots on the ground to start that?

Yes. Section of the. So so he appointed me and Governor Abbott appointed me April, April Fools Day 2016. Hey, we have this problem called child sex trafficking. Do you want to come fix it? I was like, oh my gosh, April 1st. But that was truly an honor and a joy. And, you know, a lot of the work we did still persists today.

And other states are now replicating it. So I feel really good about it. But while I was there, I, I just I had come from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, where we did a lot of the work about online exploitation, and my husband was still doing that work right. He had done some trafficking cases.

‍

‍

He's a federal prosecutor, but he was doing a lot of online stuff. And I noticed that as people started talking more about trafficking and human trafficking, that was like the hot topic and people were forgetting about the internet crimes against children and the internet crimes against children task forces. And this is at a time when kids were getting smart phones.

And, I mean, this is when it was all starting to blow up. So, I met with a dynamic businesswoman, the founder of Texas Women in Business, Lisa Beth Thomas. Actually, we were meeting the day the city shut down for Covid. Oh, this was wild. We were having coffee at that coffee place on South Congress. And the guy comes up to us and he's like, hey, we have to shut down the two today.

And we're like, why? And he goes, the pandemic. And we looked at each other and we looked outside and like, where is everybody? Is this like the zombie apocalypse? And we were literally shutting down. Wow. We were planning on starting not on our watch as an anti-trafficking group, working with Mrs. Abbott and the Governor's Commission on Women.

And we were able to do some things even during Covid, but it was really during Covid when we saw that online exploitation of kids was increasing 567%, that we were like, oh, no, we got to pivot and focus on this. And that to me, kind of felt like coming home because yes, I understand trafficking and all of our kids are at some risk of trafficking, but the online exploitation thing affects all of us.

You know, it affects every person who has a phone, which is every person pretty much in the world. And it affects all of us moms and dads and grandparents and aunts and uncles who care about kids. Absolutely. It's not a wrong place, wrong time. It's any place, any time, because they now have this device on them. Yeah. And we actually give it to them.

Right. You know, so it's and it and they get addicted to it.

I know we met through this work and protecting children and I, you know, built this coalition with you to come and testify about this and learn so much. What would you say are probably just the most shocking statistics about phone usage in children?

First of all, I want to thank you for that work last session.

We miss you at the Capitol. Thank you. And it was amazing work and very moving and, and difficult. So I'm glad you're content. And we had fun. But but we really do miss you at the Capitol. I'm just so happy for you and your new space. I'm just so happy for you. Gosh, the most shocking. You know, I don't know if I can tell you what the most shocking is.

I continue to be shocked in this work after all these years working for the National Center. You know, working on child sex trafficking, doing this work. I tell you, something happened today that kind of shocked me. And it is. I don't know how to say it, except the appalling lies

that some in our tech industry are employing to kill the good bills.

We have the commonsense bills to protect children. So today I saw an ad that basically said, hey, porn sites are, supporting Senate Bill 2420, Senator Paxton's, App Store Accountability Act, and HB 4901 by rep Fairly. And that is a lie. That is a lie. In fact, the work we did together last session partially, you know, resulted in Pornhub leaving our state.

They are not for this bill. You know, they are fighting it. And it just I guess that's what surprises me. Loss, the opposition. Yet the opposition, the opposition. Last session, I remember thinking, and you and I had had conversations about this like why? Why are they opposed? We could not figure it out. And now I've figured it out and followed the money.

You know, our kids are being monetized. They are spending time, attention, which is money for tech companies on their phones, and they're spending money every time they download an app or do an in-app purchase. They are children entering into a contract with a corporation, and we don't allow our kids to drink until they're 21 to go to the military until they're 18, you know?

But we allow them to enter into these contracts and give up all their information and privacy to these apps and these corporations. And it just blows my mind that we allow this to go on there. There were some great stats you gave there. Like, you can't go to a strip club unless you have ID and you're over 18.

But then phone in your pocket. You can do far worse than and see far worse than at these places.

So specifically, what is it? The two bills you mentioned,

Is it House bill or Senate Bill 4901.

It's House Bill 4901. Senate Bill fairly 24. And Senate Bill 2420 by Angela Paxton. So can you explain what these two bills you're advocating for do? So you have the House Bill 4901 and then Senate Bill 24. Yep. They're companion bills.

And they would basically require app stores. So most like Google and Apple, to verify age when someone logs in to their, their smartphone or tablet to app store, to buy an app.

And they do this already. Okay. They already verify age. So there's been a lot of misinformation out there like, oh, this is going to cause people to have to put in their driver's license or scan their birth certificate. No. When you buy your phone or when you sign in your Apple ID for the first time, or whatever it is you put in your name and your date of birth, it's not that hard, right?

So it requires that so that when a child under 18 downloads an app or makes an in-app purchase, parental consent is required. Okay, they're signing a contract. Perfect. So I'm a parent and my kid wants to download a penguin game. I'm going to look at the penguin game. I'm going to look at it and make sure it's safe.

I'm gonna make sure it's rated for, you know, that age. And then I'm gonna say yes. Okay, great. Click a button. Perfect. Right. There are so many apps out there that are very misleading. I just did my own research for the Senate hearing the other day. There's an app called purp. Okay, now it's purp like purple, but it's purp and it's rated for ages 12 and up.

And if you read the reviews for that app, there are literally children reviewing the app and asking for help saying, what? Yes, I found this. What does this app do? It's a wait. It says like connect, meet new friends, talk. You know, basically talk to strangers, a chat room, a chat room that is for kids. But when you look at the pictures, it's purple in purple, and then it's like all these, you know, teenage girls who is going to go to the purple app, perhaps, and the kids in the App Store reviews for this app are saying, creepy man.

I told him my age, he sent me that pic. Anyway, I did not want to see it. Now I'm afraid he knows where I live like this is one. This is public information. So, as a parent, I want to be able to look at these apps before my child downloads the app or makes an in-store purchase right.

That's all it does. The other thing it does is it makes sure that they already are supposed to rank themselves, you know, for an up nine and up 12 and up 17 and up, it makes sure that the app stores get the information from the app developers on why they are ranking themselves that way, and that they're a little bit more accurate because some of these are not accurate.

So that's it. That's it. And again, why the opposition? Because app stores make so much money on these apps. They get a cut right from every app they add every purchase they're monetizing our kids. And that that, as Senator Paxton said in her lay out of the bill, the money that kids spend on apps is so like it's it's their allowance, it's money they get from us.

Many, many times it's money that we don't know they're spending. And then, you know, I remember, you know, JT, why did you spend $200 on this Lego game? Oops, mom, I forgot to tell you, it asked me to do this, and I was in the middle playing with my friend. You know, that happens all the time. I bet every parent out there listening is like, oh yeah, and the volume is just so big that we, you know, they, they really just make so much money and don't do anything about it.

So,

that that's the bill in a nutshell, does not violate the First Amendment of the Constitution, and it does not, you know, it does not endanger our privacy laws. As my friend David Moyer at GPF said the other day, we have some of the strongest privacy laws for online activity in the world. So that's it.

It's simple.

You I've said before, quote, and it's the smartphone is the new white van. Yes. That's very compelling. Can you explain that more to policy leaders? Business leaders? Yes. Again, aging myself. But when I was growing up we played outside all the time. You know, we didn't have smartphones. I mean, we might have a new Atari or something, but, we were outside in the parks and everybody knew.

You just did not know if you saw a white van, especially one without windows. You didn't get anywhere near that. Right? Right.

And you run home and you, you know, tell your mom and or whoever was home and you, you'd kind of go, ooh, I don't know what. I don't want to know what's going on in that white van.

The predators are not in the white van anymore. I mean, they're still are occasionally. Right. But all of the work we didn't make and all of the research shows that the vast majority of kids are safe and are playing outside, like on a, abduction like that is very, very rare. Okay. The predators are where the kids are, which is on their phones, in their beds, in their rooms.

And what do you think? Obviously you're working on the policy side, but Texas, we only meet every two years. So, what other things are you doing? Are you doing this in other states or at the national level as well?

We're working with some partners nationally. We, work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Really?

Just to get the word out about their amazing products. Free resources for parents, for kids.

There's so much going on there. There's so much, good content that we want to get out from the neck. Mac, we're actually working with Girl Scouts right now on a partnership with Nick. Nick to to create a patch. So if girls learn the Nickmick material and then share it with their peers, they can get a patch.

So there's a lot of awareness work going on there. Nickmick also has something that every parent should be talking to their kids about, called Take It Down and this is a service that is amazing, but no one knows about it. And so we're really trying to get the word out about it, take it down as a service.

If a child, you know, we hope they're not sending nude pics. But if they do and they're worried that these are on the internet somewhere, they can work with Nickmick and they can do it anonymously. Actually, if they'd like to. And Nickmick will help them take it off the internet. Wow. Yeah,

I know that there were a lot of things that were constantly evolving in this space.

Like we'd hear from parents directly, and I heard from parents even saying, there's predators on video game chat rooms. Oh, yeah. How do you think is the best way to educate parents or the public before having to wait until something that happens, like help them before the bad incident happens? Because we're hearing just more and more every day?

Yeah.

I think the most important thing you can do, the most effective thing you can do is talk to your kids today. Don't wait.

We've had too many kids.

And I know some of these families personally, who are living healthy, happy lives, go to bed at night, prepare to wake up for football practice in the morning or whatever it is, you know, color guard practice and their parents find them dead from suicide.

Like, there is not only the normal predator. White man. Right? White man predator on the phones. Now, there are concerted efforts by gangs and even state sponsored or at least state tolerant businesses overseas. That and Nick Micks talks about this in their testimony in front of Congress, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, other places that literally train people to go after our kids all day long, all night long.

And there's a story that says they're actually enslaving people to do this. They tell them that they're going to be working in AI or some tech job, and all they're doing is, is, manipulating kids, getting them to send explicit photos and then blackmailing them for money. And they're making money off these kids, and we're not hearing about it because the kids are shamed or the parents are shamed, or they think it's some kind of lapse in their parenting that this happened or something's wrong with their kid.

It is none of that. It is that these people are very manipulative. They know what they're doing. They put pressure on these kids like you would not believe. And they know the psychology and they understand that these kids aren't their brains aren't fully developed. And and they're so afraid of getting in trouble with their parents that they will do anything not to get in trouble with their parents, even taking their own lives.

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Oh my gosh. So we have to talk to our kids and say, listen, we're hoping that you're being safe online. You know, I'm going to do everything in my power to help you stay safe online. I might get an app that helps me, monitor some of your activity. That's just part of the deal. Having a phone in this house, that's just part of our deal, right?

But if you feel scared, sad, confused by anything you see online, please come and talk to me. If someone scared you, if someone threatens you. If you feel like someone sharing photos, if you do share a photo that you wish you could take back, please come and talk to me. I'm on your side. I love you more than anything.

I'm. I'm. I'm going to help protect you. You're not going to be in trouble. Because if our kids don't hear that, the result is often deadly. And if I could. If I could just leave people with one thing. Please talk to your kids about this today. They. These gangs are targeting our boys who are athletes in, middle class to affluent families.

They're targeting targeting girls. They're targeting everyone. They're targeting anyone. They think they can get either more photos from or a couple hundred bucks. A couple thousand bucks. Wow. And it is so scary. So that that's it. I mean, you you can get technology that help screen or protect you or or protect your kids. Absolutely. This App Store Accountability Act will help.

But even with that, I talked to her mom yesterday. It's so devastating. She had a 12 year old who downloaded an app that she was using for school, and a predator got to her. There. And this mom did not know that her child had been exploited by this predator for good, 8 to 9 months before she accidentally came upon some photos and videos of her daughter at 12 and 13 years old.

Oh my gosh. And, so this is an app that was, you know, a safe app. And, and the daughter hadn't told her mom, right. Like, so it could have kept going. Well, that's really great advice for every parent listening right now. Having that open communication. And like that's a fantastic way to do that for, you know, some parents who aren't informed about it and it's just not publicly out there.

You were mentioning that there's parents just scared to come out and talk about this when, I do think they're so brave, the parents that do come out. I know Deborah Berry, the author of The Tech Trap, she very publicly said, all of the things that happened with her daughter, and I really respect her for doing that.

What do you think is missing in today's policy response? Is it enforcement? Is it just funding? Is it opposition? What do you think is missing that you're fighting now? You know, I am so impressed right now with our legislature on this topic. Okay. That's I mean, I have to say this is a fully bipartisan issue. Yes. And I've never seen so many bills dedicated to this issue.

And I think it's because we have parents and grandparents in the Capitol and they're seeing their own families.

It gives me hope, like we are. We're making progress. There are bills that are going to pass this session that will help keep children safer. There's more awareness coming. Kids themselves are speaking out about this. So I feel like I feel like we're winning for the first time.

I also, you saw me hesitate because I also feel like we don't know what's next. Technology is is so fast, right? Like we're having to catch up this session to put the framework around crimes that we didn't know what happened last session. You almost have to predict. Yes. Right. And with AI, I mean, we're having a huge problem in schools with AI generating apps and kids making AI generated pornographic videos of each other.

Right. And then, you know, that's devastating, too. And, you know, it's just so who would have thought that we would be here three years ago? You know what I mean? It's moving so fast, we hardly have time to catch up.

Well, another big one is the virtual reality space. And yes, how much more realistic it is getting online.

Like there's one thing on your phone, but then, you know, you've seen even the Google Glasses where you can see a giant screen or feel like you're immersed in it, which is so amazing for film and to watch movies and all. But you can obviously see what that could be really bad for a child. Who gets into the wrong hands of something, or even a virtual reality game or something like that.

I mean, the grooming potential. Yes, it's awful, and there's obviously so much benefit with tech. And then there's a dark side, like having a conversation with someone in another country, feeling like you're there if I can, and chat with my mom or dad, feeling like I'm in the same room as them, amazing. But if that's in the wrong, hands, I think it's going to be, you know, educating parents.

And.

So you've mentioned Senate Bill 2420 you testified on personally. So I'd love to share that and show that right now.

First. My name is Andrea Sparks, and I'm testifying in favor of SB 2420. Thank you, Senator Paxton, for filing this bill. I'm here on behalf of a nonprofit I co-founded called Not on Our Watch Texas Not on Our Watch is an initiative of Texas women in Business. And our mission is to engage women in business to educate themselves and others on protecting children from online harms.

When we were growing up and playing outside, we all knew to stay away from the white van, the one without the windows. When we saw one of these, we ran home to tell our mom and we tried not to think about the dangers inside. The smartphone is the new white van, but we give these to our children at about 11 years old and instead of being afraid, our children become addicted to them.

Apps are our children's gateway to the digital world and unfortunately, increasingly a gateway for predators to our children. We think we can keep our children safe by telling them to stay away from dangerous apps. But the reality is, once they are in the van on the phone, it's unrealistic to expect kids to protect themselves. I want to share with you just a few of these apps that I found, and instead of reading what I think about them, I'm going to share what the kids themselves rated them.

So these are kids who are literally begging someone to protect them. One app is called the purp app. It's for 12 and up. It's described as make new friends, meet and chat with real people. Kids says this is all for full full of pedophiles. This app is for teens, but I can't do this anymore. It makes my anxiety go crazy.

I'm 14 and shouldn't feel unsafe on an app meant for my age group. Please figure out a way to separate minors from adults. A second app called the buzz app. Again, 12 and up. It's described as make friends. Swipe. Meet. Chat. There are many apps like this one here. And so I just want to thank y’all for filing this bill Senator Paxton

It's very important to common sense solution to this problem. Protect our kids. Make sure you're testing on

Andrea. Thank you for being here. You. You were going to describe a couple of more, apps. I wonder if you could just give us a couple more examples. And what? The children themselves. I'm going to apologize in advance. I tried to screen out the ones with the explicit language, but this was just me on my phone yesterday, looking around, getting ready for today and I'm just baffled.

I mean, if these reviews are in public and I can find them, surely the app stores can find them and do something about it. These apps still exist, so one was called the fizz app. It's rated nine and up. Teen chat, chat, meet new friends. The reviews are very dangerous for children. Says one review. Another review says this is creepy and there's some more explicit language that I'm not including.

Another one was, the buzz app for rated age 12 and up. Make friends. I'm a young teen. He asked me what I was wearing and asked for that type of pic, and I said no thanks. He sent a pic of himself and said he was horny and said see you soon. I'm quite scared. So the App Store see these reviews and there's so many.

I mean, these are just from kids who are saying, help me, I'm scared. Can you take down this app? Can you do something to protect us? I think this App Store Accountability Act is a very just a commonsense way to fix this. And like you said, the technology exists. I don't know why tech companies are opposed, except all of the money.

They can tell our age to send us all kinds of ads on things that they think we want to buy. You know, you think of a pair of shoes and suddenly it's on your phone. Happens to me all the time. So thank you. Well, and I don't know if you, were in the in the chamber at the beginning during the bill out, but but children are a huge, consumer market, and they're in there, their spendable income because their children, it comes from their parents.

Right. So that's another note to parents. Pay attention. But children's income is almost exclusively, discretionary. They don't have other drags on the money. They have their allowance or whatever. And so they're tremendously appealing to, companies that want to market to them. And and there is a lot of money in it, that's for sure. They I don't think it's, comes to a big as a big shock to anyone that our children are being harvested for profit in all kinds of ways.

And, this is one way that we can make a difference, and protect kids, and I don't I don't hear a lot of speech censorship happening there. And this bill wouldn't get rid of that app. It would just create transparency for parents about what's their. Thank you Andrew. Appreciate.

So what is Project Protect Our Children and how are you involved in that?

Yes. So Project Protect Our Children is something I've known about since I was at the governor's office. Denise Smear started it in Houston, and they were really focused on helping kids understand trafficking. And like us during the pandemic, they saw, okay, online is a big problem, too. And so they work with counselors in schools to create youth action boards.

And this is middle schools and high schools where the kids themselves become leaders in this issue. They educate themselves, they educate other kids. They come up with their own projects to raise awareness, and they can then become the people in their schools who, let's say I have something online or I've done something I don't want to tell. My parents are not only tell a counselor I can go talk to potentially this peer and get some advice.

And so they're equipped with with that kind of knowledge too. And of course they know how to report and those sorts of things. And so we're just super excited about that because like Charlie Brown's parents, you know, want, want, want, want kids don't want to hear us. They want to hear from each other and they trust each other.

And so I think this has got great potential. As I said, there are many, many schools in the Houston area doing it. And recently Liberty Hill ISD brought it there. Wow. And so we're partnered with them and they're bringing it to all of their high schools and middle schools. We're hoping it comes to us like my kids school.

But I think that that gives me lots of hope because the youth, these kids are the ones who are going to have to want this to change, you know, so we can we can legislate, prosecute all of that. But it's going to have to be the kids who say, not on our watch, I don't know, watch. We're going to take care of each other.

You know, this is not okay,

I love that. Well, it's getting the awareness out there. And with not on our watch. It's a women led organization and backed. So what's the significance of bringing business into this fight in general? You know, I think we've always relied on nonprofits and maybe even churches to do a lot of our human services work.

And I think there's a real interest in business. And there should be businesses should be interested in this. I also think that there's something I mean, no offense, Papa bears. I know dads and grandparents and uncles are very protective too, but there's something about a mama bear, you know what I mean? There's something about that. Like, oh, don't mess with my kids, you know?

And I feel like there's a power that we can tap into with women and women in business. And it just so happened that when we first conceived at the idea, we were partnered with, you know, the Governor's Commission for women, and they are women owned businesses, human trafficking, that's kind of their their one of their issues. And so it it kind of worked out.

So how would a company like mine or somebody listening now get involved and help.

Oh my gosh. Follow us on social media. Right. We are on Facebook Instagram and LinkedIn. We provide a lot of educational materials, a lot of action alerts on how you can get involved in the legislature and even nationally. There's a ton of good stuff going on nationally.

We believe the App Store accountability Act has a good shot passing nationally. But yeah, get involved that way. And if you want to get really involved, contact me because this is a volunteer thing like we're doing this, I'm doing this on the side. I'll be doing this on the side. We need all the help we can get.

I love that we will definitely share those links that people can follow and reach out to you if they need to. And let's not forget all the work you're doing at Buckner International. So can you share a little bit? For those who don't know about what that is, what what that organization is and what you're doing for them,

Buckner international is a 146 year old nonprofit that serves children, family, and seniors.

We believe it's the oldest nonprofit doing this work west of the Mississippi. And it's an incredible organization. It's faith based. And I get the pleasure and honor of representing them at the Texas Capitol. And among, you know, Texas stakeholders, they, really we're really moving upstream. You know, we started out in 1879 as an orphanage because that's what you did to protect children.

That was the model. But since then, we've steadily then moved upstream to keep families together, if at all possible. So we work on family strengthening. We have our family hope centers throughout the state and really throughout the world we are in. We like to say we're in Texas and six other countries seem to be seven, in Africa and Latin America.

So it is it's such a joy. And, I really appreciate the work that they do on the ground. That makes it easy for me to be their advocate at the Capitol. And then just also the flexibility to do this work, too. I mean, keeping kids safe and helping families navigate this online world for their kids as part of family strengthening.

So it kind of all makes sense. Your time is all back to your original. Any comment where really that shows you're you've been following your passions your whole life. So I really love that you can really see that. Yeah.

So if you're sitting down with, you know, a businesswoman right now, what are the one, you know, one thing that you would tell them to do to get involved in this effort and, and stop a lot of these issues?

Honestly, we just need to get the word out. I feel like if parents knew what was really happening and they do, you know, because they're living it with their kids, but they don't know what to do. They don't know how to have that conversation. They don't know about the take It Down feature at Nick Mick.

There are tools and tips that we are constantly posting to help you navigate those conversations, and I think that is the number one thing is to just follow our posts.

We have this amazing woman in San Antonio who does all of our social media, and she's so smart and she's really learned a lot about this. And then come to the Capitol. It blows my mind that that building is where they're making all these decisions that affect us all. And the public, for the most part, is just kind of good.

You know, no one knows really how to testify, how to register support. Do you know you can send in comments to House bills from the comfort of your home? House bills were being heard that are being heard. I feel like we need to get the word out about that. You know, we we are a democracy and the legislature wants to hear from you.

And educate yourself and and watch and be there if you can. I know it's hard getting ready to go back over there and probably going to be there till late tonight waiting to testify. But, you know, you know, this work and how important it is in your USLege is helping people do this work in a better way.

And that's so important to just navigate it and understand when to plug in. But it's it's not that hard. And so I think get involved with some advocacy groups that you care about. There's many that do this work on behalf of children, on behalf of families. And they will keep you informed and kind of plug you in.

Thank you for keeping people informed and telling them which bills are out there. There's so many so I we definitely have a lot of, similarities. And yeah, what we're we're doing transits, transparency, accessibility, trying to allow people to see what's actually going on. There's too many bills to keep up with that the average person might not know.

So love that you are making sure people are aware of it and that they can come testify. That's really what's so meaningful. And I saw so many, representatives and senators change their mind on an issue just from having 20 people come with different stories that show this is an issue. And I think I just saw that two weeks ago in the Senate committee that handles public education or education.

You could see the light bulbs going off. You could see the senators, really. And we're going to have some incredible bills now that are going to, you know, they're going to do committee substitutes and really get them to be as strong as they can to protect children from predators in the schools. The testimony was amazing. It was, from survivors from, you know, law enforcement in the schools, from people who work with kids in the schools and I really saw it working that day.

It was so great to see.

Well, it's definitely a dark subject matter, but it's one that you have to talk about to get people aware what's giving you the most hope right now?

You know, I like I said before, I think that the the fact that youth are getting involved and that, they're going to be the ones who help each other through this digital landscape, you know, as it changes, I think we that is just one of the most important things we can do is empower them to understand it.

Nickmick has a lot of those materials for youth to look at videos very, you know, games, things that they can do to learn. And then the project protect our children.

I feel the fact that you have, you know, Senator Paxton or we call our senator Bob Baba, you know, is a grandma. And who is got the Senate bill?

And then you've got Rep Fairley, who's 26 and single and no kids, and she's coming at it from, you know, Amarillo area, rural area and saying they're together, saying, this is important. And you've got Democrats and Republicans joining them. That gives me a lot of hope. It tells me that there are certain issues that are really, really critical to our children that they can work on together.

And and that's that's a beautiful thing.

Well, thank you for what you do. And is there anything else you want to tell our listeners things that you're working on or share? Just, you know, don't be afraid to follow us on social media. It's not all doom and gloom. Yes, we try to keep it light to. Yes.

And there's a lot of good work happening. It's a lot of good work happening, I love yours. Thank you. Well, it's all of our jobs to protect the kids. And I love that. It's the kids themselves to, you know, every age can help. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you. I will shoot to light.

You're the best. You're the best.

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Welcome back to Building Business, your go to podcast for the latest developments in Texas legislation in business. I'm Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege. Today we have Craig Casselberry, founder and CEO, Quorum Public Affairs. He has spent decades advising companies, coalitions, public officials, including two Texas governors, on the intersection of business, government and communications. He's managed over 150 corporate communications and legislative campaigns, working with industry leaders like AT&T and Pfizer.

He's a 17 year veteran of the legislature, a political commentator, and he's also the founder of the Texas Coalition for Capital and has been instrumental in shaping policy around economic development, infrastructure and tax policy. Today, we'll talk about his background, advocacy, and a secret to communicating effectively in business.

Well, Craig, thank you for being on the show. Thanks for having me. You appreciate it very much. For those who don't know you, can you share just a little about yourself what you do? Yes. Okay, so I'm a University of Texas grad.

Yes. And I, I will take a little background. I worked at the Capitol for the Legislative Council as a runner in college. I don't think I knew that. Yeah, I worked for the. Well, I guess the worst parliamentarian back then was Bob Kelly, way back when. And, a lobbyist friend, almost like a second uncle, got me the job.

Really loved it. Working around the Capitol. First back then they put the guys in the right. We were in the Reagan building. All the pretty girls were in the Capitol. Yeah. Why did they do that? Shocking. I know, who who knew? That's so random. Yeah. So we we would we would rarely make an appearance together.

But I started in that, Laura, and enjoyed it. I got involved later in my UT career with young Republicans a little bit, sure that I really wasn't very political. My family was that political. And so after I was going, I was on a track to go to law school, and I took all the tests, the LSAT and stuff, and I did very good.

Just just stay very average. And so I thought, okay, maybe I need to rethink this. At that time in 1986, I was getting out of college. The economy was pretty bad. It was oil and gas. Bit of a bust. Real estate, everything was. Nothing was really good at that time. So a friend of mine said, hey, the govern the Governor Clements campaign is hiring.

He was in a match, a rematch with Mark White at that time. And so I thought, yeah, that sounds interesting. I'd like to try that. So I got hired to work on the the Governor Clements campaign. So we win the election. And then I got offered a job on the inaugural committee staff did that, and they got offered a job on the governor's staff, and it wasn't kind of deal with I could pass up.

But, you know, I can go to law school later if I want to do that. So I went to work for the governor. It's been two years on the governor's staff in the Criminal Justice Division and working under the general counsel, several of whom are still around. Jim Arnold was who I worked for directly. You probably know Jim.

And I remember it's funny that we came in when I first came in. I had a big office in the Sam Houston building. You looked out toward the Capitol, and my dad came to visit that couch. The whole thing. Oh, cool. It was really kind of ridiculously large for a 23 year old kid. So my dad comes to visit him, and he worked with Pfizer and then and he said, son, this office is bigger than mine, but you must like this government stuff.

So anyway, so they visually figure that out. Moved me down to a cubicle, you know. Oh, no more appropriately sized. But but I did spent two years with, with government, the Governor Clements staff, and then took a job as a senior VP for a communications firm in Dallas. But that was the start of my, of my career in politics.

And then I worked for governor or commissioner at that time, Commissioner Perry. His campaign then in the office TDA, it's in at one point I thought, you know, I want to do maybe want to do something else, like do something in business, which I really like business. But ultimately, Laura, I think I figured out, that my skill set, my relationships at that time, which I was probably 26 or 7 at that point, suited me for politics, you know, the lobbying policy advocacy world.

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And so I stayed in it and then launched my company and out of my left, Perry's office in 19 1993, I’m sorry early 94 and started my own company in Houston. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Now, what got you into, that first job, being a runner and led counsel? Did you know you're signing up for going into politics, or did you have any idea what got you there?

Not not a clue. I think I needed a job, literally. And, my uncle, his one of his good buddies, was a lobbyist for. I think it's Braceville and Patterson at that time, way back and and and Bruce Anderson, said, I know the parliamentarian. Do you want to go work over there? Great. That sounds really good.

Because the hours were flexible. I still go, I'm still in college, of course. And so it was just a happenstance kind of a fluke. I don't think I consciously chose chose it, you know what I mean? He fell into it a little bit. That's really cool. But then it's been your entire career, done your patience, worked in government.

Yeah, I feel you're so we'll see it. Well, I think so. You know, when we, when we launched, brief, brief story on the kind, the launch of the company. Can I share that with you? Sure. I'd love to know. Show. I'm working for Commissioner Perry. Rick Perry at that time and part of agriculture. You know, in the building we were over in the, the foster building, the general land Office was in that same building.

And this was Gary Morrow, the last Democrat to win statewide in Texas. Okay, I think that was you think you won last in 94. But at that time, he had an aide who worked for him, who had a contract with a Washington, DC based company for a grassroots campaign to build an aircraft carrier. So the campaign was geared around, getting the funding through Congress to build this.

CB I'll never forget CBN76, big air factory. So he comes to me because at that time Republicans were just 93. I'm in Perry's office. Republicans were in the minority with Dick Armey and Tom Delay. Both Texan were were minority and minority leadership. So he needed a Republican to help with those, too. So I took a vacation.

I took a contract with this project, took some vacation days, work the project they were paying by the letter, literally. This was back in those days, and worked on the worked on that project. And I recognize at that time that the days of the smoke filled rooms and the backroom deals still happen, but probably were going to not be as prevalent and more the grassroots lobbying would be more, would become more more prominent in terms of advocacy, because that's what I was doing, was getting just average Texans to ride into Army and delay at that time to advocate for this project.

So, so as I developed my business plans to launch my company, which was called Third Time Quorum Direct, who had first name the company, there was a company in DC. There was something direct and or maybe direct impact. That's who the contract was with direct impact. And so I thought, you know, this is probably the wave of the future towards advocacy.

And it's in DC mostly now, but it's going to devolve to the states. I think this was my projection anyway. And so this part it'll it'll come to the next stage first and the big markets. And so I launched my company that my business plan was based on grassroots lobbying being a big part of how policy was done.

How cool.

So for those who don't know, can you explain what grassroots advocacy is compared to other types of lobbying? Yeah. I mean, it's really engaging the public to influence policy.

That's how I see it. And it too has evolved. And so back then, I'll give you a good example, because when I started my company in Houston and, and an organization called Texans for Lawsuit Reform was founded in Houston. So I moved to Houston, launch my business, went several months with no revenue at all, because I'd had a deal that that end up not going through.

And so I'm sitting there trying to just keep things together. So TLR, I got  hired by TLR as a consultant to do the grassroots work. So we actually, you know, in addition to the very effective heavy lobby team engaged, just average Texans, you know, we should call them Jo, Joe and Jane six-pack to push for tort reform.

Maybe. Luckily, George W Bush had campaigned on it, but it's literally just getting folks in the district. So you're Senator Carr Davis? We're talking to your constituents, not you directly in this case. Right. That makes so much sense because they're the ones who come and testify. You call the offices being a staffer, I had to build some coalitions internally and, you know, rally the troops to come testify.

Was that part of your kind of efforts as well, or. It was a little bit. Yeah, sure. Was. And I think to some degree, yes. We had a lot of volume going on, on the, on the tour reform campaign. In fact, George W Bush at the time had said it was the most sophisticated grassroots campaign the state had ever seen when I was quoted as saying that.

So we did a lot of volume, did it pretty well. We got had great success with legislation. The testimony, I would say, I would say this about testimony. We did have a few folks who, had enough, I guess, gravitas and, you know, credentials to go, in fact, testify on it, on the issue. That's we call that more grass tops to, I guess, more the the influencer crowd key contest.

Sure. You know, we know today is that as the, as you know, that term, so we had a little bit of both, but we, we started that in 95 really the session of 95. Yeah. So what would you do. You would go and talk to different communities and, and groups as a whole and share the message, or how did you get the word out?

Well, we did actually. In fact, that’s a great question because I'm thinking back on it now. We had a speaker's bureau. Yeah. I think people like partially probably were out doing a lot of that and stirring up the grassroots and getting funding these influencers and fantastic people to testify that guy.

However, we also did a lot of mailers back in the in the 90s, a lot of mail and folks, a lot of on a mail, direct mail campaign, phone campaigns where we what we patch, we, we call a constituent, educate them on the issue and patch them through to Senator Carr Davis, his office, you know, and they and they say, please

support Senate bill, whatever it was, you know, and so there was a lot of that going on to

I see why a lot of your clients desire those skills now. Because now, are your clients predominantly tech venture capital, data centers, I know. What is it that you're working on now specifically? Yeah. So I would say right now, data centers is a big is a is a big focus.

Just given the growth of that sector, my client base, I'm just a hired gun, like many. And but my clients are corporations, mostly companies,

of all sorts in the business. You know, in the business community, and data centers, as you know, are growing like crazy. Now, there's $13 billion worth of data center projects underway in Texas right now.

And, yeah, I worked on this since about 2019, back when the sector was not as we're going to as it is today, you know, where the data is here. Coalition, which is really broad and deep. And lots of talent involved in. So we, you know, we want to grow the space, grow the sector. Right? It's an emerging sector just like space semiconductors.

AI a moderate economy runs on data. Everything we do with weather, everything on your phone. Right. Emergency services, telehealth, manufacturing, everything in our economy relies on on the flow of data. So we have to have the data centers. Absolutely. We also have we also need power. Lots of power. So we've got to add capacity to the grid.

So the rub is at the capital is how do we grow the sector, which is vitally important. It really the lead in it but also not impact the grid in a negative way. So make sure that that ratepayers aren't on the hook for whatever the power that we're using in the they're subsidizing what we're doing and they're not and they won't and we're committed to that.

How have you seen that change? With the shift from 2019, of all the people moving to Texas, that's. Yeah, I moved here a little after that, but that's changed a lot. And so many more people moving, so many more businesses. That's exactly what I was going to say. We've had a tremendous boom, obviously a population and an economic growth.

And and that just simply that's it's going to it requires more data flow right to we've got to do it. Texas wants to lead in it. But again with we have our own grid. So we've got to be forward thinking in how we plan for that going forward. Texas Energy Fund is one way to do it right. There's going to be other investment in infrastructure that supports the grid going forward.

I think you're seeing the governor sign a governor, particularly on the Senate side. And the speaker, I'm sure to, knows with what we've got to do to make sure that we can handle it. All right. All right. And then this bill, AI every sector using AI now. Yeah. So absolutely it's an exciting time that it is that that's the start.

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The Stargate stuff is kind of kind of interesting. And I haven't gotten my head fully around. That's the President Trump initiative. OpenAI and Oracle and those guys, that's another piece of it. AI and I like the you know, we'll get we want to lead that lead in that space. By the way, I will say, in this kind of on topic here, governor, state of the state address, he said, we want to lead in nuclear.

And, you know, most of us in the business community, to be included, paper on, all the above approach, terms of power, the renewables includes everything. Gas, all of it nuclear city wants to lead in nuclear. And so that's going to be another piece of the puzzle long term, I think. Smart. Yeah. Well going back we'll just to your communications background grassroots strategy.

Yeah I have a visual aid here. Oh good of a book that you gave me that you authored. So, the business of straight up the business of winning politics, communication strategies for innovative companies. Yep. So, I'm on page one of this, Craig. So I'm about to dive in, but tell us, tell those, a little bit about.

Don't rush into it now. This is great. Well, it's it's a good size. It's a manageable read. It is. I mean, but what what drew you to write this? So at the by the way, my joke about this is, I feel like Jerry Maguire from the movie, you know, Tom Cruise journey where, he would call it a he wrote the mission was a mission statement.

And people, they enjoyed your loved him. Troy Aikman says he loved your memo. Jerry said the mission statement. I edited this all down. So far, that looks like more of a mission statement than an actual book. But you know, Laura, I think so. When I worked with Exxon Mobil and Pfizer on putting a face on the on their company.

Right. And and make them exploit, you know, you've got these monolithic corporations and you kind of think the world. Okay, Exxon Mobil is cranking out all the gas and Pfizer cranking out pharmaceuticals, and they are obviously. But, they also are contributing tremendously to the Texas tax base. Put philanthropy, you know, community work, the employees that that, that are involved, you know, putting a face on what, what they're doing to support the state in which they operate, that was the objective with those with those two companies in Texas.

For Texas, I think it was our Exxon Mobil piece. Pfizer was something similar. So I wanted to to try to explain in this book how an effective, you know, public in government affairs, program can really boost your company's bottom line and how to tell your story better. That was that was the genesis of the book. And again, communicating with the public more effectively, getting them engaged, in many different way.

Employees and everybody that's part vendor suppliers, you know, part of the concentric circle who can help you. You can tell the company story that was started. That's amazing. And I'm really excited to read it because that's something we're working on so much now. You know, I was saying just before we're hiring marketing and marketing and, it's just communication and communicating your stories.

So true for business. Absolutely. Some have amazing products. There could be amazing things out there. But if you can't communicate it, well, then you're not going to get anywhere. I agree, I'm excited. I'll give you my full review very soon. Please do. Yeah. Privately, please. If it's a bit bad, I'm sure it won't be. You're so great experience.

So you're working with the Texas Coalition for capital? Yes. So a few years ago. Yep. You started that. So you're very into, you know, helping startups in their major capital world and all that. So what kind of are the biggest challenges you've seen startups face in your time starting this? Yeah, I mean, the reason we started the coalition was to try to move Texas up the board in terms of access to capital, in venture investment.

I think we're still seventh. We don't like to be seven now. We came from California, still East Coast Port, your Boston, some of those, those hubs, outperform us in venture capital. We we need to do a better job. And I think we haven't focused enough on it. We've got so much opportunity in Texas to do more and make sure they've got access to the capital for growth, like you've seen with your company.

It's vitally important. It's also important for rural Texas, too, and we're working on that still to make sure that that rural companies, who have pure options, maybe give them more so some of that can be done, can be done legislatively through tax credits and things of that nature within reason. But it's there's no reason not to leverage some of the resources the state can bring to help at least underserved areas sure have access to capital.

So that's what I've seen. I think obviously, you know, Texas, gosh, you know, we have such an innovative spirit. You know what it can do spirit with our entrepreneurs the best. And if you ask me kind of what's what's catalyzed the growth we've seen in the last 30 years, entrepreneurs definitely want to is probably leadership, public policy, a kind of a climate bill for growth, not getting in the way of entrepreneurship, you know, business friendly.

It is a very business friendly state. Business friendly state, right? Yeah. Even going back to tour for a while, I'll come back to that in a minute. If you want to hear about kind of where I see the, you know, what's which led to our 30 years of incredible growth.

I'm working on a piece now called seven for seven, because we're now the seventh largest economy in the world,

And there there are seven key reasons I think that is

you mind sharing some are that to count. No I well I can do it right now. That's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, going back to the entrepreneurial spirit, you talk about some of the greats.

You know, I go back to the remember the book The Big Rich. Yes. The oil and gas cars, the hunts, the Cullens, the Richardsons, the merchants, back in the gases back in the 30s, 40s, 50s, probably. And then you go forward to Ross Perot, Michael Dale, Drayton McQueen, you know, because governor Bill Clements last time his kind was a wildcat or before he turned, became the governor, you know, got into politics.

I think it's kind of Elon Musk lives here now, too. Yeah. Yeah. So so we've always had this entrepreneurial spirit, right? That's that's a Texas that's a big thing. And we're kind of, you know, open for business. Right. We know that. But the leadership at the top in Texas from Bush to Perry to Abbott have has contributed.

And the and the legislature, you know, again policy climate bill for growth. And so those things I think have been very key. Of course, our low tax system, no income tax, special income tax at all. You know, property taxes could can be improved. I think they're going to address that this session, I think as far as that goes.

So I still think we're a relatively low tax state is has been a factor. Why moved here? No income tax. No. You're right. That's right. And think about the diversification of our economy recently. Right. I mean from oil and gas to that, we're, you know, finance and tech and, you know, health and medical and all these different.

But now we're one space AI data, we diversify the economy smartly and plan ahead. You think back to the rainy day fund back in like the late 80s. I think it was late 80s. We established the Economic Stabilization Fund, rainy day fund, and coming out of a crash in the 80s, I mentioned I got to 86. Well, I guess the crash real estate was a mess even in those downtimes, the leadership had the foresight to establish a rainy day fund.

So we'd be prepared next time.

I mean, that's just that's that's just forward thinking. It's just it's it's, innovative way and forward thinking, way to look at stuff. You don't see that out of politicians very often or not at the federal level. Yeah. Now, at this point, though, we'll see what happens. Yeah, yeah. Hope for the best.

Well obviously what do you see. As far as your work with venture capital as what role do lobbyists play in that world? I mean, I think in terms it's like anything else, any other sector, to matter of just effective communication, you know, in relationships, of course, you know,

there's always, in my opinion, it's always kind of parallel tracks.

You've got to have the relationships and a good message, but you also want to make sure you've got stakeholders that are also weighing in consistently. You know, the old saying multiple voicemail, consistent message, multiple voices is always most effective. I like to, if I can talk about it in the book, communication with each educate, activate, stimulate, evaluate.

So when you approach a campaign, I think any campaign venture capital or otherwise, that's how you can kind of organize, strategically organize what you're doing over there. So easier said than oh absolutely  you make it the case with your okay, so what advice would you give to businesses in Texas starting out? Maybe who don't have capital yet?

Just in general, what kind of business advice would you give? Wow 

Well, business advice? Well, I guess have a gameplan, you know, and this is a, I guess, somewhat analogous, case, another acronym course Aim. I identify your audience, be your influencers and your message. Of course, I'd flip the message to the influencers, but who tells your story?

But I think it's somewhat similar in terms of how you how you yet know who your are, your where your market is. Clearly just whether it's a minor legislation or just a business in general. And then put the pieces together toward that end, you know, I guess fun, smart people, y'all. Good advice, I love it. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. You wrote an op-ed for us recently. I do the Texas Century. Yes. So anyone out there and listened or and and read it. Go and read that. It's on our Texas ledge news. But you might talk a little bit about that piece you wrote. Sure. I mean, I you know, obviously I'm a Texas homer, and the stuff we've done in the last 30 years has been amazing it up.

My career has sort of paralleled this. I've seen it, you know, that close and personal because I started in 94. I think that was the George W Bush year and governor's race and and Utah reform in 95. I talked about this in the piece. I think started it to some degree. The courts were a mess. We needed some a little more, sanity within the, our civil justice system.

And we we got it in 95, maybe past 8 to 11 bills that session. So you start there and you kind of move forward. And what we've done from there with the,

to your enterprise fund, the deal closing fund. Right.

And things like that, that that again, have been forward thinking and, and, in the piece, I think I detail some of the reasons, that we're able to be where we are today. And now it'll be the seventh largest economy in the, in the world. It's just it's it's pretty remarkable. And I think the 7% is going to build on that because these are pieces of the puzzle that, you know, just simply are part of the in of course, we have natural resources, which sure, you know, all the gas.

And now he would wind solar. That's a that's a big thing for us. But extensive infrastructure. Did you know we have the largest transportation network in the US right now, 313,000 miles of roads, rail, airports and seaports? Well, I didn't know that either. I did not look that up. It's pretty, but but that's pretty amazing.

Our workforce. Yeah.

Is 300 trade schools and 125 technical programs in Texas. You know, not just for your universities. Well, we also have the most tier one universities in the in the country. Right. That plays a big role. So, yeah, I mean, all those things combined leads to the most corporate headquarters in the, in the, in the country.

Yeah. 55 appropriate headquarters now. And it's it's growing. And how do we keep up this momentum? I think there's a big overlap with policy and business here that I love to talk about with people too. Yeah. We've got major growth coming. How do you think the legislature can kind of keep up with this momentum we have? Yeah.

You know, remember the remember Fletch, the movie, Chvy, Chevy, Chevy Chase. Now, I've a steak sandwich and a steak sandwich. Education, education, education, workforce skills development, infrastructure investment. But I really think, and they're going to do more of that, too, I'm sure. Water. Especially at this time. Yeah. And other stuff. degree of course.

But I think, you know, we're going to have to figure out. Of course, Governor Abbott made school choice a priority, and that's a piece of it. Higher ed making sure we're raising standards, raising the bar, educating our kids really, really well and with specific skills. So, for example, you probably know this. You know, Dell, for example, has partnered with AISD Austin School District on skill development for the tech industry.

Great. Yeah. My client stack infrastructure is partnering with Dallas College for on a, on a data center curriculum so they can fill these jobs. I think we've got to be more specific about how we train train our kids.

That is the most concerning to me. When I was in the legislature, I was always saying to my boss, can we change the TEKS, the high school, curriculum.

So it's kind of hard to change those. And I said, well, we need to keep up because otherwise, you know, we'll everybody's flooding here anyway. Yeah, but we need to train our own. The people that are in Texas, with all the new skills with AI, it's constantly developing. I mean, constantly trying to learn who knows where we'll be in five years with the technology.

So I feel like teaching like a band of AI in schools would be problematic, I think when other states may, you know, go the other direction. Yeah. What do you think about, you know, AI and for students in schools. Yeah. Oh I think well I think it's it's going to be inevitable. Right. It's coming. And I think most people that I've talked to here really know that space.

And I'm not an expert. But, we let's, we need to do a here and not in China. I mean, we need to we need to control the AI, the flow of data relative to AI, and protect it, you know? So, the bad actors don't get shy, you know, for us. So it's just going to be a huge growth space all the way back to the Stargate stuff.

That's all. Those are all, I think the $500 billion they're going to invest in over the next however many years is all AI it’s AI. It's great. I mean, for workforce training, when there's things that will be, you know, completely automated jobs, there'll be new jobs from that. But that just means there's so much more workforce development we need to do and train people in how to make things more efficient.

I'm all about efficiency. If I don't have to, you know, do something would take me five hours. I don't want to do it. That's why we started this company, right? That's why I started USLege. Yeah. Let's not spend 500 hours doing something that can take two minutes. Let’s be in person communicating. And that's really our message. That's where things get done.

Is the human connection there the great. AI can't take over that in any I know, I know, I know we've got to find a balance which is great. Great for your career as well maybe. Yes. They need they need a Craig. No robot could take over Craig. Yes. But they can be so amazing for for so many, things that we don't even know.

You know, children that will get access to some of these capabilities, that they'll be able to innovate faster than ever before. I hope so, I hope so, and I think, you know, we talk about the, the different, avenues to education. Back to the kid. You know, you're going to have certifications and you have trades. You're going to have you get specific skills learning that goes on outside of the four year universities, hopefully, because I think, that's just I think it's inevitable.

And I think it seems to me the kids based on on my son, his generation, a lot of kids are just doing things differently in terms of what they're able to do in education. But then when you and I were coming up right when I was, I should love, you know, I used to say with my old boss, I said, we're the same age, right?

We're the same age. You're saying I'll take it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your time, maturity wise, you're definitely you're definitely beyond your year. Thank you, I've always been an old soul. So I will appreciate that. Yes yes yes indeed.

So you mentioned infrastructure. What is the legislature doing this session that you're aware of or do you think they will do.

There's still early to enforce that. Well, so I think, it's going to be your water and energy and grid related mostly. I mean but but there's going to be investment, you know, everything. You know, highways, roads of all of all types, airports are seaports, right? Energy and everything energy related. It is has to needs to be priority.

You know, Senator Perry has the water bill and it's about transmission, just like, just like the, like just like electric electricity. Of course, in that case, more pipelines getting stuff more efficiently where it needs to go. Water, especially, I think is the focus there. And there's going to be that. By the way, I've heard, on the back to the grid stuff to the transmission lines probably need to be modernized in some way.

So it's not just the capacity of power, it's it's the transmission getting in one place to the other. I think is, should also be approved. And I'll, I'll say that. Sure.

now DC and Texas are so different. I've noticed as well like that. You did both. I did, yes. So was on the Hill and House and Senate for a couple of years. And then when I came to Texas, thought it was the same.

And I definitely realized it was not very, very different. So each state capitals very different. Yes. For other states too. Right. There's some states that have like a uni party legislature. So interesting. I'm learning all about it now. Yes. Oh. You sure? Yeah. In your business I am. Yeah. And I'm pleased to be part of the, I'm a subscriber and enjoying watching your growth and success.

Thank you. I think we have partnered and, believer and, now our user. Yeah. Early believers were the reason that we're here. So I love love to hear that. Yeah. Coach is doing a great job with the product updates too. Yeah, he is. He is.  I've been getting I've done the training. Yes. And enjoy learning. Yes. We've got more folks coming on the team.

But he's definitely a cornerstone like Rock here. He's been amazing. Absolutely is huge. Yeah. Team is a big yeah. What do you think's next for you with Quorum public figures and this session and what you're hoping to get this next couple of years. World. Yeah. Look, you know what, Laura, I, am always looking to innovate in terms of advocacy, which partly why I partner with you guys, but that's what you're doing, you know, as a with a, as a tool is but part of the process.

I don't want to keep doing that. You know, interestingly, I have a son who's 27. I don't know if he wants to come into the business or not. Maybe he does. I don't know, you know. You don't know. I have gone through one period in my business life where I was sold into a large firm and went inside for a year and then rolled   back out.

That's always an option, I suppose, you know, in all of our business lives. But, I wish I could tell you I had a five year plan. Sure. That I, I really do. You know. Yeah, but I just want to keep doing the very best work that I can for my clients. And, and again, making sure Texas is the best place in America for business.

I love. I'm all about that. Your, son was on the call. So, that we've had recently, as he gotten any, like, bug or anything to be in the capital or. What do you think? I don't think so. I encouraged it. He has resisted a little bit so far. I think at the moment he wants to be his own man.

You know, and I understand we all go through that period, you know, he works for the soccer team, Austin FC. Oh. Very cool. He's coached lacrosse. He works for a property management company. He's going back to school. Okay. So I think he has a full plate. Yes he does, but, I do think the capital, I'd like to see how he, like, you know, right when he's actually in it.

It's a very there's an energy about the capital that's just amazing. But I love that you're. Yeah. Leaning into all the new innovative, systems and things that can make us more effective. Because I know there's different types of lobbyists. And I know you're definitely the, you know, communicator and the front facing person. So I relate to more as well.

So for me, any kind of admin or research behind the scenes that takes hours is just not what is best use of my time. I'd rather have that presented in a way. To me, yes. So that's kind of what I'm using. Well, your and your, your skill set is very much a client facing people face, in my opinion.

You know, it's would be hard to replicate, Laura, in other states, you know, we are looking for that. And so we'll we'll just chat. I know you have any folks in other states I know Eric talked to you about, but that's going to be the hardest hire. I think we make it. Well, it is because you're the best.

Thank you. You really are. And it's it's hard to find you. We won't. We will. And I know that's true. We will do it I am I am ready to find okay. Ready to find some. Yeah. Why don't you replicates in other states I'm like we'll see. We'll we'll all go to get a drink and we'll get an interview from Craig to see if that's what we to.

Yes. Yeah I'm excited. I think that's the way though to go forward. Yeah. Well I like your plan based on what I've heard. I like your plan. Thank you. You're going to do well. Thank you. We can chat more offline. Got some secrets I want to share. Indeed. But yeah, I'm very excited about where we're going. And thank you for all your help.

My pleasure. Yeah, it's a pleasure. There's. Of course. Great. Before we kind of wrap. Yeah. Is there any kind of final pieces of, advice or guidance you would give to this next generation at all?

just while your words of wisdom here. You know what I think? Gosh, that's a I know it’s broad.

It is broad. But you know, it's okay. But I think you have to have a passion for what you're going to do. You know what I mean? It and it doesn't have to be motivated. I ask people, young people all the time, are you motivated by money or passion or cause whatever it is, but trying to figure that out, you know, because as they say, if you love what you're doing, the money will will follow.

Yes. If that's if that's what you if that's your goal. In other words, don't go into the occupation just for the money, but you necessarily, but also make sure you kind of figure out where your skills fit. Absolutely. You know, so when I, when I was, when I was, thinking about getting out of politics back in my 20s, I did one of those tests as a Briggs.

Yes. Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs. Yeah. Right. And and I think that makes sense for for for people, to again, if you don't know. So I admire those people that know they're going to be doctors, engineers, lawyers. Right. You know, they really know what they want to do, whatever it is or arch or whatever. Most of us don't, right?

I think I think and so you have to kind of figure it out, but I think it helps to those kind of things help at least give you some sense of where you're talents and and interest and skills. I think that's so smart. And such good advice because I think if you're going the direction of something you enjoy and that you like, you're going to do it so much better than somebody doesn't enjoy that great.

That's why I try and push with our team. What is it that you want to do long term and let's get you set up in that position because you're going to love it. You're going to push yourself, right. You're going enjoy it. And then for me it's been very hard. You know, I phrase I say to some times this can't be good at everything, right?

I definitely know that. That's right. That's true. So I know what I'm not good at now, but I think that comes with time too. And like experience, you know, I'm not good at this, someone who is experienced and good at this. Let's get them in here and I'll focus more on what I am good at. Let's do that.

Absolutely. So that's. Yeah, that's great advice. Yeah. When I was 26, I took a job at a Governor Clements office with a communications firm in Dallas, and we did the Super conducting Super Collider project this way back. And that was back in 87, pardon me, 89, 89. And it was my first experience with sort of a grassroots campaign on a policy matter.

It was a big deal. Big, you know, congressional federal project. And I was senior VP that at 28, 26 and which was way too much responsibility. But managing people. And I figured out and I figured over the years, finally, that I don't necessarily love managing people. You know, I, yeah, there are ways you want things done.

Not everybody's going to do it the same. I'd rather just go do it so that one piece of the, you know. So do you want to manage or do you, you know, do you operate better or a little more independently? You know, just something to consider overall. Yeah, I, I understand delegating is really hard. Can be.

Yes. It can't be because then you have to get the delegate. They may not do it like you'd like to do it. And you have to manage them. And it's so it's yeah it's a it's to balance. I've heard of the 8020 rule there. We heard that one. So if they can do someone else can do a job 80% of the way.

As good as you. Yeah. Do it. Do it because they're never going to do it as well as you if you. But at some point you have to handle the truth. There's some things you just have to do. So yeah, it's hard for me to, but I'm doing it. Yeah. Lots of training involved though. For sure.

Yes. Yes. So , yes.  True. Yeah, right. Any last thoughts? Where can people find you? They want to be a lobbyist and, need some representation. Yes. Well, Quorum Public Affairs is the company, right? You've always said that. Yeah.

No, we anyone who reaches out, we'll give them your, your email. So.

Send send them my way. Yes, yes. By the way, I did take an office over at the realtors building. Oh, great. With the the insurance agents, several of us are over there now. It's right across from the Capitol. That's a very great location. Yeah. So I'll be there. I'll be there for legislature. And, Of course, my poor dog, Boone.

My chocolate lab. Boone. He's got to be home without me. During the day, sadly. But because I haven't, I haven't asked if I can bring him. Maybe I'll just do it and beg for beg forgiveness and just see. Exactly right. Ask for forgiveness later. Okay. One one more fun question. Yes, ma'am. What is your a tale you have of the strangest thing that's ever happened in the Capitol during a session in the in the Capitol that you've seen that I've witnessed.

Other than the Sweetwater rattlesnakes don't slip slithering around. I had one of those on my neck who, like last session, I missed them this year. You missed them this year. They already come. They've already come and go, did I something? Let's take photos. Yeah. Already coming on. Well, they don't come back. You know, there's kind of. What? I don't let me know.

I'll go join you. Yeah. You know, Laura, I think.

I'll tell a story on myself, okay? Because when I was at, I've seen nothing terribly strange necessarily. Although if I thought about it, I probably could come up with something. But I remember one time I worked at. I was working for the Christian college for What's Up and had all the,

I'm sure I was hung over. I'm in the basement of the capitalist back, but we didn't have the oxygen. Everybody. I have no idea how we even fit people in the, you know, crowd into the house. So I'm in the basement, the Capital I've got all the the calendar, the calendars for the day that's supposed to be delivering and calendars.

Committee chair, clerk comes in. I'm sleeping much in the chair. It was looks like in the calendars. Sitting on my bed, on my desk. It hadn't been delivered. And I walk, and they know that she was none too pleased. I bet I had to move quickly. That is hilarious. Oh, there's a lot of people asleep on couches.

Oh, I know that the hours are crazy. I know, I know. So that was. Yeah, that wasn't a proud moment, but that's fun. We got we got through it I love it, I love it. Mine is just seeing I think the funniest thing was sitting on the Senate floor and it was that controversial drag film. Yeah. And seeing five drag queens come into the Senate floor.

Oh, my. Really? And everyone around us was like, this is just such a funny, funny view, right? State affairs is on that Senate floor. So it's. Yeah, very grand and regal. It was a really, funny and fun. Well, you get I mean, all walks of life come to the, you do. Right? Every day you see something, say something to right, which is always supposed to be.

I also know that in your spare time, which is I know limited, you are a screenwriter.

Can you tell us more about that, what you're working on? Yeah. You know, I think people say, why did you get into it? Why did you how did you get it? And I remember thinking, you know what? First of all, I like to write creatively. I always say, yeah, just stop songs, you know, stories, poems.

You know, we may actually have that. We'd have some fun with it, do some stuff. And, I've always dabbled there, but, I was talking to my friend Patrick Terry, who runs Terry's Burger stand is where he started. Where he started. Peter. He just come back from UCLA, writing school, and we talked about the genres and what kind of what he learned and stuff.

In the course of that conversation, I thought, you know, I think if I'm going to write anything, it wouldn't be a novel, would be a screenplay, be a script, a movie script, because I'm a dialog guy. And so I will then learned how to structure a story. There's a guy from L.A., came in for a weekend, at a hotel Omni Hotel here, and had a class and a bunch of us with and, learn how to structure a story.

I remember thinking, you know, if that company goes belly up, I need a backup skill. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I know what you read somewhere to earn a living. And so I learned how to do that. And, fast forward the first script. I had some help. I found a young guy who helped me kind of put the everything together.

And we won the Hill Country Film Festival with my very first script. How? Best feature screenplay. Second screenplay, is politics? It's called shade. It's about a U.S. senator from Texas who goes to Washington, and he has. He's ambitious, was to rise up in the ranks quickly. And in D.C. particularly, it's all about the money, right? So he gets in bed with the legalized sports gambling.

Interesting, which is a tough needle, a thread back home in conservative battle. Bill Texas politically. So the drama is around that and how he manages that. And where he's taking his career. And so, you got special interest of all you got all the parties and stuff, you got politics back home. You've got this ambitious US senator.

There may be a woman involved, so, And so it's that script made the second round of the Austin Film Festival, which is a big which is. Doesn't sound great, but it's an acolyte because it's it's very competitive. Yes. And we've had some recognition. So, it's it's a, it's it's a fun hobby and I want to do more of it in my spare time, but I'm not playing golf balls out there to the public.

Yeah, you're a busy man. Where can we find shade, or can we watch? So it hasn't been it just on page for some, which I'd like to read it. It should. Yeah, I've got certainly glad to share that with you. Okay. I've got a few things to read. I'm well to finish this. Yeah. I'd love, love your feedback.

I will give you. Yeah, yeah. I've had some notes on it, and some interest in it. And, we'll get to it a bit and I'm gonna, I'm committed to getting at least one of those scripts fully produced and to the big screen. It'll just take a minute. How cool. I've learned, Laura. Even like I tell people, like anything else, you write a a good script that actually receives good reviews and some accolades, but they're not.

Nobody's beating out of your door to buy it or to make it. You have to go find the right, you know, sell it by the right producer, by the right partnership. That could be, you know, I'm better to go sell that. That's right. I've had to spend time on it. That makes sense. How long did it take you to write the second script?

Took probably six months, all told, you know, from start to finish. Working through, typically I'll go away. I'll go somewhere. Away from my normal routine and. Right. So first script I wrote and back. Back then I'd leave no card at it in LA and shade, I wrote mostly in Aspen, just over 3 or 4 days, holed up doing it.

The bulk of it. Not all of it, of course, but, the bulk of it got done like that, you know, like the guy from remember the movie with James Caan in Misery? When he goes. Yes, to fit it right to the books. And then, yeah, it didn't end that. It didn't end that way. But I you get the idea.

Writers have to kind of go some go away and focus and just in not going out. That's kind of what I do. How cool. Well I'm excited to read and hopefully see shade on the big screen. Indeed. Someday. Yep. We'll do it.

Well, thank you for being on. Correct.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business podcast, where we break down the latest in Texas, legislation, innovation and business. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege, an AI first legislative tracking platform designed to keep you ahead of the curve. Today, I'm excited to have David Dunmoyer join us. David is the campaign director for Better Tech for tomorrow, and leads water policy efforts at the Texas Public Policy Foundation with his deep expertise in artificial intelligence, data privacy, cybersecurity and critical infrastructure.

David is shaping the future of tech policy in Texas. David has his own podcast, Rebel Tech, and today we talk about the new Texas DOGE Committee and Texas AI legislation. HB 1709. Here's our conversation.

How's your session going so far? Oh, man. When is it on my watch? It feels like it's made at this point. Really? I mean, it's it's going great. I think, you know, the top wines. We had a speaker race that, you know, ultimately, we have clarity now. We do. We have clarity and clarity and policy is a godsend whenever we have it, we feel like we can actually roll up our sleeves and get to work.

We also have committees now, and I know we were chatting before and, you know, we have ten hearings going on today. In my portfolio, we have Governor Greg Abbott creating emergency items on the Texas Cyber Command on water policy. Those are areas I'm covering. So it feels like, you know, when I first started in policy in the TXlege, my boss said, after Easter is when things really start to ramp up, things are ramping up.

We're not even anywhere close to April. It's halfway through session already, so I don't know why. For me it feels slow and this week's crazy. So thank you for being here. You're with tech. You know you move fast and break things. That's probably just the divergence. Yes, but you got a little bit of that now. So for those who don't know you can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do now?

Absolutely. Well, first and foremost, thank you for having me on your podcast. Yes. What do I do? So I, every day I wake up and my mission is to make Texas in America the freest places on earth. And I do this in a number of capacities, but mainly at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where I serve as the campaign director for the Better Tech for tomorrow initiative, which also now has water policy, which we can chat about if you want some point.

But

mainly what we do at TBPF is we engage all different manner of policy issues, starting from a data driven research perspective. And so in my role, I get to wear a lot of hats. I get to be, you know, locked in my room, you know, doing hours and hours of meticulous research, understanding, starting with issues, spotting what are some of the big issues in technology policy and water.

And then we break into the research where we start developing specific policy recommendations. And that is the necessity that makes everything so effective. When we do advocate and engage. But I'd say that is the part it's not that I like the least, but the fun is taking that research and the action oriented side. I'm testifying. I am writing op eds and meeting with members and staff and ultimately back to my mission.

I'm seeking to advance tech policy that's going to ensure Texas is leading the nation in every capacity, whether it's artificial intelligence and data centers or the energy we need. And so that's that's my job during an interim. It's a lot, a lot more research heavy. But now we're in session. So I spend the vast majority of my time the capital trying to realize that.

That's very cool. And you have your own podcast? I do, yeah. I want to shamelessly plug. Yeah. Totally shameless. Yeah, yeah. So it's the Rebel tech podcast and you obviously were on as a guest, I think our first entrepreneur. Yes. We had really what we try to do with that is create a, a different, vehicle for discussing a lot of our research and a lot of our advocacy, but mostly from hearing from folks who are in the trenches, whether it's legislative staff, which I know that's similar here, kind of being in this podcast, but also, I'm not a technologist, I'm not a software engineer.

And so this podcast allows me to hear from folks who are doing that work, because in my research, yeah, I can look at why the AUEII is supporting business and innovation, but then I can hear from a software engineer specifically why? What are when we talk about red tape, what in your day to day function can you not do effectively because we said regulation.

So I mean, I think our comms team would say the goal is to get the message out and what we're doing advocacy wise. But for me, it's a chance to connect with folks and really understand firsthand how regulation and policy can affect the whole technological well. Very cool. And you said that you are not a software engineer or your policy guy.

How did you get interested in this, sector into AI, in tech policy? Yeah, I mean, a little bit of insanity and ambition. No, it actually, this brings me back, and I'm going to have to disclose that I'm from California originally. So I was born and raised in Sacramento, and, I was blessed to have a number of internships in public affairs and in public policy.

And my first job out of college was this boutique public affairs firm in Sacramento. And, you know, one of the few conservative groups that was fighting to basically hold the line on bad policy. And there was this big fight up, right before 2020 is Assembly Bill five. And it what it did was it basically outlawed the gig economy in California.

And at the national level, this is the proact. This is what they're trying to push there. And simply what it did is it said if you are an independent contractor providing services for a company that's Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and so on, or even independent truckers who are contracting with Walmart, you cannot work for these companies if you're providing a core service that is a part of their business operation.

So what does that mean? Well, means you are completely hemorrhaging the entire entrepreneurial sector of California by saying you can't be your own independent boss, you can't own your own truck and operate your own trucking company, or make money as an Uber driver while you're at UC Davis studying pre-med. And I watch this happening, seeing the, again, the hemorrhaging of the tech sector in California.

And I concluded two things. One is there was an absence of folks who were focusing directly on technology policy, because you can see, you know, there was this fragmented approach to engagement and advocacy. You have the tech companies, which are a crucial voice in this space. But in the California legislature, well, no one's going to listen to them because to Governor Gavin Newsom, well, you're your literally his quote, you are promulgating feudalism.

And so he didn't want to engage with them. And then you had other folks who were kind of dabbling in the research space and technology, but nobody that firmly planted their flag on principles and values that were going to guide the research. So really it was I want to see tech just dominate this country. And I wanted California to be the leader.

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But all the folks who were controlling the power and apparatus, you can see today in 2025, that whole tech sector has shifted to Texas. And so I wanted to be a part of that. And I also wanted to see is there a way where I can chart my own path to build out the subject matter expertise? And one thing led to another.

My former boss, Kevin Roberts, who recently went out by three years ago, got his demotion as the CEO of the Heritage Foundation. He entrusted me to build out this initiative because there shit conservatives should own technology policy. It should be an issue that is totally integrated with our vision and ethos of making sure human flourishing takes place.

So that was essentially my journey, and it's a little bit of hard work, provenance and luck, as most things in life are. But I again wake up every day and I'm just thrilled to be able to do what I get to do. Now, what are you to Austin? Yeah. So, I did undergrad at Texas Christian University and Fort Worth, and so I learned as any good California refugee did, that Texas is the best state in the country.

And I knew I wanted to come back, and I knew Austin was going to be the city just based on the capital being located there. Right. But ultimately, I said I did public affairs in California for a couple of years, and then I enrolled in grad school at UT Austin. So it was grad school. But I think more near and dear to my heart.

It's the capital city. It's full of life and music and good food and trails. And who doesn't love Austin once you get a chance to check it out? So it just so happened that it aligned perfectly with my professional goals as well. What year was that? That was in July of 2020. Okay, I know when you said the year 2025, I think keep thinking, well, I keep writing, you know, 2019 on my, on dates for things.

It's crazy how fast time flies. I know. And was TPPF your first, full time position when you, when you were in Austin when I moved to Austin. Yeah. Okay. So I actually I started off as an intern when I was in grad school and I was, you know, was Covid the smack dab in the middle of Covid and grad school was virtual and I needed human engagement.

And so I decided after getting the internship, like, you know what, I'm going to put all my eggs in one basket. I'm going to shift a part time school and invest all my time in the internship in hopes that I can work my way into a full time position. And again, by the grace of God. Two months into that, I found myself in a full time role after interning for the education team.

Believe it or not, that was my start. So yeah, that was my first full time role. And having look back sets. Yeah, I think I met you midway through Covid or when people were coming out because I just moved from DC. That's right. I was lobbying at the time with Ryan Brandon. Yeah. So that's when when I met you.

So very, very cool. Well, some of your tech expertise I would love to bring up today because I want to hear more about this. And also we've got HB 1709, which is that bill number going to change. Do you think? You know, I, I don't know I know Speaker Burrows loves you know corporate owns leadership on tech. We'll see.

We'll see if we get a low bill number on that. Yeah okay. Cool. Well,

for those, I know a lot of people are in the we on this bill, and you probably heard this hundreds of times. So can you share the for those, a high level overview of what this bill would do for Texas? Sure. Absolutely. So House Bill 1709, the Texas Responsible AI Governance Act, there's there's kind of three buckets and approaches.

If you talk to the chairman about, you know, his inspiration behind this bill, one is regulatory consistency. And you know we heard this in the privacy debate as well on data privacy bills. We would ideally like to have a federal solution. But no one in Texas is holding their breath that Congress is going to enact something meaningful.

And so let's create a framework that provides clear rules of the road for companies to know how we can engage in this Texas miracle with a goal of exporting that either nationally across different states. The second is there are specific outcomes that 1709 seeks to prohibit. So that's the creation of child sex abuse, material political discrimination. And so that's the kind of category of what are the rotten, nasty, harmful stuff that's happening with AI tools.

And how can we eliminate that so we can focus more of our capacity and energy on things that are truly going to benefit society. And then the third piece is, and this is, you know, an interesting one, it prevents any private rights of action from happening in the AI space. And I think this gets glossed over. And I'm going to highlight this for a second here because, you know, I'm sure you know this.

You guys are starting up a company. And when there's regulatory uncertainty, sometimes you are inclined to take those same risks because you just don't know. What is the litigious environment? And I think of the story of the character AI, which there was a horrible story that happened where there was a young boy using the tool and one thing led to another, the interaction with this.

I'm going I'm blanking on the term of art for it, but it was, this AI tool that was telling this boy, hey, if you want to, be with me, because if we're falling in love with this AI tool, there's only one way to do it. And he concluded that that was suicide. And the point is, we don't necessarily have the clear regulations to know who's liable in this case here.

And so you have Myriad lawsuits that are cropping up or other examples in Texas, where Attorney General Paxton is taking action against different AI healthcare companies, and without knowing what can and can't be done, and also having that open, litigious environment, it can actually create a lot of uncertainty. And so that's one thing in in talks with Representative Cleon's office and other stakeholders, that is a lot of all things that we need to focus more on is making sure we don't have, you know, this watershed trial lawyers Paradise in Haven for lawsuits against fledgling tech companies.

So fascinating to hear you bring up an individual story about character, AI, and a good example of obviously, what people don't want to happen and most people don't want to see happen. So I think, are you hearing when you're meeting with stakeholders and you're your stakeholder in this, you know, in this bill what other, you know, stories and examples of unintended consequences or kind of happening that have caused the creation of this bill.

Yeah. Great question. So I think one of them and I actually my my perspective has shifted on this over the last year. We have Gemini, Google's AI tool, and they in the engineers even said they kind of prematurely launched this tool. And the consequence was when you asked to depict a picture of founding fathers, it was, you know, woke native American, African-American, but it wasn't an authentic, accurate representation.

And so in the bill 1709, it talks about unlawful discrimination or, or bias and things of that nature. And there's kind of two pieces to this one, the engineers at Google. There are some brilliant minds on that team that were genuinely upset. This tool came out when it wasn't fully ready yet, and it kind of hampered their credibility in that space.

But what it's ultimately data, it's the data that's training these systems. And so if you're having bad outputs because the inputs are fully in place. And so one of the things that in talks with stakeholders that we, at TBPF are taking very seriously is this idea of data governance and data provenance. And there is a component of House Bill 1709 that, hits on what we were talking about before the podcast House bill for the Texas Data Privacy Security Act, modernizing that law as it applies to AI systems, to make sure there is clarity on the data being used, that when it comes to private information.

I know you guys, USLege are very clear on the privacy components there, but making sure we have that kind of governance in place is the last thing I'd say. There's going to be a public sector AI bill, and maybe by the time this is live, it will and will have dropped. But that's another thing to be very considerate of when it comes to the public sector use of AI systems is making sure is their data house in order.

And so I bring this up because the good faith actors, of which there are many, are taking incredible steps to make sure they don't have a Gemini type situation where maybe it's a premature system that's not ready to go, or it's bad data training it. Or more importantly, how do we ensure that there are safeguards and security around consumer data that might go into these systems?

Absolutely.

so you mentioned a lot of kind of balancing innovation with also safeguarding, which obviously with this spills about. Can you talk about how it builds cleaning to do that. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's a great question. I think that's the million dollar question here.

I kind of going back in time for a second, I know, you know, listeners, your podcasts that are involved legislatively, they're probably aware that, Geo in particular is very intentional about having a stakeholder process. And so for the last it's been a year and a half, there have been different business groups or over 250 in attendance, kind of hashing out what does a good bill look like.

What are some of the concerning regulatory, you know, owner business arguments that we should not do in Texas? And that whole process? Again, it was about a year, year and a half, and Geo promised the group that he was going to file a bill before Christmas. And it was on Christmas Eve. And I remember I was at home getting all these texting calls.

Oh my goodness, it dropped. And, you know, there was a lot of uncertainty, like, is this the bill that's going to be introduced in committee? And I can say this, you know, we've been working with a lot of groups, some that have some pretty big concerns with this bill. And they would pretend that this is a, you know, California type bill that's going to be a little heavier handed on the regulatory side.

And we're working hand-in-glove with these groups because I think there is a way to get this bill in a form, in a fashion that's going to assuage some of those concerns, some of which I understand. Again, back to the point of hearing from them and how specific lines in a bill will affect a business, which is so important, while still making sure we're not going to have a permissionless environment where, again, child sex abuse material can be created.

And I don't know, that doesn't really directly answer your question, but I think what I want to emphasize is that there's still a lot of work to be done in the whole AI policy landscape before these bills are heard. And, you know, we're at the end of February now again, like halfway through session. But given the 60 day moratorium on taking up bills until the governor's merger items get through, this bill won't be heard until probably the end of March.

And I think we're going to see a lot of one off bills to you, not just 1709, but some others that we're monitoring and flagging. But, also, it continued input for the next month to make sure that this bill balances all those things. The final thing which is more directly related to your question, I love this idea of the sandbox and the council, and I think it's it's all going to be in the details of how it gets worked out.

And for folks not familiar, the bill provides a sandbox for, smaller fledgling AI companies to basically have that, you know, this is a very think tank thing, but it's an environment that's basically bereft of regulations. And so there's certain, you know, paperwork you have to fill out to make sure you're a good, compliant actor and you can engage in this system and develop your tools free of regulation, free of being burdened.

And the goal is to work in concert with the council to do a couple of things. One is notify the council, hey, here's some really cool technological applications in AI, whether it's radiologists using it to help expedite the medical process or it's the application in the DMV to get rid of this horrendously Byzantine, quotidian process so that the council can learn.

But then secondarily, signal to the council, hey, there are regulations on the books right now that are hampering our ability to innovate. And so the goal, when done correctly, is that the council can really just be a hatchet for additional regulations. And learn from this process so we can have the clarity that businesses are looking for. The guardrails were appropriate, but most importantly, the ability to beat every other state when it comes to developing next generation technologies.

And with this, just be kind of an open application for, you know, anybody in AI or in tech to come in and be part of it. Exactly. You know, there's certain criteria you have to meet, you know, like a company like Google isn't going to be eligible, but for, you know, smaller scale companies that are looking, you know, let's say they're in the first 1 or 3 years, their development, that's absolutely what it's intended for.

So a company like ours, I think a company like yours, I'd have to go back and read the specific one. But I think, you know, it's worth worth checking. Yeah. Shout out. Yeah. Let's see this chat. Let's chat. So there's a lot of states doing legislation like this. Does this legislation, is it model legislation from any other state, or is are we the first state doing a piece like this?

Yeah. So there I guess the short answer is no. There are a lot of states that are doing, you know, similar big comprehensive bills. And, you know, when you think about bills like 1709 and you have Colorado, California, which ultimately got vetoed by governor Newsome, Virginia, there's a very similar animation, which is let's have a comprehensive framework, and then you have states.

And Texas has many bills like this, too, that are focused on deepfakes or revenge porn and other things in AI. So there are a handful of states and that number is growing. Again, the goal for Texas as it always should be, is to have conservative legislation that other states then in turn adopt. So right now, you know, as we're recording this, there's a bill in Virginia that is making its way through the process.

And I believe, it's almost clear both chambers Colorado, they signed their big comprehensive AI bill into law, though I note that Governor Polis, this is very atypical in public policy. As he's signing the bill, he holds a press conference and issues a press statement saying, I'm signing this with significant reservation and an acknowledgment that we're going to have to fix it to not quash business.

And so, you know, not going to throw shade at Colorado, but that would be a horrible goal for Texas to emulate. We should be confident that the bill that we're advancing is going to be the bill that we can continue to use. Of course, fine tweaking is totally okay. But Texas is still in the pole position when it comes to advancing that conservative bill.

The last thing I'd say, California, they had Senate Bill 1047 and what's so different? There's a lot of things different between the Texas and California bill. One is California didn't hear from stakeholders. And so what happens when you create policy in a vacuum? I mean, you know, this you've been an advocate is all the folks will come out of the woodwork when a bill is filed last second and it's introduced in committee.

And they say, hey, wait, you didn't take any of our concerns into account here? Not to say that government works for business, but if those businesses are providing services to constituents, that no longer can, because that bill is so onerous. That's why you saw so many folks coming out last minute to try and kill it. And that's ultimately, I believe, why Governor Newsom vetoed it.

And then secondarily, I mean, there was just a lot of woke nonsense in the California bill. You know, for example, creating this massive Dei program through Cal compute. And, and so there's differences in all the states, but what kind of unifies the approach and where states are trying to accomplish first mover advantage is create that frameworks that other states can adopt it.

So you have a population of three plus million in Texas. You have some of the biggest businesses in the world or the eighth largest economy where we are, and so on and so forth. If we can get it right in Texas, then that sets the tone for the rest of the nation. I totally agree with that, I think.

Isn't there a concern in a way that there's going to be so many different bills at some point? In all the different states, like countries, and it'll be so hard for certain companies to comply? So do you see there being, you know, do you see Texas pushing the administration and the federal government now, especially with the new administration change, to get a more kind of all encompassing US law versus a state law?

How do you see that? Yeah, no, that's, that's a great question. And that's the ideal. I mean, David Sachs, who got, appointed to be the AI and cybersecurity czar, he is brilliant on these issues. You know, we're coming in just a week or two after J.D. Vance's epic speech on AI innovation. The first time, really, we had, you know, under the administration, Vice President Kamala Harris served as AI czar.

Talk about a stark contrast between the former administration's ethos in the current administration's ethos. They want to innovate, they want to build, and there is appetite at the federal level to create that framework. And so what I'd say is, you know, ideally, Texas has a law that can be the model for the national level and on data privacy, I mean, I've been fighting the trenches on this issue for five years now, and nothing has happened congressionally yet.

And so I'd say we need not wait for Congress. Create clarity in Texas, and other states can emulate that. In the meantime, is there going to be uncertainty if there isn't uniformity? Absolutely. And so I think this is where it's not hubris to say that Texas should be the leader because we're better. It's whatever law is the best, whatever is going to create the greatest clarity and consistency.

That should be the model throughout the country. And the last thing I'd say on that, you know, you have the stakeholder process at the state level. I've been a part of multi-state working groups and discussions with other states. We're trying to figure out what what do I do? I want to I want to do something on AI policy, but I'm not sure what.

We're trying to both promote our research so lawmakers know. Here's a general guy that can kind of animate the policy process. But I can tell you folks are looking to Texas because you have such a unique composition. We have the innovation and Technology Caucus, which a lot of states don't have. We have a chair in Giovanni Craig. We own water stands technology.

The states do look to Texas and other states like California and do their own thing. And we're already seeing there's like this natural experiment what happens when you overregulate. So I'd say long term goal uniformity at the national level. In the immediate term, Texas can step up and lead, and other states would be glad to have and follow.

You mentioned Representative Cooper. He knows his stuff, which is we're so lucky and blessed. Aren't that in Texas? Do you see any other members emerging, an interest in the space or having, you know, knowledge of the issue area? Because I think it's something that wasn't really talked about, even as a on the campaign trail at the federal level.

It was not I was not talked about once. Right. I'm curious, are there more people in Texas and representatives or senators that are interested that it's great question. So I can tell you to spend a lot of time at the Capitol. Every member or staff I've talked to you, they are so interested in how we can leverage AI, especially for government efficiency, because Doge has created this huge lightning rod effect.

So there's interest on that. And there's still, I'd say like not disrespectfully, but a lack of understanding on how exactly we do that. It's kind of all theoretical, right now. And a lot of lawmakers, when I go into an office and I talk about a research, they say, well, you know what? What do you think about this? And so they do look to him, but there are certainly members that I mean, I can name a few.

Chairman Leach, she was on the AI emerging Tech select committee during the interim. And, you know, you can tell because I spent so much time watching these hearings based on the questions and based on the engagement, that they understand these issues and the consequences of either inaction or bad action. But, you know, you look at my, my bill track right now on tech, you have so many like Representative Leo Wilson, Representative Caroline Fairley, Senator Schwerner, you have more and more members that are taking a keen interest in these, you know, AI related bills.

And we had a, a TCC working group at CBPF in the interim where we brought lawmakers in. And I'm sharing this because we had a protecting children subcommittee. And that was the biggest avenue where I saw engagement from lawmakers who they've seen the horrendous statistics on child sex abuse material that's generated, particularly targeting young girls. And they want to do something about it.

And so those individual use cases provides me the ability to kind of walk through. Here's how that tool can be used. Here's realistically what we can do here, and here's what existing statute says versus you go high level talking all things I I'm going to lose most people, including my colleagues at work at a think tank, unless you keep it focused.

And then I think once you have that, you know, initial case study, you can kind of build from there. So there's interest, there's fascination. And I think the education and awareness is growing. And it's due to a lot of folks who are just good, effective advocates in the space, I love that. Well, that's very good to hear and hear.

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Good to hear that. They're more interested in protection of children online sector, which was my you know, Bill. That's right. Isn't all that. That's right. Yep. I know that the bill is going to change a lot. And even by the time that we air this, it's going to probably have evolved. So right now, what are the biggest issues, that stakeholders are bringing up that were obviously unintended consequences in the bill?

But what were those. Yeah. So specifically, there was there's this one definition that has created a lot of ire and understandably so. First, the word was algorithmic discrimination. And that has since changed to unlawful discrimination. But basically what it says, you know, this bill focuses on consequential AI models that would have a substantive effect on my ability to receive a service that like health care, education, finance, etc..

And the discrimination piece says if an AI system discriminates against a Texan on grounds of a protected characteristic, that that AI company could be held liable. And the concern there is, well, what is the standard for liability? Is it intent to harm? Or is it just if accidentally, through the black box and nebulous system of an AI tool, it unintentionally discriminates?

Is that something you can hold a company liable for? And so that's created a lot of, I think, heartburn from the business community. On what does that look like in practice. And, and I can say having spoken with the office and other members on it, I know that's something they're working on. Mollifying because there is we don't want to have a tool that people can use to shut down business development on grounds of discrimination.

So that's a big piece. Another is this AI Council and the way I talked about it earlier, the goal really is slash regulation. Learn from innovators. And there are some folks who see that as it's creating a huge role of government in AI. And again, I know the office is working on embedding and fine tuning this, but the concern right now is what if this council has regulatory authority to do the bidding of their bodies, or there's some kind of conflict of interest that could emerge?

Or if the people appointed to the council don't have the best interest of the holistic AI development in mind, could that create some kind of regulatory capture? And that's AI at any time there is a new government authority and an issue. That's something I'm always mindful of. I mean, you can look at I think the purest example is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which initially the goal was, hey, let's study advanced nuclear technology and make sure we're being responsible for, well, now these folks developing small modular reactors, they can't build because the process is so onerous.

And so I think there are additional checks that we can work on or rather eliminate in that process to make sure it really is oversight and not regulation, because that's where in most my discussions with different stakeholders, that's a big concern for them. Absolutely. And for Texans as a whole. Shifting gears just a little bit, I know cybersecurity and data privacy are really big concerns for Texans, for businesses.

What do you see as the biggest concerns being. Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So, I'll take a moment to talk about the Texas Cyber Command. Yes. And I so I was at the state of the state, and I had heard from Governor Abbott's office, hey, there's going to be some big cyber bills this session. I did not know it was going to be an emergency item until the second it got announced.

And so for the listeners who may not, have tuned in, you know, Governor Abbott painted a picture where we have foreign adversaries Russia, Iran, China and North Korea and so on that are infiltrating in particular, are critical infrastructure systems. And so this is where my water policy background, the story I always tell in show Texas, which is population under 5000 people, Senator Kevin Sparks is district.

There was a water tower that was remotely cyber infiltrated and they caused the water tower to overflow, flood and by the grace of God, the system was old enough to where they could unplug, you know, so to speak, the system and resume operations manually. Now, if that wasn't the case, and where we've seen other, you know, foreign adversaries hacking a critical infrastructure, there's a water treatment facility, they can change the chemicals, use it used to treat water, and theoretically they could increase toxins such that you're unleashing water to all of Texans.

That's laden with poison. So that's a big concern. We're seeing the grid, the nuclear sector, our election systems as we grow as a state of Texas because of our oil and gas dominance, because of our economic dominance, we're probably the biggest threat of any state to foreign adversaries. And so what do we do? Well, we're going to create this Texas Cyber Command.

And the bill has not dropped yet. But the general idea behind it is in in World War two. Yes. I'm going to bring this to you. Where we're at today, we have the Air Force, but it was under the the Army and we realized at the time Germany, they had a much more equipped air force, and they were kind of lapping us for the first couple of years of our entry into World War Two.

And it was afterward where ultimately, folks concluded the strategy between the Air Force and the Army can be different. And so they should be standalone. Well, that's kind of the idea behind the Texas Cyber Command, because Texas has the private sector, we have the Air Force, we have the NSA, and we have UTSA, which is a flagship institution that kind of brings this whole consortium together to focus on both defensive measures for cyber security, but then proactive as well.

And so the goal is to how is this new Texas Cyber Command as a standalone entity within UTSA, will leveraging the partnerships of all the different areas in San Antonio? And the more research I've done, the more I realize San Antonio. I mean, it. It's neck and neck with, the DC area when it comes to our overall military presence and might.

Plus, on top of that, we are some of the biggest private sector companies that are laser focused on tools, whether that's, you know, antivirus and malware or things of that nature. So that's going to be a huge defining issue for the first 60 days of session. As an emergency item. And then, hey, but that's just cybersecurity in a nutshell.

But I think I'd say in conclusion, Governor Abbott understands and and thank God he does that. The future of warfare as we move more and I, we hyper digitalize our economy. He's signaling to Texas that I'm all in on tech, and I want us to lead. But the only way to do so long term for the next 20, 40, 100 years is to make sure our cyber resilience is on par, because each new digital node we create is a new vector to attack.

And so let's not just be reactive. Let's proactively prepare to be the digital leader in the country. San Antonio is a very cool space. You're bringing that out of the most airports, military bases. Those are their own grid. That's right. Yeah. Which I learned, last session, which I thought was very fascinating. Yeah. So I know that a lot of these do overlap into tech because there's a lot of kind of infrastructure that needs to be developed as well.

So how do you, you know, you work on water policy. That's your background as well. How does the water policy and the AI sector emerge and how is it connected? Yeah, it's funny, like, you know, that this is such a actually a topical question, but I think if you asked me a year ago, like white water and tech.

Well, okay, the key study right now is Stargate. We've got $500 billion at the federal level, which is a private sector. Companies that are investing in state of the art AI data centers in Texas. Already in Abilene. It's one of the first sites for this new project. Billions, if not tens, maybe hundreds will pour into Texas because folks know if you want to build an AI data center, Texas in the best state for it or not, what we need to accomplish that is energy and water.

And if you, you know, for for listeners of yours that tune in to the interim hearings, Senate B and C, Ercot came and testified and said, we're going to need to double the amount of energy as a state output wise, to keep up with all this growth that we're seeing, especially in the crypto and the data center community.

And so we need energy, which means we need to eventually bring any nuclear in the state of Texas. And TVA is all in on that. But you also need water because water is used not just in the new homes that are need built with all this growth that's happening, but in these industrial sites, whether it's the cooling of data centers or the amount of water that's needed for energy, because at the end of the day, it's steam and turbines and you need water to produce steam.

And so there's really this like triangulation between water, energy and tech right now. And again, thank God we have lawmakers who understand this because ultimately California loses in tech. Yes, because of bad regulation, but more so because of bad planning. Long term is the Texas miracle. The more and more I study all the different facets that go when it's not a miracle.

It's good policy by design, and it's this holistic coming together, again, energy, water and tech that's going to ensure we lead in the future. And I don't think there's been a single discussion I've had about AI data centers where, you know, somebody doesn't bring out small modular reactors or nuclear. All these things are going to have to be a part of that portfolio to make sure a companies like yours, when you eventually have such a massive scale energy consumption wise, that we have the ability to meet the data center needs while also the growing population of Texas.

Absolutely. And

there's so much change happening right now. Which is very exciting. I got Cyber Command and now we have the Texas Doge committees. Right. So, this is very new. So can you share your thoughts on that? Sure, sure. So, the Texas delivery of Government Efficiency Committee, I reached when I saw this. I'm not going to lie.

You know, you're reading through the house rules, and now you're. For any folks you want the best kind of analysis, just go to the house rules. I know it's boring. I know it's, you know, hundreds of pages, but you can see the jurisdiction this committee has. And it's it's exactly what Texas needs. It's where all the AI and emerging tech bills are going to be heard, and it's where cybersecurity is going to be housed.

But then more specific to this national discussion, they have the ability to inquire into different state agencies and government actors any potential inefficiencies that are occurring. And so the goal is, yes, focusing on tech legislation that's going to make sure we're innovating, but open the hood of different state actors and see where are we doubling or tripling the amount of work when only a single person needs to do it?

Or perhaps automation may be necessary for the example that the chair of this committee began Giovanni Corigliano. It's like a broken record year, I promise. I know other lawmakers, the DMV this is this is the committee to allow us to find a more efficient way of going through the whole DMV process. I'm saying there's a more efficient way I have it or not, I haven't been gaslit into believing that standing in line for 4.5 hours to take a picture is the most efficient way to do business.

Which agencies you see there being the biggest spotlight into right now with this committee? You know, where there's potential room for automation and or innovation and where we get better. What's what's the movie where it's the sloth working at the DMV, and they're moving at a glacial pace, and it's the DMV.

I mean, it has to be the DMV because, you know, here, here we are in 2025. And we have whether it's blockchain technologies or it's the ability to sift through forms and inventorying at lightning fast speed. And we're still waiting in line for hours and hours. And I just went through this process, the DMV, since I moved from California to Texas, I had to go through renewal and not even hours.

It took me months just to get an appointment in the first place. And that, to me, is one of the most palpable examples of government inefficiency. And the reason why Doge as a whole, this committee or the national level was so important is it's renewing discussions that, hey, maybe we should question the status quo, that complaining about the DMV for decades on end, we can actually do something about it.

And thank God we have an apparatus in the Doge committee to do that. I would also say there's I think we're going to be shocked with AI. Yes, we know that there's an anticipation of fraud, waste and abuse, but I think we're going to be shocked at the scale because we're in Texas. It's a conservative state. You know, we have great conservative leaders.

But there have been decades and decades and decades of legacy programs that predate the Republican majority that are still in place today, whether it's individual agencies or the procurement process. Oh my goodness. When I when I was in grad school, I did my capstone project on technology procurement. I'm going to get in trouble here. It was with the city of Austin.

Yeah. And we did focus groups and interviews and we lifted the hood up. But basically they they said, hey, for tenure to white consultants coming in to modernize an inefficient system. And, Laura, I was dismayed by how much of my taxpayer dollars are going toward tech procurement. There were more instances than I can count where I'm talking with staff.

In my case, you're buying iPads because you need to update to the next generation, which is that proper use of taxpayer dollars and of itself probably not. But they would sometimes double, triple or quintuple order the technology because the box we get dropped off somewhere, somebody who is taking, you know, inventory of it would forget to notify the authority that, hey, these iPads are here.

So a month goes by. Oh, or iPads aren't here yet. Let's order some new ones. And so the order three times. What is only necessary once. I mean, I can tell you right now just a basic and basic AI system or some kind of like existing tool that you could apply to your workflow, you could eliminate that. And that's saving millions of dollars.

I just have one example right there. And so tech procurement, which happens at the state level. And to be clear, the Department of Information Resources has done a phenomenal job of streamlining. But then being able to leverage AI tools so we can buy tech that's more cyber secure, more privacy friendly, and doing so at a much more efficient scale.

That's going to save billions for the state. So the DMV is like this sexy example of let's get rid of this anachronistic way. But there are so many other instances where I think we're just going to be shocked by how much we let happen, because the status quo was a questioned. And I know the Sunset Commission does a lot of this auditing of agencies and making sure the legislature kind of sees into that.

How do you see this committee but differing from sunset? Yeah, no, that's a great question. Because the House hasn't had its own standalone sunset. I think competition is always good. And so the Senate is still going to be laser focused on their avenue for doing so. And I'd also note that Lieutenant Governor Patrick has it's it's Senate Bill 21.

I should have said the number. It's one of the top 25 bills is the doge Doge committee. And so that's going to be the Senate's own look into that in concert with the sunset Commission. And the House will, I think, complement that, outlet very well, because what we find, what is found in Doge can also be further explored by sunset and vice versa.

I also think it's, you know, sunlight is the best disinfectant. And so the more avenues we have to kind of just shy that light there. You can attack it from, from both angles there. That that is a great question. I don't know, you know, what kind of partnerships could emerge here, but I think not not not if but when we passed school choice, the opportunity for both chambers to work together and something like this is so much more heightened.

Do you see there being any relation between Texas Judge Committee and the federal judge? Oh, I hope so. I hope so, you know, I was telling you beforehand one of my favorite podcast right now, aside from yours, of course. And, you know, again, shout out to Rebel Tech, is all in podcast. And the last episode they were talking about.

So David Sax came on and, they ask him a question. Hey, what's something about Doge? We should know? So I think it's just like when essentially what I'm hoping happens is a Doge committee in Texas I do is like, yeah. So we found out, that the people who are working at Doge, there's so driven and so ambitious and they're so focused on their mission that they'll show up at seven and stay until like midnight.

And they're just coding. They're building their models out, and they're looking for any of these, you know, patterns that can emerge or can show in efficiency. They had to change the access on their swipe cards because they were leaving so late that the lights were shutting off, the doors were locking. They had no way of exiting. That's the kind of energy that's happening at the national level, and I think we can learn from them.

The the case study of U.S. aid, which is kind of taking the whole media by storm, you know, billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars funding these crazy things that are happening across the country. What you on said is, look, all we did was issue our guidance, which said, here's how you can fly, here's the investigation, and think what we're going to do.

Please oblige us. US aid was one of the first of the, actors that just decided, nope, we're going to violate that. We're not going to do it. And so Ellen's like, that's where we're focusing our time and energy. So I think we can learn from the national level on how to kind of apply this process. And I saw last week, the Doge committee announced they're looking to hire fellow.

And that fellow is going to be tasked with a lot of things. Yeah, there's a policy and legislations and all that. But most importantly, you know, I called Spencer Ward, his executive director, that I think is joking with him, like, hey, yeah, what do I what do I sign up? And already they have numerous applicants from Stanford, Berkeley and Yale folks who are building AI models.

And so the goal is to have our own models within text. And I imagine you guys are going to be a part of this discussion as well, to to really sift through the same way we're doing at the national level. We don't have the same scope and budget, but I think, with, with a little and with the right Texan mentality, we can get a lot done.

That's very exciting. Also exciting to hear that there's so many people and the, the Doge committee and the federal level working extremely on ours, and they're excited. Again, this is not something that you necessarily think of when you think of, you know, some of those other government agencies in, in DC. So it's exciting. There's kind of like a refresh a lot of new, and that I think Texas is focusing on knowing that that's really important to have potentially.

Yeah. Your own models. Exactly. And things like that. How, do you see this impacting businesses in Texas as type of committee startups? Yeah, I got it. Yeah. Well, I think because you're going to have a lot of the AI bills go through this committee. I imagine a lot of my good business friends and, you know, folks from, you know, whether it's the trade associations or just spent a lot of time in that committee, both, you know, testifying on bills.

But I think hearing during this inquiry process, where are there inefficiencies because good entrepreneurs will work in concert with that revelation and say, oh, that's inefficient. I have a product to develop, a tool to help fix that. So I think that's going to be a very unique relationship that we see kind of play out this session. But then more broadly, I think this is an ongoing discussion.

Right? Like we're we're heading in the march. We're not going to get everything done this session. And so hopefully interim committees and interim reports will be another avenue to partner with businesses. So like I'm thinking the AI Council or the AI Emerging Tech select committee. In the interim, Deloitte came in and they had a phenomenal testimony talking about, you know, here's the analysis we did on where there's duplicate government employees, where you actually probably need zero there, and you can use AI and plug them in elsewhere because it comes back to the role of government should be as minimal as humanly possible and as efficient as can be.

And it's the business folks that are going to come in with the solutions to say, here's how you can be more efficient. And the DOJ's Committee and Sunset Commission, they're the ones lifting up the hood to say, here's the inefficiency. Now help us. That should be the goal, I love it. Yeah, our friend had a joke that he said, oh, you guys should call your software.

So this is the software that's I love that. And I was laughing so much. It was like, oh, it was a good it was a good joke. Yeah. Well,

So I've had someone recently say to me, oh, I thought that this Dodge committee is basically going to be another AI committee, and there are AI bills coming through this committee.

How are those separating out those two committees? Yeah. So the AI emerging Tech select committee got subsumed by the Dodge committee. So this will be like, for all intents and purposes, if there is a bill that touches AI, it's likely the default is to go through Dodge. But then you're going to have, you know, AI bills like I'm thinking, if they touch health care code, then there's a potential.

It goes through the, you know, committee of jurisdiction there. So it's the catchall. It's where I will follow the default. But, you know, ultimately up to the speaker's prerogative to kind of see where things and, but, the opening of the hood, I keep using that, that metaphor. I think that's going to be the meat of that committee, because there's only so many AI bills and there's oh, so much inefficiency that we'll look into that makes a lot of sense.

Are there any specific to dosage like piece of legislation that have been filed you've seen yet yet? So not off the top of my head. I did mention the big bill that we're waiting with bated breath for. Senator Tan Parker is working on an AI bill for the public sector, and it's it's hitting on all the Doge pieces you would expect, which is, you know, leveraging AI as a tool by making sure our agencies have their data house in order and have their the room clean, so to speak, and then where they can leverage AI there encouragement for them to do so.

And I believe there's going to be a similar council structure that looks at, again, we have the AI Advisory Council in the interim to find out inefficiencies at the state government level. That bill is a an extension of that committee, and it creates what they call a digital code of ethics to make sure we're doing it ethically and responsibly.

But the bench in that public sector bill is toward efficiency and using AI tools to help artists that got it. And you have you know, this has been such a good, very in-depth conversation, I mean, more knowledge than so many on the subject.

Where do you really see future Texas with all of this coming? This is a lot of new.

Where do you see it going to? Here? It's a great question. It's you know, I feel like every week because we see so much new, so many new updates, whether it's, you know, open AI nearing artificial general intelligence or at some of these incredible robotics companies, I, I don't have a crystal ball that can look clearly into this, but I can say spending all the time that I have in the last year, year and a half talking to folks in business and again, I moved from California.

And so I feel like I empathize with the spirit of entrepreneurs that have moved here or feel empowered to start up a company. Incredible things are happening in Texas, and it's not even, I think a year ago, if you would have asked me, I'd say, oh yeah, it's because it's the Sputnik moment. It's the race against China to develop.

I am sure there's that. But it's like almost a return to the 1836 ethos of Texas, where we are gritty, we are intrepid, we move fast and we break things. And there's so much excitement around this. This is ultimately why we're there is concern on hospital 1709. It's because they don't want anything to pull from that. And I empathize fully.

What I know is that I have talked to more folks, like your perfect example, actually, Laura, like, you know, who in in a government line of work decides I'm going to quit my job and I'm going to start a company that's going to solve this very niche, but very rampant problem. And I'm going to devote my time, talent and treasure to it.

There are myriad stories like yours that I've heard, and that to me signals whatever happens in Texas, it's going to be pro growth and pro innovation. And so we're going to be China, and we're going to be California and beat other states. Yes, because we'll get the regulatory environment right. And I know we're laser focused on that. But it's folks like you who are so focused on that mission driven build of these new companies.

And it feels like I we said this after the election like we're back, but Texas is in that driver's seat when it comes to innovation. So ten years from now, I don't know if we're colonizing Mars and growing potatoes there or what it looks like, but I can say that Silicon Valley will be a a chapter in this book.

But the next is Texas, and we're going to fight with cities like Miami on cryptocurrency and other things. But Texas as a state is going to be in the driver's seat when it comes to being the number one innovation hub in the country. Well, thank you for the kind words and for, you know, recognizing the mission driven piece of this, because absolutely, that's what we try and share all the time is this was a problem?

Yes. You don't need to do it this way. Right? You don't need to spend hours of your day and taxpayer dollars. When I was working for the government and getting paid by the government to do something, but now can take two seconds, right?

So I totally agree. That's very, very good and very good to hear others doing anything that is going to make things just for your life easier.

Yeah. More efficient. Yeah. Like, I don't know, like the mission driven piece is so key. You know, in the nonprofit space, given I'm at A51C3, there's this one book, Virtuous Leadership, and it talks about, you know, the difference between a nonprofit and a for profit when it comes to a leadership model for good leaders is management by objective would be some of the private sector companies and management by mission is the nonprofit realm.

But but companies like yours or I'm thinking, you know, good friend, Peter Rex who has Rex company is just ten different I startups. For him it's faith, family and the values of Texas that really inspire him to build is you're thinking about how can I corporate these values of, you know, whatever it is, integrity, transparency and so on to build for something that's going to redound for years and years to come.

I did not feel that in Sacramento when I was there, and maybe it's because I've drank the Kool-Aid in Texas, but it feels like it. That's inspiring. A lot of this great growth that we're seeing year to what it kind of advice would you give to policymakers, business leaders with the information you have on AI? And, also with this, all the stakeholders that you've heard from, what's the biggest piece of advice you get?

Just humble yourself before the process. You know, there are there are a lot of folks now that are engaging in AI advocacy and policy, and it's a reminder for me daily that I may know this niche area of XYZ policy, but there is a person I'm talking to that's going to have some other unique perspective, and it makes you stronger when you humble yourself with a desire to listen.

There is a quote, you know, I always assume that the person I'm talking to is my superior in some way. In that way, I learn, and I think it is. They can't be true any other area than technology policy because it moves so fast. And so what I thought I knew yesterday I'd be willing to reconcile with what I'm hearing today, and actively listening and wanting to hear that person out, because if we made policy in a vacuum, you're a California and so be willing to engage, roll up your sleeves, be proven wrong, and just send whatever it is that you're working on.

But ultimately know that there need not be any pride in this, because we're all kind of figuring out as we go. I love that, and I've learned so much today from you as well. And, all the work you're doing. So thank you for that. And, is there anything else you want to share with our audience before we wrap?

No, I mean, I don't know if you say this, but if you're not subscribed, you're not liking me on all the different platforms that your podcast is on. Please do. But, Laura, thank you so much for having me on the show today. Thank you. And, shout yourself out. How can people find you and subscribe to your podcast?

Yeah. So, I am on the Twitters, the x dx duniya I don't really use other social media, but the Rebel Tech podcast, we're on YouTube or on Spotify. And you'll have to check out if you haven't heard of Laura Carr. I think that's the best starting point. Thank you so much for coming on and for all your work.

Enjoy session and thanks again for coming out today in this busy time. Right. Thanks for work. Thank you.

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Welcome back to bills and business. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege, where we make government more efficient with technology. Today, we're excited to have Norman Garza, the executive director at the Texas Space Commission. On the show, Norman was recently appointed as the inaugural executive director of the Texas Space Commission. On July 1st, 2024, and before the Space Commission spent nearly a decade shaping policy and driving innovation at Texas A&M University System as their vice president of government relations.

He's a proud Texan, roots run deep in the Rio Grande Valley and South Texas. These are graduating university, where he earned his degree in political science. We're thrilled to have you here to discuss his vision for Texas Space Commission and the future of the space economy in Texas. Please join me in welcoming Norman Garza. To the podcast.

Well, tell me how your sessions been so far in general. What have you been up to? This crazy session the first time you've had this agency?

Yeah. So, honestly, I was just visiting with some of your colleagues. I almost feel as though I'm a little disconnected after so many sessions back to back that I've been in the building, either working for a member of the legislature or a statewide organization, which I did for Texas Farm Bureau or a major brand. It was an institution of higher education, Texas A&M, whereby my days were in the building, going to the committee meetings, following up on pieces of legislation, bringing in all of the right subject matter experts to have conversations in this role as executive director of the Texas Space Commission, I'm more up and out than I am down in in when

it comes to engagement at the legislature on a daily basis. Okay. Yes, I am going. Yes, I have some board members that I'd love to talk about. And they come in both under the auspices of their Texas Space Commission appointment, but also their day jobs, because they have some really incredible experiences and expertise when it comes to the commercial space ecosystem.

Not just here in Texas, across the country and around the world. But long story to your question as an answer from me, it's almost been like, I feel like there's this whole other world at the Capitol going on that I'm not as closely connected to this session in particular, because of all of the external engagements I've been part of since, since January.

Obviously, that makes so much sense. Yeah, I'm feeling that way a little too. Like I go in at least once a week, but it feels really weird. So much is done remotely now. True. Like there's so many meetings I've had with people who are in other states or in other parts of Texas. And so I'm doing those like remotely or virtually or people are coming here.

So, even I'm, you know, four minutes from the Capitol, it feels like I'm not there as much. I do miss everyone. So it's like I see it every day. The Texas Space Commission is utilizing some floor space as our office location within the texted headquarters building. Okay, cool. Right across the street from the capitol, the Greer State Office building.

So I see the Capitol every day, but I don't always go to it every day, which is kind of a weird feeling when folks like you and I have been in that building hours on in, day after day during every session. It's kind of weird, to not be in there, but, the space Commission, particularly, there are some bills that aren't affecting our agency but do affect the industry.

So we're starting to kind of keep an eye on those. The Space Commission is administratively attached to the office of the governor. So we're engaged with those conversations when, any bill might affect the operations of state agencies writ large.

So in 2023, the Texas Legislature appropriated $150 million to the Texas Space Commission board of directors to administer as a grant program, House Bill 3447 by Doctor Bannon, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. His district is the part of Houston where Johnson Space Center is located. And a lot of his constituency, whether they're students or employees or contractors and vendors, etc., are the first folks that we're talking about.

This new mission from NASA headquarters called Artemis. Artemis is the return to the moon mission from NASA, and it's been underway for several years. So there were many folks from industry as well as from NASA who were part of that development. In terms of the mission, folks who live in and around Johnson and the greater Houston area.

Of course, paying much more closely and paying much more closer attention than the rest of us around the state, in particular, started having conversations both at the federal and the state, but also at the local level in terms of how Johnson and Houston Space City USA is, it's well known as needed to position itself better for whatever the future for from Artemis would provide to that Houston area.

Quickly, there was conversation about a aging infrastructure at Johnson Space Center that the federal government has not given enough attention and appropriated enough funding to either maintain or enhance the capability. These things, like laboratories and other things that help support post mission activities. So that was one thing. And the second thing was questions that were being asked like, well, what is SpaceX doing down in South Texas?

And what is Blue Origin doing out in West Texas and what's going on in and around the San Antonio area? And there's conversations up in the Dallas-Fort worth area as well. Who's tracking all of this? Who are the right people that can help the state of Texas at a leadership level, understand the landscape and where things are going to be going into the future from the commercial space ecosystem, in addition to the ongoing federal government activities like NASA's mission called Artemis out of headquarters and a lot of stuff down in the Florida Cape area.

But then what does it mean for Johnson Space Center? And so the running joke was, who's the one person that can write a one pager about all things space related in Texas? It's not one person, and it doesn't fit on one piece of paper, okay. Which is how the concept evolved into let's get the right minds together. Let's vet some people.

Let's ask them to serve as volunteers on a governing body for a new commission called the Texas Space Commission, and gave them $150 million to solicit proposals for the big ideas, whether it's from academia or from the private sector, or from nonprofits, as well as local governmental organizations, etc., so that the state of Texas also had a little skin in the game when it comes to these emerging technologies.

That whole portfolio of research, development, testing and evaluation, a lot of that has been done using private capital from these different brands that are located around the state. So they have already demonstrated their interest in being located in Texas, hiring Texans as their workforce, bringing in all of the different hardware and software, creating these prototypes that hopefully will become commercialized for space, but not limited to just use by NASA.

There's also homeland security and national defense perspectives when it comes to certain technologies, which affects the daily lives. Like you and I, every morning, getting up using our credit cards, our cell phones, our cars and vehicles moving around, that's our way of life. And there are people in other countries around the world, adversaries of the United States of America, who have a priority to disrupt our way of life.

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And so if the companies here in Texas that are working on these really cool, innovative technologies can help, even in the slightest, protect our way of life by going through that reentry phase, commercial releasing it, having it adopted either at the NASA or the DoD level. Then talk about that narrative in terms of Texas helping Texans, but also the country and the world live in a safe place.

I love what you're doing. I don't know if you know this about me. But I was the president of Alien Club. Know I need to know. That old school. And I used to do research on aliens at lunch, and I was always interested in space, I still am. I'm, I'm very into, like, Neil deGrasse Tyson stuff.

I watch a lot of his videos. And, Michio Kaku, I love his kind of future, books. Kind of like a side hustle. You're going to have to go on a road show telling everybody about this stuff is. It's hilarious, but it's it's a fact that's happening. And so, when I was actually moving to Texas from DC, I was asking some mentors of mine, hey, I actually am really interested in space policy.

And they say it's just not big here in Texas. Yeah. So that's really exciting that they are putting all this research and development. And now that you started the Space Commission. So, how did you get interested in it? It has always been something of interest to you. Good question. Thank you. I did not research aliens at lunch in middle school.

I don't I'm sure my library had something like that, but, that wasn't what I was doing. So I've never been to space, and I'm not an engineer. And often when I'm going talking to groups, they ask a similar question. How did I end up in this position? Yeah, I started in July. July 1st was my first date as the inaugural executive director of the Texas Space Commission.

As you know, for the last ten years, I was working at Texas A&M and a lot of the faculty there were getting calls from federal and state officials, not just legislators, asking that question. What do we need to know when it comes to the commercial space ecosystem in Texas? Those calls are being made to the missions at UT, at U of age, at tech, etc., at Rice University as well.

But any time the faculty at A&M were getting calls because of the position I had at A&M, I accompanied them for those conversations. And after several years of these discussions, you know enough to be dangerous for the conversation and to also help enable whatever those big ideas might have been along the way to create a reality for the state of Texas.

And at first, it wasn't the objective of creating like a commission or an agency, it was just who were the right people. What information can they provide and what direction does the state need to be going? So like I said, I just happened to be because of my position there accompanying the faculty for these conversations. And then ultimately an agency was established, there was a fund created, and there are objectives that the agency and the board must complete.

And so it kind of got down to wait a minute, I could apply for that and maybe work there and continue this conversation. After all of those meetings that I went to. So I was encouraged and I, completed an application, got invited to interview, and I was very humbled when the board, made an offer to me, with the governor's office alongside.

So it's pretty cool.

How exciting. Well, congrats again. Thank you. And I know this is, like, few times, I haven't seen you in a couple months since you've been doing all this work, so. Yeah, very exciting. You. You mentioned your team a few times. Who is on your team? You said you've got an all star studded team.

What types of folks doing research do you have? Work? Yeah. Thanks. So I'm one of 15. That's the build out of the office organization, if you will. House Bill 3447 prescribes for the board to hire an executive director and a chief compliance officer. So those two roles are required by law. So I was the executive director.

Select the person who was selected to be the chief compliance officer. Her name is Erin Chancellor. Well known around the Austin and D.C. circles. She's an attorney. We stole her from TCU. And she's originally from Midland. So in terms of, the Texas strong, the agency strength and the, industry perspective, things weren't like completely unknown to her.

And she has been an incredible addition to build out the team at the Texas Space Commission, because by law, she's the person that has to certify any grant application that we receive is eligible for evaluation by the board of directors. So, first and foremost, Aaron also brought on, Blake Calvert, who was a policy analyst within the governor's office, as the deputy executive director.

We have a grant manager, financial analyst, two program managers. One is specific to the commercial aerospace industry. The other is specific to military aerospace activities. We also have some data scientists to help us go through all of this plethora of information that has been provided, not just through the application process, but by stakeholders, people that are in and around the country and the state who want to make sure that the Texas Space Commission Board knows who they are.

Well, you can only receive so many one pagers and, you know, not feel overwhelmed. So we've got a couple of program, our data scientists to assist the program managers with capturing the information, synthesizing it. And my vision is that we're able to create this incredible web of information, literally across the state of Texas, so that everybody, whether you're in Lubbock or you're in Nacogdoches or you're in Brownsville or you're up in Duma, all of these different places, you do, you have a place to go to understand what the opportunities are.

If your local community does, in fact, want to be involved with the commercial space ecosystem in Texas. So long answer to your question. We're at 15 folks, and it's a really fun team to work with, I'm sure fast growing as well. So we're at chapter 1515 is the build out for the model. And that's who we've got on on board.

That's a great size team. Yeah.

You're setting the tone for this agency. So where what's the vision you have for the next few years. So kind of short term, mid term long term short term was moving out on implementing the grant program. We had to write rules, send them to the secretary of state's office, leave them open for public comment, promulgate them.

That then gave the board the legal authority to start evaluating applications. So we're in that phase right now of going through the evaluation process. Within four months, the board received 281 applications from 140 unique entities. And combined, the funding request was $3.4 billion oversubscribed to $150 million. Fund that I described was appropriated by the legislature in 2023. But what it does is it provided us line of sight of the demand signal in terms of RTT across Texas research, development, testing and evaluation, we now have a good sense of what university faculty researchers would like to do, what commercial companies would like to do, those that are both publicly traded and privately held, as well as

several nonprofits, think Stem education at all levels for students to get reinvigorated for this thing called space exploration. And maybe there's a young lady in some middle school doing alien research during her lunch break. Everyone from the five year olds to my 89 year old grandmother appreciating what Texas is doing and the opportunities in 2025 and beyond.

So my term vision for the Texas Space Commission is utilizing all of this input that we've received, and not just from the applications for funding, but also all of those sort of one pagers that we've been receiving. And then long term, it's to ensure that this is this agency becomes so successful that it's in the envy of all other states.

Currently, other states have something similar as a space commission might call it something different. But what they don't have is the number of companies, the experts, those with experience from NASA, and the leadership support from their respective states cohesively. Let me describe what I mean by that. Today in Texas, we have the support from the governor, from the lieutenant governor, from the Texas House, the chairman of the two appropriations committees, the Senate Finance and House appropriations at the Texas Legislature.

Both are from the Houston area. But then we also have these two guys up in DC that hold the chairmanship of committees with jurisdiction over NASA. Congressman Brian Babin, dentist. Houston chairs the right committee in the US House, Senator Ted Cruz from Texas, Houston also chairing the Committee of Jurisdiction over NASA in the United States Senate. The stars, pun intended, could not be better aligned when it comes to positioning Texas for incredible opportunities long term.

And if the Texas Space Commission can help enable that, the current board of directors are all for it.

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I need more space funds in my life. This is fantastic. Arm, you mentioned you're receiving so many one pagers, and obviously we're seeing Texas just booming right now with with businesses moving here and then new innovation. So are you seeing most of the people that are writing these in the private sector, or is it more, government?

Good question. It's what we've received to date are coming from those private sector companies, not just those that are in and around the Houston area, but also in the valley in Central Texas. I think the corridor of 35 between San Antonio all the way up to Waco with Austin in between, but also out in West Texas all the way to El Paso and the DFW area as well.

I often like to ask the room if I'm speaking in front of a crowd, whether anyone knows how many FAA designated public space ports there are in Texas. I do not know how many. Two. Okay, what does that mean? Could you guess where there are located though? First San Antonio could guess, but no. And. West Texas yes. Specifically Midland Garrett Midland and Ellington Field okay.

Which is in the Houston area up the road from Johnson Space Center are the two publicly or FAA designated public space ports in Texas. What it means to answer your second question is that those communities are eligible to do certain kinds of things, not necessarily just launching and not necessarily just maintaining certain supplies or assets, but also think reentry and return missions, whatever goes up has to come down.

Why can't it come back through somewhere like rural West Texas with the support of Midland, which is a spaceport and also has a Space Port Development Corporation, which is different than an economic development corporation, of which most communities in Texas has one formed. What it means is these communities are sending a signal around the state, throughout the country and around the world that if you want to be present in Texas, come to my area.

We have a spaceport, or maybe they don't have a spaceport, but they have a spaceport development corporation. There are plenty of locations around the state that I've learned have not maintained a spaceport development corporation, but once upon a time created one, and over time it just became defunct. So there's a lot of places that I've learned are interested in having their local officials create a spaceport development corporation.

What that does, like I said, is it sends the signal for folks to come somewhere to Texas. So long answer again, sorry to the caller asking jaslyn. But there's, there's some great opportunities, obviously. Are you trying to help expand these spaceports and are to is that a lot? Is that not that many compared to other states?

Good question. So first off, House Bill 3447 provides the guardrails for which the Texas Space Commission operates and how we can utilize the $150 million fund. So let me start there. Your question was about spaceports and whether the Space Commission is charged with helping expand. Yes. The current ones or create additional ones, I think. So there are five areas that the Texas Space Commission can fund projects when it comes to the surf grant program, when one of those five areas is maintaining or enhancing spaceports.

But that's not the only item that they can fund. It's also workforce development. It's also research, think post mission. Samples that come back either from the moon or from an asteroid or somewhere else in orbit that needs to be analyzed. So it's post mission curation. And then it's emerging tech. It's the new ideas that are coming from the folks that are much smarter than me, but they want to maybe develop the next kind of bio tissue and zero gravity.

Or perhaps it's a new, material for better fiber optics. All of these things, I'm told it's just better to research them and or manufacture them in space. So what if we get to a year where semiconductor wafers, the chips are being manufactured in zero gravity, and then they need to be brought back to Earth for us to use in our different devices.

But because they can be produced up, they're manufactured literally at a higher quality. There needs to then become this ongoing cycle of a supply chain whereby things need to go to a location, they need to be created, then it needs to be put on some kind of a payload, it needs to be blasted. It needs to then perhaps either use humans or robots to make, and then it has to be brought back to Texas.

So there's this whole new vision called the lunar economy, that the state of Texas should be positioning itself throughout all of our communities to have some bite at this big piece, this big pie. Just have a little piece of a big pie. And if the Texas Space Commission is able to help enable those discussions at the local level, because perhaps somebody decided to create a spaceport development corporation and attract the right kind of company to be in their backyard, then literally the opportunity is out of this world.

I love the space funds. Yeah, seriously, keep em up. So you mentioned like SpaceX and Blue Origin. What other types of companies are you seeing popping up that you can talk about, that you're working with or helping in any way? Sure. Well, just in the last ten days, plus or minus, maybe about 15 now for companies that have roots in Texas, have done some really incredible things off this planet.

On February 25th, Blue Origin's 10th crew on their New Shepard rocket launched from Van Horn, Texas. It's already been announced their next mission is going to be an all girls trip. You should read into this or look this up and read about it. Mr. Bezos, his fiancé and her best friend and a couple of other ladies are going to have, afternoon girls trip to space.

A little bit different than just going to a spa day, but that was Blue Origin. On February 26th, intuitive machines, that's a company based in Houston. They launched, they launched their, lunar lander, that made its way through space and over to the moon. And ultimately, that's the second asset that this one company here in Texas has launched, and it has gone to the moon on March 2nd, Firefly, another company just up the road from Austin in Cedar Park, their lunar lander mission began and it landed on Texas Independence Day on the surface of the moon tonight, there's going to be a lunar eclipse for us here on Earth, and it will

be a solar eclipse on the moon for this lunar lander to capture video footage and transmit back to Earth. So in the morning, we can all watch this new film that was captured tonight by a device that was made by a Texas company, the first to share that video. Yes. When this airs, that will have happened. So we would love to.

Well, let's add that in. Here's a here's a footage of that beautiful James post. Production ad. Yes. And then also SpaceX down at Boca Chica Beach outside of Brownsville in Cameron County. They also ultimately launched, another rocket. And that all happened from people in companies rooted here in Texas doing things off this planet.

I think your question was, what are some of these other companies that are coming to Texas, but also what are the ones here now and what are they doing? Yeah, we've learned that there are satellite manufacturing companies that want to set up shop. We've learned that there are some hypersonic engine companies that are wanting to do some high altitude, long range testing.

Think between perhaps the Houston area and the Brownsville area or the Houston area in the Midland area. We've also met with several generals of the United States Space Force. They are tracking from a military perspective what innovation these privately held companies are doing and what technologies might be created with advanced materials to operate in extreme environments that they might one day be interested in using from a warfighter perspective.

And so there's also this big push for there to be more guardians. Guardians are the term of the warfighters for the Space Force, whereas you have, Marines and soldiers and airmen for all of the other branches for the Space Force, their guardians. Okay. There's already a small presence of them out in El Paso connected to the University of Texas at El Paso, because the lady who's the president of UTEp, her name is Doctor Heather Wilson.

She used to be the secretary of the Air Force when the Space Force was created by President Trump. Doctor Wilson was the secretary of the Air Force. You can just imagine her Rolodex, and she's tracking what is needed from a pipeline perspective, both workforce and education, as well as the commercialization of these technologies that might be adopted down the road by the Space Force.

So there's conversations about how Texas, just like Governor Abbott and others, helped to attract Army Futures Command to be located here in Texas, right up the road in Austin. One day, perhaps there's more Space Force commands placing guardians, warfighters, and their families somewhere in Texas, not necessarily only out in West Texas at El Paso, but perhaps also across the entire state.

So those are some of the other conversations that are underway. Therefore, the opportunities truly, truly, truly are exponential. Oh, yeah. Out of this world, as we say. Yeah.

Is your role specifically with the Space Commission to meet with these companies? Is it helping with economic development or helping grow these opportunities or, kind of what's your role in that with the companies?

Sure. Yes. It's always economic development oriented. No, I don't have the keys to any rocket ship, nor do I have a spacesuit. My brother and buddies are asking, you know, does it fit right? And all this kind of stuff don't have one. So it really is from an economic development perspective of maintaining those companies that are already located here in Texas that have been putting their own skin in the game for years, truly their capital, regardless of whether it was from one person or from a fund or from this incredible investment scheme that they have properly done over time.

But it's also helping them to expand their footprint and then hopefully other companies are seeing the benefit of the their competitors or their competitive mates being located here in Texas. And that encourages them to move to Texas and set up shop somewhere. House Bill 3447. Like I said, it had five areas specifically that we can fund. But the first requirement before the Space Commission board of directors can consider making a grant.

Is the entity eligible to submit an application to us must already be present in Texas. Okay. So your answer again, long answer or your question again, long answer. For me, yes, it's all economic development oriented, but really it's enabling the emerging technology that can come from these companies once they decide to set up shop somewhere in Texas.

That's awesome.

Yeah. And I was reading that you've received almost 70 million in surf grants since January alone, and we are just at the beginning of March. So, what are those, going towards? And. Sure. Yeah. So, like I mentioned, we opened the application period in September. The rules were promulgated in December. So it was the weeks during the winter break whereby my board members could start evaluating some of those applications that came in.

That was the legal start date for them to start looking at, some of these applications. So on their downtime with their families over their holiday break during vacation, they spent time looking at applications, which is how we were able to get to a decision point in January, at which time the board approved four applications. And combined, that total award was $21.5 million for those four entities in January.

Then on a rolling basis, kind of like when you apply to university or law school, you're waiting to, you know, get your application reviewed. They were continuing that process, so they got to February and they were ready to make awards for five entities. And that combined value was $47.7 million. So just under 50% of $150 million fund has been awarded to date.

These folks, obviously, with the year underway, this is a volunteer process for their personal time to read evaluations or proposals and evaluate. So we're in that phase of them continuing through their balance of these applications. But secondly, they have to meet an open meeting following the Open Meetings Act, and so polling them for a consensus date of a particular day and time that works for enough of them, whereby we have a quorum for them to have a meeting.

It's harder than you might imagine. Again, these are volunteers, so I can't just like demand. You've got to be available on Tuesday at 10:00 and you've got to read 30 applications in one week, and you have to be ready to make a recommendation for consideration of making some awards. I'm just I'm sharing that for for the advantage of the public audience listening to your podcast so that I can help explain and teach along the way.

Yes, we're trying to move quickly, but we are still state government and these are volunteers. So, I'm hopeful that they'll have a meeting in March, at least one a meeting in April and meeting in May, and they'll continue to spin down the balance of that hundred and 50 million, but still available. And are these volunteers just good Samaritans interested in space, or who are these these folks?

Great question. They are truly subject matter experts when it comes to the space economy. I've told you about Doctor Wilson and what her past is that qualifies her as one of our board members. But our board chair, her name is Gwen Griffin. She grew up in and around the NASA world because her father was mission control director at Johnson Space Center, plus many other hats that he wore along the way during his NASA career, both down at the Cape in Florida as well as up in headquarters at DC.

We also have a retired astronaut, retired Army aviator at the rank of colonel doctor Nancy Currie Gregg professor at Texas A&M University. We also have an Air Force Academy graduate who has been part of the venture capital world for many, many years. Brad Morrison. We also have the lady who runs Starbase for space, Kathy Leaders. She's the vice chair.

Kirk Shearman. We also have John Shannon. We also have Evan Loomis. These guys Boeing, Lockheed, also private capital folks. Let's see, we've got a lady by the name of Sassy Duggleby. She and her husband are working on the most efficient engine in the world that can be used both on rockets or on satellites, as well as perhaps a commercial aviation company in the future.

Remember the Concorde that grew at supersonic speed around the world? I wish it was still here. What if there was a airline out there that moved at hypersonic speeds? Her technology could enable that someday. So we've got some really impressive people. They're not your typical political appointees. As the governing body of this new agency called the Texas Space Commission, I would love teleportation, but hypersonic speed would probably do the job.

I feel you're still in the UK, as you know, so it would be. The Concorde was amazing. You could get, I think. Yeah. London to New York in four hours. So sassy and her husband Andrew, they, kind of came up with this concept because he's a, he was in, in the service and they were living abroad and said, gosh, I wish I could get to some family event and still be back, you know, in time to go to work or the next thing that I needed to do.

So he's an engineer and started having these conversations. So she and they started having these conversations and said, let's, let's make it happen. And so when they hire people, they tell the story for folks that work for them. They would like everybody to be home for dinner. That's great. Whether they're just coming to their site at Ellington Field in Houston, Texas, or they're a business person going somewhere around the world and then needs to come back in time for dinner.

And maybe this technology could enable that for us mere mortals who will never leave Earth but could benefit from some of this innovative technology that's being developed for SpaceX. But it'll be used right here on Earth. Who knows, you may get an invite to go up to SpaceX with, Bezos, his wife, maybe. I think I'd say yes.

I think I'd say yes, I would. I don't know that I'm going to get that invite, though. Well, with all of this and actually, one more question on that hypersonic speed, do you know how fast we're talking as far as, you know, a ten hour flight? What that time would change to? No, a because I'm not an engineer, okay.

And B, because it depends on, the size and the amount of people and the weight of the, aircraft, etc., etc.. I have heard sassy answer this question before. She can answer the question. I'm not even going to try. Okay, and so intrigued, I'm gonna have to go, you know, look it up. Well, with all this, you know, really exciting potential innovation, you're talking about manufacturing from space.

I'm just thinking jobs, right? There's a lot of new jobs, and then workforce training is going to be huge. How are you helping, with that? Is that on the radar? Yep. So, like I said, workforce development is, in fact, one of those five categories, whereby the Texas Space Commission can appropriate or, award funds from our surf grant program through the hundred and $50 million appropriated by the legislature.

Ultimately, what would be in the best interest of all of Texas is if some of those funds, if they're going towards workforce development programs, it will support this whole new pipeline of people that are capable of working at any of these space companies. It's not like you need to be trained, overly trained just to work at SpaceX or just to work at Blue Origin, or just to work at Firefly or Star Lab or Venus, etc. there's a lot of transferable skills between people who are currently employed within the oil and gas sector, and those who might want to be employed within the commercial space ecosystem.

They all work with really advanced materials under extreme conditions. They also work with really flammable and or hazardous fluids and chemicals. They also have to move all of these different products. So think supply chain logistics, whether that's on rail or on road or on boat or in the air, there's a lot of different capabilities that Texans are already working somewhere across the state could easily pivot and move into the space world.

So we just need the right kinds of job requirements from those employers to understand how the state of Texas, whether that's through an institution of higher education such as Texas State Technical College System or STC or other junior colleges, two year institutions around the state, much less those bigger advanced degrees like mechanical engineers or electrical engineers at the master's or PhD levels.

A couple of other things I want to pull on here. When Governor Abbott announced the appointees for the Texas Space Commission governing board as well as their advisory consortium, the acronym is tasked to RCC. He challenged every president of an institution of higher education and chancellor here in Texas to create a space degree, whether it's space engineering or a space certificate.

Some of them have done that already, but not all of them. So in order to help meet this demand from a workforce perspective, whether it's through an academic program or through a training program, we need industry to inform the universities and the colleges and to see what kind of skills they're looking for, so that within Texas government, through the institutions of higher education, these programs are available to Texans, and then they're ready to be hired by these companies that are located in Texas.

I have to give you an other side of the coin here. A lot of these companies are working on projects that might have a connection back to the United States government whereby they need to hire domestic workforce, American folks that are born in the United States of America that can obtain a security clearance. So we need to take advantage of, for example, veterans that are retiring from the military and are already vetted and are ready to go into the workforce when it comes to space, because they're training in the military as well as their backgrounds, are the right kind of profile that these companies might want to hire.

Additionally, we need to help students who are eligible to undergo security clearances. Their background checks start while they're still in college, as crazy as that sounds, so that when they graduate, they have their degree, they have any additional certifications that might be useful and they have a security clearance. So when they get hired by these companies working on these U.S government contracts, they're able to be part of that conversation on day one, not a year later, once their security clearances are processed.

That makes sense. So there's a lot of overlap then with what you're doing, the state level and the federal level. How are you working with the federal government? Yeah. So a lot of conversations, like I said, with the US Space Force as well as with DARPA, there's also the Defense Innovation Unit, the IU, which is part of the Secretary's office at the Pentagon.

So a lot of these different, folks and programs at the DC level are connected to some of my board members. And these conversations have also been underway in the background. Separate and apart from the grant evaluation process, because that's short term goal. Things like discussions that we're having now are sort of mid term goals. So that long term, Texas is positioned to really be the epicenter when it comes to that space economy or that lunar ecosystem, as well as anything that deals with national defense.

Exciting it is. And you're we're midway through session. Yep.

So what are some of your legislative priorities you've been working on so far? And your team? Sure. So we're monitoring bills that might not have a direct application on the Texas Space Commission. But there's general bills out there that affect every state agency in Texas. So we're monitoring those.

There's a couple of others, Senator Middleton, Representative Paul, for example, they have legislation that deals with franchise tax, for space companies. There's also transportation funding that's important to tech start for a lot of the communities whose roadways are getting torn up, for lack of a better word, when it comes to moving the big pieces of equipment for the space companies, it's very similar to the same conversations that have been had, over the past several years with regards to the oil and gas industry in Texas.

Other renewable energy efforts think pipelines for horizontal drilling. When it came to be a big thing where I grew up, the Eagle Ford Shale, Pleasanton, Texas, just south of San Antonio. Now this goes to County at the top of that, but also the Barnett Shale, also out in West Texas, etc.. So funding for other state agencies is something that we're also monitoring right now during session.

It's not a singular game here for just getting more resources and authority to the Texas Space Commission. Rather, it's how to divide the load and conquer together all of what's required for the entire state of Texas to row the boat in the same direction. Here for space economy efforts. So things at the Higher Education Coordinating Board, things that TDA things at DPS, things that tech start, all of these other agencies that the legislature might either be, passing a bill or appropriating dollars, are other things that we're monitoring at the Texas Space Commission this session, or have you been testifying at all?

Not me, but our board chair, Gwen Griffin, was invited by the Texas House Committee on the delivery of government efficiency. Yes. The DOJ's Committee, chaired by Representative Leone. She testified last week, I believe it was. All the dates are running together in my mind. And she did an overview about what we're how we're functioning as a state agency.

And her comments were well received. She did get some, direct questions, in terms of some of the awards that we've made and explaining what the conflict interest process is as an example, for our board, because of their past experiences and expertise, it's inevitable that one of the applications was going to be a conflict for them to consider a proposed project.

So she was answering those kinds of questions, but I did not personally testify. However, we, participated in, the Dodge Committee and then the House Appropriations Committee held an interim hearing back in the fall. And Gwen testified there as well. We can, we occasionally do this, but we can share her testimony. Link. I will link that so it right that for.

Yeah. For your viewers. Yeah. Exactly. Great. Well, so Gwen's testimony. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah.

What are some of the biggest challenges you're seeing with the Texas Space Commission? Sure. Several of the challenges include how best to ask a question. And who is the best person to provide the answer back to things like informing what kind of workforce needs companies have to attract the right person to work at their location?

We're working on, developing a survey to send out through task and the space Commission's contacts task is the Texas Aerospace Research. Sorry, I won't say that wrong. I got to read it. All the government acronyms. I'm sure there's plenty Texas Aerospace Research and Space Economy Consortium task.

They to have a nine person group appointed by the governor, Lieutenant governor, house speaker, as well as the UT system Chancellor's designee, the A&M system Chancellor's designee, and the Rice President's designee. White rice. Often people ask is because this guy by the name of President Kennedy made a pretty impactful speech at Owl Stadium years ago, just up the road from Johnson Space Center as we know it today.

All to say what we're trying to make sure occurs is we have the right information after we've asked the right question through the right mechanism, a challenge is just synthesizing all of the information that comes in as well. So we just like every state agency, is having to go through the regular rigamarole of the procurement processes in order to have the right access to software, so that our expert staff, who are capable of working on these different kinds of projects, have the tools that they need.

But that takes time. So to answer your question about a challenge, it's things that we wanted to do yesterday. It just takes time to do, whether that's reviewing applications or procuring a certain software license or something like that. We're doing our best to move as quickly as possible, but obviously under all of the requirements of the law, that's the biggest challenge.

And time is of the essence. In order for the Texas Space Commission to demonstrate, some good work, as well as start becoming the envy of the rest of the nation as well. Well, I understand your your plight because we definitely deal with this slow things sometimes, but you guys were first actually becoming partners with us. So.

So good work, you guys. True. And just really becoming, partners with a lot of different areas of the state. It was March of 2024 when Governor Abbott announced the governing body for the Texas Space Commission, the board of directors. It is now March 2025. In terms of state government and efficiency and effectiveness, I don't know any other state, much less federal entity, that has made this much progress.

In a matter of 12 months, the board was announced. They started having open meetings in May of 2025. They conducted interviews in June. I'm sorry, 2024. They conducted interviews in June. They hired me in July. We opened our grant process. In September. We made our first award in January. I mean, all of that transpired in less than 12 months.

That's incredible. In my opinion. That is amazing. And we're seeing so much change in Texas in the rural areas. You've mentioned a lot of the different locations that there's a spaceport. Or, but then there's places like Bastrop with the Mega Center. Yeah. What are your thoughts on kind of rural development? And now it's changed in Texas. And sure.

So, I always answer this kind of a question by saying, you have to appreciate who the local leaders are in these different communities, because if they under their leadership, in coordination with their constituency there at the local level, think towns, municipalities, counties from the rural parts of the state, if they and I grew up in it. So I know exactly how this can sometimes go really well or really bad.

If they've decided that they want to put the marker on the table and say, we're open for business, and whether it's Bastrop or elsewhere, that's the first step. And I commend those local community leaders with deciding through their locals with local support, their local processes, that that's what they want to do. Then they call their state reps and their state senators and their congressmen and others and say, we really do want to be the location for something.

Bastrop is well known because of the Tesla mega spot there and who owns it. But there's other parts of the state that might not yet have anything to do with the space economy, but want to. I've learned that other communities in and around Austin, but also out in West Texas, even some in, along the Gulf Coast are interested in filing the paperwork and creating local space port development corporations.

If they did that, there's no better way to formally, officially, and publicly put that marker on the table and say, hey, companies around the United States or any of other parts of the world come to my backyard, let's have a conversation, and let's figure out how we can get you to be here in Texas. The Space Commission is within the office of the governor.

But there's another division that I have to brag on within the office of the governor, which is the Office of Economic Development Tourism. My counterpart, the executive director of Ed, her name is Adriana Cruz. She is incredible at helping make sure that Texas is on anybody's radar, agnostic of the industry. But if it happens to be something regarding space, Governor Abbott has mentioned space in almost all of his public speeches, including the state of the state.

So Adriana's team is ready and willing to help have the conversation for any space company that wants to do a site selection and determine if they want to be have a presence in Texas. And after they pass that step, a company passes that step with Adriana. Her team then says, okay, well, now you should call Norman or Blake and Aaron over at the Space Commission and have conversations with their board or, with them for, perhaps, proposing something to the board of directors for consideration.

So, like I said, right now, our grant window application is already closed for the current, $150 million fund. But we're anxious to see how the remainder of session unfolds so that we know what is possible for the next two years, I bet. And how are you staying competitive with other states? I'm sure there you mentioned there's other states that have this type of agency.

So yeah, one of the biggest, examples is space Florida. That's a big conglomerate. It's, political subdivision of the state of Florida. They, of course, have Kennedy Space Center and Space. Florida has been around for a while. But what they don't have is the mission as clear and direct as the Texas Space Commission does, which is here's money, create the fund, identify proposals, fund the projects, make some really cool stuff happen.

Theirs is much, much more complicated and a little bit more bureaucratic. As I've understood, several of my board members and I have gone to other places, whether it's Washington DC or California, we're going to participate in a major conference in Colorado whereby industry is located as well as, military presence. We'll be in attendance to tell the story about the Texas Space Commission and to make the comparisons about what it is that we're doing versus what whether it's Florida, Alabama, Colorado, Virginia, Alaska, California, any of those other states.

And every time we go to any of these gatherings outside of Texas, folks come up to us and say, wow, the Texas Legislature, Governor Abbott, all of the big leaders in Texas that have decided to create this commission, we're paying attention. We're watching how quickly the Texas Space Commission has stood up and moved out. And the first two rounds of awards that have been made using almost 50% of the $150 million fund, it's catching their attention.

The governor and Gwen met with the acting NASA administrator, Janet Petro, at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC last month. The first thing that she said was, boy, we sure are looking at everything that y'all are doing down in Texas. We're paying attention to what the Texas Space Commission is doing. Then we went and sold 2 or 3 generals and they said, wow, that's incredible.

I sure hope that the legislature continues to give you all additional resources, and it doesn't dip lower than what y'all were provided in the first year at $150 million, because there's a lot of their programs that they might be able to come and stack on top of any awards that the Texas Space Commission makes to some of the eligible entities who apply and are awarded funds from the Surf account.

For example, if force per se, there's an award made, for a technology being developed by a company here in Texas that makes its way through the process at the Texas Space Commission, there could be some kernel with, available funds through Space Force that reads our press release calls. That company says, I saw that you got a surf grant from the Texas Space Commission.

I think you should also submit an application to my organization, because we have some federal dollars that might be leveraged so that you can do more than just what you asked the Space Commission to fund. And if the Texas Space Commission can be part of that stacking opportunity, funds from the state to go after funds from the feds, that might also then later attract private capital for whoever this person is developing, whatever that technology may be at the end of the day will be useful both under the auspices of a warfighter as well as regular Laura Norman, citizens of the United States, making sure that our way of life is protected every day.

Well, that's a lot of praise you've been getting. Congrats. Thank you. And so that's only a year in. So there's, you know, where do you see the vision of this ten years from now? Ten years from now? It would be great to look back at whatever full amount of time I spend at the Texas based commission and be able to say the inaugural team, the inaugural board, made sure that the state of Texas, through the Space Commission, is the epicenter of America for everything to do with outer space.

That is a very broad and ambitious answer to your question. But in ten years, if we've attracted more companies, if we've enabled more technology, if we had trained more people, if we have brought economic development advantages to as many communities around the state as possible, and at the end of the day, everyone around the world knows that Texas is part of the space economy.

That will be a success in ten years. So exciting. What do you say to anybody who's looking, you know, who's a student, high school, college, who's kind of looking to get into this field? What advice would you give them? First thing I would, encourage them to do, regardless of their field of study, is to ensure that they have some, situational awareness, whether formally through a class or maybe it's through a club or some kind of other program.

When it comes to commercial space, don't just go read the NASA website, look at who these other companies are, read what their missions are, understand the profile of the people leading those companies today, which, you know, not all engineers, for the record, so that they can, appreciate the opportunity if they're, for example, a Texan, they grew up somewhere in the state.

They stayed in state to go to college. They're ready to get hired by some company utilizing their university degree. They need to understand that if you want to be a lawyer, you can still be hired by a space company. If you want to be a dietitian, if you want to be a farmer, if you want to be the actual, manufacturer of certain things products, devices, etc., you can do all of that here in Texas.

So go get whatever degree you want, but make sure that you're understanding what the opportunities are, regardless of your field of study, whatever discipline that you're going to become an expert at, you don't have to go to Florida. You don't have to go to Colorado. You don't have to go to California to get that space related job that you might want, like I said, as an engineer or a doctor or, or lawyer for that matter, you can do it right here in Texas.

You can do it in the heart of Austin. You can do it in a down in Houston. You can, be hired down in the valley, out in West Texas. The whole idea is to help students understand. If you want to work in the space industry, go to college, get whatever degree it is that's going to help you wake up every morning, and go to work and do good.

But you can then get hired by a company still here in Texas, space farmers are really stood out. How about that? Well, you got to grow food. You got to grow food. Make sense? So there's a whole thing. Well, yeah. At A&M, there's a big there is Activision I'm trying to remain a little neutral here. But I can talk I can talk Aggie Land a lot if if that's okay.

Yeah okay okay. Final thoughts and a kind of closing question. Probably my most serious of the day. Okay, okay. Aliens, give me the story. Any scoop, anything you can share that's not a file that I've received yet. So really, I know no, no one's briefly on it. Nobody's invited me to participate in that conversation. Maybe I need to go read some of these books from, your middle school lunch days.

Yes, but I have no insight, to, you know, either enable your imagination or hinder the world's contemplation of whether or not aliens exist. There's been a lot more discussion at the federal level with these committees coming out. So that's why I was curious. It's becoming less of a silly conversation and more. That's true. And you're right. It is.

It is a serious topic. But it is not a duty of the Texas Space Commission unless statute is changed this session. Let's hope. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Any final thoughts? Where people can companies can reach out to you and, you know, share how people can find you. Yes, ma'am. Thanks.

It's pretty cool to share. Yeah. Our website is space.texas.gov. I highly encourage everybody to go to our website, read about our board of directors, understand the process for funding that we currently are following today. Hopefully we are able to continue that over the next two years, but we also have an ability for folks to, sign up for our newsletter.

Register for any event notifications, etc.. I have to give a plug. March 25th will be Space Day at the Texas Capitol. So go to our website and download that agenda item so that you can, see all of the fun activities that will be at the Capitol. There will be two astronauts there unless something changes between now and then.

Two of the crew for the Artemis mission, should be on site as well. So yeah. Space.texas.gov. Please go learn, all about us and register for our distribution list as well. Awesome. I will be there on the 25th. So thank you so much again, Norm. Thanks for having me. Yes. Make sure to subscribe. Thanks, Joe.

Thank you.

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Welcome back to Bills and  Business, your go to podcast for the latest developments in Texas legislation and business. I'm Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege an AI first legislative tracking platform designed to keep you ahead of the curve. Today we have Ivan Jaime, director of government affairs at Walmart. Since November of 2020, Ivan's led Walmart's corporate strategy for government relations, legislative advocacy and crisis corporate reputation management in Texas and Oklahoma.

Before Walmart, he spent 15 years at Union Pacific Railroad, gaining extensive experience in public affairs. Additionally, he's been recognized by the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility as a Young Hispanic Corporate Achiever by San Antonio Business Journal. As one of the 40 most successful professionals under the age of 40. Here's our conversation.

I know it's crazy with session right now.

What kind of is taking up most of your time. Yeah. March of session. Yeah. Now. So I mean excited to be back during session and you know, I think that one thing that I find really interesting is, you know, I work for the biggest company right in the world. Really? Yeah, it's a very large company.

But, you know, I end up doing a lot of the work, right? Everybody's very busy, so I end up doing a lot of the work. What we do, we get some. I got some great colleagues. We do have some great resources, but just like everyone else. Right. There's like, tiers to things. And so there's specific projects where people are assigned to.

But then basically everything that doesn't have a home ends up with me. Right? So I end up spending equal amounts of time kind of in direct contact with legislators and working. But I also spend a lot of time doing research on issues and and checking internally to make sure that I'm understanding the business case that we're making, that I'm understanding that whatever I'm saying at the Capitol is absolutely factual and accurate and can be double checked with, with legitimate sources.

And so, I spend I also need a lot of office time, you know, it's always a it's a push and pull in terms of you can't be stuck in front of a computer all day, because obviously, we all know that this is a people business. Right? At the end of the day, lobbying and implementing policy is about people and about relationships.

But you also need to have your facts right, and you have data to support. So it's it's this constant it's this constant push and pull. You can't be in front of a computer all day, but you also need to be able to be there to be checking what you need to be doing. So it's, it's always equal parts for me.

That's a lot of work. That's the reason I started USLege. I was running around all the time and thought, no, I need to be talking to people and doing influence. But then you need to know so much information, so much research to back it up. Do you have a team that helps you with that? Yeah. You know, the Walmart is set up in a very interesting way, which I really appreciate.

Right. Number one, I'm very fortunate to work with world class experts in just about any field. And I know that, you know, there's some folks that work for, for maybe smaller businesses where that might not be the case, where it's a little more limited. So, I am extremely blessed to have access to people like that.

And, and we have a policy team. We have a policy shop that kind of sits between where I'm working at and the kind of, you know, front line government affairs role. And then our, our folks that are running the business, right, the world class experts that I mentioned. And then there's, there's this layer of policy experts that we work with, very often.

And so, but again, as I mentioned, there's kind of different tiers when you look, when you think about a company as big as Walmart, we employ 200 of, what is it? No, I'm sorry, 2.5 million people. Right. And so whenever you think about a company that scale and how many customers we have, there's a lot of different things happening all at once.

And so everybody's kind of focused on different tiers of issues. What what do our customers and our associates need most? And then what? Maybe are we looking a little bit more forward, maybe playing a little more offense, or being a little more strategic? And so I kind of fluctuate between these two worlds, as I was mentioning, and working with our policy team, working with our business, experts, and then also some of it just kind of doing my own organic research, talking to our associates, talking to customers, talking to industry, peers, trying to kind of keep an ear for what's coming next.

So it's, it's an interesting kind of combination of all the above keeping you very busy. Well, so for those who don't know, Ivan, you're the head of government affairs for Walmart. So do you want to share a little bit about how you got to that position and how you got to where you are now? Yeah.

Laura. Thanks. Yeah, yeah. So I'm the director of government affairs. I cover two states. I've got Texas and Oklahoma. Which happened to me. Texas is the biggest state for Walmart in terms of stores. We operate about 600 stores in Texas, which is almost twice as much as the next, biggest state. And I grew up in the Grande Valley.

I'm a valley boy, born and raised in Brownsville. Then I went to UT, to the McCombs School of Business, and I actually worked at H-E-B, in high school. It was my first job. I was a bagger and putting shopping carts in 100 plus degree weather, and then became a cashier. And when I came to UT, transferred to Austin, I actually used to work at the, Congress, an old tourist store.

Okay. And then I did an internship, with H-e-b at the big K store. Oh, wow. That focused on management. And so I was a, central checkout manager and, spent some time rotating them on, the different departments. And so my goal was actually to become a grocery store manager. Okay. That's what I wanted to do.

I wanted to run grocery stores and maybe become a district manager. And I've always enjoyed working with people. I've always enjoyed business. And so I kind of wanted to be front facing with customers. And my last year at UT went through some interviews. I had an offer to go run stores, with H-e-b through something that they call the School of Retail Leadership, where they train their their store managers.

But I actually ended up taking an offer instead from Union Pacific Railroad. Yes. And so, it was similar, except that instead of running grocery stores, I was running rail yards. And so I right after I went back to Brownsville and I was an operations manager, I was a night manager at Union Pacific Railroad dealing with employees at the at this time.

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When I started in 2005, it was the baby boomers were still kind of in the workforce, but they were beginning to kind of exit. Right. It was like folks born in like 19, mid 1940s, early 1940s, late 1940s. And so everybody was very tenured and they were getting ready to exit. And so they weren't exactly wanting to listen to a recent college grad that was 22 or 20 3 or 24 years old.

So I did that about three years. And it's, it's, you know, to make a very long story short, at that time, Union Pacific was really innovating the way that it moved its trains. And the trains started becoming a little bit longer. And they started to be a lot of complaints about the trains blocking streets and making a lot of noise in the middle of the night.

We were also building new rail yards. And so the company created a community relations department. And I was very lucky, very fortunate, very blessed that one of my bosses, that I had a dotted line to said, you know, you would do really well at this. You kind of have a way with people. I really I would really like for you to apply.

And so I applied and I ended up moving to San Antonio to lead our community relations. That was the first guy that did that. And so my job entailed, and I remember when I interviewed for this, they asked me my, you know, the gentleman that hired me, I said, have you ever worked on a campaign? And I said, no, I, I and I said, well, because this is very similar to run an ad campaign, you're going to have a car, you can have a laptop and a cell phone, a BlackBerry at the time, and that's it.

Everything else, you're going to have to create everything yourself. And so I would just drive the state of Texas, Midland, Laredo, Victoria, El Paso, Laredo, the Rio Grande Valley, Dallas, wherever, and just go it visit with mayors and city council members. And I did that for about three years. And then the gentleman that was doing lobbying for us, a gentleman named Ron Olson, had been a Southern Pacific lobbyist before Southern Pacific and Union Pacific merged.

And he decided that he didn't want to, you know, he wanted to retire and spend more time with his wife and his grandkids and I knew that the company was going to do a search. And I raised my hand. I was 25 years old. I had never worked in the legislature. I didn't really have any political experience. But I knew that I understood the real business because I had been an operations manager and I had now spent I had been an operations manager for three years and spent three years driving the entire state, learning and meeting with mayors and city council members.

And I thought that I could do a good job at it. And famous last words, right? I, I started doing that. I think my first session was 2011. Okay. And and then, you know, about four years ago, I got a call here and there about maybe, you know, if I would be interested in coming to Walmart.

And one thing led to another, and here I am. I love your story, and I love that you started off in the industry, you know, ground floor, what you work for now, working actually, in the grocery store. That is an amazing tale because I think that's so helpful for everybody to, you know, in in our role now, when I'm bringing new people on, it's good to have done the job that they do.

Obviously for engineers. Sorry, I don't happen to have done the other pieces and know it really well, is so important and have done it in the, in that field. So, very cool. Now, for those who don't know, kind of the difference between an in-house lobbyist and a contract lobbyist, we've had other more contact lobbyists on podcast.

So what would you say is the biggest difference and explain that to people who don't know. Yeah. So well and it's a perfect Segway because I think that, probably the most stark difference for me is the understanding of the business. Right. And I really take a lot of pride in understanding our business. So, you identify opportunities that you wouldn't otherwise.

So I think that we live in a world driven by politics. Right. And when we're at the Capitol, and sometimes it's a little more difficult to kind of understand what the business needs are. Right. And so what's been cool about both my, my job at Union Pacific and now at Walmart is having done the job. I can kind of understand where some of those opportunities might exist, where some of those friction points are.

So I'll give you another example. Every year Walmart kind of puts out a, an invitation that if you're in management and you want to go work at a store, you can go do so. And so I always sign up to go, do things at the store. I'd like to, you know, stock or help with the service center or whatever.

And I think that you pick up things also from customers, like the customers will come in. And so a lot of the things that I find myself lobbying for, and one of the things I feel really blessed for is Walmart really believes in saving people money, right? That has been the ethos of Walmart since the very beginning is save money, live better and you hear from your customers when they say comments like, I used to be able to feed my family, you know, on my income, I used to be able to come in and spend $100, and I knew we were going to be okay for a week and then hear them say some comments,

like, now I can't write like now. Yeah, I'm sure today. And so I'm having to switch when I'm eating or I'm not filling my prescription anymore, like I'm waiting an extra week. And I think that those are things that are really, really special. I'm not saying that if you're a contract lobbyist, you can't do that. You probably still could.

But I think that that's probably something that being in the business, being in-house is a little bit more accessible, that information is a little more accessible. That's so interesting. And yeah, I can definitely relate. Now, being a business owner, thinking about all the different strategies and things and things I would like to change just for the company because you're always in it.

So one focus that you have which which makes a lot of sense.

So I've been there. Any kind of strategy questions or strategies that you can share with us? Not not to date, but that you've kind of picked up and identified from being boots on the ground in a Walmart store.

What has it made you think, you know, how could you change your lobbying strategy and things like that? I mean, that's a that's a really good question. I mean, I think that the that the number one thing is what I just mentioned, right? I think that we live in a bubble. Right. And, and I think that, that the policies that we discuss, we get very into, winning and losing.

Right? I think that that the lobby profession is very competitive. Sure. Right. And I think that we, we really want to win. We don't want to lose on our issues. And we get paid to win. Right. But I also think that sometimes we lose, sight on potential compromises. We could be reaching with each other if we keep our clients and our customers and our constituents front of mind.

So I think one of the things that I appreciate about Walmart is that I really do feel really empowered to center our customers or another, area where I lobby is, pharmacy issues because we, we have pharmacy. And so, I am able and I feel free to be able to say, okay, what would benefit patients.

Right. And do I really need to when do I need to, you know, spike the ball in the end zone or is there ways that we can work together with the opposition, with whoever doesn't feel way where we center the patient, we center the customer, and we can both find some sort of win? I find that really empowering.

I found it exhilarating. And oftentimes it's even more rewarding than just a win or loss. So I think and I think that that's a that's a way that people, you know, customers, associates, like people, you know, yesterday I, checked into a hotel at Hampton Inn and Suites here. Near the Capitol. And the lady that was checking me and she saw that I work for Walmart and she said, I love Walmart.

And she said. And I said, oh, thank you. You know, I thought it was just a small, like, small talk. But then she wanted to tell me about why she likes Walmart. And she basically said, I'm the night manager here, right? And as a night manager I also check people in and she's like, she's the person overnight. Like, she does everything right and she's trying to make her ends meet just like the rest of us.

Right. And so I told her, I said, well, you know, you'd be happy to know that. I like to tell myself that I'm advocating for you, that, your your lobbyist at the Capitol, that I'm advocating for the Walmart shopper, not just for the corporation. And she at the end, she ended with something like, just please remember those lawmakers that, you know, we're trying to make ends meet to.

And I find that extremely empowering. I also take it as a little bit of a burden, right. And like to, to think about it. So, that'd be one thing that I think I've learned especially more recently, the more mature, the more mature in my job and and making that transition to Walmart. Whereas Union Pacific, my prior employer, was more business.

I mean, I'm sorry, customer or business to business B2B, right? I didn't really interface with with the end users of the service. Yeah, that's been a really neat thing that I've learned more from Walmart, here more recently. That's very cool. What is someone said to you? It's been a customer that's made you think maybe I should change my policy view on that?

Or has there been something like that? You know, I think that so far it's mostly just reinforcing. Yeah, it's mostly just reinforcing and, you know, but I also think that companies and clients are living, breathing organizations. Right. And I think that sometimes in our profession, when we communicate with our clients, whether you're in-house or not, in-house, we communicate on the politics.

Right? Like, hey, this bill might not pass because Chairperson and or committee member doesn't like it, or we communicate in political terms. And I think it's really useful if we can communicate in business terms. Right. Like the reason why this bill might not pass or what might give this bill a better chance to pass, is we need to understand how this impacts customers, associates, workers, the people that live in the districts for these legislators.

Right. So I think that's, that's something that probably more reinforces me currently. And, you know, and I also think that, you know, we're not in our profession, we're not really in the business of making a lot of these decisions. Right? We're we're following guidance that we're given. But I do think we're in a position to be influential.

And so I do think that, you know, if, if and when that, that time comes, not being afraid to speak truth to power. Right. To also say, here's the information I've come across that has completely changed my view on this. And I think it has changed the view or, and enforces the view of why this is impossible.

And going back to the thing, is there a way that we can find a win win if we are, you know, really focusing our, our, our customer in this? I love that you have our customer facing and get to meet with them because you do testify at all. I do, I do from time to time. I mean, I think it's, you know, that's another kind of loaded question, right?

Because, I do testify from time to time, but I also sometimes want them to hear from real people. Yeah. Right. So I, I would much rather have a store manager that has 300 employees that hears their stories every day, that goes to church with his customers or her customers. So I do testify from time to time, but I would prefer I much more prefer that it's the people actually doing the job in that particular, policy area to do the to do the talking.

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That makes so much sense. What types of policies are you working on this session? Yeah. So, we're working, on trying to bring relief to folks struggling with inflation. Right. That's why I keep talking about it today. It's we're hearing again, I think that we're very blessed. Those of us that have good careers that we enjoy and we get to.

But the truth of the matter is there's a lot of people struggling out there. And, you know, price of eggs, right? Like, that's something that's very everyone's every right to feel that right now. Absolutely right. Yeah. The shortage of it. Sure thing. It is really it's incredible how everything's interconnected. And so, I'm really excited that we're working on, on, like, there's some tax relief, reform that we're looking at that would reduce, inventory taxes on high impact goods like food and medication.

We're really happy about that. And I think we got a lot of support within our industry and outside of it. I mentioned health. We're working to see if we can find a way to have pharmacists play, be play a more active role in health care, especially in rural settings where there's a huge shortage of health care providers and see if there's a way that we can make deals with maybe, you know, other health care professionals that might not see this as a win for them.

But if we're keeping the patient top of mind, is there something that we can do that benefits everybody but most definitely benefits the patient? So I think that those are just two, two pieces where I get really passionate that I love, you know, among many other things. But those are probably what I'm the most passionate about this session very cool.

Yeah. And that's I know more on the customer side. So on the business side, we were chatting earlier, but, Walmart's a logistics company more than a grocery store. Right. So how, this kind of strategy impact those decisions in the political space? Yeah. That's, Yeah. I mean, I think that Walmart is the logistics behemoth, right?

And, one of the rites of passage when you hire on Walmart is to read the Sam Walton book. It's, it's a book that the founder of Walmart wrote called Made in America. And he kind of walks you through, his thought process. But one of the things that he found was being price conscious from the beginning.

And I remember one example that he talked about, I think it was about toothpaste. Right. And he found that if he bought certain things in bulk, regardless of whether that was a super On-Demand product, he could put it at a price that people couldn't resist. But but buy it. And so he bought, like this huge amount of toothpaste.

And then he just put it in the store and said, this better sell. And let's, you know, let's make sure. And the customers maybe you didn't need five tubes of toothpaste, but it was a deal you couldn't pass up, right? It was like, I will use it at some point. And so, I think that, you know, in terms of business needs and strategies, I think it's, it's, you know, trying to kind of, find that balance where you can be profitable.

And I don't think that being profitable is a dirty word. Right? It's it's it's trying and that in Texas. Exactly. Right. And so it's how can you center your customer trying to turn a profit on and make a living? And where are their needs in the market? Where the where the, where the private sector can really move the needle, right.

The health care, the health care example I gave earlier, we see that the health care system has some gaps. I mean, I think anybody would agree with that in the private sector can provide can meet that need, you know, to a certain extent, but we need some help from our legislator friends to pave the way for us to do that.

Right. And so I think that's one way that, that our company creates value also for our customers is to be able to do things at mass, at scale, and do it in a way that, that we're where we can make a profit, and then we can then articulate to the legislators why it's important, why it's important for the state and for the constituents.

Because if you can't do that, then, you know, it's kind of off or not interesting. And it's obviously a huge political shift, the session. So many changes. Are you are you working completely across the aisle typically, to pass legislation. How has that changed with the influx of, you know, more red wave we've seen? Yeah, I think, you know, you and I have talked a little bit about this, about how it's whereby I mean, nonpartisan, right.

Like so we have 600 stores in Texas. And I want to say that at my last check, we have at least one store in every legislator's district. So we're a constituent of every legislator in Texas. And so I think that's the way that we view it. And definitely I think the vast majority of Texans are our shoppers. So the vast majority of our legislators constituents shop in our stores.

So I think that that makes it easy for us. We we don't have to make that calculus. We don't have to determine, do we want to work with one or the other? I think that we can come in and, yeah, you know, I also sit on the board of directors of Texas. Okay. You know, and it's I just recently joined the board, and I've been learning.

I don't, I don't I'm not fully up to speed on it yet, but one of the things that I've, been working with, with, with my colleagues at KIPP is the way that we talk about. Right. So charter schools can be a, it's a topic that people have different opinions on. There's some that like, some they don't.

Right. But the case that I make is whether you like them or not, KIPP educates 32,000 kids in Texas, 32,000 Texans. Right. And that's, you know, maybe up to 30,000 families or so. And, that, you know, no matter what you feels like, whenever you sit down in front of a legislator, you say, I'm educating 32,000 kids, you know, 300 of which are in your district.

The politics kind of go out the window, in my opinion, at that point. Right. Or the partizanship for sure. Like at that point, it's whatever our differences are, it's it's I think you would agree. It's a spectrum. Yeah, it's a spectrum. There's very rarely a black or white. It's a spectrum. And we agree on some issues. We don't agree on other issues.

Can we try to find ways that we center the students can, you know, customers? Can we find a way that we bring wins to the people that we both care about? And if not, maybe, you know, there's another session where you can kind of go about it. So I don't think, I don't think that the, the political environment, it just makes us think a little bit more critically about how we can get our message through the noise.

Sure. I think a lot of people are feeling that right now that's you're not alone. How did you, kind of get onto the board of KIPP and and get to that position? Yeah. So, I mean, I'm a father. I have, my wife and I, we have three kiddos, ages six, eight and ten. And so I've always I mean, I'm a product of public schools myself, in the valley, but I've always, always been a kids guy.

Like. Like my wife. She cries anytime. Like elderly people come on TV, like her issues. Elderly and like, she just she just can't help but think about senior citizens that in nursing homes. Right? Like that's there's some people that are pets, right? Like you see that? What is that? The commercial with the puppies and the sad song with, you know what I'm talking about, like NSPCC.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah, they they all do. Black and white. I'm so sad. Yeah. And so there's some people that like really cry at those. My issue is kids. And I've always like making sure that kids, have innocent childhoods that they have fun, that they learn that they have healthy schools and that we don't let adult issues, you know, affect the way that they're growing up.

And so I, I think we sponsored, table Walmart's sponsored a table, one of their galas, and they invited me for a tour. I went to the tour. And one interesting thing that they do is they defer their tours or they empower their students to lead the tours. Okay, so I met a freshman and, senior girl, both girls that gave the tour, and they walked me through campus.

They explain what they were learning and just I was so impressed by their ability to articulate because at that age, I couldn't talk to adults really probably. And I was so impressed at the way they can articulate certain things and the connections that I felt. And so from there kind of kept talking to them. And then they said, hey, we don't really have anybody that I mean, charter schools have a very close connection to state funding, right?

It's public schools. And they said, we don't really have anybody that kind of has their feet on the ground at the Capitol often. And we think it'd be great if, you know, you can come on our board and maybe you can help talk to us a little bit about how the capital works and how Austin works, and, and so that's, that's kind of how I ended up in it.

I'm passionate about kids first and foremost. I think education is critical on that. And there was a need that they needed somebody like me to. So it kind of had to check all three boxes. Okay. Yeah. Well, you do a big job because Texas is busy. We also, you know, Oklahoma. So and they're in session, right? Am I correct?

They are homeless in session. Yep. How different are the two states? They're legislatures. Yeah. So I don't know that they're very different, but there are some key differences. So I think one of the things that I really enjoy working in small states, when I was at Union Pacific, I had Texas in New Mexico and legislators are very accessible.

They don't have staffs for the most part. Right? Right. Like they don't have a chief of staff, a legislative director or legislative aide. It's them. And so you're working directly with a legislator on just about everything. So I find that really refreshing many times that, you know, you can get meetings, you text them. I mean, you know, it's very, very accessible because there's no staff and and there's pros and cons.

Right. Because we know that staff in Texas many times, I mean, you have staffers that are just so critical to the process here. So I mean, there's kind of pros and cons, but I think that part of it, when you come, when you have both can be really neat. Also Oklahoma has a two year session. So one thing I have found really interesting is you have a bill, and as long as you get it through its original committee, as long like if it's a Senate bill, you get it through that committee.

It's alive for the whole two years, even if that year you don't have the votes to get it through the chamber, you can come back and take another bite at the apple the following session. So that's kind of interesting. But they also have like five week deadlines. Like within the first five weeks you got to get out of your first committee.

And then I think there's one week in between. And then the next five weeks you got to get out through your original chamber. And then there's, maybe another week and then you got to get out. So the field clears pretty quickly because, you know, it's not like in Texas, where everything is alive until the very end. I know, right.

Last week to the last week. Yeah. No. Like, like in Oklahoma, you know, like if you're pursuing bills like they didn't make it through committee in those five weeks or they didn't make it to the chamber. For all intents and purposes, you don't have to worry about that bill. So whenever you get to the end of session, you're really focusing on what's viable.

You know, I mean, which is which is really neat. You're zero focused, for better or for worse, on what is actually viable. So those are some things that I really enjoy about Oklahoma. That's very cool. As we look to expand other states where, it's so funny and fascinating to see all the different legislatures and like you said, a state that doesn't have staff, they are just the legislature.

There's like, you know, party systems or different states. So you've managed those. Yeah. Texas is an interesting probably more like DC with its larger offices and things like that. But, it's more turf fights here, right, than, than social issues, which I like. Yeah. That's right. For the most part, for the most part. Exactly. It's changed a little bit.

So what's the biggest, you know, change you've seen in the legislature in the last ten years? You've been doing this thing? You know, I would start with a first change. For me, it's just understanding things a little bit better, right? It's. I mean, I would say ten years ago, I hadn't been doing it all that long.

And so, you know, it's like the you don't know what you don't know type of deal. So I think the first thing is, once you kind of really understand how the process works, the process doesn't really change. Right? Like, I mean, it's you still need to have good data. You still need to have a coalition. You still need to be honest and accurate.

And I mean, those things are like those traditional values, right? That just don't change. Like if you don't have your ducks in a row, if you don't have your data, if you don't have relationships, if you don't, you know, have if you're if you people can't trust your word. Right. If you don't present all sides of an issue to your allies so they understand what they're getting into.

I don't think that that changes at all by politics, right? I mean, I just don't think that does. Now, where I do think that we need to be careful with is maybe the potential for I don't want to work with that other chamber. Right. Like it might change. You know, we do things in certain way in our chamber or I don't want to work with that legislator on the other hand because he, you know things that they said on social media that can be taken back.

And so some of that could defeat an otherwise really great proposal. Yeah. Right. And so maybe social media. Right. Like maybe social media is one aspect that like it's one thing whenever it's hearsay, it's another thing whenever you put something out of the social media, when you're passionate about something and maybe that ruins relationships between legislators or between legislators and lobbyists or whatever, whatever the case might be.

So I think that's probably one thing that we need to navigate very carefully. Not to let our passions get the best of us. And then we need to be able to navigate that when when it does take the best of others. And how do you navigate through that, too? Oh, yeah. There's so much strategy because it's not always good policy that passes.

Sometimes politics gets in a way. That's right. You definitely saw it last session. Yeah. Well thinking of kind of the future of Walmart. I know that you're working on autonomous delivery services. Is that right in Texas? Yeah. So one of the things that we've been working on really, really heavily is drone delivery. Yes. Drone delivery of goods in the DFW area.

That's our pilot area. Very cool. We're looking at expand that and we're looking to see how it goes in other areas. But I think that the probably the better way to put it, because we're also opening new stores in Texas, which hadn't been the case in the last few years. Okay. So we're opening up some new stores again.

So I think that the best way to put it is what Walmart is doing. What our company is doing is we're really trying, just like things are changing and politics. I think that the reason why things change in politics is as a result of things happening in the real world, right? Quote unquote, the real world. So I think that our customers are expecting a different experience.

They're expecting to shop in different ways. We don't shop the same way our grandparents did, but we don't. Right. And so we have different expectations when it comes to, Walmart calls it omnichannel shopping. And that means that you should have a streamlined experience with Walmart, whether you choose to shop on Walmart.com, whether you choose to walk into the store, whether you choose to do curbside pickup, right, like where you just grab your car and we load your groceries, or whether you have the groceries delivered directly to your, to your, house.

And so I think that what Walmart is really focusing is on keeping up with how people are changing. And then the multi-generational difference is, like I always I always uses this example like, when I talk to my mom, my mom is like an in person, like shopper and I don't get it. She will not use the technology and she goes to the pharmacy like every day.

And she's always like striking up conversations with a pharmacist. And I'm just like, like, why don't you just get it delivered? Like, I can't remember the last time I've been in a store. Like, honestly, like I do everything delivery and curbside pickup, like, I, definitely. It's a fun joy occasionally to go to the grocery store. It's like, but I do love to get things delivered and the convenience of it.

But ten years ago, nobody was getting no anything delivered or no on for anything now. So it's but the convenience of it is insane. It's so amazing. And yeah, I got back from a trip like Monday night and then we were Stockbridge Tuesday. Good to go, right? It's just easy to get everything delivered. And we're talking about technology, right.

Like your line of business. I mean, I don't I don't understand this line of our business too deeply, but I know that the algorithms are getting better and the technology is getting better. So what I used to worry about was like picking the produce and stuff, right? Like, be like, I want to pick my own produce. Well, I don't know how it is, but like, that experience has gotten so much better.

Like, you know, items you should be able to stock. I can't tell you the last time that I've gotten something saying it's not in stock. Like, almost everything's in stock. The substitutions. If something's not in stock, the substitutions are getting really good. I mean, it's just the technology is getting so good around fulfillment and customer experience that also it's exciting to see where it's going next.

You don't need to make a grocery list. You already know everything you order, right? And that I guess, is pros and cons for certain industries. If they're more of the, you know, at the checkout aisle confectionery stuff. I'm sure that's an interesting business now because if you're doing online order, it doesn't let you buy anything you maybe shouldn't buy or don't want to buy.

Just you're getting the basics. So I find that interesting. You tell me more about this pilot program in Dallas. My grandma is in Plano, so maybe she could be a tester, but that's interesting. Yeah. How is that going? Yeah. So we've, So Walmart's actually designated DFW. It's one of our most important markets. We have a lot of customers area, a lot of stores, and we've designated it our innovation hub.

And so what that means is we test technology, exciting technology that we're thinking about, taking it throughout the country in our other stores. First, we test it in DFW. And so one of that has been the drum delivery. It's you know, it's drones are not new per se, but the application to delivering groceries is pretty new. And so it's, it's been exciting to kind of go to cities present because we need to get certain permits, and then meet with neighborhood associations and explain to them what we're trying to do.

And the feedback that we've gotten so far is that this is really cool. It's especially, I guess, when you're having to think about DFW traffic and, you know, it's and it's so far so broad. Yeah, it's metroplex. It's huge. And so I think people are excited about, hey, you went to the grocery store. You're busy, mom. You're, you know, an elderly person that can get a ride on a, you know, drop of a hat and you forgot one thing, or you get home.

Like I said, busy mother, and your kid is sick and you just don't want to get back. Load them up in the car and get to the store. And now you can order Tylenol, you know, to get dropped off by a drone or you're making your favorite dish and you forgot one thing, or, or your kids are home.

They go home from home from school before you were able to because of traffic. And you can order them a rotisserie chicken with a loaf of bread to just get them through, you know, until you can get there. Like, I think people are pretty excited about that. Next level of convenience and flexibility that that Walmart can provide at sci fi.

How quick is that delivery from click order to delivery? Less than 30 minutes in some cases, 18, 19, 20 minutes. Yeah, it's very quick. That is wild where we fly in the sky. I know it is very well. And then you mention something else interesting. You said that you weren't really expanding stores over the last few years.

What, what's caused the change now? And more expansion? Yeah. So, I mean, that's another good question. I think that from from my vantage point, what I've seen is there's been a lot of insecurity, right, in terms of, or lack of visibility, maybe in terms of how did the pandemic affect, shopping experiences. Like, I can tell you, when I came, when I started working for Walmart, I would kind of hear like, oh, you know, we're not going to open these stores anymore.

Or I would hear kind of rumors like, you know, people not going to shop in the store anymore. What have you been to a Walmart lately? Like, that's not true. Like, there's it's still packed. It's still packed. Packed like people are still shopping in store. And so Walmart's done a great job of investing into remodeling stores, making sure that the stores are in great shape, that they are providing a world class environment for people that, people are shopping differently, right.

Like maybe it's more wind enjoyment experience for some now. Maybe it's not just, let me get into times a week or one time a week now it's like, I want to come in and take my time and see what else is new, or whatever the case is, to be able to provide a good experience while also growing our, our delivery capabilities and our pickup capabilities.

But clearly, the state continues to grow and people continue to go in and to the store. And so we think we have a great model to serve people that want to shop in the store. Right. Like we can we can do it all out of one store. We can deliver your groceries. We can have you pick up or you can come in store and shop with us.

So, so it's exciting. It's another piece of our, strategy that we're super excited about right now. Okay, cool. What do you see the future of Walmart being? I mean, I think that as long as the company continues to focus on providing value to the customer, I see, me personally, I mean, there's a lot of instability in the world, right?

Like there's this change in the changing dynamics as we talked about the baby boomers, and they're retiring. And generation X is, you know, kind of, you know, driving the car now in the millennials, I think you're like, oh, your millennials are like, you know we got to wait our turn, you know. But I but I think as long as Walmart stays focused on what it's always done right.

I think Walmart started in 62. So what's that like 60 years? 50 years? I think as long as Walmart stays true to that and I have no, no doubt that it will, I think that the future's going to be really exciting. Very cool. Well, what, just kind of closing thought, what advice would you give to anybody looking to go into public policy and interested in any way?

Yeah. I mean, I think that there's different paths to this career. Yeah. And I think that one of the things that I found when I first started was there was a sense of purist, you know, there was a group of purists that were like, what legislative office did you work? Where did you. Clarke. Like, there was like a very clear like you had to pay your dues.

You had to start off maybe as an intern or a fellow and cannot, you know, become rise up the ranks to become a chief of staff or or, you know, be a director of a committee. And there was almost kind of like, you know, maybe a dismissiveness if you didn't follow that. Right, that precise career path.

And I would just say that that's that's great. But I just think that difference is a track, right? Like, so, for example, I didn't have that experience. So I'm going to value an external lobbyist that did that. On the other hand, I have a very, significant interest in the business and in strategy and in people.

Right. And so I can bring a different dynamic to the conversation. I'm, I'm, I'm constantly thinking about, like, how does this impact people? How does this impact the business? How can we communicate this? How can we message this? What's a human way to like, you know, build consensus? And I think there's a ton of value to that, too, you know?

And so I think that my advice to people would be is, don't be scared to be nontraditional. You know, we need all sorts of different talent to produce the best policy, business owners, entrepreneurs, you know, in-house, big corporate people. You know, a lot of people don't like working for big companies. I love it, I love working for big companies.

I find it exciting and and and invigorating. And so I think that there's room at the table for all sorts of different talents that we can that we can help each other achieve great outcomes. I love it, no, I love the nontraditional. I find that refreshing. So that's wonderful. Anything else you want to share about Walmart or your experience before we, you know, thank you Laura, I appreciate it.

This was fun. You know, I've really enjoyed working with you a while back. We always have fun with our stories of things that have happened. And, I find it very joyful. And we have great mutual friends. And, I really appreciate the, you know, the opportunity to talk a little bit about my employer and myself, too.

Yes, I love it. I've got the part, the license plate over there. We can laugh about asking me, have you told that story yet on the podcast, I did okay, yeah, but the main part was you were at the table where I met the head of. Yes, Ford, who was like, I saw the video in the video.

Just the funniest or weirdest incident. That was the craziest part. I'm happy to have been there. Yeah, to witness that. So yes. Thank you. And, for those listening, yeah, make sure to subscribe to Bills and Business and we'll, we'll link link I've been in the, in the latest so. Yeah. And put in your Walmart or.

Yeah. It's it's great. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business. I'm Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege, where we make government more efficient with technology. If you're new here, this is where we break down the intersection of business policy and innovation with real conversations from people shaping industries. And today, I'm sitting down with not just an incredible entrepreneur, but also a good friend, Vinay Hiremath.

Now, you probably know Vinay as the co-founder of loom, the video messaging tool that scales to nearly 14 million users and sold for nearly $8 billion. But what you might not know is what happens after that little success. But hey, it's been a fascinating journey. Turning down a $60 million retention offer, exploring everything from robotics to Doge, and even heading off to the Himalayas.

So today we're getting into all of it building, selling, redefining success, and figuring out what comes next when you already hit the sort of jackpot.

So what are you doing in Austin right now?

So in Austin,

Well, the truth is, is that I feel like I'm in a phase of life where there's a lot that I don't know that I'm doing. So it's a very transitionary, sort of fluid chapter of my life.

I've been like, fun employment for coming up on a year now, and, and so, like, that's been like a journey of, like figuring out what I do after my previous company?

I've, I've done a lot of stuff like. Yeah, I kind of gone like balls. The wall, which is usually myself like trying to find myself. And right now in Austin, what I'm what I know I'm doing is this meeting is meeting with, like, good friends, meeting some new friends. Austin has an amazing same. Yeah. Amazing taxi.

And there's, like, a ton of manufacturing room that's coming back here. Right? It's just like electric. And so meeting new people and, like, meeting old friends.

And then I'm also. I've been like, kind of staying in this warehouse there, kind of like self company. But they're doing they're doing stuff of like, optics and electrical engineering and bio sensing and kind of street.

And I've been like dropping in on the factory trying to figure out, do I want to intern here? Basically taking an unpaid internship,

to, accelerate my learning of like, electrical engineering and optics because I've been I've been, like, self-teaching myself as, like, for the past, like six months or so. Very cool. And are you,

I think Eric said to me, he's like, what?

I was like, what's you going to do next? And I think he said, humanoid robotics. Is this the same company or group or. No, that is like that was like the beginning, the very beginning of my journey, like a year ago after leaving, leaving uh loom. let's back up also that then I would love to hear from you.

You know how you got to starting loom and then got a ton of questions for you, but you know where you started and how you got there. Yeah. Oh my God, we have this. Me, and my co-founders had this joke that,

by the end of loom. So we started it. I think that must have started when I was 23 or like. What was 23 year old Vinay doing? Pre 23 year old Vinay.

And I was,

clearly managing a team of web engineers at a startup called Up there. Okay. And this company was, this company was competing with Dropbox on storage, and the the model was like one based on computer science. It was like, we have superior technology for storage. We can do things cheaper.

Which all turned out to not be true.

And I basically started this company as like a web front end engineer. And then during this period, I was learning a lot of computer science. I was probably doing,

80 to 100 hours a week of like, work, plus just getting as technical as I could. So I started on a web team and then I went down to like the back end servers team and then like distributed systems, which is how the servers like work together.

And then eventually I was like at the data center, working with the network ops engineers. Then I went all the way back up and managed the one team because my previous manager had had left and I was the most senior web engineer, and I did a terrible job of, management was like did not come naturally to me.

I, I was like, I don't think I'm doing a good job. So we hired a director of engineering who, like, mentored me.

And around that time, I was like, I'd gotten so technical. I met my co-founders, Shahid and Joe, which is a long story. Okay, let's hear it. Okay. How do you meet them? So, Shaw, I met, so they're both like my brothers.

Basically. And Shaw, I met at the first company that I interned at or. Sorry, that I worked at after my internship, after dropping out. So I, like, dropped out of college two years in,

you know, interned at then Facebook now meta right as they were their IPO ING, which was an insane experience as their first job as my first internship, just like my introduction to Silicon Valley was like interning at this, like the center of the Silicon Valley, basically, as this company was like IPO ING,

and I, I was really lucky I got to work on,

this specific web performance, like web mobile performance team at Facebook that had these like, engineering.

That's like one guy was like writing the JavaScript standard, and the other guy was writing was like a core contributor to WebKit, which is like the rendering engine for Safari and a bunch of different browsers. And, I learned a lot, but I was super junior, so I didn't get a full time offer, which was absolutely the the right thing at the time for, for Facebook to define search.

And so after that, I applied to honestly close to 70 different companies trying to get a full time job because I told my Indian parents and all my friends, many of whom doubted me, I told them that I was like not returning home and I was just going to drop out of school. And so I'm like, I cannot afford to have a job and like, go back home with my tail between my legs.

And so I applied to all these companies. I got rejected by all of them except for two of them. And one of them was Pinterest as a very early employee, which would have been extremely lucrative. Sure. And the other was this, like, dingy startup called backplane that, was dysfunctional. And so many different ways, but actually extremely functional somehow.

And how they hire and I think, like, I think at least four of the team of like 13 or so individuals at that point are like now like multi-core or 100 millionaires, like, wow. Which is, which is crazy. It's crazy. Like it's actually phenomenal because the way they hired their CTO was they put up like an application form and they chose the first person who had an at google.com email address, who happened to be an intern at Google, and he didn't have any programming experience.

And then they hired this guy, a CTO. So he made a bunch of terrible technical decisions. And then he was fired the week before I started. And so I kind of like, yeah. What made you choose is a backplane. Yeah. Over Pinterest. So I emailed I sent an email to a program. And, you know, the Valley is like for people who aren't in like, the Silicon Valley, there's this perception that there's like, the others and there's like the in-group.

And that's certainly true at a certain like, power dynamic. But,

Actually, people in the Silicon Valley are like very reachable. They're very reachable and they're very open usually to replying to people who reach out to them. And so I reached out to the program and I was like, okay, I don't know if you can respond, but I like to ask them, what should I do?

Like Pinterest? This, this company were like, I feel like the business is going to do better, but,

the people are kind of really hipsters. And I just like doing like a drop out 20 year old who hung out with what frat kids, you know? And I was like, I don't know if I feel like super integrated in this culture.

And there's this other startup backplane that I really don't know about the business model, but the people are awesome. Like, they're super fun to hang out with. They're all like bunk beds in the in the office. It was like way scrappier. And he basically told me to go wherever I felt like I would learn more. And he was like, you should absolutely maximize the learnings.

Like if you feel more comfortable with one group versus another, you will learn there faster. And so I went back to Blank Culture fit is so important. It’s hugeIt's even higher. And,

I've got a cushion here. It's starting the culture for us, you know, and we've got James now, these are all Austin folks, and,

essentially bunk beds in our place.

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We started our apartment. But that's so cool to hear that a startup in Silicon Valley, you have one bunk bed in your office. Oh, yeah. So my, my co-founder, Shaw.

The story so ridiculous. My my co-founder, Shaw, is a very talented product designer. He's like, probably I've met a lot of product designers. I think he's probably one of the best product designers I know, like in the world. And he worked with our design team, who I love but were mostly Mormon. Okay. And they didn't the Charles Muslim and,

you know, they they won't ever say this, but I think there was some beef between Shaw and  the main guy.

Okay. And so Shaw just starts working, with James is the mobile engineer and just starts designing the mobile app. And the mobile app looks like way better than Samsung working on. And so they get the CEO to, let Sean go, like to fire him from an internship. Oh, well, two weeks before it ends. So they fired him two weeks beforehand and and paid him the two week severance.

And, as they're telling us this in a stand up, Sean's living out of the office at this point. So he's literally living. He's sleeping in the bunk. That's, No. Oh, God. And it's literally, projector from all hands. And Sean, like, walks out of the bathroom and just, like, goes and brushes his teeth in the bathroom.

And I would rinse my hair, and I was like, hey, I know I'm really junior, but I have an idea. Why don't we just let the intern finish the last few weeks? Because you pay them anyway, and it's like, it's obviously very awkward because you live here. Everybody, like, sort of laughing. And it was just like, yeah, yeah, either way, I.

That's how I met you. You should be at the internet, back like so you all were back playing, starting out as how you guys met mentioned you were Joe. Joe I'm Matt because one night me and my friend wanted to, go to this, like, electronic dude, this, like, pretty hardcore electro electronic, deejay called Feed Me, and we wanted to go to his concert, but his concert was sold out.

And so we were trying to sell tickets, but no one would sell them because this guy has, like, a cult following, right? And so we look online and we noticed that,

two weeks later or, sorry, a week later, he was going to be playing in L.A. and so we rented a couple of motorcycles and just started heading down to LA with no thought at all, like, where are we going to stay?

What are we going to do? And I start to realize this on the way down. Like, it sounds really dumb when I say it, but we're just so caught up in the moment. I start to realize this on the way down. I'm like, wait, we don't know. Do you know anybody down in L.A.? No, no, I don't either.

And so I called the only guy who I've never hung out with since college. This is like a couple years after college. I haven't seen this guy in a while. This guy, Adam Carney, who is one of my great friends. But he was like, in the entrepreneurship group at, U of I, I kind of walked up to him because, you know, he was always with like, really cute girls.

And I was like, okay, this guy seems like cool, charismatic. And I hit him up and I was like, yo, I don't know anybody in LA. It's totally cool if I can, but I'm on a motorcycle, so I'm either sleeping outside or I'm or me and my friends are sleeping on the couch and he's like, come through. And his roommate was, Joe, who's my the way.

Yeah. So I met Joe. That night was meant to be. It was meant to be that you would never have met had you not done that random I know. Which is why, like, people should do random things. People should do. People are not doing enough random stuff in their life like you should if you're stock like you should.

If you can afford it, you should ricochet this as fast as humanly possible outside of whatever vibe you're on. I mean, not enough people do that. They're, like, scared to, like, blow up their life, even for a little bit. And it's like, but if you don't like your life and it's not great, like, maybe blow it off. Well, you said something really interesting to me that I really relate to, as not everybody would have made the same decision of, okay, drop out of college.

No, I have to make this work. A lot of people would have just gone home. And I know this because so many people not taking a leap. So I commend you in that. And that's how I felt when I moved to the U.S because I moved here. Yeah, 17.5 and I was at military school, which I hated, and I voluntarily went, I can totally imagine you at at military school though.

It was hilarious. Yeah, you're funny in your mind because it was really funny. I think it's funny in general. The idea of military school is hilarious, but,

it's also cool. It's like you, I'm sure you learn to like, you know, discipline. And that's exactly what I went. Yeah, but like, three months in, you know, commander sexually harassing everyone and, like, trying to get me kicked out if I didn't comply.

And I'm like, really? Go back to the UK like I'm in America. I want to pursue the American dream. Yeah. And I just kind of, you know, push through and and whistle blew for sure. To make sure I stayed. So I wanted to stay in the US. Transferred to different school. But that was kind of my experience.

I'm sorry that that was your your experience of military school or academy or whatever you call it. Sounds like a pretty badass experience. You know, like Commander. Awesome people. Everyone. Yeah. And he's in jail now, like, for life. But in and that's a whole like, story, which is great. Yeah. But it put me off you know when to go to the academy.

I want to go to the Coast Guard County. And so I was like, oh, you know, you know me. So I went to the most American school I could find out there was Alabama. But,

and I was there right? I was like, this is such a good experience. But I felt that same way as you like, oh, shit.

I can't make this not work. Yeah, I have to make it work. But most people I know wouldn't. They would be like, oh, just go back home. Yeah. Or what was kind of your goal moving to Silicon Valley? Like, what did you think you would achieve there? Where like American Dream? Like, what did you think?

my, my sophomore year.

So I went to, I went to college for material science,

which is extremely boring for most people. I'm like the study of material. It's like, what is material science? It's. It's so material science actually started as the oldest engineering profession. So the beginning of material science, is metallurgy. So if you think about, like the Bronze Age, the Iron Age range, like all these ages, determine the tools we were able to build and how we were able to have all this civilization.

And so smithing and metallurgy was like the beginning of material science. And now it encompasses all of the materials of everything around us. So,

you know, anything on spaceships, the wood, the way that this house is built, like there's probably a lab of material science scientists working on innovations to make all of this a lot sturdier and cheaper to build.

And so material science is really the study of everything. If you have a basis in material science, I think it's kind of like the goaded engineering profession. If you can get through and you don't find it dreadfully boring, which most people do, you can get through and you find it interesting. You will understand the basis for everything that gets put together.

And so you kind of you have this like low level understanding of the universe or what I call simulation zero, level zero. And so, yeah, like that. Like for me, I was, I was really into over tronic materials. So, you know, like, how do you dope silicon? Silicon. And I learned the difference between, so com like, just a day ago from the sky at one of the factories.

Silicon, silicon. So I won't go into that because no one's gonna hear you love it. I love. Yeah,

but, you know, you basically are studying things like doping. Silicon, which is like adding certain elements to increase electrons so that they can flow through your chips. I was, I was interested in the research of, like, nanotubes and nanomaterials, for transistor design.

So how can you make transistors nanoscale to increase how many, zeros and ones you can compute on the chip, which of course is where we're at today. Now transistors are on the nanoscale, which is crazy.

So that that was like the stuff that I was interested in. And then I started to, I watched a website called Secret Feed with two of my friends.

We just wanted to see what it was like to watch something, to build something in software. And it kind of took off, like there were there were thousands of comments or like hundreds of students on it. And at any given time, and I kind of got addicted to the idea of building stuff that didn't require a multi-billion dollar laboratory.

I was like, oh, this is really cool. You can just, like, put something out there and,

people will use it. And so I started taking computer science classes,

maybe like second semester a couple and then like full blown sophomore year. And I started getting really into computers. And around the same time I bought myself a math book, which when I opened this thing, I was like, wow, this is the most beautiful product I've ever used.

They thought about every detail. It just works. I have to restart my computer when I install new software. It's like, this is magic. And so I started learning about Steve Jobs and certain Steve Jobs biography. You know, this is around the time that The Social Network came out as well, the movie about,

Mark Zuckerberg and the start of Facebook.

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And, you know, it's very cliche, but I just, like, fell in love with all of it. I was like, this is awesome. This is what I want to be doing. And I remember the day that Steve Jobs passed away, I was working. I was like, this computer is basically like my job was like, I worked at this computer lab where I tell people to, like, not bring food and drink into those.

I was like, I was like a hallway monitor for, for computer lab. And I remember reading, like most of my job was just sitting around and doing homework and doing nothing. You know, I remember reading about Steve Jobs, passing, and I just felt like.

I don't know, like, I, I felt like this pretty deep hole. Like, I it like a deep hole, like in my soul. Like that's all like a part of the universe, like a creative energy in the universe. It just dissipated and become like energy with other things. But it used to be, like, concentrated in this individual who pushed us forward.

And it was like gone. And I was I was just really sad. And it was it was really funny to most people was explaining it to you because they're like, they're like, why are you so down on like Steve Jobs? That's the way they're like, you don't, you don't know. And I was like, that is the correct.

That's the rational response. What was irrational? I just felt this way.

And I, I decided I kind of decided at that moment, like it was the beginning of this journey that started in high school. But I kind of decided at that moment that one of the guiding principles in my life was going to be to become one of the best engineers I possibly could be.

And so I, you know, like the beginning of or end of sophomore year, I decided to, to drop out and,

yeah, that's been like my guiding principle through everything. You would ask me the original question. I believe, was that you asked me,

what kind of pushed you? So I'd go out and do it on the road.

That's kind of like the backdrop of it. And I was just like, I just want to be the best engineer I can be. I know people in the Silicon Valley are like, they're just shipping shit. They're doing stuff. And I was like, I want to be part of that,

I love it. Yeah, that's very motivational. And also to know where you were, you got to with that mindset.

So,

very big believer in like power light and very good. Yeah. So how did you get from being on the couch? Sleeping on the couch in LA. And you meet Joe. Yeah. And then Shaw, how did you guys come up with loom and decided to start that?

when I met Joe, I was struck.

Every time I traveled between L.A., I'd hit on Joe. Joe's like my bro. You know, you must have been a very special night. It was very, very special. You know? I mean, Joe immediately, like the first night I met him, he stayed up until, like, we stayed up until, like, 3 a.m. or something, just talking. And Adam, like, went to sleep.

He's like, I feel like I'm like, third, you play. And. And it was just like, yeah, I mean, like, at one point, you know. So I've been hanging out, Joe, maybe like a few times a year.

And at one point after my internship with back playing, me and Shaheen moved in, we actually started like a YouTube channel, and we did a bunch of other things.

For me, actually, it had become like,

brothers as well, you know, and,

Sean, at one point, interning as an associate, up front ventures, he interned or I think it was like, I forget what it was like an intern pro outlet, I forgot. But either way, he worked, like, with Mark, sister and all these, like, legendary dicks.

He's going to he's going to moved on to LA. They're based on the LA. And so I introduced Joe and should and should he'd sword crashing on Joe's. And

she'd be like, you know at this point I think he was like 19. Oh, no, because she didn't go to college. So he just like, went straight to internet back in high school.

And,

Joe's like, okay, I have this, like, 19 year old sleeping on my couch. Joe's like, I need to get rid of him. It's like, I'm this guy's awesome. I can help him, but I do not want a 19 year old continuous living. Like I've said, he tells you, hey, if you want to sleep on my couch, you got to pay this line.

And it's like an astronomical rent. So this is like, so would be better off. Like the the message was supposed to be short. Like, go find a place because you'll be able to find your own place for the same amount. Right. And she's like, yeah, sure. He's like, I like hanging out with you. I'm 19, you know, I'll, I'll pay this much to sleep on the couch.

No way. Yeah. So, so, so this thing of full rooms right in LA sleep on Joe's couch and,

just like, okay, I guess I'm not getting rid of this guy. Like, I am making a decent amount of money now and then. Just think I'm really good friends of Joe's. Joe's roommate Adam. Who's the guy that intro me to?

Joe moved out, and then she he moved in. And so then Joe and she even became roommates at this point, I was going I was going down to LA like all the time because I was like two of my favorite people live together down in L.A. like, why not? And so let's go down to LA all the time.

One night we go out. It's a bit of a hazy night, you know, we go out and, you know, we're like 20 young twentysomething boys who are like, you know, just want to get drunk and have fun. So we go out to, like Victoria and we get back,

and I remember we're all like, smoking a cigaret outside of Joe's place, and we're just talking and we're like, yeah, you know, I noticed X, Y, and Z at my current place of employment.

It's really stupid. Like, I would do things differently. And we have like all these opinions about how poorly managed the companies we're working at were.

Which I now realize I now understand totally why all those things pop up when you sell companies. But,

yeah, we we basically were like, we have a really good distribution of skill sets between, like, product design, a VC network, technical charts.

And we're just like, we should start something together, you know?

And so that began, opens us up. Began like what we started this, like, user testing, expert network like, to help experts, like, match up with companies and help them test their products. The product testing,

and open test eventually turned into loom. At one point we were like, grinding for like six, seven months, and then we just did it our way.

Over time, the screen recorder hooked up to the client know,

wow. So you, did you kind of pivot a little in direction from what you started doing to, yeah, we we pivoted a ton. So we started as this, like forum where we just had people submit,

like a website and then ask five questions that they wanted someone to record themselves going through their product as, like a product expert.

But the first forum was just me, John Sheehy. So there was no expert network. It was like just us three, and we would we would use all this really janky software, like, look for and record ourselves on the screen and, like, talk through the questions and go through these product experiences and be like, maybe this button is off.

Or like, this wasn't really clear. It was the next step. And we eventually started charging for that. And then we eventually were like, why don't we just combine all of this with a Chrome extension and a JavaScript snippet and allow our customers to do these types of videos for their own customers, for their own clients?

And so that began like the kind of product ization of, like the video recording, because we noticed, like all the reporting tools were super janky, like streamlining the uploading, pairing it with like questions on the website, having like in, in screen user experiences and starting to build up like kind of a product intuition behind those types of

controls. And we we iterated through that, that space of like user testing for a while,

and eventually got to a point where we really only had two weeks of money left in the bank. This is like a very it's almost like a very common story now. I feel like for a lot of startups, you know, it's like founders, you know, have nothing to lose.

Very young. They like, iterate their way through. They have like very little money left.

But

that's how it happened to us. And, and we decided to, like, kind of throw a Hail Mary and we're like, well, what if we decoupled the Chrome extension from this like platform for user testing and just made just made the Chrome extension, like record videos and people can do whatever they want with that.

And we launched it thinking it was going to be like a growth or lead funnel back into the user testing platform, because for whatever reason, we haven't learned a lesson that this is a terrible but I have no idea why.

Because we're distilling left and right. But,

that launching, you know, what was then called open did terrible name.

All right, well that's cool. No, it's a horrible name. But, hey, you know, your your opinion matters there. You know, like, so many questions. So when you started, it was three of you or you all living together at this point, what was like the work set up? You were hunkered down for six months building this, like, what was that office environment like?

Do they move to San Francisco? Yeah. So were you were all working out of my,

apartment in San Mateo. Okay. Which was a pretty small apartment.

You know, and we had two bedrooms, but there were three dudes, right? So one of the bedrooms had two beds, and then my bedroom had the only solo button, but we had to rotate because really, we were first.

We were working. Oh, we were working all the time.

I had, like, been working, so we were working so, like so much I'll just speak for myself but also I'll for direction. And so we were doing a bunch of we, we were doing modafinil and like I remember we were doing this like going to the gym and meditating.

So it's kind of both impressive. Yeah. It was somewhat counterproductive. Right. So there's like this weird kind of like bro science of yeah. How we were going to like be in the zone. And but to this day I cannot do Adderall in the afternoon or any of that stuff because I'm just so scarred from that period of, like, getting the point where, like, it feels like your brain is like a bunch of cogs and they're really rusty.

Just like moving forward.

And so, like, we're we're working all the time out of this dingy apartment.

You know, there were periods where we like lockers, shelves, like, I would, like, lock myself in the room and literally not get up for, like, the sounds crazy. I would literally not get up other than to go to the bathroom for, like, over 24 hours.

Oh, wow. Yeah, like 36 hour sprints and just sitting down and, like, coding and being like, I need to get this perfect. I need to make sure all the performance is right. Like, usually people are like they're like, okay, we need to figure out the scope. For me, I was like, the scope is like the perfect product every single time.

And so I was like, you just got to sit down and do the work.

And I was the only coder. So yeah, I was not. I was like, all on you and you're they were there. They were doing a ton of sales product design like I saw. And Joe would just be on calls all the time,

all the time.

And so we were just, you know, cranking, where you would stretch at the time or did you have any money in it? And were you working anything other jobs? Were you all full time in this? We were all full time in this at this point. At the beginning, Joe had to, like, taper off because he actually had people pouring into them.

But, you know, for the majority of them, we were like all full time on it,

bootstrapped or did you have any funding? We started but bootstrapped, but we actually had a few friends like, call us Angel tracks, which was if we didn't have those, we would not have survived. I think we took lives. And then it was like something like 10 or 15 K yeah, and an angel y at this point.

And so,

yeah. Like basically the the day or two days after we launched, two investors, Danielle and Michael of 1517. So venture on, Danielle, Michael, like at this point had been following our journey for a while and they just felt bad. Also, I think they just felt bad for us because we're like, dude, these guys are working all the time and they just can't get a break.

And so they came over to like, write us like a smaller paycheck.

And we basically sat them down and we're like, hey, we know we're going to talk about the user testing platform, but I'm sure all of us are thrilled of talking about as it's failing every single week.

But actually, we, like, launched this other thing and we just wanted to sit down.

We don't know what it is, but we'll, like, tell you about it because there's a ton of growth.

And so that turned from like a meeting where they were going to just write us a track to survive to, hey, we'd love to, like, cut you a bigger check and we'd, your pre-seed round if you guys would be down.

And so, like, I kind of set up there like two different modes that founders can be in and predominantly are in for each journey that they're on. It's like one is the founder that's very visioned, driven, and they're like, the world needs to be in this section. And they they usually stick to it. Very few pivots.

It either succeeds or spectacular fails.

That's me. I know exactly. I think so too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that and that's great. And and then there's founders where, you know, you really just pivoting and it's like this thing takes off and you basically have to have a choice as to whether or not to jump on the rocket ship or not. And so we were squarely in the latter category.

And, you know, this thing was just taking off. And,

we're like, well, we got to hop on and do this. You know, that's so goal now, how much do they write for you for your pricing?

So they wrote, a 252 chock full.

And I'm not going to remember any of the number of our raising round.

So there's just been some of but I think it's a big one, though. Yeah, I think I think it was like,

I believe it was like a four and a half free. Cool. And we raised, a couple million dollars and,

Yeah. Danielle, Michael, like, I can't, I can't, like, sink them and offer basically said our company and Danielle and Michael are like amazing individuals.

So they actually started the Teal Fellowship. They worked with Peter Teal and started the whole program.

And like Danielle, like they do these crazy other things like Danielle, like sponsors this like really Forbes and King Elementary School in San Diego. That's like a top elementary school that they're really interesting individuals. And because they have like such a different thesis on how about, people, they've been able to be early in companies like Sigma and like fossil and like all the all these other companies Luminar, Major White are like producer of all the self-driving cars and everything else.

And,

Yeah, both. Thank you. And they're both, like, very impressive people. So we were lucky to have them as first investors. So from, start of your building phase where you guys were just throwing balls at the wall, so you're playing your first customers? Yeah. What? Timelines. That. And what was that like, getting first people? Well, during our, during our series.

So we still had not monetized and like until after our series. So it was a while actually. Okay. And our one of our lead series investors, Eylea at Kleiner Perkins,

was like he pulls Joe aside and he's like, hey. So Rubin's like growing a lot. We are obviously very happy with this, but it's like, I feel like I've been duped into investing in a consumer startup because you guys would still have not charged a single person a single penny.

We have, like, all of these people on the platform at this point, like we had, we were probably in the like tens of thousands of companies at this point and hundreds of thousands of users,

like monthly active, weekly active users. And it was like we had in charge anyway. And the reason is because we just hyper focus on making the product as good as we possibly could.

Making it performant faster. You know, supporting new media types like building, more full screen controls and like all these features that people wanted. And so we just hyper focus on that and we're like, as long as we have the best possible product, we will win. Which now, in hindsight, I think we could have charged for flavor.

But it was like a great idea at the time. Like, but I think going through I see the value in charging or rolling out.

But you know, that was our that was kind of like the though it's like the surrogate that's I'm sure there's some like 0% interest rate, you know, delusion going on there too.

We were suddenly deleting all that just as anybody else's. Well, it's really exciting for me to hear kind of how you grow. And you just blew up from where you started. So tell me a little bit about the journey you had from, you know, starting out and then seeing Hypergrowth. Yeah. What was that like to scale a business and, you know, bring on new members of the team.

Obviously, when the three founders get along great, that's awesome. But then there's more people and more scaling. So can you tell me about that?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it was a lot. No, I know I'm it's just like my mind is like going through a montage of, like, all these things, and it's always interesting. I don't like to prepare for podcasts or interviews, like, I think it's better not to.

And so

but it's funny because, like, telling the story, it's always like, what do I feel like selecting or highlighting at any given moment? Well, the first thing you mentioned, like co-founder dynamics, those definitely. I mean, expectedly. So shift as things grow. You got on one hand, you got more specialized, right? Each of the co-founders got more specialized.

And so your worlds, start to not overlap as much over time, which is very strange because you start out and you're like all the other in every meeting, and then all of a sudden you have all these meetings,

it's like, don't join our engineering stand up. Yeah. I'm not. Yeah, yeah. And so there's this, like, isolation effect that happens as you grow bigger.

And so one thing I always tell founders is it is critical, absolutely critical that founders maintain like a weekly, a weekly dinner or like a Sunday dinner where they can just like, talk about their week and then also give each other feedback about how the business is doing, like there has to be this like open feedback that is like intimate, where you're building a bridge and like maintaining that intimacy.

And it's because, as you say, a lot of you, you don't overlap as much. And it's like critical. You maintain that cohesion. That's great advice. Or in that phase out. Yeah. Well, I mean, you and Eric, obviously we do not work together at all. Yeah. It's really weird at the beginning. We're in every meeting all together. And then now we are in our own bubbles.

We get to talk about it, but we've like a three hour meeting with them today. So the three of us, and just like, see what's been going on and all catch up because it's been like a couple weeks going to the wedding last week. Right. So, okay, that's so fascinating. That's really good advice as well. For me, but for other founders, it's just that relationship.

And it's surprising because, a lot of founders I talk to do not do this. Really. I'm, I'm blown away by how many founders don't do this, like founders of companies that are growing very quickly. They don't want to in the spotlight.

You know, I try I try to like, talk to both through like, trying to angel investors, but also like, meet new founders and just give them advice.

Yeah. I talked to all these people and it's like I'd say maybe, maybe 15% of the founders that I talk to maintain a weekly conversation with their other co-founders. And for me, that that's wild, you know. Yeah, that that's wild.

So but either way, like, isolation is kind of one thing that happens when you sell,

also, you know, like a founder has, like they will always have like a very large gravitational field around culture.

And the thing is, is that as a company grows, the growth rate in the company might be like this, but the growth rate of the individual might be under the growth rate of the company. And as a founder especially, it's important that you maintain at that growth rate. And so feedback, you know, you start to get into like strategic disagreements, you start to get into disagreements about the culture and how it's evolving.

And so there's all these disagreements,

and you have to learn how to like, navigate. That is the he goes on and it's also like, am I the right person for this role? You know, you have to ask yourself over and over again, were you CTO at the time? At the time I was CTO, okay, no, no, not at the at the time.

Early on I was head of engineering. Okay. So I handle, you know, bolt management or whatever else or

and then I became CTO where I was, where I hired in or VP of engineering to replace me on the management side, both so I can learn more about management, but also because I just viewed the technical roadmap as critical at that moment.

For him. And I had to choose, you know, and and then I was, CTO, VP of people. So I took over like our people leader. So like over time, I learned a ton about management from the core product. Yeah, it's all about strategy.

And I would like, manage like special teams every now and then. And our, our people function need a leader, like, we need a new people.

And so I took it on for like six months and learned a ton about like HR, legal, facilities. And then I was, CTO, but also like, managing everybody. So our VP and, left and I took over that team,

and tried to shake up the team post, a second round of layoffs that, like, left our entire company in, like, a zombie state.

And so, I'm played, like, both. But within all of this, I played, like, many, many different roles. I mean, you have to. Yeah, yeah. And how big was the team? It that time? This is like how many? This was a span of seven years. Okay.

This was a span of nine and a half years. Okay. Yeah.

Almost ten years. Yeah.

So when you scaled kind of how how many did that get to, at our max, I think we're at like 340. Oh, wow. Yeah. We were we were way too big.

We had made, the proverbial mistake that most high skill founders were making, especially in, like, the zero zero 0% interest rate era.

And we like oversell sales before we really nailed down like, an enterprise sales notion, like even a mid-market sales motion.

We, we oversee of the team, because we were bifurcated on our focus on products like, we we lost a lot of focus on product. And me and Joe made a ton of mistakes there, and we had to undo, so we had made a ton of mistakes.

Get to 340 and after the layoffs are and, we were down to like 175 180 so huge. Which is, which is, which is big. Yeah. But it's for, for one scale. It was, it was,

the right size, I think. I think we, we ended at the right size and,

Yeah, I'm just really proud, like during that period of, of the company getting together and like, rallying and getting us to a point where like a year later, you know, we were 400, 405% year over year growth in our error rate to go from a zombie state to that, I'm like really proud of the team because they basically had to be like,

we need to put our egos aside and trust two people who just royally fucked up for multiple years. We have to trust that they can get us out of this. And there's like understandably a level of, distrust and like, resentment and the fact that the team went through that and trusted us anyway, and we all won together.

Like I could not be more thankful of, like, everybody on the team. So one of you was a good number? Yeah.

How close were you with most of the team and did there were people on the team you didn't know?

Yeah, there were definitely people. It was so weird when there's so many people on the team I didn't know or, you know, honestly, I just didn't have time to spend time with.

And that

was not a good feeling, you know, like, I think, as a leader, it's so much it's so much as I like as a teammate. It's so much more fun when you know everybody, you know. And so, to not be able to have, like, as personal relationships with people who you rely on, to get yourself done, it was like it was weird.

I, I, I love not scaling and I like I think if you can get away with not hiring people, that's always better.

But yeah, Chipotle, Chipotle and Tim were like great was like an amazing culture. What was the culture like? I guess. So the way that I describe culture is like every level of in like an org hierarchy, the function of that of that new level of indirection is to shield the next layer from the psychopathic,

forces of the market.

So like you have your board, which sits right on the market, right. Like everybody's an investor. They're super in us. It's like what's happening with market? Oh no, we're down on revenue. And then like you have your exact team and then you have like like everyone's level at that point, a leadership team order them and then you have like line managers and ICS and like each layer like hopefully the icons like working on,

like designing a new feature.

Like it's not like there are drastically falls and it's like, okay, it's your fault, right? Know that's your done. You specialize and you kind of shield yourself on this. And so yeah. Like I, I view culture as like actually not based on just values. I think it's like, what is the flavor of your leadership team? And then like, everybody has a bunch of different values and they kind of like integrate that flavor into like a feel or a vibe.

And so, less it's a vibe and wounds leadership team is kind of like I would describe us as, a mix of hippies and capitalist cults. So if you just take that like that flavor of that vibe, right? And you think of like a team of infrastructure engineers or super or maybe like more conservative and they're like, we need to keep things off things and go with something we can't go down.

And then you think about like some of those value systems and then like incorporating it like you would, you would get like, I don't know, like a bunch of people who are like when things go down, hey, dude, it's fine. Like, we need to calm down and relax because we need to solve the problem. But it's not like it's fine.

Like Navy Seal. It's fine like a Navy Seal. It's fine would be out like, but like, you know, Bridgewater or like a hedge fund or something. Loomis was like a hippie, you know, hippie, capitalist state. It's fine. And then you just, like, think about all these behaviors and that that's the best way to describe the culture for me.

But yeah. How did your lifestyle change over those years? You were all working, like from a tiny apartment with two rooms you obviously didn't do that forever. Right. So you scale to a bigger office or some remote, like what was your life like kind of post growth? Mid growth. Yeah. I mean, the first thing I'd say is like, I know enough Saunders who have done this so differently and so if anyone's like thinking of you know what how how close do I want to stay with like a core team?

You can really do whatever you want in life. I mean, there's going to be consequences, right? For sure. But, like, I can tell you about the time that I lived with,

my roommate harsh, who was also an engineer on the team, and I mentioned and how awkward it was when I had to give them feedback, performance feedback.

And then we, like, walked back to our apartment the other day. There definitely questions and stuff, but you can like, you know, I know a team like the CTO of my team, which is like an app that does, you know, text to speech. They have their like at a sizable scale and the core team has been, like living together and just like moving into these giant Airbnb mansions between like, Miami and London and L.A.

For us, we we took the more I'd say traditional path where, you know, after our our privacy, we moved in together. We're still living. But then when our seed round had you know Joe was Joe was and is so on a roll I should try. He's married now, but Joe was in a relationship with Maggie, who's his wife?

And they're like, okay, we'd love to have our own apartment, you know, and like, so we kind of like, federated around the the seed stage.

And yeah, like overtime working hours went down as well, which I think is like one of our biggest mistakes,

personally. But, you know, hey, it happens. And I think that, you're like, just figuring stuff out, especially for first time founders, just figuring out, okay, like, lifestyle work, leadership values, like, what do I choose?

You know, and so we it was a mix of like it was a mix of choosing like maybe some more traditional things, but then keeping our culture like weird and holding on to that.

That, that that's kind of like how the womb journey unfolded. But if I could go back, I would hold on. I really have to stick on this one.

Like I would hold on to like, Psychopathic Performance at all costs because I think it makes it more fun. And not everybody wants that, you know? But I think it's more fun and you actually deal with less, less problems, right? That's good to know because I'm definitely on that side, which I'm sure you are going to make sure.

It's like you're hard core kind of tough. And I'm like, yeah, because I think the three of us did things in a certain way. And so whenever we're managing training new people, we want it done the same way, which is never going to happen. It's really hard to do right or something's up, but I try and get everybody in their strengths and their skill sets.

But I think something I'm curious if you think this is true. Someone has said to me before, there's nothing that can prepare you for the founder role, like everyone is. So unprepared. Yeah. To it. Do you think that's true? Is there anything that you would advise or, you know, give, tips to any entrepreneurs that could prepare them?

I mean, there's tons of tips, but it's like at this point I feel like I've mentored enough founders where I'm like giving it any specific advice. It's like there's a lot of danger and you can do like, I've given bad advice before and seen the outcome of that. And I was like, whoa, I should like, make sure that I'm giving like advice I believe in and caveat everything, you know.

but here's what I'm saying. Like,

You know, like in, in, either platonic or Socratic philosophy, I've forgotten Socrates or what I mean is both of them, they have this ideal where there's like these four pillars that every person should maximize. That's like a core of the essence that increases their alignment with nature and their utility to society and increases their happiness.

And there's only one of these pillars that, there's only one of these tools that you can't actually maximize. You're born with the maximum amount of it, so you can't get it, and it's within you. And that's wisdom. And so, you know, I'm just going to go with Plato, even though that might be wrong. I don't want to keep some Plato and Socrates.

Plato. You know, he basically was like every person, they can hear advice all they want, but until they make their own decisions and ask themselves internally, what would a wise person do? They will never actually build up their wisdom. So every person has like a wise there's like an old wise world inside of you. Yes, there's an old, old, wise Laura.

She's so rocking the business. Business casual or I don't know if that's full business, you know. And she's she's like, hey, Laura, like be kind of yourself or whatever, right. Like maybe she's saying, don't define yourself.

But every person has to listen about internal voice and then observe their consequences and see if it was actually a wise choice.

So you must make your own actions. And so I'm a big believer that founders are like the most stubborn, they're the most stubborn and set in their values and principles of like most people. And so,

I think I would always give advice with the caveat of like this is the way I would think about it, but, you know, whether or not it's a wise decision is totally up to you.

And I've found that founders actually take more of my place. And I see that's and so, I don't know if I have any specific advice. I think that it's like most things, you know, you, you, you know, you're never going to you're never going to be able to describe what it's like to like, hook up with someone if you're like a fortune reward jockey, right?

You're never going to understand what it's like to, to climb a mountain or, like, go do something adventurous in nature. Unless you do it. It's. Yeah, it's like that with founding the company, you know, it's like that with anything we're like in this trippy life's journey. And it's like we can take these paths, not less people. I think in general, I think a lot of people in some companies, it's it's not that that atypical, but like less people than the norm.

Sure. And you can kind of go on and be like, okay, this is what it's like.

I feel like advice is like, you should just give it up situationally. That's great. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people come to you for mentorship. Yeah. Do they? Yeah. Okay, I get it. It's just weird to say that. Yeah, well, it's like a lot of people come to me for advice on mentorship.

Well, I think it when people see the success, you're like, okay, a lot of people fail companies. But what defines success in a company? And there's so many different things that can define that. Yeah. Your company was successful. You know, you have yours in what, acquisition? Yeah. So, for almost $1 billion, almost nothing else. I think everyone's like, yeah, all the things I couldn't get to a billion, bro, I, I, I cracked up, I was dying because I was like, guys exactly.

That is exactly what I think. Super endo. Super proud of you. Yeah. So what was that acquisition like going through that?

Well, it was so that the acquisition process itself was like thousands of questions. I got thousands of questions. And you don't want to, like, disclose your company like, this is going on, right? Yeah. You don't want to disclose your company.

No. This is going on. So you're pulling in as few people as possible to answer all of these compliance questions. And these like, SEC questions and security questions. And so it was like a really intense, month to two months where I was doing this entirely different job on top of everything else that I had to, like, maintain and make people real.

Like, I didn't want people to be like, what is going on with a and so,

it's kind of an intense period of a lot of work, but it was also like fun. It was it was different. You know, you're going through this transition. You're like, whoa. Like my company is like evolving in a way that,

you know, I really didn't count on or like, expands on that last name was like, awesome there.

The amazing that there is right there. They're not like, trying to, you know, sneak in like poison firms or any of that stuff. It was like very fair, like even base terms before the negotiations. And so it was it was also fun. You know, it's actually it's actually great.

Going through the acquisition itself, there's always a ton of pain because it's all, you know, at the time, I think like 180, 200 person company getting absorbed into an 11,000 person like, publicly traded company.

Totally like many differences between the cultures. There's like similarities or similarities, but many differences between the cultures as well as well. On pacing and,

you know, how how much risk tolerance does each person have?

And so there's a lot of pain to, you know,

but yeah, like, in the end, I think, in the end, I think for me, like, I'd gotten to a point where I, I really wanted to hold on.

They really incentivized me to hold on. What's the key to do it without was known when you got acquired. So I was just putting off the the worm, my engineering unit. I was just setting up the Imagineering unit, but I was reporting into this, woman, Tonya, who is awesome. I one time there's just such a sweetheart. But Tonya, like, manages all of the, like, work management for all apps like confluence and, Loom and Bitbucket and, like, all this other stuff.

And I, I basically, you know what my job ended up becoming, really because I had an amazing, like, senior director below me who's like, managing everybody on a certain scale out,

and what my job really became was like a lot of conversations with our legal team on cross-training on user now, like, whether or not we could do that for like, I am a full stop on like, armholes.

And honestly, it was like a lot of politics. It's just like I, I was struggling like the the culture. I understand why Atlassian has to operate that way. I totally got that. I wouldn't operate it that way. But I also, hey, I'm not like Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott. I didn't start, you know, like $1 billion company that's like publicly traded.

So it's like, I'm sure there's a lot of wisdom there on how to actually do it, but,

I didn't I wasn't really finding, like, joy in, like, working anymore. I was just like, you know, this is not for me. This is like, not really a culture I want to be a part of. I want to be a part of the culture.

That's like, way more disruptive and fast moving, which they genuinely cannot do for compliance reasons. And many in many are. It's not a lot since we,

and I basically like, went to the, the redwoods for a week and just unplugged and was like, I'm going to think about this problem. And within five minutes of like being on this redwood trail, I stared at like the trees and they whispered to me and they're like, Vanessa, you're you're an idiot.

You're a complete idiot. You have, like, all the money you could possibly want. And so you can do whatever you want with your life, and you're seriously wondering about, like, you know, whether or not incremental dollars is going to, like, change your life and make you happier when you are. It's so clear that you're already unhappy. And so I was like, what is the point of like having a bunch of money if you don't exercise free on your time?

And I just like made the decision at that point like I was. And that was in March and talked to Joe and then rolled off and in May.

How much do you leave on the table? I'm, I'm not going to say it was. It was a lot of money. Yeah, yeah. Good for you for doing what was that?

Actually, I will say, because I think I said it in my blog post, I did, yeah, at six I left Facebook 60 million. Yeah, that's a bold move, but good for you. I mean that's awesome. Yeah. I mean, going back to like that whole thing about, you know, shaking up your life like I really, you know, I get people to do it.

It's like you find out a lot about yourself when your life, when you follow your heart, even though logically it doesn't make sense.

Wild ride. Yeah, an amazing ride. Speaking of blog. So, I was wrapping up. Eric and I went to walk with, VC in Austin, and I don't know how it came out, but, came up and, the VC goes, oh, is that the knee?

And we're like, oh, how do you know the knee? Like, what? A small world you went. Oh, he went viral. Yeah. And I was like, what? And we didn't know Eric for like a week, but it went viral talking about. And then I, I see your post on Instagram and I was like, oh, day. And, so yeah, I, I did read it like briefly yesterday.

Okay. Yeah. Because I had before I hung out with you this weekend and I was like, I do need to go read it before,

this is what inspired you to write this blog and share with the world. So, yeah, the great thing is, we're we're good friends, so you don't even have to read it. I know you talk about it on your podcast.

You told me about this weekend. That was on there. I was like, okay, cool. And you must do this stuff. Yeah, yeah. What inspired you to write that publicly? Yeah. So the the blog post is titled, I think it's subtle. I'm rich and I've. No, I've no idea what to do with my life. Yeah. So basically, what I don't want to happen from this is that I become the white partner of doc, which I'm learning a lot of Gen Z does not know about.

And so I'm sorry for Gen Z. I'll give you a little bit of background. Like I was like, this is you wrote this song, I took a pill. And these are words like, sad about being famous and lonely. And I'm like, I don't want that to be me. But that is like the flavor of the article is like, I've made all of this money, I've done all of this stuff.

Like, I got really deep into robotics after leaving, when I got really deep into robotics, I learned like deep learning from. And I'm like building neural networks from scratch on through this, video series called Zero to Hero by Andre Karpathy, which I highly, highly recommend for anyone who is in deep learning. He takes you all the way from building a single neuron all the way up to like, building gpt2 from scratch.

And so you learn a lot about deep learning. I went through that,

you know, did a bunch of weddings, you know, unfortunately, I had a breakup.

I know I had to meet her at, our wedding, so. Yeah, everything's okay there. Yeah, I also. Well, I'd rather not talk about that too much, but, you know, I, you know, I hope she's doing well.

I hope she's doing well.

And. Yeah, just like slime climb mountains in Nepal, like, climb mountains in the Himalayas and, recently got back from, like, being in the jungle in Hawaii. And so I've had, like, a very, I'd say like bipolar and unstable year, but there's been, like, method to the madness. I see it now,

just so a lot of extremes to kind of figure myself out, figure out who I am after, you know, attaching my identity to a company for over a decade, you know, just trying to find, like, in again, which I feel, I feel I found that this one which is like, oh, yeah, I was going to

ask you that. That's amazing. What was the time that you felt like you found that again? It's been it's been kind of like a slow roll, but I recently I was, I was in

I was on the Big Island in Hawaii, and my first week on the island, I was hanging out with like a good group of friends.

That was a lot more social. We were like, more in the Kona area with like, like the urban area. And then after that week, after all my friends lost because they have jobs and I'm unemployed. And I was like, I'm gonna stay here and, go to the jungle and just like, unplug from society and just learn physics and read.

And so I found this Airbnb,

in this area called White Hill Valley. I didn't see any other Airbnbs that were like, deep in the jungle, which I thought was kind of weird at the time, but I didn't really watch too much into it. I just bought it. And

as I'm driving towards the valley, the Airbnb host is like, hey, by the way, you have to park outside of the valley because they don't let non-natives drive into the valley.

So I have to show you in. Oh, this isn't how horrible what game I'm in. Yeah, it was like we were. We were driving, like, up the river. Was like. It was weird. We were, like, going in the valley. And she'd take, like, a laugh and be like. We're like, driving on the river, you know? So it's like, it's really, really out there.

The cottage ran off of, like, a solar cell. But if I went out, I had to run like a diesel generator. 060, wow. And, yeah, I get there and I'm like, okay, I should probably figure out where I am, you know? And so I woke up like a valley y chill Valley is also known as the Valley of the Kings because a ton of like Hawaiian, like a bunch of different Hawaiian royal lineages ruled Hawaii from that valley.

And there's these, like, ceremonial burial grounds with like, princes and princesses and queens and kings. And so it's a super sacred, sacred place. You know? And like, I'm just reading about all this and I'm starting to feel really guilty because I'm like, I feel like I'm intruding, you know, in a place that I really shouldn't be. And that the natives don't want me at.

And I could kind of understand why I was like, okay, this seems like a really sacred place. It's it's super beautiful, but you would never be, but you would never be me. I know, but still. I'm sorry. I was like, I don't know if I should. I think if anything bad is not going to make the natives like me, or it's like, hey, why are you down here?

Oh, don't worry, I.

Was like, oh, okay. We like, you know. So yeah. So it was, you know, the first couple days I was like, avoiding eye contact with the natives. There's only like 30 or 40 people in the entire valley. And I, I was like, so self-conscious. And at the same time, I was reading,

funny enough, two different books. One is called The Way of Kings, which is like this high fantasy book.

It's the first of this like series called The Stormlight Archive. It's amazing, but it's a read. It's like over a thousand pages. And I'm reading this book about like, the way of Kings, where a central theme is like how to be a proper king and like weed with, like the Netherlands. And then I'm also reading the bottom on guitar, which is on this spiritual book.

And, you know, essentially it opens with this Prince Arjuna on who's fighting for his brother's rightful place on the throne. And he's he's in a chariot traveling between these two lines of armies that are about to engage in an epic battle. And his charioteer is, Krishna. Krishna doesn't know at the time, but is the reincarnation of Brahma, the ultimate God creator.

And so Arjun is like noticing that the people he's about to fight are like his cousins and his uncles and whoever else. And he's like having an existential crisis, right? Because he's like, is this really worth the am I willing to kill people that I know? Who are my friends, for a moral higher good? And so Krishna is like having this conversation with him in the middle of this battlefield, like giving him, like, basically tips on how to philosophically think about life.

And I had no idea, like, I didn't plan this. It's not like I was like, oh, ypo Valley of the Kings. But there's like all these themes of like Prince, and kings that were like kind of interwoven together. And this is one thing that Krishna sons to Arjun on that I took to heart, which he basically lays out the formula of life.

And it's like, look, if you remember anything else, just remember that old patterns and bleeds. So people who are looking for more success are seeking people who are looking for nothing and tend to denounce things. They're seeking it. Every single path leads to me. And I'm like the creation of everything. And so it's like, the way that you get to me is by building wisdom.

Wisdom. It's built off of action, selfless intent. So take an action to gain knowledge. Make sure the action that you're doing is to serve others. So even if you're doing something for yourself, do it to build yourself up to be better for others. And then we all have expectations in life. So don't give up expectations that something will turn out good or bad, like you should have your expectations.

But whatever happens, it's by my design so do not have attachment to the outcome. So that's like the formula for life. This is what Krishna says action selfless and time non-attachment. And I basically decided, okay, I definitely don't want to spend multiple weeks in Ypo Valley avoiding local. So I'm just going to like adopt this formula and see how it goes.

And the next day I walk by these guys, these like shredded like taller than me,

Native Hawaiian due to like carrying boulders and just on the side. And I'm like, okay. And so I go up, I start talking, I, you know, I start thinking about selfless intention and I'm like, hey, I can like, help you guys landscape these houses, invest in are doing.

So I began helping them carry hundreds of pounds of boulders like. And I was doing it like every day and they like, invited me and I started like, making fronts for them. I started meeting everybody in the valley. And so I just crazy conversations like one with this guy who, like, moved a ton of marijuana into the US in the 80s and like, gave that all up and now lives in like values, like a weed kingdom.

Another person who lived in like a tree house and like, meditates like 12 hours a day. Well, and I was just meeting all these people because I was just following this, like one formula for, like, engaging with people.

And it was like a really strange kind of like psychedelic spiritual experience with, with none of the drugs. And I was like, this is my being like super present.

And I was like doing that. And then like doing physics as well. So as I say, that's like, yeah, that was that was odd. That's what made me so pretty receptive. And like finding the social quotient is like, yeah, I'm finding this kind of through all that great answer. How long were you there for? Overall, I think I was on Hawaii for five weeks.

Okay. Yeah,

And I know we've talked about what you know, the past and a little bit about future. You feel like you found a, Again. What? Tell me a little bit about the timeline of when you were and why, and then your connection with Doge and working at Doge. Yeah. So I, I'm sure there's a few times I will, I will say I'm on camera again.

There's a lot that I can't talk about with. And, it's both like it's not just legally, although it's definitely legal. Like that does not get me. Okay. There is some cruel and unusual punishment coming my way if I if I disclose things that are confidential. But also I have like a lot of respect for the team and what they're doing.

And like secrecy is actually critical for what they're doing. And there are people on the team, you know, who I hired on and I worked with who crew safety I care about and like, yeah, this well-being I care about. And this is something like really high stakes, some really high stakes stuff. So,

yeah, there's a lot I can't talk about, but what I'll, what I'll say is like some of the, some of the stuff that I said on my blog post, which is like I had just gotten back from climbing, you know, mountains in the Himalayas.

And I was like, okay, like, I definitely don't want to sit alone with my thoughts. This is where my headspace was like, I don't want to be sitting alone with my thoughts. I want to be like moving and doing stuff.

And so my friends, in a text group that I'm part of called Asaf Fugees, which are basically people from US of flood as refugees and as you're the reason one of the guys, it's actually Griffin's like the name should absolutely apply to be part of Doge.

And I thought about it. I was like, that looks and sounds super epic. Like we have a huge deficit problem. This is obviously an important problem we we must solve for our country. Like this is the thing is, like, it's crazy to me that, there's as much by, partizanship about the just there is like, I think there's a lot of bipartisan support, but it's surprisingly that there is so much partizanship because this should be something that it's, like important to everybody.

Which is that like, if we keep spending at the rate that we're setting out, we will default on our dime, right?

And the strength of the US economy, but also geopolitical position is, is basically anchored on the fact that we are the reserve currency of the world and that we have economic and military supremacy. So if we start losing out on our economic supremacy, we also will start losing out on our military supremacy, which will lead to a ton of violence.

So it's the people who are working on Doge are working on literally the most important thing you can be working on as an American citizen right now. And it's crazy to me that people want this to stop because it's like, where do you think this graph is going? Or the time of our spending? Do you think it just got politicized by Elon Musk?

The maybe people who don't support him and his use in connection with President Trump? Because that's where I see it. Like I think most people we talk about Doge all the time on this podcast. I think most people are really excited about it. We are especially here in the summer where for government efficiency, right. We're making everything a lot easier.

So, so I know what our friend came up with that is hilarious. So do you think that it's just the politics politicization of it or what do you think? Well, I think that

I mean, I think I don't know, but I would say that, you know, everything that is going to drive clicks will be politicized because that's the way to drive.

Like so there's some percentage of the pie that's not digging down the details for sure. There's a lot of people that you want more like Donald Trump. These are like super polarizing figures. Right? So there's a lot of that as well as always going to be the case. If you believe that Doge is dismantling a bunch of fraud and a bunch of embezzlement, and it's like dismantling these systems where people are benefiting from it, if you believe that there's also, there's also some percentage of there's some people who are very wealthy and very powerful who want the current power structures to remain in place.

And if you don't believe that, I mean, I don't know, like, I just don't know how to talk to those people because I don't. So, I'm I'm open. You know, I'm open minded, though, but,

Yeah. So I think it's kind of a mix of all of that. Who's going to get politicized either way? On, you know, moving fast and government moving fast.

Spending that benefits citizens is always going to be dicey. You know, these senators and congresspeople, have constituents that they have to answer to, and the constituents usually want more money. So there's like a lot going on that I think is happening, to contribute to the politicization of it.

But obviously, as well, when you're doing things like cutting Dei, it's automatically going to get politicized.

Regardless of what, what your opinions are. Not at all. And so, yeah, can you speak at all to what you wanted to do or we're doing a Doge if you can't. So if I do, I'm just curious what you wanted to do there. Yeah, honestly, I just wanted to do. Well, first of all, I will say that I spent four weeks at Doge Guy, 4 or 5 weeks on Doge, and the team has, like, they were we were moving so fast back then without like like without the, the the transition to Trump happening.

Yeah. We're moving so fast that and I can only imagine how fast. So moving now. And so the first thing that I would say is I was there for four weeks, like whatever I even did, it's just like so small in comparison with what they're probably doing now and how much impact they're having, you know? So that's the first thing I'd say.

The second thing I'd say is that I, I just wanted to focus on whatever would maximize my usefulness to the team. So I really at or being like, look, I don't I don't care what my title is like, you know, I don't need like some big fancy title. I don't need something like whatever I can actually contribute to, I'll do.

And so I did,

I'm a, I'm a pretty good recruiter. So I did a lot of recruiting, a lot of phone calls. And, I got to talk to really not some of the literally the brightest people in our country verifiably, like just some of the brightest people of all time, who wanted to join and wanted to make an impact because they care about this country and, they care about the values of the US living on.

And so it was it was awesome. It was awesome. We hired so much people. And,

you know, I did some, some other work that I can't talk about, but you know, that that's awesome. Yeah. Why? For weeks. Why did you leave so I, I ended up working with a lot of people, but there was one guy who's now publicly names on them, on this guy, Steve Davis, who is,

the, you know, the CEO of Boring Company and like, helped yawn with, like, the Twitter takeover.

So like very closely on the sky. One's at a million miles an hour. You know, there's this one anecdote I have where, you know, I he basically from time, from time that we made a decision about a candidate's close hand like this candidate coding with us and four minutes. So like from the time we decided we want this person to close, this person was like, coding within four minutes, close completely and have, like a bunch of doubts too.

And so Steven's kind of this, like maniac, you know, in a great way, in a fantastic way. And I learned a lot from Steven, a lot of people on the team.

But the one thing I think I really learned at that moment was I'm watching this guy just move at a million miles an hour as urgently as possible.

Like, I see that before those very simple. It's like, what is the most important thing I could be doing right now? And then just immediately redirect all of your resources to that one thing. And so I just ask myself that question. I was like, what is the most important thing I should be working on right now? And the answer is, as a U.S. citizen, probably when I was doing was kind of a weird like equation.

It wasn't like super straightforward. But, you know, I was like as the day hire, probably working on my shit and like sitting in the ambiguity and sitting in my emotions and dealing with this now, you know, and that was something that I absolutely did not want to do. Like, I was having a blast working like 80 hours a week.

It was so much fun. But I was like, this is what I should be doing. I should be sitting with myself and be sitting in the ambiguity of, you don't actually know what you want to do right now. And so that's when I left and decided to go to Hawaii and all that stuff. But yeah, and that was absolutely the right call.

Absolutely the right call.

I see the things Doge is doing, and every now and then I get so much for sure. Yeah. I'm like, there doing some cool, cool stuff.

But I'm so happy I made this decision. What it was I needed to do. You have a relationship with Elon? No. No, it's a big. It's a big organization.

What was it? What are you most excited about publicly for Doge to do that? They said they're going to do, I mean, I don't yeah. I don't want to comment on that. Okay. Yeah. But I would say that, you know, the overall, I find the overall mission of, you know, cutting a bunch of stuff out in general exciting.

I know it's not that exciting. Oh, it's so exciting. So I'm like, I mean, it's not a government nerd, I love that. Oh, sure. For sure. I'm like, you're going to get rid of the one penny because it cost two pennies to make. Yes. As you. It's why that's not even a question. Nobody uses pays anymore. So, yeah, I'm excited.

The government spending, it's like huge. Like, if you get that down and then we can stimulate the economy again. We could, we could have a true golden age for, for the US. And when I say that, like obviously I say that is us and I think it'll be great for everyone. There will be like golden ages for everybody.

Like this is we're super globalized economy. And so,

yeah, I was just excited about the AI, the idea of like it, like all of this shit hitting the fan and then just seeing lights on, the stunning go away and being like, whoa, we're like, I feel lighter. I, you know, every day I wake up, I feel the weight of the deficit on me.

I don't actually, I yeah, I'm wow. Thank you, thank you. Lawrence. In terms oh what is next for Rene. What's what's your next chapter? Do you know?

I don't know in a lot of ways, but there's kind of three things that I'm focused on right now.

Like, one is, I've been writing a bunch of screenplays.

Oh, cool. And so we'll see where that goes. I've been writing much screenplays. I've met with a few, like, actors and actresses in New York.

You know. No, nobody like A-list, but just people who will actually respond to me. Someone who's never made a film. Whatever place.

I mean, these are all like, short films. So the truth is, is similar to me writing my blog post like when I wrote it, the blog post that went viral when I wrote it, like I had written a bunch of other blog posts, like I written like ten leadership management style blog and it was like so bad and so bad.

I was like, no one wants to read this. Not a single person wants to read this. And,

it took me like 20 or 30 different rubs before I landed on the thing that I released. And it's like, similarly from screenplays. I'm writing a bunch of these and,

I, I don't like really any of them. Yeah. And at some point I'll like one and then I'll get, like, a crew together and try to sell it.

And so I don't know I don't know what that will be, but that's just kind of a new journey I'm going on eventually. I want to like, make feature length films, but we'll see. That's like a, you know, 15 year journey. So we'll see about that.

The other thing, you gave us a preview of the wedding with the Close Your Eyes.

Imagine the space.

So we were at a wedding together this weekend, and we we had a talent show that we were forced to participate in. We're happy to be part of. We're happy to be part. And I'm really happy that it actually happened because it made everyone do something. Ended up being really cool, for sure. And but you're one was, you know, music and then you were narrating a story and we felt like we were there.

We had to close our eyes. I really it was very cool. I visualize you and Shane meeting and you telling the story. That was very, very cool. Thank you for. I thought it was terrible there. There were no cuts like. So there was like a song for each scene of me, like Shane and Wendy. And it's like there were there were songs for each scene and the cuts were terrible.

It was like, I like, played the next song. And then I had to fast forward to the timestamp. I didn't even have the timestamps, like saved. And so, like, people would be like meditating them on their eyes and like blink. As the call was happening, I was like, I don't I don't know what's happening here.

But it was fun.

It was it was fun. It's kind of like a movie. Yeah. Yes. Very cool. No. What were you going to say in the next piece, other than screenplays? Yeah, with the physics, you know,

I've been. I had a realization like a week ago or weeks ago where I was just looking at my iPad and all my notes, and I was like, well, I've done a lot of physics, like a ton of physics.

And it was for the longest time I was like, this is like in my head, there was a voice where I was just like, this is not going to work out, dude. Like, there's a lot you have to do. And it was like, cool to see how much progress I've made. But, you know, staying in my friend and I can't name the factory again.

Like, I don't usually keep this many things under wraps. This is like something where somebody else is trying to send stuff. But I, I was in this factory, they're building some cool sensor stuff, and,

I was just thinking, like, it'd be really cool if I interned here, like, did an unpaid internship and just accelerated my understanding of, like, electrical engineering and optics and, like, all the stuff that I'm learning about theoretically, but apply it.

And so,

I'm considering, you know, joining a company and or just doing an unpaid internship where I accelerate my understanding of electrical engineering, all these other fields that hopefully I apply in some way. Very cool. Yeah. And then the third thing I'm working on is, a men's addiction support group. So, I'm starting a as an experience.

There are now some people, you know, we're going to join a group at the wedding, but I won't name names. Okay.

And it's like, basically. And, men who are addicted to, like, vaping, or like any nicotine, porn, pornography, video game, social media, these are kind of like before things were we're concentrated on. But I'm just starting it as an experiment to start.

I have like kind of a basic structure of a program in mind.

And if it goes lol, like expand the group, extend the experiment, and then if it goes really well, Productize it and create like a platform for it. But

that's like another thing I'm kind of doing that is great effort to be really very cool.

Yeah.

There's some bills in Texas that are crazy. Like there's I think anal sex is illegal.

It's a legal.

Yes. Like across the board.

There's a bunch of things that are illegal. Wow. I know it's very. But it's because we just they have been so long ago and then. Yeah, well, there's also the, the, Texas porn ban bill. Like the porn. That was my bill. What do you mean, that was your bill? I wrote that bill.

You wrote that bill. Okay, I have it framed downstairs. Was so crazy. No. Okay, so I worked for Senator Paxton. Okay. Last session,

and we got a call one day from a constituent who was very upset talking about how

their child got a digital pornography and that we need to do something to help it. So I went to talk to my boss about it, and she's very much on the protecting child children in every way, whether it's in schools or online.

And so I said, hey, there's a bill, Louisiana, that doesn't ban photography, but it's an eight year vacation for minors, right? So that you have to show how old you are. Go to see Port. So she said, I love this. And there were a few people in the office that were very against it. Like, I don't want to be the porn people.

We don't. And she went, what do? Oh yeah, let's do it. And so we changed it up. We've we've used it. Louisiana legislation is model installation for the AIS. You're doing all this research. And so I ended up having this coalition of like 20 parents who had the most tragic stories of all time. So from a woman who she was from a very, like, upper middle class area in Houston.

And she said, you know, doesn't matter what zip code you're in, what private schools and your kids do, they have these phones in their pockets. My eight year old daughter got addicted to pornography and trafficked the eight year old daughter and traffic she got because it's not just pornography, it's not. They always say there was an article. It's like, not your daddy's Playboy.

Pornography today is not the same as, like a pinup image for sure. Yeah, but there's also chat rooms and all these things, and it's like a gateway, all these things for kids. And some of them are stumbling across this completely innocently, maybe through social media or clicking on an accidental link. So after reading all this, I was like, this is so bad for the children's brains.

It's not good for adult brains, but if you're over 18, do whatever you want. It's not good for anyone. Friends. I think people who are over 18 should strongly consider not watching pornography. Okay, and I agree with that. After doing all the research to for sure, because a lot of it was, well, it damages your brain because it's a super human supernatural stimulus that you can never find in nature, even if you're at an orgy.

Yeah. You still cannot. The the stimulus you get from that is still different from her aggravate pornography. You can see 100 different women speed things up or men whatever. It is so unnatural that it doesn't. Your brain ruins your dopamine, all that. So for kids, it's even worse because their brains aren't developed yet. So my bill, was partially the Louisiana legislation, but we added in it had the porn sites, had to have a hotline to help slang for anyone addicted and a health warning.

So I required Health and Human Services to have a health warning of like the 4 or 5 different bullet points that I had researched, which were, you know, just warning somebody about what it does to your brain. Yeah, because some people might not have known that. Well, I mean, we also put warnings on everything else. We put warnings on cigarets and alcohol.

And so I'm, I'm that's awesome that you wrote this film. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for them. Thanks. Another one too. It got ten killed, by big tech. That's like a whole other, sorry. It was more, like, more, compliant on the manufacturers actually put in, like, a software update that would automatically filter things for kids. Tech was not a fan of that for sure, since didn't Apple, they implemented like, something like that.

Right? There was like a client side hash verification for like, okay, you have harmful content or something like that. It had to be like a backdoor, that didn't expose the images, but it like verified whether or not, you know, I don't know what the the end result was, I guess, like hellbent on the there's a lot of things going on in each individual state.

So we'll say this was just Texas, I think. I don't know what that specific bill was. But then there was House Bill 18, which was protection of children's social media. Yeah, that also does harm. But this bill was also 1181 and as it passes endlessly, I think there may be one person who also said no to it.

Yeah. And then it went through, but then there was a Supreme Court decision on it and and it won. But the Pornhub was actually the place that censored it and other porn sites. So they said, you know what, we don't want to comply. So we're going to shut down Texas. Oh, yeah, have. So, anytime somebody mentioned, you know, pornography is banned here, I kind of like to tell the story because it it was like, well, I fought so hard for it.

Built like coalition of 20 moms and dads and, experts and people to come in and fill in from all over the country to come and talk about it. And then the senators got really, really enraged. And I can show you that the five minute video. But everybody was present that night. It was like a perfect storm. And the senators all co-sponsored the bill.

And I've never seen this happen before. So it's sitting on the floor and they hear all the testimony, and then all senators go, this is happening. My middle school for my grandchild, children that are having someone attacked because of pornography and like seeing it and showing the children and all these horrible stories. And then they said, I'm going to co-sponsor this bill.

And senators, for any, Democrat senator here, very senior she says, Senator Patterson, I would like to invite everyone here to co-sponsor bills. And each senator came up to me and dropped a card on my desk to co-sponsor it. And it was really cool, exciting, cool. Yeah, because it's my bill baby obsession. But then it got this, like, viral traction.

So it was a very cool experience to see that become law. Well, cheers. They. Yeah, it sucks for the kids. Yeah, that's my favorite thing.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today and for all these Rossum and your stories. Do you have anything else you want to share or how people can find you? Thank you for having me on this course. Thank you for, being the head of the FBI. This morning. He's my manager. He's keeping all this on track and polish.

Yeah. People can find me, on MTA. That's my handle on, you know, X, which I hate calling ATS. I like Twitter ones, and Instagram. And so you can find me there, or you can go to my website, donate on sage. I look all the links. Check it. We'll find you after this. So thank you again and I'll enjoy the weekend.

Thank you.

that you guys need. I don't, y'all, I'm going to tell the full story.

Go for it, go for it. All right,

So, me and Eric, we met on a pickup group called the simple Make up Project go Facebook group, and, yeah. So this was a group filled with, you know, naturally, the most popular people in the world who he is being facetious.

I am very much not none. It was, you know, I was new to the city and moved in and, like, what do you have to do when you move to a city for the first time, you make sure that you can meet the local women, right? Yeah. So we we and I entered the group, and then the first message I got was the names who, like, we got somehow we got chatting, came over to my house off of the internet, and then it was you, myself, one of our best friends named Shane.

And then my brother, and then, an Uber driver named Boris, and. Oh, yeah, the Uber driver named Boris. And then we. Yeah, then we hit it off, and then we started hanging out more and more, and then, yeah, that's history. That's how we met for the first time. I think I'm missing. Yeah, well, we started this group on Facebook, called the channel The Gentleman of the Bay.

Yeah. So, we met on the street. We started this group. We. I think you were at it for a little longer, but I was there for, like, a week. I think you started loom, and then you definitely got like. Yeah, you're like, this is all of my energy that. Yeah, it quickly, quickly shifted from, how do I need all the women in the area to how do I marry my computer for and my co-founders for life?

What I ended up being a decade of my life. Yes, absolutely. You know, you missed out on a couple great opportunity with the gentleman of the Bay. I will say that now, we did. We did. It was it was there for a little bit hung out with Boris, the, you know, the a couple times shout out to Boris is he's resurrected.

So the virus is there. But no, that's that's, And the rest is history. And that, you met Laura as well. And now, Yeah. Now it's a whole family here. Whoa. Family all together. I'm part of the family. Right. Well, we I mean, for, like, ten years for like that. Yeah. And for people who don't know, me and Eric and moreover, one of our best friends wedding ceremonies over the weekend and it was this, like, the most happy wedding you could possibly imagine.

But I'm looking at all the redwoods, and there these two different, exercises where there was I gazing at both. And I'm not show up with Eric during the, like, masculine. Like, let's get the men together and, like, be man portion. I'm not sure of the war. During the like dancy more feminine portion and I like looked into both of their audience, for a very long time.

And so I feel like I'm part of the, thoughts. And so for eyes zero souls now and now for good. I just get it, you know, it was it was very, very fun, I will say, when, you know, there was like, the cuddle puddle on the middle of the in the middle of the thing. I was definitely like, what?

What is happening? I was I was what was the reaction that we've been talking? I think everybody was like, what is happening? Because it's so rare for there to be like that intimate of a connection at a wedding. I feel like so many weddings are just like, you know, their tradition. It's a little bit more conservative. And so when you're like gazing in people's eyes and cuddling and like doing animal yoga or whatever else, it's like so intimate.

And so did I. Did you get one that covered blood? Well, I was, I don't think I don't think I did. Yeah, I think people watched them. You know, I don't know when you're the only one where you don't want it, I, I don't, I don't, I don't know about that, but, you know, I'm one of your eyes closed.

If you feel comfortable, crawl into the middle right now, you know, and, and then I was like, yeah, I sort of see what's happening. More is in the bathroom at this point, and I open my eyes and just see, like a cuddle puddle of, like, six women rolling around on the ground in the middle of. You're like, this is a trap.

This, this, this trap. I hope I'm not getting in there. And then and then Laura came back in and I was I was like, you want it? You want to get it on there? It's like. It's like, you know, good. Love you, Shane and Wendy.

good. Hey, y'all. This is my podcast, but, so let let y'all go.

Yeah. Thanks for coming, man. I really appreciate it. Talk to you, and

I'll see you after this. And I'll see you tomorrow as well, for sure.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business, the podcast, where we dive in the policies keeping business innovation and government efficiency. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege and today we're talking about Texas Leads Trade Coalition, a coalition under the Texas Association of Business aimed at strengthening trade between U.S., Mexico and Canada. Joining me today is Glen Hamer, CEO of the Texas Association of Business and Champion for policies that drive economic development and growth and ensure Texas remains a global trade leader.

So what is it you're doing today you’re doing a speaking engagement? Thank you. For one of the, chambers. And I'm not sure which one.

Okay. Yeah. During this time of year, the chambers Trek to Austin, which is great. They usually come to our office. Sometimes they go to the. Well, they're almost always go to the Capitol. And so I think next stop will be the Capitol. Speaking to one of our great local chambers.

What is your day to day like right now in session?

Yeah. Well, a lot of time at the legislature for myself and our terrific, lobbying team. Yeah.

A lot of it also is just, working with our great 250 local chamber partners from across the state of Texas as they come to Austin to advocate and interact with their lawmakers. So, you know, very often will host them in our boardroom or we'll do a rooftop reception.

So best rooftop in town, yes. It's, you know, we could we could, we could host, well over 100 people. I'm not sure what exactly meets fire code, but, it's a great it's really this time where we get good Chamber of commerce weather. Great place to just, you know, enjoy each other's company and talk about what's going on at the state, at the state capitol.

And there's a lot going on at the state capitol right now. It's. Yeah, full and swing. You go.

Well, if I if I had a frame, I'm very excited. You know, the the fact remains that that we are in the best place for, for business, in the country. So we're sitting on another massive surplus. It's about $23 billion or so.

We have 10 or 12 states Laura just by contrast, that have budget deficits. Right? No state is even close to us in terms of a surplus. In fact, I I'm going to disclose might be a little bit uncomfortable for some of the listeners, but this is the first argument I got into with grok three, because my, my thesis is that if you add up the surplus in Texas, it's probably more if you add and subtract all the surpluses and the deficits of the 49 other states, it's got to be in the ballpark of just being about equal to the rest of the 49 states, though.

Wow. That's how massive our surpluses again.

And what Grok say, what was Grok saying?

We were arguing it about a little bit that it's unlikely that that if you added up all 49 states that it wouldn't, add up past $23 billion.

But I can't think of any other state that's really, you know, anywhere close to three, 4 or 5 billion, let alone 23 billion.

And then, of course, there's some in the basket case states like California that are likely to have deficits. So, you know, I'm not sure I'm right. I can't compete necessarily with Grok three. But, you know, the point is here we are at a at a point in time where the states economy is doing very well. The tax revenues are surging.

So you, you know, we you have to keep that number on my mind when we talk about what's likely to happen, this legislative session. Absolutely. It's a really exciting time to be in Texas in the business community

once again. Absolutely. The best the best state. And and you know what I expect, Laura? Just a few things. If I can maybe just get into what I think will happen.

This will be a big session when it comes to infrastructure investment, right? You know, we're adding, probably about 1300 people or so on net each day. You know, that's over 30,000 people, new people, new Texans every month. And that requires a lot of infrastructure. So you, Governor Abbott, during state of the state, which I which I thought was really superb and he touched on the right issues, you know, made it clear that the state's going to have a generational investment in water.

We need that. He talked about, vocational ed he talked about, when we talk about infrastructure, let's have the nuclear renaissance, be centered in Texas. All of these initiatives are going to require investments. We have it. He also talked about, you know, having another package, that that would have very strong tax relief, for Texans and that's, you know, Texas households and businesses.

So, you know, we're very optimistic that this is going to be another great session when it comes to infrastructure investment, a generational investment in water, as well as another session to reduce the tax burden on our great Texas, businesses.

Amazing. And what's taking up most of your time session?

Yeah. So, you know, and connected. So, part of the tax relief, you know, that Governor Abbott put together,

something call that he calls the, Small Business Freedom Council, which I co-chair with Jeff Burdette of NFIB.

And the purpose of this, of this Freedom Council is to reduce the tax and regulatory burden on small businesses. And the governor touched on some of the highlights. In a state of the state. But this report, is is dynamite because what it's what it it's going to pave the way for. Laura. In my opinion, this could be the very best session in the history of Texas for small businesses in terms of tax and regulatory relief.

Amazing. The the commission really rolled up its sleeve. And I want to give Gabrielle Gabriela from our shop a ton of credit. He really, dug in and helped, with NFIB, which has been a just a phenomenal dance partner. And all the members of the of the council work with, Adriana Cruz and her incredible team.

That that run Governor Abbott's economic development, office to put together a set of very practical recommendations on how we could reduce, taxes, fees and the regulatory burden and speed up permitting for our small businesses. And and, Laura, we know that, there's an incredible appetite on the state level to, to do this. Like, for example, the chairman of the House Doge committee, chairman, Gio Cappellini, who's a terrific legislator, I think he's going to have a lot of stuff in there that he's going to enjoy.

Oh, I bet yeah, we've talked a lot about that the last week or so. Do you want to touch on your thoughts on the new Doge committee?

Yeah. Well, you know, I, I look at it, there's, there's two pieces of this, that I believe that the, that the, that the committee will touch on one will be to reduce,

regulations on business and the other will be to,

cut government waste in a way that doesn't,

it negatively impacts services.

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So, you know,

obviously the federal Doge effort gets quite a bit of attention. You know, for the first time in my lifetime, Laura, you have a federal entity now, Doge, that is having success. It's there's some controversy, obviously, and there's, you know, there's blowback might be, a word, but this is the first time where there's a demonstration that you could actually cut into the growing federal government.

And and when you look at, on the federal side, a $36 trillion debt, we obviously need to cut spending starting like now. That is inspired a number of states, including Texas, to say, okay, even if we're well run, which we are, even if we have big budget surpluses, which we do, how could we deliver government services, more efficiently?

And when we do that more efficiently, it's good for businesses that, have less regulation. But it's also great for taxpayers because there's more money for things like property tax relief. So we're excited about this. And, you know, we're going to be very active participants as these Doge committee efforts in the state of Texas, go for it.

We'll let Elon, handle the federal side, will participate on the on the state level. I'm excited to see what you do. What happens with all of that? And, Glenn, the last time we spoke, we talked a lot about trade. Yeah. And this new administration's, kind of position on that and potential big changes. So what, since we last spoke, what are the changes been, if at all?

I know you said that Tuesday's a big deadline. So do you want to go into that? Sure. Yeah. So when we last spoke, you know, there was there's the possibility of having, pretty massive tariffs on our North American trading partners that's, Mexico and Canada.

The president has put out a proposal, 25% tariffs. Tariffs are really taxes on Americans, but say 25% taxes on most goods, 10% for Canadian energy that's coming into the United States.

The president suspended those, tariffs for a month. March 4th is the day that that suspension would end. Now, when the president initiated those tariffs, he mentioned two big reasons that he wanted to do so. One, he wanted greater cooperation with both Canada and Mexico to keep illegal migration outside of the United States. And he wanted to keep deadly illicit substances like fentanyl out of the United States.

Both Canada and Mexico, by any objective metrics, are doing more today than they probably ever have done to accomplish both goals. We feel very strongly that we could accomplish those important goals to keep out illegal migration and to keep out deadly fentanyl while we keep, North America tariff free. The US, Mexico and Canada right now are the world's most prosperous trading bloc.

We build things together to compete against China and the rest of the world. And the bottom line law is that if you know and and I'm I'm, I'm hoping we're not going to actually have to go through this exercise. If 25% tariffs are enacted on Canada and Mexico, it will cause serious disruptions to our auto supply chains, our consumer electronics supply chains, as well as raise consumer prices for everyday staples that people don't even think about, like avocados, which I think about because they eat them every day.

Like tomatoes, like blueberries, like beer. I love modelo beer, but that that would get slapped with a 25%, tariff. So we'll see what happens. We know that our neighbors in Canada and Mexico are are working hard so that they could, meet President Trump's desire to reduce illegal migration and keep out fentanyl. But, let's also remember that if, if, if these tariffs are slapped on 25%, which would be, unbelievable, really unprecedented, particularly in the auto sector where parts go back and forth between the border seven, eight times, no one even really knows.

It's very likely that Canada and Mexico will retaliate and we just don't know where they would retaliate. You know, Texas is obviously the energy capital of the United States. It could be an energy. It could be on goodness. Goodness knows what. So, we're very concerned about what could happen. And because of this, we have set up, a coalition Texas Leads Trade.

So for all the viewers out there, I appreciate if you go on to our LinkedIn page, which we keep very updated. Texas leads trade. We built up a coalition now of about 35 major businesses and leading, economic development groups and chambers to say, including the U.S. chamber, which we're really proud to have as a partner, to say, look, we want to keep, North America, tariff free.

It has brought incredible prosperity to the people of Texas. Right now, Laura, we have and this was a record, that just came out about a week or two ago. We are trading with Mexico $281 billion, where we, as in Texas, Texas, just Texas. Texas. Yeah. And for our friends in Canada, that's about, 75 billion.

It's at least 75 billion, maybe up closer to 80 billion, both numbers this past year. Record highs. And what does that mean? That means more jobs. And we also know export jobs, trade jobs pay more. So Texas leads the country in exports. We have more to gain, the most to gain out of any state. When we trade more.

And we unfortunately have the most to lose if we're trading less.

You mentioned the U.S. chamber as a partner. So there's a national interest in this coalition bill, which is exciting.

Well, and our friends at the National Association of Manufacturers, Jay Timmons does a terrific job representing the manufacturing, economy in the United States.

He was actually in Texas, very recently.

And a big item was, and for the manufacturers, a big reason our manufacturers are producing more than they ever have is because of these very tight, sophisticated, integrated supply chains, with Mexico and Canada. You know, simply put, for the prosperity and national security of the United States, we need a strong Mexico and Canada to build things together, to compete against China and the rest of the world.

We can't we cannot do it alone. At least we can't do it alone in the foreseeable future. So we're going to do everything we can to respectfully make the case that we need to keep North America tariff free. I think there's legitimate conversations when it comes to China. I think there's legitimate conversations when it comes to to the EU in terms of how they tax or tariff our goods, how the EU, for example, treats our tech companies, which isn't so hot, so, Laura, we there are points where the president on tariffs, you know, does make sense.

I mean countries should not be treating us unfairly. Whether it's tariffs are non-tariff barriers like what the EU does on a lot of our tech stuff like the EU is poised to do on things like I, we have a right to respond and we should respond. And that's where an aggressive Trump administration could do, our economy, the Texas economy and the US economy a lot of good.

But, going down the tariff road, the tax road with Mexico and Canada will disrupt jobs in Texas and the United States and raise consumer prices and possibly really stoke inflation. Last point on this thing could think through the to the pandemic, the incredible frustration all Americans had because you're getting you couldn't get stuff. The supply chains were all clogged up.

This has the potential if you put 25% tariffs on the supply chains in Mexico and Canada, we might start experiencing some of those frustrations, which also would result in dramatically increased prices for goods like SUVs could go up 8 or 9000 bucks. And I don't think that American consumers want to see, inflation, which is now starting to get under control.

Spike again.

Absolutely. And I know that you do have these national partners. Can you shine any light on potentially where they are in negotiations with this? And the alternative

that is that it's just a great, you know, and I'll, I'll give President Trump is is absolutely an expert negotiator. I would never want to play poker with him.

I think I would lose it all.

So it's hard it's hard to say. And I'll also say that this is a business person who has stacked his cabinet with very successful business people, his family, his financial team is stellar. And we've talked about it before. You know, when you look at the rest of program, cutting government spending, cutting government regulations, extending the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which was done under his first administration, which is probably, one of the most important tax reforms in our country's history.

He's working to extend and improve those. There's so many good things. Energy expansion. I mean, just think about for Texas, you know, overturning really bad policies like the LNG pause, which really nailed the state of Texas. So there's so much good going on with this administration. We feel very strongly if we could help the administration navigate the tariff issue, that we really will enter the golden age.

If we don't, I do believe we'll still enter a golden age, but it will happen, later in this, administration, because there's no way to get around the pain that these tariffs on Mexico and Canada would cause to the US, economy. And our view, we may see it, you know, in real time if I'm right or the administration's right.

But these supply chains are just so integrated that it would really hurt a lot of Texas and American small businesses if if they were just really impacted in a severe way, particularly without a chance, without sufficient time to change course, like if this if, if he really feel strongly about 25% tariffs, I would say do it. I would argue I'd never do it, but say 3 or 4 years.

So businesses would have a time to adjust, make the case. But if you just do this on a dime, it's going to be a real problem.

And I think a lot of people don't know how this would affect employment. Can you speak to how trade would impact that?

Yeah. So we, you know, in Texas, it's a great question.

I can't get precise numbers. I'll tell you, it will reduce employment. How much? I don't know. But the U.S. chamber put out some good numbers. There's about 3.6 million Texas Texans, 3.6 million. That's a big number.

People in Texas whose jobs, one way or another, are tied to trade. And since well over half of our trade is with our friends, when with with with with, you know, Canada and Mexico, you've got to figure there's over a million and a half jobs tied to to trade with those countries.

So, Laura, I'm not saying that all of those jobs would go away. They they wouldn't. I'm not. And, you know, you can make an argument. There'll be new jobs that are potentially created over time, but it could have a very significant, impact on our economy. And again, when we have all of these other things working in our favor, why why risk it?

And and, you know, it was President Trump that renegotiated NAFTA and, and renegotiated it into the US Mexico-canada agreement, which he calls the best trade deal ever. I agree, it's the only trade deal in our country's history that has a small and medium enterprise section. So I, I applaud President Trump for saying that trade is very important to not just big companies, but small and medium sized companies.

It has probably the best intellectual property provisions in the history of the country in terms of a trade agreement. And every member of the Texas congressional delegation from right to left that was in office 5 or 6 years ago, voted for it. So it was a really great deal. Probably should have won a Nobel Peace Prize for it because of its importance to the North American economy.

But, for whatever reason, you know, the president has been threatening these tariffs. And, you know, if it is if it is if it is determined that, Mexico and Canada have stepped up efforts which they have to keep out of deadly drugs and to keep out, migrants who don't have permission to enter the United States.

We should by all means keep North America tariff free. And the American economy, the US economy. Humming.

Absolutely. We mentioned that you have 35 members already on the Texas Street Coalition. So who are they? What types of industries are. Yeah.

So we have great, great companies, like Dell, IBC Bank, which is just, you know, a great leader in, in, in the state of Texas when it comes to trade and migration and just good, sensible energy policies.

It's great. It's great. It's a great bank.

And then we have, chambers, from an economic development corporation from all across the state, that are part of this, the Laredo Chamber was the last one to jump on. And we're really proud of that, because the Laredo port of entry, the Laura, it is the busiest port in the United States of America.

We want to keep it that way. You start throwing heavy tariffs on Mexico and Canada. That's obviously going to affect negatively the trade flows between, Texas and Mexico. So, many of the chambers in the, in the RGV, the Rio Grande Valley are part of what we're doing. El Paso. So the, you know, the, the Greater Houston Partnership, which is, you know, a monster, economic development organization.

They do and chamber, they do a fantastic job. So, you know, the the support in the chamber economic Development Corporation and, some of the really, blue chip companies in the state of Texas that do business in the state of Texas. It's it says quite a bit about the importance of this effort. Absolutely. And it's and it's gaining steam.

So as I've said, we try to keep our website updated. Texas leads trade, but the, the LinkedIn page is, is where we really, the are able to get out the most amount of information. And then the reason why we love the LinkedIn page, Laura, is and people could share it.

Oh yes. Links is great.

LinkedIn is really something. That's the that's one of my favorite or really my favorite social media that I spend this time on now.

It is just so effective of and in terms of it's, it's there's just good information and, and and the the ability to to share it and the ability to understand what your peers are looking at.

It's it's, it's, it's enhanced our ability to perform as a Texas Association of business and ours. Absolutely. That's how we get the most, outreach, actually. Really people seeing things from LinkedIn. Yeah. So we're about to hire a new marketing person. If you know anybody. I'm doing interviews right now. Interesting. Okay, okay. Head that up. So anyone listening, feel free to send your I'm interviewing literally this week and next.

And it's going to be a quick process. So yeah you mentioned there's so many different ports and the bridge of the Americas and in Texas at the border.

Oh, and I'm glad you mentioned this because this is an area where the Trump administration could do an immediate good. So the past administration foolishly, put put a plan together for the bridge of the Americas, which connects El Paso with Mexico to say no commercial traffic.

That's a big, big problem. This is the type of thing that we would want this new administration to say. That's a bad idea. We will reverse that. And, you know, again, we want to see more trade, more legal trade. And, you know, when you think about, what we've accomplished in the last year, I want to give, Senator Ted Cruz, who is now the chair of the US, Senate Commerce Committee, great credit.

He he worked on a bill with, with Henry Clay, our a congressman from the Rato area to to ease the permitting process to build bridges between Texas and Mexico. You know, as we're near shoring, you know, I like and I'm just if I could zoom out, I think every American Republican, Democrat, independent would love to see more trade, more jobs in the United States, Texas and North America as opposed to China.

While that's been happening because of the most successful trade agreement in the history of the United States, US Mexico-canada agreement. So what does that mean, Laura? It means we have much greater flows of trade. We need we need we need more bridges. We need more staff to deal with all this trade. It's like as Texas grows, we obviously need more money for infrastructure, for roads and water.

Same principle as we increase these trade flows. And as we're experiencing record trade flows with Canada and Mexico, we need more bridges north and south. And that was, thanks to the great work of Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Cornyn, Congressman player, and really South Texas members of Congress. They accomplish that. So, you know, our focus is on let's build infrastructure, let's ease regulatory burdens.

But for the love of God, let's not impose tariffs on our two most important, important trading partners. So for the US now just for those watching it's Mexico. It's Canada and it's China. And it's because of the Usmca that China, which was the number one trading partner for the United States, is now number three. And dropping anyone upset about that, does anyone think that that's bad for the United States of America?

Of course it's not. But if we blow up, the greatest trade agreement ever by putting high tariffs, we're going to see some things on trade flows that are going to cost American jobs, American prosperity. And I will say this with 100% certainty. They will be reversed. It's just a question of how much pain the country experiences.

It's pretty severe what you're

saying. And how are people preparing for this? And I guess I get passionate because I do eat avocados every day, and I do love modelo beer. So I will admit there I am biased.

So I am a consumer and but, yeah, I would just encourage people and we're respectfully, you know, we know that the president is a master negotiator and and we know that he has very legitimate areas that he wants to work on to protect American security.

And we're a chamber of commerce. So I'll, I'll I'll also admit that our focus is on commerce. You know, we acknowledge we all live in this great state and great country. We want to keep the United States secure. We, both in terms of, from crime or from, foreign, threats. So our focus is always going to be on the Commerce side with a recognition.

There are other areas of importance. We recognize that the president has more that he needs to juggle. But we're going to respectfully continue to make the case that this would be a misfire in an administration that's focused in so many good, positive areas that we strongly support and want to help the administration along tariffs is an area where we we we think that if you aim that bazooka at our top trading partners, Mexico and Canada, it will cause, unintended consequences that, we would regret as a country.

Could you share a little bit more light into some real world examples of what the Texas Leads Coalition is actually doing for businesses?

so the the number one thing is, is making sure that our policy makers, particularly at the federal level, recognize how many jobs are tied to trade, particularly with trade with Mexico, and Canada.

We're also making sure that there's a better understanding of how these supply chains are so, integrated today that, that these auto parts take Tesla, for example. A lot of their parts, come in from Mexico. Would it be healthy to have a 25% sales tax basically imposed each time something crosses the border? No, it wouldn't it doesn't make that American vehicle manufactured right here in the Austin area, more competitive.

We're also trying to explain on the consumer side, you know, you go to go to your local grocer, take a look at where your produce is coming from at this point of the year. I know where mine is coming from. I know my avocados are coming from Mexico. I know my cherry tomatoes are either coming from Mexico or Canada.

I know my blueberries right now are coming from, generally speaking, Mexico and part of it's seasonal. You know, later in the year they might be coming from new Jersey, but, so we're also trying to explain practically what this means. And, Laura, we're also trying to when you think about inflation, you know, President Trump likes to talk about reducing the price of gas and groceries.

This will increase the price of groceries 100%, period. How much I don't know. I mean, look, this doesn't really affect eggs, but I just bought some eggs. I couldn't you know, I don't know if I may if I had a bigger condo, maybe I get a few chickens. It would be cheaper. Yeah. Let's see what happens. But I mean, Americans don't enjoy that.

We would see other, types of food that we regularly enjoy increase. You talk about gas. Probably wouldn't hit us as much in Texas, because we're such a big producer, even though our refineries do refine a lot of the Canadian, oil, that that comes into the United States. But I can guarantee that in the Midwest, they would see, a price increase in the cost of gas.

I know that in the East Coast, they would see an increase in the price of energy. Why? Canada, exports quite a bit of, like, hydro electricity on the East Coast. That's why senators in the New England area, New York, my birth state, are very concerned about this, because in terms of what it would mean to the consumer, cost.

And I think we need to think about what does this mean? Is it bad for Americans to enjoy lower priced Canadian energy and electricity? But I think it's a rhetorical question.

I mean, I went to Costco last night and fire was $14, the good butter, but really $14 at Costco. Is that from Ireland? Yes. Okay, I get butter.

It's so good. I go to Costco and I get the same butter. It's amazing. But I put it in for ten bucks. Wow, wow. I hadn't noticed it before. And then it spoke it out loud to me and I said, wow, we can't have that go any higher. We like butter in this house. We want to keep what we want to keep.

And and the president in large part, won all the swing states because he made a very convincing case that he was the guy to lower inflation. And I will say that because of his policies, including Usmca and the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act there before we hit the pandemic, you could make an argument that the US economy was the strongest, that it had ever been.

But what were the key ingredients of that? And maybe we just need to go rewind that tape. A great trade deal with our two most important trading partners, Mexico and Canada, a great tax package that dramatically reduced corporate tax rates, as well as tax rates for small businesses, and also encouraged R&D investment, as well as energy expansion.

Basically, let's produce more and more juice, which we which we need, particularly with I now coming online and reducing regulations dramatically. I mean, I think the first Trump administration was probably the best in our country's history in terms of reducing, red tape. And this one is clearly going to be even better. So, you know, again, I, I'm not an economist.

I just try to play one on podcasts and TV. But this tariff, this focus on tariffs on Mexico and Canada, is, is is not a good economic move.

Look, there's a lot of optimism in Texas, in the United States. And, you know, when the president, President Trump took office again for the second time, the NFIB small business, climate gauge went through the roof.

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We want to keep that going. And right now, the fact is, consumer confidence is dropping pretty considerably. Businesses are very concerned about the uncertainty. Businesses like certainty. And the biggest reason why right now is the threat of tariffs on Mexico and Canada and to some extent, the rest of the world. Our focus right now, Laura, on our Texas Leads Trade coalition, is keeping North America tariff free.

And we could deal with some of the other issues when it comes to tariffs for the rest of the world. This is important for the continued, health of the state of Texas. It's important for, the United States to enter the golden age, as the president would like. And we'd all like to say, but we we have some real work to do on the tariffs side.

And that's why Texas, being the top exporting state, the top trading state by far, we feel is the responsibility of the Texas State Chamber through our Texas Leads Trade Coalition to sound the alarms, build a coalition and and and and actually, you know, let's not just think negatively. How could we build on the best trade deal ever US, Mexico, Canada agreement maybe to, allow more workers in for areas like child care, elderly care where we're struggling, like agriculture, you know, areas where we're having a tough time to an impossible time getting domestic American workers.

So we want to maintain Usmca, we want to build on it, and we want to work with the administration and so many of these other areas that are, we're aligned, with, with our with our members.

Well, you are definitely a wealth of knowledge, Glenn, and all of the issues of trade. And how can businesses and legislators get involved?

Yeah. The coalition

I would really appreciate if people just, do a search for Texas leads trade. It's our Texas Association of Business. LinkedIn page also has, a pretty easy way to connect to Texas leads trade. But we we really want to build, that LinkedIn presence as, as as much as we can. It's the fast.

We've just found that that's the fastest way to get the word out. We do put stuff on X, but, Elon Musk isn't retweeting me at this point. So, LinkedIn is probably the best way.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, and we'll definitely have you back to see how this all went and chat maybe in the next month or so and continue the conversation.

Laura, thank you for all that you that you do. And,

I enjoy watching your podcast, probably more when I'm not on it and I sometimes cringe. You're so eloquent and I stumble and bumble a little bit, but, thank you for giving us this great platform. No. You're fantastic. Thank you so much again for joining and CC.

Thanks, Laura.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business, Your grocery podcast for Texas legislation and business. I'm Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege, an AI first legislative tracking platform designed to keep you ahead of the curve. Today, I'm joined by representative Tom Oliverson, representing Texas's 130th statehouse district in Harris County. And he's the chairman of the House Republican Caucus and a practicing anesthesiologist.

He's played a key role in shaping health care policy here in Texas. And today, we'll explore his journey from medicine to politics. His run for the speaker's seat is legislative priorities and his vision to shape Texas's future.

So for those who don't know your background, we do have a lot of legislators and lawmakers and people listening to, you know, you.

But for those who don't yet, you might just sharing kind of how you got into the legislative health care.

Well, so, so those are kind of two different stories. I got into the legislature because I felt like that was God calling me to serve my community. You know, serve him by serving others. And it was sort of a process that, that happened.

But the bottom line is that somebody who was a great inspiration to me, you know, sort of impressed upon me the idea that if you don't like what you see in terms of the morals and ethics and behavior of elected officials, you have to be willing to sacrifice and stand up and be part of the solution. Otherwise, you really don't have the right to complain, because a lot of what you get is based on who's willing to drop whatever important thing they're doing and say, you know what?

The future of our state, the future of our nation is important to me, and I'm willing to give something up on my own what it belongs to me in order to do that. So it really was something. I prayed about it a lot. And, and it just became very clear that that's what God wanted me to do.

You want me to serve him by serving my community. And so I've always approached it as a mission field opportunity, as part of the reason why you were talking earlier about getting killed and getting wounded and stuff like that. I think if you're going to be a lawmaker, you have to have prodigiously thick skin and a very short memory.

Because people who are your enemies can suddenly become your allies. It just depends on what you're working on. And that's just the nature of the business. And so it's like, I don't. I've had people, even colleagues, you know, throughout this beta race or things that people said about me that were untrue and nasty. And I'm, I just don't choose to dwell on that because I think that's it's counterproductive.

And it's just it's just you got to have the skin, you know, the game. It's it's it's a, it is full contact. Right? I mean, it is there's no question that if you think AMA is violent, run for office and see what people actually say about you and you'd be shocked you didn't know you were that bad of a person until you ran for office, right?

It's the way it's, So anyway, I, I am an anesthesiologist, and board certified. I am actually the third anesthesiologist, literally from the same group of 35 doctors in Harris County to successfully run for office in the Texas Legislature. So Kyle Janik is one of my former partners. And he's I think he's still practicing on the Lakeway now.

But he, you know, obviously served in the legislature and was our HHS commissioner for a time. John Zerwas is another partner of mine. And then I'm, I'm the third. So so I'm number three, right? I don't know if there'll be a fourth, but we have, you know, it's a it's an interesting thing, I think in, in Doctor Bond and, and I talk about this a lot.

I think doctors make good lawmakers because we're problem solvers. We're used to listening, gathering information, diagnosing and then treating. And so I think we were good at policy because that's sort of our default mechanism of thinking is to identify problems by gathering information and then choosing to act on those things in a scientific way, in a very scientific way.

Right. So and I think that's and that's also really, really important is like you show me the data. Sure. And, so, yeah, I'm in my fifth term. And, you know, just doing, you know, what I can to make Texas a better place. You mentioned health care. You know, I've, I have championed in my five terms or four terms completed this term, starting now.

I have championed a wide variety of things to try to help with health care costs. I'm a big believer in price transparency. I'm still waiting for the app that basically, you know, for all the tech people that might be listening to their if you really, really want to make it big in the world and make a lot of people really happy, create an app that functions very much like a Yelp or an Edmunds that essentially allows people to search for discounted healthcare prices for services that they need to get.

Doctors says, I need to get an MRI. Well, there's an app for that, right? But there's not really an app for that. But if there was the only way to really lower health care costs in this country is to get consumers of health care to think like they're actually consumers of any other product out there. And health care is the only sector of our economy where you don't actually know the cost of the goods and services you're purchasing at the time of purchase.

Imagine if you went into a car dealership and you said, okay, I'm going to buy this car. And the dealership says to take it home and you drive it. And then 30 days later, you get a bill in the mail and you find out how much the car costs, and you had no idea it was going to cost upfront.

We just had the Texas Association of Health Plans on. Jamie didn't, and she was saying just that exact stuff. I mean, it's it's it's absurd. It's really absurd. Now, health care is complicated. And there's a lot of middlemen and little women in health care in terms of barriers between providers and patients. So the problem is like, nobody buys a car with insurance.

And so you have all of these dysfunctional incentives that are serving as basically barriers to consumers actually shopping, because they're a lot of times they're not using their dollars, they've met their deductible, they don't care. They just go wherever the doctor tells them. They get whatever they're told to get. And the doctors are not ever given any information about price, because, you know, that's the latest, greatest thing.

And you want to live, don't you? And so it's like there's just no, there's a complete fiscal disconnect for health care, except with, with the exception of cash pay, like direct primary care and things like that, or when you haven't met your deductible and then you care a lot more about what things cost because you're like, what is coming out of my pocket now?

So you had some good ideas. Why don't you start a startup? Have you thought about that? How I helped him, I don't well, I mean, and I will just say, like, I'm certainly willing to be the the silent partner or whatever. The idea guy, but, I do believe that doctor know I'm not. I don't have that business background, but I feel confident, like your husband, that I could just, start a startup, you know?

And I know how you know, I'm not a finance guy. I'm not a business guy. I'm a policymaker. Domain expertise. That's. That's where you're coming up on our expertise. That's going to be my contribution. Is that expertise that's helpful. You know and here's don't know what to build. Yeah. Unless yeah you're right. So so we've done in the sessions that I've been here we've done we've so we eliminated surprise medical billing in Texas in 2019.

That was Senator Hancock and myself working together. And I would say still to this day that is probably in the health care world. That's that is my greatest contribution to state law. And the thing I'm most proud of, because we we actually took a problem and completely eliminated it almost overnight. And our idea was so well thought out and so good that the federal no surprises Act is modeled after the Texas law.

Wow. Congressman Brady took our law that Senator Hancock and I passed together to Congress and gave it to Chairman Neal, and it became the Brady Neal compromise that broke the stalemate. And that is the No Surprises act. So it's the only time that I can actually say that I had a hand in creating federal law is I had a policy.

I found somebody in the Senate that wanted to work with me, and we worked together. We didn't always see eye to eye, but that's the process. And you work it out and we ended up with something that has withstood the test of time. That is very good policy by anybody's standard. That's also federal law. That's amazing. Yeah. And are you still practicing?

I am, I'm actually, believe it or not, today is HCA day at the Capitol. Okay. Right. I am actually the chief of anesthesia at an HCA hospital in my district. And how on earth did you do that? Well, running for speaker. And you have legislative session going on now. What is your schedule like to be on to of that?

It is a one day at a time, right? I think, you know, that's that's something I learned a long time ago. But sometimes you just have to break things down into the days and you have to just look at the day ahead and what the calendar is and, and move that direction. I mean, no, I'm not saying don't plan right.

You need a plan. But I mean, sometimes you really have to in order to avoid being overwhelmed. In the busyness of your day, you just have to take things a day at a time, an hour at a time, a of the time. Just focus on the present with one eye towards what's the next thing coming up, but be focused on the present and just, you know, that doesn't leave a lot of time to contemplate the past, right?

You just keep moving forward. Absolutely. And that's that's kind of how you do it. Right? I think also because this is not something that I decided to do because I just always wanted to be a state officials, you know, but this was something I felt like God was calling to me, to do. I believe in following in his will, you know, he's equipped me and given these the patients and the grace and the time and the, you know, sympathetic partners in my business and everything, to be able to pull it all together and get it done.

Yeah, I still get to do family stuff, too. So it's fun. And you're three hours from here roughly. Yeah, it's about two minutes. Depends on how fast I drive. Have you ever talked on this podcast about the little, little trickery? And it's not really trickery in state law where it talks about not you can't really law enforcement can't really impede, state official to or from the capital.

And that gets interpreted to I can drive as fast as I want. Is that true? I have I will say that I think there are limits, to reality. And I think if you ask the average state trooper, they would say, listen, if you're driving 100 miles an hour, I'm pulling you over. And I don't care if you have soap plates or not.

I'm telling you to slow down. What's the fastest you've ever done? I can't say, but it's. I just I used to have an idea. I used to have a. So I drive an F250. Okay, so. But I did used to have a little Mercedes convertible. I was one of those ones that had that big biturbo, you know, their AMG engine and everything.

So, that they can go pretty fast. Very cool. So do you ever do road trip days up here and then go back? Yes. During interim I do that all the time. If you just have to come up here for the day, the only time I don't, I and I don't want to offend anyone who's from Austin and maybe listening to this, but but my home's in Cypress and my family's in Cypress, and I really am a family guy, and I don't really want to be up here any more than, like, what I have to be up here.

So it's like, it's tough. I'm just here for the day. I'm not the guy that comes in the night before and tries to find like three happy hours and then dinner and then after party, you know, I found stuff. Yeah, there are members like that in the legislature. I don't know, I want to know. I want to get my work done, do my policy, go home.

And so I'll come up for the day right now, I'll leave when I'm done. Okay. That's Zoome has actually been a revelation because, see, like when I first joined the legislature, there wasn't a whole lot of this. This was it wasn't that long ago. It was 2017. There was not a whole long a whole lot of meetings by video conference shows.

But it so you physically had to be here or they had to come to you and you had to be in your district office, and it was all face to face. But now I think people are still like, you know, even though we're out of the pandemic, we're like, well, can we just do a zoom, right? Oh, absolutely.

And so, yeah, I'm a big fan of all you're trying to do is exchange information and that works too. What's a typical week like for you? You know, my height of session say month for now. Yeah. So a month from now it probably looks like I'm rolling in Sunday evening, I'm going to my meeting with the Texas Conservative Coalition, DCC, which is sort of my all my friends and co laborers.

And, you know, we're talking policy and what's on the calendar and all that kind of stuff. And then I'm getting up, Monday morning and I'm coming to the Capitol. You know, we usually have a mix of committees. Again, this is all new for me. I kind of got sent back to square one, you know, I and it's like, if you're playing monopoly, I hit the, you know, the go, go back, you know, to the go whatever or Chutes and Ladders or whatever.

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It's like 200. Yeah, I didn't collect 200, but I got sent back to the beginning and, so I'm everything's new to me this session. And, but, yeah, normally you're, you're in committee in the morning, and then you go on the floor and you have a calendar and you pass bills, and then you go back to committee afterwards.

And, you know, when I was a committee chair, I think the latest our committee in insurance ever went was 10:00 at night. Oh, that's not bad. And we and we do a lot of bills. I mean, insurance gets a lot of bills, but I try to be very methodical, very focused. You know, we want witnesses come up. We we have a timer.

Right. And so we, you know, we we work through the agenda. And I think, you know, I'm very proud of the fact that our committee always heard a lot of bills work through the policy. Good questions, very diligent work. But we didn't just hang out all day and all night, you know, let one bill just sort of consume the entirety of our day.

Now, there's some committees, like State Affairs or Pub Ed where you just can't avoid that. I start state affairs on the Senate side and you just can't. You can't. It was very fun. But the two three and meetings I'm not I'm not. No I'm you look, I'm a I'm a practicing physician. And I certainly have stayed up all night in my career on many an occasion taking care of sick patients.

And but I don't just look forward to that, like part of the job. Like, I'm kind of like, well, let's see. Be up all night, not be up all night. How about we opt for not be a bother? Yep. So, yeah, still get the important work done. So going back to your time and, all these things, into the speaker.

Timing of that was also just fascinating as I watched the other year play out, what made you first, you know, what made you run for speaker?

I mean, and I have to say, as a disclaimer and I think a lot of people don't realize this, I was one of the people who was there at the very beginning of day feel and speakership and believe very strongly that he was the right guy to take over for Dennis.

But

I think a lot of us felt like Dennis had done a really good job managing the house, and especially coming off of my first session with Joe Strauss. I felt like Dennis was more conservative, and I felt like he had a better relationship with the Senate, and I felt like the House was being seen and being respected.

And I was devastated, you know, when he wasn't able to continue as speaker, and I think we all felt like David was the next guy. And I think to his credit, I think he from a policy perspective, I think speaker feeling achieved some great policy wins. I, I'm just going to say I, I think impeachment was a terrible mistake.

I don't, I you know, I was not there and I knew that was going to be known ahead of time. I mean, I was well known that my son was graduating from high school that weekend and that, you know, I'm sorry that this bomb drops out from outer space like 72 hours before you actually decide to do it.

But I'm not missing a once in a lifetime event with my oldest child. You and I just wasn't into it now, so, you know, wasn't going to let them vote for me in my absence, having not heard the conversation because it clearly was not uncontroversial. Right. And I just I felt like there were some decisions that were made that, were unrecoverable errors.

You know, my dad's an air former Air Force pilot. And one of the things I learned growing up is that sometimes in flying, you can make a mistake that is unrecoverable. And no matter what you do from that point forward, you're never going to get control of that airplane again. And I think that unfortunately, that's what happened, and I didn't realize it at the time.

I was really unhappy about the impeachment thing, and I was really unhappy about the fact that we couldn't get to a resolution on the school choice. And I was willing to sort of sit there quietly and bite my tongue because I thought maybe there's something that people don't know and it's going to be okay. And clearly it was.

I mean, the primaries were brutal to the speaker's team, and I think that was a clear indication to me that my worst fears were realized and that we had to have a change. And it was an unrecoverable error. It was a flat. I mean, I think one of the ones that your pilots would recognize is that airplanes do get into what's called a flat spin, and you can't get out of that.

And then my dad flew a force in the Air Force, and there were certain things you could do in that plane that if you pushed that plane in a certain direction, did the wrong thing, you were going to crash no matter what. And you may not always be able to punch out. Well. And so like, I felt like that's what happened.

And so I felt like somebody had to stand up and say, okay, this is gone as far as it can go. We have to put forward another idea. And I think, my hope was that that would be recognized and that, you know, people would say, yeah, okay. And I think there were a lot of people who said, yeah, finally, especially people outside the building were like, hey, finally somebody listening to us.

I've always felt that there's been this secret tension. Maybe some people know about some down in the house where people feel like it's the house against the world. Once you're in that chamber, it's like everybody doesn't like us and screw everybody outside of this building. And I just really think that self-destructive, counterproductive philosophies. Right? I want the house to be seen with the same level of competence, respect and willingness to work with grassroots and listen to the people of Texas.

As I think the Senate gets a lot of credit for. And people were angry and the people were mad. And so, you know, I felt like somebody had to stand up and say something. And I didn't see anybody else that was willing to do it. And I just said, look, I didn't come here to be served. I came here to serve.

And if it all falls apart on me and tomorrow, I'll be okay with that. At least I have the courage to stand up and try. And you were the first person to put your hat in the ring, and it was right. And I and I will tell you, I articulate in a very simple platform based on some things that I thought were real obvious.

And my, my belief in my fellows was rewarded because it wasn't very long after that that a group of lawmakers came together and they put out the contract with Texas, which quite frankly, took every idea that I had said, this is my platform. This is what's important. And they took it and ran with it. You know, we and I would say, like, if you look at some of the things that Speaker Burrows has done, he has embraced a lot of the things that we've talked about as reforms.

So in some respects I may have lost, but I also felt like I won. We did reform the House. We did get some things, you know, we didn't get everything we want and nobody ever does in life. But, I mean, I do feel like we moved the needle at the end of the day. And the movement is growing, right?

There is a strong desire to reform.

Oh, absolutely. There's been a huge shakeup. So what, was your thought with the timing as well, of everything from the time that you came out and announced? And then, you know, I think I two others during that same was it four months? Well, actually so Shelby Slawson, yes, announced on the same day is when we impeach Ken Paxton a year earlier.

And, and for her, that was a very momentous day. She was there on the chamber, saw it play out. And, you know, you can go back and look at her statement, although she talks a lot about that.

I just felt like at the time, I mean, I really I didn't just sort of say, hey, I want to do it, or, you know, somebody put you up to it or whatever.

I mean, I really thought about it, but I was I think the main thing is I was searching for answers as to what is the lesson of the primaries here? It was the most prodigious loss I've ever seen in my career of Republicans in the primary, many of whom I fought really hard to try to keep. You know, these.

You're my friends, right, colleagues? It's a tough thing to lose somebody that you work with and then have that. You know, I learned very quickly that people come, people go. That's the nature. And so you new people come in, you work with them. Sometimes they end up being better than the people that preceded them. Right? It's just the way it goes.

But I felt like somebody, I felt like the grassroots were trying to tell us something, and I felt like what they were trying to say is that we're not happy with the status quo anymore. We were begging for change, and the timing, to me was important. Again, I felt like the House needed to respond with the message of reform, and I thought it it needed to be somebody who was credible.

You know, I felt like it needed the first person out of the gate had to be somebody that would be seen as somebody who could actually win, who could actually do it, who had some respect in the chamber, who had a, you know, how to, you know, track record of working with everybody. I have a very bipartisan track record.

I was going to. Yeah. Mention that. Absolutely. So people would say, well, why are you suddenly against spending Democrat chairs? You work with Democrats all the time. And I'm like, look at it. It is. We are literally like the last man standing in the States in terms of having this bipartisan chair arrangement. And we're not setting the example.

We're sort of at the tail end of history on that. And, it's dysfunctional. And as the parties have moved farther apart in the middle, you know, the mushy middle has kind of winnowed out and doesn't really exist anymore. It becomes harder and harder to not find yourself in situations where you're stepping all over each other in a shared leadership thing.

The, so anyway, the timing for me really had everything to do with the fact that I wanted. I felt like somebody had to stand up and it had to be somebody credible. And it was like, you know, one of those here I am said, or kind of things where I was willing to make that sacrifice and come what may, give it my best shot

So the lieutenant governor has come out and said that we're the only state where the Democrats elect the, speaker. Debris signature.

I think the reality is, is that you have a chamber of 150 people who vote, right? And you need 76 to win. And it doesn't matter where the 76 come from, right? At the end of the day, that's the only vote that matters.

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Now. We've had meetings before the meetings, and people have been critical and we've had caucus meetings.

And, you know, obviously people know that didn't play out because we had a caucus nominee and he didn't win. But at the end of the day, I want to be really clear about, the fact that the only vote that matters for speaker is the vote that you take on the House floor on day one, and Dustin Burrows won the vote fair and square.

He did. And, the majority of the people that voted for him to the lieutenant governor's point were Democrats. But he is the duly elected speaker of the Texas House.

Absolutely. How much time on the back end was it negotiating with your peers, to get to this, this final vote here?

Well, I mean, I'm just going to be honest, I our caucus is is still healing.

We were very divided last year, and it was it was really hard. And, there were those that like the status quo and just want to keep business as usual going. And then there were those that really want to change, and it kind of rocked us to our core. And I think as a family of Republicans, we're still processing now and still working through that.

You don't have the kind of seismic shift that we had in terms of, people losing. I mean, this wasn't a case where you had 25 people that retired, right? You had a ton of people and quite a few chairmen that were just flat out defeated, and not by 100 votes here and 100 votes there, but by solid margins.

Right. And so we're still working through all that. I mean, the whole process, you know, of getting to the point to where we actually chose our speaker was painful, I think for all Republicans, regardless of who you were supporting, both sides felt like they were being they were doing the right thing, and both sides felt like they were being attacked for doing what they thought was right.

And I do think that, you know, I don't think we're at a steady state at this point in terms of like, what is the new house look like, right? When they feel and became speaker of the House, he came in. And by that time, essentially everybody had put their sword away and the hatchets were buried. And, you know, people they may not have all been on team feel on, but it was no question that the majority, was was with him, and supporting him and Dennis Bourne and had a similar thing.

Right. And so, you know, we come into this session and I think in my experience, one of the unique things about this session is that, you know, the speaker, he's a he's a very conservative guy. I like Dustin Burrows. I would consider him to be a friend. He's a very conservative policymaker. He came into a session where essentially on day one, he didn't know if he was going to be the speaker.

That didn't happen since, to my knowledge, like the 1970s, where you had a truly contested. Speaker five all the way to the House floor, we know who's going to win. So you think about all the things that you have to put in place before you come to the House floor, and you start leading staff policy, you know, all of these, these directions that you want to go, who your leaders are going to be.

Every speaker I've ever served under up until today has had that at least a month before session began to work through all that. And he's literally doing it. He's, you know, it's like, you know, assembling an airplane while riding a bike at the same time. Right? I mean, it's it's literally multitasking at a very high level.

Very few people could do that and do that successfully. So I give him a lot of credit. He's made, some very difficult choices and, and really kind of put together, I think, a very good team of folks around him. And so, you know, he's done very well. And I just I hope that people that are listening to us understand how unique this is and how difficult of a situation this is to find yourself in where you're you're at, having to multitask at this very high level.

You're having to run the chamber while at the same time trying to set up a chamber that's really hard and pair that with all the new influx of new members and all the new members. And, you know, you still have, legislative priorities for our party. You have the governor's emergency action items, which include some, you know, some pretty big issues that are, I think we would all agree, are unfinished business.

You know, like ESR is. It's called choice, right. And he's managing all that. And, so, you know, I think he deserves a lot of credit for that, that that's, that's a lot. Now, you know, to put all that together so quickly, so much change, tremendous change. Tremendous. You know, out with the old and with the new, right?

Absolutely. And the new members, how are they all handling this? Because usually it's a huge, you know, learning curve for all the new members. But there's so many and so much. Yeah. How is that I mean, there you know, I think new members are always coming in drinking from a firehose. That's how it was when I did it.

You know, I think, the House Republican Caucus is doing everything it can to be a resource to those members and to train and equip people to be highly effective for their district. We are, as a caucus, singularly focused right now on getting our legislative priorities from our party accomplished, getting our governor's emergency action items accomplished, and equipping our House Republican colleagues to be able to lead on those issues, and making sure they have the resources, making sure that everybody can get to where my my hope is that on all of these things that we're you know, we may not always agree on the play calling, but I want everybody to be on the same

playbook. Right. And to know, like this is the bill, this is what we're doing. This is, you know, and so to me that's good leadership. Right. And that's what I want I want the caucus to be that that place. So, you know, I want us to just like right now we are united in terms of focusing on the policies.

That's what everybody's you know, whether you, you know, wherever you were on the speaker's race or any of that kind of stuff that's behind us now. We have work to do. We have priorities to pass the Senate off to a head start. They always get the benefit of of that. And, and we have a little catching up to do, which we will but we need to be focused on our priorities right now.

And that's what the caucus is doing. And what are yours this session? I know three months really left. So there's a couple of things that I'm really laser focused on that I think are really critical, and they're a little bit out of the box for me. One is an insurance bill, but the other one that I'm really excited about is

I have a bill that would establish an interim commission or, you know, sort of fully operational commission to study the education code and also the federal education requirements.

From the standpoint of how does this impact teacher job satisfaction and retention of teachers? Because what I hear from classroom teachers, including my wife, is that we keep passing HGVs and subs and we just make teachers working conditions miserable. And we put a lot of things on them that have nothing to do with actually teaching their, you know, reporting requirements and testing requirements and special education requirements.

And, you know, all of these other things. And it just it makes their job so hard. And it's everything from, you know, like my wife just despises this Pass program that English language arts teachers do, which is, you know, for kids with English as a second language copying. And it's it's just government bureaucracy is really what it is.

It's fill out the reports, grade the tests, busywork. And meanwhile, your class is over here on pause while you're doing all this stuff. For the 1 or 2 students that in your classes are needed. Discipline is an issue, right? And some of that is tied up in the codes that we have. You know, there are things, some of which are federal requirements and special education code that essentially prevent teachers from being able to take disciplinary actions against kids that may even physically assault them.

And we're talking about a teacher feeling safe in their own classroom as well. So the problem is education code is dense. It's complicated. It's like 5000 pages long, right? You don't just pull a string parachute in in the middle of a session and say, I'm here to save the day and pull a string and fix that. It's more likely that you're going to pull the wrong piece out of the Jenga puzzle, and the whole thing's going to fall over.

So what we need to do is, is create a commission funded, let them hire the experts, put some teachers on it, get some members together, give them the entire interim to study the issue. Figure out how we can actually improve the working conditions or classroom teachers so that people actually enjoy their job a little bit more or a bit more.

Hopefully. And that's my number one goal. And the other one has to do with insurance. Property casualty rates are really high, and a lot of that has to do with things that are just, quite frankly, completely beyond our control. Inflation is high, building materials have been scarce, and weather patterns in our state have been such that in the last five years, three of the most expensive storms, from an insurance loss perspective, are all here in central and North Texas.

And they were not named storms. They were straight-line wind and hail. That's devastating and really expensive. And insurance is just a factor of like, it's it's all math, right? Like how much your insurance cost depends on the likelihood of a claim and the severity of a claim period. And so you can't control the weather. No one's invented a weather machine.

We can't control inflation. But what we can control is the severity of the claims. From the standpoint of how well is your house bill? Is your house built to withstand weather events or does it any time there's hail, your shingles get damaged, you need a new roof. So there are things that we can do to fortify our homes.

And I'm not one who likes mandating things, and I'm not doing that. But I have a bill that would incentivize the, the state would create a fund through the Department of Insurance to help subsidize the cost of making some of these structural upgrades to your homestead. That makes it more resistant to claims. And what that does is it lowers your cost of insurance right off the bat by about 20 to anywhere from 25 to 50%.

It increases the value of your home through a certification program by 5 to 10% of your home's total value. Suddenly increase lifetime certificate transferable to the next home, and it affects the community rating for the entire area. So everybody, even the people that don't undertake resiliency, start to get some relief from their property casualty rates. We don't want to be like California where they rates that.

And then companies like USAA and State Farm just say, you know what, we're out of here not writing anymore policies in that state. That just decreases competition. And it makes it less likely that you're going to have, competitive prices in the California Palisades Fire. You know, let's talk about that one. You know, I think from what I've read, about 50% of the people have insurance through the state's insurer of last resort because it's not affordable in any other means, because they have completely screwed up their insurance market by overregulation, you know, responding to increases in premium overregulation.

Carriers lead the market. You can't make them stay. So then the state's left holding the bag. And basically who's holding the bag. The taxpayers. So it's another unfunded mandate, on the government. And so, you know, people's taxes now have to go to pay for other people's property casualty insurance. And because of a loss, you know, that's just not a good way to, solve that problem.

So that so I have a bill that would fix that. Alabama's done it. Florida's doing it. Other states have done it. And it really seems to be having very positive effect in, in a market friendly way.

Exciting. And, the three months left to do it. Yeah. How do you feel about the biannual legislature?

Oh, I like it.

Yeah. I mean, I as I heard somebody say when I first came in the legislature, I'm glad you guys only meet once every other year because I think you can do less damage that way. I have friends that are in legislatures that me, you know, two years, like, every year. Right. And usually what they have is like a short cycle on a long cycle.

And I mean, I think one of the things and it gets back to, you know, the house is in is busy right now and all this kind of stuff. There are so many things in the way that our government has set up in Texas that keep our state free and prosperous by virtue of the fact that is, it is actually difficult to pass legislation in Texas.

It's meant to be. It's an entity. Right. And so that's one of the things meeting every other year. Yeah. You get a lot of bills filed because everybody's got to get it out of their system. And it's a great big funnel and a lot of stuff doesn't make it through. And that keeps our state free, prosperous and lowering regulatory burden.

Down a little bit. And we talked a little bit about that. The tech and health care. Yeah. What do you see. Do you see an opportunity for AI. Oh it's

freaking totally like I think the thing that AI is not fully being utilized for anybody that wants to start a startup, just remember you. You heard it here.

The first person that develops a comprehensive AI to help healthcare providers deal with prior authorizations and utilization reviews, and automates that system completely.

That's a game changer

in the health care industry. You know, prior authorizations are pretty universally used. It clearly lowers the cost of health care delivery from an insurance perspective, because it puts a barrier and a delay in the delivery of that care, and you know it.

They're not going away. They're burdensome. Most private practices have to have several people that are full time employees that do nothing but deal with that stuff all day long. That is a major reason for drive that drives consolidation and across mergers and acquisitions in our health care market space vertical, consolidate and horizontal consolidation, you know, private equity, all that stuff, hospital, practices, all that stuff.

A lot of that is driven by the complexity of the overhead that is necessary in order to be able to run a medical practice, whether you're a primary care provider or a neurosurgeon, everybody has to get on the phone with the insurance company and deal with, I get approved for this. Can I get this prescription? You know, it's it's constant.

If you could use AI to actually do that, it would be a game changer. Very cool. So I hope somebody is listening to this that will say, oh yeah, that's great, I'm going to do that. Right? Yeah. Because that would be a game changer for us. I think that would actually put downward pressure on the numbers of mergers and acquisitions and horizontal vertical consolidation in health care, and I think it would actually lower health care costs.

Very cool. Yeah. I hope people are listening I hope so. This is food in Texas anymore. Yeah. So yeah, for sure. What is kind of your long term vision for health care in Texas and where do you see the big change? Yeah. So, I am a big believer in competition and transparency. I as I said earlier in my car analogy, I mean, what I really want to see in health care is a marketplace of competition.

We have an insurance system. I don't think we're going to get rid of that anytime soon, because the fact that matter of fact is that our health care system in America, although health care systems around the world may be cheaper per capita, they don't offer the same level of easy access, high cost cutting edge treatments and therapies that we have in America, even in places where you could say, well, you know, like the European countries probably have comparable technology and capability, all of that hyper expensive care is rationed.

I grew up in the UK, so you know what I'm talking about under the NHS. Yeah, exactly. So you know what I'm talking about. So, you know, if you're, you know, 75 years old and you want to have a quadruple bypass, that is harder to get, you don't just sort of show up and have that done.

It's harder to get that approved than it is if you're 55. They my grandparents have to get private health care because they can't get an appointment quicker. So I don't want to I don't think that we're going to junk the system that we have. I am always frustrated when people use these catchy little phrases like Medicare for all and stuff like that, because I think that's basically a misnomer.

We do have single payer health in America. It's called the VA medical system. And I think if you talk to a lot of bands that use it, they will tell you it's great for primary care access and pretty much sucks for everything else. And if you have cancer, if you need a hip replacement, if your gallbladder or your hernia is bothering you.

Yeah. I actually worked at the VA one time when they actually ran out of money. Oh wow. So they they operate on six budget annually. So when they run out of money, they basically just shut down all of their outpatient, you know, and, day surgery and inpatient stuff. So, like, they had a whole surgical units on the fifth floor is in Houston that they just shut them down and just reassigned everybody.

And they just told all patients like, hey, I know you're supposed to have a replacement next week, but better luck next year. Well, you know, we'll wait till we get next year's budget and let's say like that's Medicare for all. Right? There. If you're going to if you're going to have a one size fits all health care system, like a single payer system, the only lever you have to control cost is rationing care because there is no competition.

A little medical story from the UK. So Christmas one year my brother got some steak stuck in his throat. So we go to the ER in the UK and the doctor comes out and says do you have £0.50 for the venue. Shame. And we said sure. So we said okay we get a Coke and we said okay.

And we paid for the coke and said okay drink this. And that was what was supposed to just launch it. It actually did. But now what's the big. Easy ologist? I'm horrified. I'm thinking about all the aspirational shit that's so I don't tell you a funny or not funny story, but interesting story. Just. Just a scary story.

Maybe a little bit, for some of the listeners out there. But one time I got called in the middle of the night for an impaction, that food kind of bolus the thing or whatever. And we went in there and it wasn't actually a food bolus that was causing the pain and in the spasms and all that good stuff, it was a single bristle from a wire grill brush.

Oh, no. And we were actually watching it on camera like a sewing needle going in and out of the tube. Oh, wow. And it was just stuck crossways in the esophagus. And it came off of, you know, it was a grilled steak, right? And it was legs that got stuck on the grill, and it came off on the steak and the person ate it.

And so never, ever, ever use a wire brush to clean your grill or, you know. Yeah. Well, now that is you two might end up that way. Yeah. It was I mean, we were just literally watching it on video and like I said, it was like literally like watching a sewing needle on a machine because it was just poke, poke, poke every time there was a movement of the tissues, you know, it's just us, you know, going right into the tissue.

That sounds so painful. When we pulled it out, it was like that big, not big at all. You know, that's pretty fucking

So, with the Make America Healthy Again campaign, I you've got a lot of thoughts on health care. What are your thoughts on it?

I could not be more excited about RFK Jr being our Health and Human Services secretary.

I am not a Democrat. I have never voted Democrat in my life. With the exception that there was one judge one time I had actually served on a jury on his bench and, you know, in his courtroom.

And so I knew him and I had a lot of respect for him. So I might have voted for him at one time. But I am super excited about RFK Jr. He, he says a lot of the things to me that need to be said, you know, when I was a medical student, I went to the best medical school in the state, hands down.

Everybody's top list. I got one hour of nutrition in four years. I brought this up the other day. I I've had a lot of physicians. I have a bill for that. Oh, it. So I filed a very straightforward bill that basically would require every medical student going to a publicly funded medical school in this state to have a minimum of one semester of clinical nutrition.

And the curriculum may not be written by or influenced by a pharmaceutical manufacturer or a food and beverage company. Well and it has to talk about normal dietary concerns, disease states where diet becomes important, common additives and toxins that can be introduced into our food supply, as well as some of the ideas that are coming out now about mitochondrial health and energy levels and things like that.

There's a whole frontier of medicine out there that has to do with wellness. And I say it's a frontier only because the the American medical community, for the most part, has not really embraced it. And we're still stuck in the whole issue of, you have diabetes, you take the thousand dollars a month till you know you're obese.

There's a drug for that. I have a good friend who's a plastic surgeon and the woodlands area and, he always would tell me says, you know what the real secret to weight loss is? It's like, no, because it's more tricep and less bicep. And I would say, well, what is it? What does that mean to me? Be like, push away from the table, and stop bringing the spoon to your mouth, sir.

And I'm like, well, you can always count on a plastic surgeon to lift you up that. But and he's like, hahaha, right? But I mean, it's like, yeah. So diet and nutrition and so much of chronic disease is really all about choices that you make over the course of your life. That leads you to that decision. And something that I've been campaigning on for years.

Another bill idea, this one I filed before. But food is medicine and it's and the kind of food that you eat and the kind of food that you have access to eating will largely determine the state of your health, not just in the immediacy, but moving forward as well. I mean, we have problems with things like, you know, maternal mortality, for example.

It's good to look at a lot of the maternal mortality is tied up in poorly managed chronic disease, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure. These conditions that all impact maternal mortality are directly tied to diet and so much lifestyle. Yes. And yet we have all of these patients who are on state assistance because of their socioeconomic status. They're poor, right?

They have poor access to health care, and they don't have a lot of resources. So we put them on Medicaid. Okay, great. I'm glad we have a safety net program that provides for pregnant women. I'm a pro-life guy, and I think pregnant women should have access to health care, not abortions, but health care. And so you're you're managing this chronic disease and you're worried about the health of the mom and the baby, and yet you're not addressing the dietary issues.

And so part of that is, and I'm, you know, this freaks out conservatives when I say it's like one of those dirty words you can't say like he said it, but I'm going to say it. There are social determinants of health. There are people in this state, especially those who are on, public assistance from a health care standpoint or covered by state health benefits.

Medicaid, Chip that live in a community where they don't have access to good nutrition, food deserts are all food deserts are real. I don't care what anybody says. I've seen it firsthand. I know it's real. And look, you can't be arguing at one side of your mouth that we're all Maha this happy about Maha woo. But I'm perfectly okay with a pregnant mom who basically has access to McDonald's and a convenience store, right?

As a source of nutrition. That is not going to lead to good outcome. So instead of paying for all these million dollar cares, why are we providing nutrition? Why are we helping people learn how to prepare food in a healthy way? Why aren't we, I mean, is it cheaper to provide groceries or pay for those epic. And, I listen to a lot of podcasts on this so I could go on all day about.

Yeah, I mean, this is a huge thing. So, so food is medicine is big. It's very bipartisan. I'm very proud to say that, there's a Democrat senator. His name's, Nathan Johnson. Right. Senator Johnson, incredibly intelligent man. We don't always agree on policy, but when we agree on policy, I mean, I love working with the guy.

He's one of the smartest guys in the room. And, so he and I are going to give it another shot. Great. We're going to try to get soon as medicine down again. Yeah. I mean, there's so many things that we need to do. You know, Brian Harrison and I, at one point, session ago, we're talking about, like, why we need the FDA.

Why? You know, the FDA is so corrupt and so crooked. Their only real success was in the 1960s with thalidomide. And everything since then has been, you know, mediocre at best. And there's a lot of corruption there. You know, a lot of people work in the agency and then go work for the pharmaceutical industry and, you know, they they literally the FDA creates supply chain shortages by virtue of the fact that they shut down supply because they find something they don't like, because they only allow a certain number of licenses, because, you know, all this stuff, I mean, pharmaceutical research, cursors manufactured in nations that don't like us very much, like China.

How do you so we wanted to create a Texas Drug Administration and just cut the feds out entirely and just say, look, Texas doesn't need the federal government to regulate food and medicines. Let Texas run. Texas Senator Creighton used to say that all the time that Texas run Texas right. It's a good thing. How do you feel about this experiment?

I don't know that the food pyramid is accurate. It's totally right. Yeah. The stuff that I'm reading and again, look, I don't want you to think of me as an expert on this because I'm not a by admission admission as a doctor, I was never taught nutrition. I don't know what I don't know, I learning just like the rest of you.

But I'm telling you, I've been doing some reading. I've looked at some of the studies that are out there looking at mitochondrial health and how that impacts chronic disease, and how we essentially overfeed ourselves chronically, and that that leads to chronic disease. And so, you know, I really think we need to be talking about these things. This needs to be part of our core curriculum, and our medical practitioners need to be educated on the importance of nutrition as a means of preventing chronic disease, and not just waiting until people get really, really sick.

Almost processed foods are just poison, and anything we do is just poisoning ourselves. And then and then you get to like the food. So I have an uncle. He's, you know, gone to be with the Lord. But he was a farmer in Minnesota. My whole life, you know, growing up, we'd go see, you know, uncle Bill and Mary and I could drive on tractors and he, you know, grew soybeans and corn.

Look, a lot of Minnesota farmers, right? But he won't always say to me, he's like, Monsanto is literally going to kill everybody in this country. He's like with their genetically modified organisms and spraying everything with roundup and all this stuff. He's like, this is just terrible. He's like, and they're increasing yields left and right, and everybody's happy because there's more grain in the barn and people are getting paid more.

And he's like, but they're poisoning us. I don't like corn. And he was saying this in the mid 80s. And so so now here we are, you know, 40 years later and it's like the chickens really have come home to roost. So I hope we ban all of those chemicals on our food products. I hope we ban all GMOs.

I hope we go back, you know, RFK Jr introduced some very interesting ideas about, you know, incentivizing, these regenerative farms. I think that's what they call them. Right? And they talking about bringing back small farming. And that's the other thing my uncle used to say all the time is like, commercial farming is literally killing us. Like it's literally putting us all out of business.

It used to be a farm was 200 acres, 300 acres, and they were all family farms. And now they're like massive corporations and they're farming like 5000, 10,000 acres at a time, you know? And like that, that's just that's part of the problem with our food supply. Absolutely. And everyone has the luxury to eat local necessarily if they're not around it.

But and look, the last thing I want to say is, the vaccine issue has to be looked at too. I think Covid kind of really put a exclamation point on this, but the VAR system is an unmitigated disaster. There's no reason why. Just because you make a vaccine, you should be immune from liability. And I'm not anti-vaccine.

I don't want to come across to say, I think all vaccines are bad. You know, polio is a very debilitating disease. When it was common, right. There are things that we have done with vaccinations that have decreased mortality overall that are beneficial. But I don't understand this whole business of trying to protect people from liability for their products.

I do think that people have also been injured, and I don't think we've actually done a very good job of acknowledging that. And, you know, I can't remember her name, but in in everybody in your podcast, that's a tech person knows who I'm talking about. But, RFK as vice presidential nominee, she, you know, comes from Silicon Valley.

I think she was married to one of the Google founders for a while. Okay, I remember her name, but I heard her speak and it was brilliant. And she was talking about how her child had all these vaccinations. And she's like, you know, when you're a mother, you just know. And she's like, literally a day later everything changed.

And she's like, the worst thing about it is the fact that, like, because of my social circle and how everybody was so pro-vaccine like I was shamed into not even being able to consider the possibility in the process of working through my grief as my child growing up with autism, or which I think that's what she said. But it was like clearly her child had some severe consequences.

She's like, I was forbidden from even considering the possibility that maybe it was related to the fact that they got all these vaccines on one day. They used to be spread out, I know, and so it's like like we need to be having these conversations stressful. And it is. And I'm going to tell you something that I strongly believe and that is that science isn't afraid to be challenged.

Real science and real scientists don't care about the political implications of their work, because science is only about the relentless pursuit of the truth through rigorous and unbiased observation and repeated study and repeated study alone. Leading to the same conclusions, is the only thing that moves a hypothesis to a theory. The reason, the reason we know gravity is gravity is because you can test it and I can test it, and we can get the same result.

And so science is not afraid to be challenged. And there are far too many people in the scientific space, particularly with regard to food, medicine and vaccinations, who are deathly afraid of having their work challenged. And that is unscientific.

well. You are a very busy man. But I hear a rumor that you played for as long as

I have been known to dabble. I will say so. Two things about my guitar playing is that, number one, I'm not very good at,

And number two, I'm left handed. So all my guitar and I don't play the Hendrix way, where I play upside down and backwards on a restrung right handed guitar. I actually go out and buy left handed guitars. And they're harder to come by and very expensive. But I will say, as a shout out to them, because I really think very highly of them.

There is a guitar store in my area in Bellaire called South Park Guitars, and it is exclusively a left handed guitar store in your district. That's how it's not in my district, but it's very close. And it's, So I have that a loyal customer, there. So you can get a left handed guitar if you're a left handed guitar player.

I like grunge, really. You know, I'm a kid of the 80s, so I was. Yeah, I was starting college in 1990, and so I was there, you know, when Nirvana's Nevermind album came out. And Alice in Chains is one of my all time favorite bands. I think Jerry Cantrell, such a great guitarist. And of course, you know, Red Hot Chili Peppers are really like John facility and, you know, just that I mean, that is really my, my genre.

Do you play in bands? I don't play in the band now. My son, my middle child, Logan, is a very accomplished musician. And that kid can just hear it one time, pick it up. And he's he's a bit, He he's a bit like the, David Crowder. I don't if, you know David Crowder. So David Crowder has this amazing musical talent where he's like, from what I've heard, he can he can just pick up an instrument and just start playing it.

You know. And my son Logan is one of these kids where it's just like he's not made a musical instrument, that he can't just sit down and teach himself to play. Oh that's impressive. So for Christmas, he asked for a banjo. Oh. So we got all kinds of, you know, bluegrass and hillbilly stuff going on up in his room upstairs now because it's you know, all of a sudden it's about the banjo.

And I'm like, why do you want to learn to play the banjo? He's like, well, because I don't have a banjo. Good for him. Just, you know, so that's the new thing right now. So he's actually very good. Yeah. But yes, I have a guitar in my office. I think music is very soothing. And, and so I have been known to sort of collect my thoughts and think about how I'm going to play this belong on the House floor while trying to strum a few bars from, you know, Interstate Love Song or, plush by Stone Temple Pilots or rooster by, Alice in Chains or we're all trapped in capital late one

night we'll bring team by, hopefully hear you play some tunes. Hey, maybe that sounds good. Yeah. So where can your constituents come up with all your legislative updates and everything you're working on? So, we try to be pretty active on social media. We send out newsletters, and we have, you know, Facebook and all those kind of things.

And,

you know, we're we'll try to keep everybody updated on the bills that we're working and filing. I didn't I talked about the top two, but, you know, we're we're kind of known as being one of those workhorse type offices where we carry a lot of bills and we pass a lot of stuff. So hopefully that'll continue this session and we'll get a lot of things done.

And that I really hope. On behalf of, all my teacher, constituents and friends, I want to pass that bill in the worst way. I mean, we talked about doing all this stuff for schools. We just need a bill that is really singularly focused on making teachers lives better. That's working conditions better. You have your wife can tell you firsthand experiences, too.

It's great. She can, you can. So it's been a pleasure having. Yeah, it's tough to talk about that, what with any final thoughts before we wrap up? Yeah, I just really appreciate the opportunity to be on. And I think, you know, I know everyone's like, well, you know, well, you know, slow start and all this kind of stuff, but there's still a lot of session left to go.

A lot can happen in 100 days. And don't kid yourself or the house is going to pass a lot of really good bills this session. A lot of, you know, we I do believe we're going to walk out of here and all of our legislative priorities will be completed. And we'll have a very good conservative session. And I do think our speaker is a very conservative leader.

You know, he's the guy that basically passed the Death Star bill. Everybody forgets that that he's the guy that, you know, said, no more silly local ordinances than this, than the other crazy stuff. We're going to have some regulatory consistency. Huge undertaking. Pulled it off. The Death Star is alive and well. So I think we're going to get good things done.

And from what I've heard, he and the lieutenant governor are having conversations working together. That was the other thing during the speaker's race that was really important to me. Is you can't have the leadership between the two chambers constantly fighting and not willing to talk and meet and discuss. And I think our current speaker is, from what I understand, is, he's off to a good start with civility.

I mean, there's conversations, there's policy discussions. And so I hope that continues. And I hope that, that bears fruit, you know, and I believe it will. Well, that's good to hear. Optimistic and there so thank you again for coming on. You're welcome everyone listening. Make sure to subscribe. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business where we explore the Critical issues shaping Texas and beyond with leaders, experts, and changemakers. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege. And today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Jamie Dudensing, the CEO of the Texas Association of Health Plans, and Blake Hutson, director of public affairs. Today, we'll cover a range of topics from Medicaid mental health coverage to the individual insurance market and how Texas can work towards a healthier, more affordable health care market.

Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on and, we'll start with again, you want to introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about you. And yeah, I got to hear, my name's Jamie Dudensing, and I'm the CEO of the Tech association health plans and how I got here. Well, I started off as a registered nurse.

I was a labor and delivery nurse in LEC Texas. I really cared about patients and what was happening to them. And somehow either really lucky or unlucky to meet the speaker of the House at the time, who wasn't, at the hospital. I was exactly who I am today. Got on a soapbox, had an opinion about these, and he said, well, would you like to work at the capital and he was like

We had a job opening up to be the capital nurse. And I was like, well, okay. I didn't know you couldn't just call the speaker of the House. So he said, okay, just call me the next day and we'll set up a meeting. You can't just call think you they to crazy like no no, I promise.

He said to call him. I run into him again later. At that time, I think anyone knows who Mark Bell is. Mark Bell was working for him. Was like, give him your phone number. We're going to call you. And I ended up coming down and interviewing him. The capital nurse I had interviewed with Lieutenant Governor, the speaker, and we both had to agree to it.

And I was like, this is amazing. I gave my two weeks notice about Dawson. My first week, I was, lucky enough to meet the governor, George Bush. He became president that week. I got to sit on the floor for his presidential speech. I got to sit on the Senate floor for Rick Perry giving his speech to become governor.

Wow. And I was like, wow. This is my first meeting. I'm never leaving. You know, fast forward, I guess, almost 25 years later and said, wow. Yeah. That's amazing. And what got you into. How did the segue go from nurse to being the CEO of Health Plans? Well, so, you know, I was interested in health care policy quite a bit.

And I was the Capitol nurse. I was lucky enough that they would let me sit on the House floor at five every day, and all the members would come over and explain what was going on. I loved all of it. Thought, okay, I really want to do this. I'm going to, you know, risk my career and change everything up.

Went to the LBJ school in between sessions and came back and was like, you need to get a job in the Appropriations Committee writing Medicaid budget. So I had what got started there. And then I hung out with the team for years. And, as things you do not look old enough for any of this stale here, I don't know how all the big old pickleball is amazing.

So, I worked in the Capitol for about 13, 14 years, and I was lucky enough that when it was time for me to move out, I, you know, really cared about coverage, keeping coverage affordable, Medicaid coverage, access to long term care services. All these pieces. And the association was the one place that touched all of. Like it's the one place, I think, outside that you could really get to advocate for coverage, care, lower prices, affordability, all of those pieces it touches.

So many lives. So I've really had such a great opportunity almost, to continue that same journey that I was doing in the Capitol, outside of the Capitol. You know, that's an incredible journey. Well, I love it. And you've got your my right hand man partner right here. Blake. So, Blake, how did you, how did you start all this as well?

Before I start working with THP and with Jamie, I worked for several years for different nonprofit organizations doing consumer advocacy work around health care. So I work with Consumer Reports and AARP, American Cancer Society, and this sort of always focused on how we can make health care more affordable. And now I would always have bill ideas and and bring them to Capitol Hill and, you know, try to find allies to help me get bills passed and, and it turned out that most of the time, the only ally I could find that could really help me move a bill was the health plans that also cared about affordability and really trying to get premiums down, get

costs down and get out of pocket costs for consumers and patients. And, and so, you know, after after working closely together for a couple sessions on some really big bills and big consumer protection bills, I said, let's do this together. And Jamie, so this is together, and we've been doing this now for a few years and, and really still focus on the same things, you know, how can we make coverage more affordable?

How can we get more people covered? It's sort of just the big challenges out there. Very cool. And how long we've been working together? Just over three years. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to do our second session now. So it feels like forever. Yes. Sometimes more. Sure. Well, 130 day session feel like. Yeah. Years. Yeah. Marked into one piece.

So I'm sure a lot of people most familiar probably with the employer sponsored, insurance plans. So what kind of trends are you seeing in the space and challenges that you may be seeing? Well, I think what we've seen in Texas for coverage is really interesting. So our plans cover almost claim over 20, right? But people get their coverage all kinds of ways.

Right. So like your grandparents may get their coverage of Medicare. You know, we've we've heard about Medicaid coverage for individuals that are low income. But most people in Texas get their coverage in their job. And that's actually the first thing they think about getting a job. Do they have good health insurance coverage? Right. It's one of the number one reasons why someone picks a job behind salary a lot of times.

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Right. So employers are who really provide coverage on I think Tulsa 14 on in Texas. So they're paying for most of the coverage in state taxes. And what we're seeing is super interesting. So for employer based coverage here, large employer, they've got so many employees that they're able to do new and interesting innovative things out. Things say it's like Southwest Airlines, right.

Or Tesla just right. They can do new and interesting things with tons of employees. Right. But then you've also got small employers, our association small employer. Right. You have ten people. 30 people. Sure. We are four people. Right. Health insurance is a lot harder to create small where you don't have the same flexibility it cost most of the time.

Well, we see that same thing happen in the markets, right. So large employers have also like ability. You can do these things in small employer. There's just not much. So we've gone from I think about 50% small employers of cleaners offering coverage to 25%. There are only two brands players down to Texas. If you move over to where if you buy insurance by yourself, we call that individual coverage.

We have 15 companies okay. So you have like completely different things happening in the market. That's happening and it shows really challenges. But all of it stems from especially for small players. It's just the reassignment. And the number one thing that drives up the cost of insurance prices and that's you're just seeing prices, just like we talk about inflation happening, that affordability crisis is worse, inflation is substantially lower.

And so, a real big goal for US recession. A lot of times when it comes to coverage and protecting affordability is one say, you know, don't like don't mess with employers. We're doing a great job. But for small employers, we could do more. We could help them make it more affordable. So what can we do to do that.

So we can bolster that where we are having a hard time specifically this session. What legislation are you aiming to pass for this type of issue? Sure. So transparency has been a big theme the legislature's been focused on for the last several sessions, trying to make health care prices more transparent and trying to get consumers more engaged to look at prices, make smart choices.

We have come a long way, but we're not go all the way there yet. You know, patients really need to be able get a good upfront price so they can go out and they can they can kind of count on that being the final price at the end of the day for their health care services, and they can be smart shoppers.

The other big thing for us is really around surprise facility fees too. And this is fees that are getting added unexpectedly to things like your annual checkup, your well visit, where you thought that was just preventive care. And next thing you know, it has a hospital sort of related fee attached to it that you didn't see coming.

We think the legislature ought to look at that this session. And quality of care, transparency is a big thing to, flexibility and how you can design a health plan. What we're finding when you talk to employers, they say, well, I can't afford that Cadillac kind of plan, but can I maybe I could, I could afford something that was a little more narrow but met my needs.

It's like an offer to my employees. So these kinds of things are what we're hearing will be focused on during a session. And you all are boots on the ground. I know we see you testify a lot, all your team, and you have a lot of priorities. One of them I know we talked about is, I think healthier Texans.

So, how do you think, you know, what steps are needed to achieve that, do you think in Texas? Well, I think workforce is a big piece of it. And, Jamie, do any serves on the governor's task force, or, expanding our health care workforce or looking at nursing and these kind of issues anyone expand on?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I do think we talk about coverage, but you've covered none of it so far. You also have access to care, right? So we have to have enough nurses, doctors when we talk about that. And mental health providers, I think you see a lot of the health care profession going into specialties, but not necessarily those we kind of call them the quarterbacks of health care.

Your primary care nurse practitioners, these places where you you have someone that you coordinate all that here. Take the time that you need to help keep you healthy. So a bill that you just brought up earlier that I think is super interesting, we've talked about this for years. It's like let's it's paper, sit here and let's you know right.

Let's all right. Let's talk about health care. Right. You know, the old way in healthcare is that you get paid more the security. That's right. The more procedures you do. Right. So you're just constantly shelling out money, but only making money if you actually didn't do a good job for your patient, that's just entirely the wrong incentive. So there's been this entire movement we call it, you know, the technical values can and, where you could pay a doctor, a provider a completely different way.

And you just say, look, we're going to pay you a lump sum payment. You'll hear about this a lot of times with direct primary care, right. Or concierge, you're like, oh, we're just gonna pay you amount per month and you do a good job. We're going to hold you accountable for doing a good job. Like they'll be, you know, you've got to make sure you see the patient, you take care of them.

But we're not going to sit here and be like, did they come into the office? Did you talk to, did you text them? Did you have telemedicine? Just what did you do to take care of that patient? Did you have the time to claim all the administrative cost of the processing and going back and forth the insurance company, it goes away.

You just get paid that lump sum amount? Well, that focuses on someone's health and all that provider, reducing the burden and get pay and they make more money. The healthier they get that patient, the more money they do. Right. But interestingly enough, as he was just talking about, Texas is just we've just ended up a place where the insurance market is pretty overregulated to a point where you can't have innovation.

So we technically can't do that. So almost you can do it in almost every other state. You can do it with Medicare. You do with Medicaid. But you can't do it in insurance and tax, because somehow we have made insurance so regulated and so rigid that you've lost can't have innovation. So when he was arguing about like, we would have bills that allow, you know, to allow someone to look at quality or prices or, you know, pay your doctor differently.

You can't do that, right? Yeah. Wow. Right. So all of the things that are the smart, innovative things that will actually changes to keep everyone healthy, those are the bills we're trying to get through this session and we've got great partners on it. So for example, the family doctors, the primary care doctor partners with us. They're like, yes, we want to be paid differently.

We would like this arrangement. So we're working through that decision to try to get rid of these barriers so that we can focus on that. So what I'm hearing is it's more about the preventative care than the sick care. And why is it that Texas does this so differently to other states? And is is this like the one unique state or are there others that follow this suit?

You know, it's just insurance laws are, you know, 30, 40, 50 years old. Sure. No one, you know, no one was thinking, this is what this is what it would look like at this point. Right? Or and that's why sometimes we warn people about, you know, other new innovations that are coming, right? Don't overregulate them too fast because you're going to get away of that of all of the, you know, new technology, new innovations happening and the same things with health care.

A lot of these are all laws that were in place when 20 years ago, right. For a long time in Texas, we actually blocked telehealth, right? It sounds crazy to say that today, but we literally blocked them out up until around 2017, 2018. Right? So it wasn't that long ago that we said, oh, this is a innovative good thing, right?

So you just you see this throughout, whether it's a licensure for health care providers, whether it's our regulations here are just all the obstacles in the put in way, in the way that just stop us from being innovative and creative and kind of getting stuck in that, you know, kind of sick way. Interesting looking at this. And Texas is booming with business, right, where so many new, people, so many people moving here, new business and forming all the time.

So what ways are you working on kind of giving more, options to choose from for employers? Well, that's I mean, that's sort of gets back to what Jamie is talking about. And you, you have a health insurance market in overregulated. It's sort of I characterize it as kind of a dinosaur in terms of just being really prescriptive on what you can offer.

So some of the suggestions that we'll bring to the legislature is looking at the parts of the health insurance market that aren't regulated by the state and saying, hey, look at all that innovation happening over there. Why don't we open some of that up for the market, the Texas, the Texas Legislature and Texas Combative Insurance do regulate. One of the big things in this sort of will blow your mind.

We actually can't give someone a health insurance company, can't give someone a lower copay if they choose a lower cost in-network health care provider. And in health plans are saying, we really want to do that. We want to give you that incentive. We want to share savings with you. But the block from doing that, and again, it's just these old relic relics of an insurance code that are standing in the way.

So there's some ideas that have been filed that are out there to address these kinds of things Jamie are talking about. It really falls into this bigger bucket of, we just have an excessive number of mandates in the legislature. And, you know, we've been kind of waving that flag for several sessions now and saying, hey, you're really mandating away a lot of innovation.

You're mandating in a lot of cost. And, and we're kind of asking for, some change in that direction. This session. Interesting. What's been on the topic of mandates? So what have you seen in terms of mandates imposed this last session or recent years. Yeah. So so it's a little disturbing. So you know Texas bills itself as sort of the land of low regulation, low, private market intervention.

And the last two sessions, there's been 110 mandate bills filed in the legislature. Combined, 23 of those have become law. You know, each 1st May not add a cost of its big on its own, but collectively, all those mandates add up to a lot more costs. Those mandates range from, you got to add these benefits do to your health plan.

But it's also more technical things about you have to design your health plan exactly like this, or you can't do these things to go after fraud, waste and abuse, which that's always a frustrating one for us because everyone knows there's so much fraud, waste and abuse in health care. Yeah, there's bills on every session that stand in the way of us addressing that for why waste and abuse?

So it's really it's really gotten out of hand. There's a stat out there that we like to point to. The Texas is third in the nation for the most mandates to go above the Affordable Care Act. Again. So just keep that in mind that the Affordable Care Act mandates here, Texas mandates go above that and quite a few.

So, there's some opportunity address that this session. And how do you plan to address some of these mandates? Well, one is just to kind of stop the problem. So I think a big bill that has been filed already this session, and it's been discussed for a few sessions is okay. But, you know, going back to that theme of transparency, when bills are filed, a lot of times they manifest.

Right. Sure. The legislature has the legislative budget board will come in and say, here's what this is going to cost taxpayers, right. And we'll provide that estimate for them for their own insurance. Right. So this is what is going to increase the cost of the employees and us, this is what it will increase the cost for parents of teachers, retired teachers and current teachers.

And so they'll look at that and say, oh, now we know what the impact of this is, right? So now we know what this is doing. So we're not going to do that, or they'll see the cost added to Medicaid and they'll say, oh, we shouldn't do this in Medicaid because it's just not worth the money. But it's and so they'll carve Medicaid out.

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So carve employees, their employees themselves out, and they'll bring the teachers out and they'll still apply it to all the employees because there was no transparency. Anything that took place. And so we think a real solution to this, and we've seen it in how many other states, 29, 29 states at some point, and other states have at this moment process where it says, we're going to give you the full information for what this does, not just for your employees, but for everything within Texas.

So that you can make a full decision. And, you know, so maybe that means that they do want to pass it, right? There have been, you know, definitely benefits that have been out over the years that are valuable, decrease the costs over time of health care, make someone healthier those pieces. But you don't know unless you have the information to make that truly thoughtful decision.

Is this really worth the cost to everyone? So we think it's important if you're going to get the information for you and what it cost for you, you should also look at the cost. Make that cost transparent for all employees, employers, etc. that way you can make a more thoughtful decision. And we found that to be really effective in other states for them, instead of just passing a lot of these things, really deciding what is the most important, it doesn't mean they don't ever have discounts.

That's more. Is this one really important? Does it matter or is it worth the money? Or a lot of the bills that you're working on passing the session, you know, refile bills from the past that have kind of moved a little bit? Or are they new ideas? What are they? Oh, I mean, I think a lot of them are refiled, ideas that have been around, for example, he was talking about like the, the fact that we can't lower copays if you go shopping.

Real simple. Fact that we just can't pay, a doctor a lump sum amount per month instead of, you know, forcing to go through all this because it's, you know, arrangement can't do that right now. So that's a refile meant that we were talking about having a that transparency process and the cost of legislation piece of it.

But there are new bills, and really a big part of what Blake and I worked and worked on long before we worked together. He was, consumer protections. Yeah. So, you know, we worked on prohibiting and in Texas together and making sure we knew which of these are intent. Yeah. Services explained. Surprise billing okay. So surprise billing is, you know, you've got insurance and you have your network of providers, but you you don't have an emergency.

You have a hard and ambulance takes you to a hospital. Maybe a hospital is the network, you know. Right. And your insurance company is going to pay that amount, but there's no limit. Or there used to be no limit to what someone can charge on top of that. So like, I'll go back to like, Covid tests. I don't know if people remember the newspaper article where it was like a Covid test was the price of a Tesla.

It was a $30,000 Covid test for a drive through. Wow. When was this then? Covid during Covid? I didn't have that right. But here's the thing there's no limit to what you can build something state. It doesn't matter that that's completely insane. A $30,000 drive through, you know as well. How is that possible? There's just no regulation. I see right.

So there's nothing around ethical building on that, right? So there's no stopping that. So with surprise billing if you could out-of-network I hopefully doesn't have a contract with the provider to make them hold them accountable to that. So it was just the moment was the patients were getting I mean, do you remember some of the stories you got?

Like, there was the gentleman in Austin that had the heart attack that was like a $65,000 prize bill. And so fast forward the state of Texas, it was near Hancock and Alderson. Finally, we in 2019 was one of the first states in the country. Representative Alverson to prohibit transferring. And just if we're going to take the patient over no, you cannot, for that matter.

And we're just going to make the insurance company and the provider work it out. We're going to leave you out so that that's a huge consumer protection. So we still are working on that. So when he brought facilities, that's the news across America that I see. So like when I went to my annual visit, which is just you're supposed to be you're out of pocket costs.

There is a 15 minute visit. I got a $500 facility. Yeah, I was on top of it. And it's not covered. It's just this added extra bill. That's a surprise. And you're seeing people get $5,000 facility fees for visit $2,000 facility fees for a visit. It's you know, we're watching newspaper articles, story after story of people going to their doctor one month and it being a couple hundred dollars for just the regular visit.

They go the next month and there's another $2,000. That same doctor, same doctor, same sir, different ownership. No, it has absolutely paid well. Yeah. Yeah. So like that's our you know, we're working with all the patient groups. Stakeholder groups again kind of create consumer protections around those new types of supplies. There are. Can you explain a little more, for how it kind of works currently for coverage for individuals.

So individuals looking for to shop for coverage. How is that working now and then? How do you think that could change? That's actually, you know, you bring up a good point. That's a great story. So, everyone knows Texas has one of the higher uninsured rate, uninsured rates in the country, and maybe the highest rate in the country.

But we've actually started to bring that down. And one of the ways that we've done that in Texas is the number of people that go out and buy coverage on their own in the healthcare.gov marketplace. That number has gone from about 1,000,000 in 2020 20 to about 4 million today. So we've had real big growth in that. Right.

And it's a great stories. You get 15 health insurers offering coverage in that market. Now. You have lots of options all across the state. What's happened is that that coverage has gotten a lot more affordable. And it sort of goes back to what, Jamie, I always say when coverage is affordable, people really want to buy it. They want to be covered because they know that they don't want the risk of really high cost, unexpected procedures, high cost drugs, these kinds of things that they may need.

They don't want to get an unexpected bill for those things without coverage. So it's been a great story. There is some sort of debate in Washington around will they continue those tax credits to help people buy that coverage and keep it affordable? We'll see how that goes. Our plans is 100% supportive of continuing those those tax credits and making sure that those 1 million Texans don't lose that coverage.

So but it has been a great story. And these are people that that don't have coverage of their employer. You know these are entrepreneurs. So like you guys here right that are looking for coverage. And you know it's it's difficult to get it from work. So you got to go buy it on your own. And you need options.

You need to be affordable. So is there another reason that that's increased a lot and people moving here or what do you think. No, it's really so, you know, prior to the ACA passing along with 6000 people because that coverage, and the individual market, then you saw things, you know, people preexisting, protections, you know, and then guaranteed issue that meant that anybody didn't get cancer before anything was to go back coverage.

So right it so now it's universal. You can go buy it with the tax credit. This is the big one. One of the big reasons employers are able to provide coverage is it's one of the largest tax credits. They're able to write so much of it off the tax. You as an individual that you're an entrepreneur want to buy coverage.

There was no tax for you. Now there's a very sizable comparable tax credit for individuals that lowers that cost of the coverage. So you can have that happen in the market. And that means you're no longer forced to work for someone, right? Jobs. You can start your own business. You can do something like this is like with saying and take the risk and not be because you're trapped, because you need that employer's coverage.

Right. And so those tax credits drop the average premium. So didn't take them. It didn't make it cheaper necessarily, but it made it cheaper for and for Texans to on an average of $50 an wow. Right. So for $50 a month you have really broad health insurance. It'll pay for your emergency room care, your drug hospital care. If something that happens.

And so yeah, we've just watched I mean like I say, we watched it be around 600,000, jumping up into 1.2 million for about ten years, went to suddenly 2020 to 2020, you know, five now for many people. Wow. Well, I'm curious to know your thoughts on kind of, mental health and health care for that sector. So, you know, Medicaid coverage in general, what are kind of the biggest challenges to insuring people in the mental health space?

So I, you know, I it's so fascinating to learn that mental health parity did not start from the late 2000. I don't know that substance abuse was even seen as like a health care issue with that. Like that was the first time people start getting acceptance abuse as a clinical issue that you treat. Right? The same way mental health, you start seeing that growth happen.

So really what I'm seeing is, you know, the movement for mental health coverage is such a strong link the last 12 years now in the private market where you've had all these bills passed, you have comprehensive coverage, but something that's really difficult is in Texas, 50% of kids are covered. Maybe. Right. So that's half your population of children.

You also have your, you know, your elderly population that has disabilities, right? They're covered. Right. Medicaid doesn't have the same parity requirements. So they don't cover everything the same way as we would in the private market. So the private market. Yeah. You a, you know, cover a 30 day hospital thing and it'll cover any hospital. Right. So like a traditional hospital or a mental hospital, it'll cover your if you go to a psychiatrist or psychologist.

Right. But it'll also cover other types of treatments in between that are mean. They're more intense, but you're not being forced to be in the hospital. Right. So it covers all those benefits Medicaid does now. So I'm correct in saying that Medicaid does not cover, for the most part, mental health or health care. No, no, it does cover it covers a 30 day hospital stay, but it limits.

If you go to a true mental health hospital, you here itself. You look at this arbitrary for no reason, and those people will leave that hospital and then have to be read it again. Makes no sense. And then Medicaid will cover over here, you know, like counselor or like, you know, like that office visit thing. But there's something called intensive outpatient services.

So if I think about it, I'm a mom, right. So think about your mom. And your child has pretty intense mental health issues, right? It's not oh, they're not sleeping well at night. It's, you know, they've been diagnosed. They've been hospitalized before, you know, how am I going to deal with this? If there was a way to keep your kid at home at night and save and take them somewhere every day, they have that same intense service that they would have had in the hospital.

But you get to bring them home every night when it makes you feel better. Sure. Right. When you like to have that option. Also, that option is cheaper for tax payers. It makes no sense, right? That isn't that the cheaper way to do it? Or you could have that same intensive service all day at your house and it may still be cheaper than that 30 day hospital stay.

But you know, it's complex. I one thing I find with healthcare is it's just so complex it's difficult to get into. And as a result, it's just it takes time for, you know, all the stakeholders and everyone to be like, hey, this doesn't make complete sense. You know, we just been, you know, 2 or $3 million a year here on this little thing.

You know, you can have services at home, not the hospital has a benefit Medicaid program. But, you know, these things happen over time. But that's a big one for mental health decision. I think that a whole lot of stakeholders care about I think so. And we're seeing it with just the times changing. You said early 2000 was when this started even coming up.

Is it just social stigma of what that meant, like mental health or what do you think the reason was that this is wasn't even talked about before that, you know, I think that there's a difference between substance abuse and mental health. Right? So you had mental health was on track. That was really like, we're just going to house people in these large institutions and not like that.

Right. And we all, you know, hope we all became better people and realized that was not a great thing. And there are ways to treat these. You've also seen, you know, the innovation around you, mental health crisis that happened in the last 15 years. So we had before you had really no help because really that sometimes do you really, you know, help progress and change and advance very fast.

On the substance abuse side, I think it took a lot for conversion, wasn't just a lifestyle choice, and it was also a disease. Right. And so the packaging of those two things together and understanding that getting past those stigmas made a huge difference here. But as we were talking about earlier, you know, when you have antiquated health care programs that were built 40 years ago, it's just hard to, you know, for change, right?

You say like, these are all the new things. Now we're going to fix this and make them innovative and more flexible and have it make sense of. Right. So with, what role does the Texas Legislature play in improving access to make you think? Well, I mean, they're the ones that decide what benefits are, make it so you have so many that are federally required, but those, for example, those mental health benefits, that's a choice that they make.

It's all on the state level. That's right. So mental you know, Medicaid is a federal state partnership. But the states really have a lot of ownership flexibility of deciding what populations are going to cover, how they're going to cover them, what benefits are going to cover the rates that they're going to pay providers who can participate in the program, all of those pieces.

So it's a huge role by the state to basically administer this benefit for probably the most vulnerable Texans. And I know the associations are based in Texas. Do you do any federal level, monitoring or work at that level as well? We do. We mainly we mainly focus in states because insurance is mainly regulated states. Right. It's not.

And then the Affordable Care Act, you see, most of it happen at the state level. Medicaid happens most times. But we also work on Medicare and Medicare's entirely federal on those pieces. And then, you know, he was just talking about the tax credits for the full coverage. The decision to continue this is coming up. Okay. So if Congress continues those tax credits for individuals, we'll continue to see people get coverage and buy coverage.

If they take them away, you could easily see, you know, those 3 to 4 million people who've been buying coverage no longer have health insurance. The other thing I'll add is that a lot of times what you see is the states. It can be a little bit of a lab for what ends up in DC. So for example, enterprise billing, we let on that in Texas with Senator Hancock, everybody his bill here, it was not long after that that the federal government sort of felt that pressure.

And they finished off those protections. I think you could see the same thing here on that facility fee issue. They've been talking about it in DC. A lot of times they'll talk, talk, talk will do. And then it'll kind of move the needle in DC. So I think you can see some of that, that there's always you always kind of keep an eye on how those conversations are going.

Between DC and states. Interesting. Well, shifting gears a little into the I side of things. And you mentioned kind of AI and regulation and health care. Definitely had some testimonies and opinions on that. So I'm curious to hear more on, you know, how, big the balancing act is from, you know, innovation and regulation with AI and then the role it plays in, in health care.

So, and that's brought back what do you see? Kind of is there anything that's going to stop, this innovation and growth? I mean, there could be, right? I mean, we just talked about how overregulation can stifle innovation, right? Right. So if you come into, you know, before we really understand, they'll come in and overregulate it too much.

There's, you know, you're probably going to stop the innovative part of it that doesn't mean you don't need protections, right. So sure, it's a balancing act, but it really needs to be a thoughtful one. And for health care, it's more important I you know, I can't think of a nother industry that's that's just ripe for innovation. I think 50%, what we kind of call like prior all requests to come in through fax machine information, right?

Right. I mean, I don't know when we all passed electronic medical records, but it's still all come through. Fax machine, you know, faxes all the time. It's just it's really old. It's antiquated. There's also ridiculous amounts of data out there. Right. You know, that someone came into the hospital. Someone left the hospital, and you hear about all the time, I don't know, how many England would you ever had in the hospital, bill items.

They'll be getting ready to discharge. And there's no plan, right? There's no coordination. The plan didn't know that. The primary care doctors didn't know that. Right. Like this is all happening. They may need it. Some changes at their house, the ability to have all this information move more easily and shared in a way that makes us all smarter and better at patient care, has so much potential in health care and does anything else.

I would also say the same thing on race views. You know, you hear that up to 10% of claims out there could be fraudulent or have problems. That's a lot. Yeah, it could be really smart finding these things. Oh absolutely. Right. The data side of things and I there's just so that you're just talking about an area that's rich with a lot of, paperwork, administrative burden and data.

Right. That's not easy to find. And so there's such options I but if you prohibit all of that, then you've got a problem. Flipside, though, when it comes to people's lives, like actual patient care, you know, we I think the phrase that everyone uses for AI is having a human in it. Right. But I think the great thing already that exists for insurance and for a lot of health care is that we're already required by law to have a human right, so it doesn't matter what technology comes out.

Whether it was telemedicine, right, was like chronic medical records or AI, you still have to have a doctor for so many decisions. It doesn't matter what the new platform is. Absolutely. Humans want that to be. Let's assume the humans want the humans there, but there's a lot I can do. I know a lot of people doing AI startups for health care right now, so it's definitely I mean, it's huge.

The opportunity is so huge for health care because there's so many things broken in this. And it's each month there's millions of claims that get processed. There's no world in which humans can look at all that data. I can support that. Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, it's an exciting time. I mean, it's kind of the same in every field, but there's a place for AI to come in and, you know, do a lot of changing of some of the administrative things, like what we're doing with government, for sure.

A lot of fax machines in government as well, you know. So you guys are giving me a lot to think about. And then I've learned actually a lot today about how the coverage, is in Texas in general. So what are kind of your top priorities this session going in? Obviously getting a handle on the overregulation, the mandate problem, the lack of ability to innovate, offer coverage and meet the needs of employers and families in Texas.

It's probably the biggest thing for us. We've got to move our, our, our health plan coverage market for it in a way that is more innovative and more and more efficient and just doesn't put government so much in the way. And so and so, in, in the weeds of exactly how benefits are designed and you just sort of throw your hands up, this coverage looks like it's always that we've got to be more innovative.

We've got to pay differently and just be smarter about how we regulate health insurance, for sure. He had one key message for, to share with Texas. What would you say that we really should be focusing on health care, not sit here and say Texas, and there's a lot of opportunity. So with this new administration, there's a lot of talk, with make America Healthy Again with RFK.

How have you been involved in that in any way? And are you so I wouldn't think, you know, directly, but I will say that you're seeing kind of what I consider, like these innovative benefits or things that are sort of go beyond the walls of a doctor's office that you're seeing in Medicaid, Medicare and coverage. Employers want it.

And that's, you know, a big word that gets users food is medicine, right? And that's almost to the benefit. Now, I think there was a bill called last session to make it that. Okay. And so a lot of our health plans, whether it's dietitian nutritionist or just the actual delivery of healthy foods, so here's your meals and here's the actual food for it can change more for someone's health healthier.

So that's a big part of it. I'll even go past that. You know, we talk about that overall health for that individual. Children with asthma make yes a drug. That's right. But it's not preventable. They're going to the emergency room more different. And that's really isn't what we found. It's just going in their home and replacing models in an air conditioning unit completely opposite chambers.

That child's life. Right. That is not a traditional. Yes, but it's kind of it's it's those we're going to just keep people healthy. I'm going to focus on the health. And I will say that movement of value based care, we're going to start paying you as a doctor for doing. And so instead of, like I say, just treating that disease, how do you we're going to pay you for keeping that person healthy, thinking about their diet, talking about their diet, helping them get through on that side of it.

So I we've seen this movement and it's so interesting because in the end it saves money. Right? Right. Absolutely. And so the incentives are there to do it. We just have to shift that way with everyone else. So I think there's huge opportunities, especially if you build more flexibility in Medicare, Medicare, which program. Yeah. For those opportunities to grow.

That's exciting. I've known a lot of doctors in my day and they've all said, yeah, whenever somebody comes in and has a symptom, we don't ask what they're eating or what they're doing, their lifestyle. So I do think it's a huge factor. Yeah, I think there's an opportunity to change our overall workforce, health care, workforce education to a wrap.

So like you just said, you're only going to provide care wait times. Right. So yeah, if you start to change it in the medical schools, in the nursing schools, you know, pharmacy schools and services, you start it, you start to see that change happen. And that's exciting. Well, thanks for your efforts and making Texas healthier I love it.

And how can people find you if they want to reach out and and reach and where people have a way of finding us if they want to find. Sure they do. We are THP, thp.org and we actually have we put all of our public testimony, tons of our slide deck. So we go over issues, 101, all of our one pagers.

We have all of that there in, an organized way for other our issues and, and a lot of informative resources. So check it out I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and for being great partners. And keep up the good work. Okay. Thank you so.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business, your go to podcast for the latest developments in Texas legislation and business. I'm the host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege. Today I'm excited to welcome Andy Cates to the show. Andy is the owner of Cates Legal Group, where he provides legal counsel to candidates, PACs and nonprofits across local, state and federal lobbyists. He's also the author of Texas Ethics Laws Annotated, the leading resource on campaign finance and lobby laws in Texas.

In this episode, we'll discuss legislative and campaign law. His vision for integrating AI into government relations, and a lot more. Thank you for coming out. This was fun. We'll start the session and excited to have you on a chat. For those who don't know you. You wanted to say a little bit more about you. How they are, how they should.

Sure. Yeah. My name is Andrew Cates. I go by Andy most of the time. I am a political lawyer. I've been doing that for, gosh, ten, 12 years, something like that. I, you know, primarily do kind of like the DC Ethics Commission compliance type stuff. I work in different cities as well. I represent people in front of the Ethics Commission to help them out with, you know, candidates, PACs, non-profits kind of landscape of campaign finance and lobby law.

Yeah. I mean, that's the I've been a lobbyist, but this will be the first year, first session in 14 years that I won't be a registered lobbyist. Is that relieving to you? It is extremely. I, I, I will admit freely I was not a good enough lobbyist to do it forever. I just I never had the drive to go out into the districts during the interim, during campaign season.

I did that, it was brutal. Yeah. You know, so there's so many different types of lobbyists out there. You know, there's the policy wonks there, the people that almost like, let's say, country club type people that, you know, they just know a bunch of people. They're either, you know, wealthy. To begin with or they are in the right spots to see everybody, you know, and in the spa or in the gym or whatever, you know, at the country club.

And then what I call skeet shoot lobbyists that always go to all the barbecues, all the skeet shoots, all the golf tournaments, all that kind of stuff, and, you know, and then the ones that generally pay for meals like crazy during session and take everybody out and all that. There's just so many different types of lobbyists. And I just that was never my thing, was to do go out into the districts and spend all that time.

It's like, I've got a kid, I've got a wife, I want to be home. And so I never really built those, like one on one campaign relationships that you kind of need to get the member cell phone number. And sure, you come up to the Capitol and you don't have to mess with staff. You just go straight to the member kind of thing, you know?

So that never really was my deal. And so especially now that I'm in San Antonio and I didn't spend the time to get to know any of the new members, it's just it's honestly kind of a relief. Just like, you know what? I'll be done. I'll just do the legal side for a while, and, I'll be a, what I like to call the Bill assassin.

Which is, to to work on points of order during session for hire. And, and that's just fine. I'm, I'm I'm fine to be done with it. Well, I know you've become an expert in elections and campaign law. How did you get into that niche? Very randomly. Accidentally, even I have, So I started at the.

Okay, let me go way back. Okay. I graduated from law school at the end or. Well, in oh seven. Got licensed to practice at November of oh seven, two months before the oh eight recession, to. Right. So I was a baby lawyer and there were no jobs and so brutal. So I worked three jobs as a lawyer, as a licensed lawyer to pay rent, and sleeping on a buddy's couch down here in Austin.

And, one of those jobs was I. He graciously gave me a job on a judicial campaign down here in Austin. And so I was working on a campaign, and it just so happened that I liked politics, and I knew some law. And I worked a little bit in criminal defense at the time that I started working at the Capitol for the House Democratic Caucus under Jim Dunham at the time.

And then I started with now Congressman Mark VC for that session in 09. And, then I go stormy away from Mark, when he got the criminal Jurisprudence committee to be a committee clerk. And so my first session, I was with Mark for like a month and a half and then straight into committee land. And, then after that, everybody got knocked out.

Right after that was the 2010 Tea Party wave. So all of those guys got beat. And so I was kind of out into the wilderness, I went into a law firm where I learned very quickly that I do not want to be sitting behind a desk all the time, just sitting at a law firm.

It was just from the fun of being at the Capitol. To stand behind a desk is not my thing. So, anyway, so right after that, I got picked up by the Texas Realtors, and I was there, to be basically like, a during session, I was the person to read all of the bills and to analyze all the bills and to, you know, run all the committees through the different bills of like, do we want to track this?

Do we not want to track this? You know, that kind of stuff. So I read every single bill. And that's where I got very comfortable with Bill tracking software. He was as comfortable as I could be at the time, sure, and, and but then I was also in charge. I was told I was to be in charge of the pack that they have and make sure we don't get in trouble.

And I was like, you mean your multi-million dollar pack? Like, this is one of the largest, at least at the time in Texas. Yes. Keep us out of trouble. So I had to learn it all very quickly on the job. I had a great mentor, Ed Schack. He was the outside counsel, and I spent far too much of the realtor's money on his retainers.

Because we would talk and talk and talk and talk, and he would bill us for every minute. Yeah, and they do. We've learned that. Yeah. Me, too. And, so that's where I got to to to learn it all. And, that's where I started with the idea of, hey, there are legal practice guides out there for all of this, all these kind of areas of law.

So let me just pick one up at the state Bar annual meeting one time. And I went and they didn't have one. And so I said, damn, pound my fist on the table, I'm going to make one. So I spent two years of my off time, developing one and really just for myself. And I told people about it and they got excited about it.

So I started selling it. There wasn't one existed. It didn't exist. So I made one. You're on your second book now? Yes. So the first one is I have pushed off the ninth edition until after this session, because I want to get all the new laws and everything into it. And the second one. Yeah, I just kicked it out again, mostly for myself.

Now that I live down in San Antonio, for the San Antonio ethics code. Sure. You know, it's just it's same sort of thing. It's a kind of a, shove together of all the laws and rules and opinions and cases and everything that apply to, San Antonio proper. So, yeah, that's that's the second one out now.

So who does this book like, what's your audience for the size of Berkeley? Well, I've seen it on people's desks, so it's clearer than that. Just. Yeah. So the San Antonio one is definitely very much more esoteric and a much smaller audience. The, the, the bigger book, the Texas version is for, I mean, people like me.

There are not very many honestly, lawyers that do this in particular. You know, me, any associations out there, trade associations, industry associations that are interested, universities sometimes and sometimes with a law library or something. But honestly, my biggest purchaser is the Texas Ethics Commission. And so they purchase copies for, I mean, their whole enforcement division, their legal division and all of that, that.

Yeah. Yeah, it's like they're the biggest purchaser of the book now. Yeah. So that's a great like, you know, brush my shoulder off kind of thing. It feels good. And obviously us we have, you know, brought you on to do a lot of the ethics checking out in Texas and making sure we're following all the rules, especially working in government now and then in other states.

So, yeah. Excited? Yeah. Me too. And that was kind of the impetus behind where we got connected in the first place. Yes. Well, we could definitely chat about that. Yeah, I would be happy to. So going into more of the and government relations that you mentioned, the bill tracking software. Well, and you've been doing prior to us meeting that, sparked us even getting connected.

Yeah. I, you know, what y'all are doing? Looks like we are doing. Yeah. No, ideas is something that I have been thinking about for almost a decade. I have been I mean, you know, I used another bill tracking software while we were at the realtors, and I got about as good as anybody can get at it using it.

But it was clunky. It wasn't. It wasn't it. And I have been thinking and dreaming and ideating for, like I said, a better part of a decade about a new there's got to be a better way to do it kind of thing, right? When I got to after the after the Realtors, I went to be general counsel and director of Government affairs at the Texas Nurses Association, and they're there I was in charge of doing, I mean, really all of the lobbying and everything, but our lobby day at the Capitol, last day at the Capitol, bring in 300, 400 whatever nurses and swarm the Capitol just like everybody does it.

There's like 200 lobby days at the Capitol every year. Oh, yeah, I've been there through session with everybody in a white coat is bonkers. It's like United Colors of Benetton kind of day. I mean, usually white coat, Capitol Day for the doctors and these crazy. There's tons of people floating around the Capitol. And I was using a spreadsheet to do all the registration bring, you know, bring everybody's names and addresses in and then go through in some columns and match them up to their representatives and their senators, and then call the offices and find out who the scheduler is, and then try to figure out how many people line up you want to, you

know, split off people from Central Texas area, because that's much more likely that people are going to show up to a Capitol Day from the Central Texas area than from Amarillo or Beaumont or whatever. And you know, you're going to get 50 registrations from the Austin area where you're going to get two from Amarillo or something. You don't want to have 50 people show up to a representative's office.

You split them off to other office anyway. It's a nightmare of scheduling and organization and all that. So I went to a software development company here in town and asked them if they would be interested, and my pitch to them was, I have got a great idea. I know the audience, I know the market, but I don't know how to build it.

And I have no money to pay you. Who's in? Yeah. And you know, everybody said no, when software companies said yes and we went 5050 on it essentially, and built it and we called it Lobby Days. And I built that in 2018. It was active for the 2019 session. And, we were gearing up making some changes going for 2.0.

So March 20th, 20 everything shut down. I had to make a snap decision on whether or not I thought that there would be big groups of people at the Capitol again when it came around to January, and I assumed, no, I was right. Yeah. And so we put it on the shelf, and it's been there ever since. But I also realized very quickly that that type of software is not a standalone product.

It's just not because it's so seasonal, it's seasonality. And everybody only does one, you know, so it's not you don't have to use it multiple times. It's not a thing that, you know, I know like some of the metrics are you track eyeballs on the screen and how long people engage on your website. And so I just wouldn't.

Right? I mean, they do it for a whole lot for a short amount of time and then dump it. And so trying to price it is hard. And anyway, it wasn't a standalone. It's an add on. Sure. And so I realized that obviously, and started looking at what it would cost to build a build tracker. And I, I mean, I went around to angels and VCs and, you know, all kinds of people.

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And I went to a, what was it, Univision pitch contest and won it. You want it? Oh no way. Yeah. I did not know that. Yeah, yeah, it was over at the Google building down here, but, back in the day. Yeah. And I won it. And they were like, your products are just too far along. We don't we don't know what we can offer you here, but congratulations, I guess, so it was all cool and everything, but, you know, when I wouldn't talk to everybody, they were like, yeah, it's going to cost half $1 million to build this.

And I just couldn't get the money in the door. I couldn't get the right team together. So anyway, flash forward, I see you guys pop up. I realize, they're going to do it. They're going to do it. Wait. What made you think we would do. Well, it just, you know, when I was doing it, I. It's so weird to say, but, like, I didn't exist yet.

It was in the same capacity. Right? Absolutely. What was your first exposure to us? I saw the marketing, I think, like on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, you work on something. Okay. And I saw it, and I, and at the time, I think you only had, like, the kind of splash marketing page, up and available. And so I put my information in.

I have demoed every single build tracking product that exists, I guarantee it. I mean, all the national ones, you know, and my issue has always been these national groups that create these build trackers or whatever for capitals. They are built around DC specifically because that's where all the money is. That's where the big corporations and associations go at the national level.

Everything they're built around DC, and then all they do is scrape the state sites, repackage it into their platform and say, you're welcome. Now buy from us. Sure. Literally. Yeah. And I know because I was a staffer and, you know, I've been a lobbyist for a long time in interacting with the capital and everything. I know that we've got some idiosyncrasies here that other people do not understand and do not know about.

Each state is totally different. Each one is different. And you've got to do your research to understand that state. And those people and what they need and what they don't need. And a repackaging of the state website is not what we need, right? We need something much more robust and much more targeted and focused. And so anyway, so that, you know, I demoed them and I was like, new one, I'm going to demo them too, because I don't want to go with who I was going with before.

I don't I'm not feeling it. And so I filled out the form and Eric called me and said, hey, I hear you're looking to do a demo. Can I ask, you know, what your relationship is to this? What do you do to do that? And I, for better or worse, I think for better at this point for sure.

Yeah, I straight up told him I look, man, I, I am legitimately interested in a demo because I am looking for something to use for next session. But I also need to tell you transparently that I have been trying to build this for ten years, and I'm potentially a competitor. And he was like, well, I kind of don't want to demo you now.

It's like, I don't blame you. But we ended up talking for like 45 minutes an hour, and then we talked again for another hour. And Eric, at some point was just like, you know, why don't you just not do that and come work with us instead? Yes, yes, let's do that. And that's how it that's how it kicked off.

It cracked me up. I remember him telling me about it, and it was like one of you gave a little bit of info, one gave a little bit more, and then you kind of could trust each other, which I find so unique. It's a really interesting way, but you mentioned it. You are solo founder. I don't know how so many solo founders do it.

I really think it's tough. And if you're non-technical, I know that that was the problem. The hardest things. I do feel like we have such a dream team, like across the board with our team now and having Ben or, you know, secret weapon CTO Eric with the go to market side and then domain expertise now with both of us is really cool.

But yeah, I love that. That's how we, originally got connected. Yeah, I know it's very random, but I mean, it it works. And, you know, I think that, to, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn't have jumped on board if I didn't see huge, huge potential. Sure. And I think that there is huge potential there. And I and I'm excited to be on board for building $1 billion company.

Yeah, I want to do this for everywhere, the entire world and make it easy for people to access so and so. God, it's been awesome working with you. I'm excited for you to do a lot of the things and other states too. I know as we start traveling around and, making sure it's specific to that state because it's so custom.

Yes, it is very custom. I mean, that's the thing that I think that we're offering this right now, we're offering Texas and that I want to be able to offer these other states that that the other big companies don't. They just they just want to do the quick scale. And then obviously we want to scale fast. But for sure, you know, the pinpoint, you know, and I hate to say point twice, but you know what it what exactly as a staffer in your capital, as a lobbyist around your capital, as an association, you know, etc., what are the pain points that you have engaging over there in tracking?

What are they not doing for you? That's that's going to be the fun part for me in researching that, because, figuring out the problem and finding the solution and especially finding the technical solution, like, you know, Ben, I think could probably code and create anything and, you know, coming in and saying, this is what they're telling us is a problem.

What can we do for them? It, I think, is going to be a huge benefit. We have a great product, mine, because I was my thing and I had all these ideas but non-technical. And so when I get to talk to the engineering team, it's so fun. It is fun every time, but there's so much to do. I always more, there's always going to be more every time I talk to the engineering team and we end up, you know, 20 minute conversation turns into an hour and a half because it's like, what if we did this and did this and did this and built on this and isn't it is it's fun.

So in addition to your ethics, law practice and really the niche expert in that, you've also become like an AI expert. How did that happen again? Randomly. Super randomly. It's it was kind of built off the, the election stuff. It was really started this last April. Giovanni completely own. Yeah. It has or had a select committee on AI and emerging technology and that sort of thing.

And they were only going to have one select committee hearing during the interim. They put out the agenda for that hearing. And it's got, you know, all the different things are going to talk about and all the different people that are invited. Testimony. And we're going to talk about it, I mean, everything. And then one of them was elections.

And I looked at the list of people that were coming and it was, you know, was like Google Meet, TechNet, whoever model. Sure. And I was like, They might be talking about elections broadly, but nobody there is going to be talking about like what our election law says and what I impacts that statute and whatever. And so I called the office and said, hey, can I be invited testimony because I'll talk about election law stuff.

And they're like, oh, it's already full. Sorry. So I just packed up and drove up to Austin and sat through the whole hearing and wrote myself in for public testimony. And I was the only public testimony person, waited until the end of the day and got up there and just said, hey, look, I don't have a dog in this fight.

I don't represent anybody here. I'm just telling you that the laws that we have on the books for political advertising and deepfakes are not enough, and I think you all know that, and you all need to know that you're screwed for a year because you're not coming back to make laws until January, and they're not going to be effective until at least, you know, maybe probably September next year or 25.

So you're going to have to watch this whole election cycle go with AI. You're going to have to go through this session that's starting on Tuesday. With potentially I lobbying, you know, and that's and that's going to be an issue. And right after that, like, I mean, it's just kind of a throwaway thing, like, hey, you guys need to fix the fix the law and whatever.

And then all of a sudden I started getting calls from reporters. I got calls from people to come and speak at their conferences. I'm speaking at, Independent Insurance Agents Conference in a couple of weeks. I'm speaking to another group a couple weeks after that. I mean, it's it's blown up and it's completely by accident. That's very cool.

Well, you were also, in a way, warning the legislature and what that you've read and what you've predicted is to come, which sounds like it's happening. And we can actually show a clip now of that testimony. 011, but we'll pull it up. All right. Here you go. Enjoy. My name is Sandra Cates. I am not an expert in artificial intelligence.

So you're going to break from that? But I am an expert on the laws and regulations of campaigns. The legislature, elections and the lobby. I've written a legal practice guide. That is the first of its kind in the state, because also, by the way, available in us purchasing, no one to take the decision at about.

I'm one of about 20 attorneys in the state, actually in the country that is board certified and legislative and campaign. I know you've heard a lot from everybody today. I am a lobbyist, just so everybody knows. I'm not here representing anybody. I'm here honestly, just on my own, in my spare time, because I felt like this kind of needed a Texas legal, equitable perspective.

I'll let you all, You know, I don't need to tell you anymore. I didn't hear a lot of it today because I was out at another meeting. But, I'm sure you heard a lot about the dangers of AI and a lot about how it's going to impact elections. You know, we all saw what happened with, you know, the Biden, the fake Biden call in New Hampshire and all that.

I put some other examples in there with links to, other things you can check out. But, you know, federally, there have been a couple advancements made. After the Biden call, the FCC made, I calls it legal. By tying them into the overall what they call ban, However, much like regular robocalls, bad actors can get around the rules.

They obtain prior express consent. To call you. But how they get that consent is questionable, and ripe for abuse. If my cell phone has anything to say about it because it's a been on the Do not call list, but forever. And I'm getting blown up. To protect elections from deceptive AI act is a bipartisan bill in Congress that would ban intentional publishing of material, deceptive, materially deceptive AI generated with let's.

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That's not federally. I know I heard you just a minute ago. Like, I don't know about the federal government, getting into this. So in Texas, we have a good head start. After my remarks, I put a couple of charts in there from, in Csail specifically about AI laws around campaign finance and elections, and where the rest of the country stands.

There's another one at the end of that. That is a chart of 2023 legislation and how that fared around the country as well. Most of it failed. We're actually in a better spot because of the Brian Hughes Morgan Lukemire bill, Senate bill, some 51 that Renzo mentioned a minute ago, about deepfakes. And, that is in 255.004 of the election code, that regulates political advertising.

There's also another one right after that. 005 is about misrepresenting one's identity. It talks about what a deep fake is. And, both of those statues carry a class A misdemeanor penalty. There are a couple of changes I want I would recommend to make to those statutes, just so I can get through all of this. I would just say, somebody please ask me what those changes are.

But it, I would encourage you all to also, besides political advertising, also take a look at chapter 305 of the government code, which regulates lobbying. I was the reason I didn't hear a lot of this earlier today was because I was actually at a meeting with about 30 other lobbyists talking about the Ethics Commission sunset bill, which is going to happen this year, theoretically, hopefully happen this session.

And all the things that we would hope to go into that and, and all of that. I mentioned I and deepfakes and the issues that could come up with lobbying specifically. And literally everyone agreed that something needs to be done because, you know, as I as I write down here, you know, regulates lobbying bodies, communications, legislative advertising and grassroots advocacy, grassroots advocacy.

I know y'all have been hit with a lot. There are some voter voice like, one click politics or all kinds of different, phone to action, different softwares out there that people use, you know, associations used to send out to their members to say, contact your legislator and it's got a pre-filled out, whatever they send and they blast you all and your emails and all that.

I really think there's a very high likelihood that deepfakes and fake images and all that kind of stuff can, can and will make their way into, your inboxes during session. And there's not going to be anything we can do about it at this time, because we're not going to have laws in place to stop it yet.

So I have every reason to believe during the election cycle and during session, you are going to get hit with a lot of fake stuff that is potentially very untraceable because, you know, there's we've got 305 0 to 1 in the lobby code that prohibits false communications. So legislators by lobbyists, but not by literally anybody else. And so if a lobbyist is putting it out there to other people, and then they change it up and send it out, there's nothing we can do about it.

So that's definitely a section two to look at. One other issue very quickly that I think needs to be said, because I don't think, well, I doubt anybody else has mentioned this today. Specifically with AI in general. And I, I was reading, the most recent issue of the Texas Bar at all, the Bay issue.

I tried to find a link to it, but it's not out on that website yet. And it's a lot of the the articles in there are about AI, and there is one specifically by a man named Mark Vogel, about AI and intellectual property rights. And he said that there are a couple of test cases early on already with the US Copyright Office and the D.C. District Court that said that no matter, no matter what input a person puts into generative AI, the output of it and the result of what you get cannot be copyrighted because a person didn't create it.

And that's, interesting and a little bit intimidating in terms that a lot of the laws that we have on the books here in Texas that have a penalty attached to them are specifically because a person did committed an act. And if a person is not included in this, I mean, you wouldn't be able to grab some of it in terms of like political advertising.

It's like caused to be distributed or caused to be published. But there are a lot of other laws out there about what a person does. And if it's not, you know, if these courts are saying that the output is not from a person, then I don't know if it applies. So, you know, I don't have a lot of answers, have a lot of questions and a lot of things that I think you guys should look at.

But, I, you know, I would be happy to help out. If anybody needs it. I'd be a bit, you know, given my voice and experience to it. But I do have other, things specifically related issues that I would want to recommend for members. Any questions? I remember one of the first votes I took, 12 years ago or so.

Was there an amendment related to whether a business was a person and said that we had to have a conversation about whether I suffered through their media as a person has got the business and a lot of that person question is, you know, comes around a citizen united to, you know, and how corporations can engage in politics and direct campaign expenditures and all of that.

So, well, obviously, we'd like to hear from you after this to, to talk about maybe because we do have an ethics bill, but also there's could be opportunities to make changes outside of that, especially when it comes to because one of the things that we've heard about today and it's not only around the country, is people think much at least disclosure about AI, and how that can or cannot be effectively done.

Yeah. Well, one of the things I really quickly, you know, the true sorts of communication, billed as the deepfake language in it, I would very, very highly recommend amending that or making a recommendation to amend that to include photos, videos, sound, stage text, because, you know, not to bring up insensitive stuff, I guess. But yeah, the speaker got hit a couple of days ago.

Was that a fake image or a deceptively, you know, altered image? And, it's not against the law here because the campaign that put it out, put their name on it, and it's a photo and not a video or to the deepfake law. And so it falls into that exception. That's right. It's it's in between. It was multiple images.

Right. One on each side. Right. And it's a video but multiple images played really quickly. Right. And then also it technically landed 33 days before the election. So it wasn't electioneering technically. Right. Yeah. Which maybe another little edit that is. Right. Well, on both of these of the and the reason why though is because it's unfair.

It's deliberately made to deceive individuals. Right, right. I mean, especially yeah. Because I can make things look so realistic and, and when obviously neither of those two images actually happened. Right, right. And, you know, both of those, true source and misrepresent your identity, both have class A misdemeanor penalties. I think I would recommend jumping it up to a third degree felony.

Because I'll tell you from my experience, having clients and everything impacts and all that in this area, everybody knows the corporate ban on contributions because it's a felony and everyone is terrified of it, and nobody really knows the penalties for all the rest of this stuff. They just know the felony one. And so if, if, if you want to have a serious solution, you got to have a serious penalty.

Yeah, sure. And I think again, the reason why it should be against the law is yeah, because it hurts our feelings as electrocution. Right. We get that all the time. But it's because it's intentionally meant to deceive the voter. You know, it's intentionally made to provide a different election result and to affect the integrity of our election commitments.

Right. And members any questions? All right. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Right. What were your big takeaways and like advice recommendations to the legislature. Well basically that what we've got on the books right now, specifically around deepfakes and specifically around elections, that's kind of where my, you know, let's say bailiwick is the deepfake law that we have is in the political advertising section of the code, and it's it was Grace.

It was passed in 2019. It was great in ahead of the time at the time, but everything has jumped forward so fast that now it's behind and it needs to be picked up. And so, you know, off the top of my head, the deepfake is specifically a video that depicts a real person, a candidate or officeholder doing something that they didn't naturally do within 30 days of an election, with the intent to influence the election or to intent to deceive the viewer.

There's probably another part of that to the missing, but there's it sounds great, but there's just so many loopholes around it. Like, how do you prove intent to deceive and how do you prove intent to influence the election? It being only 30 days before the election? We know these elections last forever now, and so just 30 days isn't nearly enough time.

And then, expanding the deepfake definition beyond just video to pictures, voice manipulation to, you know, images of scenes out there that may not include the candidate or officeholder, but scenes that didn't exist, you know, like a doomsday, you know, fire and brimstone scene or whatever. Like, I don't know, maybe, but sure. But think about it and play with it.

The issue that everybody's going to have is First Amendment, because political speech, I don't want to go to like constitutional law here, but political speech is very, very protected in the courts. You know, lying is actually protected in political speech, anonymous speech, like Federalist Papers kind of thing, like changing your name. That's protected, you know, so whether or not it's going to be enforceable and whether or not the courts will strike it down is one thing.

But my recommendation to them was just for the love of God, pass something. Because if you don't pass anything for fear of First Amendment issues, then we're going to be stuck exactly where we are anyway. So pass something, get it to the courts and let them figure it out. And we're seeing tech like Sora, the OpenAI's video tool.

Amazing capabilities. Yeah. Also concerning for multiple reason. And it does sound like it's subjective in the intent to deceive. Yeah, and then also satire, I know. Yeah, that was the other one. You don't want to like, censor satire and just jokes. I get things that pop up on my feet all the time. I love, you know, leaders from around the world all together.

Clearly fake, right? But it's, it also isn't that good yet. So people, I think it's kind of in a bad way, using people and knowing it's a joke. But there is point a point that it's not a joke. And people are going to believe that. How do you, what's the biggest threat to a campaign. So would I do you think so in in the presentations that I've been giving I, I've kind of.

So the first one that I gave on AI and elections, the feedback was great presentation, but you scared the crap out of everybody. Please lighten it up a little bit. Because it was very I mean, it's just like, hey, look, guys, we're kind of screwed. I'll backtrack that a good amount. But one of the things that I, that I found in some of my research, is a term called the liar's dividend and liar's dividend is basically that the intent of, let's say, bad actors out there that are providing misinformation and disinformation on the internet, be they, you know, internal, external, extra national groups, whatever is not to dissuade you or move influence

you on one direction or another on an individual race or campaign or issue. It's to erode the overall trust of the system enough that you don't believe anything on the internet anymore. And honestly, that's more on that. I was going to say how far along that scale everybody's on the scale, everybody's on that scale. Everything somewhere. Yeah.

And but it's it the point is to just drag everybody down all at once, gradually so that you don't trust anything you see online. So anything it's I kind of call it the like the Schrodinger's cat, a political communication. Anything you see online now can be both true or false, depending on your perspective, because there's so much misinformation out there that when anybody even comes to try to combat it and say, well, no, that's not true, it's actually this like, not fake news that doesn't exist, you know, here are five doctored photos to prove that you're wrong.

Whatever. Like, yeah, it it just it just kind of drags everybody down at the same time. The, the sort of light in the tunnel on that to me is that I think that we are moving so far, so fast in the tech bubble, let's say, to where everything is pushing into tech so hard that I think that even I think that the a good consequence of that liar's dividend could be that people start trusting what they see online and try and kind of swing that pendulum back to trust more of interpersonal communication.

Yes. And one on one. And I think this is a question that you haven't asked yet, I think. But I think that that's why it will be over. Overall, a net positive, for lobbyists because lobbyists, your whole job is interpersonal communication. And honestly, making friends like, that's like it's honestly a great job. You getting paid well to make friends with people.

Yeah. You know, and yeah, sure influence them at some point. But like most of it is just going around being a nice person, making friends with everyone, and being a good communicator. And I think that with better tools to maximize efficiency and to automate some of the more administrative tasks that we've got out there, which are a lot.

I was talking about a the of day stuff is just a lot of administrative stuff. You can automate more of that. Then you can get back to what you were supposed to be doing, which is going around making friends with people being seen. You know, I think it'll help people kind of get back to the core of what lobby is about.

I think so, too, and also do more in-person things. There'll be more in-person rallies or live video. I think people start trusting and watching maybe more, official government videos like committee hearings, because they know those can't be modified or edited. It's illegal to do that. Right. So things that we're showing are facts of what actually happened.

And that helps. I think people understand you're mentioning the sides of everything. Everything has to sides, right. And you can choose to believe one or the other. But if you hear it in a committee hearing, type of way, you hear both sides, the argument and all the people. So I love that. Feel good. Okay. You've mentioned one thing that I've told other staff.

The freaked them out too. Okay. And I so, want to see, you know, where you are with that in your research. So one of the things you mentioned was how AI is going to impact potentially grassroots campaigns and then lobby campaigns starting this session. So, yeah, scary staff for sure. Yeah. No, I mean, it it should.

And not to whatever. But and staff is staff is already part of that let's say problem themselves. So well because you know, I heard you mentioned in the training today that Wedge Council estimates that there will be 20,000 plus bills filed this year, or at least sent to them to be drafted. And all that. That is an absurd number.

It's usually no more than 10 to 12, right? Almost double the number of bills that are being put to them to to right and kick back out for filing. And I have zero doubt in my mind it's because of ChatGPT. I think that offices are kicking bills into ChatGPT or kicking ideas for bills into ChatGPT, having it write the bill and then they kick that over to legit council to formalize, you know, in the in the style and.

You know I think it's going to be a problem. I think that lodge council is going to get overwhelmed and they're like they already are you know. And it it like they get a lot of crap. They get a lot of crap for being slow and having a a, I mean, I would tell you, let's say draconian process, of review all the way up the steps to make sure that the bill is right and, and inform and purpose and everything before they hand it to you to file.

I know, I mean, like I said, I've been lobbying for over a decade. I know offices get frustrated with Ledge Council for the speed that they need, the bills back and all that. It is also a very hard job. And they're going to they're going to be overwhelmed if they're not already with the number of bills that are being asked of them.

And I think it's going to, you know, lead to some mistakes. And, you know, if I will be very interested to see what the house rules look like after Tuesday. Sure. On points of order. Yeah, especially. And bill analysis, because I mean, like I said, I mean, that's, I'm a Bill assassin sometimes for hire. And, you know, if ChatGPT is hallucinating and dumping stuff into these bills that then go to legit council and hopefully get caught, but maybe not.

And then they're filing all of these bills. I mean, you know, it's usually, you know, 20% end up passing, right. As the kind of normal average I mean, that's that's so many bills, you know. And so we'll see. But I think that that's going to be an issue that they're going to have to deal with. And then I think on the staffers perspective of being scared, you know, everybody else is also using ChatGPT.

And they're also going to be using it for talking points and for testing money and for presentations to the capital. And I mean, we know it hallucinates. And so for the efficiency that I think is going to be made up for the staff in terms of using it to, you know, knock out some of the talking points that they need or whatever.

You know, they're also going to have to, I think, vet everything that comes into their office very, very closely and probably check citations because it's very likely that somebody's going to GPT something up that hallucinates a citation. And, you know, then, my God, what happens when they make laws based on hallucinated data? You know, absolutely. That's a problem.

I do think there are some, things they could do for efficiency in the bill drafting thing, though, because I noticed last session, I would submit a bill and then three other members have filed a similar request, and then three different attorneys had drafted three different versions of a bill that were completely different sections of code. Yeah, modifying and things like that.

So that seems inefficient as well. Definitely seems like there could be some reform in this area and maybe, you know, in this era of AI having something that checks all the requests. So there's I'm sure most of these cats, right. They're either refile bills or they're not that original. It might be from another state then or another country.

I know I looked at EU legislation last year. Interesting. Tried especially with data privacy and yeah they have going on. Yeah. So there's there's going to be some ways I can help you guys. But I think this is the Wild West session. The first one that is Wild West. No regulation, no nothing in place, no guardrails. And we'll see.

Yeah I think that's right. And I'm I am personally really looking forward to our expansion into other states. So that down the line we can collate all the different states legislation, you know, find a bill in Texas and find similar legislation in other states that have been filed, and see what language they did to it in what how did that bill work there and that sort of thing.

Right. But there's so many different cool ways that we can play with this and, and move forward. It's going to be great. But yeah, I mean, you know, we're going to have to be careful, you know, there, there, you know, there's ethics is a big term. It's a, it's a big heady idea more than anything else.

I think it just means you have to be intentional about what you're doing and not be cavalier about what you're developing and how it could impact. Let's say people could say the world, you know, and I, I again, I wouldn't have jumped on board with us ledge if, if I had concerns about any of that. I think that that the way that you guys set it up initially was the right way.

We're not going to mess with ChatGPT. We're not going to use any of this data to inform the bigger model. Right. Because we don't have control over that. And it's it's going to put your stuff out into the world that could end up somewhere else. You know, and it's somebody else's answers. And I think that that's, you know, ethically built and, it's going to be something that we are continuously monitoring.

And data privacy for the customer is most important because I think the one thing that's one last thing that I am interested to see how this goes are just potentially, you know, any organization that has a lot of money for potentially spam bot farms to spam letters to officers, like, we got thousands of letters and. Yeah, yeah. And that is not knowing if you're working for Senator, a House member, what's a real constituent problem and what's not.

Or is someone going to use a spam letter just to bog down the senator in their state? It could be their opponent or a targeted attack. There's so many new crazy things that could come out. I know, I know, and you know, one of the things that I have talked to the team about, and I, you know, down the line, I'm going to I'm going to be.

Yeah, I've got so many ideas and different. Right, different software offerings we can roll into the overall platform. One of which is specific kind of to that idea of, you know, just and we were talking about it internally the other day about, you know, the House House member emails and, you know, the first that Greg Abbott or, you know, they fill in or whatever, you know, those emails are junk because they have a transparency requirement and they have to make those emails available to the public.

And as a result, they get spammed like crazy. Everybody hits those because those are the I mean, those are the ones that the big national bill trackers use. If you want to, if you want to send an email to your legislator, here's how you do it. And use our software to send a message that you don't like this bill, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, grassroots advocacy, whatever.

I know damn well nobody reads that email. Ten years ago, I did okay. It's a terrible job. Yes, it is terrible. Yeah. I was, started as a staff assistant in Congress, and then I got bumped up to LC legislative correspondent, and my job was reading that email of thousands and thousands of constituents at the time. Yep. Or haters.

That was a funny, really funny email. Yeah. And I had to respond to them all personally. My boss at the time was very much a proponent of getting those responded to. I know a lot of members that still are, but how on earth can you respond to all of those individually? You can. That's impossible. Yeah, and I would argue the wanted me to write those letters.

So it was not fun. Yeah. It's brilliant. Least favorite. It's brutal. Yeah I'm good at that either. And you know these and these these especially, you know, newer offices and and you know especially house offices. They don't have the staff to spare to do that. Now, you know, and I mean you've got somebody that yeah, your job is, you know, legislative coordinator or legislative assistant whatever.

But like in session you don't have time for that. You were working on bills and those things just stack up three, 400 a day of just exact same subject mine, exact same body from 300 different people. It's like great, thanks. Batch delete. And it happens, you know, and so there is a better way to do that that does not involve the public email address and spamming everybody and going crazy on letter writing campaign ends.

Like there are better ways to do that. We can use technology. We can make it easier. I I've got ideas, we've got ideas, and I want to I want to bring this stuff forward if I what's real. Yeah. Because there are real concerns that get put in there. Yeah. And like tragic. I've been I've cried in office talking to constituents with them because they've been through such ordeals.

And they send that email the ability to their senator or House member to the public email. And it's going to get and you know what's crazy? When I was talking to venture capital firms back in the day about trying to do something like this, I specifically said, and another thing that I really like about your, and I think specifically built on you is that having had experience being a staffer, sure.

You want to build it to be staffer friendly. Yeah, right. You want you want them. You want the staff in the capital to want people to use this because it makes their life easier. It makes your life easier. All the way across the board. And a VC told me when I said that too. And I was like, I want this to be a staffer friendly as possible.

I want to make sure they have buy in that, add it up. You know, I was set for two, so it makes sense. He was like, why? Why would you want that? Just bombard them with your information so that they listened to you. And I was like, you have not worked in the building, have you? You have never worked in the Capitol.

Like, no, I haven't. And I was like, yeah, that's not done. We don't do that for sure. You know? And it's very clear the people that get it and the people that don't, and you always want to try to convert the people that don't, but the people that get it, I think really appreciate the attention to detail. And of course, it's a very niche field.

So definitely, I mean, one of VCs we talked to recently, I've been actually a staffer on the Hill. Oh yeah. So that was really cool, actually. Yeah. And there's definitely a lot to do, but it's a lot to explain if somebody is completely new. Okay. It's very hard. I can see that was tricky. Yeah. What do you think too?

The biennial legislature. You know, I definitely think there's pros and cons to the reason it's designed to designed to kill bills, right? Yeah. As many as possible. Keep a conservative, limited government. But what do you think about it now as it relates to tech and innovation going so fast? It's brutal. I mean, tech always outpaces government. Always, right?

No matter what. Sure. But at least I mean, I would say in Congress, but Congress doesn't do a whole lot to begin with in these other states that are either at least once a year for a time or year round, they can address it almost in real time, at least a little behind, but they can address it quicker.

Right? Man, it's tough in Texas. I mean, we're one of four three states Georgia that do biennial. Yeah. And I mean, I get it. It's it's based around not having, career politicians and they go home to do their real jobs and they, I mean, they don't get paid much of anything like 6000 a year, maybe to be a legislator.

But, man, it makes it hard to respond to stuff. I mean, it it puts a lot. I mean, you know, literally three quarters of the biennium is interim and is agency, state agency work. And so that puts so much more of the work in the state agencies than it is in the legislature. Right? You know, and so, it's just it's it's tough to respond to things quickly.

It's tough to, you know, especially during this session here, it's six months. It's really only about a month and a half to two months. That real bill bill movement happens. You know, it's like March to the end of April. May is where it like crunch time but like the the deep conversations about things. I mean, you know, committees don't even come out till end of January, beginning of February.

Then it takes them a couple of weeks to get their feet under. And start getting, bills to, so, I mean, the real meat of it's only like 60, 80 days, you know, and so, I mean, that's not very long out of two years to be doing this stuff. But, you know, I mean, whatever, we're Texas, we do it.

We're just, you know, we do our own thing. But, but it is hard made an interesting point about the agency's taking on a lot of work because I think, for those people who don't know much about how the rulemaking process works, they're doing this year round, they can impact law. Do you mind sharing more? For those who don't know just what state agencies do and why they're getting more bogged down with this?

Yeah. So state agencies are part of the executive branch, which is like the governor. But all the state agencies are part of the executive branch. You got the legislative branch, obviously, the Capitol over here. And and the judicial is, you know, all the courts. Yeah. I mean, the state agencies basically once I mean, they've got some leeway to do stuff on their own.

But once the bills pass, they have to be implemented by state agencies. And, you know, some of these agencies are enormous. I mean, HHS see, the Health and Human Services Commission is like the largest and like the largest state employer at least. I mean, they've got like 100,000 employees, maybe think crazy. And but I mean, you know, they also manage Medicaid and all the big stuff.

So, they continuously work, you know, if, if it's a licensing kind of agency, like nurses, doctors, real estate, whatever. Then they're continually working on enforcement matters, you know, did they did this doctor do something bad? We need to bring them up and have a complaint and take their license away or whatever. And then they're also continuously promulgating rules.

They have to put them out for public comment. They have a whole hearing. People come and yell at them about it, and then they decide whether or not they're going to adopt them anyway. And it's, you know, working on the profession, working on the thing, Medicaid, how we deliver services, etc., etc. and that's ongoing all year long.

You know, the, the Ethics Commission, the one that I follow all the time, I go to all the meetings. I'm one of the only people in the public that actually shows up to all their meetings in person. Nobody knows when they are. They don't know when they want they it's it's easier to watch online. Some are televised, some of.

Yeah. I mean some of the I mean, I know, Donna Howard I think has a bill every session to force every state agency and subcommittee and all that to televise all the meetings. Yeah, yeah, I know, and it's like, I want to go lobby for that because, I mean, that's a good government bill in transparency. Let's see what you're doing.

So I don't have to get up off, you know, get up out of my office and go drive over there and sit around for seven hours. While you probably don't talk about what I care about anyway, you know, it's it's right. Tedious. So, Yeah, it's very tedious. So, Yeah, I mean, they do a lot of work.

They do a lot of good work. But it is, it is a lot of different agencies to keep track of, depending on what, area of industry you're in. And we work with a lot of state agencies now. And from their perspective, there'll be bills filed randomly that they didn't know that they had anything to do with.

And the bills will say, name the agency by name and say, this agency is going to be responsible for this piece of legislation. And they'll go, oh, great, another one. And they have to do that for every piece to make sure they're not missing anything. Yeah, become that subject matter expert. So they usually have huge GRT teams that handle this.

And then if they screw something up they get ripped at the Capitol for it. It's a hard job. It is a hard job I do not have. I have a lot of sympathy for everybody in the agency. Yeah. Me too. So before we close, I want to ask you what advice you would give to anybody starting out in the government relations world or in law in this kind of political law?

Yeah. What advice would you give? So I've got probably three things. Okay. The one is that, you know, the legislative and kind of campaign law area does not have very many lawyers in it. I randomly fell into this. I did not go to law school for this. I didn't particularly love law school to begin with. I didn't like a lot of the subjects that I had to take, you know, I fell into this and I liked it to do what you like to do.

If you like this, get into it, because there are not very many lawyers in it. And if there's enough to go around to everybody for sure in terms of clients, especially legal, you know, like lawyers, I would say my advice is, it's going to be controversial, but if you don't like your job, quit your job.

So controversial. I mean, rock n roll. My right. Yeah, right, I know. Yeah. Do it. My resume. If I weren't getting into this, I probably wouldn't get hired anywhere else because my resume is brutal. It's like, oh, yeah, well, because I've quit the last, like, four jobs that I've been in, and it wasn't like, well, we were downsizing and you got to go or I got a new job and I'm going to go up to this.

I just straight walk into an office and quit both of the last two jobs that I was in because I, I either felt myself getting stuck there and pigeonholed into an area of law that I didn't want to do for the rest of my life. Sure. Or I had other, grander plans and made a pitch to them to be a part of it, and they didn't want to be a part of it.

And so I just quit my job, right, right on the spot. And it's a scary thing to do. Yeah, it is a very scary thing to do. I at the time when I quit my last job, I, I have a wife, still have a wife. And at the time, my son was three, I was going to say security is a surety.

It's hard to leave it at this, but it's same with, like, retirement and health benefits and that to that, that I should add to that. It's it's hard to leave that all behind. But man it is so much more freeing to just go and at least try to go and do what you want to do. It is so much more fulfilling.

Yes. So than the last thing. Is advice I got from my first boss in the capital P guy ago, and when I first started working at the capital, he said, okay, Andy, I'm going to give you one year, 12 months to work in my office and then I'm going to come back to you and I'm going to ask if you still want to do it.

Okay. And I was like, okay. And he was like, I'm like, wait, why? I'll be fine, dude. I'm good. I like it here, he said. Because if you stay in politics for more than one year, you will get dragged into it and sucked in forever. So you got to make sure that this is actually what you want to do long term.

And a year went by, true to his word brought me in. He's like, okay, it's been a year. Do you want to do this wherever you want to get out? Now? I was like, whatever, dude, I can quit any time. Don't worry about it. I'm fine. I'm having a good time. And he's like, okay, we'll see. Now, here we are.

Yeah. You know, 15 years later, I'm still doing it. So, you know, the capital itself is busy. It's crazy. It is a lot of fun. And the the energy of walking around the capital when a lot of big stuff is going on, is. I can't find a better way to say that. It's seductive. Yeah. It's addictive. It is.

It's really fun. It is so much fun. And it will ruin you for an office job on the desk. So just keep that in mind if that's something that you want to do. Great. And actually the last piece is, you know, the House and Senate. Application job application process is a box to check off, but that's not the way to get a job at the Capitol.

What's the best way to know somebody and talk to them? Find somebody that has worked there before and and get to know them. Ask them for any recommendation, anybody that they know in the capital that that you can apply to. And they will move your resume up to the top of the stack. That's the way to get the job at the Capitol.

So much is trust. I totally agree with you. Trust in friendships. I moved to the US on a 70.5 from the UK. Didn't know anybody but had to get to know people. I wanted to go into politics and I went to every event on campus, met every speaker, got, you know, recommendations from them. And then, you know what?

Got coffee, got to know them. And that's how I found out about every political job it ever done. Yeah. From my first, in the US Senate. Yeah. Like I applied. Didn't hear back. It was only when I made a call to one of the people. Had been a wonderful mentor of my of my in college, who made a call, and I immediately got the job.

Yes. Referral. So it's definitely a who, you know, but you have to hustle to get there. Like you can't just know everybody. Absolutely. And relationships matter. Your reputation matters a lot, so protect it. You know, don't be a sloppy drunk around people at the Capitol if you can avoid it. You know, because your reputation around here matters a whole lot.

Don't date in the capital. That's my tip. My big tip. I know people find love. Oh, man. Yeah. Good luck. Never from Capitol Hill, I thought. No, I can't say anyone on Capitol Hill. Because it could just be drama, you know? Just it is. It is drama. You know, people ask all the times like, is the capital, like high school with all the gossips and rumors and like, no, no, it's worse.

It's middle school. It is. I mean, it's, you see, all the same people all the time. If that's what happens. And so, just, you know, go in, work hard, have fun. It's a it's a great life. Well, thank you so much for coming on. I would love to have you on the show again. I actually way more questions for you.

I know we have to wrap. So thank you for coming on. Yeah, let's do it again. Abby too. Sounds good. Thanks.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business, where we bring you the stories and insights expertise from the forefront of the legislative and business landscapes. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege and Today, and joined by Texas lobbyist Lucas Myers. Lucas is a managing principal of Government Affairs LLC, a firm representing over half $1 trillion in shareholder value.

He's a veteran of the Texas House and Senate, having advised both leaders in House sides, both sides of the aisle on complex policy areas ranging from telecommunications to taxes to oil and gas. With a career that spans both legislative holes, corporate boardrooms and even the right we feel like is here to share his journey and insights into lobbying and how businesses can benefit from it.

Lucas. So we're starting, but it's Jill, it's Jill. One of the big reasons I want to bring you on today was to hear, you know, about your musical talents, because I know that you have. And so if you want to share more about that with us, the band you're in and all that. Yeah, a lot of, a lot of people don't realize that, I was really big in the 80s New York rap scene.

I know what you're thinking. I was probably very, very young to be there, but I was, and, the, y'all probably know the Beastie Boys, but I knew them when they were the bestie boys. Oh, and and they were like, we're the best friends, so we're the bestie boys. And I just told them, I said, guys, you'll probably need to toughen up a little bit.

And, you know, try Beastie Boys. That was you. That was me. And then history is what it is. And then that led me into, you know, the kind of 90s grunge resurgence right there. And and, yeah. And then, and then I discovered Rihanna. And so that makes sense. I was because we're talking about music and your musical tastes and,

Yeah. Did you live in some tropical house? I do think I did. It was good. It was good. Kind of made me want to go to I beat that. You know, you have to. Yeah, it was good. I know it was like happy, happy dance music. Yeah. Pretty much not heavy. I know my my playlists are complete. Mix of everything.

I was actually at a pilates class this morning. That was all, like Jonas Brothers music, old school Jonas Brothers. And that was like my thing. And the instructor said, hey, this was really fun. All these. She said, yeah, a bunch of the class. I just had no clue what any of these songs were, and it aged and it was all ages and it hit me really, really high because we have friends here.

Yeah, I do, occasionally I'll do, Spotify playlists based on the session and. Oh yeah. What is this sessions song? Well, was tied, so last session I had, music to watch legislators by. And then this session I had music to endure session by. And, okay. So I think it's kind of a mix. It's always a random grab bag.

But yeah, so we have, so I can tell you, some artists, but it's all names. I want to hear it. Please send it. If you're happy, you can make it public. We have the. You know who is, Tracy. The one where she's like, I'm sitting on the couch over here, and I don't want to talk to anybody.

Is that a song? Yeah, that's a song. Okay, well, I mean, that's not the way. That's the lyric. All right. We have, Lorde. If I could be royals. Yes, yes. Rihanna. We found love. Okay. And I'm trying to think whether that's sunflower. Oh, that's a good one. So, yeah, some pop hits a little bit.

Something like that. Well, Lucas entertains me. It entertains me. I'm very excited to hear that. So. Well, for those who don't know you, you sure love what yourself already? Yeah. So my name is Lucas, and, I'm a lobbyist, and I made that to myself. And, Yeah. So I originally, I'm from Austin originally.

I can claim that I was born here. Just up the roads. Yeah. And, actually lived in, Buda. So I'm a regional Buite and, family moved up to Austin, grew up mainly in Dallas, went to the University of Texas, undergrad. During that time, I interned at the Texas State Capitol for representative and, worked with her.

Didn't like it. Thought it was a terrible job. Full disclosure. Really? Yeah. Why was that? Why did you not like it? I just didn't like it. It was just like. I don't get what this is about. And, you know, you're only coming in for four hours a day for, like, three times a week, right? And I had a lot of other stuff going around going on, and, I just never was really kind of fully into it.

And, but it was fine. It just was. It wasn't what I thought it would be. And then after I graduated, UT undergrad, I went to, play rugby for a year in London, and, Lance. Well, yeah. That's right. That's where you're from. Yeah. I can tell by the accent and and so I played rugby there for a year, came back to, take the, take the Lsat and, ended up getting mono.

Couldn't go play for the Spanish team that was going to play, payment platform. So ended up back in the capital, and I really liked it. I thought it was great. It was really fun. And, I loved working there, and I did that for a few years. Went to. Took a year off, went to, travel, and then went to law school at the UT, law school and then worked for Scan Arts after that came back to the capital.

And here I am today. And that is a very funny tale. And I'm curious, what made you what kind of jobs were you doing as an intern that you hated? And then when you came back as a full, full time staffer, you ended up liking it. Was it the jobs you were doing or what do they have it?

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I think it was more that I was unpaid for a long time. Yeah, that's true that. No. Yeah. You just you were doing all the staff work, you know, running, running around and doing things and, the grunt work. But what you don't realize at the time is that's where you're actually learning how everything works. Yeah, you're learning through osmosis at the Capitol as a junior, staff.

You just listen, you pay attention, and it's kind of sinking in. Because there is no handbook for it, right? Like no one's like, this is exactly how you become a staffer or work as an effective staffer. So, and then when I, when I came back, my representative was, placed on a lot of key committees.

And so this we were really busy, and I was really stuck in, doing a lot of different work all at, the, you know, the really kind of substantive work. So it was nice to see, like, where all of a sudden you work on something and then that $10 million goes to the thing that needs to go to or whatever, right?

So did you always, did after that experience, like, that's when you decided you were going to go into lobbying or when did you know you wanted to lobby? My joke always is you fail a few tests and then you become a lobbyist. And so, yeah, I don't, I don't know, I think I was, you know, I saw lobbyists.

It seemed interesting. But I went to law school, and when I was in law school, I really liked law. And so going to be a lawyer and, I was a lawyer, but it didn't didn't stick, because of the the hours and the time and, you know, the kind of lifestyle that it required. And so my wife at the time and I'm like, we're going to be back to Texas.

We're going to have, you know, family here and got back into politics because politics is generally very family friendly. And you can have, you know, you have the time to devote to family. Well, it's good you think that. I think I've heard kind of mixed reviews, for sure. There's no such a time commitments, right, when you're especially in session.

But when you're not a staffer, you can make your own. You have more unstructured time. That makes sense. Yeah. You. Well, when you work for yourself, right? And you run your own business, then you have that time, so. Well, some things I wanted to get in. Questions with you today were more about, you know, what actually is lobbying.

We have a variety of listeners. And I think sometimes that can be misinterpreted or not understand what that actually means. So in your view, what is lobbying? It's great. Okay. That is that is my viewpoint on lobbying. And I, we can probably in the podcast now. Yeah. I mean, government relations, governmental consulting, government affairs, it goes by a lot of different names.

But ultimately, at the end of the day, it's it's lobbying, and a lobbying is trying to influence the legislative process for certain outcomes. Right. And, some people have a very low estimation of lobbyists. And other people don't have an opinion. And most people usually do have an opinion on it. And, my kind of push back always on that is everybody lobbies every everything that you believe in has a lobbyist.

And the simple fact of the matter is, is we provide, the informational resources for the elected stakeholders on the work that they're doing. And, that is important because otherwise there would be a vacuum. And the thing, you know, no good policy can be done in a vacuum. And, there are so many bills and so many issues that the lobbyists role is to kind of be an expert on certain issues and, and be a source, a credible source for information.

Yeah. You can't be an expert on everything as a legislator, something I found so fascinating in the Texas Capitol specifically, was there wasn't opposition to everything. And there's a lobby for everything. So even when you think, oh, well, you know, this is the keep Puppies Alive lobby, right? There's people against that somewhere. Somebody has an opinion on it and they hired or you know, they're they're expressing it.

Yeah. Right. And so there's there's good there's bad. There's a lot of in the middle. Why why do you think people do have a misconception of having. Oh, I mean, you know, it's like anything right there are, there are, pop culture, portrayals of lobbyists, right. And I think also like politics, politics is change. Change is politics.

It's a, it's how we as a society try to harness that change and understand how it all works. And the political process. You get to vote and then you have these elected members, you know, the elected representatives go and do their thing. And you can feel I think a lot of people can be very disconnected from the point of voting to what actually is produced or, you know, what is past or whatever we want to call it.

And so that kind of feeling of, I don't have control over that and somebody else maybe has control can make people kind of feel that they're not, you know, that can make them uncomfortable. Sure. Well, someone recently asked me about how lobbying campaigns work together, and it made me think of actually how we originally met, which is at a polling location, around North Austin area.

And, we both were kind of undercover lobbyists at the time, and we're sussing each other out. We didn't want to, go too deep into what we were doing. And I was like, oh, I work in offices and saline. We ended up figuring out pretty quick. So what role do lobbyists play for those who don't know, in the campaign process?

Yes we did. I remember we both were first trying to figure out where you, you know, like, wait, what's that? You for? Who? Okay, we both have the same side. That's good. Like, okay. First step should. We're good there. Yeah. The, your question was. Oh, yeah. The lobbying campaigns. So it's very right. I mean, you and I were, I think you were a lobbyist at time.

Correct. And we were volunteering at a polling station. There is the kind of the volunteering aspect of it. There is also the kind of the, for, for lack of a better word, the kind of campaign strategy side of it with, with our clients. And, it's interesting to maybe hear me today talk about that was, like, I can go in the weeds on research and stuff.

And there was, a study. I was looking at that was seeking to try to figure out, like, if you're going to lobby, what do you do? Or if you're going to have a government relations strategy, do you do you do campaign? Do you do you know, political action committee checks? Do you do PAC checks? Do you, lobby what do you know?

Do you, do you hire right, right away? I mean, do you hire only for like, the session for, you know, whatever, or do you do you have a long term extended relationship? And, the the take away from these academics was the best government relations strategy is you have a lobbyist and you can you contribute to campaigns like there's, you know, you you make your voice heard that way.

And it's a long term strategy. And if you keep those two things sync up for a long term, then your your aims. As for whatever your government relations aims are, I mean by business and nonprofit, you know, whatever you are more likely to get success, to get your agenda. You know, you know, is that for building lasting relationships?

I love the relationship side. What do you think the reason of that is? Yes. Relationships for sure. I mean, a lot of it is just understanding the relationships. I would also say that it is it is. You can have it's hard to to run this the same race if you keep switching jockeys during the middle of it.

And so by having the same folks by, by consistently, implementing the same strategy, it's a good one. That's because back and say if you hire but the the campaign contributions everybody kind of thing sometimes though it's the be all in all, it's all about the money and it really isn't. The campaign contributions are kind of like, that's that's not a it's like trying to say, like, you can stir, your cereal with a spoon.

With a spoon isn't the recipe for cereal or super love the analogy. Yeah. So, so like, I think there's an overall recipe. The spoon is just part of it and that's part of what campaign contributions are. And so to kind of circle back to the beginning of your question, why is that? Is because if you're only concentrating on PAC contributions or you only concentrate on lobbying in the state legislature, then you're you're not taking the full recipe.

Okay, for sure. And you are a contract lobbyist. Yes, ma'am. So you get to pick your clients. Yes. And what types of times they pick me, they pick you. I was going to say how does that sourcing usually come? Do they just call you out of the blue or is referrals referrals word of mouth usually. And there's multiple podcasts.

There we go. Shout out Lucas, what's your website? Governor Mills Governmental Affairs llc.com. There you go. There you go. Anyone's looking for a contract lobbyist. So you're called a hired gun? Essentially. Yeah, that's what they say. And why is that? Well, because you we we work for the things that you want us to work for. And so, now, I mean, you know, if you, if you do go to my website, you'll see that it's this is actually what I believe in is that I like to do work that benefits economically all Texans.

Okay. And so there are certain issues I tend to stay away from if you don't to talk about those. But those are just the ones I stay away from, because I do think that having kind of aligning your values with what you do allows you to keep doing what you do, and be happy about it. Right? People can read through, you know, the the fake, the phony.

And especially if you're building these long term relationships, they're going to go, really? I mean, if you go in and start lobbying for something pretty off the wall, they're going to be like, come on, I know. Yeah, like I know you. We've known each other for 20 years. I kind of this is this is B.S.. What you telling me?

Right. And so as a lobbyist, you know, you try to maintain your credibility at all times. I mean, that's that's your number one asset, for sure. What other types of lobbyists are there? Well, there's the in house GR you know, corporate lobbyists, there's your association lobbyists. They're your lawyer lobbyists. And then there your, like, law firm lobbyists.

And then you probably you go back down to kind of your hired gun and your contract lobbyists. And I think everyone is has a different role, and expertise and, kind of, you know, it's your hired guns tend to be very local based. Right. Not always, but and then you corporate gr person may be in charge of 27 states, right?

Right. What made you want to be a hired gun?

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I think, the I've always just kind of want to do my own thing. Like, there's a persistent demand for autonomy in my brain now, and so, I tend to, Yeah. Like, I tend to work better by myself and just kind of. I enjoy I enjoy building something, and you kind of give a little overview on the kinds of things you have, but typically you have specific subjects that you're more of a subject matter expert in.

I think mainly. So a lot of my experience in the legislature was, in kind of the, the, the business issues that you hear about. Right? So when I worked for lieutenant governor, serves the analyst for Business and Commerce, where a lot of the major kind of business bills go through, electricity, telecom, insurance, things like that.

And, and in the house, I worked on the budget. I worked on ways and Means, things like that, too. So, so it was always kind of the top line that I've actually worked for you folks in leadership. And so it so the expertise kind of lies on those things. Very cool. No. Definitely matters to a lot of our listeners depositions.

Yeah, yeah. What's like your day to day like now in session. So is there a typical day. You know I think that's the kind of fun part about it. Right. Like you can the joke always is you create a to do list and there'll be 15 things on that to do list and then 8A7 new things get added to that to do those.

And you still have in process 15 of that. Right. So the really fun part about sessions for me is that it is so fluid and that things are happening and pop up, and it's kind of the, you know, we joke is the four dimensional charts, right? And the other really fun thing is you'll never have perfect information.

You just don't. And so you have to make educated inferences and guesses on what to do. And then as more new information comes, you have to adjust. And so it's kind of so when someone's hiring a lobbyist, what are the types of issues that same business like a typical issue or business would want help with. So top line we'll say like just not only where people see value in lobbying.

Maybe I'll, I'll dodge your question a little bit. That's slightly different. But where you'll see it is it's reducing reducing taxes taxation. Right. Or keeping things the same a lot of times it's just having certainty. Right. And so like one of the things that in my experience is always terrifies business is the blank. Like the blank Excel.

So. Right. Like what what cost do we put into here. And so because politics is so much change, right. That things can be happening over here, that can have profound impacts on business and you can't quantify that. It's really hard. And so the insight is that, I mean, obviously as a bill gets filed you can start to quantify some of that.

But so for a lot of at least for businesses, it's a lot of just certainty it's keeping things sometimes the same or not having too big of swings. Right. And so you're and then your macro issues or like say taxes, subsidies either you know, or incentives, but then to call them and procurement, things like that, you know, make a really big kind of difference to a company.

And then also just kind of making sure from a defensive play, nobody else is trying to put in barriers to, you know, competition or entry to a, to an industry or a segment that somebody is wanting to get into. Totally. Those are all things most businesses care about. And then I think to the economic benefits, you know, we'll dive into that a little because that's there's definitely some economic benefits to love it.

Yeah. There. And again going back into like my like into the weeds research. It's it's funny because the academics try I think if you're a lobbyist if you're around the game you understand the economic benefits of lobbying. But if you're if you're not necessarily in the governmental space, it can kind of seem opaque. And so you see these academics try to put together like, okay, well, how do we create an objective measure of what lobbying can bring to a company?

Right. And I kind of talked about before, if you have this kind of whole strategy of campaign involvement and and lobbying, then you can see these kind of positive returns. And so they try to look at what are the positive returns errors. The average return, net return for a company that, that, didn't there's a, this whole analysis found it was 1.4% more.

If you are and if you didn't lobby, it was -2.5%. So 2.4%. So there is a significant swing right on on those who didn't have, insured in lobbying at the end. So, so they're these kind of, general the economic benefits of lobbying. And then there is there is another one that looked at just one piece of legislation at the federal level, and they found that for every dollar spent lobbying the industry, that was the businesses.

This is actually a whole corporate, all corporate, you know, a deal with the offshore, the reshoring of, tax revenue. But it was for every 200 and for every dollar spent, they got $220 back. How interesting. You know, so, like, 20, 20% return, which is probably better than a lot of our internal, our allies. But I could be wrong.

Yeah. No, you got some stats right there. And you also mentioned the procurement opportunities reduce competition. Do you have any examples, real world examples for those. Well, I mean, I think just generally, you know, governments have large budgets, right? Their budget, they spend money on things. And so there are, many folks who want to be part of that procurement, right, to, to do that.

And for reducing competition. I mean, I think the turning point and I was a staffer, they called them Vanderbilt's. Oh, yes. The Vanderbilt. Yeah. And I would never know which company they were when. And then I would, you know, laugh after the is you stated one word in this bill. Right. Right. And this is one word. Yeah.

Yeah. Those exist I think there's usually, you know, as you said, the Vanderbilt, it's kind of said with a inflection in a voice saying it's not a good thing. Yes. Definitely has a bad rap. It's a way to make sure the bill dies. Yes. Everyone's essentially a vendor, is it? But there's definitely ones that are more specific than others.

Yeah, yeah, it depends for sure. So are there the companies that typically want to lobby? I think there's a misconception. There's always big corporations. You notice there's more like nonprofits, charities, mid-level companies. Yeah. I mean nonprofits, large corporations certainly do. But I think you could go through of in Texas, there's you have to register who you lobby for, and you'll see a bunch of companies you've never heard of.

I mean, there's definitely the, the fortune five hundreds. But then there are those middle market companies that are out there, getting a foothold. And personally, I think that's a something that if I had a middle market company, that is where I would start to look at it. Is the benefits from hiring lobbyists? Absolutely. Yeah. When you're in it, you see more value on how applies to everything.

Yeah. And if you're if you're, a company making 50, you know, revenue of 50, $100 million a year and you, you, you know, a new procurement contract of $2 million, $10 million, that's a significant percentage of new revenue. If you can protect your business from from, you know, if you're if you're a disruptor or whatever we call them these days.

Right? And you're trying to, insert yourself into established business. You know, again, it's it's you're you're helping to protect yourself as you grow. And then the, the large companies, obviously, they have, you know, many of represent over half $1 trillion in shareholder value. So, I mean, this is the these are sophisticated companies that, recognize the benefit of, what do you see, involvement of private equity and their usage of lobbying and how that can help protect their interests.

Yeah. So I'm glad you asked. It's so cool. So I love that. Yeah. You know, we know it's. Well, it's interesting because you have now so many venture capital private equity funds out there. Right. And, you have a massive amount of capital under investment. And from personally, what I, what I see is you may be, private equity fund manager.

Right. And you have a portfolio of 50 companies or 30 companies. Right. And some of those companies may have no GR internal structure. Some of them may, and they're all disconnected. And so you may have a portfolio that all has natural synergies. Right. Or you have collections of funds that have synergies with each other, but there's no connection from the government affairs angle.

And at the same time, to your private equity or venture capital fund and you are a potential target, right, for legislation. And so you want to make sure that you can continue to do your I mean, yeah, the your private equity or venture capital thing. And you want to be able to sync up the because of these, you know, raindrops become oceans, right.

So like if you can make 1% here more 1% here more 1% over 50 companies, 30 companies, 20 companies, all of a sudden your bottom line return was a lot different. Right. And so I think there's a there's folks leaving money on the table and leaving returns on the table. Really that that could that by not there just seems to be a lot of misunderstand especially, I was talking to somebody who works for startups who had done a couple startups, and they listen to me, they're just kind of around and they, they, they heard kind of the conversations, not that I was having, but just kind of talking about government

relations stuff. And she said, yeah, you know, gosh, I kind of finally understand what it is you do. Like we should have used our lobbyist better when we had when we were doing our startup, because we just didn't understand what they're talking about. And it's like, yeah, that's that's kind of what we do. But and that is what got me thinking was like, oh man.

Like I watch the news and like, I was doing a bunch of fund research and you look at it and you're like, oh, well, he had this portfolio, you know, these fund companies and this company could be doing this to help this company. From a political standpoint, but they may not be talking to. And that has to happen at the fund.

Right. Like the fund has to have that, see the value of it and then coordinate all of that. And so that's where, you know, you can either hire somebody to come in and explain how you can set up all those new systems, or you just hire someone to do it. And I go the latter. That's really cool. You mentioned the first mover advantage, in this kind of concept for, kind of leading to the bigger returns.

Can you play that? Yeah. So, so the let's go again, going back to kind of the studies that look at kind of quantifying some of the returns that can happen or the benefits of it, economic benefits and lobbying. That if you are a if you are in a market segment that does not traditionally lot or have a political presence, and you start to.

Engage the process, you have outsized returns. I forget the numbers, but they were significant. And I think the logic kind of being, you don't have any of those that you have to worry about, right? There's no no other person in your industry that's going to come in and like, say you have the negotiating, right? It's just you're just able to kind of help advise on how things should go.

And that could be very beneficial to you. Want to chat offline, but have you got advice for startups before? Maybe we'll chat before. Definitely. What do you say? I know there's some secret sauce to lobbying. Everybody's got their, everybody's very friendly, but they have their, you know, their trade secrets. So for companies new to lobbying, what kind of first step would you be advising them to create a good government relations strategy?

Well, you should hire a lobbyist. Step one, you have to also, I think really the very first step, if you are a company looking to get into the governmental relations space, is you have to realize culturally that you're doing this and it's a long term commitment. It will provide benefits to your company, and you have to have some patience.

The a many times you'll see a company who will have an entire GR department because all their competitors do. They don't know how to utilize it. And building that internal culture where your GR is not just siloed off to the side and it works with sales, it works. It has a direct line to the C-suite, like the C-suite understands what the GR folks are doing.

Like, I remember talking to, the general counsel of a very large, yeah, investment fund. When I was a lawyer, he was. Oh, yeah. Lobbying like hammer. Those guys, we had a line item in the budget. I never understood what they did, but every couple of years, we really needed them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. But he looked at it as more of a form of insurance.

Right. You know, I think sometimes a lot of folks sometimes do like these are these folks that we, we hire and then sometimes something happens and we have to call them, if you integrate those folks in to your business, no matter what level of business you're at, that is the first the cultural acceptance of it and having it integrated and communicating between your different departments.

That's step one. I always find it so fascinating when I was lobbying that people would say, oh, can we do a session only contract? And it was that is just there's not really enough value in that at all for them because you're not working on it in the entire interim, which is when you're really building their reputation, your relationships, and you can actually be sowing the seed of the legislation you've passed or not.

And, I saw that is such a missed opportunity for people dismissing misunderstanding how it works. Do you think the same? Yes. The the interim. And in Texas we have, you know, we have session once every two years for 140 days and the rest of the time, maybe special sessions, but they have interim hearings and things like that.

But as a, as a lobbyist, one that told me the the interim is where you, you kill and you pass all the legislation, that's where you lay the groundwork. That's where the work gets done. And so yes, I agree with you. The the session only contract is a thing. But having that long term commitment over multiple years really allows the value to be utilized, to be realized.

Why do you think targeting state and local lobbying efforts is more important sometimes, and leads to greater outcomes in federal lobbying? Short answer, because you can actually get stuff done. The bills will pass, legislation, you know, will will move, at a I don't think any of your listeners are shocked to hear that sometimes nothing happens at the federal level.

All right. There can be some frustration at the federal level, a level over gridlock. And I mean, but at the end of the day, when you're dealing with is it 435 Congress folks and 100, you know, on the Senate side? They're just it's just harder. I mean, you could put 400 people in a room and asking if they like ice cream.

Right? And you're not going to come up with a consensus. And so, so, like, as kind of there became more gridlock at the federal level about 15 years ago, which started to see was folks starting to turn their attention to state, state lobbying and some local lobbying as well, but mainly the states. And it kind of makes sense, because when you look at kind of this, the state's in the union, right.

You have California is the M top GDP, Texas, New York and then Florida and those four states combined would be the third largest country in the world by US and China from GDP GOP perspective. So if you're passing legislation in those four states, well, here's it. You know, that's a $10 trillion GDP. You're you're acting, and so there's there is a benefit, again, to shifting from the, the federal where there are more folks and Texas, we have 150 state representatives and 31 senators.

And there's just again, there's less people. And so and they're also just going to have more natural affinities with each other, right? I mean, yes, Brownsville, Texas, at the southern tip is very different than Amarillo, but there's still kind of natural affinities that connect them. Right. And so it's easier to pass legislation that way. And then if you go down one more level to the counties, you're seeing like Harris County has a $500 billion GDP and it's the size of just behind Saint Paul, right in, in, in, in GDP.

And so you have five commissioners there. Right? So three is an easier number to get to than 218 at the federal level. Right. And so and again, they have more natural affinity because they're all within. Yeah. And so there's some there places you can go that you can you can build your business. You can affect change and have meaningful, what's the word I'm looking for.

You can see meaningful change. Absolutely. We've talked a lot about the state lobbying, at that level today. But how? I know it's very different. And you do some local lobbying. How how different is that? And obviously mentioned the size. So is that. Yeah. I mean, you're dealing in Texas. You usually have, you know, five county commissioners and seven, county officials.

And so, yeah, it is is different because it's just less people. And this is very clear where those people tend to be on issues. And they're also I mean, they say our politics is local, right? So the closer you get to the local, they're just closer to the neighborhood associations, closer to the local Elks, Elks Lodge chapter or whatever that is.

You know, and so again, they they are very hypersensitive to what the neighbor down the street thinks. Right. And they're meeting year round. Right. The local. Yes, yes. Good point, good point. I forget that is I was going to say how do you keep up with all that you to be in person in the city. All right.

Yeah. Theoretically, it's a lot of work. Yeah. On a side note, you want to find a way to solve that. There's nobody doing that. Doing doing, legislative fracking at the local level. Oh, interesting. And it's very, a lot more people than that. I talk to do local lobbying, which is interesting. Okay. Well, you want to do the question again, and I'll, frame it there.

All right. What are you using to track? And what do I just mean? Like, yeah, I just kind of, his is the way I do the local stuff is, is more just like one issue, and then I drop it. Okay. Right. So I'm not tracking, like, every individual piece of every piece of agenda item or whatever you want to call it that goes there.

Larger companies will have it for, for yeah. So hypothetically, companies looking for a lot. That's what do you recommend it look for? Well, you should you should base it on height. If you're if your listeners are not seeing this scrunched into this chair. I'm six eight. So there. But I just kind of feel like, you know, at least six six or over, as I say, what's the ideal?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, just we can just it's just perspective at that point. But, Yeah, I mean, hiring a lobbyist is always the it's the most difficult thing, right? Because it's a lot of trust in it's, there's there's not there's there's not a handbook. There's not a lobbying for dummies. There's not a, you know, business course on how to hire a lobbyist.

Right. Like I'm not familiar with an MBA course on that. And so, it's a usually a totally new, new experience for folks. And, the kind of simple answer is interview folks and see where you kind of make a connection with somebody. You know, your your lobbyist should also be a champion for you as the person who's, who's, you know, my hiring them, like, my joke always is, I'm here for you to take all the credit for anything I do and to blame you for everything that, you know, I need to be mindful.

Right. And I'm happy to do that. And the, you know, also always. What mean? I always tell everybody that I work with, I want to see them as CEO. One day. Right? I mean, you know, that that's that's that's my goal too. And but you, you, you kind of work through your, your, your professional network, right, to see who, who you connect with.

And it depends on your issue as well. Like whether are you looking to is there a specific piece of legislation that you have concerns with? Is there a specific piece of legislation you're seeking to pass, and are you looking to do something more long term, short term things like that? That's very cool. And I will also add, I think kind of one of the things you should look for is kind of, is that person good at strategy because relationships come and go.

People change in. Again, going back to politics, it's always changing. And so having somebody that's that's working for you that kind of understands legislative strategy and can help you implement that would be beneficial. And my half joke is kind of like the other role is like we're like the jungle guide, right? So it's like, you know, where everybody, the tribes are at, the lions are hiding and all that kind of stuff, and we can tell you what to do.

You may do everything right, but at the end of the day. So let's make that like that's a great allergy, you know. Yeah. It doesn't it doesn't necessarily always happen the way you want it to. But you have to be flexible and you have to kind of constantly, be objetos. Absolutely. You know, shifting gears a little bit, you are a rugby player.

I was and is that, you know, shaped or influenced any of your lobbying at all over the years? Yeah. The, you know, some of the one of my clients one time told me they just looked at and they said, you handle stress differently than normal humans. And I said, yeah, I guess I do. Yeah. I think with rugby it's it's.

Nothing over there in that in the legislature can be worse than what was done to me on rugby. And so, I have, I have been, stepped on broken literally multiple times. And and I think it just keeps you just, you just rugby is about moving that ball forward no matter what. And I think that's lobbying too.

Is that you? Just when the door closes, you go try to find another door. You try to sneak in through the window. Maybe the chimney works, right? Whatever it is, you just keep pushing forward and until the bell rings, right until the sessions in. And I think that's that's what rugby taught me, right? And that's ultimately what I did.

So. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. We have a, in our company, kind of motto, mission, which is Ride the Tiger. Yeah, yeah. And that is part of our interview process. You have to, you know, it essentially means we hold on for dear life. It's going to be a bumpy ride, but you just gotta. You have true grit and resilience to get through it.

And, so I definitely think sports do a lot of that. And we were talking before this about, you know, most sea level executives or CEOs or in some kind of sport or, thing like that. I saw a stat today about most female, CEOs in 70% were in some sport. Wow. Yeah. So, yeah. Got I gotta get my pickleball.

I mean, yeah, I mean, it's you can do, you can do the job or whatever. The one where you like, throw that ball really fast or. Yeah. So if I was a competitive swimmer in high school, but. Well there you go. I got I didn't want to get my hair wet. How sad is that. That's that makes swimming difficult.

It does it because you do it every morning. It it's very right. But now. Yeah, I'm more into the 40s and stuff now. Yeah. Well can you, can you just do a really bad blood stream? I can swim fast like water in your head, up over the water. I underwater was my favorite one. Okay. You know, for a long time.

Here's what I know. Yeah, yeah. Is. So that's why you didn't go Olympic? Yeah. My dad was a pretty good swimmer. Almost travel for the Olympics, but he didn't want to quit drinking beer. No joke. Interesting. So he had a different reason. But that's true story. Yeah. What's your what's your routine in session? Do you have a workout routine or is it all steps?

I try to do 20 minutes at least every other day. Nice and all that, you know, I mean, it's hard. It's hard to just tell yourself you can't do 20 minutes, 20 minutes of what's working out in some way, shape or form. So that's great. Yeah. Something kind of, you know, get the heart rate up. Kind of takes the edge off session a little bit.

Consistency is key. I hear it is better to do like 20, 30 minutes or something consistently versus, you know, once a week and kill yourself on some workout class. Yeah. So it's well, and it's like it's really my brain's really good at telling me I don't need to do something right now sometimes. And so having the, you know, it's 20 minutes, like if you just start you're done.

Like that's 20 minutes. People are on their phones more than 20. Right. You can scroll for 20 minutes. So that's yeah. So I do I try, I'm trying, I'm trying, I love it, I am proud. Yeah. It's okay. Yeah. Look, is you're a absolute wealth of knowledge in this space. And I'm sure a big help to a lot of companies.

And we'll definitely chat more offline about some at some strategy there because I'm intrigued to hear it. But yeah, I really appreciate your time and for coming on the show. We'd love to have you back after session. I know it's crazy time. So in the meantime, as you for, well, anyway, people can find you. I know you mentioned is it Governmental Affairs, LLC?

Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much. It was very fun being here, and I really appreciate it. Happy to come back and. Yeah, if you, you can find me at, Governmental Affairs llc.com. You can Google Lucas Myers, lobbyist. Texas. That usually works. And my email is Lucas at Governmental Affairs llc.com.

Awesome. Thank you so much and have a good and productive session. Oh, thank you very much. Take care. Best of luck.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business, your go to podcast for the latest developments in Texas legislation and business. I’m Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege. I'm your host today, and I'm thrilled to welcome Representative Josey Garcia, the first woman active duty veteran to serve in the Texas House of Representatives, serving district 124, in West San Antonio. From her inspiring journey through foster care and military service to becoming a community advocate and state legislator, Rep Garcia story embodies resilience and leadership in this episode, we'll dive into her very moving life story.

How are you feeling about this coming session in general? You know, I like to stay very optimistic. Right? Yes. You know, it's just such an honor to, to be able to come back to represent, you know, my district, I mean, Texans, right? And, you know, I had a lot of wonderful lessons last session. I was able to earn freshman of the year for the Democratic caucus.

And, that was a big deal. You know, had a few laws that were signed by the governor. And so I think I made a wonderful impact as a freshman with a whole freshman team. And so that if I can get through that part, I feel like this session is going to be, just icing on the cake.

I mean, of course, you know, maybe one of the most historic sessions we're looking at. So, I mean, you can definitely be a mentor to some of the the newer folks because it was a lot. You went through. You have this last session and a lot of people did. But for those who don't know much about you, can you just share a little bit about your background and, you know, want to dive into your military experience today and you're really your badass?

I got to say, you're badass so I want to hear about that. But then what drove you into politics? So yeah, first love to hear more just about you. And for those who don't know. Yeah. Well, I'm retired military. I retired out of the Air Force and Lackland Air Force Base, which is part of my district.

So it's, it's kind of written in the stars, if you will, you know, because things have just connected together. I would have never thought I'd be in the political realm, ever. I ran for, class clown in high school and won two years in a row. And that's about the extent of, you know, my election or campaigning experience in terms of for myself.

But I'm a community activist, an advocate at heart and have really learned a lot. Growing up, I went to schools in New York, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Michigan. Moved around a lot. My mother, she was a young mom and was a single mom. And so her and I would hitchhike from New York to Florida and for those who may not know what hitchhiking is, it's where you stick your thumb out on the highway and wait for good hearted strangers to pick you up and carry you on your journey.

So imagine that as a 20. Well, I think my mom was like 23, 24 years old. With me, I was about four years old because I remember vividly doing it with her, and, you know, lived a very nomadic life. I went to 14 different schools before, I graduated and joined the military, after graduation. It's, it's very difficult to say what would make me join the military other than, I was impacted at a young age by the foster care system, by juvenile justice.

My mother did become addicted to various drugs and alcohol and things of that sort. You know, looking back now, it was difficult for me to understand. Of course, when I became a mother. And you know how my mother could choose those types of things over me. But, now, as an older, more mature woman, you know, I realize that my mother endured a lot of trauma in her life.

You know, from, you know, generational trauma to, you know, every type of abuse a woman could probably endure. My mother has endured it, and she's passed. She passed away, about, you know, ten, 12 years ago. Forgive me because the years go by so fast, but. And we weren't on speaking terms when she passed. Unfortunately. So a lot of my insight now and a lot of my advocacy is based on my mother and, forgive me goosebumps.

And it's it's humbling. It is very humbling because I was taught by my mom at a very young age to always stand up for people, you know, to stand up for who you are and and not be ashamed of who you are. I'm biracial. My my father is a black Puerto Rican, and I was born in the 70s during these segregation times in our country, during a time where being mixed race was not accepted.

And, my mother was put out of the house because I wasn't white. I had to use the restroom outside in an outhouse along with one of my cousins, who was also biracial. We weren't allowed to use the restroom in our grandparents home, while our, Caucasian cousins were allowed to. Where was this? This was in in New York.

Wow. Yes. And when people think New York, New York is more than the city. It's more than the Bronx. In the boroughs, in Long Island, where where my family was from is upstate New York, right? Rochester area and where my mother is from was about not even an hour from the Canadian border in in Gloversville, Johnstown, New York.

And it's a little bit more country, more laid back, mountain people, if you will. My, my uncle was one of them. Somebody who literally hunts for his food, for his clothes. Bill. Wow. Built his house out of a log out of trees that he cut down, that he teaches and stuff. That's pretty cool. You know, I wasn't very close to him.

You know, I remembered him because my family would always sit around the fires and sing, and they all had such beautiful voices. And I remember I loved my uncle Lee because he sounded like Elvis Presley. Oh, wow. And my grandmother was obsessed with Elvis. Everything. Elvis, she loved. And so, you know, those those. There are some good memories that are sprinkled in, but a lot of trauma in my life.

And so when it came down to my graduation and joined in the military, I ended up in a place in Tennessee where, again, there were racial issues. I was one of the only others, meaning not white, not black. And that was, an issue for me. You know, even though being biracial, you would think that one or the other side would, you know, embrace you and bring you in.

And there were those differences and those, challenges where I had to be the funniest, the fastest, the, you know, one who would try to talk to everybody and, you know, try to earn friends because I would always be the new person coming without friends. And I, I learned at a young age, too, that you make friends with everybody.

And when it comes down to things like you be an elected for class clown, you get the votes that you need from both sides to win, right? But I was also able to, impact a lot of people's lives in Tennessee that I didn't realize until I got older. And that was because they hadn't been used to somebody like me who was of mixed race.

Some of my friends, although they would have a friend that was of the opposite race. And now I'll say one of my friends in particular was a, was a white young lady, and we had a black lady who was our friend as well, and she would use the N-word and my white friend as a descriptive with a hard R.

Wow. Okay. Just hey, that over there in front of in front of our black friend. I never experienced anything like that happening. Sure, it was always racism in my face, but behind me. But I was never dark enough to experience being called that by other people. I was called that by my own family. So to hear somebody that was not her family saying that in such a hateful way, I didn't understand that.

And I remember telling her, no, you don't do that, you can't do that. And our black friend was confused as to why I would say that. And she was like, no, it's okay, it's okay. And I said, it's not okay. And then the Los Angeles riots happened. The beating of Rodney King and Reginald Denny. Back then, we didn't have internet.

We didn't have, we had the news, we had radio stories and the Enquirer, the National Enquirer would tell you about things like aliens landing, but that was the extent of our media, and especially kids in high school. We didn't have access to any of that, but we would learn about the riots that were happening in in Los Angeles and how they were race riots.

And I remember every report I did in English was based on, you know, the racial history and unity and coming together. And I will say that a lot of my friends stood beside me and behind me, and we would lead many marches through the school calling for unity. I love that. So this was in you early on. Early.

It's it's always it has always been a part of who I am because I had always been told that I wasn't good enough, always seeking justice for the issues. Exactly. Were you in high school in Tennessee or was that okay? Yeah. So I got there at the end of eighth grade, ninth grade, like the end of eighth grade.

And so into like 90, 91 season. So I left New York before eighth grade was over. Yeah. Due to issues that I had there, unfortunately, you know, when you're a little girl who grows up in the streets and there was a point in time where I did live homeless in the streets with my mother. I was about seven, eight years old.

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And that also went hand in hand to my first incarceration. I was seven years old. Seven. I say seven, eight years old because I know the time frame. I don't know the exact dates. Do you want to? But yeah, I, was minding my own business. I was at a park playing minding my own business one day, and I didn't realize that that was something bad.

Police officers came up to me, asked me why I was in the park, and obviously I was playing, and, I found myself being detained, and I was literally taken to a jail cell because I was truant. I was skipping school. Well, when they found out who my mother was. That opened a whole nother ball of wax, because my mother was, in the streets very significantly, and she was very well known in the streets.

My mother was five foot one, maybe 80 pounds, blond hair, blue eyed, and she definitely stuck out like a sore thumb. In the community we lived in, because, of her, her stature, though, the fact that she had me with her, everybody knew who she was. And she was very funny and entertaining. She was a such a wonderful personality, and very likable.

So she always had friends and people always knew her well. When law enforcement knew her, they knew that my place was to be detained in this, this, jail cell. And that's exactly what it was. It was cinderblock walls. There was the little metal bed with the thin pad. We were locked in. So this was not juvenile. This was.

This was juvenile, yes. Meaning all the children were there. But it was literally like a jail. How long were you there? I can't remember a time frame, but I do remember it was a lot longer than it was supposed to. If I had to tell you, I would say a year. Because the stipulations to me being released was my mother had to test clean, and unfortunately, she refused a test.

But there was also another, element to that story where, prior to this happening, I was in the custody of my grandmother, my grandmother, and my grandfather, who is biologically my mother's stepfather. He he wasn't biologically her father, but he had been married to my grandmother since she was about eight years old, probably. Well, there was a point in time where my mom relinquished me to my grandparents and again, I can remember that I remember being about 4 or 5 years old at that time.

And after the incarceration, it was before the the initial incarceration that occurred at eight years old. So I remember my grandparents having me and I was in their custody when my mom took me from them, and I went and lived with her in the streets. And that's when I got picked up. So what they tried to do was have my grandmother come back and, and, you know, take over custody of me, but unfortunately, my grandmother was a severe, severe victim of domestic violence.

And, because of that, at a very early age, about 4 or 5 years old, I was utilized as an instrument to tame the beast, if you will say so. I government by my my family, meaning that I was the only one that was capable of keeping my grandfather from beating my grandmother. And and the reason why is because he loved me.

He loved me in ways that he was not supposed to. And my whole family knew that. And they they allowed this behavior to occur because at least he was nice. Okay. And so my grandmother tried to save me by not bringing me back home, by leaving me incarcerated. Do you have memories of this time? Absolutely. Very vivid, very far.

Absolutely. Memories as far back as I can remember. Who else did you meet there? Well, I remember this young lady named Roy Netter. I will never I got goosebumps. Matter of fact, I will never forget Roy. Never. As long as I lived. Because Roy never stood up for me there I was, one of the younger girls that was,

There was probably five girls. When I first got there. I was the only one that was single digit age. The rest were older teenagers and, you know, there was a there was a girl who tried to pick on me and wanted to fight me. And again, I was eight years old and these were older girls, 12, 14 or older, you know.

And I remember one of them was trying to fight me. And Roy never stood up for me, and and I'll never forget her for that. There was another girl as well. I could see her face and I could see all their faces. This other girl also stood up for me, but, They ended up fighting this fight within these confined cells.

And so I remember it being a terrifying time for me because, I didn't feel like anybody would come in and do anything. And so if at any time you're locked in these rooms and I wasn't, I wasn't beyond the fighting. I understood the fighting. Fighting wasn't a bad thing for me. Because I had seen it my whole life, whether it was my grandmother being beaten, whether it was my mother being beaten by people that she loved or that were supposed to love her.

You know, I have been, I think about it, the faces of the men that have abused my mother and go through my head, you know, and I'm not talking, I'm talking. And as I mentioned, how small she was, big men just hitting her like she was a man. And so, seeing that my cousins, I had cousins that were older than me.

One was two years older than me. The other one was four years older than me. They used to make me fight their friends for fun. Oh my gosh, how old were you again? Same time frame, same time frame. It became kind of the punch line to have the little baby cousin beat up one of their friends. So the violence in the fighting that was second nature for me, because that's what I grew up in.

I wasn't afraid of that. What I was afraid of is nobody rescuing us from ourselves in their and I. What makes you think that a kid would have insight like that? Because we always had an open door that we could run out of. I remember, being ten years old, taking my my three year old sister and running away from home in the middle of the night because my stepfather was beating my mother so severely that all I could do was take my baby sister, run through this trailer park, and hide underneath trailer skirts in the country in the dark, in the middle of the night.

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We always had a place to run. Whether it was my my grandmother and I run and my mom and I, and there was always a place to go. But when you're locked up inside of of a steel door, there's no place to go. Yeah. So that was very, you know, impactful, if you will. Absolutely. How did you get out of that situation and get released?

My mother was able to test positive finally. I mean, test clean positive test clean. Finally. The day that I was released with her, we're on our way to New York. What would you say about that time? It sounds like you were locked up in a cell as a child. What types of things have impacted your view on changing the system and what happens in there?

Knowing what happens in there, what is it that you're working on? Or, your ideas are for reforming that share in my testimony. Yeah. I will tell you, you know, you think of especially being a veteran, you think of the word freedom, right? And when you think of freedom, thanks a lot. You think a lot of things.

You know, you could think red, white and blue. You can think bald eagle, you can think Budweiser. You know, you can think, you know, the military, you know, you think so many things when you think freedom. But freedom for me is the ability to share these stories and not be ashamed anymore, because these are stories that we have been taught, from those ages.

I never made cries out to my teachers about what was happening to me at home. I never made cries out at church about what was happening to me at home. Why not? Because I didn't think it was bad. I didn't think it was wrong. I thought that was okay. When did that change for you? Well, that's a multi-pronged approach because there have been multiple, that wasn't my first situation of abuse.

I had been, I, I have endured abuses and traumas that most women have experienced. So, you know, experiencing the traumas, and, you know, I'm not ashamed to say that I've experienced, traumas that, that a lot of women are terrified of experiencing and, being so ashamed because you look at it in so many different ways.

You analyze it. Why was it me? Why did I deserve this? Did I deserve this? I did make one cry out, okay, that cry out was to my mother. And looking back, she asked me one day we we weren't in Florida. We lived in North Carolina at this time. It was after I had gotten out of that, juvenile incarceration situation.

We were now in North Carolina, where she was with her new husband, her current husband, and my baby sister. And one day she just asked me, she was she said, you and my mom called me Joe. My given name is Jolene. I don't know why Beyonce. I want to start a beef with me, but, you know,

But, there's a lot of trauma attached to Jolene. That's why I'm known as Jolene. But, Josie is actually, a nickname that my grandmother gave me, and she used to call me Nosy Josie, so. But you liked it. But, I'll tell you the story of how that happened. But, Anyways, my mom used to call me Joe.

Everybody called me Joe. And, I remember her saying, Joe, come here, I want to talk to you. And my mom was very open. She's a Gemini, very open, honest about things that would make me cringe. I was like, I didn't want you telling me stuff that you tell me. But she would. Yeah. And she asked me one time.

She said.

Has grandma touched you? Not has anybody. She asked him specifically, and I remember looking at her being afraid to tell her. Yes, because I didn't want to be in trouble. But knowing that, I could still tell my mom. And so I told her, yeah, you know, but I'm thinking, no big deal, you know? You know. And she started crying.

And back then our form of communication was writing letters. We didn't have a phone. Yeah, phones weren't available, of course, but we were very low income, very poor, and we didn't have phones. And I remember my mom sitting down and writing this letter, and my stepfather, he, he was there with her, and I remember her reading the letter, and it was basically telling my grandmother everything that I had told her.

You when she sent that letter. And my aunt sent the letter back blaming me and saying that it was my fault because I was the favorite grandchild. It was my fault because when I was instructed to sit on his lap, I would it was my fault because when he would pick me up and take me to the candy store and then abuse me, I would go now as I mentioned, this began as far back as I can remember.

Being four years old. I also remember him being caught multiple times. And being told that my aunt wrote in that letter here. My mom read that letter with her sister, blaming me when she had a young daughter that was two years younger than me or a year younger than me that let me know that was my fault. When did you, realize that it wasn't your fault and that you realized the right and wrong, which you clearly do.

So sitting here now, you were obviously child. So what changed when you realized that it was bad? And then knowing the moral compass there, I'm proud to say that I never had to be put in a situation to where I was in front of him again. I did see him again later in life. But it also was one of the reasons why, at 19, I got custody of my three year old brother.

Where? Because my mother moved back to Florida. She. She had a, baby when I was 16. It's my my baby brother. And, she was taking him to stay over at grandma's, you know, and I remember over my dead body. And at 19 years old, I was stationed in Panama with the Army. Just a couple of years after Operation Just Cause in the 90s.

And I hired a lawyer in Florida while I was stationed in Panama, got custody of my, my brother and him and I flew to Germany, where I was stationed from Panama. He's 30 now. This is feasible. That's probably amazing. So here it is with what drew you to the military as a kid? You know, again, we didn't have internet and all that good stuff.

I was an avid reader. I would read the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is like, books, the internet in book form. Yeah. Like Wikipedia. Yeah. And so I would read those stories and, just really loved everything about the patriotism of fighting for your country. I remember, TV show in the 80s called Tours of Duty. My grandmother would watch that all the time, and it was based on the Vietnam War.

Vietnam had been fresh over in the 70s when, I was born, and so, well, sexy. But, you know, it was recent history. So it was something that people talked about a lot. My mother was a biker woman as well, and a lot of her biker friends were Vietnam veterans. And I would hear some stories sometimes from them.

And I always just wanted to be a part of something great. And I thought it was so cool. And, my senior year of high school, well, actually, it was when I was 16, I wasn't a senior. I was in 10th grade when, the recruiter, had come to school. People, we had to take the Asvab, but I really wasn't interested in the military because I was big into softball and cheerleading.

I taught myself how to tumble, so I wasn't like the pretty cute cheerleader. I was the one that was sweating, dancing hard and doing flips. And, you know, all of that. More of the athletic side of it. And, I didn't think that there was any future for me. In Tennessee, I lived with an aunt, because I got in trouble in New York, you know, and and ended up my aunt took custody of me.

And that's how I ended up in Tennessee. Well, this was the very same aunt that blamed me for my abuse. Oh, my God. She was a severe alcoholic and, mother of one. She was married, had a, a daughter and my cousin, who was a year younger than me. Unfortunately, she passed, when I was running for office, and, when you go from being a street kid, being able to walk and do everything to being in Tennessee, that's on the Mississippi border, where literally our town had a red light and that was it, a stoplight one and, stop signs, four way stops.

We had one Piggly Wiggly, which was a little tiny grocery store. Yeah, there was a diner. We had to drive, like 45 minutes to an hour to get to a mall. So there was no nowhere for me to go. I had no way to walk anywhere. And so, that caused me to to dive into sports more and, so that's why I joined the military was because I knew I didn't have family support.

My aunt reminded me all the time how she. That wasn't enough, you know, she would compare me to my cousin all the time, like, I, I remember my senior year, I made the United States All-Star cheerleading squad. UCA. Wow. We went and cheered for the Queen of England. My town got together and raised the money for me to go.

And I remember being so excited and running back and telling my aunt. And as dismissive as she was, like it was nothing. And then she was like, well, how are your grades? Because my daughter made out all. Well, and, you know, so it was always like, I would try so hard to do something good. And the people that loved me would slap me back down and tell me how I wasn't worth it.

And, you know, one of my friend's brother, he was about three years ahead of us. He joined the Marines, and I remember he would come back and visit and he would be dressed in his, his, dress blues. And I was like, this is just amazing. Like, who doesn't want to do this? Well, my friend was a year older than me, and he was like, hey, I'm going to join the Air Force.

And I was like, oh, that's weak. You join the Air Force, I'm going to join the Marines. And I went to the marine recruiter again. I was in 10th grade. And I remember going to knock on the door or to pull the door open, and the door was locked, and I knocked on the door at the marine recruiter again.

It was like an hour drive in the next town over for us to get there, and they weren't there. So I turned around, went to go walk back to the car and I hear, hey, where are you going? And I stopped and I turned around and the Air Force guy opened the door and he was like, what are you doing?

And I was like, oh, I came to talk to the marine recruiter. No, you didn't come over here. And he was like, did you sign with them? I was like, no, I'm just here. Like he was like, no, you don't want them. Come over here. Let me show you what the Air Force can do. And I was like, my friends join in the Air Force, so let me see what they're talking about.

Well, I thought I was going to fly planes and, you know, be GI Jane and do all this cool stuff. And I became Air Force dental technician. Oh, I love it so much. Okay, well, that makes sense. Too beautiful smile you have. Oh. Thank you. Did you. So I had an interesting I was my grandfather and I were really close growing up.

And he got diagnosed, with mesothelioma, asbestos exposure, cancer. And he was really healthy guy. So that was really tragic. So, it was his dying wish that I joined military. And so I had no interest in, in doing it before, but I thought I was very into, debate and, and justice and all that kind of air, realm of things in high school.

And so I said, you know, if I want to go into politics one day and actually make change, this will just make me more badass. Maybe I'll maybe I'll do it. So he actually loved the Coast Guard, and he took us to the recruiter. The funniest way. When I was a baby, I was like five years old. But I remember this.

This was an early, early memory. So he called the recruiter and said, I've got two new cadets ready to enlist right now. And they were like, so excited. And he tells these, you know, very official people at the Coast Guard office. So my brother and I show up and it's we're like five years old that they're like, oh my gosh.

But they showed us around all of the, all the Coast Guard stuff, all the boats and all the things that I have more of an interest in. My brother did. And so I did. It was always kind of the back of my mind that that might be something I'd be interested in. And then I did it for my grandpa.

But also it was a really I'm glad I did it. We can definitely talk. I'd love to chat with you about your experience going in. And if you feel how women are treated in it because there's more female friendly, militaries and others. And I did hear, Coast Guard and Air Force were more female friendly. But how do you feel about that?

And is that what drew you to it? A little as well, that you kind of recruited you? It sounds like. So, Yeah, I guess I was kind of recruited. Yeah. You know, I, I had always, thought that I would be a part of something. I just didn't know what. And the fact that my mom and I had traveled so much, it was so easy for me to think, hey, heck, yeah, you know, send me wherever.

And, you know, I can go. And. And that was another thing that I know a lot of women don't have that I say luxury kind of tongue in cheek, but, a lot of women don't want to leave their families, you know, they don't want to leave their mom. They don't want to leave their grandparents or their siblings.

You know, for me, I, was the oldest of eight, but I had only met one of my siblings at that time. And so for me to, travel was like a dream come true. And so, I had my preconceived notions of what the military was and even, join in the military and and the first day in basic training, I was selected out of about 40 women to, to be the leader of my flight to be the dorm chief.

Wow. I was the youngest in my flight. Wow. And and chosen as the leader because I was a loudmouth out there. So. So yeah. So they was like, you don't say that here. They say the Army and but I was like, so forward with, you know, doing everything, you know. Right. And being to the, the best that I could that, you know, it kind of made me stand out.

And I was chosen for that leadership position. But it was hard. It was my first dose, not my first dose, because you experienced things in high school, of course, with Mean Girls and things like that. But because I was always kind of class clown and, you know, more of a tougher girl, I didn't really experience a lot of mean girl behavior towards me.

I was more of sticking up for other people that would experience those types of things because unfortunately, you know, and I'm not proud to say that when I was that age, I would just assume. But you in your back then, you know, then argue with you and let you say bad stuff to me. And I've grown a lot since then, thank God.

But, but yeah, I, I where were we saying I'm sorry? So you were saying that I want to know you're. Oh, this was my. So it's not. Yes. So that was a crash course in to a woman in leadership and how they are treated because I went from, having friends to everybody hated me. Interesting. Because you were chosen.

Because I was chosen as the leader. And again, I was the youngest. Like, there were girls in there whose dad was a colonel. You, you know, went to ROTC at two years of college. You, you know, had all these accolades who came in with stripes. I came in with nothing. That's what you call a slick sleeve. Like, I wasn't even one slick sleeve.

And there were girls in there who were leaving basic with. With three. And so when you have those types of dynamics, you know where it is a hierarchy and a rank structure, and you take somebody who doesn't have that rank and experience and you put them in charge because you see their leadership as being capable. It put a target on me.

And one thing, another thing that was a feat that I was able to do that wasn't typical, especially of women, was I maintained that position the entire basic training. Wow. Which recycling is something that's common where you lose your position and they send you back a couple of weeks or back a week or two. Wow. And so, but it was bittersweet because I didn't get to go off from basic to my next base with these wonderful friendships and people to, you know, go with me.

I went with, you know, people being mad at me because I was in a leadership position. So that kind of kept me from volunteering and I didn't volunteer out with Volun told. But that kind of had me leery of, you know, fighting for leadership positions because I was like, why would I want this? You know, just to I have to do the same thing and as everybody else does, and then some, but, the experience as far as being a woman, I will say I experienced sexual harassment in basic training from my, they're called technical instructors in the Air Force.

Most people are used to drill sergeants. So think of it as a drill sergeant for the Air Force, as a technical instructor. And lo and behold, a couple of years later, that instructor was court martialed for, sexual abuse of trainees. So they do get justice, does get served a lot of the time. But two years? Well, I wouldn't say a lot of the time.

And that kind of leads me to now where, you know, we advocate pretty hard for military sexual trauma. A lot of our legislation is, you know, based on trauma that community feels I like to call my legislation community based legislation. And and when people come to me with an issue like military sexual trauma, and again, I'm the first woman veteran to serve in the Texas House of Representatives, the first perspective of what sexual trauma in the military is.

Okay, because and not to take anything away from our male colleagues. There are male male veterans in the house, like Ray Lopez, who's my delegation mate, and Phil Cortez as well. Both my delegation mates. But, you know, it's always treated as it doesn't happen to men, you know, and either you're a part of it or you're not.

It's something that people historically don't talk about, you know, or oh, you can't take a joke. Oh, we can't give you a compliment. You know, it's it's the culture. The culture that is built up around leadership, rank, retribution, getting retribution. And and I will sit here today and let you know that as somebody who has been outspoken in my career, you know, I could have very easily I'm telling you stories about my career.

And you would think that I went on, served my 20 years and I got out at the highest rate possible. Imagine that did not happen for me. Yes, I did serve two decades, but I did not make you nine. Well, there's many reasons, and some of that is you call the ugly baby an ugly baby, and you speak out against injustice, against abuses of authority.

And now your performance reports. There's words that they put inside of your performance reports that dictates your worth and value. And I'm sitting here and telling you that my worth and value was diminished because I didn't sell cookies at the hospital for a fundraiser now. But what I did do was work past duty hours every day. What I did do as a single parent to four children, because at that time I did have my brother more children as well.

Well, I gave birth to my own children. I had a set of special needs children, special needs twins who during my service, I was reminded of what a what an issue they were for me to have in the military because anytime I had to take them to doctor's appointments, I get in trouble. Any time I had to take them to therapy, I would get in trouble.

Those are things that would get marked down on my performance reports, but you would have people that would violate laws that would abuse people, and you would watch them get promoted. I saw it, so I did officer training for a year, and it was in a random school in Alabama, the Marion Military Institute, and I went in there very undisciplined.

And when somebody who was in the leadership position over me would do something I thought was injustice, unjust, I would not want to obey that authority. And I was the most punished and in trouble student at that school. I came from being a very sheltered goody goody in high school to being the most, like at the top of the list, bad student.

And it was because I could not obey. Someone I saw was doing something completely unjust, and it made me so angry. And I would laugh. And I got so much trouble for stupid things, just smiling or laughing. But I remember getting caught outside my room because I just became the biggest rebel ever. I snuck out every night. I broke all the rules.

I did everything bad, and my roommate was my savior. And Amy, she's an amazing woman. She stayed in the military, did three deployments. She's one of my best friends to this day, and this was 12 years ago. So we were roommates and I got in huge trouble sneaking out of my room, got caught and the female sergeant on our floor said to me, hey, you're in huge trouble.

You're about to have to marched 50 penalty hours over the next few weekends, so I just had to march in square with my rifle. But the worst part was the sexual harassment and it was males. That's what it was interesting to hear you saying, and I'm curious to hear more of those stories. There were many abused, so we had student leadership as these.

But this was a private school. This wasn't actually the military yet. So everybody was training to get their credentials in the military, whether enlisted or going into officer training in some way. And, I mean, I was hazed so severely. I had scars from it, from being zip tied and left in dark rooms and screamed at, told I was going to be raped.

I they, you know, we the running and the exercise was fun. That was like running ten miles stuff I'd never really done before. I was a swimmer, but I wasn't really. I pushed myself as an athlete. I loved that I'm not running unless something's chasing, I like, I don't like it. I felt like they do it at 3:00 in the morning.

They say, okay, we have to go do ten miles. I'm like, okay, we did, but we uncovered a sex ring at the school. So one of the most innocent girls I will remain totally keep her privacy here. The most innocent girl has never been kissed a boy. She was being summoned down to the, captain's office every night.

We were very worried about her, but she. We knew that if something was going on, she'd probably tell us. She didn't know until I found out because I went. I was summoned down after hours to Captain Brooke Walters office. And I will say his name because he is now in jail. So he straight quid pro quo harassed me, said, you know, if you do this, I will promote you do all this.

I had braces at the time. I was barely 18. I just moved to the US from another country, scared out of my mind when I slapped him and told him. And he said, the next day I see him, I have to salute him because he's our captain outside. And he said to me, cadet car, if you don't do everything I say, I'm going to get you kicked out of the school.

I just moved to the US. My dad didn't want me to leave. You know. My mom didn't either. They wanted me to stay with them. So there were a lot of things pushing me to make sure this was successful and that I did well. But I did my goals and achieved what I wanted to. So I wanted to stick it out.

And I just said, try me. But I found out my friend, her dad was a Jag in the Army and she said, you need to call my dad because he deals with these types of cases all the time. Amazing, amazing man. I'm Colonel IFR, save, save the day here. So he said, if this happened to you, you're not the first.

So you need to get other testimony. So he's like write down everything. Write down all your text messages. What phones were a thing at the time. So you type it up. And so my best friend Amy and I went to all of the girls rooms were 50 girls out of the school, and we knock on everyone's door and we said, hey, do you have any thing you'd like to share about Captain Burkhalter?

And, we got 32 statements, and 30 out of the 32 had slept with him. And this was only two months, three months of being actually in the training. So they had some were anonymous. Some came forward because they found out how many women were coming forward. The commandant of the school blamed every single woman except the two that didn't sleep with them.

So he said, okay, Laura. And then this other young woman, he said, I apologize because you didn't, but the rest of you consented. These were girls barely of age. We found out there's no consent when there's a power exchange. Exactly, exactly. It's the culture, though. The culture. And I was really turned off by that culture. But the good thing that did happen was Colonel Ethos and out, you know, a letter to the school, a really big packet with all of the testimonies and the information.

We never saw him again, but they let him commission as an officer. Then the boys got some encouragement because all the girls had come out, and it turns out he had been doing the same thing to the men with a senior chief who was older on the campus was a professor. He left overnight. You could see it just put me off pretty, pretty severely.

But it made me very tough and, you know, so commend you for everything you went through to you for speaking out because you saved those girls. And I'm going to tell you how I'm going to tell you how and just you haven't enough. Are just you caring enough to ask? Oh, and the statements, oh, I get chills. I know, I know, I have hundreds of pages of these documents still to this day.

And so to wrap it up, they they let him commission. I then said, I do not want to be part of this more. I'm going to go study political science, and I'm going to go get my degree elsewhere. And I went to the most American school I could find, which was the University of Alabama, to get that experience.

But I loved it so much. And two years into that experience, I get a call from someone in the Army and they said that this law car. And I said yes. And they said, we have some questions about someone. And I said, I think I already know what this is about. And I met him at a library and I gave him all the statements and said, I know this about Captain Burkhalter, right.

And they said, yep, this is about him. And they couldn't tell me anything at the time, but they really appreciate me giving the documents. And I found out he was dishonorably discharged. But then he went and worked in a school. And so only, you know, and years go by, I'm living in D.C. and it was in 2020, I get a call from someone at the military school who went there at the time is that he's going to jail for life.

And I just cried. I was just so I was so sad that it took like seven years and that other women had to go through far more trauma than I ever did through this. But it was so relieving to hear that that happened that just did kind of serve. But it really framed, yeah, that really young age, just my view on the world and there are bad things that are happening.

And so now that was a little my experience and unfortunately turn me off to the military, even though really great friends and people who work in it, I just knew it was such a fight that caused so much trauma for me that I didn't want to continue it, but I wanted to help others in that. So yeah, it really shaped a lot for me in politics, and that's where we're at.

To still the stories that you're telling, they're still happening. You know, my story is still happening, your story is still happening. And the one thing that we do have now is social media, because people can't hide from it anymore. And, and I have a wonderful group of women who are my mystique committee. And what they do is they not only collect stories of, of trauma, but we fight those cases still.

Wow, do like I've written letters. And here's one thing I want to do. This is the sad part. Some women are being empowered to speak up. Some men are being empowered to speak up, but are still not seeking and that not receiving any type of justice. We had a case that went to the JAG day. It's a woman who was given alcohol by her supervisor.

They were both married. He doused her with alcohol, instructed one of the other young, younger enlisted folks to take this enlisted folk, this young lady, to his room. They were in the dorms or what have you. I'm so she can sleep off her alcohol because she was really, really drunk. Well, he took advantage of her and she ended up pregnant.

She went to him, tried to tell him and like, look, this is what's happened to me, you know, you got to step up. And he told her that it never happened. And if he if she said anything, that he would get her kicked out for adultery because adultery is illegal in the military, if you commit adultery and you cheat on your spouse in the military, you can get court martialed, right?

And so as a young enlisted member, I think she was maybe e 3 or 4 at the time, and this was an NCO. She gave Britain's child, raise the child. The child is proof that this happened. And they didn't take the case because it was too long ago. Even though she has a child from the instance. And I thought a child would be proof.

Well, DNA. But they're trying to say that it that she can't prove that it wasn't consensual. Well, why? Because you were drinking. Why? Because you didn't report it. There's alcohol involved at all. But that's the culture. And see, and that's the sad part about it. But we're able to break through a lot of those barriers, whereas people are seeing stuff and saying stuff now, you know.

And so although I'm happy to say that I've got all these, you know, women and men who are advocating for MST and Military City, USA because that's what I represent in San Antonio and Bexar County. You know, we we have a system now where people can report, they report to one of these, these leaders, one of these advocates, and they're walk through the process, walk through how to file an appeal on a case to how to file with JAG, how to, you know, advocate at the miss at the Texas Capitol.

And that's what we do. We had the Vanessa Guillen bill that passed last year. That was my very first bill. It was it it was to honor the life of Vanessa Guillen, who was an Army private who was killed at Fort Hood by her abuser there. Fort hood is, well, Fort Cavazos now, thank God. You know, the stigma of Fort Hood.

It holds negative energy to it. So Fort Cavazos is now like a beacon of hope for people who have impact, been impacted by sexual trauma. And every year we're able to celebrate Vanessa Guillen Day, September 22nd. And this is Destigmatizing the conversation. Yes, around talking about military sexual trauma. Because, you know, I'm not going to say I'm not proud to have served.

I am so proud. Yes, I bleed red, white and blue. I love the fact that, you know, the military saved my life because, as you heard, I gave you some very grim examples of where I could have been, and the military afforded me the opportunity to save my life and my brothers. Did you find community and family there?

And and you said it was hard at first? No. Where did you find it? No, I didn't, you. I know you're married now. And you have a wonderful family, a big family. So where did you find that peace and happiness? So one side effect to experiencing a life. I've experienced is the inability to to maintain relationships. When you move around as much as I do you, you don't like to connect to people because they're going to leave you or you're going to leave them.

I have severe like attachment, detachment issues, you know, meaning that I'm not the best that calling and checking on you. I'm not the best at coming to visit, but I would still fight for you, you know? And so when I think of community and who I have from my military experiences, I do have a couple of people who are very close to me, one of them being my best friend.

We've been stationed overseas together in Germany, where we were stationed in Tech school and Wichita Falls. Together. We're stationed here in San Antonio together. Tanya, she she was somebody who always understood me. She always got me, which I wasn't. Somebody that was easy for people to get along with because I was very assertive of myself. I was very protective of myself.

But once you could crack through that shell, I was the most fun and happy and just exciting person. And she gave me that opportunity to love me at a time where I didn't feel worthy of love from a friend. You know, having a friend that love me. So she's one of those people where, you know, I've literally I've seen her once in the last ten years, 15 years.

You know, we don't talk every day. We talk about she. I know she's going to call me every New Year's Eve, you know, that's that's what I have. And also I went back and got my sister because as I mentioned, my sister was taken from me when she was four years old. Her father, who was extremely abusive, forced.

My mother had a gun to the face to give up my sister. He comes from a very prominent family in another state, a family that is ingrained in the judiciary, a family that's ingrained in legal journals, a family that is a part of the beginning of the major metropolitan city. Wow. A name that is so recognizable that all of our children read about one of their relatives in the books.

I'm not going to say it just because, but you see what my mom was up against? She was a little poor woman who was so damaged she gave up my sister. I didn't see my sister again until my sister was 14 years old. I didn't see her again from that point because I was military and I was able to go visit her at her home.

She grew up into a beautiful young lady who ended up married and had a baby, who was biracial. My stepfather disowned her for having a biracial child. When I found out that that happened, I brought my sister to Texas to live with me and my sister still with me. How cool she is. I'm seven years younger than me, but she's the unsung hero behind the scenes of everything that I do, and that's because we've raised our kids together.

She would get my uniforms ready for me so I could go to work on base. She would make sure the kids had food when I had to work 2 to 3 jobs just to put food on the table for us. Because believe it or not, as an NCO in the military we qualify for work and food stamps. And so I would have to work 2 to 3 jobs to make sure that I could afford a house and a roof over my children's and my brothers and my nephew and my sisters I had she's why I'm able to be a full time legislator now.

She was my first investor on my political campaign. She's somebody that is so different from me and and I'm sharing this with you because I don't celebrate my sister enough. She is my younger sister. I still hold severe animosity against her for eating the nose and toes off of my Barbies. When she was little, and it's been hard for me to get past, so there's still a little chip on my shoulder being the bigger sister.

But. But she has been an just unfavorable supporter of mine. No matter how crazy the idea is. She's like, oh my gosh, if we have to, but okay, I'll go, you know? But I don't want to, but okay, let's do it. You know, she's very polar opposite of me. You know, I've got dark hair, she's got light hair, I've got dark eyes, she's got blue eyes, you know, she's taller, I'm shorter, I'm older.

You know, she's very well mannered. She's a debutante. She's, you know, she knows where her forks and place settings go. I eat with my hands, you know. She doesn't say bad words. I curse like sailors sometimes, you know, but she's she's just. She's my biggest cheerleader. And I couldn't be more proud to have her support because I know I couldn't do what I do without her.

She doesn't like to be a part of the political stuff, you know? But she's she takes care of our babies. And that means the world to me and her and my husband. My husband. You know, Ramone, he's a Purple Heart veteran. He's my hero. You'll never hear him say anything other than he absolutely loved his job. He loves his country.

He loves Texas. He loves our family. He supports me being a type A powerful woman. You know, I picture us as two wolves, right? Because we're both alpha powerhouses in our own right. But he supports anything and everything I want to do. And and for those who don't know a lot about me and for those who do, you know, my right hand man is Farrell Clark.

My chief of staff, my partner in crime. He was my brother in advocacy. That's a whole nother story. But us three, we are like the trinity of power because we are able to do and to come as far as we have in such a short period of time. You know, I went from just being a no named activist who just wanted to be a part of bringing water and food to people during Covid in the power outage.

And and now here we are, you know, able to impact laws, able to, as I like to say, you know, save the world one Texan at a time. And it's just such an honor. It's such an honor. And and if I may, I think this is the perfect segue, actually, because you asked me a question earlier and forgive me because I get very I call it preachy, and it's important that I mention it and say it in the way I do, because I got something so valuable, so valuable as an incarcerated eight year old.

And I see that now as a 47 year old who is at the heights of, of my life beyond anything that I ever thought would be possible. But I remember being in the cell and as I mentioned to you, it's literally cell block. The walls were painted. I feel like they were white, but it could have been like that really ugly hospital blue, light white, bluish color.

There were cinderblock walls that had a little piece of wood wedged between it. So it would make like a desk, right? You could pull a chair up there and we didn't have a chair, but you could pull a chair up there and, you know, read, write, do whatever, because we still had to go to school and do things well.

They provided us with the little New Testament Bible. I was familiar with the Bible because I went to Sunday school. My grandmother would send me to Sunday school because she would always say, I need to get you out of my hair. So the Sunday school bus is coming. You're getting on. It wasn't because we were religious, you know, my grandmother and my mom, they grew up, Lutheran in upstate New York, and my grandfather was Catholic, so I was aware of religion.

I went to a Baptist school, Emmanuel Baptist Church in Fort Pierce, Florida. I'll never forget it. I got baptized multiple times because I wanted my hair out the window, because we got to stick our heads out the bus window with wet hair, and I saw the older girls do it, so I thought it was so cool. I remember I would lie in church because they'd ask me what my name was and I hated my name was Jolene, so I would tell them my name was Candy.

I don't know why I chose that name, but I always wanted a cute, cutesy name. Yeah. So I remember sitting in my room in my cell, and I would climb underneath the desk with my little Bible, and my back would be on one side of the wall. My feet would be on the other side of the wall, and I would sit under there, and I read that New Testament Bible from front to back, and I would read all the stories, and they were such beautiful stories.

And I was so excited because God loved me so much and, you know, but then it hit me. I was like, wait a minute, then why does this bad stuff happen to me? If God loves? And I couldn't understand that. And I remember I ended up going to church with a friend who was Methodist, and I went and they had a Bible two it wasn't the same Bible, you know, but I remember going through it and I see similar stories.

I see similar verses, similar chapters, but it was different. But then I would see again, oh, the Lord gives you the strength to get through. And I would hear the sermons and they tell you, the Lord doesn't give you more than you can handle. You know you are a vessel for the Lord. And I would think he chose me.

He chose me to be abused. He chose me to watch my mother get beaten within inches of her life. He chose me to live in the streets. He chose me to sleep in a chicken coop when it's frickin five inches of snow outside. He chose me for this suffering. If he chose me for that, I don't want him.

What kind of God does that to a little girl? What kind of God does all this stuff that we see on TV? I was mad at God. So mad at God that I thought, maybe I'm not talking to the right God. I became Buddhist interesting because I was like, okay, well, maybe that's the God I need to. So that wasn't it.

So then I became Christian Catholic at 19 years old in Panama. I got christened by the Archbishop of Panama every day, religiously, I would do my prayers every day. Hail Mary, our father, you know, I would do everything every day religiously by the book. Bad stuff keep happening to me. So then maybe I'm not supposed to be Catholic.

Well, maybe there is no God, but I would never bring myself to say there was no God. I gave birth to my twins three months premature. They had a 100% mortality rate. They had twin to twin transfusion syndrome. There had been five cases at Lackland Wilford Hall Hospital and half of those cases the twins died. So I was carrying children that at 14 weeks they told me were going to die.

I carried them until 27 weeks. They were born three months premature, 2 pounds each. I didn't think they were going to live. Do you know that I couldn't bring myself to pray for my own children, because I was so terrified that I was not God's chosen one, and that my prayer held no power, so I would take it upon myself to stalk people who I thought believed.

Any time the chaplain would come and visit and say, can I pray for you? Yes, please, please, yes, pray for my babies. My colonel, Colonel Karen, I will never forget him. And when we're talking about men in the military, this is a phenomenal human being. Because at a time where he could have made me come back to work, he changed my duty station to the NICU, meaning he assigned me to serve in the NICU for three months so I can stay with my babies every day.

So when I want to just give that shout out to he actually he's General Karen. He went on to be he went on to be of I believe that four star. If you're not a four star, sir, I'm giving you the four stars because I'm just that phenomenal. But forgive me for not knowing off the top of my head.

But General Karen, he went on to do amazing things and I will always hold a soft spot in my heart for him because him and his wife came up on Mother's Day and I remember they brought me flowers and they asked if they could pray for my baby. And I remember saying, yes, please, please do. And I would seek out people who I thought were believers to pray for my children so they would save them for me because the Lord didn't love me enough.

Fast forward, I navigate in my life as somebody who would never come out of my mouth and say that the Lord didn't exist. I would still thank him for my food. I would still thank you. Say thank you, Lord. I would still, you know, respect people's religions, you know? So getting being stationed in Iraq, you know, I always want to learn as much as I can about other people's religions, other people's cultures.

And then, you know, fast forward, and I marry a man whose parents are Pentecostal preachers. Oh, well, they have their own church. And I'm terrified because I'm like, oh my goodness, here we go again. I'm not going to be good enough, right? Because this is where history is telling me, because here comes a new religion, Pentecostals. Not only that, but now I'm married to these pastor's son, and I remember crying one night to my husband.

I don't, I say to him because I was crying. He was like, what's going on with the matter? And I just felt this overwhelming sadness just come over me. And he's like, what did I do? Did something happen? I said, no, I envy your parents. He was like, what in the world are you talking about? What do you mean?

I said, I envy their faith because they believe in something that I can't believe in. And it hurts. And I envy that so bad. And he's like, oh, don't say that. You know, you look at what you've done in your life, you know, and try to, you know, really encourage me and tell me, you know, no, look at the look at what you've done in your life.

You can't, you know, you can't live your life according to, you know, what other people tell you. And, you know, just try to really make me feel better about it. Well, as you know, my my path progressed. I ended up, you know, being a community activist and advocate during the with the George Floyd and Police Accountability era, again, wanting to make sure that we were all coming together as a community to support, you know, our communities that were wronged.

And also you know, getting rid of those who tarnish our uniform, you know, and being somebody who has served because, I mean, you served. I'm sorry. You you have served in a capacity. You have served in a capacity to where you understand what I'm saying. Sure. You know, then Covid hit and then my past led me to community advocacy.

And, during that advocacy, we had a lot of things occur. We had the death of George Floyd, the, you know, nationwide, worldwide protests. We had Covid 19 outbreak that, you know, saw our life as we knew it changed. I thought the apocalypse was coming. I didn't know what was happening, but I knew I wasn't going to sit at home.

You know, I had already retired from the military. I put my combat boots on, and I was like, I have to be a part of what's happening because I can't in good conscience go to Panama, go to, you know, Africa, go to Iraq and fight for other people and other people's country and well-being and wellness and not do anything here.

And so that led me to serve a meeting. Pharaoh Clark, who was a community activist that ended up being, you know, just a kindred spirit. We hit the ground running, never looked back, helping people connect to jobs, connect to food, connect to things that they need to survive. It wasn't it wasn't until. And I'm not afraid to say it wasn't until two years ago when I got elected, when everything kind of just started making sense, and until I started advocating unapologetically and sharing my trauma on that House floor, did I ever, ever finally have the ability to understand what the Lord was about and understanding what the Bible was about, and understanding the messages of

the Lord doesn't give you more than you can handle, because my perception was, the Lord is doing this to me. When now my perception is the Lord has honored me with a gift of being able to understand people and their traumas, a way that other representatives in that House would never. You have such an empathy, and I can see it in everything that you do, and I love that you feel that that is a gift, because I personally feel everything happens for a reason.

Everything bad led me to right now. Yes. And if you can, you said something very powerful earlier about your testimony being the most powerful. It it's, you know, being able to have this conversation freely will be able to share this with your constituents and whoever would like to get to know more about you, because you have such a powerful story and it's getting that message out there is huge because then more people will speak out.

You'll be able to help so many more people from speaking about it. So that's amazing to hear. That was when you were grateful for those experiences. And now and you know what? And it's so liberating. It really is so liberating. Once you find your faith and you understand what it means, you know, it doesn't mean that I have to change who I am.

It means I have the gift to be exactly who I am unapologetically. And that was something that I struggled with very it was something that was a huge, huge struggle for me when I saw my name next to everybody else's name in that house, because I would look and I would see and I would learn about my colleagues.

Like Charles Cunningham. He was a freshman with me and his grandfather, his pictures in their house on the walls of the House of Representatives. Like there's legacy. There are people who are eighth generation Texan. There are people who are lawyers who are, you know, doctors who own just phenomenal ranches. Like I call him my desk mate. He's not.

But Representative Glenn Rogers. He sat behind me on the floor. And I absolutely just adored our conversations of faith and cows because I could bring him very in videos. I'm obsessed with watching groups get shamed on social media. But, you know, I would compare myself to the other members of the House. And thank God I'm just an Air Force dental assistant.

Right? So I'm so curious what like, drew you to running? Obviously all seemed very well, I'll be honest. So when the idea was first brought to me, I laughed. Yeah, to be quite honest. And I said absolutely no. There's absolutely zero chance that I would ever do that to you. So it's kind of a little bit of a story.

So there was a time when Snow Snowpocalypse happened. Yeah. So I was on social media because our team was boots on the ground, you know, trying to get water and food to people. An elected official reached out to me because she saw me on social media asking for food and water because we were on the ground delivering. She was like, hey, I can provide 200 meals.

Can you come pick them up? Can your team pick them up and deliver them? Yes, absolutely. So we went and we we did that. We picked them up, we delivered and she kept calling. Hey, we got water. Can you do it? Yes, absolutely. So we would do that. And lo and behold we we learned that, you know, as activists it's so easy to get into the rah rah and and be mad and yell and holler and scream, you know.

But as a military, I know that there's a process. Right. And so we have figured out that the process was, hey, we have to take protest. The policy, we have to go up to the Capitol and testify in support of some of these bills. And we had met Representative Barbara Gervin Hawkins early as protesters and advocates, activists. And she was like, hey, you know, I have this bill that we're working on.

We'd love to have you all come up and testify on it. Would you be interested? Absolutely, yes. So Pharaoh and I and some of our youth, we have youth that are impacted by, you know, foster care, you know, horrible home lives and other things of that sort who are part of our team. And I'm proud to say they are now our legislative aides in our office.

They aid. So if you've called my office, you've talked to them. But we came up to testify in support of a House bill. And it just so happens that, that representative was on the dais. And after I advocated for the bill, I just took a point of privilege and said, you know, I just wanted to say, because this individual was a freshman, as a freshman legislator, she's doing it right.

She's providing for her community. She's reaching out to people who are in the community and making sure that her community is taken care of. You can learn a lot from her example, and that was Rep Liz Campos. And the funny thing about it was we had kept in touch because she she didn't know we were coming to testify.

It just so happens that she was there. So remember again, when we're talking about faith and we're talking about things not happening on accident, this was one of those things. She had got the opportunity to hear me advocate, which she hadn't, you know, had that opportunity before. Well, my state representative and I still call her my state representative.

You know, I'm in is and she decided that she was going to seek a different office and the seat was open. And so I got a call one day from Rep Campos and she was like, Josey, hey, how are you doing? And I was like, hey, how are you? You know, I'm expecting a collaboration of some sort. She was like, you know, I wanted to talk to you about something.

And I was like, yeah, what's that? She was like, would you ever think of running for state rep? And I started laughing and I said, absolutely not. Yeah, I'll be there for you because our our mission, Ferro and I and our team, our mission was accountability. That's what we're known for in San Antonio. Accountability is is who we are.

And we were keeping our electeds accountable to the people. Right. And by doing that, you know, we we became known. And she was like, we need a voice like you. And I was like, no, absolutely not. We're accountability. We're here to back you up, you know, and be support of the community. And so she was like, well, I really like if you think about it, you know, and I was like, I don't know about that.

And so I hung up and I called Ferro laughing. And I was like, you are going to believe what just happened. And I tell them. And she was like, yeah, I think that's a great idea. So that's kind of how it started. There's a couple more pieces that occurred. But finally, after I looked at the bigger picture and we contacted the historian and found out that a woman veteran has never served in the House of Representatives.

I represent military USA from Lackland Air Force Base is where my life began, and it's the place that I chose to raise my family. The majority of my children, with the exception of my oldest son, Adrian, who was born in Germany at Ramstein, launched Landstuhl Hospital. My babies were born at Wilford Hall and BMC and it was so just serendipitous, right?

It was one of those things to where I looked at the big picture and I was like, Texas is the first place that ever gave me home. When people ask you, when they meet you, what's the first thing they ask you? Where are you from? Where are you from? I could never answer that. Who are your parents? What school did you go to?

One side of town you from? You got some creative answers. Well, did you end up saying hello? Gypsy was number one. I'm a traveler, you know. You know, it would depend. Sometimes it would be like a little funny, sarcastic. Sometimes I would just say New York because people would always think that I sounded like I was from New York.

You know, it it was. It was something that made me realize that Texas has given me more than I could ever ask for. It's the place that I chose to retire. My husband chose to retire here. We chose to have our legacy here. And even more so than that, I tell people this, especially when advocating for veterans, Texas is a place that veterans go to die.

And when I say that, I want you to think about it. Who joins the military? Unless is somebody who is a legacy and whose family has told you, hey, you know, you should do this. This is good for you as people who are poor, people who don't have families, people who might want to get away from the tiny town that they're stuck in because all they have there is a lumber mill to work in.

It's people like my husband who who left who left Lebanon, Pennsylvania, as soon as he turned 18 and joined the military. Matter of fact, he was in high school as a member of the National Guard because their claim to fame in that part of the country is the Tyson chicken factory or poultry. There's different poultry factories out there, you know, so people who join the military are people who may not really have a home.

You know, we move around a lot depending on what what branch you're in. You know, you could, you know, move to 10 to 20 places in your lifetime. You never have the opportunity to establish roots. So when you go to establish roots, what do you look for? You look for schools, which can be a whole nother conversation. I'm sure.

You look for job opportunities. You look for proximity to veteran services. Who has that better than Texas and San Antonio. Your district. Right? Right. So that's my point now is I tell people, I remind us that Texas is a place where veterans come to die. That's how much the state means to us. Right? Wow. Without being too melancholy.

No, I don't think it is huge, huge respect for your what you've done. Thank you for your service. Thank you. Thank you for what you're doing. Because I think something you mentioned that really resonated with me was you said you knew you understood the system and how it worked in the military and that there were processes. Now there's so much division.

You know, I'm definitely with you on. Everybody has a different view on everything. But most people agree on most things, which I really love. And I actually love that about Texas coming from D.C., seeing how polarized it was up there, I really liked that about Texas being more where Texas and we're going to figure out Texas. It's less polarizing issues.

It's more let's kind of figure out how to make this good for each other. But you learn the system and how it worked. So did you see an opportunity being a state rep for the most good to be able to come from all of your advocacy? Because I really see that as the more people that can hear your story, hear you and hear what you care about, the better.

Yes, and knowing that how the how the system works, you have the power to make so much change now. And it's I couldn't be more just humbled. Honestly. You know, I if somebody calls and asks me, hey Josey, will you come speak on this, I do it, you know, if my calendar allows, you know, and and it's so important to me because it heals me, you know, it takes a lot out of me.

You know, anybody can go back and watch testimony. You know, I speak with my heart. You'll never see me talk with. No, it's hardly ever, you know, it's because I can't see number one. I won't be able to see the notes anyway. And you know, we don't need to put these away. You know, I wouldn't be able to see my notes anyways, but if I.

If but you'll see that, you know, I speak from the heart on the, the the heart of the issues because my job is to be the voice of the people that are understood missing, understood and misrepresented, not represented. And and to put a face to the issue. And I couldn't be more proud than to case in point. You know, there was a bill last session that was slated to fail.

It was slated not to pass, and it was to provide some bags to children in foster care duffel bags, a backpack, a canvas bag instead of a garbage bag. A lot of kids are given garbage bags, and, you know, that's demeaning. And this you look at it for face value and you say, who wouldn't want to give a kid a backpack, right?

Especially a kid in foster care. I mean, you could go to AliExpress or whatever and buy a whole pallet of backpacks for a dollar, you know, I mean, I'm being facetious here, but, you know, I mean, when I was hearing that there was a fiscally conservative reason why I was going to say what was the fiscal note on is I was a staffer.

I know you know, I couldn't tell you what the note was, but there was a note, and the note was enough to where some of our more fiscally conservative members had a hard time with it. And so it was due to fail. It was not my bill. And I was like, you know what? I want to share on this bill?

And I went up and I shared my story of when I was a trash bag kid. My trash bag had two changes of clothes in it, a full size trash bag. Not picture that picture. Leaving incarceration at eight years old. Okay, I'm gonna put that picture for you real quick. I was sprung from incarceration by my mother. She was able to pass a drug test.

She pulled me out immediately. We hit the road to New York. So there was a kidnaping that happened there because, as you know, you don't get released. So we took off head to New York to where I was going to meet my father for the first time in my life. My mother took me and I met him. Never saw him, didn't know what to expect, and I literally had a black trash bag.

And I remember, you know, my dad looking at my mom and being like, that's what you brought her with. And she was like, well, that's what they gave her, okay? And he took it. And the next day he went and bought me clothes, and I lived with him for a few years from that point. But, you know, of course, you know, as my story went on, I ended up with an aunt in Tennessee.

I am proud to say that I was largely estranged from my father for many, many years. He, as well, was a young father. I was his first child and, he also had addiction issues along with my mother. They were high school sweethearts. And, you know, my mother took me away from him. I was a victim of parental kidnaping twice in my life, three times in my life.

One of those being my father, had me for visitation, and he flew me to Puerto Rico and left me and came back to the United States and left me in Puerto Rico. I had to kind of find out how long I was there, you know, I was there for a significant amount of time, like a year and a half, two years.

Because remember, my memory picks up when I'm around for so, so, I'm proud to say that my dad was here with me on my swearing in for my first session. I was able to to bring him here. He got to spend that time with me. And and that meant so much to me because I've held a lot of resentment to my dad over the years, because everything that I went through in my life was in my mother's custody or under my mother's family's watch or, you know, family or people that would just take me in.

And I resented my father for that because he took care of my brothers. He was there for all of my brothers from the day they were born. Now their kids got to grow up with with a well or their kids got to grow up with him, I didn't I didn't get any of that. My kids didn't get any of that.

And so I held a lot of anger and resentment towards him for that. And, you know, I'm happy to say that I don't feel that way about him anymore. And equally and held that type of resentment towards my mother. You know, she passed a long time ago. We weren't on speaking terms when she passed because unfortunately, she had not been a very good person to me and, and our family.

And I remember my last, my last child. So I gave birth to five children. I have typical, you know, Afro-Latino babies with curly hair, darker skin, brown skinned babies. And I remembered I told my husband, I said, you know what? I want a ginger baby with freckles and blue eyes. And he said, if that happens, we got a problem because my husband, he's Dominican, Puerto Rican, he was like, well, if that happens, we got a big problem.

And sure enough, my last child, my baby Reese, has blond hair, blue eyes, and he looks just like my mother. And it's so funny because I had so much resentment towards her. I was so terrified because I was like, am I going to look at my son, see my mother, and resent him because he looks like my mother, you know?

And and those are real thoughts that go through your head as a parent. Right. And I remember feeling just so much peace. And I was in the bathroom one day, like getting ready to go somewhere. And I heard my mother's voice and she said to me, she was like, hi, like that, you little bitch. Now you got to see my face for the rest of your life.

Oh no, that's what I heard. But it wasn't evil or mean. It was like a ha, right? And I just started laughing because I was like, you're still up there talking that crap. It's you, you know? But it gave me a sense of peace with my mom, you know? So much so that I can talk about her and smile.

So much so that I can look at her and just remember how brilliant she was. Oh, my God, she could solve any crossword puzzle in a second. Not only that, but she was a chameleon. It didn't matter who you were or where you were from or how you spoke. She could do it too. Or she tried like hell to like she would.

She would dance. She would. And she was just. Everybody loved her except for her family. And what I mean by that is we're the ones she hurt. She loved everybody else and everybody loved her because she was the life of the party. She was a phenomenal artist. She drew me. I still have the the drawing. It's on my Facebook.

I'm I'm old, so I don't I'm not very good with all the social media, but I'm pretty consistent with Facebook and on that one. Yeah. That's it. That's I'm pretty consistent there. But well actually this a little button that shares it with Insta now. So you'll see something else here. But you know that that has been like kind of a roundabout journey of hardship pain but just being so just happy, just so content, just so at peace with the past.

That's wonderful that, you know, I love to share it because I want other people to feel that too. I love that, you know. No, you so much power. And in what you speak about, what are the things you are focused on this session and fixing? Well, it's funny, people ask me this and I go through a million things in my head, and folks always tell me, you have to have your one thing.

You know, there be several. I don't have my one thing. But what I do know is, as I mentioned, you know, Texas is a place where veterans go to die. I want to see our veterans leave the military here in Texas and go into support. Meaning the second they walk outside of those gates, they're walking in to the brotherhood that we have created through the Texas Veterans Commission, through the American GI forum, and Vlp through all the grassroots organizers and nonprofits and people who just give a damn who are out there doing the work.

We need to uplift and celebrate those people and bring them all together and get our troops together, because we've got a lot of work to do for our veterans. I'm working actually with a group that's working with the University of Alabama, Roll Tide. No way. Because last session I carried psilocybin legislation. I was going to ask you about it because I am working so hard for psilocybin and cannabis because I and this is another thing that I share.

I am a victim of legal military, pharmaceuticals, legal, military, pharmaceuticals, pharmaceuticals that they give us in our brown grocery bag, usually filled with pharmaceuticals, pharmaceuticals, excuse me. And I'm talking Xanax. Klonopin. What? Lamictal, Wellbutrin, different forms, a worldview and different forms of Xanax is like all these different things that they're given our military. Like legally, we're allowed to take them.

We're allowed to have them. We can have them whenever. But when we leave the military and we go to a civilian and ask for the same thing that we're getting in the military boom, automatically we're treated like drug addicts trying to get Xanax to sell on the black market, to try to do all this stuff when all we want to do is live.

We want to live in a world where it's not blackness. And what I mean by that is in the deepest, darkest pits of hell of my PTSD. The only thing I can describe as black, I call it suicide by proxy. That's what I call what I had. It's this over preparation to die. And it happened when I came back from Iraq, where I served as an advisor to the Iraqi military.

I was so gung ho, so ready for everything. I always had my sidearm on me. I traveled with Iraqi military. I always had my sidearm ready with one in the chamber for me, because as a woman, we can take you can Google. Al Jazeera was real big in my day. You know, you watch it on YouTube, you watch it on Yahoo news.

All of that was big international news for us back in the early 200. 2000s. Wow. That's rude to say right? Back in the early 2000, social media wasn't what it is, right? But we would see videos. I saw and heard the Daniel Pearl beheading. This is what's happening to people during this time of combat that were out in theater.

Theater, meaning the deployment area. I overprepared to die. I wholeheartedly did not expect to come home. I wholeheartedly expected and was ready to give my life for my country. And when I came home, I didn't know how to live because I was terrified that every day was the day that the Grim Reaper was coming to get me. And then came suicide by proxy.

Because you get so tired and so exhausted and so terrified of waiting for the Grim Reaper, you're afraid of your shadow. People knocking on the door would freak me out. Somebody's calling the phone. The phone ringing would send me into this fight or flight. So much so that I just wish that would just die. I just did not want to wake up, but I would never do nothing to myself.

I could never take myself away from my children. But it was like this feeling of hope, hopelessness, but hope that it would end. That's what our veterans are experiencing. That is what psilocybin and cannabis can help eliminate and alleviate. Yeah. Do you mind sharing some examples? I know some of this legislation is up for debate this session on potentially banning marijuana in Texas and all that.

So I would love to hear your stories that you have, whether they be personal or from others, about how it has helped, because I did get some very interesting perspective. That's what I love about the legislature. You get to hear both sides of everything, which I really love. So I'd love to hear some stories you have well, with as, as with any and anything that you take that is in, you know, part of your body chemical makeup.

You know how people adapt to it is, is largely based on how they metabolize. So you know how how it helps one person isn't going to be how it helps somebody else. It might help someone that it does and it doesn't, you know. But what I want to say is I have worked very hard to to de 70s hippie the medicine because when you mentioned psilocybin or mushrooms, when you mention cannabis or weed, people automatically think that you're, you know, a lazy beach bum hippie who has no life and doesn't want to do anything.

What they don't think of is their mothers and grandmothers who now are able to see because of their glaucoma. What they're not thinking about are they're grandmothers and their their parents, who are now on so many blood pressure medications that now they have to take other medications to combat the symptoms. That's happening from being on the blood pressure medication.

And a lot of these symptoms can be eased with the use, the holistic use of plant medicine. And so what I have seen, and even what I have experienced personally, is not having to be zombified by pharmaceuticals. And I'm sorry, but you have somebody driving on Xanax legally, you hear what I'm saying? Why doesn't Texas legalize cannabis? I am a full fledged, unapologetic, yeah, advocate for full usage because, number one, I grew up to parents who were severely addicted and I wish they were addicted to weed.

I know what's the worst thing, you know what I'm saying? When it when there's needles involved. Hello? Yeah. That's drugs. Yeah. I'm sorry, but the good Lord Jesus Christ himself made this for us to heal our ailments. Yep. And any any. You know, you just can't. You can't victimize a population that is already being victimized. And what I mean by that is, is if my grandmother gets pulled over and she has, you know, weed in the car with her for her glaucoma, you know, she's going to be victimized in multiple ways.

Number one, she she loses her medicine. Number two, she's now incarcerated, maybe never had a ticket in her life. And now she's incarcerated. Number three, she lives on Social Security, by the way. She can't afford to bail out. You're ruining lives over a plant that the Lord has provided for us to heal. And so I will stand on the mountain tops and continue to advocate, because this is for our community.

This is for our grandparents, this is for our veterans. And and if we can't say that, that we care enough about our own seniors and veterans, then what are we even doing here? Like what is what is our fiscal conservative values even worth if we're not using the funds to to heal our community? You know, so I'm going to continue fighting for this legislation.

The beautiful thing about it is that it's not it's not a Partizan bill. I mean, it's not a Partizan issue at all with the supports looking like both sides. I'm telling you, the support from last session, we had support from and from Senator Tom Parker, from former Governor Rick Perry, from Rep Dan Crenshaw, all veterans I know and Crenshaw's out there.

And that is so instrumental, because if anybody can really bring forward issues that are bipartisan, nonpartisan, is veterans. Absolutely. And so that's that's a beautiful part of it, you know, to have wonderful Republican support. And even in my own delegation, I've been having some wonderful conversations with red, blue and Rep Lujan is he we share a lot of passions from the foster care industry, as I call it, because that's another thing we're going to be working on.

Children that are are aging out of foster care, children and being taken away from their families and, and put into abusive environments. And some of these, these residential places. And in order for us to be able to to address those major big issues, we have to have a leadership that is willing to put their money where their mouth is.

You know, we had a record rainy day fund. And I tell people, look, our piggy bank is overflowing like, this is our piggy bank with our spare change. It's not the actual bank account, you know, and we have all of this money that we can literally start working on new processes like we know it's broken. You know, I'm new to politics, but I hear my colleagues talking about, oh, yeah, this was stuff that we were fighting for in my first session 20 years ago.

You know, we have made some ground, but with the rapid number of legislators that are overturned every session. And that's another thing too, that is an Achilles heel for us in the state of Texas, this overturning every two years, literally us being in session for, you know, 140 days, like there is minimal capability of having any type of follow through on these bills.

I was talking about that earlier with Andy is what you think about the biannual legislature, and that we're one of only four states that does this. I think it's a disservice to Texans. I really, honestly do. I mean, and not to mention, you know, that we have to travel here and our $500 a month salary, you know, is is phenomenal.

I'm grateful for that. You know, but it's not about the money for me, you know. And I'm very humbled and grateful to the fact that my husband and I are disabled veterans. And so we have a pension. That's what we live off. We live off of our military disability. And that is what affords a normal, regular, everyday person like myself to actually serve here.

Because these seats aren't made for us. These seats are not made for regular, everyday Texans. They're made for the elite because you have to be able to afford to live here, to afford to live in Austin during session, to afford to to leave your your home, to afford to leave your job, you know, but to sacrifice all of that just to have to start running for a campaign again seven months later, you know, with the hopes that you'll be back to continue on with some of these bills.

You know, regular, everyday citizens don't realize how much work and how many different avenues legislation has to actually go before it's it's brought into law. How will you be the last session was your first session? Yes. So at the end of it, I know we talked about this a little earlier, but how did you feel at the end of last session?

How are you going to prepare for this session? I like to be very descriptive. It was like drinking a certain milkshake with bones in it. I love to say that because it gives you a real taste in the mouth, if you know what I mean. Yeah, it was very hard and difficult to watch people's personalities interfere with legislation.

It was very difficult to watch, to hear some of the hateful rhetoric. You think that everybody loves kids, right? Yeah. You think that everybody will do everything they can to protect kids? You think that everybody would do everything that they can to make sure that, you know, that elderly folks aren't freezing to death, that they have food? You know, you you, especially when you're opposition, is the party that holds themselves in such spiritually high esteem as somebody who is newly fallen in to the security of my faith, I have never been more disappointed in hearing such hateful, non-Christian, non-living, non Jesus words, actions, behaviors, you know?

So what I mean by that is, as I felt like there was an weaponization of our Lord and Savior and, you know, even if you're not religious, right? And again, you know, for the sake of semantics, you know, we say Jesus the Lord, you know, but to me, God is is your overall essence of experience, your overall capability to navigate with a moral compass of doing good.

That's what Jesus and God and the Lord and all that feels to me. And I saw a lot of hypocrisy in that. And when I see that, and when we fight so hard on the floor for bills that are, you know, impacting children and, you know, our most vulnerable, it hurts your heart so bad and you can't wrap your brain around why people are saying and doing the things that they're doing when we're supposed to be here to help Texans.

And to be quite honest with you, I left the session in severely bad health. And I mean my spiritual health, my mental health, my physical health. I, topped the scales at about 210 pounds at five for last session. This last session. Okay. And a lot, 210 pounds is what I weighed. I for health wise I was in the obese category.

I suffer from respiratory disease. I wasn't able to to walk from my office to the Capitol to the floor without being winded and losing my breath. I survived the entire session. Damn near on coffee, I didn't sleep, I worried a lot. Yeah, I would advocate on the floor and regret it for days. Why? Because there's a you still live in shame, you know?

So when you share your stories, your personal stories about what you've been through, I mean, let's face the facts. It's political ammunition. You know, being an imperfect person and being openly imperfect. I have a lot of sleepless nights because every time I do have those, you know, times where I go to churches and I give them ministry, you know, I go to graduations and I give, you know, words of, you know, encouragement, I do speeches, I do all these things.

And there's not one time where I don't have to take time to myself when I'm done to physically come down off the passion, the emotion, the trauma, feeling it. But it's not just feeling it. I feel what other people are feeling and and I feel so strange telling people this and you know, and since I'm so unapologetically me, I, I'm, I'm sure I share it, you know, and I know people will look at me kind of like I'm crazy or what have you.

But I laugh at it and say, laugh at me, laugh with my pain. But I feel people's energies and I can feel, you know, their pain. And to feel other people's pain is a burden that is very heavy. But I would do it a million times over again. And so when that happens, I get the nudge, I get nauseous, I'll get migraines, you know, and and that would happen to me so much that I had to finally take my health back into my own hands and really get serious about my mental health and my physical health, because along with my PTSD comes my fear of mortality.

You know, and I have 20 year old twins who are on the autism spectrum, and they will depend on me and my husband for the rest of our lives and for the rest of theirs. And so just looking my mortality in the face, looking at my sons and and knowing that they're really running the risk of having a future without their mom.

You know, I'm almost 50. And being in such poor physical and mental condition, you know, it was really taking a toll on me. So now literally, I work out every day. I do not take a rest day. Of course, there are forced rest days. But since June of last year. Wow. Where we at? Are we in January? Okay, so another January.

So about a year and a half since we've been out of session, I have gone nonstop in my weight training. I'm a powerlifter and amateur bodybuilder. Some videos here, they're really good. Like I'm so impressed. And I you could clip of reviews of this. It's I love I love to well I have to kill and that's the thing.

And as coming into this session you know a lot of people are stressing about where are we going to live? I'm stressing about where are we going to live and where's the gym, because, you know, I go to Fitness Connection, which it's one of the cheaper gyms, but they have everything. One thing I love about fitness Connection and this is a shameless plug I guess, or shameless plug, whatever.

They have equipment for all types of backgrounds of of weightlifting. I used to compete in CrossFit, you know, I was in one of those huge games athletes. But you know, we would do competitions and stuff within CrossFit. And so you have your functional fitness and then you have your commercial commercial fitness, and then you have your calisthenics fitness.

And I have a background in, in all of that, you know, especially being military, I was a personal trainer. And for our troops in the military, and my methods of training is a little bit different from a lot of trainers. What is it because you were telling me that earlier, now I'm dying to know because I'm up for a challenge.

I love lifting and working out and pushing myself. And doesn't it feel good to be the strongest girl in the room? That's why I love it. It feels good to be the strongest girl. I mean the strongest person in the room. Sometimes I am not right now, but tell me what your how different it is. So one thing that I've realized.

So I'm somebody you know in the military we have to maintain our fitness, we have to maintain our waist. And that's something hard, as you know, an afro-latina like, you know, we we have curves. We have, you know, you know, our waists aren't necessarily, you know, measurable the way that some waists are. And the military really did used to do they're doing better now, but they used to do a disservice on how they would measure us as women, you know.

And if you were a woman who had, you know, full voluptuous style body, then, you know, nine times out of ten you had problems and you were running risks of of getting kicked out of the military. If you fail your test, you know, so you would have us go through very unhealthy methods. I remember a point in time eating nothing but ramen noodles dry, just plain ramen because it fills your stomach and you don't eat.

Now these are bad things. Do not do these. These are bad. But there's all these unhealthy methods that people will go through, like Ozempic. People are using ozempic. And now I do want to disclaim that Ozempic has been a wonderful tool saving tool for those who are suffering so severely from their medical conditions, you know, so I don't want to take that away.

But what we are seeing is a boutique use of ozempic. And and for me, you know, I understand the, the long term effects of proper health. You know, I eat those that the raw pack of ramen noodles. Well guess what? You gain the weight right back and people don't understand that not eating doesn't make you lose weight. It makes you gain weight because there's no, no, no nutritional value.

Your hair falls out, your teeth, your nails, your lashes, all of that. All the fad diets, they don't work. I've been vegan. I've been vegetarian, I've done keto. When I was vegan and vegetarian, I found that if I couldn't find a vegan option, I just would need. Oh, right. See? So those what is what is that? We need the protein.

The women too, that's causing unhealthy habits. Now there are some vegans who are successful. They get their, you know, protein through legumes and other things. But but the fact of the matter is, is these are all methods that people start and stop. You start, you do it a little bit, you get tired, you don't want to do it no more.

There's apps, you can get an app you can look on social media, you can do these little diva dance videos, all of that. What are you going to do this session to prioritize health as it's such a big part of your routine now? Well, I have to get my at least one a day in the gym, so I'm looking for a gym to join right now.

I know we have one in the capital, but it doesn't have a shower, so I'm not going to. Yeah, that's so gross. I know that's horrible. Maybe we can get that put in the budget. Oh my gosh I would like that might be my budget piece. Maybe I'll ask for that. But then it probably will never happen. But anyway I'm looking for a gym that has a that's in close proximity to the Capitol, and I have every intention of still getting my workouts in every day.

We have a little fitness caucus type thing that you do. Yeah, it's a little, little group of people that we're getting together. There's actually somebody that I met. I forget who it is off the top of my head, but they they were like, well, if you're serious, we'll get a location for you, for us to host, like hot yoga and cool all types of different fitness events we want to have, like regular I know in the House Democratic Caucus and we're going to have like regular weekly type of events like, fitness events usually.

I'll usually go to the gym before work. So depending on what time we got to be at the House floor, probably every five, every 6 or 7:00 in the morning, I'll be at the gym. If you ever want to come to 7 a.m. Pilates, I do. You know, I've never tried Pilates, but it's not the one, is it?

The woman reformer. So it's it's weightlifting. But really, really low impact. So you can put the springs or the weight. Yeah. And you just load them up. And the stronger you get, the more you do. But it's really intense core which let me know I want to do okay. Any time. Are you when are you moving up? Officially.

We're still going back and forth because my husband's like. But you guys aren't really in session, right? So you could come home. So I'm doing that a little bit, but we're we're going to be moving in probably in the next month or so. But I'll be here regularly. But we have to definitely do taxi. That sounds great.

But I'm trying to diversify fitness because, you know, the thing that's important, and as we were talking about a little bit about personal training earlier, you know, at the end of the day, it has to be your own free will to get up and actually do whatever the prescription is. You know, I've had personal trainers a few times in my life.

I've trained, you know, whether it be for sports, you know, or, you know, just my amateur bodybuilding, you have to have your Y period. Like you can have all the fancy apps and equipment that you want, but if you don't have your Y that's going to keep you dedicated to it, then it's it's not going to happen and it's going to be something that you dread.

It's going to be something that you don't want to do. So one thing that has has helped me because I do all my own programing. If you look at any of my fitness videos, like from my day one till now, I do all of my own programing and a lot of my programing is based on my playlist. Now what does that mean?

You find songs that motivate you for whatever reason. It b whether it's girl power, you know, kickass songs, or if it's like stuff that reminds you from high school or, you know, whatever it is, find your playlist and we do your workouts according to your playlist. That's all. And that's very important because you figure five songs is about 25 minutes, like give or take.

Okay, so ten songs you've got, you know, pretty much an hour of work that you can put in, you know, and so as you're going through those songs, you, you utilize them for the type of cardio you want to do for the day. Now, if you're like me and you hate cardio and you won't run unless something's chasing you, then I do the elliptical and stairs.

The reason why and again, everything is at your own pace. It's not like, oh, get on the elliptical and put it to ten and take up. No, it's all at your own pace because I need you to keep showing up. I need you to want to be there. And with that comes, I want you to to dress in the way that it makes you feel good about yourself.

You come and you wear something that you never thought that you would ever wear and you own it. I remember when I went to the when I left session, and my husband and I decided that we were going to take our fitness serious again. I remember putting on leggings and just feeling so just, you know, I would always use excuse, oh, I just had a baby for my son's eight, so it's not going to work, you know.

But I remember putting on a tank top and feeling so awkward because it wouldn't cover the proper way. I remember trying to get a t shirt that was tight enough to to fit on me, but that too loose to be too big and I couldn't move right. And I remember putting more time into trying to figure out what I was going to wear and being so hard on myself because I was so unhappy with my body.

And, you know, nothing fit me right. And, you know, so one day I just put on a sports bra and put on leggings and I walked out the house, showed my stomach, had my little kangaroo fat belly pouch out, and I just went and I just did work. And, you know, it happened over time. People would look at me and I would feel horrible, like, oh my God, they're making fun of me.

Oh my God, they're looking at me because I'm so fat. Oh my God, they're wondering why I'm here. You know, all those things that gets in our mind. But what really happened was I was sitting there one day and I remember not wanting to go. And because we do two a days, we go in the morning and at night, you know, to de-stress.

And it's very important. And I remember telling my husband, I don't want to go, this is stupid. This is dumb. I just don't want to do this no more, because I wasn't seeing the results that I wanted to see. And he was like, okay. He was like, well, you can do that, he said. But then you're just gonna have to start your day one all over again.

I'm like, fine, I'll go. And I went this day and I saw a mother and a daughter watching me. And they were thin, thin mother and daughter, you know, and I'm like, I could probably look in mom's body like, oh, look at her and make sure you don't get like that, you know? And they came up to me and I took my headphones off and I looked and they was like, you know, my daughter comes here because she likes to watch you work.

Oh, wow. And I was like, what? And this is like a high school girl. And she was so excited. She was like, she was like, we just love watching you. Like, it's just so awesome. And the whole time I was telling myself that they were talking bad about me or that they were making fun of me. But what I realized that me being authentically myself, empowered so many other women.

And let me tell you, there's probably like 10 or 15 of us now that all of us may not know our names personally, but we know if one of us isn't there, like, hey, we haven't seen you, where have you been? You know, we we have our crews. When we go in, in the morning, we expect to see certain people.

And, you know, sometimes that's what you need. You need that consistency. People that are going to look for you, people that are away from the capital, that are away from your work, that you can go in and listen to your favorite song and sing. And, you know, I play your piano a lot. That's great. But, you know, that's a that's my key to fitness is being authentically yourself and being happy while doing it.

You know, it sounds like that's your motto in general. Yes. I'm trying. You know, you're so motivational and I would love if you ever want to come to plays or train me, I'm going to go to parties and I will train you. I love you. Yeah, I want to see the workout because I bet you work just as hard in that as you do in everything else in your life.

So yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing all of your very deep stories today, and I really appreciate it. Thank you, Laura, I appreciate you so much. Anytime. Thanks.

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Welcome back to bills and business. I'm your host, Lara Carr, co-founder of USLege. Today, I'm excited to welcome the Honorable Larry Gonzalez to the podcast. He's a former member of the Texas House of Representatives. Now, key roles, including chairman of the Sunset Advisory Commission, as well as being chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, overseeing 42 appropriations for state agencies.

Really excited to have him on the podcast today, because we're going to discuss his unique story of how he came to be and what he's doing right now, and also the impacts of artificial intelligence on the state's infrastructure and economy. What did you enjoy more about being staff than member, because you didn't have all the pressure of actually pushing the button.

You didn't have to campaign. You didn't. And was it your name on the line? They weren't saying things about you that your wife and, you know, mom had to read. Sure. Had three death threats that DPS took very seriously. Wow. Long story there. Really? Oh, DPS followed me home and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Is there a reason for that?

Because I wouldn't. I wouldn't sign my name to a bill that never even got a hearing. Everyone got referred. And, I don't sign things unless I hear the debate in committee. And I have the notes and then for amendments. And then once it passed and I understood what it was from anyway, even things that I knew, I support all the pro-life stuff.

I waited for all of it. My name on it, so that I could use the same reason not to put my name on other things. And they were mad because I wouldn't put my name on some stuff that never even got a hearing. And, death threats, these days got taken seriously. So, yeah, it was, you know, I mean, the staff was great, you know, advising the members and sitting down and that was a great number.

And of course, you know, going broke as a member is when you pay. You know, I think a lot of people who are not in the Texas Legislature do not know that they have no idea. They have no idea and does not know that they have no idea. I lost $1.4 million in ten years. Every penny I made in my 20s, in my 30s, doing direct mail I lost in my 40s being a member, and I've been just have to rebuild it ever since I walked out of there.

Dead ass broke $80,000 in there. And how much do members make a year? 600 a month. But after insurance and taxes? Two 59.73 if you're Tony Dale, my friend Tony Dale, who had his entire family on health insurance, he was in the hole every month, lost money every month. People have no idea. You have no idea where you have had a crazy career.

It's been a long time. I've literally. I've. You. No. Can you tell us how it all started? Because we've got a visual aid here. We've got it all. But how where you started, how you started it. I just love to hear it. I know everybody what I was taking a class at the University of Texas called US-Mexico Border Relations, where we studied NAFTA with the American Free Trade Agreement at that time was a theory.

It was not law, yet it was a theory. Great class. And then I saw on the birding hall bulletin board, there was a state rep who wanted some NAFTA researchers. I figured I've just finished the entire class. So I got a job doing NAFTA research. Representative Tim Von Doan and just spent the semester, doing everything constituent work, phone calls.

You weren't doing everything, not just the NAFTA stuff. And I was hooked. And that was the fall of 1991, I think, still in school. And how did you get into direct mail? People even know that you. Well, I figured out that there was no money in government, and, there's you can't make a living there. So I had a consultant who asked me, you would learn how to design direct mail.

Sure. So I bought Photoshop like 1 in 1993 and illustrator just come out. InDesign wasn't out yet, and I for eight months hunt and poke and taught myself Photoshop and taught myself illustrator. Taught myself the postal regs for a six by 11 card versus the fold versus how it has to fold up, with myself, all the postal rules and just start to figure it out what size to mail for, what rates, and what was the best bang for your buck, and just figured out the science behind direct mail.

Started doing direct mail, working for a consultant. A lot of money in that. And that was pretty cool. Did that for him for two years for a put up my own shingle. And then for the next 20 years, I ran Lazarus Graphics and Design direct mail for 20 years. Is this one of your pieces? Yeah. Okay, let's put it up in the camera here.

But just before this. Yeah. Larry said he saw this outside and said, this is some of my work. That's my work. It, I it took me back when I saw it because I remember designing all that mail piece for Tex association business. My friend Bill Hammond hired me to do a lot of work. And so we did these direct mail pieces all over the state for all the state reps who had earned a certain, you know, score with the tab.

And that's what I did. I designed to your right now. And it was great. What I did was I would work a legislative session, okay, staff. And then I'd do campaigns for a year and a half. And then after the campaign season, I would go work for one of the freshmen to help get elected, set up their office, show them how to use a computer system, follow Bill all the work, work part of it.

Knowing I was going to leave my job was to train the staff. And then when session ended, I left and I would go to the campaigns direct mail for the year and a half and then go work for the next freshman. And I did that cycle for 20 years. Great. How many members did you work for? Wow. As state staff or campaigns?

I'd state staff. Gosh. Let's see here. I did nine sessions on staff, and I only did back to back once. John Otto Terminado 0507. So somebody different every year since 91. Wow. It's a lot. So you saw a lot of different members. Didn't put you off running for office, though. How did that happen? It almost did because I knew what it was.

I knew the sacrifice on your finances. I knew the sacrifice on your time. Your family. Right. I've seen some great men and women get here and just really struggle with the personal side of what this is. It's very, very difficult job. I was like, you know what? I'll be staff forever. This is great, I love it. And then I got approached, to go, run a race and, thought about it and we got in and did pretty well and then did have had a pretty good run as chairman and doing some really good stuff in the legislature.

So very proud of the work we did. But, you know, I think every member has a certain amount of gas in their tank, and there are some members who can have a 20 year career but have a very slow burn. You know, they do a whole lot. And, I burned through my fuel and a very, very, difficult years wearing lots of different hats.

And it was great. We did some really good work, but it was time. And, I mean, it was time. And I was there for eight years, and it's time for the next guy. That was wonderful. And what were some of the highlights from those eight years? You know, what's interesting is I did this post. I did this exit interview on my way out with my local paper, and they asked me that question, what's your biggest accomplishment?

Right. And there are lots of things to say, right? You could point to Chairman of Sunset Commission, the sunset Bill and the Railroad Commission. Sunset bill. As chairman, I appropriated for 42 state agencies twice budget contrary twice. I mean, there's a lot of gavels handed in my office for some really cool stuff. But the best stuff you never heard of, because the best thing we did was we were heavily invested in the world of special education, because of my son.

And he was struggling. And as Alexander was struggling, I would go to the Legislative Council and say, how do I fix this for my kid? Like, tell me, how do I get my kid out? He hates pee. He can't throw a ball, catch a ball, dribble a ball. It's second period of the day. They laugh at and make fun of him.

He cries rest of the day like I need my kids to pee. And they said, well, there's this thing called adaptive PE for physically handicapped kids in a wheelchair. You're not doing the basketball section. Like if you're visually impaired, you aren't running track. So their statute allowed for some accommodations for handicapped kids. It didn't say physical, but the ISDs had interpreted it to be physical.

Okay. So we changed it to physical and mental and under mental we defined autism. And so all the kids, like my Alexander, had an out and out, and they didn't have to do those things that caused them so much grief the rest of the day. And, about a year later, two years later, I show up at one of the parent groups that we were belong to with Alexander.

And, the young man's table asked, did you preregister? Or I said, I did, which I am Larry Gonzalez. He looked at me. He goes like, Larry Gonzalez. Yeah, that's me. And for the next 30 minutes, I'm surrounded by parents telling them how much it changed their kid's life. And so, you know, it's important why you do what you do.

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And I see it change Alexander's life. And I know there's probably thousands of kids just like him out there, but I got to meet those kids very emotionally overwhelming, knowing that you did really, really good work. With all due respect to text, are much more important. The text at sunset Bill was giving these kids an opportunity to go to school and just get through their day without being bullied.

How cool was that for Alexander to know that his dad had done that? I don't think he knows to this day. That is my really cool. My older daughter completely understands what we're doing, why we're doing, and I'm sure Alexander ever did. But 2 or 3 years ago, I'm driving home and there's a junior high right next to my house.

I'm driving home and all these kids are playing soccer. There's about eight kids by themselves walking around the fence very heavily stemming. I thought my kids like, those are the kids who don't have to play soccer. Those are the kids who give me three laps and they're not having to be in the middle of a situation. It's very difficult for them, and it causes them a whole bunch of grief when the class is over.

Right? So you see some really good things like that. Every bill that dealt with autism for eight years had my name on it. It was me, Stan Hubert. It was a bit. It rattled for a year. And then Ron Simmons, we were the ones who really championed a bunch of the, the special education and some of the stuff we did wasn't the most Republican thing sometimes, because it wasn't nonpartisan.

Disciples. Yeah, yeah, it was it was great. Right. But when we had this insurance mandate bill that insurance had to pay for therapy for child with autism, you know, we were pulled aside very quickly and told that's an insurance mandate. Is the 62nd one in Texas. We don't want to do that. And, we go to committee and there's a lot of cards against the bill, and we started talking through what the bill does, and what it means.

And there was one particular member who kept pounding on the fact, what does it cost? What does it cost? What does it cost? I think talking around it a little bit, you know, what does it cost? And I finally address the member by first name. And I said, have you ever had a birthday party for your kid? Nobody shows up because I have.

In the room, just go silent. And I said, by the way, it's $0.38 a day or a month. You're paying $0.38 a month. Everybody is to make sure that my kid gets when he's in. Okay. So flies out of committee at that point. I'm sorry. Can you go to the floor? It's still an insurance mandate, and there are still some groups that were happy with the legislation.

And I had one member particularly walk up to me and says, you know, not real happy with the bill, but I trust you as a dad that you know what you're doing. The bill passes unanimously right? But it was because the dads were there, right? Not the legislative staff. The dad was there. Right. And I tell people all the time, from a numbers perspective, people walk in with all these think tank papers and white papers and all this theory.

It doesn't mean anything to me. I want to hear the story of the girl who got denied this, or the little boy who struggles. Was this like to me? Was the Eric, don't tell me about the kid. Tell me about the family. Right. We were working on child Protective Services. Tell me the story of the family that we disrupted their lives.

Like keeping the real stuff. Right? And that's what we did. We simply talked about our kids and the struggles they were going through. We made it real for people, and it's much more relatable. That was my favorite part of being a staffer. I we would meet like nine, ten people a day, and a lot of times it was like building coalitions, and it was those real people who've had the experience.

I've cried in meetings, right? There were times I would like, hold her hand and be like, okay, well, we'll we'll do this and we'll make change. And it was that was the most empowering. Yeah. I will tell you, though, don't forget the most difficult day ever as a member, since that was your next question. What was on sunset?

We were doing child protective services, and for 18 hours, we listened to all the horror stories of how the state of Texas had ruined these kids lives. And everybody was there to tell us how we messed up. We took kids when we shouldn't have. We didn't take kids when we should have. And all the things that happened to all those kids.

Laura. For 18 hours, a mom sits down with a picture of like, oh man, whenever, whenever the witness brings out the framed photograph. Yeah, it's going to be a tough one, right? And they were just story after story after story. If we didn't remove this kid and look what happened to him, or we took a kid that we should have taken and look what happened to him in foster care.

It was just it's the real stuff, right? I think that was the most difficult days. A member was listening to how we, the state, had just ruined these people's lives. And I think that's why, for me, I took the job so seriously because with the responsibilities I had and, in some of the really big stuff in appropriating a lot of really important things, the reality of what that is and the weight of what that is really was on my shoulders.

Right. And I think I think Mrs. Leonard Gonzalez would tell you that, the job for me wasn't maybe as fun as it was for a lot of other people, that it really weighed on me. Right? It really weighed on me. And I wasn't there, to go eat. I wasn't there to go drink, and I wasn't there to play golf.

I was there to work, like, give me a problem and I'm going to fix it right? And I was so fixated on the problem that I couldn't enjoy maybe the good stuff that was going on around me. So in 2017, I would get to the House floor at 10:00. I've already been in my committee for 3.5 hours, and I was already mad.

Here I am in this incredible chamber right on 3 million people, and there's 150 of us. Like, what an honor. And I wasn't enjoying it anymore because it was just so much work. I was like, you know what? It's probably time to go, right? Let the next guy have it, the next guy step up because I'd burn through my fuel very quickly.

And, I was tired. I think I was spiritually, physically, mentally just broken in 2017. And I'll be honest with you, it took me a couple of years to recover. I mean, it really did it. It took me a couple of years to get back to me, like where I felt like me, because the weight of all of that just really, really weighed on me for a long time.

You have a lot of power in that position, but there's a lot of problems everyone's bringing to you with, can imagine what's the quote with great power, with great ability. And I felt it. I felt it all the time. Right. And so that when we're looking at a budget and there's going to be an elimination of, you know, 32, you know, full time equivalents, employees, those are 32 real people who have real families who who are losing their job.

Right. And so when you look at we're going to cut 32 people, they kind of go through their legislative appropriations request, and they're talking about these exceptional items and all these budgetary items. But those are people, man. Like it wasn't just a line and a number and a decimal point for me, I really thought about. So think about the guy who's going home and say his job had been rift reduction and forced and have a job anymore.

Didn't have insurance anymore. Right. That's the kind of thing that just that I really worried about a lot and that when I got home, it still kind of weighed with me a little bit. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Were there any times that you had to go really against the party, your peers, because you were really passionate about it?

Yes. Well, that's a great question. The answer is yes, but the answer is I'm more voted against myself because I sided with my district. I feel there's two trains of thought here. Okay. Are you there to represent your district, or did your district send you there to do the best you can with the information you have? Okay.

What was it for you? I was at represent my district and and I can argue the pros and cons of both. I'm not saying there's one right answer for me. I was there to represent the people that has to 52 and on items where maybe Larry Gonzalez differed from the district. I went with the district, that it caused me a little bit of grief, sure, but I never lost.

But I never lost. Yeah, I never lost. But we gave up. People. People here was tough, right? People knew that it wasn't just a knee jerk, kind of party vote, that it was thoughtful. And I was thinking, these are issues. And I and I heard that over the years that people gave me that wiggle room that I was representing the people who sent me there.

And what district, span was that? So which cities and counties? All through Winston County. It was round Rock, Hudson, Taylor and parts of Georgetown. And look, it was a you know, when I was there, I'll say this, it was red because it was my brand of red. Right. It wasn't a super red district. It was a very much purple district, but it looked Uber red because it was me.

But the year I left, it flipped. We flipped and I told them it would happen. It's back now. It's red. It is, it is, it's back now. But it's a very different light. I don't even live in my own district anymore. I don't live in 52 anymore. So where are you now? You're in 136. Okay. 136. Same county, same house.

But the districts have changed so much that I'm not even in my own district anymore. I'm in a 68% Democrat district. Interesting. How have you seen it change in the greater Austin area? People can't afford to be in Travis County, and you have a lot of state employees who just can't afford to be here anymore. And then when they retire and they get 60% of a number they couldn't afford, now they really can't afford to be here.

So they're going north and going south, right? Hays County is just booming. Williamson County now you're not buying in round Rock. It's like it's going up 35. Georgetown is for girls. The next spot, right. Going going north. It's just changing so much. The people when they say, oh, people are coming to Texas, let me tell you, they're coming to Central Texas, where I live to not just the metroplex.

It's changing a lot. And there are a lot of people coming here. I mean, just living around rock, since I have since 96 and just watching the tremendous amount of growth. And we've gone from when I was there, a completely red county, every office across the entire county. Not anymore. Not anymore. It is definitely changing up there.

How do you feel about all the expansion and growth we've had in Texas? I think it's a good thing when managed correctly and when it's thoughtful. Going forward. Right. So sometimes that Bridge to Nowhere is necessary because in six years it's going somewhere, right? So in Williamson County, we've managed so much of it with our county commissioners in that we anticipate the growth.

And, you know, it's coming, it's coming. So being able to invest in the infrastructure beforehand, water, roads, rail, air, whatever it is to anticipate that growth. And here's the crazy thing from having appropriated stuff for as long as I have, the answer to traffic isn't necessarily more roads. Because we build that new road, here come more stores, here come more superstores, here comes more traffic.

So as you build up more roads, you continue to bring in more traffic to those roads. What's the solution? What we did with one 3130 is built for mobility. That's it. If you get on 30, how far do you go before the next exit? Oh, it's like on MoPac. I mean, you can't get off your own for a reason, right?

So on 130 you think about 130 once you figure we're going south, there's an exit every few miles. And even that doesn't take you to a convenience store. Right? Because 130 was built for mobility. You're on and you're moving if you want to build it out with box stores and gas stations and restaurants, it just brings more people.

So the idea from beginning to Georgetown is you have a parallel of 35, you're not stopping. Oh, it's like the Autobahn that I'm like, okay, I'm going so I know or I always drive the speed limit. So you would never hear me say that. Well, now we have here I have, I have I have hit triple digits on occasion.

But you are. But that was the reason it was built. Was the mobility along to run parallel 35 without getting through all the major cities? We use it all the time, and it's and it's fantastic. If you remember, back in the day, there was something called the Trans Texas Corridor, and the idea was to build this superhighway with infrastructure.

It would have utilities, it would have water like along this one major, major thoroughfare would be all the way to traffic and all the infrastructure to help, run these cities. It's very big under Rick Perry. And it got nixed because one terrorist hit takes out everything. Right? That was one of the concerns was, wait a minute.

If somebody puts a bomb right there, you're talking about water, electricity, roads, like that's a prison. So the one that might get done, but the chairman of transportation at that time was a guy named Mike Kersey from around Moore, Texas. So 130 is our trans Texas corridor to the rest of the state. Chose not to build. Oh, we built it.

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And look how great it is. That was the idea behind that mass mobility. Interesting. But we built ours anyway. And it's nothing but positive infrastructure, economic development. It's incredible. It's incredible. So final kind of question for you on the, legislative side, what was you said there were there was a lot of, hard work and some dark times for sure.

What were some of your favorite moments to be in the legislature for fun times. You remember? I, I really miss the people. Right? I really miss the people. There's a word fraternity, but there is a fraternity that you go through. There's 150 hours living to the very same difficult moments, making the very same difficult votes, going back home, facing the constituents with the very same decisions.

Right. There's a camaraderie there that is just so different, than when I was staff or anything else. And I miss the people. I miss the problem solving that. I could actually get in there and push the green button right to, to progress something or push the red button to stop something from being progressed. But the actual decision making of making making things better, I think, it was it was good.

You know, several of my really good friends, former employers have since passed away, and that's been hard. When I was a young staffer, these, former members would pass away, and I never knew. And then you start hearing members pass away that you remember, you know, as a staffer. Oh, I remember that guy. And now I go to the state cemetery.

Like I just went for, Parker McCullers funeral. And now the tombstones are men and women I served with. And so it's interesting to me, this progression through life, right, that now they're my friend. You know, Chairman John Otto. Right. Is is there in the state cemetery, one of my best friends ever in the legislature. I went to, you know, Chairman Jim Pitts, his funeral, you know, over the summer.

And Parker McCullough, who used to represent House at 252, which is how I knew him. We had the same area. And it's the camaraderie amongst the very few of us who get this honor and privilege to represent. I miss those guys. I really do. I miss those guys, and I miss I miss those kind of conversations where we're really doing some good work.

Right. So I think that's probably what I'm. What I miss the most about it. The laughing and joking and having a good time. Honestly, that wasn't really me. I mean, we were we were pretty focused. I think my staff would tell you as well. In my office, it was 6 a.m.. 6 a.m., not arrive six.

And that 6 a.m. computer on at the desk with your coffee ready to roll. Because I had from six until 715 before I went to go chair my committee. And the more I didn't come back. Right. So that that hour and a half, whatever it was, was my opportunity to be to play offense with my staff. How did you stay awake in those those times?

I really think you use a major stamina as a member. I know as a staffer, I too am falling asleep in my desk at times. Now. When my bill was up, I was thin. But yeah, how do you do that night after night? It's awful. True story. I never drank coffee until the 2013 session. That was. I just couldn't stay awake.

Yeah. Let me tell you what. That first cup of coffee in your life. That's pretty hard, man. Like that hit me hard. I was like, what is this thing as a stimulant, man? I was like, it's like, my gosh, so true story. I've never had a drop of alcohol in my life. I've never done any drugs in my life.

So to have a cup of coffee with that amount of caffeine in it actually had a serious impact on me. So I learned how to drink coffee, black coffee. And, it's it's very different. The truth is, it's hard to be on all the time personality wise, right? Because everybody who walks in expects a certain personality. I can bring in myself.

Right. And I have a certain, personality and kind of how I carry myself. And people expect that all the time. It's exhausting to do that guy all the time. Right. And so, very, very difficult. I would go home and the light switch comes off just done right, like all my energy is, man. So one time I took Marie with me to, to a chamber event, and my wife was wonderful, but my wife didn't care about any of this at all, so I took all of that one day, and she saw me being Larry.

She saw me be in the chair. And then she saw me work in the room doing all the things that we have to do. And the lights definitely on. We got back in the car and she says, how come I never get that guy? I thought, wow, how unfair of me. But it's true. I when I get home, the light switch comes off.

I am this guy for everybody else, but not my wife and kids. Because when I got home, I was just. I was just beating down at the time. Right. So I really I really thought about that a lot. After that was who am I when I get home? And that's why in 2017, when I realized I'm not happy and it's just overwhelming me, it's time to go.

Oh, left. That makes sense. And I left it to the next guy to feel all those terrible, awful things as well. How you said you took like two years to really get back to yourself. What did you do for those two years after being a member? Yeah. What's crazy is, I was I was pretty sick, actually, and I was struggling a lot physically.

And, had some very serious, GI issues that had developed over the years with the amount of stress and just everything. And so I went vegan for two years and I lost a total of probably, 51 pounds. The first 30 came off in the first four weeks just on a vegan diet. And so Vegan diet started lifting weights again, which I hadn't done in 20 years and just worked on my my physical body.

Right. Getting my body to operate again. Mental. Right? Listening to music, lifting weights, just getting in a space that wasn't a phone call or somebody meeting something I just needed to be really. So from the physical part, the mental part, I just had to decompress. And I think going vegan really helped me on the physical side.

It's a very hard lifestyle, by the way. I it's I mean, I've done it for six months and then missed meat and, Yeah, far more on the carnivore side now. Yeah. But when you stick to something with discipline, I think it is great. Yeah. I think where I struggled with it would be easier for me. Rather, maybe easier for me is if I had that meat, I got violently ill.

So it's a pretty good, pretty good reason not to have that. Everybody's different, you know, because I knew if I eat that, there's a price, there's a there's a price to pay. So just two years of just sitting still, your mind, your spirit, your physical body, and just. I had to decompress. And I did that with diet and exercise.

Go figure. That's awesome. What they've told you your whole life. Your diet and exercise. There's no quick cure to feeling good. Correct it. You know what you have to do. And that's it's diet and exercise. I mean, it just it works. There's no shortcuts when you do it right. It feels fantastic. So and then I felt better.

And then was able to get back to being me again. I feel like you again. My sense of humor had just disappeared. I mean, I really oh, yeah, I was, I was, I was unrecognizable to your body. I'm completely know I can like how you know me today. You would not have recognized me in 2017. Yeah. It's very, very difficult time for me.

Yeah. Did I'm sure your family noticed you. You feeling better? Did you go back then into the workforce? When did you get into, like, So I actually resigned my position early in 2018. In the summer, because people were building lobby teams, and I told the speaker, I need to leave early because I need to look for a gig.

And you're actually prohibited by law as a sitting member to have those conversations about employment. So I'm a rule follower. I'm good. And to me that meant something. Yeah, I was like, you know what? I, I need to go so I can start planning the rest of my life. So I actually left early. I didn't I didn't finish up my term.

So I, I left early and got my shingle out and, it's been a good run. It's been a good run, but it's it's a lot of work still, for sure, without the campaign stuff. The campaign stuff and maybe the lobbies, people are like, hey, where do you go? Walk, walk? Do you want to go? No, I don't.

If I wanted to walk, one would walk on them for me. Here's a check. But I'm not walking, man, I know, I know, those days are. And those days are past me I. Do you still drink coffee? Yes. And I shouldn't because of caffeine, but, Yes, I have developed a taste for that. I try to add more tea.

It's not good. I know, it's just I love coffee and the cocoa has way too much sugar, right? Cocoa is just for sure. Yeah, yeah. So coffee, black coffees, I mean, great. Does not. Yeah. 50 cups, but in session it's hard to to stay up. What is your specialty now as a lobbyist and and go into this you seem, you know, always very energized and obviously keeps you as you, as you go.

And so, yeah, tell me more about what you're doing now and what you're working on. You know, I keep everything stacked in silos. You know, I've never there are certain issues I've never done as a member or staff that I just I'm not going to learn. Now. I don't want to I want to stay in my wheelhouse. I want to stay.

What? I know I'm one of those lobbyists who wants to be a subject matter expert so that when I walk in, I'm not just opening the door, I'm not just entertainment lobbyists like I pride myself on. I know what I'm talking about. In order to do that effectively, I stay in things that I know. So I have a lot of business issues, taxes issues, appropriations issues.

Sunset. I'm staying within my realm of knowledge. Right. That's where I'm more comfortable. And when I walk in, I can give my client spiel the entire time because I know it largely, I had a bill on it, or there's something relevant in my life that's anecdotal about it. I worked for Autism Speaks for a while, doing some food bank work now, and I was active with the food banks when I was a member.

So it's things that I already familiar with, right. So I still remain subject matter expert on this side though, for my clients. So it really helps, to have that relationship when I walk in a largely I'm still Mr. Chairman when I walk in which I, which I appreciate, even with the people who have never served with me, they know who I am, and I still get that respect.

Which I appreciate very much. So they know that I've been there. They know that I understand it. They know that I've probably seen it before in 34 years. I've probably seen that piece of legislation once or twice in my life. And we talk about it. But I value that for sure. Oh, definitely. Yeah, sure. People hear your story.

Oh, last session I get these phone calls. Remember I said, hey, can you help me with some water? Absolutely. So I go down there into the office and they have a stack of writers, for the budget, and they just want to better understand them. So I went through probably 68 writers, 70 writers with this one member of appropriations.

You know what this is? And I'll just explain what that is. The budget with the programing is for the next page. Oh, on this one. And we just talk to them, talk through them for like an hour and 15 minutes. We just talked through all the writers. I have a dog in that fight other than a member asked me to just explain things.

Absolutely. That's very cool. Yeah. It's cool. With this coming session, what are your top legislative focuses with most of your clients? I would say artificial intelligence is just dominating my time in my conversations. Artificial intelligence is touching on every part of our lives, right? Every part of our lives. So that when I go to an AI hearing that somebody might go to 12 or 13 different clients, for different reasons.

But, you know, when you start looking at, at how all encompassing the issue is, you know, there's some draft legislation in there that includes financial institutions. One of my guys, the electric grid, what am I guys? And so all of a sudden, artificial intelligence is the issue and legislation that's coming and the issues that are coming around, artificial intelligence start really affecting a whole lot of people.

So when you get into the infrastructure of AI and the the electric grid in the water and all these things that are necessary to operate a AI that hits, I mean, probably all of my clients. So definitely artificial intelligence is something that I'm really following represent completely. I'm is doing a great job. I can't tell you dozens and dozens of conferences and things that I've been to because it's so all encompassing across so many issues.

All right. Is your stance similar to that of many in Texas of trying to continue growth, innovation while also kind of mitigating any risks? Where where are you not. Absolutely. I come from the let go, let the private sector do its thing. Research and development. Put the tools out there. Let's go. Let's grow the economy. Let's go to jobs.

Let's put the technology out there. Let's see what it can do. Come. However, we need to recognize where there can be some issues. So I'll tell you this very, very fascinating story. In 2001, I worked for Attorney General John Cornyn. One of the folks I worked with was a, now he's a congressman who also worked with us in 2001, one of the bills I worked on the internet was still relatively new at this time as I date myself.

So the child pornography laws in Texas were written around, actual hard copy photographs. Right? There was nothing in statute for electronic images of these things, right? Because it was new and the statutes didn't address electronic images. So in 2001, we worked very hard to pass a bill that dealt with child pornography as it pertains to the electronic images that people are seeing online.

Okay, 23 years later, we're talking about legislation now that deals with child pornography as it pertains to artificial intelligence images, deepfakes completely. Yes, because it's not a real person. You would know it's not a real person. It looks entirely real, but it's not a real person. So how does the law address that? And if you look now that been filed, dozens of bills, easily dozens of bills are involved specifically around AI in child pornography.

And I had a share from me and said, hey, here's a case that I have now and outlined this awful situation. And he says, I can't do anything about it. It's not real image. Okay, so they had to figure out what that looks like, right? And so yes, guardrails around okay. But what happens when Adobe puts a product, puts a product out there that I've used for 40 years, right?

35 years. What happens when someone uses that product to do something they shouldn't be doing right? In my opinion, Adobe didn't do anything or held harmless, right? There are some members who would disagree with that statement. Well, there's some changing technology. Look at, eye opening. I saw, have you seen a trailer for that? So it's very controversial.

But the video image that it creates is that it generates using AI prompt. You take been, showed me a picture of Larry Gonzalez flying around with monkeys. And it is the most accurate image. This has not been released to the public yet. They've just been teasing it. And now the movie industry and Hollywood's freaking out caught everyone's freaking work.

And also people on this side of things, seeing the terrible ramifications, but also the amazing things we could grow with it. Right. So it's this oh, it's a really hard, right. But they haven't released it. And I'm curious to know more reasons. Wow. Why? But Sora, some of the graphics look incredibly real. I have three friends that work in Hollywood.

And they're struggling with this. Right. Because the big strike that happened over the summer was about screenplays being written by AI. It was about acting. If you can generate these images of the perfect actor for this role, your artificial intelligence, maybe the higher the actual person. Right. So there's all these conversations around what Hollywood could do with artificial intelligence.

That's why you saw the back up the summer, the strike was saying that we need some guarantees for screenwriters and actors and things like that, because I possibly can really get in there and start doing things on its own. Right? You think of modeling, influencing advertising that wouldn't need to hire people, correct? Right. But they would need a different, skill set to do another job that would probably be created by it.

So it's this whole kind of industrial revolution, right, that we're in, right? Where everything's changing. Everyone needs to adapt. All right. So I understand it touches every single one of your clients. That makes sense. So back in my graphic design days, there was a certain technology in the print shop, and all these guys were working on things called match prints and blue lines.

This whole proofing process of what it looks like, and these were the machines that produced proofs. And you had to go through all this, this whole process. Now they just create a PDF and send it to you. So what happens to all the guys that used to do match prints and blue lines and all these things that are now nonexistent in the printing industry?

Well, they had to learn how to do the things that it was adapting to, right? These guys had to adapt or they were gone. And so they had to learn a new skill set. Yes, there were efficiencies with it. There's all kinds of wonderful things that come with today's technology. But you had a group that had to adapt, but it did create more opportunities in different things, but you had to adapt to it.

Well, you were one of our earliest adopters of us led. Yeah. And I love that you gave us so much feedback and I've seen it evolve. What do you see this being in five years, you know, with the legislature how we can utilize AI. Where do you see it going? It is transformative. I think it will change what we do, how we do it greater than the internet did.

Right? So when I got here, we had typewriters. That was the technology. There were no video cameras on the floor. You couldn't watch session, you couldn't watch committees. If you wanted to see session, you'd go to the gallery or go to the committee room. Right? So, man, I was there before the computers were right. Along comes the internet and like, wow, this is changing everything about how that building operates.

The next step is AI. It is going to make the change to the internet, look like child's play compared to what's available now. The tools are absolutely amazing what you can do from an efficiency standpoint, right? The access information, but I'm really beginning is I really dig down into US ledge, really beginning to, do much better at my.

I promise I'm getting much better pulling information because it's there right? Then the skill set becomes, how do you grab it? And that's what I've been having a blast figuring out was the best utilization, the best prompts. How do I word the prompt in a way that gets what I what I get from it, what I need from it?

So I really gotten creative with my prompts lately, and I'm just asking it like I had one, right? I just asked it. Which three questions prompted the most, conversation? Which questions were the most consternation? Which was three questions. The ones the members really stuck with the most? Well, you know, and and so it was, you know, Senator Shorten or ask the question to the guy from and it just completely described to me the question that was asked.

And it was through all the back and forth it has. I mean, yeah, now you're you're you read through it and you work through it and, and then that kind of prompts some more questions for me. And you can dig down as deep as you want. Right. Some people say summarize this in 500 words. There's a great job.

Most of mine are 8 to 12 pages. And that's just, in my opinion. Still, I'm touching the beginning of it. So I tell my clients, the first thing I do is I put an outline on top. Here's what the next ten pages look like. There's an outline in the beta graphic designer I have mine designed in a way where the I can instantly see the breaks.

Right? Yeah. So for me the format's important. Otherwise you get ten pages of paragraph. That's not the best format for someone to receive it. So I use my graphic design background with, different elements. Secret sauce people discuss here. Yeah. But my reports look really good. And they're visually easy to read, so I'm running better and better all the time.

How to get the best information from the software. It's just you're becoming a, prompt and prompt engineer. Prompt engineer? That's a new job. Did you ever think you would have that? My dad's an aerospace engineer, and I knew I would never, walk in my dad's footsteps, so I think he would laugh if you were to use the word engineer anywhere near.

Is it that the thing with technology, though, it can allow people, a lot more in the creative space? I'm not technically, I'm not the tech expert at the company, but I'm able to, with some of these tools, become, technically advanced. And, I mean, five years in the future, who knows where we'll be with just automating complete workflows, right?

Which is amazing. So I had, a young, young girl, a friend of, one of my. I guess I've known this guy since we were in second grade, and so, I hired her to come help me. Has never been in the building. Didn't know policy. Had never seen a committee hearing. She was summarizing for me these committee hearings as good or better than I was, because the tools allow her.

You don't have to be an expert in that Senate BNC subject matter for eight hours and 32 minutes. What you have to do is write the question to write the prompt. You can get the information just with the prompts and then read through it, which gives you idea for more prompts, right? She did a fantastic job with zero experience.

The tools enabled her oh abs to pull that out. Yeah, I remember when I first was summarizing committee hearings. I did a terrible job because I would be in there for eight hours. I was working on other things, so I was trying to listen out for things and to pull all that information and aggregate for eight hours. Right.

It's just a very hard task. I was typing up exact sentences. I couldn't keep up with how fast people were speaking, right. It was not my specialty and that was one of the reasons I started this exact tool was because of that and thinking this would help a lot of people, oh, it's great. And so like so I, I'm watching this thing live right with come to life and I'm able to send the to do the do the transcription the exact quote.

Sure. Not my summary. Here's the exact quote. Right. Yeah. And what really helps is I see a lot of videos. I send a lot of videos of my clients because to me the video is important because it because it in context how they said it. Right. The expression they said it with right. The pacing. They said it with the volume.

They said it with. I mean, to me, all of that is more important than the actual words sometimes. So when someone gets a transcription, yes, the words are there, but you're missing so much more when you see the arms crossed, when they're asking the question, when they're leaning back and asking the question. There's so much visual, nonverbal communication that goes on.

That's where the video comes in. So you send in the video link. It really allows them to see with all the emotions of what was said. I'm happy you're loving it. It's great. Clients like it's great. It's great. Oh my gosh. You know it's great is my clients love the fact I'm using it. They love the fact that I'm using the new technology.

Right. They appreciate the fact that they're getting their reports and it's great. It's accurate. It's really good information. They get in a timely manner. It's in a format that looks good. And so, they, they, they like the fact that I'm using AI, I love it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Well, it's changing everything. Any. Yeah. What's the biggest way this is impacting AI is changing and impacting your clients.

So, we do a lot of work in the business side, so a lot of business is a lot of economic development stuff. Cities with economic development corporations, you're looking at jobs, you're looking at building infrastructure. And so when somebody says to me, hey, you know, we're bringing three data centers to our wonderful city, let's talk about that.

Right. Let's talk about what that means to bring in a data center, right. With the amount of energy uses, and or the amount of water it uses to cool it. And all of a sudden you've got an entity there that, that, you really got to think through what's the ROI? And so different cities are making different decisions.

But when you have a data center and there's one being built in Central Texas, when you have a data center that uses, a day of electricity equals a day of the city of Lubbock, I mean, sorry, the city of Lubbock in four days. One day data center equals four days. The city of Lubbock. Wow. You really got to think through your grid and the electricity use and what that means for the rest of your community.

So the answer is getting more into. Well, we're going to build our own plant on site nuclear. Okay. So now we're talking about, a big data center. My guess is they don't want to be on our grid either. Right? Is, you know, I think we have some work to do on our grid, too. So I think it goes both ways.

But then we're having a conversation. What does that look like to have your own mini nuclear running your stuff? And then the governor has the commission, and it just came out, a couple weeks ago, the whole Commission on studying Nuclear Energy in Texas. And it was very, very good. I wrote a beautiful summary, about it for you.

So that's next. Right. So now you start thinking of, okay, so what does that mean? Right. And you have to really think through the one layer from economic development perspective, I'm the city manager and I'm bringing in a big box store. And I know there's a certain amount of draw on resources, but I'm also getting 600 jobs.

I'm getting a tax base. Those guys have disposable income. They're spending in my community. So yes, there's this certain amount of take from the system, but a certain amount of put back in the system for for the city manager perspective, what does that look like? Like what's my ratio. Right. Well, when you get into certain issues, maybe doesn't provide a whole lot of jobs, maybe they didn't provide nearly as much taxes.

Maybe the maybe the from a city's perspective, the outgo is way more than the income. And you just have to weigh those things out to understand what the benefit is for your particular community to have certain projects come in, because the draw on water and electricity is significant. It is significant. Do they pay taxes? Yes, they pay taxes.

Great. But on items that are depreciating, every five years, maybe there's new servers. We're right back to this value and they depreciate them, pay less taxes, new service come in. Taxes go up again. They depreciate them. So I'm not even sure that number is as steady as, one would think of a better status property tax. Right.

So it's all those kind of economic development things you have to really think through when you bring these, types of projects in. What are you most excited about this session coming up? Oh my gosh. Every session has its own field. This will be my 17th regular session. I can't even tell you that special session. Sure. My 17th regular session.

And every one of them have its own thing, right? Every one of them have its own feel. When I first got here, it was a Democrat, House Democrat, Senate Democrat, governor. That's how long I've been here. Right. So I've seen it all. And with the exception of technology, put technology aside for a second, with exception technology. There aren't a whole lot of new issues, Laura.

Something that somebody is looking at 2025, we probably looked at in 2011 and 2003, and we've seen it before, right. But what's changed is where we are as a society looking at the same issue and the makeup of the body, looking at the same issue. It's not fair for someone in 2025 to say, well, why didn't they do this in 2003?

You know, it's a different time, right? It's just it's not where we were in in 2003. That wasn't going to be possible. But in 2025, maybe it is now. Right. But I think it's fair to have some, you know, kind of like this historical perspective of then what were they doing in oh three and oh five, in those first two years of Republican control?

And why wasn't it done yet? It's a different time. It's a different time. But largely the bills that I'm reading through, I've I've seen these bills. They're all I've seen these bills for a long, long, long time. Which is, which is, always amusing to me. So we'll see what this one takes on. Right. Everybody has its own feel, its own flavor.

There's always an issue or an issue or two that kind of dominates. I'm sure this is new, different. Everything you're watching now is things that we've seen before over and over and over again. So from the old guy perspective, I can say this with certainty. You won't hear a lot of certainty statements. I will say this with certainty.

What is it every two years for 107, 170 years, many women have come to Austin and they figured it out. And they're going to figure it out again. Yeah, because they always have. And 100 years from now, they always will. They're they're going to figure it out. And I have full confidence in the people of Texas. They have full confidence in my colleagues and former colleagues across the street.

Every year we'll figure it out. It'll be fine. The world's not going to end on June 5th. I mean, it's going to be fine. Maybe some things didn't pass. You would like to have passed and maybe some things passed that maybe you would want to have passed. But then of the day, it's Texas. We've got great leaders here.

They're going to work together and they're going to figure it out, and it's going to be fine. I'm gonna love it. Well, I love the optimism always. It's going to be fun. Fine. Nothing to worry about. Just smile and keep going. It's going to be fine. Excited to see your smiling face saying that all of the session when we're around the Capitol.

I mean, may I you may. You know that goes to say that I worked. So I worked nine sessions of staff, okay? And everybody knew me. Just, like smiling and happy and friendly and joking around, things like that. It was very important to me as a member that I didn't lose that. Yeah. I didn't want to be the guy that they were like, yeah, learning was so cool.

I forgot to like the kind of a jerk now. Like like I was so aware of. I didn't want people to think that going from staff to member, that I became like this awful human being, right? Arrogant or power hungry or egocentric or narcissistic. I wanted to be there, right? I just wanted to be Larry. So we worked really, really hard at that the whole time I was a member to make certain that nobody thought, hey, Larry thinks he's too big for his britches now, right?

So maybe one day I was walking through conference committee for the budget. I have all my binders and my chief of staff, Chris Sanchez. Great guys walking in. He has a set full of binders, and we're we're walking around. We're trying to hide from people because we don't want to answer all the budget conference committee questions. And so I see a great friend of mine who since passed away, David Jensen.

David Jensen is sitting there by himself on a bench, and he just had a Facebook post about both his kids are actors in Hollywood, and we had both had these really great readings, and they called to tell him how great the auditions were, and I read that earlier that morning. So here I am with all the stuff and Chris with all the stuff, and I saw Dennis say, give me 30s.

So I went, I sat down with Danny, said, hey man, congratulations on your kids. It's really cool. Proud pop lit up and tell me all about his kids and how great it was, how happy they were. That's. And then I'm happy for you, I said, I, I got to run, I got a thing to take care of. And he laughed and I walked away.

And, later that night, he posted on Facebook, Raymond and Chairman. His office got here, which was.

That's great. And I don't say it from a brighter standpoint. I'm saying that we work really hard to just be Larry. Like, you know, like just be the guy you always were and don't let it get to you right from the from from from from the from the ego side. So are you proud that we were still just Larry?

That's great advice. Just Larry, you know, if people want to find this great Larry here in front of me, to have as a lobbyist or find you, where do they go? Gosh, the website is that desk. Desk 138.com. I took a lot of ribbing and teasing from my colleagues when I called my company desk. 138.com, but from a marketing guy, I knew what I was doing because everybody says that's a strange thing.

Where does that come from? And I get to say, you know, when I was chairman of the House, that was my desk number. So it not only puts, you know, the elected class, it puts you in leadership. And from a perspective, client perspective, that's what I call my zoom. You know, my zooms with me have all my chairman gavels behind me.

I, I, I don't tell you what they are. You just see all the galleys lined up and you know. Yeah, I mean, you probably figure out pretty quickly that I may have done a thing or two in my, in my life and, but I will say this credit goes to a lot of people who work with me.

You heard me mention Chris Sanchez earlier. Really great staff, really great staff. LBP staffers and budget board staff sat with us for hundreds of hours going through budget items. Wonderful staff, the governor's office, the governor's office. There's nobody over there that just pat himself on the back and can take credit for all of it. What a tremendous teamwork from the 22 year old staffer at the front desk.

Everybody makes it work. And, you know, you be kind to everybody. Be kind of a buddy. Not hard to smile and be kind. I mean, it's just, the world goes a lot better, you know? More more flies with with honey, with vinegar right in. And so just maintain the smile. And we work hard. And don't let the pressure wear you down like it did me, in 2017.

You know, I think, that was a really, really, really dark time for me. But, you know, now just Larry, really the first thing that people like, what do we call you, like just Larry, man, like, I'm. I'm fine. It's just just Larry. Just my first name is just. And that's fine. So. Well, you've got quite the story, and I so appreciate you coming on for all your support for being a partner.

And, keep keep up the good work. Appreciate it. Great being here. Thank you. Yeah.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business Podcast, where we connect Texas lawmakers, industry leaders and business experts to key issues shaping Texas business and legislative landscape. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege today. I'm excited to welcome A.J. Rodriguez, executive vice president of Texas 2036. AJ brings decades of leadership experience from public and private sectors, and now is head of strategic initiatives for the think tank Texas 2036.

Well, AJ, thanks for being on the podcast. Thank you Laura. So looking forward to it coming on you. I don't know you. I would love to hear more about your background. I know, I know, but if you want to share a little bit more about yourself, then we're happy to. So, born and raised in San Antonio and a lifelong Texan and, I went to UTSA, got my BBA, an MBA there, cut my teeth in chamber work, working as an intern for for Joe Krier, who was the president at the time.

And he was, working as a, commissioner on the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. So supporting a lot of the work that he did there. And, that got my, my involvement with chamber work, which has continued to this day, as, you know, involved with the Texas section of business. And and then I had the opportunity to run the Hispanic chamber in San Antonio, and I was recruited to be deputy city manager for Cheryl Scully, back in 2008 and then went on, to work in the corporate sector for about almost ten years for a pretty significant engineering, procurement construction firm here in, in in Texas.

Zachary engineering okay. Or Zachary Industrial rather. And so I worked with him for about that time before being recruited by Margaret Spellings are former CEO, who was former U.S. Secretary of education to George W Bush. And, so it was a delight to come on board. I really saw this as an opportunity to work for an incredibly noble endeavor and the opportunity to move the needle on lots of issues, and be on the offensive side of the equation in many, in many respects.

So it's been it's been terrific. It's been a terrific experience. So, AJ, you serve as executive vice president at Texas 2036, the very one known organization here in Texas. But for those who don't mind sharing a little bit about it, sure. Well, we're, very proud of the organization that I work with. Nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy shop, that's focused on improving lives and opportunities for all Texans.

And we do that, using data is our major thrust, to drive policy solutions. We really want to be seen as a trusted resource for the legislature. And we were initiated by Tom Luce in 2016. Tom was famous for saying, without data, you're just another person with an opinion. And with the population growth that we're experiencing now, having, being at 30 million people now and projecting 2 to 5 million people in the future, we felt like we've got to get Texas already to sustain this Texas miracle that we've been so fortunate to experience.

And many of the ways in which to do that is to focus on, the areas where the state, works, which is an education and health care, natural resources, infrastructure, justice and safety and government performance, which essentially outline our six pillars that we are focused in on, to ensure that Texas remains a thriving place to live and work and raise a family.

I love it all. It's a great mission, and I know you've been more unique origin story. Could you share that with us? Well, sure. So, as as I mentioned, Tom Lewis, who's a long time, a Dallas, business and civic servant, you know, he, we like to say he's a serial social entrepreneur. He's founded several organizations like, like ours in the past.

And really, he saw a need, in somewhat a polarization that was occurring at the national and state level with politics and felt like a data driven organization could be a place, a trusted, valued resource for, legislators and and the public alike, to be able to look to for answers, in terms of what are the facts and then be able to make decisions on those facts, in the policy realm again, to move the needle, and to also demonstrate there were some areas of need, in different places.

So within education, for instance, our, our reading levels, where you know, about half our kids weren't reading a grade level, for instance, at the time that we were looking at some of the data. And so this compelled not only Tom, but our 36 member board of directors, now 34. But at the time, it was 36 to essentially establish this comprehensive set of goals, that outlined what we call our strategic framework, for the state.

And I've gone around the state asking if there's anything close to that, that comprehensive and that long term in nature. We haven't found anything like it yet. So that definitely is a differentiator in terms of the kinds of goals that drive our everyday operation and our work in these several areas in our legislative agenda that will outline shortly.

So some, Texas 2036, the name of that is that because of the board members I heard you say or is the date time. So the 2036 specifically refers to our 200 year birthday, for the state that we're, we're embarking upon here. So finally, in 2016, you know, this is a 20 year program of work, which to me, really creates this innate sense of urgency about getting things done every single session.

And for our team, every single session is really iterative, and it's in the process. Right. So each session builds upon others. The previous session in terms of the work that we're doing, at the same time, you know, our board's going to have some, some decision making to make about, people often ask, what what happens after 20, 36, you know, and so one of the things that we're contemplating is, you know, we set up all this infrastructure and resource around this.

So is it merely a a branding exercise that we think about? Or is it something more substantive? So we have some time to think about that. But in the meantime, we're trying to get things done between now and then and create again, create that sense of urgency to make it happen. Absolutely. And you mentioned, the nonpartisan piece to this, and we'll definitely jump into some of your legislative priorities as an organization.

How does everything is everything that you work on at Texas 2036 something you would consider nonpartisan across board? You know, I think everything that we work on, again, focuses on improving lives for all Texans. And so that, shouldn't be a Republican or Democratic, issue, a Partizan issue. So again, we try to really focus on what we like to think of is mean and potato, issues in many ways.

And making the case for, those items that can make a significant difference just to give you an example, I like to go around the state and ask about pension reform. You know, our staff or policy team specifically, worked, last couple of sessions before this last session on trying to reform, pension reform. And as a result of some of the policy work that we did and working with our legislators, they deserve the credit in terms of actually passing all the legislation.

We wanted to be a resource to them. You know, the state legislature, we'll have save, all Texans, you know, $35 billion or $40 billion over the next 35 years. So that's a substantive, deal for taxpayers. And it's something that you don't often, hear about or read about in the news. But we like to think about our work truly making that impactful difference.

And I can tell similar stories around, you know, permanent school funding, for instance, that our team worked on. I think we were one of the sole, testimonials at one of the committee hearings on under the permanent school fund, which will save the state another we estimate at the time $100 million a year, you know, over the life of that, that program permanently.

But, what we're now anticipating is that's going to save, you know, close to $250 million, you know, over the life of that program as well. So, that's the kind of work that we're focused on is and is, working on these issues that matter to all Texans, and doing so in a way that really brings folks from both sides across the aisle.

I'll just make one last example. And that's, HB eight, which is our community college finance reform work, that we put an extraordinary amount of a focus on in terms of producing the data, producing a, a tool that essentially allowed, different community colleges to go in and see what the financing structure would look like. On an outcomes based system, you know, versus an enrollment based system, and also work with the commission that was headed by Woody Hunt.

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Those commission recommendations went through their process largely unchanged and ultimately were passed by the House, 142 to 0 in the Senate, 31 to 0. And signed by the governor. And now it's one of the most innovative, extraordinary programs of its kind across the entire entire country. And that was here in the, in Texas.

And I think it's going to produce some significant results, for many years to come. And, I like to point to that when we're out in the public to demonstrate that bipartisanship is not just a possibility, but a reality, and that our legislators also need to get credit for when they get things like that. Right. In that way, absolutely.

So much, divides everybody, especially when you look at headline news. And there's so much in this Texas legislature, it does pass unanimously bipartisan. So I love that that is you think I know you've spoken a lot with me about your policy experts at Texas 2036, and you have an amazing team that seemed to believe with my data that I'm looking at have testified more than any other organization.

I think so, hundreds of times. Yeah, hundreds. So, can you speak a little bit more about your. Yeah. Well, it's it's definitely one of our, incredible assets is the team that we've assembled, that come from all backgrounds, both sides of the aisle. But more importantly, have, had all had in some shape or form, some legislative and, and government experience.

Right. Some of whom have been we have four chiefs of staff, that have worked at the, just in the legislative body. We have, as well as someone that's worked in the governor's office, someone this working the lieutenant governor's office. They also come from different backgrounds and careers. We have four teachers, you know, on our team, as well.

So, you know, we're very proud of the, the group that we've assembled in terms of the capability, to go out and again, support, the research and, and the policy solutions for these issues in which they are experts. I often say that they've forgotten more than I will ever know about their specific subject matter area, that they work on.

But in addition to their policy team, we also have a pretty significant, presence with our data team. In terms of the work that they're doing, coordinating with our policy team and of course, our communications team. This is the programmatic areas, that are all in our Austin office. Essentially, I had a former boss that used to say, you got a plan of doing good things, you got to do good things, and you got to tell people you did those good things in order to keep doing those good things.

And that's kind of the story of what we're trying to achieve, with the organization. And as a result of that, in terms of our engagement, not just with the legislature, but with the public and with our, our contributors, you know, we're trying to build this, well, this movement and, really momentum in civic demand for these issues that matter to all Texans as well.

I love it. And some of those that definitely resonated me with me were, the workforce development. I know you're very big to that topic if you want to dive in a little too high priority. No, no, definitely. So in terms of, college and career, career and college readiness, college and career readiness, we're really trying to emphasize the, upward mobility, right?

The ability to have, this seamless pipeline of individuals that get the right level of education, the right credentials, to be able to seamlessly move into the workforce and to have a family sustaining wage. And therefore, you know, ensure that our population, you know, can sustain, this economy that we've built, over time, and the employers that are responsible for hiring this, this talent, so, you know, we we feel strongly that, this $110 billion that we that is, essentially supports education, the workforce pipeline, we want to ensure that that's being used effectively and efficiently, throughout the system.

You know, our team, as I mentioned, this is an iterative process. And, you know, beginning with, a lot of the reforms that we're doing with public school finance and hp3, ultimately led to some of the tri agency work that we were engaged with in terms of ensuring that the three entities that are responsible for education and workforce, in state government and to the Workforce Commission and the Coordinating Board, all have a coordinated strategy going for how to make sure that pipeline continues robustly.

Right. And then, HBA was this last, you know, item that I mentioned earlier with community college finance reform, that's really going to leverage these 50 community college districts throughout the state. And the legislature put some significant funding, into ensuring that would, continue, you know, 700 plus million dollars that, is going into our community college system that wasn't there in the past, to support these incentivizes, outcomes based system, you know, and this next kind of focus that we're going to have is on this, you know, college and career readiness from the standpoint of ensuring that our students are prepared, for these families sustain wage jobs.

Right. And also considering how do we redefine high school, in a way that doubles down, on their ability to with existing programs like dual credit and internships and apprenticeships and p-tech and a lot of things that the that the legislature has already put into place. But how do we scale that in a way that impacts, more students in a profound manner in which they're able to achieve those types of opportunities and jobs?

So that's our next really main focus. And, and there's a lot of strategies to go underneath that umbrella for instance. And we're in this new technological revolution happening. So I do feel that there's a line that you mentioned, high schools, doing some new training. How are you all helping or proposing that legislature work on kind of changing some of the curriculum in high schools or changing?

Yeah, in this time, I think there's been quite a bit of emphasis and, strengthening a lot of the, reading materials that have been in the past, according to our policy folks who have been really engaged in the high quality instructional material, work that was put into place at the State Board of Education is also implementing, and I think this session, what we're really, focusing in on, is our math curriculum, and trying to enhance that and also the training that goes along with that and supporting our teachers, resource wise, in terms of being able to deliver on that promise for our students.

Of course, they have to learn some of the new things. It's really workforce training. Have you done any, mean to, you know, free workforce training throughout Texas and getting people ready across the board kind of for different fields that are new and innovative? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one of the some of the things that we're emphasizing right now and this is a great shift in to our water, area in terms of what we're trying to do with water security in the future.

You know, there's a need for, that that workforce is, is, is aging. And we need to replenish that workforce, just like we need to replenish our water supply as well. We, we adequate, water supply and, and so part of it is, is our supply, but also our aging, deteriorating water infrastructure around the state.

So we'd like about the size of Lake Buchanan. Every single year because of our old pipes, throughout the entire state. So, we were very encouraged to hear from, the leadership, the governor, like governor, lieutenant governor, rather on their emphasis on making water, strategic priority for this upcoming session. Obviously, we have been very engaged in that in terms of building a coalition of support around it, with, Texas Nation of Business and with the greater Houston Partnership and with a number of, Dallas Regional Chamber, a number of other partners as well, that have been instrumental, in trying to build the business case around water.

It's $150 million problem. It's about $120 billion, deficit in terms of our future funding. So we think that there needs to be a constitutionally dedicated, funding stream. Pun intended. You're welcome. Jeremy, please get me used to these coins in water. That, that we're trying to achieve. Okay. And is part of this huge influx of people moving to Texas, part of this shortage.

I know that you mentioned aging infrastructure as well, which is natural. But, yeah, I mean, I, when we do some of these conversations around the state, you know, we've got about 1300 people moving to Texas every single day. Are the estimates and, they're not bringing roads or energy or water or broadband or anything else with them.

With what they are bringing with them is, is, is there a new resource for us, in addition to the people that we have here, we've got the ability if we can, ensure that our workforce is ready, for this economy, in these jobs, we have the ability to sustain this this, top ten in the world economy, going forward, for many years to come.

And that's why the things that we emphasize, whether it's education or as you mentioned earlier, you know, our workforce, our housing, some of the work that we're doing with in childcare, all these work together, you know, that's one of the things that our founder also emphasized, was these things don't operate in silos, and it shouldn't be a, a zero sum game for one versus the other, where one wins over the other.

Water is really important. And, energy reliability is really important. And education is really important. So how do we optimize our work around these issues? That's on the one hand. On the other hand, what I also appreciate about the work that we do in terms of its comprehensive approach is, things like housing affordability. Right. So housing affordability doesn't just impact housing affordability, increasing density, and lowering costs for people over time, does impact, housing affordability in terms of some of the regulatory work that we can do there to improve the system, but that also impacts, mobility in terms of transportation.

It impacts schools, not necessarily closing, inner city wise and helping to open, other places. I often refer to my hometown, San Antonio, 500 million plus square miles. And then we have Austin. That's what, 300 somewhat, square miles, 500mi². And the 500,000,500mi² and 300mi² in terms of Austin. And so I think what's important is that, this housing affordability can impact things like walkability and therefore health care.

So those are the kinds of issues that we're that we're focusing in on, as well. Now, in your paper that you sent me, you have different pillars of, priorities, actually. So, what are those, the ones we maybe haven't covered? Sure. I think one of the ones that we we haven't necessarily covered is, is childcare.

And I also talk a little bit about some of the innovative work that we're that we've been focused on in the past. And we were very engaged, in the, 2023 session on some big down payments for Texas. Right. So the billion dollars that was done for water, a billion and a half that was done for broadband, that leverages $3.3 billion and into federal funding to expand broadband across the state, $1 billion for state parks.

Those are some of the things that we were focused in on. You know, the state's going to have a revenue surplus again or experience a potentially revenue surplus again this coming session. So there's another opportunity to, to, to, to work on, issues like, water again, as I mentioned, and also just thinking about, things like childcare, and ensuring that the data is exists, there's interoperability between the agencies to understand where the childcare system is, where the needs are, where the demand is, and how can we effectively deploy those resources in an efficient way?

As well as well as, you know, government, performance and trying to ensure that our government systems and data are, again, interoperable and working together to be more efficient, for taxpayers and the consumer that's interfacing with those. Right. So that's another, focus area that we'll be working on. And then there's these kind of, future of innovation work that we're doing within things like artificial intelligence.

And there's opportunities there in terms of how the state, uses artificial intelligence to become more efficient while also protecting, data privacy, as well, and potential cyber attacks. So those are another area that, I believe the legislature will be focused on. And, and then there are things like, advanced air mobility, that we are interested in, as well as the implementation of the Space Commission, a $350 million investment that the that the legislature made this last session that will be, working with the director there, Norman Garcia, who's doing a great job in trying to ensure that we're, we're working closely with them in that implementation, how

that works, because, you know, we'll it's projected to be $1 trillion industry, at some point for our state. So we have to focus in on that. Norman's coming on the show, in a couple weeks. Oh. Very good. So, yeah, he's he's great. Excited to hear what he's working on over there. Excellent. Yeah. A lot of your issues are broad, but definitely hearing across the board, those are completely things that everybody would be on board with.

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What are some of the big solutions you see to the childcare, affordable housing, side of things? There's so many people moving here. Prices are going up here in Austin. But what are you guys seeing as the main solutions to some of these issues in the childcare when it's such a complicated. Well, most of these issues are really complicated, but the childcare issue is a complicated, item.

And and part of what we've witnessed thus far is just this, this lack of data within the system and whether it's the Workforce Commission or, or some of the Health and Human services and whether or not those systems talk to each other. So we're going to be encouraging, some of that, work, in terms of just understanding what the day it looks like before.

Again, start with dinner before any of those policy solutions. So I imagine this will be a, there'll be some things that, that come out, that support trying to expand child care. But we want to do it in a way that's that, again, is effective over the long term. Right? Not just a Band-Aid type approach.

And then, and housing affordability, you know, we we think that just there are a lot of regulatory barriers and items that we can focus in on, you know, local level. There are things that, that aren't uniform across different communities. You know, Austin has done a good job recently of trying to relax some of those burdens, for instance, on lot sizes and how big a lot sizes have to be for a single family home.

And, allowing for these, there's a role at the state level in terms of voter petition, which allows 20% of the landowners around you, surrounding landowners to petition for city council, take up a supermajority vote on, you know, something within your neighborhood. And so just providing for better access and zoning changes that could support Casitas and ADUs, accessory dwelling units being built in backyards to again expand the opportunity for more density.

And eventually, this is a, this is supply and demand issue. That can that can lower costs for everybody. So that's the intent of what we're trying to focus on housing affordability as well. Absolutely. Seeing so many of those in use pop up and all across Austin. Well, you're probably seeing a lot of those structures that are, you know, 2 or 3 stories that are these smaller lots.

And I think that's also as a result of some of these zoning changes that are, taking place. And you know, that some of these, new innovative techniques, or housing structures and also, new, materials that can be created, 3D printing that you're seeing now that, they can go a pretty quick. Those, those are particular opportunities for us.

That or the legislation or the regulatory environment should catch up with the technology and where it's going. How have you seen Texas change the most over the last ten years? Do you think? I just think the the significant impact of our, our population growth, I mean, you see it everywhere. We've had the good fortune of, our new president and CEO, David Lebrun, who is head of rice.

For 18 years, we've had the good fortune, the fortune of touring the state over the last six months and introducing ourselves to different communities. And I think what you're seeing is just this, this extraordinary, you know, development and growth, and building, you know, construction everywhere, that's happening. I know that's it's tough. It is a little bit like ripping off the Band-Aid here in many ways, in terms of our the way our growing pains are happening and that I can see that continuing to happen.

But, but we we want to keep up from an infrastructure perspective. And that's not just, you know, physical capital, but also human capital. And, the growth that's happened within the Texas Triangle, has accounted for a lot of that. So the how we balance and harmonize between what happens in our urban centers of growth, and that attractiveness, to, to continue to make that happen while, you know, maintaining our focus on and supporting our, our rural areas and, and, those pieces that also have needs, in a greater way because we need those communities to thrive as well.

Absolutely. That's an interesting balance because, isn't it? It is that 80% of people live in the Texas Triangle in Texas. I think it's I think it might even be a little higher than that, but it's but yeah, it's, that's pretty close. And then a lot of people from these more rural areas are moving to the Texas Triangle.

Yeah, I think I think the number I saw was, you know, 80, 80 somewhat percent of the growth has happened within the triangle itself for Texas. Not great for our traffic. Yeah. Okay. That's okay. Yeah. We're working on that. And, you know, that's the other thing. You know, going back to, you know, the prop one and prop seven that, supported, you know, a continuous stream of transportation funding that the legislature at that time saw real need addressed, that need.

And now there's funding. Now, now the work is in the implementation of that right in the, actually getting the shovels in the ground and making all that work happen. And that's what we're seeing throughout. But with that certainty and funding does and is, is provide ability to plan around it in a more, intentional way. And that's what we're trying to create for water, you know, as we think about, the ability to plan for water infrastructure and, and our sustainability as a population, really important issues that you're working on.

And we're coming up to this legislative session how, especially in a presidential year, a heated election, very polarizing. How do you stay, nonpartisan and get the work done across the board, even when there may be disagreements or, our team, I'm just always so profoundly impressed, with their ability to stay, positive and focused and and part of that also is what they're seeing at the building.

Right? So when coming back, they see this certain level of enthusiasm of this, let's get things done. You know, this coming session, I think you're hearing that as well from from different corners. I know, a lot of what's seen in the majority of the public eye and what what's happens in the media mostly is some of the contentious issues that that are part of the process that will probably always have been and always will be part of the process.

But but I think, you know, highlighting and that's kind of the area that we like to focus in on is highlighting that there are definitely opportunities where both sides of the aisle can work together, have worked together, and we'll continue to work together. And that's what keeps us, very optimistic about about the state and our work.

And I think it's reflected in the results. You know, we've had 120 plus, pieces of legislation crossed the finish line that we've supported that, that our that our legislature, passed, and worked together on. And again, we, we want to be a piece of that puzzle, to help them solve and work through those issues.

And, again, I just I'm, inspired, every day, through our team and their outlook and, enthusiasm in, in getting ready for the next session. And by the way, they've been getting ready for the next session, you know, since the end of last session or last session. Absolutely. So they've been at, interim, committee hearings and, have been active, the, pursuing a policy, changes, through the sunset review process, and now gearing up through the bill filing, etc..

So they are engaged every step of the way. And then the rest of our team, you know, working in tandem with into an of their own, right, you know, going out to the state and visiting with local, officials and understanding, you know, what's happening in their respective communities or not making, policy recommendations in a vacuum.

We're we're doing that in coordination with these local communities, and we're building stronger relationships and partnerships with, government officials and institutions. I think there's a real opportunity, we as a collective team, following the vision of our new CEO, believe there's a real opportunity in pushing, strategic partnerships with our universities across the state. These are research engines, that we ought to be collectively harnessing the power of, and, and being a convener of such to, to activate that research at the capital outlay.

And you're issues are you a broad range and as well as they are equally important to your team? There's always one issue that's the real, hot button one during session. What do you predict for this session is going to have your department. Was it whether it's, you know, infrastructure or, school funding and, and workforce, what do you think's gonna be the big hot button issue session?

I, I truly believe that we're going to make some real progress on, on the waterfront to use another time. This this, I think we're going to make some real progress in water, this session, and that's what our team has been working extra extraordinary hard on. Jeremy Mazer, our senior policy advisor, has also been all over the state, has been in every single panel.

He's been at the Capitol, supporting this work along with our, senior VP of policy, John Walker, in trying to push, on water, and making sure that happens. So I, I think that's going to be, you know, one of the major areas of, of, initiative and, success at the end of the session, I you got to believe it.

Yes. In order to see it. And, and have it happen. So we're looking forward to working on that issue even further. And, you know, I also take pride in the fact that there's there's lots of different issues out there. And we've got a credible board of directors, 34 members in our board that span from Amarillo to El Paso to, Laredo and McAllen to Beaumont, Port Arthur and everywhere in between.

I mean, we're really intentional about making sure our board is the face of our state, and they are, so enthusiastic, fully supportive of the way in which we engage. It's not just, what we're doing, but how we're doing it, I think is just as important. And, you know, the thoughtfulness that our team members have in their engagement with the way in which they do their work, you know, how they do their work, and and their care and thought for one another.

And in doing that work, I think is really extraordinary. So, we, we are focused on the issues that really matter again, to all Texans, underscore all, and we want to be part of that conversation and discussion. We have a great mission. And, how can people reach you and, and worry about your work? Well, look for them to reach us at Texas 2030 6.org.

That's where our website is. And, we've got an email sign up sheet that can, update them, via newsletter on the work that we're engaged in on a weekly basis. As I mentioned, our comms team does a fantastic job. In terms of getting the data out there. And also the, the arguments for, you know, supporting, this work.

So, I would highly encourage them to sign up that way. And, and looking forward to working with you, Laura. And, sledge hammer. Thank you. You guys have done a great job as, entrepreneurial spirit of Texas. And so looking forward to seeing that growth and, and working with you for many sessions to come. Absolutely.

Nine months in very excited about, you know, the more years and, working with you. So absolutely. Anything else you'd like to shout out before, before we wrap up now, I just would say, looking forward to reporting back to you and, and the end of, or the middle of 2025, hopefully. So. Yeah. So that works.

We'll do a post session recap and see everything landed. I know you'll be busy for the next six months as we'll be there watching and assisting. So yeah, thank you so much for your time and for being with us. Thank you very much. My pleasure.

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Welcome to Bills and Business. I'm your host Laura Carr, and today we have an incredibly insightful guest, Nora Cox, the chief executive officer, Texas Health Alliance. Nora has a tech and policy background, which is rare and has been the leading advocate for the modernization of healthcare delivery through technology, shaping healthcare policy in both Texas and at the national level. Today, we dive deep into the critical role air plays in health care, growing privacy concerns, telemedicine, how legislative decisions impact business and consumers.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been so nice to meet you officially in person after our conversations online. And I would love to hear more. I know, I know a lot about it, but I want to hear more about your background and how you got to where you are right now. The Texas e-Health Alliance.

And yeah, tell us where you started. You have so many interesting positions that you've been in before now. So I had an amazing journey in getting to this position. I think the thing that I would say is that technology was new. When I started in policy in the 1990s, We didn't we barely had word processors. I had colleagues that were still longhand writing their memos for the girls to type into the computer, so on and so forth.

So the idea of technology policy in the 1990s, particularly in health care, was relatively new. So over the course of my career, I had the great privilege of working at the Texas Medical Association. I worked for the Medicaid program. I worked for Governor Rick Perry for five years during Health and Human and some other things. And I always had technology policy in my portfolio, but it was partially because no one else wanted to work on it.

It was that nerdy stuff. Oh, Nora's the nerdy one. She knows the nerdy stuff. Well, you have that interesting background of tech. Yeah, and health care. So for the listeners who don't know one, tell me about your secret weapon that you have in this technology. I studied computer programming, and so that did make me very unusual in public policy.

There are now more people, obviously, with tech backgrounds in this space than there were when I started. But it is a different language. And the way that you think about technology, if you've come at it from the programming side, is very different than if you're just a user or just on the operational side. So I would sit in meetings at Medicaid and they would be talking about systems, and I would raise my hand and say, okay, so you're going to load in stress test that software to handle all of the Medicaid clients.

How? Because, you know, in test environment, you've only got a couple hundred people in it. Medicaid has a couple million. So tell me about that. And they would just look at me like, who are you and where did you come from? Sure. You're like, well, I'm here to be a nerd. So at some point, someone referred to me as the Queen of the nerds, and that nickname sort of stuck.

It's actually on the license plate of my car I love outside, I have a pin, I do. What does it say? Queen nerd? I need to see that I decided to embrace it and make it my personal brand, because you need a personal brand to sort of get through all the noise and the clutter. So I carried that portfolio forward.

And then in 2009, when electronic medical records really became a market force, with the government backing through the stimulus plan, billions of dollars, it became pretty clear that the public policy conversation was not organized. And that's a very nerdy public policy conversation. It's telemedicine. It's telehealth. It's electronic medical records. It's data privacy, it's broadband, it's cybersecurity. I worked on all of those things.

And so I had thought about, oh, you know, there should probably be an association to handle all this. And the people I pitched who said, here is money, will you please build something? And at first I thought, you me build start from scratch. I'm sorry. You want me to do what? And then the more I thought about it, I saw the opportunity to take what was already my brand and take it to the next level and really build an association that could have public policy impact here in Texas and at the national level as well.

And so for 15 years, we just celebrated our 15 year anniversary. So we have a driver's license, learner's permit working on our driver's license as an association. We had a little celebration for it. And it is the most interesting portfolio because it is always in motion and there's always things to be learned constant. It's always changing. It's always change in technology and especially there's so many people trying to keep up with with that.

And I know that you mentioned so 15 years ago, you started this thing up. So we have a lot in common with with startup. You're so much further along, though, than me. How did it start? It really started with a recognition. I was consulting and my consulting clients, some of which are still on my board of directors, were all pursuing projects, but they weren't talking to each other.

And so we had some legislation in in 2009, and I won't mention the names of the companies because it really doesn't matter. That contract lobbyist was chasing another contract lobbyist around Capitol trying to kill a bill. They weren't successful, but then their company ended up winning the contract created by the bill. Which is unusual. Sometimes you have, things that look like they're open procurements, right?

You want competition, but you generally don't have competitions won by the people who tried to kill the bills that created the competition. Interesting. And that was because they weren't talking to each other. There was no structure for those lobbyists to come together, for those companies to come together and talk about. Is this vendor specific? Is this industry in general, what will this do to the market?

And I got pulled into that conversation to be the mediator. Okay. And I thought to myself, well, maybe we need to do more of this. And so I wrote a pitch paper. It wasn't even a deck. It was a paper. And I started shopping it to companies. And and so I have an enormous empathy for y'all as a startup because some people told me no, but, my consulting clients in particular said, oh my gosh, we need this.

We didn't even think we please, will you get something started? We'll give you money. Here's where some seed money. So I did my first round of seed money in the fall of 2009. That's so exciting. It was amazing. And I do think that, as you were saying, with those questions you were asking that were very specific and kind of more in the back end, programing language, I'm learning so much of that now.

I'm a non-technical person, completely right as my role as a co-founder, the technical co-founder, of course, but I'm learning these things as we scale like absolutely. That so makes sense that certain technologies wouldn't be, available at a small scale when they're for the entire country or, you know, half the population. Right? As a state as big as Texas, you have to have solutions as big as Texas.

And that includes your technology solutions. So there is also ways to bring, startups and new companies, which is something else I get to do that's really fun watching the marketplace. We want to make sure there's no artificial barriers to competition, either deliberately built or inadvertently built by the legislature. So a lot of the work we do in reviewing bills is making sure that they ensure a free and open market for competition in health tech, and that's a really important principle for us.

Second only to it's got to help patients. And if you square it back around to does what we're talking about help patients, you get the right answer almost every single time. So would you explain to me just exactly what the Texas e-Health Alliance does? Sure. So we are a trade association of 76, similar to the Texas Association of Business.

We represent competing interests in the marketplace. So we have a governing board that sets policy. Those are my bosses. We have companies of all shapes and sizes that sit on that board. Then we have another tier of membership that has associations. It has providers, hospitals, systems, non-profits and a separate vertical for our academic partners. So we work with all of the major academic systems UT system, Texas Tech and Texas A&M.

So I don't get in trouble with anybody. And so wearing the wrong colored jersey. And our primary focus is on legislation, regulation and policy. So really, my job as a CEO, besides running the operations of the association, is to constantly be in dialog with my leadership, with the stakeholders, with the legislature and with state agencies about what new technologies are coming on the market.

Do we need to adjust regulations or remove them? How do we make sure providers can get paid for using digital tools? And it it builds a feedback loop, essentially. So as the technology continues to change, that comes back around to us and we sort of look at it in the context of the statute, context of other legislation we've worked on, try to see if we've got to go to the legislature, the things we need to ask either for them to do or sometimes to not do, because our legislators have to look at a lot of bills.

And so we have built ourselves to be a neutral resource. They get very anxious if they think a bill might benefit a specific company or vendor. The Texas Legislature, as I'm sure you have learned then the bills. So we want to be a credible source for a member or a staffer. The flip side is sometimes an individual company will bring a bill and we'll look at it and say, boy, that would improve competition and it would improve that program.

And we have other folks who will compete for that. So being filed by a vendor doesn't make it a vendor bill. That makes the vendor bill is how it plays out in the marketplace. And by having competitors in a room who have to drop their shields just a little bit, gives us a venue to do those evaluations and then be credible with the legislature.

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So how many companies are you working with at a given time? So the board changes a little bit every few months, 22 to 23 companies on the board. And then we have about 100 organizations total in the organization and are some of those startups. And we do have startups, we do have startups, we have new companies. We have some of them are brand new companies, but they know.

And then I've got companies that came to us as startups who now are bigger. They've grown their revenue, they've become more robust. But I remember when they only had two people. Right. And they've been with us for a long time. So it's open to anybody that has an interest in digital health policy. It's an open door.

Anyone can walk through it. To be in leadership, you do have to have a market presence. We do ask that because those folks are weighing in on legislation and policy, and we want you to have some to have grown some roots, to get up to that level. But startups are welcome, and we have them and we enjoy working with them because sometimes they're seeing stuff no one else is seeing.

That's the need, as you well know, that is startup identifies a gap in the market. Somebody stepped up to fill it. And what I don't want is legislation, regulation, policy inappropriately impeding that startups ability to be successful. So I ask because there's so much a use for AI now in this space. Absolutely. A lot of emerging technologies. Yes.

Can you tell us about just more of the technologies you've seen lately and use cases in the healthcare? Sure. So in terms of healthcare, AI, there's a bunch of stuff I'm really excited about. The first bucket is to get rid of the thing that I despise the most. The two things I despise are those fax machines and clipboard.

Me too. I want them gone. So anyone who's watching over you, if you want to, you know, carry an amendment for me, for the budget. I don't think the taxpayer should pay another dime for a fax machine. Right. So the first bucket for artificial intelligence is the streamlining of administrative functions in health care. How many times have you gone to the doctor and been given a clipboard with tiny lines you can't even read?

Much the less you know, fill out by hand. All that information exists in the digital space and we're going to use AI. We are using AI to pick that information up, cleaned it up, collate it, and hopefully give a better digital experience to the patient. Check in even prior to their visit, and give their doctor the right information about that patient before the visit so they'll have a better encounter.

So that's kind of one of the buckets. Also helps the consumer, helps the consumer. And I think about, radiology practices that I go to where the people in the waiting room have to have scribes helping them with the paperwork. Well, because they can't fill it out on their own. So we're failing those patients by not using tools to help them.

The second bucket is, believe it or not, doctors are going to be going back to dictation. So ambient artificial intelligence is going to allow doctors to once again dictate patient notes by talking out loud. And the AI is going to pick the information up, fill out the electronic medical record, fill out the notes. The doctor has to prove it and sign off on it.

But there's a clumsiness right now with electronic records if you've had a visit with it. I had a visit this morning. My doctor brought in her scribe, and her scribe was using the electronic record while the doctor and I were talking. I was going to move that to a whole new level, kind of take that out of the way.

I have a friend who's a physician in Austin, and we've been helping her utilize, actually create like a GPT four for it because she has a scribe. Is there a technology you want to tell me online or offline that that does that? There are several technologies that do that. So if you're in that marketplace, it might depend on your electronic medical record because some of them are building it into the platforms.

Those choices are better than they were a year ago. And a year from now they'll be even better. So yes, absolutely. That is a thing. Very exciting. And then the third thing that I'll mention is the, capacity to index research. So I, at places like MD Anderson Cancer Center is going to be able to hold, track, classify, retain, retrieve oncology studies in a way that no human brain is really going to be able to.

And for me personally, that's an area that's really interesting because I'm a breast cancer patient, so I want the absolute best possible outcome for every woman that comes behind me. And some of that is going to be making sure that we take that research and that those oncologists can get without having to, you know, we don't have card catalogs anymore, but you still, you know, a Google search is not going to be enough.

You really going to have to have all that clinical literature at a very iterative level in a place where an oncologist can ask the tools questions. I've got a patient. Here's what I've got. Show me all the relevant studies, help me narrow it down, and then use their best clinical judgment to use that information. So those are three buckets that I'm really excited about.

I also do you know anything about AI agents. And can we go that deep AI agents. Yes. Basically it's the new SAS software. Maybe some startups have started this, but we're actually becoming. But, our agents are essentially where the AI can complete, complete workflows. Yes. So that is going to be so some of that administrative stuff that I was talking about is going to be AI driven from top to bottom, where it gets tricky is when it starts to move into that clinical space where the provider judgment comes into question, and how do they support the provider versus replace the provider?

Well, there are certainly people looking forward saying, well, you know, we're not going to need doctors to do x, y, z anymore. I would not be in that much of a rush. I think, I was speaking about this at a conference a week ago, and I reminded the audience that we still have something in medicine called the Hippocratic Oath.

First, do no harm. And so I would like to see the administrative pieces cleaned up and streamlined first, and then supporting the providers. And then as we learn how to use AI, keeping in mind do no harm. Then I think those workflows can become more and more automated, because what you really want in, in health care is for your providers to practice.

That will be called top of license if you know that. Do you know that phrase? So we spend a quarter of $1 million to send you a medical school, and then we turn you into a clerk typist, right? That is that's the opposite of top of life, right? What you really want is the marriage of what I like to call high tech and high touch.

You want to use high tech to create everything you can to support my oncologist, for example. But then you want the high touch of their compassion, their humanity, their intuition, their experience. You really want to marry those things together. So I think sometimes traditional medicine is resistant to some of this because we nerds and I am one, we get very excited about the tools.

We want everybody to use the tools right now, and it gets presented as an either or. And the language that I always go back to time and time again is you really want a combination of high tech and high touch. And when you do that, then you're leveraging the technology to the best benefit of the patient, and you have the provider at what we call top of license, using the best of their skills and their training and not doing data entry work right.

And that's the biggest, use case for it, I would say, is a really tedious manual administrative work that somebody could be doing something more, correct, productive or even research heavy. But utilizing these tools and spending more time with their patients. Right. Because every second that you're typing in the computer is a second that you're not making eye contact, you're not dialoging with your patient.

Your patient doesn't feel seen when electronic medical records were new. I can't tell you how many times I got chewed out at the testimony table by a House member or a senator who'd had a bad experience with their doctor not making eye contact because they were typing away. Well, this could get rid of that. That's part of the plan that's actually super similar to what we are doing.

Yes, yes. Very similar. It talks really, really nicely. I want people to be far more, you know, actually talking to people, having dialogs, interacting, debating things that people are just hidden away from right now, but they're busy doing more administrative work. If we can get people together and it is actually a more human world with AI, which is kind of crazy, it is not the first reaction that people have to a lot of this.

And as someone who's been a tech advocate for a long time, I can't tell you how many times I've heard, you know, oh, you just want to replace doctors with computers. No, that's the last thing in the world that I want, but I want the doctor to do is to be able to be a doctor and not a data entry clerk.

Be more efficient, be more efficient, but also be able to not have weighing on their shoulders. I need to do three hours of data entry when I get home tonight, because I'm behind on my electronic medical record. I hear that a lot. That charting is challenging and we need to build tools to make that better. And I think AI is one of the game changing tools in that space.

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For those doctors. Now, they can't take their eyes off of it. They are still obligated to look at everything the AI is doing, but it takes the burden of the data entry off of the doctor and puts some control back in their hands so they feel like they're practicing medicine on it. And just like what you're talking about trying to do, for those of us in the lobby, build the tools, have the tools, do what I need them to do so that I am not word searching into a box and hoping that I've put the right thing in the box, and then searching through all the results to find the thing I put in the

box. Well, speaking of testimonies, we have a ton that you, done over the years. One of the clips is you talking about, you know, people worrying and getting concerned about the fears of AI and health care, right? So this I think we can play this for our listeners now. And this is a clip that we have of Nora from last session on SB 1467.

So we'll play it now and keep listening. Thank you, Madam Chair. So, I enjoyed what you said and yes, I'm part of my life is being tortured every year by, refresher course on HIPAA. So, but I think one of the most important things about this bill and the thing I like about this bill a lot is that, wellness and healing requires humanity.

It requires a human touch. A computer is never going to be sufficient to deliver information. That is difficult to accept, that produces anxiety. That may not be what you are looking for. And, I can think of countless movies I've watched in my life, you know, a few, you know, dystopian future things where the computer says, you know, congratulations, you have cancer or you're going to die.

And it's just you need that human component. And I hope that I hear what you're saying, but I hope that we never get to a place in healthcare in the future where, you know, through the use of AI or any other means that we sort of take the human part out because I think the the ability of the doctor to be with that patient to, you know, essentially hold that patient's hand to explain and to answer questions, that's actually healthcare, that's actually practicing medicine.

This electronic delivery of stuff is is it's heartless. And I think is counterproductive to the healing process. And that's, that's what I just wanted to say to you. Thank you for that Doctor Oliver sent. I appreciate it. I think I would say a couple of things. I, I frequently get accused of wanting to eliminate physicians. Why would I do that?

It's not like a good idea to replace the illness technology. I really think the solutions of the future are a combination of high tech and high touch using automation to automate the routine to address administrative, ridiculous. I think that's my favorite word for it. I could pick on prior authorizations. I know we've already had that discussion in this committee to free our practitioners to do what we send them to school to do, which is to be healers to communicate with their patients.

I've actually had this experience of having to receive this sort of pass, and having my surgeon literally holding my hand eyes, I can't drain, a piece of technology that could replace that experience. It would be a nightmare. That wouldn't be a drain. So on behalf of the industry, I just want to make sure that I say that we hear you and don't let the headlines about the fancy things people are trying to do to take away from your mission, which ought to be using technology to make your life better as a practicing physician, and for you to be with your patients.

If we strike that balance, that's a win for everybody, because I'm not interested in the dystopian future that you're describing either. That has no appeal to me. Thank you. Thank you sir. What do you think, Nora? Seeing that watching that back, you know, that hit me in a really tender spot because of my own personal health journey. Yeah.

Listening to that question. So I think that that, Doctor Alverson raises a really good point. The context of that particular bill is that, the federal law changed to tell providers you have to give lab results directly to patients through an electronic portal. You you can't sit on the results for days and days and days because you want to see them in person and their story after story that we've heard, including people that I know who had, a malignant, spot removed, for example.

And the dermatologist never called and told them it was malignant. So they had no idea they had cancer. They had skin cancer. So enough of those stories got told. The federal law change. The problem is now something that is a malignant tumor or maybe certain genetic test results that can be very scary to receive electronically. Some people would like to hear from their doctor.

Yeah. I do not want to see that. You do not want to see that in an email, which is what Doctor Alverson didn't want. He didn't want to see it in an email either. So the legislation is intended to buy a three day window to allow doctors to reach out directly to their patients to have that personal contact before they release the results electronically.

It didn't pass. It was vetoed by Governor Abbott for unrelated reasons. It's going to be back this session. We're going to file it again. But I think what Doctor Oliver said was trying to say was that's that's dystopian and sort of scary. That's Minority Report Land, where you're finding out that you have cancer from an email. Now, there are patient advocates who would say doctors have terrible bedside manner, and I would rather find out from the email and from my doctor, I'm not willing to go that far, but it does go back.

And I think I said this in the testimony to high tech in high touch, that what we really want is a combination of those two things. And it's not about the AI replacing the healthcare workers, it's about building supports around them. And but it also has to do with empowering patients and making sure they have access to their information, that they can work with it, that they can understand it, they can use it.

There's nothing dystopian about that. And the good physicians won't be. And I think Doctor Oliver understands, as we've talked about it, the good physicians won't be threatened by that. But I also think that there is a concern that a patient might have a very negative reaction to such an email, especially if they're not expecting it. And so this three day window would build that protection.

And and that's it's not an it's not an AI discussion per se. But it does have to do with the personalization of the health care system and how everybody feels like a little chip in a big flood in the health care system. And then on top of that, you get an email that tells you something really awful that's a dehumanizing feeling.

And so the legislation was intended to address that, that this bill passed last session. It did pass, but it was vetoed, by Governor Abbott's, not for substantive reasons. Okay. During his veto parade at the end of last session where he was, he was not pleased with the legislature's choices, and he was trying to send some messages.

So I do believe that it will be back. Yes. Oh, yes. We've seen a lot refiled has been refiled this session. I have not seen a refile, but I understand it. There are conversations going on about it in the House. I would not be surprised to see it refiled. Do you know the bill, passage on this? The numbers.

Was it my, majority? Oh, yeah. It there was no there was no opposition that I was aware of. Right. It was conversation. But the bills I hate to jinx something. I say that's not word, but I'm going to knock on it anyway. I think everybody understood the proposition, which is the federal law was solving one problem, but it created a different problem.

And the federal law says, well, if your state has a requirement, you have to follow that to so we can build a state requirement in to, to create that protection. I think there was very broad consensus about that. And it sounds like, you know, your position on this high tech, high touch is very, I feel like the majority of people would agree with that.

Do you think that that is the case in corporations and in your world? Most people do agree with that. I do think most people agree with that sentiment when they stop and think about it. I think the the thing you can run into in health tech, if you're not careful is, getting disconnected from the purpose of health care, which is to take care of patients because you built something really neat and cool and you really do have to build in a process, within your company.

And that's why, startups, for example, the Texas Medical Center in Houston, they have TMC innovation and they provide mentorship and access to providers and conversations about, okay, you have an idea for a startup. What's the real world effect going to have if there's adoption of your technology? We have a tendency in tech sometimes to get very excited about our tools, and they're so amazing.

But you have to also make sure that you talk to the users about the user journey, the user interfaces is the ripple effect to the system. There may be a reason why things are done a certain way, and maybe to an engineer. I say this all the time. No one. You're about to learn about another one of my favorite analogies I love a good analogy.

That health care system is a platypus. It is the platypus is this animal in Australia that was built by a committee. It's got like a beaver tail that duck for, and it lays eggs. And I think it's poisonous. Okay. How is it that no one would build that? Just like no one would be to help build health care?

Engineers tend to look at health care and they say, oh, this is very linear. It should mean they should mention Mindy. So if an engineer is building an animal, they're going to build, you know, a cheetah or house cat, depending. It would never build a platypus. They would never kind of vote on different things, on different into a single animal.

The thing about health care, though, is you have multiple stakeholders that all have a stake in the conversation. So one of the pitfalls for these conversations, and this applies to AI as well, is we tend to think of it as a one on one consumer conversation. When in health care, you've got the health plan, you've got the government, you've got the health department, you've got the physician, you've got the patient, you might have a navigator.

And all of them are consumers in different angles in the health care conversation. Have you ever thought about starting your own software? I feel like you have a lot of the skills to, you know, direct an engineer into what needs to be done with your health care experience. You know, I find a lot of satisfaction in serving as an advisor in different capacities to, folks that are startups.

My my great love is at the Capitol. Yeah. But if if I ever. I know who I would ask. How about that? If I really ever had an idea for a package of software that I've already got the team built out in my head, so you can't rule it out? I'd have to give up this job. Yeah, because that would be a conflict.

So it would have to be when I'm done doing this work. So I would say you cannot rule out that there might be something someday. Sure. And never rule it out. You should never rule anything out in this business. No. Well, I don't think. Yeah, not at all. I mean, look at what you're doing. I know if you asked me a few years ago, I would not have expected it.

And, But it was just from a need. Exactly what you said. There was frustration in what was currently existing, and, a need for this new work, so that's cool. So there's a lot of people who are scared of AI policing it, their jobs. And this is hurt all across all the sectors, specifically in health care. How would you alleviate those concerns people have in your health care workers?

Sure. So, first of all, we cannot have this conversation without acknowledging how short on workers our system is. We are short right this minute, tens of thousands of workers. There is a hospital system in West Texas. I was on a call with Texas Tech recently, and they are short, 435 nurses. And those are people who do direct patient care.

So if you follow sort of the pattern that I laid out a few minutes ago, which is you're going to automate administration, you're going to automate some of these other things. We still need direct care workers and we need them very, very badly. We also need to retrain our administrative workers around AI. How to use the AI, for example, if you think about indexing clinical research, a librarian that might be working at a major university in a medical library could very easily become a prompt engineer, which is a job that did not exist just a couple of years ago.

But it's a real job. So I think the other dynamic around it is we don't talk enough about the aging of the healthcare workforce and the impact that that's going to have. The statistic that I will never forget, because I was in the room when he said it, one of the, folks that works for Acadian, which is a big ambulance company, Texas, Louisiana, the average average age of a paramedic in West Texas is 65.

Our average, age. There is no AI that exists right now that can replace a paramedic at the scene of a car accident. So lots of things I can do to wrap around that paramedic, but not replace the need to put hands on a body in a situation like that. So it's when people treat it like a zero sum game that the trade off means if we do I, we have to eliminate jobs, maybe functions.

Certainly people. Absolutely not. We actually have to prioritize the human beings in the system is the assets we just may need to deploy them differently. And I think there's enormous pressure on the health care system right now to become efficient. Right. And, you know, that's a concept you're familiar with because time is money. And unfortunately in health care, a lot of the money is the human capital that we use as part of the system.

I would argue that that's a shortsighted way of looking at it. What we should be doing is figuring out how do we use all these tools to alleviate the burden on our health care workforce. Covid burned everybody out. Lots of folks have left. We don't have enough physical space to train the nurses. We need to replace the nurses that are retiring.

We have a we have a huge challenge with workforce. So to shorthand it and say, well, we're going to have AI, so we're going to need fewer people in health care is to not understand where we sit in terms of that workforce right now, and to sort of stop the conversation before you get to what's really important, which is you still have to have human beings interacting with other human beings, and that's not going to go away.

Now, that might be a hologram, right? We had a holographic doctor on the International Space Station now past years. So yeah, we're very close to Star Trek. We're very, very close to have it with zoom. Yeah, we have it. We see every so so the other thing I would say is if we hadn't had Covid, this might be a different conversation because Covid, it was sort of the breakthrough for virtual care in terms of telemedicine and telehealth to the general public.

We have always thought of health care as a thing. You go to, you go to the doctor. Doctor does not come to you. Now, those of us who've been in telemedicine for a long time, we've been trying to be like, hey, look over here, this is all the things we can do, right? So the analogy that I always use, and I love a good analogy, is that speech and debate background, is in the 90s, America Online sent everybody a CD-Rom to their house.

Remember? My grandmother thought it was. I was near the UK. Oh, that's why you were here. Did they not do that in the UK? Did not? They did not. They missed an opportunity. So tell us what they did. They literally mailed a CD-Rom to every address in America. Wow. And people were like what is this? What is online?

What is America Online? You woke up in the morning, everyone was online. So it was kind of the first mass distribution of access to the internet that had ever happened in the United States. That's amazing. And my grandma, like I said, she thought it was a coaster. She butter iced tea on it. She didn't have a computer. So funny.

But we woke up a morning and everyone was online, and it was the big consumer shift for the internet became accessible and useful to people in their everyday lives. Telemedicine. Telehealth is the equivalent of those CD-ROMs. Covid made it accessible and useful to people in their regular lives in a way that doesn't make you, with all due respect to the physical world of health care, if you have to miss three hours of work to go to the doctor for a 15 minute conversation, and that impacts your paycheck, right?

Because you're an hourly worker, the chances you're not going to make that appointment are pretty high. But if you can do it on your cell phone, you can do it from your work site, you can do it from your house, and if it's appropriate, via the standard of care to treat that virtually. It's a win for business. It's a win for productivity.

It's a win for morale. It's a win for the patient. And I would also say whether we like it or not, it's, a women's issue because women are disproportionately the caregivers, those down to children and up to elderly adults. And as a result, we know that women neglect their own health. And so anything we can do to make sure people go in and get those visits and have those conversations before the upper respiratory infection becomes pneumonia, is a savings for the whole system.

But without Covid, it doesn't get, viral, for lack of a better word, the worst word I could use, but I still think it's the right word. It is the worst word, but it's the right word. Everybody had to do telemedicine. You couldn't go see your doctor, and our physicians had to turn on that video capacity. And most of them have kept it.

And so that's now an everyday part of how we do health care. And I think the AI tools will become more and more. So I'm envisioning a future where you're sitting at your desk, you put on VR goggles, you step into a VR room, and your first conversation about what's making you not feel well is with an AI avatar that has been trained by that doctor and that practice to ask you all the questions, fill out the clipboard without you having to do it.

Make sure everything's right. Package it up, summarize it, and hand it to the physician. So the conversation with your physician is the eye contact conversation based on that information? Oh yeah, I'm much more informed and much more understanding efficient. And that we're there. We are there. We are there today. That is. And that's going to become more and more commonplace as we as we move forward.

Shifting gears a little to your other favorite thing, the legislature. But we have a big AI bill. We do, representative chairman, correctly on this session. So let's talk a little about that. How does that affect healthcare industry with these AI regulations? Is it does it affect it? I know some industries aren't affected as much. Sure. So the first thing I would say is, of course this brings in you and I talked about this a couple times already.

There's a lot of questions about what is the role of federal government in regulating AI in health care, what is the role of state government in the role of regulating in AI? And I in health care? I believe Chairman Cooper Early has said publicly he doesn't believe the federal government will do enough or not do what's needed. He wants Texas to be a leader.

Sure. I think where this gets complicated quickly. And we've conveyed this to him in our in our comments on the bill, is that health care has a lot of actors in it. So it's one thing to regulate AI if it's just a consumer at their computer interacting with a chat bot, for example, or having an internet experience, all those actors I was describing earlier, the patient, the health plan, the provider, so on and so forth.

May all be a consumer of health care at any given moment. So in looking at the draft bill, we've asked some questions about, you know, what is your intent for regulating the consumer? Who is the consumer? We have all these different kinds of consumers. Let's talk about how we're going to make that work. So when I talk to health care, stakeholders, that's the one of the big things that I hear back is do and I do think Chairman Cooper can probably and I do think he understands that health care is complex.

But I also think that he, wants to see a single standard for this work across the state, no matter what industry it's in. And so keeping those two things in tension, I think, is going to be a challenge. But I think it's a challenge. We worked with him on data privacy. We worked with him on other issues.

It's an important conversation. We need to have it. But I can't tell you exactly what the end of that process is going to be quite yet. Are you concerned at all that too much regulation in this AI space could lead to not as much innovation and progress in this realm, so too much regulation is always a thing that can impede progress.

But there's there's regulation and then there's the sense that there is regulation. Those two things aren't always the same. So if what he's proposing is a complaint driven system with certain requirements and checklists and things, that's that's one thing. If we start to bleed over into something that looks more like the Food and Drug Administration, where the government is actually approving apps, then that becomes a really different conversation, because then you get the state federal attention and then you get a long burn cycle, potentially before you can get to market.

One of the advantages right now is you can move pretty fast with your AI, and if you have to build in a whole bunch of stuff, depending on what that stuff is, that could really slow a startup down. For example, and that can tilt the playing field. House price data privacy is huge in this huge in. Yeah, care.

How are, different corporations, startups, companies that you're working with kind of handling the data privacy concerns for consumers and, in the legislature? Sure. So that comes up a lot. So I think a couple of things I would say, first of all, no state is stronger as a state on protecting consumer privacy and health care than Texas.

We did some major legislation in 2011. It was House Bill 300 by then House Representative Lois Cook Horse and Senator Jane Nelson, obviously representative cohorts now Senator call course still very interested in that portfolio. So we have stronger patient protections for data than HIPAA at the federal level in the state of Texas. And that put us on the map.

Not everybody was happy about that. But I think the legislature was really taking a very strong stance against patient information being exploited. So the privacy conversation is really going to depend on the use case. It's one thing if you're scraping people's data off the internet. For example, if you have posted to social media that you have a medical condition, you've waived your privacy, right?

Because you've put it out on public social media. Where's the line, though? If AI is collecting up that information and doing analytics, it is a different conversation and I think a different kind of consent. If you are a patient to a hospital that wants to run AI models on all its patient records, because for that patient information, that is also the hospital's work product, where they may be in a value-based purchasing arrangement, they may be trying to figure out why their outcomes with certain populations are different from other populations.

We frequently call that predictive analytics. So one of the challenges, I think, for all of this is making sure we don't over classify things that are AI that really aren't AI in the sense of gen AI or some of these large language models. We've been doing predictive analytics in health care for a really long time. We want to make sure that tools we're using now that aren't really intended to fall in these definitions sort of stay useful.

So the question really becomes what is the consent conversation? Is it your public information? Is it your private medical record? Do you have a right to say to your physician, I would not like you to run any analytics on my record. We pull enough records out of the database. Then you have an incomplete database. And that may mean that the analysis out of that database is not as good as it should be.

And some of that can be adjusted in mathematical models. So it would not be the end of the world. But we, we have some decisions to make. And I think the provider community is probably going to be pretty vocal about preserving their right to use these tools to perform their jobs, to provide health care, but they've got to do it in a way where patients feel safe and like their information is not being exploited.

And I think part of that will hinge on profit and whether the analysis of that information, how does that make money or not make money for certain parties? That's where things, in Texas have traditionally gotten really sticky. They don't want to see data being sold. They don't want to see patients being exploited. That's what our statutes say.

And I expect to see that sort of pull over into the AI conversation as well. Are there any hot topic bills you'd like to discuss for this? Oh, hot topic bills already? Not yet. I will say there's a lot of refiled bills from last session, as you noted earlier in our conversation. So there were telemedicine and telehealth bills that didn't get all the way through the process last session for various reasons.

And I've seen a number of those already be refiled, by the author or in some cases by, folks that are picking up on behalf of maybe a member who's left the legislature. I think you're also going to see single shot artificial intelligence bills. And so chairman typically on has said this publicly that he does expect to see some things around deepfakes and some of these other really sensitive use cases in addition to his comprehensive legislation.

I also think we have a little bit of Covid snap back. So we still have the Texas legislature sort of saying we're really not happy with how some of this played out. And everyone was doing the best they could. I was have to remind everybody we didn't know what we didn't know. Everyone was doing the best they could.

But I think as we continue to unwind from the pandemic, I'm certainly seeing very strong opinions being expressed by the legislature around, certain aspects of Covid. And I think you're going to continue. If you look at what happened in the election, the the hand of those legislators is a stronger one this time around. They're holding more cards.

So I think you're going to continue to see that state federal attention, even with a Republican administration, because that's just it's inherent in this system. And I tell people all the time, it's a feature, not a bug. It's the way that our constitutional republic is structured. We are not a, we're not a democracy. We have checks and balances, and those checks and balances are going to continue to be in place.

I love your analogy of it's a feature, not a bug. It's not as I speak. I said our program, but it's oh I love it. Yeah, fantastic analogy. And I think with privacy. Right. That's another thing. People think, oh these privacy laws, they're a problem. Well, if you have a consent conversation with the patient then you don't have a problem.

The problems start to crop up when we don't get consent. Now that has to be meaningful. So then I pick on the European Union for just a second, even though we both have rights over there now, have you ever rejected a cookie on a website? All the time. I'm so glad almost nobody dies when I asked that question and I ask that question at a big audience, people just click accept, and then move on.

That's sad because they want access to what's on the website. And so is that meaningful consent? That's consent. You clicked accept, right? So that makes me so happy. I can't even begin to tell you, but I think most people don't stop and have that conversation even with themselves. What information am I giving away? What information I allowing people to monetize?

It's something I maybe clicked on. You know, I'm like, why did I click on this anyway? Let's just yeah, do I really need to be here? Do I really need this information for spam emails? So you take that up to the next level with, the consent to use your health care information, and the conversation has to be about a meaningful form of consent and not just a box that gets checked.

If we're really going to do it right. And if we're going to honor the Texas Legislature's tradition that goes back now over a decade of being really strong, actually back to of 20 years now that I think about it, from the initial HIPAA implementations, we've got that track record. So that consent needs to be meaningful so that patients are protected.

Well, I'd love to have you back on the podcast either midway through or at the end of session to get your recap and your take on it. Sure, there's gonna be a lot of, unpredictable things that happen as usual. But it's been a pleasure having you on. Is there anything else you'd like to like? Kind of shout out and even where people could find you?

Certainly they can reach us through the website. Org very, there's a contact form. You can fill it out. You can send me a note. I respond to them all personally and they all come to me. I'm at the Capitol running around being nerdy. Pretty easy to find. You can find me at Senate Health and Human Committee and the Public Health Committee pretty much every week.

Once those committees get started. And I think I would say we do policymaking by anecdote. This is the thing that I'll say to close. And we have I have another saying, you're getting to build the whole Nora catch phrase bingo card today because I'm giving you all my catchphrases, the plural of anecdote is not data, and we have a tendency in policy to say, well, I've heard two stories about being a something a mess must be broken or no thing I might not be functioning right, or there might be some people inside it that got their incentives misaligned.

Doesn't always mean you have a trend, and it doesn't always mean you need to make changes. So when you were looking at a field that is as complex as health care, you just need to be careful. Because if you make one change, you can have a cascading effect through the entire system. And that's why working in article two on health and human is considered to be a difficult and not for the faint of heart.

You got to have some fortitude. You got to be able to play the long game, and you have to be able to rise and fall with the trends. But I think it's one of the most important things that any of us can work on, because of the way that health care has a direct impact on people's daily lives, and that's what keeps me in the game.

Thank you for sharing. I'm so excited about your work and what you do, and I thank you coming on and have a wonderful Christmas, and we thank you so much for having me. I look forward to being back. Thank work. I'll bring more sayings, more catchphrase. I need to come see your license plate before you go so I have time.

You bet we can do that as I leave things for my home. Thank you for having me.

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Welcome back to Bills in Business. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege. Today I'm thrilled to welcome Mia McCord recently joined the Texas Chemistry Council as the Vice President of Government Affairs, has nearly two decades of experience where she's held roles as chief of staff in both the House and Senate in the Texas Legislature.

And she was the first Hispanic female president of the Texas Conservative Coalition. She also founded Hourglass Strategies, representing clients across the state. Is a South Texas native, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. And here's our conversation. Well, it's good to have you on the podcast, Mia. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming on. Yes.

Well, for people who don't know you, and I know you are pretty known in the Texas space. So yeah, if you want to share with everybody who you are and you're all about sharing. So Mia Garza McCord and I have been working in this business. This will be my 20th year. Go way. January will be year 20 for me.

My very first. Thank you. I think. Yes, I was the first to do something temporarily that turned into a 20 year career. You know, I, I graduated from UT and thought I wanted to go to law school and ended up getting an intern, a paid internship, I got called the week of my graduation. I had been working at a law firm, so I knew I had kind of a part time gig if I needed it.

I thought I wanted to go to law school. I get this call. I had already left for Christmas break, and they said, you know, we'd love for you to come and intern for us. It was now. So I was a second class of interns. They had just started the program the year before. And I never left the building after that.

I mean, technically, I left the building for other, you know, sides of the career, but really, I fell in love with it. Both of my grandfathers were local elected officials growing up. So I remember, hand painting were my pieces of plywood, stenciling them from stencils we bought it, went with, with paint. I mean, there were no campaign disclosures.

Wow. So my grandmother used to always tell me that I was destined to go into politics. I still kind of laughed it off. As I got older. When I was younger, I used to. I want to be president of the United States. I used to say that, too. I and so fun. I changed my mind on that.

Oh, yeah. There's no way I love money in the world. That would be considered not so funny. Yeah, know I love that. That's kind of how a lot of, young, people wanting to go into politics think, oh, I want to be in office. Yeah. And then they kind of work for a member and they say either yes or absolutely no.

Absolutely. When I, you know, as I rose and within legislative offices and was, you know, had a staff and whatnot, I used to especially the young interns that we'd bring in, I used to tell them, you're either going to love it or you're going to hate it, and if you would, it don't. It's nothing to be ashamed of.

It's just this is the kind of world we work in. Luckily, none of them ever told me they hated it. But when you obviously didn't, I didn't, I didn't, I stuck it out. What made it go from being temporary to, you know, your passion? I realized that I really did love, And it sounds so high in the sky, but, you know, helping people and shaping public policy, and, you know, the the good that does come out of it.

I know sometimes, especially now, it's hard to see the good that comes out of politics and policy because you only hear the bad stuff. But there's some really, really cool stories of, how you help people. You know, one of my, my favorite moments is, you know, I work for, now, Senator Hancock, work for him in the House and then in the Senate.

So ten years with him. He he married me and my husband. Our kids know him as Uncle Kelly and aunt, and his wife is Aunt Robin. But, we worked on the first ever piece of balanced building legislation, and it became model legislation across the nation to protect consumers from, you know, unexpected hospital bills. And so that's something that I take a lot of pride in that I got to be part of.

And it continues today and the fight continues. You know, that's really cool. Well, that I think that's a good balance. What made you not want to go to law school? Money. So I, my parents couldn't afford to pay for school for me. So I made the decision, to go to U.T. and knew that with that came some financial burdens.

And so I did. I had once I also worked just about the entire time I was in college. So I went to school full time, worked. You know, it wasn't really part time. It usually ended up being free, full time. And I just once I fell in love with the process and the career that I could see.

I realized that and necessarily need a law degree to do what I love. And I was terrified of getting into more debt. I felt the same, honestly. Yeah, yeah, I knew I was I was going to be paying for it myself. I thought, is this going to be enough of a, a significant increase in my salary, right?

Yes. At the time when I was on Capitol Hill, there were interns we were making no, nothing. And, and then they all said, oh, this person went to law school and they're still making nothing. Yeah. So I said, okay. And a lot of people say it was like a master's degree. I feel like it's the same in the Texas Legislature.

Absolutely. Which you taught me too. So I always, Yeah. Look to you as a mentor. You were the first people I talked to. I remember that when you were across across the ocean when I talked to you. So I. It might have been nighttime for you Wednesday. Time for me. But it's, you know, nothing. I mean, attorneys in this business are great.

You know, we have at our association a phenomenal general counsel who I rely on a whole bunch. But for me, it just wasn't the right decision because I knew I didn't want to practice, and this is what I wanted to do. So you've had a really impressive career. I know I mentioned in the intro all the things that you've accomplished, but what has led you to where you are now with the Texas Chemistry Council?

It was not. If you had asked me even six months ago if I would be, where I am now. So I just recently, in September, accepted a job as a vice president of government affairs for the Texas Chemistry Council. Congratulations again. Thank you, thank you. It's really exciting. I was before that. For those who don't know, I was running my own business.

I had started my own law firm and it had been going really well. And I loved my clients. I love your shoes. I was working on, you know, I've done it both ways. I've gone, and been kind of an assistant lobbyist for somebody. Inherited their clients. I really love the idea. And I love, you know, in actuality of having my own clients and being able to somewhat pick and choose and pick and choose the issues I was passionate about.

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But I was presented with a really great opportunity. You know, Texas Chemistry Council was one of the first associations I got to know when I was a young staffer. And they used to in 2009, between 2008 and 2009, there was a whole bunch of, EPA attainment issues going on. They were looking at changing regulations.

Texas was, working on a state implementation plan. And, you know, just like you were talking about mentors, a lawyer named Christina Wisdom. And then, Daniel Womack, who currently still works for Doe, were essentially in the position I'm in there, and they took a whole bunch of young staffers and would bring them into their office and would teach us environmental policy.

And what was incredible about it is, the majority of them were women, and that wasn't really a policy issue that you saw a lot of women engaging on. And so, I mean, quite literally, there was a white board involved and there was a binder of information, and we sat there and we learned attorneys, and we learned what the federal government was doing and how the state was responding.

And so I've always really held, TCC in high regard. And I've always admired, you know, Hector Rivera, our president and CEO, has always also been just a mentor to me and, always willing to help and answer questions. And so it really was a, a good opportunity. I have absolutely it has taken me by surprise, I have to say, because, even my husband says that he's like, you just light up when you talk about it.

And not that that wasn't happening with my own business. Better. It's a policy issue that I hadn't really dabbled in a whole lot since. Since those early days. Sure. But I we have the most incredible members, so we're about, about 70 member companies. And then we have another portion of our organization called the Texas Chemistry Alliance.

And these are all of the contractors and professionals who work in and around the chemical industry so that they touch a chemical plant. They can be members of TCO. And these are just truly, you know, these are your plant managers, these are your people running these companies, and these are the people on the ground everyday. And it has been so refreshing getting to know them.

You know, a little bit outside of my comfort zone. Right? This is my comfort zone here. The capital policy. But getting to know what they do and how they are impacting our economy, how important their employees, their employees health and safety are to them has really kind of reinvigorated that curious mind. Part of me, for sure.

I was reading you a TC you you've over 50 billion in annual exports just from Texas, just from Texas alone. And it continues to grow. We are responsible for both direct and indirect, about 500,000 jobs in the state. Well, you know, we have just people don't realize that everything you see and touch and everything that's part of your life, chemistry has something to do with, you know, I think people think of, you know, really synthetic type, material when you're thinking about chemicals, but, you know, modern medicine, the fact that we can wear the clothes that we wear, the fact that I can drink out of an aluminum can, we have

plastic bottles? I mean, these are all modern conveniences that our industry is at the forefront of. That's really cool. And so your specific role and TC, for anyone who doesn't know what is it that you do. So I do head up, our government affairs. So you'll see me at the capital lots. You will see me testifying. A role on definitely.

I've had to get better at. You're familiar with it, though? I am, I did I did a lot more testifying last session than I intended. You know, sometimes a lot of lobbyists have a very strict like I will not testify role. But I was a little bit different when I started my firm because I found kind of a an interesting niche in, coalition building.

And I actually was executive director of two coalitions. So I had to testify. I was their voice in the building. Which was a kind of neat part of of what I did, which is, I think why I like the membership side of TCC so much. It's that same kind of coalition building. But, you know, I will be the one at the Capitol testifying, working on policy, negotiating and educating and all of the things that come with, government affairs, nationals.

Well, would you have ever thought I mean, you know, you see, Teslas, Teslas used to be such a rare thing, you'd see one, you know, driving around like, oh, my gosh, like, that's such a novelty. My next door neighbor doesn't have a single gas run car. They have their plugs in the garage, and they both drive electric vehicles.

It's it's a it's a consumer demand we're demanding as consumers. So it's it's a free market enterprise a free market innovation. And it's really cool to see we're not quite at the flying cars yet, but I can't wait till that happens. I cannot wait. I do not want to drive. I'm so scared of the autonomous cars, you see, kind of testing around the streets.

Your, Every time I see one, I tend to, like, step back a little bit. Yes. I honked at one the other day and and realized, no, what's in it? And thought, this is all yours. It was actually waiting. It was a Waymo waiting. Oh, wait. No. Yeah. We I'm very ready for this to just take over, but we need more charging stations.

Do you get involved in any of that on the energy side, you know, not specifically. Energy and electricity are obviously really important to our companies. Without it, we can't run. Same with water. So, you know, electricity and water will be things that we continue to be part of. And have conversations on. You know, we want affordable electricity just like everybody else does, takes a lot of electricity to run any sort of plant.

We need water sources, just like, everybody else. So those are huge issues. And then another thing that will be really involved in and watching your taxes, making sure that our tax system is fair and balanced. And, you know, Texas has a lot to be proud of. And we're great at attracting businesses, but we are heart.

Some of the highest property taxes in the entire country. And it's not just homeowners paying them. Our businesses are paying them too. And those are big tax bills. And so, just making sure that our tax system is fair and equitable across, across all, you know, both homeowners and businesses so that we don't end up with an unfair balance here.

Nice. Well, I'm excited to see it testify. This session in Iowa is like a test run right here. Exactly. Well, I'm curious to see and what you think on how the capital is changed because. Yeah, 20 years. Isn't it crazy how quickly you can go by? Yes. What do you think's been the biggest change in the capital?

A lot of things. But one of the things that we were talking about when we first, when I first got here was fashion. Yes. You know, my first job, my first internship. I remember my, you know, I didn't have a whole lot of money. And so my aunt came into town and she took me to, Stein Mart, and we bought, these awful, awful polyester suits.

I mean, one of them was not even a pretty red. This, like, bright red. You can't, you know, the fabric was really. But not very comfortable to wear. Used to wear pantyhose and, you know, really terrible high heels. And you kind of felt like you had to, you know, you felt like you had to. And I love that.

Now you go into the capital and we're all embracing modern. That's got a lot of style. Yeah, I love it. The business attire change. The business attire is changed. Now, when I testify you still feel the need to wear a jacket, but I don't feel the need to go out and buy, you know, the very formal suits anymore.

Although I'm hoping there will be one under the tree that I've been eyeing. Yeah. Yeah, there's some really cool. There's some really cool ones. Now, it's not the, you know, I that red suit, I, I used to wear it once a week and it was just so I came down to like the very awkward not quite at your calf loan, your knee and, you know, the really awful big buttons.

It was it was special. But yeah, fashions changed. And I love that people can express themselves and what they're wearing. You don't feel called to like it's become so stuffy anymore. Shoes. I mean, you know, you can you can get into just about everything and anything. And last year, the women in the Capitol, we got a little bit tired of the men getting to where I call them, the white bottoms.

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So they're the, like, fake loafers with the. Sorry, guys. Yes. We're like, that's not fair. They get to walk around and here we are trotting around and our like no one's telling us we have to wear high heels. We're ruining our feet. Yeah, we are our eat our hips, all of it. So, a bunch of women in the capital implemented, Sneaker Thursdays.

Which is great because at the end of session, it kind of turned into, like, Sneaker Fridays and Sneaker Mondays. But it was fun, you know, I reinvested I there's there's very cute styles out there. Some of them cost a whole lot of money. I am a Keds girl. I was going to ask what brand because I need some new comfy shoes for running around the session.

I am a Keds girl. Hey, have some cute sparkly. I just bought some that are lace like black and gold lace. Write it down and they're super affordable. And washable. That is amazing. We need this. We. I don't wash my heels and I ruin them every chiffon I almost immediately ruin, and it was so funny. I texted my grandma the other day.

She was my personal shopper all through my intern days and years, and she's a really good she can find the best, like, sale item that's, you know, $1,000 shoot down to 200. Oh my goodness. Or a $300 dress down to $90. Grandmothers. She can find like $20 shoes. But that were really, really, really great. Yeah. That's amazing. She's so good at finding the deal.

It's like, I'll never pay full price because you can get all these great deals. Oh yeah. And the other day I text her, hey grandma, any tips on where I can get some new shoes? I really need some, for the session, she said, I ordered three pairs for you because I saw them on your podcast. It looked.

They looked terrible. I mean, that's, like, kind of crazy prediction of hers, but I thought I was a wizard. How did she do that? That is kind of amazing. It was very funny. So she stole my, fashion guru. I don't have time. I wish I had more time to do fun shopping. I know, Amazon is honestly a lifesaver.

We we currently get her, honey, especially in the Christmas holiday in, like, pile of Amazon boxes on Christmas. And it's Christmas and you're asking what is changed? One of the really neat things that I've loved watching is the diversity. And people who are working at the Capitol. When I started, there were very few women in kind of higher up leadership roles.

And you've seen that completely change. You know, I would venture to say, without taking account that at least in like, office leadership, not necessarily elected officials, you see just as many women as you do men running offices and having higher up positions within offices. I was reading somewhere that this is going to be, the the highest number of women serving in the House, in the Senate, I believe it's 31.

The sentence of nine in the Senate and, the number I'm I'm gonna get the number one, but 30% 50 maybe. Yeah, something maybe a third, something like that in the house are going to be, serving this year. It's 30%. That's huge. We were at one point down to almost nothing. I mean, like ten years ago, we lost so many women in elections.

And that's not to say, you know, women are better than men or what have you not. But having that balanced perspective, right? Women, women tend to approach things in a different way. So, you know, I personally am involved in the LBJ women's in school. For that reason, I strongly believe that, as women, we find a million reasons why we should not do things.

You know, we had this conversation earlier, like run prop like, no, I would never run for office now, I would never want to be president. However, you know, we. Why not? Yeah. I'm not running for. Let's be fair. But, you know, there's so many women who have the skills and have the desire and the passion, and sometimes they just need that little extra training and feel like they can do it.

And so, that's one of my personal passions. And this and this role is I've had so many amazing male and female but female mentors that have, you know, really taken the time to, to nurture my career and to help me when I needed it when I was starting my own business. You know, we're always recommended me to to people looking for a lobbyist, which was really neat.

That's really awesome that you've had that experience, too. When I met you, you were at TCC. I was the other TCC. Yes. And for that, you were the first female president of the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute. I was that's amazing. It was it was it was a great place to, you know, they are they have some phenomenal policy ideas.

They always have. They really never had, prior to me stepping in the role of very public facing side of it. So that was also just kind of a new role that was almost be an experiment is a little experimental that I think worked out really well. You know, finally, their policy ideas are front and center and, you know, I always say the guys over there not sorry, most of them are men who work over there, like, you all have these amazing policy ideas and you'll never take credit for them.

And not that it's a credit kind of thing, but, it's really neat to see things, especially now, kind of move through the process. I'm like, this is this was you worked on this with him. How cool is that? So I got to be part of a team is, believe me, like, all of these policy ideas were coming from them.

But I got to be the one to kind of push them in the building, and that was fine, too. It's really a lot of fun. Yeah. When did you feel the shift going from, like, mentee to mentor? Oh, I don't know if I still if I, if I'm even there yet. I mean, I, I love being able to help help people, help women along the way.

I think I will always need mentors and people who will, walk alongside me, people who keep me honest and accountable, tell me when I'm making mistakes and totally, brutally honest. But, it I think for me, it probably started happening when my daughter I have two kids, my son is 11 and my daughter is eight.

And when she was about 2 or 3, she started mimicking me. And so she would go get her little like, Minnie Mouse purse and walk around holding her fake phone on her ear. And I would say, you know, I'm going to a board meeting like mommy. And I think it really hit me at that point, you know, the the impact that we can have on other people, whether we realize it or not.

And so I think at that point, I just, I feel like I changed the way I as a whole carried myself. You know, I think we all, as women suffer from imposter syndrome. But really embracing a little more confidence, realizing my daughter is watching me. So all the insecurities that I show, surely she will pick up on as well in the same.

And in our professional world, and just having the confidence to know that I've done the work and I've put in the time and I'm ready, you know, because it's really easy to talk ourselves out or out of time. It's the number of times I've sat in a committee room and scratched through testimony, and I've gotten in my head and just.

I can't say that anymore. I can't, you know, and you, you just you I sometimes forget that I know this stuff. I can do this. And there is no difference between, you know, me and anybody else in that room. So, you know, I think that really hit me, though. I think having a daughter and having her start working, the things that I was doing kind of made me change the way I carried myself as well.

I love that that's a great philosophy to have. And I know I, don't get the little ones yet, but I can't wait till, yeah, they start mimicking me. That's so foreign. For better or worse, you don't check me. Oh, they will put you in check real quick. That's so cute. And having that kind of student mentality, I think, you know, for me, I've had such great mentors through my time, and, and you included.

And, but it was funny because when people start reaching out to me who are, you know, right out of college and want to call and get insights or need help getting a job, I'm so excited and thrilled to help people. It's kind of like the stage of life that they're in, but always being a student, knowing I have so much more to learn about this.

And now as a business owner, so much more to learn in the in the tech startup space and all these things. So that's, always learning, but always helping folks that are in different stages. And we've we've been there. Absolutely. Cool. And there are just so many people who hate the path for all of us, your own career.

Men, women who have challenged what? Our career. What this career looks like. You know, it used to be a very different world. Even 20 years ago, it was different. You mentioned the clothing, piece to it. And when I was on Capitol Hill, it was an unspoken rule. The door pantyhose, your skirt had to be knee length.

And then in the Senate, in the US Senate, we had to wear skirts. We couldn't wear pants. Well, that was wild to me, but all my suits were skirt suits, so I did anyway. Right. But it was. Yeah, I was running a lot of those types of polyester suits at the time, and it was funny to have that unspoken rule that you had to wear.

Oh, absolutely. Skirts. It really wasn't. And it really was like an unspoken rule, right? Like, I don't know, you know, my we have like office just standards, right. Like don't show up in a pair of torn up jeans and whatnot. But, you know, it really was just an expectation that people didn't really talk about. But you knew you knew what you had to dress like and wear and, you know, and there's also just still a certain respect for that.

Oh, there's a certain respect right there on the House or on the Senate floor, or that kind of carries a little more weight with that. And so obviously, like, I still feel a responsibility to dress a certain way if I'm going to ever be in, in those spaces. But yeah, things are changing. It's fun. We're, you know, for men, it really hasn't.

They're sitting there, their suits and ties are so, that, you know, they've been wearing white bottom shoes. So whatever. It's they've gone crazy. Yeah, they've gone crazy. They're wearing comfortable shoes and not boots anymore. It's like. Yeah. It's so funny. Yeah. The three suits and they're good. Yeah. There's it's. And they're good. Yeah. That's that's what I bought my husband for Christmas.

Surprise. I also got him. Yeah. Suits. Yeah. Surprise. I'm not going to be really excited when you when you open your gifts. He's not excited. You know, he's not even remotely excited. It's okay. Well, what do you think of the work from home situation because you've lobbied in both. When we had lockdown in the capital, that's when I first moved here that said, yeah, it goes down.

That's right. And then to now, and then there's some kind of hybrid in the middle now where people are working from home more or having home offices. Yep. How do you see it? I know that you have a great office, right next to the Capitol. Yeah. So, when I started my own business, I, I kind of did the rules.

You know, a lot of. I talked to a lot of people who had done it before, and, like, you don't have to get an office face down. It'll save you a lot of money. So I was lucky enough that I had friends and around that would let me kind of crash in their offices. I was definitely, you know, squatting in several offices for a while.

But then I really embraced, like, working from home after that, I will say, during Covid, I learned that I am not a I if the whole family is home, work from home is not a good situation for me. I'm really easily distracted. You know, I feel a responsibility to like you laundry and do my work or, you know, I also feel like because of all of that, we don't have off buttons anymore.

And so I know I personally have a really hard time and I'm relearning it and I'm really grateful because because Hector has been really good about telling me, like, hey, your your shirt off your home stop. Because I have a hard time with and I could get became a harder task for me after Covid because there were no, you know, there were no boundaries.

You know, you're you were home, you were on calls. Weird hours. You were on zooms. You know, you do two hours of laundry, but then you were back at work at 7 p.m., you know, so it's. I feel like now post having my own business and kind of having my home office and having a proper office and whatnot, I'm actually getting a little better at balancing that time.

Yeah. You know, I think it's hybrids work well for certain people. My husband is a great work from home person. Like, he can sit there and focus in on what he needs to do and nothing else distracts him. I was I was not thriving during Covid. You know, you have two young kids at the house and have, you know, everybody I think was struggling with it.

Oh, for sure. I did not like the, trapped I. Yeah. Chat. Yeah. So I think that was a common sentiment. And I was living alone at the time, so it was just extremely I missed people so much. That was the hardest thing for me. So what are you expecting coming up for this session? I think, you know, I feel like it's so cliche to say, like, every session is a different session.

It. Sure. I have been through multiple speaker races at this point. In fact, my second session, I guess the end of my first session was a school finance year. That internship and that kind of carried on. And you had, a huge fight in 2007. Every speaker race, I feel has had a little bit of a different feel to it.

And so, you know, this is this will be interesting to see. I truly don't have a prediction. And if I've learned anything in my 20 years, is that especially in the speaker's race, it's just I feel like you don't know. I mean, I'm hopeful that we're going to go in and get things done and we won't have, I hope all have special sessions.

I, I'd like to, you know, have a nice vacation. I like the kids this summer. I hope everybody does. Everybody does. I don't know. I think it'll be interesting to you to see what's happening in DC and how that affects needs here. You know, there have already been talks about like border security, asking the federal government for reimbursements, things like that, that I think will really play into, you know, the one thing that our legislators that's tasked with which just passing a budget.

So, you know, I'll be really interested to see how that federal government is plays because typically Texas is Texas, right? It really isn't a factor, but I think it might be just around. I don't know, I, I think so too. A lot of unknowns. Is that going to impact a lot of your strategy depending on what happens on January 14th?

I mean, yes. No, I think, you know, for our association to stick to the basics of, you know, tax policy, electricity, water, you know, those sort of things that really are, you know, the business of chemistry. You do the best that we can in that situation. You know, a big kind of philosophy that I've met her, taken us.

You got to try to got to try to do things, because if you don't at least try, you'll never know. Like, it may be a big fat no, but when it comes to policy work into new ideas or whatnot, you know, being willing to ask and see what happens is better than wondering that you could have accomplished something that you didn't think.

So, you know, whatever the leadership is, whatever the final decision is on the 14th, or if it goes on longer than that, who knows? You know, we'll work with that and we will work with the leadership and just make sure that we can continue to thrive and access and make sure that we can, represent the, you know, thousands of employees that our members employ.

And that's been I've really enjoyed as hard as it is to like, do day trips away from the family, going to sites, going to events where our members and their employees are is really helping me understand who is I'm representing. And I don't think that you can adequate represent a brand or a group of people if you don't understand what it is that is really, truly important to them.

And so, I think that, you know, one of the coolest things since I've taken on this role is, is really being able to get to know, the people on the ground and being able to represent them here, I think, is really cool. Like it's you have a lot of empathy from general and that's great for this type of thing.

So South Texas girl at heart, well, I'm excited to see more of you around the Capitol session. And I appreciate you coming on the show and being a partner. This one. Yes. I've thought that too. And, and I want to shout yourself out at all, any where people can find you or reach out to your organization.

Yeah, I obviously, you know, Texas chemistry.org and find all of our information there. And I'm on, I'm not cool enough to do, like, a really cool, hip social media stuff. Like, I still have a Facebook page. But I do. You don't tweet a lot, but I do do Twitter. Just me and McCord. Thanks, Sam.

On on LinkedIn. See, I'm at LinkedIn. I'm on hold. And like the yeah, the LinkedIn I mean I can I just really quickly so Twitter in 2007 then Representative Hancock walks into the office and says it may have been, oh, it may have been a second session and says, have you seen this, this Twitter bird thing? I have an account and I'm doing this, this tweeting thing.

And I'm like, what are you talking about? I have no idea what the Twitter bird, the you're tweeting the whatever this was. And now it's really funny because you talk about like, being on Twitter X or whatever, we're calling out, you know, like a that's like, that's what I looking for on.

Me I don't, I don't know I don't know I don't have time for it. But that's so funny. The origin of Twitter. Yeah. Oh I, I had this like blank stare on my face. But I'll go follow you on Twitter. And. Yeah, thank you so much for joining me.

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Welcome back to bills and business. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege, where we bring you in-depth discussions with key players shaping Texas's business and legislative landscape. Today, we're thrilled to be joined by a powerhouse in the world of legal reform. Mary Tipps. Mary serves as the executive director for Texans for Lawsuit Reform, or TLR, an organization that's been at the forefront for transforming it into a model common sense legal reform for the last three decades.

From tackling the Wild West era and defending the economic principles that make Texas a beacon for families and businesses. Let's dive in. Well, speaking of session, we'll get into some stuff. Mary, thanks for coming on the show. And for those who don't know you, I know most do. But for any listener, do you want to share a little about yourself?

I'm Mary Tipps. I'm the executive director of Texans for Lawsuit Reform. I've been there since 2003. It was very serendipitous. I got a call from Dick Weekley, our founder's college roommate, who's also a family friend, and said, get down here. Come talk to us about Tor reform. What a lot of people don't know about me. I have a degree in Latin American Studies, and I.

Yes, and had been living in Mexico. So tor reform in Mexico was nonexistent. So, they brought me on for the 2003 session when they were trying to transform from a Houston based association to an Austin based association. And here I am, 22 years later. How wild were you doing anything political in South America? No. Just marketing. I was a new business development.

How cool. So this was your first stint in politics, and you obviously got the bug completely. You stayed. Can you tell us a little bit more about TLR for those listeners you don't know? TLR was founded by gentleman Dick Weekley. They have already been, and three other gentlemen whom in the 90s Wall Street or. Excuse me, 60 Minutes did a special on the tor tax.

And anybody doing business in Texas because of litigation pays the tor tax. And he said something needs to be done. So they came to Austin. They thought they could get it done in one session and realized, oh, this is every time, every session, another. And something that affects industry and business in the state comes up. I was reading a little bit more, just on the Taylor website, and there was a like in the 70s and 80s, I was reading that it was note Texas was known as the lawsuit Capital of the world.

Yes. Can you say more about that? That is crazy stuff. Yeah. John Stamos did a special on it. I mean, it was all over the news and Dick just said, I've had enough and we've got to do this. And so Dick Leo Lindbergh, he writes, Kelly and Dick Trabelsi all banded together, went statewide to build our network of our supporters to get them involved.

And it's been very successful, and I'm blessed to work there for sure. What is your primary role? I know its executive director. I like to say I'm the director of engagement and our general counsel and our president, Lee Parsley. He's legal on people and it works. It's a nice balance. You need that? Yeah, you definitely need that in there.

So how have. I mean, you mentioned how these lawsuits were really impacting businesses. Can you speak to how you've seen that change over the years since you've been there in Texas? You know, I'll have to say, while I've enjoyed all the things that we've done through the years, my favorite session we were dealing with the dredging community, which were like, the what?

Texas has no natural ports, and so they have to be dredged constantly to facilitate the ship. And there was an attorney out of Houston who found something in the Jones act where you could sue anywhere you wanted. So he would have these runners on that in the shipping community. Somebody fell down, never reported it was. Never went to a doctor.

And next thing you know, the shipping company, dredging company was being sued in Laredo, which didn't seem fair if it was happened and, you know, in Houston, at the port. So we worked with these groups of dredgers and what salt of the earth these gentlemen were, and women Port Lavaca, Houston, Baytown, come. And they came and walked the halls with us.

And we were able to pass a bill to help them. And we've seen it day in and day out. I mean, they're dredging our ports now to accommodate bigger and better ships. What other industries have you seen it affect over the years? Well, in 2003, we passed the medical malpractice reform that I have to say, the from what I'm told, I'm not an attorney, that the medical community in Texas has the best legal atmosphere of any other industry in the state.

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They are protected from malpractice lawsuits. You used to be. you go to Brownsville and you've come out of the emergency room at the hospital. They're in, and there was a huge billboard. Have you been, you know, had medical malpractice? Well, that none of that exists anymore. Interesting. What other industries specifically, does this impact the most? Well, if you bring it to the present day.

Yeah, the template that was used for medical malpractice has evolved through the years. And now we are seeing it in every industry in the state in 40% of funeral homes. Funeral homes don't have insurance because of the litigation that's affecting their industry. And people can sue because they don't like the flowers. The body was unable they couldn't bury the body because of the casket, because there's water in the hole.

There are all sorts of litigation. There is all sorts of litigation currently affecting them. Who can you can't drive down a highway in the state of Texas without seeing a billboard for some sort of a. Have you been an accident? It was trucking. But now that fracking is gone on to all industries and as a result, in 2021, and as we worked with the trucking industry to pass House Bill 19 to help alleviate some of the litigation they were suffering.

We in that session, we kept we, created the Keep Texas Trucking Coalition and had about 800 members. Well, because the litigation has gone so far now, we've created the Lone Star Economic Alliance that is representative of every industry in the state. We have probably 35 associations. And then the rest of thousand members are just mom and pops of every pest control, funeral home, dairy farmers, etc. that are impacted by higher insurance costs.

Because that's what it all boils down. More litigation, higher insurance, cost of goods. So what is the main goal of that Lone Star? We have a legislative package that we're hoping to, pass this next session that deals with a lot of this litigation, and we're not going to get down in the litigation weeds. I'll make a fool of myself in deals with excessive medical expenses in the cases.

Oftentimes when you call an attorney that you see on a billboard, they'll say, don't go to your doctor, don't use your insurance. Come, go to my doctors and we'll pay for it, and we'll talk about it later. Well, those doctors are not, held accountable for their charges. They can say, you know, if you or I went to a chiropractor, we'd pay $100.

Well, they can charge 1500. So we just like to see some transparency in the medical expenses in these lawsuits. And, most of these businesses, small or large, across the board. How do they get involved with. They are interested in. Oh, the LSC aid. Yeah. Dot com okay. Or Marriott tort reform.com. Email me or sign up online.

We'd love to have you and and hear your story. More importantly because you know, as a lobbyist lawyer, you know this. We can go to the Capitol all day long. But the members, they want to hear from their constituents. And that's really why we created LC, was to gather the constituents who can get their voice heard at the Capitol.

Very cool. We've seen a lot of legislation over the last 20 or so years. What has been the most significant, changes that you are implemented? Well, I think what I said in 2003, HB four is, is historical, and several other states have tried to copy it. In their own versions to put caps on medical malpractice.

And I think, like I said, the medical community's legal atmosphere, there is no litigation per se compared to what they were having. You know, there was in Texas, over three fourths of the counties in Texas prior to HB 19 or, excuse me, HB four did not have an ob gyn to deliver babies. People were driving hours upon hours and now they're all coming back.

Wow. What are some of the kind of upcoming priorities that you're looking at with? You've already made such big strides, but what are some of the big things this session that you're focused on? Well, as I mentioned, the transparency and the medical expenses, public nuisance. You may have read some about, cities and, states around the country suing people for cigaret butts on the ground.

The companies, what was the one the other day I heard of, Oh, Hyundai Base. They sued Hyundai as a public nuisance because their cars are too easy to steal. Hello. And so we'd like to bring some clarity to that as well and get some legislation passed so that it's being used in the proper fashion.

Interesting. You know, it's always fascinating to hear those unique stories, I'm sure. Yeah. The Lone Star Economic Alliance will bring a lot of good, folks to the capital. Yeah, there's a thing called nuclear verdicts. And that's where the Lone Star Economic Alliance is really focused. Texas has more nuclear verdicts. And what that is, it's the verdict of over 10 million.

Okay. We have more of those than every other state. And the United States still to this day. Now, why is that? Because of our legal environment. And a lot of it is because of the, legal the medical expenses. I'll give you an example. Gentleman who was in his pickup truck going to a church picnic in East Texas.

A truck hit, you know, just before some police come. Sheriff comes in. Are you okay, sir? I'm fine. No problem. Everything's great. Goes on to the church picnic. Two days later, his father says, well, son, you need to talk to an attorney or dad. I'm fine, I'm okay. Well, then he goes to go to trial. His medical, you know, and it was an $80 million judge.

Well, I'm fine, dad. I'm okay. I don't need a medical assistance. Everything. We've got to get some clarity in this process in the system. Well, we've been very, politically active over the years with sealer pack and very, how do you get involved in choosing which elections to get involved in? There's, like some toss up seats, there's some more controversial elections, a lot of research.

And that's what we do at TLR. I don't if that's the legislatively the PAC, we also have a judicial fairness PAC. We researched the heck out of all of it to make sure that we're making the right decisions in line with your priorities. Yes. And then as far as this upcoming, the most will, we're past November now, which is great.

We have one more, the speaker's race. Are you all getting involved now? Absolutely not. You can see on Twitter that we are we are not involved. We never have been in the since I've been at work. 20 the history of TLR. We've never been involved in the speaker race, and we've left it to the will of the House.

That makes a lot of sense. So don't believe what you read. And we ever we ever we we're looking at that what has been, you know, the most significant win for y'all this year in regards to oh my gosh legislative. Well it was legislative, but JF PAC was involved in 25 Court of appeals races around the state and four different areas.

We won 24 of those 25 races. Oh well, it was huge. So what's kind of the broader impact on, the average Texan who doesn't know necessarily about the efforts? You're working on what is kind of what would you say to the average person to explain what you do, which arm of that leg of good to the stool that our legislative, our PAC or JF PAC?

Sure. Yeah. We everybody needs to have the ability to go to court. We don't want to take anybody's. I mean, I've gone to court others in the organization, but we want a fair and balanced system. And when you go, you want to make sure that you have the best to judge and your day is in court. Is is not slight, slanted in any way.

And so we want it fair and balanced. And that's all we're looking to do. And in the same as the legislature, we can go into offices. We know we're going to agree to disagree. Just hear us out. And that's all we ask. Our focus a lot at the state level of Texas philosophy reform. Are you at the national level?

Never. And why is that? And we've just never done it. Our founders are active nationally, federally. But, we got our hands full in Texas sounds like for sure. And we were always very complimented by we get outreach from other states and ask us to come and tell them how we did it and, advise them on how they could replicate.

No, no bigger compliment than that, sir. Yeah. Imitations. Most sincere form of flattery. Yes. What would you say? Is kind of a big threat coming up this session. We're always on defense. The biggest threat, I don't know yet. They'll be one and there'll be a fight. But it's always, you know, fighting our bills and trying to get them heard.

And in committee and on the floor. But something always pops up last minute. Somebody will say, hey, did you know about this? And, and then we're on it. What keeps you motivated? Going through the battles sometimes. And in politics, the people I work with, I am. So like I said, I'm so blessed. The team at TLR is very familiar.

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We are small and we are mighty, and we work hard and we celebrate together because it's all for one and one for all. How many people? Well, there's seven in Austin and then we have, four in Houston. Is that we're, we have 11 on our team, Project Standard and seven. It's big for us. We were just five.

We just have two new attorneys that joined us. Yes, one of them. Very interesting. So as far as, you know, you said other states reach out to you and ask how they could replicate it, what kinds of tips you give them. Well, it's unfortunate because the first one is you have to have a leader like Dick Weekley.

Dick Weekley is passionate about what he does for Taylor. He has the most incredible fundraiser. There's nobody in the whole country like Dick in his fundraising. And so that's a disadvantage to someone else, to have somebody with his knowledge and his abilities and his Rolodex. But, you know, start small. If we went to, you know, Kentucky, we just say, pick a bill, find some advocates, and let your voice be heard and be unified.

And that's where you start best practices for advocating and all of that. What do you recommend for someone coming in coalition building? I think that the more people that you have that are in support of the same issues, it's helpful. Yeah. The bigger the better. Dick Weekley has raised us. Dick is an an unusual individual that every dollar he asked you to put in, he's already going to put an end himself.

So when you have somebody that believes in that such conviction, that's why he is so successful. Yeah, there's he is one of a kind. Are you looking forward to the session? I am it's going to be interesting. We have a lot of new members, and I don't know if you have if you've met the freshmen. They're a great group of people, very diverse, a lot of energy.

I think the most energetic group that we've I've ever experienced at my time at Taylor. Interesting. Well, I love that. I feel like probably because there's a lot of new people, new faces. What else do you see why they're so energetic? They're informed they take the time to learn. You know, other freshmen oftentimes come in and they're deer in the headlights.

They don't have a clue. But this class seems to have as a group, and they have a tech strength that they all, you know, sharing information constantly. They're really preparing themselves in advance. So when I moved to Austin, I remember I remember we had lunch that Thanksgiving, Wednesday before Thanksgiving, items and vinaigrette that I had from Harold Kim.

Yeah, I up to Harold, they're watching. I get to see him. What I like to see and I'm really happy. Connect with us. And you know, so my resume around and, it's funny how this goes around and those ladies that are at the table, I still, in touch with Sally, see? And so, yeah, that was very influential.

But when I moved here, I did feel it was more of a nonpartisan landscape. Agreed. Really, worked across the aisle. Didn't really matter about party as much. And I just come from DC, where it seemed very, you had to stick with one party or, people were very angry and animosity. It was very polarizing.

So seeing it, I have seen it changed in Texas since being here. Yeah, it definitely it's and we're not sure how it all play out. I think, I think things will always work themselves out. I think so too. Time and people just communicating and talking, that's the best thing. I think the internet is probably caused more, trouble with social media, with people not actually just communicating about their topics.

Yeah. People need to get off their ex, and or just ask somebody, you know, straight on. Yeah, absolutely. Get on. Subscribe. Get on. Watch this. Right. Exactly. Sure. But yeah let's let's argument. And I think that will that will come out in this session when people realize that, hey, I got to get my bills passed and I'm going to have to work across the aisle.

And it's not so bad. I've seen some unique relationships build with decimates. That could not be any more different. Completely different that have turned into lifelong friendships. And, it's really it's beautiful to watch because they just come in with such perception. And then it's there's bonds that are built. You have to I mean, you're in the trenches for hours and hours a day.

Oh, yeah. Miserable shit. It's cold. It is cold. That's the biggest problem for me. I'm always freezing with us. You got to come get a TLR blanket. Thank you. Oh, come. Come. Yeah. What is one of the craziest stories that you can share from one of these legislative sessions? Oh, well, there's so many. This is a it's the office.

It's. People come into the office with two totally different shoes on, and, you know, it's April or early May, and it's like hobbling into the office and you don't even notice because you have on two shoes with two different heels, or you at accidentally answer the remote control, for the TV. When you think it's your phone, you can understand why they're not talking back.

We have a lot of stories like that, and we laugh constantly. There are stories. There is a former member who was late night, had a bill that was very controversial and and said. And Mary Tips says she likes this bill. Well, I could have died. I never discussed the bill with the gentleman. And I thought, oh my God, I'm going to get fired.

I mean, oh my God. But everybody knew that that was not the case. And he quickly apologized in the heat of the moment that he spoke wrong. But, things like that. And that's always online. Oh yeah. That's not where I want my name on the Rochester. Funniest tale of the capitals. Oh I'm going to leave that to somebody else.

And yeah I told Ryan Brennan the other week about my car totaling situation. Oh were you the one that went through the windows. Yeah. Yeah. When I first installed them I never knew that was you installed it. Would there be multiple people? I'm curious to know if anyone out there listening who's had the same thing happening. Please tell me.

Make me feel better. But I heard it's not just me I which I'm sure it's not. Yeah, I, I'm sure it happens all the time. Yeah. Some members there was a member of that did it last session or like. Yeah I don't remember now. It was scary. It was on the phone talking, not thinking. And what right through on the barricades over there.

Absolutely damn barricades I can it came out. It just timed out on me. Oh, it's a whole thing. Oh well, I will say one of my favorite things too about session is that, we sponsor puppy polls and making laws during the session, and we used to just have it once every session, but it's become so popular. We partner with, Austin Pets Alive, and we're going to do it once a month, weather permitting.

And we they bring a litter of puppies. And it's twofold because we want the puppies to be adopted, but we also do it for stress relief because who doesn't want a small puppy breath? Yeah. And, just come and hug. And I, I've seen members and staff members come and just hold a puppy and cry, and it's just such a sweet occasion.

I've been to it. Yes, you have, I do. I have some pictures. They're so cute. I know we have a friend. You just got a puppy. Who's this big and it looks like a fake dog. And, now the time for us to get a dog right now with, the business. But I'll come by. I'm no good.

We'll just come by and smell. Yes. Well, anything else you'd like to share with us? I really I really would hope that anybody that has an interest has been sued. You know, we have fortunate that we have quite a few members of the legislature that have trucks, fleets and businesses that are, could potentially have lawsuits. So they're well informed.

But if you've got a story to tell or you're worried about your insurance or your company, please Satcom love to have you. That's how you reach you, Mark. Thank you. Merry Christmas.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business, the podcast where we break down the policies and innovations shaping the state's business and legislative landscape. I'm your host, Walker. Co-Founder of USLege. Today we’re diving deep in our Texas committed to groundbreaking technologies AI and blockchain. Joining us is Ben Bhatti, president, CEO, and founder of Texas AI Association. Ben has been a long leading voice for innovation, advancing book AI and blockchain policy in Texas.

Five smart growth Insurance brands. Thanks so much for coming down and visiting with us. Ben and for those who don't know you. You want to tell us a little bit about yourself? So Ben Bhatti, Texas AI Association founder and CEO Warren, raised in Dallas, grew up there with the undergrad there. Lived all over the US, Los Angeles LA, and Francisco, New York, Chicago, in and out.

A lot of those places and work there Atlanta all over Texas and, in and out of a number of different jobs, from everything from being a governance advisor to now and a governance advisor, a senator and education to, film producer, school teacher set a number of things and really had, just a great exposure in our different fields.

So what, made you want to start an AI background, which is interesting because you have legislative and tech. Just something obviously I'm very good to. So yeah. Tell us how that used to be. So I was kind of looking at the AI field developed from the Dallas Regional Chamber. And as the AI expert there and working with a number of big fortune 500 and sort of seeing how they were using AI and how was developing and seeing that there wasn't a one stop shop or go to place that companies and people trusted, to figure out where was I going to get the best solution that was actually and then deliver

a return on investment. And so, seeing how AI products are being kind of dispersed and, acquired and utilized in the marketplace, I knew that there was a need for companies to say, hey, I can come to this trusted company that has been in this space for years, knows how to integrate the technology in the right way, and it's very specific vertical, and is not trying to sell me everything in the kitchen sink, but really try to send me a solution that can actually solve problem.

And I think that's what's missing in the market when you have a large number of enterprise companies that are sort of able to pay for it, both the infrastructure and the solutions, and the integration aspect of it, and it's really leading the smaller companies behind. And I think the best way to level the playing field is to create the market conditions for everyone to be successful.

So I think that's what we really want to do with this association, through both community growth and then advocacy, is how you approach the community of AI nationals and really help with business development there. And what are your something or top legislative priority? So this session, one of the biggest bills that we're kind of working on is getting across the board tax incentives for every single company that is like yourself, utilizing AI and bringing an AI solution.

And then with your client base, those companies that want to experiment with the new technology, to try to use this technology to see how they can use it and figure out how they can get a return on investment using those technologies is really what we're talking about. So you both have the integrating company and the company deploying the technology.

And how do you figure out how do we the AI, we feel like the best market condition is to create a structure by which, if there's an ROI, there's an efficiency created to the data, to the companies. Integration of this new technology can be quantified through data acquisition of whatever vertical that technology integrated. It can show that it's producing a savings and you get the incentive.

So I think that's one of the big key things I think is missing in the market right now, because the biggest companies that are flush with cash have the resources are able to pay for, again, I think the resources infrastructure and then focus on the leave a lot of companies unable to compete. We can you wrote an op ed on that.

What and your vision for that feature. So hearing a lot of know, Department of Governance efficiency similarities here, but what is your under waterfall. Yeah, definitely. So, I think you got to look at, what our government has evolved into pretty much during my lifetime. A lot of it is, is really turned into, a structure that's not really helping people, but it's sort of feeding its own self and, and and not really, you know, meeting the needs of what it's intended to do.

And so I think through transparency and through technology and create a system by which taxpayers can both see their dollars go through the system on chain, you know, is out there where we can show where your tax dollars, if you're tightening, you know, citizen, you can get to see where your dollars are being disbursed. And then through that technology, you can split the way that you allocate, the way that those dollars, your tax dollars get, dispersed to the system.

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And so one of the pieces of the legislation is to allow for the bureaucrat to do what the bureaucrat does. The best, right? Take your tax dollars and they get to do whatever they get to do with with those dollars. But the other part of it is you get to, as a taxpayer, gets control 50% of those dollars, and you get to allocate them on real problems that matter to you.

And I think what that will do, it will create a number of great things in our society that we don't have right now. Right now, politics and and our systems, we have division. And I think if you have people focusing on, problems that affect everyone around you and your community, then you start to create the second great cracks.

You'll have, you know, people on one side of the political spectrum and the other one working together to solve a problem that everyone faces in the community. And you start to really evolve past, these silos that are creating dissension and non unity in the United States and really creating a culture where what do we call the United States now used to be saying the plans or doing wearing the American flag.

None of this stuff is uniting any longer. So how do we create a culture where we go back to it? And I think a lot of that culture got, devolved because we are transferring that negative energy of our not anything working towards government. And I think that's because of lack of actual government not having the intentions of people and through technology, again, transparency on its own.

Once you have groups of communities focusing on problems, putting those problems on every single politician from the federal level, your state politician, your local city council person, everyone gets to see that problem and get to see how many people want to fix this problem. And then everybody gets to see how which politicians are actually going to do the right things to solve those problems.

I think what you'll see is you'll see a natural evolution, any sort of outside money that everyone wants to take out of the system, let it sit in the system, let the market condition and do what it needs to do. The politician wants to clearly be influenced by money without actually helping their constituents. I think the system's going to vote them out, and I think that you'll see it clearly through data acquisition, that you can see that that option is not working for any person or the people.

And I think the market, no matter how much money you push in it, we saw with the last election the person that put the most money in the election didn't win. So I think if you start to really see that same thing, you're going to see the same evolution happen in the whole political system where you hold politicians accountable.

No longer are we going to be stuck or beholden to the whims of a politician. Now we will be in control of the system and our. So you believe that transparency, that data, it's something that we're doing well would be an overall good for society. I think anything that you can do to really break down a system as complicated as the legislative and the bureaucratic systems that are out there to really show people how the sausage is made and how it works is something that is beneficial to people really getting involved in elections.

I think you're seeing more participation in different groups, politically, simply because those policies in the current times of technology are ineffective. You see a lot of people on both ends of the political spectrum in technology now getting interested in politics. Think Sam Altman literally be part of the transfer team, right, in San Francisco, because he has a little island that he can control, and he needs the policy and the politics of that island to ensure that he gets you and he wants you in the Bay area.

And then he also now have Evan in on the other end, right on in DC at the federal level, able to control federal purse strings and of these rulemaking and all sorts of different things that they can do now and that it. So what you keenly understand is that if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a technician, you're going to have to know policy.

And it you shouldn't be a billionaire with all the resources and all the mouths of lobbyists to get the information you need the regular person on the street. And that was one of the things that and, you know, this lawyer working in, as a, as a staffer, it's you're you're really tasked as a staffer. And I hope that's probably the same now, even with the evolution of politics, is to really help every single person that walks in the door and trying to use the system in a way and in a manner that works for them, because we all know how difficult that is.

And you're like a person in a sinking ship trying to make sure the ship doesn't sink and helping the public and the water is all the problems as it comes into that, that ship and trying to help as many people as you can, and you're doing it with a really unfettered heart of just trying to help everyone that needs to help them out.

The problems always is, is how do you actually get the government that you or whatever little island, the power that you're in charge with? It's Pfizer, Stanford. How do you get it to work for the people? You may be able to get it for the ones that complain behind the system, that's the hardest part. Unless you have a thousand people like yourself that look at the world and the way you do it, and over time, and I don't care if you are, you work there long enough.

You start seeing the whole system through different lenses. You start seeing it as vendettas rather than problem solving. Because people, people don't work right with you and you carry that baggage through the whole process. So even if you're trying to problem solve, you carrying a problem of like, we did work together on this issue or whatever it is, there's all this layers of relationship and everything.

It's always funny. It was just because the people, all those people I talked to work from different bills, different relationships, different offices. Coming to his office, one from this group, you had all these different experiences in life, and now they're all doing something different. And so a lot. And you kind of look at all those things and why did you did it?

And inevitably, I'll tell you, most of the staffers and you know this even with your work, I think with technology was I think is great. I think what you guys are advocating for and what you're bringing to the market is something that's very necessary because it really brings the ability to the common person to look at policy, to look at the legislature in a way that, makes it simple.

And I think that's the thing that technology brings expensive guarantees, implicitly talking to people in their language. I think when you when you create mechanisms that they information in a dynamic way, in which I think your technology does help people understand policy really makes the whole process less complicated. The process is complicated because of people. If you put transparency in there with technologies like exercise, by having something on a blockchain where you see it, it creates, the access to information, and then it gives people the best, ways to, to make decisions in the vote or make by somehow they, you know, dissipate.

And I can you can see where they, they can fit in, plug in and actually change the world that they want to make up to. You highlighted, this that a lot of people and captured me because of policy. How many the organizations you're working with, are focused on policy and where they're not. Do you think should be a so I would say every single one.

I think you look at the future of what's going to happen the next 5 or 10 years, and you're sort of seeing the evolution in the last three really very quickly that every single corporation, every single company, every single startup is going to be a tech company. They're going to have to understand technology cleanly. If it's not social media, if it's not, I if it's not understanding how different software is integrated into their workflows, they're going to be behind.

And if you keep looking at every single vertical, every single way that technology will integrate and eventually evolve corporations, as you can clearly see what's happening. You know, my lovely intern right there, just a wonderful university, right? And in the problem that a lot of young people are going to be facing in the market. And I saw this back when I was advising as an advisor to about, in the Senate, the Senate make was no matter what you teach students, the issue is always going to be it's going to move back.

Then people are asking me, should I teach my student how to code? And I kind of looked at them like, well, if it's like a language and I'm not a coder, but I kind of understood it as a language. And I was like, well, if it's a language, that means anybody can learn it and, you can become proficient learning it.

But I know that's the case and it's and can actually get then you need this as a, as an advisor and as a policy person. The rudimentary way to analyze a bill and to break it down is very simple. You can get a computer to do it. The hardest part is actually understanding how the bill get implemented, how it works.

What are people thinking about the bill? Who's supporting it? Who's against it? Why isn't moving here there? What are people saying? That is all soft skills that your ability to go out there and figure it out, that would never be replaces it. It would be impossible. But the part about research understanding, like the nuances of certain data points in the bill technologies can do that.

And then advice on the bill when you're taking it a little bit further, like what your technology does with technology, I think then you have, something that makes the bill alive. Now you can interact with a bill in a more meaningful way. And so for you or myself as a staff or you're going to kind of see that different, but as a layman, you're going to get to actually see stuff that staffers and other people can understand, in a different way.

But it's going to be broken down in a way that you can completely understand the same way. And I think that I think that's a critical thing to that nature. Absolutely. I don't care what most people will say. No one can break down each bill's power, right? So that technology is there to do that. But exactly what you said, the soft skills are not always like there's going to be more and more need for them.

I think growing in this time or in demand for change. And we're in this industrial revolution right there in its new revolution. So I want to dive into the blockchain in a little bit further for those initial following. That's all. That's the first time I heard that one of. So tell me a little bit, is this technology already in existence or is it something that you are pushing to be built?

Is this developed already? Yeah. So blockchain technology is oh, and it's specifically for this purpose. That's the whole, beauty of it. I think right now with technology and how it's evolving and how we're seeing the cases of it, it hasn't been used yet this way, but it really and it's already being used in a number of different ways.

You look at, some governments are using blockchain to utilize it in titles. So there was a couple scammers that were going out there and they would get people's titles from, you know, South County office or git, go get a loan or sell the house. And there was almost no way to verify this. You wouldn't have to go through like, chain of ownership.

Right. And this is going through county offices. And then actually Hank referenced this whole issue that came up with this is like, if someone picked it up at a county office and started, you know, dividing them on your title. Well, a way to capture this and stop this from happening is to put it online. But then there was the same thing, happened with Georgia, state of Georgia, Georgia's you know, obviously with the last election results, questions, whatever happened, the state put their voting on chain.

So now you have a complete record. Person that voted where that vote went, who verified it out went, and it's all black. So if you do this, I think you're going to create, the best case years for governments to be transparent with tax dollars and transparent about what they're doing with the tax dollars. And I think that there's a number of cases where it's been used and not where it can be transferred to.

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What don't you do everything from creating a stablecoin where it's just converting every X dollar into a coin looked upon as a chain, or there's a number other ways. There's a couple of governments that are doing this certain different ways. But, I don't think anybody's done it in this particular way of trying to figure out how do you track every dollar that's out there now you've got that entrepreneurial spirit and what you're what you're doing, but this is what gave you the idea to do this.

Call it. It really was, looking at how are we listening to Stand By as citizens and seeing as soldiers being racist? People are becoming very cynical about what's happening in government and what's happening. In terms of like where they see the future and what they feel like is working for them. And every single system. And when you're seeing 700 million, $800 million, get lost for the eighth time at a time, an audit is done on a humongous government agency and you're like, what is happening with who is doing what with these dollars?

And nothing happens, but it'll happen. The next time it will be the eighth will be the ninth, it'll be the 10th. But no one's going to stop it and nothing you can do about it. What are you going to do, vote out everybody? Okay, we did that. And then it's still not going to happen. It's just going to keep happening.

That's a blob. That's a government. That's a government. I saw this and government working as an advisor. There were people that blew money that was nefarious, and they were people that blew money that was nontaxable, and they blew millions of dollars, both on both ends. But what you have to do is you have to actually look at what is actually happening and why did they pull that money, or why were they inefficient?

In what way? They need help? Was it the system folks? It was. What was it? I literally sat with lawmakers that told me that blown out $100 million. Like, literally, I literally was like, hey, how did you know? Like and the donation and the donation or a specific need, like education, where you would not think you'd lose that much money and it would go to help its own number.

That's a key of it. And the lawmakers will tell you that, you know, this is like, how is that mostly it happened was nefarious, happened with the system, and half of it was with this consuming the money. And I you know, I think the more you can integrate technologies that that. Yeah, show things and expose things for what they are and really what it is, is not exposing anything.

It's just, hey, everyone can see where it hurts. So. Oh, I love that. That's definitely some well brought up. And we'll talk more offline for sure. But so what chains and what typically misunderstood technology can you break it down. Our listeners who are more so look at it like this is a ledger. When you look at blockchain, think of it like as a ledger that, basically can keep a immutable, record of a transaction or anything.

An interesting cases that I think where I've, blockchain in space, you wouldn't think initially we're at this blockchain. It's based on its own balance. It's doing blockchains, but it a lot of times it's a crazy concept. Right. And he said the second that somebody came up with it, the second he got like three VCs to commit to it.

Sure. But what it is, is you think about, a satellite up there with thousands of other satellites flying around. And if you can blockchain the movement of that satellite, figure out every single place where it's going and how things are actually operate, maybe you can now figure out paths that you can now keep track of, and you can make sure that satellite is hit by something, or that there's no damage on some or even the space station moving the space station, certainly keeping all of the records of their mesons on block so that he could point.

You can say this is what happened at this time, at this point in time, just these are all the metrics that came with it at that time. Instead of storing data in a way that we lost, it's not usable. It's throw it in a big cell sheet and then maybe we use, something. And right now they're starting to use I right length.

I go through that data and actually figure out what's in it. But now if you're blockchain, it's a whole other way to both store, consume and then actually use the data. That's the key thing. We can collect data, but how do we use it. And blockchain just offers a different way. And there's layers right. You could actually layer blocks up at EOT.

You can do this with maximized energy. That's one of the key areas. Yeah this issue right. Everyone's talking about nuclear power. How do we maximize and make the state grid efficient? Well, again, blockchain, knowing we're, different energy is going how it's going, what time of day it is, heat, everything else, having a record and then having an overlap of AI, understanding all that data and then figuring it out and then using that data and that technology right way where you can now say, okay, now we can make this whole grid system moving at such a directional.

We know these certain things are happening. It becomes a different way to this, can collect that information, make sure it's not going to be moved in any way. Different weights immutable. When we use that technology here I think it's a whole other different way. Is it so and that how do you think Texas is uniquely positioned with AI, blockchain.

Well their policy at all. So I think you kind of look at the general philosophy of the state and what's kind of led to the economic miracle here. They call it here in Texas. And a lot of it really relates to, I think, regulation. Right. And I think encouragement of businesses. So again, going back to sort of the ethos, the, mindset behind that AI incentive is to not look at regulation is how do we do things from the top down, but how do we create an environment for businesses to succeed?

And then we figure out once they succeed and they start to integrate, how do we then regulate it? There's obviously going to be mistakes, is obviously going to be make errors with any technology. When we saw this with social media and see this with data, we've seen this with, telecom, we've seen this in every single technology that we've had science, space, everything you can think of.

How do we then go back and figure out, before the cat's out of the bag for there's too much damage? How do we create the regulations that are going to be the best thing? And I think there's some things that can obviously be very forward thinking about, things like data protection rights, cybersecurity, privacy, using, people's images, things like that.

Obviously IP is where you kind of look at different things that come from that. But all in all, when you look at what the technologies are bringing to the marketplace, I think Texas is strategically and generally positioned in a way because of its state regulation and its encouragement of business to really bring in those two industries. We saw that, I think with what is happening with the bitcoin miners, right?

The Bitcoin miners came to Texas because, energy is cheap, right? Land is cheap. They can make big data centers and Texas is open to innovative ways to, create the energy markets for the Bitcoiners to be successful here. And so now we're the capital, right? I think the same thing can happen with AI through this Texas into how do we create a market, that creates the right structures for businesses to succeed?

Again, going back to your technologies or a number of other technologies and then remember companies and let's say ISIS nation, if you get the right number of close uses with these technologies, it doesn't matter how many competitors come into the market, because you know that your technology is going to deliver an ROI and a solution that's going to help people and help people become better at what they're doing.

And it's up to them then to select it and see if that's what they want to. Then use that technology to see if they can become, I think personally that if the market is left to itself, then he let people succeed through the innovation and integration of that innovation bill will be successful and you fail if you don't.

Right. And I think that's a natural churn in market conditions. So instead of creating, top down regulation, I think encouraging and incentivizing innovation is the best way, to see how the state, you know, I think you're going to continue to see another miracle happen in the next few years, year, if Texas continues to stay on the same topic, really opening up regulation, opening itself up for business, and looking at regulation is a necessary need for the enablement of business.

I think it's really. And how do you feel about this? I mean, administration of early, are you optimistic and so on a number of levels. I mean, you think you have to be a little bit optimistic, just because it is a change, you know, it's like, same day, different story. Right? It's it doesn't matter who's going to be in office.

We all know that the federal government, pretty much for my entire lifetime, has it that a whole lot. And so because of that, at the same time, you know, that you have that in the back of your mind. But I think now again, with technologies and some of the people that are going to be put in critical positions, they have a technology mindset.

I mean, I think you look at Elon Musk, right? He's got a technology mindset. He knows how to, innovate, to integrate, to make things move faster than things that people say, that they never could move fast. And that's a problem with government. I think people have to dream bigger than, going into just snail's pace. Right. And so I think technology enables that.

It makes it a reality rather than talking about it. You look at JD Vance, I think he's had, you know, history in, venture capital and with technology, startups and, and doing, work in and understanding how technology can again create efficiencies where maybe there, wasn't right. And to make a company competitive to technology, I think you look at a number of others that are in the administration that have that background, either through experience or through other lines, right?

And having different jobs. I think that can be very optimistic because things like what we're talking about, transparency issues using blockchain, you know, they're using a podcast, right, to have people start talking about different issues with Doge, and one that I think you're going to have to try to do different things. Government has not been working for people, for probably the last 40 years.

And I think if we can rate that, through the utilization of technology and really connect people to government, the people that want to get stuff done, they can now now they know they don't have to yell at the TV screen or yell at their neighbor. That's on the other side of the political spectrum, or yell at the politician, right?

They can now work together to solving solution and everyone can see it. So I think that's the best way to really look at a way feature politics and technology that optimism always gets here. How about for this upcoming Texas legislative session? Have you had favorable responses to a lot of ideas? I think the, you know, everyone talks about the hype cycles of technology.

And I know, it's not immune to the conversation. And some people will say it's it's a hype cycle everyone's talking about. So yeah. So for about a year, you know, we've been working. When I was over at the chamber, the Dallas Regional Chamber, I was working with the women's office and sort of during that year of going out, and trying to connect with people both.

And I didn't just really understand, you know, how is AI being used and integrated companies. So from that, I think is very, you know, open heart to want to hear from constituents and then everyone across the state to really figure out how is it going to come to do that. And so I think that's a great way to begin a conversation on how do you regulate AI.

Now, the flip of it also is how do we incentivize AI? How do we create a mechanism to whereby we encourage integration and innovation? And I think they also have, a heart for that and wanting to do it. The businesses want business development, right? We have a lot of startups, your startup, a number of companies, it's you create again the right structure.

Your business development becomes so much more, not only easier, but it also, creates a better product. The more your product gets integrated into different uses, the better it becomes and the better it becomes against its competitors. Not only that, you become a better product, but if someone wants to compete and try to offer different things that you can offer and offer the things that you know it would cost you and you'd rather cut it and they would rather include it, well then now you have market competition and it wouldn't hurt your business.

It would actually encourage your business to grow and encourage the other businesses to continue to grow, to get to the other side of the market. And with that, I think you you really create a better business environment for everybody because everyone thinks they can win. And that's really what you want. You don't want the latter being whipped up by anybody.

And, and creating the right regulations to do that I think is critical. Okay, okay. And explain to those you haven't read your op ed and that you're at the end. So check out what and how the program exactly would work. Yeah. So the idea kind of is to really look at a current market out there, an analogous market with the current credit market, and to look at what they're doing and flip it on its head.

So the carbon credit market, you know, generally speaking, is, a market that trades, companies that want to pollute or credit they can now purchase. Right. And then that credit says we've taken this many carbon emissions out from the environment or done some sort of sustainability, but there's no real way and there's no real system or there's no real trust, mechanism for people to really understand what is that credit rating.

And so the idea with this tax incentive is really with, again, across the board tax incentive for companies that are when you integrate and wanting to deploy, well, what you do is you create a little extra incentive for companies that know they want to go chase something in sustainability. They want to create market efficiencies. So let's look at a company like Amazon or even Walmart or any of these other companies that I have.

A company is a member company in the Texas. The association called them up. And does the last mile, optimization delivery. It's a software company for those companies, for Amazon and Walmart and every single company. I think if you think about it, when I was sitting with book CEOs, the dad in the Senate about it and talking to them about what did your technology really their founders, their creators have been around for 25 years and work with those mega companies.

But when you talk about what their companies really offer is efficient technology creates efficiencies through operations. And then you ask, well, why can't you offer Amazon or Walmart or any of these other companies? So oil and gas, they are predictive maintenance because I can tell you when the truck is going to break, this is going to break. I saved them on, aerials.

Right. All these things are the same things that we're doing in the carbon credit market. So why don't instead of doing this in the same way, let's create a high credit market where we're now utilizing technology to create efficiency, and we offer that as an extra little incentive to those companies. And then when those companies chase that incentive, we get that credit and we use that unsustainability credit market in this picture stock exchange, we sell out a lot of it.

Other companies can purchase it. And the same thing happens in the same thing. We will have to have a carbon market is now happening. I credit markets with the Texas stock. We see that new way of really creating another market that will digitize the world and put Texas at the lead, as I put it, every single point, because you now are going to have a state in the United States is literally saying, we are incentivizing companies to come here and integrate that.

You tell me what state is out there, and I'll tell you why it works best if you do. And I incentivize this nation first, it's going to be very low, cost to the taxpayer, one of the big things and, you know, this working in the legislature, it's good. Now it's people. It's hard to come find the money.

I think it's going to be a very low. It's it's any fiscal note to it because it's going to be self-sustaining and moneys are going to be supplied through the selling of that sustainable credit, the I credit. And so now you created a market that continues to create itself the and to sustain itself. The other part is as more companies move here, you're going to create market conditions that will create, AI technologies that are going to be priced, everyone to get a piece of this revolution that's coming.

And now instead of companies at the top being able to succeed and move the markets on their end, now have companies that knitted bottom tiered, they can sell. But somebody asked, one of the I think it was one of these option moats or something like that. They mailed in some questions to presidential candidates, and one of the ones was this bakery in Alabama.

And they asked her, hey, Mr. President, you know, the next president, how am I going to survive? I let a 16 year old bakery, and it's going to fail because I can't survive inflation. Let me, one president and they said, hey, I'm going to save you. And the other one says, I'm going to give you a loan.

Both of these are not sustainable and one is not sustainable for long. And then the other one, she's going to burn through the money and then she's running the same operation. She's going to survive just a little bit longer. It's just like putting a Band-Aid on an open bleeding wound. Whereas energy savings ain't coming for a long time.

So what do you do? Oh, geez. The answer is that bakery lady, who's been around for 16 years and some brewery now go find technology or some of that new technology and say look at like company. Where can I say we're going to increase my efficiencies? Where can I maybe get on social media and get a national presence?

Where's the market for this one on? So I know there is I mean, there's a thousand bakers out there. So, you know, you can help the company be somewhat successful civil. But she knew where to go. Now you have her not only have a successful capital, but she's increasing businesses, decreasing jobs, increasing her happiness, using people, increasing her people's happiness.

And again, market conditions. There's no picking and choosing winners. She was willing to go find the people with. And that's what I think people are missing. They don't know where to go. They don't know where to go find the right people say, how do we become part of this technology? Your technology is again going back to how do I become a how do I do so unfair?

How do I start, becoming more efficient at what I'm doing? You know this as an entrepreneur, you always need extra help, and you always feel like you need somebody else to, to help you with doing whatever you're doing because you're doing so many different things. And so I, you use help us really get beyond those, those, hopes that will help, help me become more efficient.

So let's say you're you're beginning lobbyists or you're, you're beginning a small company and you know about government relations. Are you going to keep up with bills? I don't know what's going on if you've never done it, but knowing that that's a full time job and you probably 100 of those jobs you're going to do in your company.

So how are you going to promote your growing or your network? You know, so we've definitely made a very compelling case for this. How do you, business leaders, lawmakers, any citizen get involved and maybe can work can work with you here. So so I think, you know, reach out to us on WWL with that Texas Eye Association talk.

You can reach out to me personally. Call me on my cell. It's on the editorial and then really get connected. I think if you're really wanting to figure out how to do business development and then only that if you just want to learn about AI. We had an event at South Lake, focusing on both fintech and healthcare AI.

And it's a great event to more than 200 people showed up talking about, a number of startups also came and, sort of presented. But getting involved in the community and hearing about technologies and understanding, I think is going to be key because, skills are going to change very quickly. Jobs, you know, necessities, what they're going to need.

And the job market is going to change very quickly the next 5 to 10 years. It's just going to change every single aspect of how we operate. You can also see humanoid robots watching next year, all with AI, all of the elements in self-driving cars. I'm already seeing them now. We're seeing, you know, Waymo cars running around all over the other day in front of me.

And I ask, why don't I lock it up? It was a bad driver and it was a bad oh, it was on the no screen there. And then I thought, oh no. Well, no wonder if it's a bad drive into it. It's coming. It's going to come around the end. You know, I think even with, even with, the self-driving, Tesla cars, they're going to have people look.

Right. So the first ones are going to be people driving it. I think with the humanoid robots, it's going to be people actually doing it. But eventually the technologies take over and we're at that transitionary point, which is like, we know it's coming. We're seeing it coming very soon, seeing the consequences. It's it's very nominal right now in some way, the sticking with humanoid robots.

But I think in the next five years and like, perhaps not for me like too much here. Like it's. Yeah. Yeah. Same. So when it had that software update. No. And then I, I wouldn't get it for free for a little bit. It did it, it freaked me out. It's a little bit slower than I like right. It's way safer.

It's a little safer I would say honestly, for anyone who knows, I did a podcast, go, talk about my getting little. Oh, no, what happened? And, this happened recently, a few months back. I'll be so happy you're smiling back on the Capitol grounds. Yeah, it's a whole day. You know what's up now? I'm like, no better.

What? How do I make sense? Oh. Yeah, like you're what everyone is. Listen, it's it's her tragic tale, art. No. Well, fine. But I'm a lot. Oh, it's all, you know, in one piece. That was enough for, like. Okay, well, it was a call it, but I feel like at the top, the power of that is there.

Oh, I can totally agree. Yeah. It is. No, it's been super thought provoking. Anything else you'd like to share with our listeners today? More about what you're doing or, can you definitely jump out? One factual accident, I think the other one is education. You know, I think when, you know, coming from my background in education, I think on all levels, you're going to need to educate people about what AI is.

So there's not this fear about, oh, it's going to take my job. Oh, it's going to do, you know, X, Y or Z in a fearful manner when it really is going to do is the name I think everything about people's lives, make them more efficient, make them healthier, make them happier and make them more creative.

And I think if we focus on those things through, the technology naturally falls into those good things. You see it with the deepfakes, you know, all the other things that come with it. There's always going to be a negative side. But I think, my times of laughing at memes and connecting with my friends, I it's not the ability to call every day, but I can send them and whatever off the internet or out from, you know, a story or whatever, a post.

I think that's kind of outweighed a lot of that negative stuff. So I think you kind of have to look at it. And is there two edged sword, you know, dilemma with technology? Yeah. For sure. You're going to remove certain aspects. I think right now the job market with students coming out. Yeah. There's a there's an issue.

There's ChatGPT right now, this being the vast majority of students that are coming out of college, which is not a digital sign, but that's a sign of the market problem, right? The market problem is and this is happening been happening for years. Every single year that I've been in education, I've seen it from the inside as a school teacher, or as an advisor or as a business owner.

The system has not evolved to meet with kids need to be learning. So for them to be successful out in the market, when they go and get a job, and then the jobs are training the kids because they want and needed return on investment, so they don't have time to train for ten years. And so what do you do?

You go find small boutiques and train them and you induce natural. And then the boutique can't survive because the bigger firms are always taking the smaller ones than creates this system. But, again, it's market conditions. But how do you how do you create the technologies really that will it's going to create a higher divide. It's going to be a bigger digital divide.

And you're going to see that with large enterprises that have the resources to pay for it. And the lower companies are, but you're gonna have to figure out how how do you create different pathways for people as these jobs get eliminated, there's going to be a thousand more jobs that will get crazy and there's going to be other pathways for people to figure out.

You got to show them that pathway. They can't just, you know, play with them and find a million jobs, like with the credit system is a terrible, terrible job market finding job. It's terrible to, get a job as a student. It and it doesn't make any sense. So, like, colleges should be obligated to, to ensure that their students are successful, be this their cradle to grave.

But, if you're going to make me pay those loans off, and if I bought a product, then my product should make sure that I'm going to not have to deal with struggles in the market. I pay for it, right? Some of us wanted to save. So it was what it took. The expensive schools. Let's saying that they should be a better product than a cheaper school or state school like a you.

It's a great product, right? It's a great school. But, I think we've got to figure out ways to get utilize technology to both, train and educate everybody on every single level, on the technology, how it is used, and then how can they use it for the future? Because the future is something that is coming right around the corner.

At the same time, that future is going to include a bunch of jobs that are pretty useless and corporations and bureaucrat bureaucratic, you know, institutions, they're going to be eliminated and they're going to be eliminated and replaced with technology. But you're going to need somebody to manage all that, and that person is going to be need be very educated, very smart.

But it's a new skill and creativity. And I mean, it's for innovation. It's coming. Right. But the thing is, I think people are prepared for it. Even in high school. I really do think workforce development is are the biggest things we need to prepare. It's for high school, educating them with AI tools early if you right. That's the easiest, best way to get it in.

But it comes with a lot of training. So that I think is part of the important thing. I okay. But the issue is like for example, like a reach out to me when we get these the we of the community colleges with state and in the city in August Augustine just walked out and I was like, okay, if we're your institutions and I'm working with SMU and UTC, and then they'll stop this, I'll stop this in the career center.

Send me with that edtech hub. That's my sector. That's a big thing. Right? And then McKinney leaves. We're we're going to do some good. When you look at what the universities are really trying to do is trying to figure out how do they get the students to commercialize companies because they know that the product is is not getting them.

And they're like, oh, crap, the kids aren't getting jobs. Let's just figure out how to get to these startups. So all of them are like, hey, then go get anybody to come here that wants to do anything. Well, we'll take I will take an equity very small 3% equity cut, but we'll give them everything. We'll give them all the backing of the university, all the professors and the research, the validation studies, all that stuff.

We'll go get the funding. But we just want companies to come to. The real reason for this is to employ their students. That's the problem, that it's are not giving up. So you kind of look at some of these universities particularly that's and as soon as we're the only schools, I think it is the only school in the United States with three art centers.

They all have different focus areas and sort of what they're trying to give to their students. And I think SMU, many schools, you know, graduate from that same. But they do put a lot of resources into their students being successful because they do have a lot of resources. And one of the things so when I was in Moscow was the worst time to be a world university, the law school, it was a recession, 2009, you know, absolutely terrible thing.

Right. But the university at the law school did was they went out and they formed partnerships, and they said, what would pay for you, our student salaries for a semester. So for an entire semester, they were willing to pay for your salary. And the law firm got to use the student for free. So what types of programs are universities using out of etcetera entrepreneurship.

So they're looking at how do they get ideas to market. And so there's a number of ways. Do you do it. There's a number of ways. You try to get it internally through students wanting to figure out how can I start a company before I leave? And I use the resources that I had in my back yard to really use this technology and create something new, or to create something that's out there and modify its matrix.

Successful. So what programs are some of these universities doing to encourage entrepreneurial Shepherd. So one of the ways is internally to incentivize and encourage students to, create startup, that they can grow internally and kind of go through their system and vet them and support them, right, with the infrastructure that is sort of in parallel. The other way is to have startups that are outside of the university that sort of align, with different departments that are trying to create either research projects or figure out different technology.

For example, SMU right now has one of two super, pod Nvidia Super pods, meaning, companies can come in, use those super pods, to see how those technologies can be applied in different aspects of the cases. Data, AI or is it's an area right from that university can do research and then you can spin off a company, because now you know how to use this technology in efficient and effective ways to help public health success.

You did this with this mega fortune five hundreds that are all over DFW, right? You could also figure out ways where smaller companies like yourself that are doing, interesting work in areas where if you get the right business, pipeline, that you can just literally get into a flood of market. Just think about if you could get into every, lobby firm in different states, or you have the access to get front and center and all them and they can you can all at the same time.

They can see your technology, utilize your technology and then choose whether or not they want to purchase, utilize your, their technology and think about if there was a marketplace. So I think, creating the mechanisms for that is like it's a you're so you lived in California for how long you it was off and on for about 12 years.

It was in between. Hum. I was a film producer and then at the time that I was working as an advisor, and then I just kept going back between California and Texas. And what would you say the biggest differences you've seen in Cisco Silicon Valley area? And now there's the booming texting we have here in Texas. We got to look at both states.

I mean, California is a beautiful state. It's a wonder. It's a great people, great food international, all cosmopolitan, metropolitan, everything you can say. That's great about it. Now, some of the issues that have sort of taken over, and we'll look at San Francisco in particular because I lived, I live in the heart of it. I lived in market and H Street, and then in LA, I lived all over Long Beach.

You see the it's, you know, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, spent a lot of time all over the area and just sort of know it pretty well. The, and when you look at, let's look at San Francisco, particularly in San Francisco, where I lived in Market and ate. Right. Trinity Plaza Apartments, which so there in when I walk into the Embarcadero every single day, I saw the same people that you will see you there today.

Homeless people, people shooting up. Right. People that are, you know, just out there. There is a difference now in the culture in San Francisco in 2007, I can tell you in 2007 was San Francisco was not a Texan. San Francisco was closer to the summer of love in the 1960s and 1970s than it was Texan. When I walked every day, I noticed smiles.

I noticed people making eye contact. All those homeless people, even the people shooting at Red and everybody looked at you, you know, I kind of smile. Then eventually it became, hey, how's it? Hey, hope you have a good day. Hey, I hope you're having a good day. I hope you're having a great day. Then it turned into me asking, hey, I'm going to go rent that McDonald's.

Do you want to? In the melting smile and someone say, thank you for treating me like a human being and then being like, no, don't worry about it. And you go get that. You know what? I go eat? Well, what was different in San Francisco was it was a community of culture. There's a community of care. The people that lived there had lived there for 30, 40 years or so because tech hadn't entered in and pushed them out and not just pushed them out, they left a lot of them left.

They made a lot of money selling those houses. And the city changed because of what was going down in Palo Alto and was moving slowly and creeping up into the same. So when I lived there from the year afterwards, I want to say it was 2000 and or living around there when I was oh seven, Uber there, and then Twitter moved right there.

Then Facebook started have a big sales. All the big companies that you see now started to move into actual city of San Francisco. And then what happened is you had tech start and you had a bunch of people that were coming in from everywhere, and most of these people were coming from the best colleges in America, and the best colleges in America are on the East Coast and West.

And what was happening was, I beg to differ, Alabama, I don't know, you know, sound. Let's get rid of the South and tell you that is why the South has football today. We all know that I will put the South up against anybody else. There's no competition. But let's look at academics. Yes, but but the best schools besides Alabama, we're moving right along.

But we had was and I noticed this walking down Market Street. I started to see ads for, the Wharton School of Business. So did you see ads for East Coast MBA programs? But I'm in one of the best, smartest places on planet Earth, right? In America, there's Berkley. There's all sorts of great schools in the Bay area, but I'm seeing school.

Wharton. Well, what I started to notice was the East Coast culture started to come into the West Coast, which is a completely different culture. I spent a lot of time in here. New Yorkers, are a curse. Nobody will hate each other, though. Nobody's going to have a fight, you know, they will yell, they'll scream, they'll curse.

But no, West Coasters are. Take everything literal. You say any of that in front of them, they will take it, like, really personal. Where in New York you can take to anybody on the street. And it's hard. No one's gonna take. But in San Francisco they take it personally. So it was happening was East Coast people were coming in and slowly moving into the city.

Well, those kids, guys and girls were making a lot of money, but they were living in San Francisco. So and they also brought in the party culture that San Francisco in the Bay area does not have a party scene. It's quiet. People do not go out late night. It's not a club scene. But the East Coasters came and they started saying, I don't want to work in the East Coast in law and business.

I want to go work at Netflix and Facebook, where I'm getting people they more have way more stock options, and I have a very cushy job. And so that changed the culture of the Bay area slowly since about 2012 over time. And then what happened was it brought the East Coast culture to the West Coast. So those same homeless people on that same street that had been coddled and loved and cherished even though they were homeless, but it gave them a sense of dignity and people cared about them every day.

It changed from that to East Coasters who just go to work, and it's this New York, it's got to go. You move, you fast. You don't stop and say hi. You move, you gotta go. You gotta get to work. So you think you change it for the worse? Well, I think you look at it from any other city.

Yeah, I live in Dallas. Has changed a lot. I live in Austin. It's completely changed. Massively. Better for worse is always a hard question. I think Covid, in certain things damaged those cities in ways were exposed. A lot of the failing systems of government of, again, a bureaucratic system that wasn't meeting the needs of the people.

And then you saw that through homelessness, through, extensive crime that's not controllable in those cities right now. And it's not saying that, you know, Dallas-Fort worth don't have crime. They do. And all these Texas cities do. Now, when I remember, Austin did not have crime at the level it does now. There's there's bad things that happen with grow.

And the same thing happened in California, but there's a way to control the bad things that I think California did not do a great job at doing. And again, going back to market conditions, you're seeing it clearly by how many people are moving out of the state and the demographics of who can stay in that state.

The only people that can really survive are people with ample amount of resources that can do the taxes, whether the cost of living, whether what it costs to actually just, you know, survive in California. And a lot of those people that live in Alabama, Texas right now, what do you think about, that same thing happening in Austin and in Texas?

We've obviously had more live here than ever, actually, in your neck of the woods in North Texas, in the Dallas, Metropolitan area. So how do you see that impacting and changing the culture and, safety and everything in those cities? It's going to make everything bigger. You know, it's obviously going to bring problems when you have growth because you don't have a lot of the infrastructure and resources that are there that are needed to actually address some of those needs.

And the government's a little bit behind, obviously, on meeting needs. Oaks can play catch up for a little while as growth happens. You're obviously starting to see expenses increase. In these cities, as you know, resources become you can see starting to go up. You're having a lot of the problems that, you know, people don't want in there.

We're trying to escape from those cities. Traffic is terrible, a lot of these cities. But again, I think you can utilize technology to solve a lot of these things. So, I don't know why companies are going back from remote work to, you know, in, in, in office requirements. I think that there was a efficiency, greater efficiency of people's lives when you do remote work.

Obviously, I think maybe certain professions or certain things you allow it or certain cultures, and I think it was up to the companies to make. But making blanket statements, I think either way or, or trying to culture, you know, I think you also create better efficiencies with just quality of life. I mean, you think about many hours, which I have in Austin, traffic going very short distances and how it makes you feel.

And the buildup, right. The buildup of the stress throughout the day and everything else is layered with something else. So like trying to get to home or trying to get a meal or trying to get out, you know, reservation or whatever at a restaurant. All those things build up and it makes that place either likable or, right.

So, if you came here for certain things, you're translating those cities like LA, New York, and they're here. I think those problems are here. It's I think that when it comes down to, meeting the needs and then sort of look, you look at economic direction of both the East and West Coast versus here. And why is that happening?

A lot of that is regulation and a lot of that is market. I think a lot of people will still live in California. And I think you've seen that in the last few years, the uptick in people actually moving back to California, it's because it's got great weather, it's got great people, great everything. Right. Beautiful state. So it's not as though people continue to think with the taxes.

If it's too expensive, if it doesn't meet the needs of the market, people go somewhere else, try something different. And you see that there's been people that have tried Californians who tried to sit down and read that or moved to a different part of the country. Florida, where else to see what else is greener. So, I think that's a great thing because you offer, you know, options for people.

But again, you're not going to take away, I think even with all that crime and aggravation, I don't think you'll take away the, success and the history and the continued future success. So, like integration, technology, startups, how it evolves from San Francisco Bay area, it you're kind of seeing that with, the entertainment industry in California.

It's being pushed again across the country, and different states are taking, big chunks. Everyone from Georgia to Texas to North Carolina, Tennessee, they're all taking, big chunks of Hollywood out because, again, the cost regulation and everything that comes in California. But everybody wants to live in California's beautiful, nice hills. You know, the weather's great, so you're gonna always have something, but Texas and a number of other states are going to be competitive.

I well, for sure. Well, last question. What's your next one? Our robots. Look at that. Like there's definitely I feel like 90% of people I talk to 95 are super comfortable. I but the the 5% are never used it. Oh it's scared of it. So what do you tell those people? I don't think robots are smart enough to take over yet.

But they will, and it will be a different world. But we're going to live in some sort of harmony. You got to think about balance and how technology tend to balance out. Certain aspects of society will change, of course. Right. I don't some kids, but I have friends that have kids and, you know, they go and talk to them and I ask them about social media, and they would rather spend time on cell phones and talk to their parents.

Right. That was the different time my friends forced me to sit around a meal and talked a little about my day on on my wife. It people still need to connect. People still need to communicate. There's different ways of doing it and technologies change that. Are we going to go back now? It's like eating the eating from the fruit of the garden of good and evil.

I wanted to ask, yeah, but does this change your mind completely making space. So when you think about it, you no longer see the world the same way. And that's going to be the same thing with technology. Is it going to be better or worse? I think in the last, like, you know, other than government not working for the last 50 years, technology's improved a lot and it's improved a lot of our lifestyles and a lot of instant, things that we just never thought we could.

We could have you go back centuries ago, right into ancient times and even the greatest king is not living in the same way the average person living right now in modern the modern world, you can go to, you know, countries that are changing, like India or China, integrating technologies. And you can see a, you know, hyper, advanced, electronic car next to a rickshaw and, you know, that just stuck in the 1950s on one end, and then you're 20, 25 on the other end.

And when you see that, you can really see that the future is right around the corner. But we're not all there. It's going to take a lot of time. And that growth is going to be both painful. And a lot of cool things are going to happen. So I think when you look at are the robots going to take over?

Probably, but they already have. I mean, we are addicted to fans. We have a little robot in our pocket and all. We have self-driving cars. We can order anything. I could order stuff on Amazon right now during this conversation. So if you think about how quickly technology has integrated into all aspects of our lives and how our, how society going to change, it's going to change.

But it's always it's just happening quick. Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. You mean by the robots taking over a DoorDash? So that's a little bit more work. Heartwarming. So it has been so great having your child and I would love to, you know, have you talked about how people can find you on your website, but you want to get in touch with yours that come up?

Yeah, yeah, you can they can reach out, call me, text me on my cell. (404) 625-6076. Or they can email me and my and I at Texas Bar Association for you are not holding back their phone number. That is all. Love it both of you and I look forward to seeing you again soon. It's brand.

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Welcome to Bills and Business. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege, where we empower businesses, policymakers and advocates to navigate the complexities of the legislative world with AI. Today, I'm thrilled to welcome Glen Hamer, president CEO of the Texas Association of Business, for Hammer Time. Glen has made it his mission to visit more local chambers of commerce than anyone else in the world.

Fostering connections between small and large businesses and lawmakers from all political backgrounds. Before T.B. Glen spent several years at the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, where he championed efforts on tax reform, education and international trade. He was very instrumental in advocating for the US, Mexico, Canadian agreement and topics that are really in the forefront of today's conversations. On top of all this, Glen's deeply involved in the broader business community, serving on the board of the US Chamber of Commerce, chairing its Committee of 100.

And today, we'll cover everything from proposed tariffs on Mexican, Canadian, Chinese goods to the future of what this all means for the economy. Thank you for coming. Yeah. No. Thank you. Good to be back on. I know we've had so much happen since our last on the first podcast. So, very excited to have you today and talking about, you know, tariffs.

Everyone I was talking about. So get rid of any questions. Just say tariffs. Go, let's see what what goes up. But there's been a lot of change. So thanks for coming up. Well trade is good. Tariffs for North America would would be bad. But very optimistic that the United States, Mexico and Canada work closely together to resolve the issues when it comes to illegal migration and deadly fentanyl coming into the United States.

That was something we can jump right in. And sure, that was something that I was going to bring up today was that those are the main reasons. It seems like President Trump wants to have these tariffs in place. So how what are kind of the maybe unintended consequences or things that you're noticing from this proposal. So President Trump, you know, is going to soon take office again, first for a second administration.

I'll say a few things. One, he does love tariffs. He loves tariffs as a negotiating tool. And he loves tariffs as a way to help get manufacturing back in the United States. President Trump also though cares deeply about the economy and he cares deeply about having a very strong economy where inflation is low and employment is is robust.

So what we believe on the business side is we are always going to take, very seriously any proposal that the president, puts out there. But we're always going to look for ways we could help navigate. Particularly when we all share the same objectives. So, Laura, we all want less illegal migration. We'd like to see more legal migration, but there's never an excuse for a person to cross in between ports of entry.

We all want to see, fentanyl deaths reduced. 75,000 Americans die every year from fentanyl poisoning. But we also all want to see more legal trade. I mean, right now in Texas is far and away the largest export state. We win with trade and the United States-mexico-canada agreement, which was negotiated by the Trump administration and passed with more votes than any other trade agreement in our country's history, except for our first one with this rule, is, as President Trump likes to say, the best trade deal ever negotiated by the United States.

And we want to keep it and we want to build on it. So President Trump announced a 25% proposal of tariffs, on goods from Mexico and Canada. So how do you foresee that impacting Mexico? Canada? We have this great arrangement. And yeah, we have to make sure that that doesn't happen. Simply put, we need to make sure that our friends in Mexico and Canada work with President Trump and his administration to prevent, illegal migration and to do everything possible to, to prevent deadly fentanyl from reaching the United States.

Because the bottom line is we build things together. Now, United States, Mexico and Canada, we have these very complex supply chains where when you think about semiconductors, you think about automobiles and auto parts and you think about consumer electronics, you think about agriculture, you think about avocado toast and what you put on it. We're making all of these things together, not separately.

And one additional quick fact that's interesting to me is that even when we think about exports from Mexico and Canada coming into the United States, usually about 40% of the stuff that Mexico and Canada are exporting into the United States includes parts that were made right here in the US that share for China that number of China's exporting something.

The United States, it's 4%. So it's really completely separate. So the bottom line is we're just building these things together. And and we need to have a strong Mexico and Canada to compete with China and other regions. So we don't want to see the tariffs take effect. And we're going to do everything possible on the business side to work with the business communities and Canada and Mexico to put positive pressure in on the governments of Canada and Mexico.

So they work closely with the the next Trump administration to achieve the objectives of the Trump administration in terms of cutting down illegal migration and deadly fentanyl from coming into the United States, and then to do everything possible to not only keep tariffs from reappearing, but to look for ways to reduce non-tariff barriers. So we have even more integrated supply chains in North America.

What are some of the biggest risks you see to industries and which industries impacted most? You listed a few, but if this were to go into effect, which ones do you see impacted the most? And seeing from I'm just going to say that the manufacturing supply chains, in the automobile sector, in advanced electronics would be severely impacted because let's let's talk quickly about autos.

Oftentimes, you'll have different parts whizzing between the borders of Canada, the United States and Mexico 7 or 8 times. So if you add 25% tariffs, it would anywhere from disrupt to destroy those, supply chains. And Laura, that's not to mention what would happen because Canada and Mexico would retaliate. So they may you know, we have a great we're going to have a great new, secretary of agriculture, Texas, his own Brooke Rollins.

Right. You could probably take it to the bank. That one area where, Canada and Mexico would retaliate is against American Agri. We don't want to see that our farmers would get hurt if Mexico or Canada or any country puts increased tariffs. And. And then you think of the state of Texas, we are the export powerhouse, the United States of America.

We export more than New York and North Carolina combined. So tariffs would really be disruptive to the Texas economy. And we just have to work constructively to make sure that President Trump's objectives in these other areas are met with the partnership of our friends in Mexico and Canada. And we don't see 25% tariffs that would destroy those, supply chains that have been so carefully built.

And, Laura, and this is personal, I started today eating avocado toast. You had a 25% tariff to my avocado toast. I might have to eat something less healthy and think about that with Robert Kennedy. And to make America healthy again, 40 or 50% of our imported produce are fresh blueberries and berries and tomatoes and avocados. They come from Mexico.

And sometimes, just the fresh produce, comes from Canada. Sure. And everything's already, very, very overpriced. So so we talk about inflation, you know, so if you added these tariffs to cars and trucks because so many vehicles, again, with a lot of American US made product comes, from Mexico or Canada, it would mean thousands of dollars more for the autos we and trucks we drive around.

It would mean more for the, fresh fruits and vegetables that we rely on. And we want to keep them affordable and accessible for health reasons as well. So, you know, it would really wallop consumers. It would hurt manufacturers. And again, I were, how to say this, I'm personally very optimistic about the next Trump administration. He has made some outstanding selections when it comes to the economic team.

And we talked about Rick Ross, Brooke Rollins and some of the other Texans. I personally think that the economy, at right before the pandemic hit, after all of the deregulatory and the 2017 Trump Tax Cut and Jobs Act, and you add in the renegotiation of NAFTA, the US Mexico-canada agreement, or during a part of the Trump administration, we had the best economy this country has ever had, record low employment and very low inflation with the team that President Trump's assembling with the right policies.

If we get tariffs right, we get migration right. I'm super excited. We can talk about Doge and what Musk and Ramaswamy will do. Yeah, definitely. This country could have the strongest economy by far it's ever had. And we're going to do everything on the business side. With Texas leading the way to help the president achieve our common vision.

And so it sounds like the business community, a very like minded here. And as the Texas Association of Business, the Texas Chamber, what are what's been your response and how are active? Are you going to be at the federal level? We're going to be super active. Our our top issues are going to be to make sure we keep the US mexico-canada agreement intact.

It comes up for, a review in 2026. We want to build on it. We think that there's things impact on the employment side that can be built on. There's something called ten visas, NAFTA visas for about 60 plus categories of employment, where people from Mexico and Canada could come into the United States and work. One of these areas is engineering.

We know with the advanced manufacturing activity, in the state of Texas, we need more engineers. So let's take advantage of that. I'd say our second issue is going to be make sure we need sensible migration. We understand we don't want people coming into the country, illegally. We want legal migration, but we need it for the Texas economy.

You think about construction, higher tech, we have more jobs open than people to fill them. The third big thing is, we need to make sure the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are extended. Very own Kevin Brady was chairman of Ways and Means when that went through. Probably the most important tax reform that ever happened.

That was under the first Trump administration. If provisions aren't extended, every small business in Texas is probably going to see a tax increase because there's a very important pass through provision and that tax law that expires in 2025. And then I'll add, if I had to add a fourth or fifth thing, we want all the above and below energy.

I think the Trump administration will understand we need every molecule of energy we could get. And then the deregulation side, we know if you reduce regulations on business, if you basically take the Texas model and use that for the United States, our economy will soar. So again, those are the 4 or 5 big ticket items. And I'm optimistic that we're going to be able to align with the administration, even though, you know, from time to time there's going to be eruptions on, on on tariffs or some areas where there may not be perfect immediate alignment.

President Trump's a business guy, and I know he wants this economy to roar again. And we can help working together achieve achieve that objective. True trade is good. Tariffs in North America are bad. We have developed because of the US, Mexico, Canada agreement, the world's most prosperous trading bloc. When you look at Texas in particular, we have one so much because of the certainty of that trade agreement, the US, Mexico, Canada agreement, expertly negotiated by Ambassador Lighthizer and pushed by the Trump administration, every Texas member of the congressional delegation from right to left voted for it.

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So it's a great trade deal. Let's let's build on it. We understand that, you know, the president, is more tariff friendly than most presidents in the last 80 or so years. But we're confident we can navigate that. And there are some areas, you know, where countries are not trading the United States well, and they're not reciprocating our open market where tariffs are appropriate.

But the fact is for Cat in the United States, these are open markets. We're building things together. And let's build on, you know, President Trump says Usmca is the best trade deal ever. We agree. Let's make it even better. Well, one thing, one thing I should have said. It's all working. You know, higher tariffs that were put on China and the Usmca.

What does this mean? More Mexico is now is excuse me, Mexico is now our top trading partner. Canada is our second top trading partner. Canada, our greatest rival from national security and economic security, has slipped to third and is dropping. That's a good thing. That's working. That's a win. So I speak before a lot of Texas chambers and crowds.

No one is upset that China has slipped to the third trading top trading partner in the United States. It is working. So let's build on that success and make our supply chains even more integrated so that we have better jobs in the United States and in Texas. And we could achieve that. Are you a for a 10%, tariff on Chinese imports?

That's something that President Trump also suggested. I think we have to look carefully at that. We do export. Texas exports a lot of hydrocarbons to China. In the past, we've also exported a lot of agricultural goods. We also have some of the most sophisticated semiconductors that might not be able to be exported now for security reasons, but we need to be careful of tariffs.

I will say this. China has not lived up to the deal that President Trump signed, during his first term in office. So if China doesn't live up to its deal, I would say additional tariffs are appropriate. But we need to be careful that we're not harming good Texas and American businesses that are exporting product, to to China.

But it's it's far more justified in, in terms of China, for the US, Mexico, Canada. Let's work together as friends and allies on immigration and illegal drugs. But let's keep the area tariff free. And let's look for ways to even have stronger supply chains so that we have, an easier time competing with China and other regions of the world that are working together.

The EU works together. So we need for the United States. I'm talking America first for America. If if you just care about the United States. And obviously the United States is our core. That's what we care about in Texas. We need, a strong, integrated, North America. And, you know, we're going to do everything we can to, to, to make that case.

And again, it was President Trump that negotiated the US Mexico-canada agreement. And I just give him a tremendous credit for a job extremely well done. Right. And I shifting gears a little, you mentioned Doge in the Department of Economic Efficiency. Elon Musk's role in that Texan. So yeah, I would love to get your thoughts on that. Well, when you look at what, Elon Musk has done, it's it's remarkable.

And he is a Texan and I think it's appropriate to say you also move, you know, from California to Texas. And you look at all of his different companies, whether it's Tesla, The Boring Company, SpaceX is an extraordinarily important company in terms of space and national defense. Neuralink, all these different companies, now X being located in Bastrop, Texas, one of the things that Trump X in that Trump, that Musk has done extremely well is he runs these companies very efficiently and, and he runs them.

Obviously it's the world's richest man, so he runs them successfully. You look at the federal government, it is bloated. And we still have thousands, tens of thousands of federal workers that are not showing up every day. So I'm excited. I think it's a very positive thing that, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are going to be looking across the spectrum and making sure that these positions are warranted.

And, Laura, I think that, there are probably easily tens of thousands of federal employees who, are not really producing much and may actually be getting in the way of private industry that's looking to produce for the economy. So I think that this is going to be the biggest, ever successful effort in our nation's history to cut government waste and to free up the entrepreneurial spirits of the private sector.

That's a really fascinating way to look at it. I know that a lot of people have had concern or worry, especially around D.C., Maryland, Virginia area of this potential layoffs or off. And what do you see as far as any they should be worried. No, seriously. But yeah, I think Rama Swamy has made it clear that any sort of reductions they will they'll will be generous severance packages which which are important.

But we're taxpayers and we have a 34, $35 trillion debt. And the bottom line is for all of these valuable things that we need the federal government to do, like national defense, so that we're a safe country, we have to get government spending under control. And the bureaucracies that have grown up in the D.C. area, are way beyond what was originally envisioned.

So I think there's a few other things that are going on that are going to be important. Congress needs to be much crisper and more aggressive in, in in the legislation it passes, meaning don't just give to unaccountable bureaucratic agencies a charge and let them just build up all sorts of rules and regulations that are far and away beyond probably what Congress envisioned.

Laura, what I'm also excited about is that I am positive that President Trump will put in far better people and, important entities like the Federal Trade Commission, like the Securities and Exchange Commission. Because when you think about the the past and this current administration, the Biden-Harris administration has been the worst administration in the history of the United States in terms of overregulating.

It is sickening. And and what this is done, I'm going to draw a point to, the FEC, who's now going to be the VC. Excuse me, the VC, who's now going to be the VP, and JD Vance, you think about venture capital and entrepreneurial activity. We need to make sure we're going to have a great administration that understands venture capital, that understands entrepreneurial activity, that understands the importance of, growing companies, including heirs, to have opportunities in the open market or to be acquired.

And the bottom line is people like Lina Khan, at the FTC and Gary Gensler at the SEC have been extraordinarily anti VC, anti small business, anti entrepreneurial activity. And I'm excited that the Trump administration is going to come in and put people who, who who get good policy so that our small companies, our entrepreneurial companies can, can grow and don't die because they can't have any sort of liquidity events.

I love that, optimism for the, you know, the workers there in Washington. I think there's a lot of opportunity that comes from this. That's great. Yeah. And, and and you know, I also think that, you know, they're looking, at removing some of the civil service protections for government workers. I think, on the federal level, that's wise.

You know, for those that are performing, they should have a chance to earn more. And for those that aren't performing, just like in the private sector, they should go bye bye. I also, personally, I think the idea of having some of these agencies go outside of the DC Beltway area would be good. I mean, interior probably would belong in a place like, say, Colorado Energy.

Texas is the energy capital. Move it here. You know, so I, I think that this administration is going to be far more disruptive than people understand, but in a very, very positive way. And at a time with a $3,435 trillion debt and a government bureaucracy that is way out of control and that harms the private sector, the job creators, the people that are creating wealth and opportunity for Americans.

This is going to be a terrific reset. I think it's going to be morning in America again. If I had to predict the next, four years. Sure. Hold, as long as we don't go overboard on tariffs, it'll all be dead. Yes. Make sure remember, full, for, Thanksgiving, I went to, Houston, and so was driving back through Bastrop, and we actually did a wrong turn and drove through the Hyperloop, area, huge development.

Couldn't believe how much all The Boring Company and all of that, they're making their own little town. What do you think about all of that innovation and coming to Texas? Coming to Bastrop? Well, it's it's it's it's it's so exciting. And and, you know, we could talk about Musk and all the different companies, but it's, it's it's so much deeper and richer and it's all across the, the state of Texas.

You know, when you think about we can talk about financial services. You know, we're going to have a stock exchange in Dallas. JPMorgan Chase has more jobs in Texas than that in New York. You take a look at, our auto sector and that's, you know, that's GM, it's Toyota. It's it's it's it's obviously Tesla. I mean, it's it's it's growing like crazy.

The energy sector I love talking about this. Yes. We're number one in oil number one and natural gas. And and the next administration will remove that ridiculous LNG liquid liquefied natural gas pores that the Biden-Harris administration put in. But Texas also number one and deployed photovoltaic solar. We're number one in wind. We're doing great in batteries. We have a lot of geothermal opportunities.

We're going to, the governor's, commission that Jimmy felt Lee, expertly headed on nuclear power is going to pave the way for Texas to be a leader on something called small modular reactors, nuclear reactors. So we're going to lead in energy. Laura, we're going to lead in I just an announcement today that, Amazon is going to be developing a big, big AI related, cloud, effort right here in Texas.

So the health care, we have the largest concentration of great health care, services in the Houston area. It's it's the diversity of this economy. Semiconductors, I mean, everything chips, chips, chips. You think about Samsung and TI. We have more manufacturing activity and exports and semiconductors than any other state. So we're winning in energy. We're winning in semiconductors.

We have an incredible health sector, financial sector, ag sector. This is Laura. I mean, the state is just rocking and rolling and I want to just give credit. We have the best economic development governor in the country by far. And and Greg Abbott, he has the most sophisticated economic development team led by Adriana Cruz. And this state sings off the same sheet of music, whether you're economic development corporations, individual companies or chambers of commerce.

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And, you know, this, this state is just going to continue to rocket and well within your lifetime. I don't know if I'll live to make it, but we'll, we'll we'll blow right past California and be the top economy in the country as well as have, the most, number of people, I definitely think in your lifetime. So I'll try to keep eating avocado toast.

Yes. Well, it's an exciting time for Texas. What are some of the top? I mean, you mentioned so many different areas where Texas is just rocking and rolling, but where are the focuses for this legislative session that UTB and the business community are really focused? Well, one of the things we want to make sure we have to make sure we have we continue to have great economic development tools.

You know, we have a great regulatory environment, low tax, no income tax. We have to make sure that our capital intensive economic development tools work well. We also have, an expiring research and development tax credit. We need to get that right. We want to make sure that we're continuing to incentivize research and development and how much R&D is too much.

Well, I, I have these philosophical conversations with my 15 year old daughter. How much chocolate is too much? The answer is there's no amount. That's too much. We want more R&D. So we're part of a robust coalition to make sure we have a good R&D tax credit that gets extended. Laura, we're also going to work on plenty of things with our great universities.

I mean, what's going on in the university side with UT Austin, Texas A&M and our other universities? It's best in the country, our community college system. We're the only state that added 650 million new dollars tied to performance based. It is the best model. So what does that mean? What are community colleges? Earn more. They're providing credentials of value to our to our confidence.

We're going to continue to invest in infrastructure. We're probably going to have a $20 billion surplus. You know, we have a great comptroller and Glenn Hager who expertly manages the state's finances. So we'll invest more in energy and water and broadband and roads and ports. It's and we'll do it in a bipartisan fashion, which is which is sort of refreshing.

Can you talk a little bit more about your role at TRV? What you what you do is what do I do? Yeah. So we're we're the state chamber of commerce. So what we we do is in addition to our 12 1300 direct members, we work very closely with 250 great chambers of commerce, throughout the state. And Meghan Morrow, who leads all of our legislative efforts, does a phenomenal job of bringing these chambers together behind a common business agenda.

So when we talk about things like the R&D tax credit or additional funds for community colleges tied to credentials of value that our employers need, Megan is really the one who who brings these different organizations together all across Texas so that we have, a united front when we go to the legislature. And, Laura, when the chamber community is united, it it we tend to do very well.

And the reason why is we have great legislators, both sides of the aisle, who care about their chambers, who care deeply about keeping Texas as the best state for jobs. So, you know, our our job is to make sure that we keep the Texas, miracle, going. Absolutely. That's awesome. Yeah, you do a lot. And your team, Megan, shout out to all of all your team have awesome group.

And our tech means business platform, which Megan also runs, which has over 100 major tech companies and chambers and those really interested in making sure we get privacy legislation and AI legislation. Right. I do want to say, and particularly given your business with Tech Sledge I, which we love, which everyone should have, is it is the best, most sophisticated tool on the market by far.

We need to make sure that our regulatory environment is light and right. And I just want to commend President Trump for saying he's going to rescind, President Biden's, overbearing executive order on AI. It's very clear that this incoming administration, Trump administration, is going to be have a very light regulatory touch when it comes to AI, because the United States has to make sure that our private sector has, the flexibility it needs for the United States to be the leader of AI.

We cannot let China be the leader. And if we overregulate, we're at risk of harming our national security and our economic competitiveness. And I'm also going to say we're thrilled that, Senator Ted Cruz is likely to be in the next Senate Commerce chair, the Senate Commerce, US Senate, Commerce overseas, 40% of the US economy, including AI, including space, including transportation, the FAA and Senator Cruz has made it clear in some of the writings that he's put out that he supports a a more, open situation and less regulatory, heavy, approach when it comes to AI.

We have to get this policy right. And while there certainly will need to be some guardrails and rules of the road, we need to make sure that the private sector can do what it needs to keep the United States on top, and we can unleash AI for a lot of good uses, whether it's to cut government waste or more efficient health care.

We're we're confident that the private sector responsibly could make sure that, we lead the world in AI. And, Laura, we want to make sure Texas leads the United States when it comes to AI. Deployment. We're well on our way to doing that, so it's an exciting time. Overall, do you think that the consensus from the business community is optimistic for this new presidential administration?

Extremely optimistic. Yeah. Again, there's some areas there's always going to be turbulence. Like I don't always agree with myself on 100% of stuff. You know it's just we're always conflicted. But this is why we should be very optimistic. We have it now. It's a unified government. It's a pro-business Senate. It's a pro-business United States House of Representatives. And it's and it's an administration that folk is focusing on jobs, jobs, jobs and and also, you think about Texas, that they understand the importance of energy production.

They understand, the international competitiveness landscape. And I'm also going to give President Trump a ton of credit for recognizing the economic and military threat of China. Before his administration, there was a consensus that China was basically a benign country that did not threaten the United States from an economic or national security standpoint. He changed that.

And to the credit, the Biden administration, they continue those policies. So one other area I want to point out where I'm extremely optimistic. If you look at the Middle East, one of the things President Trump and his team deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for the Abraham Accords. It's the most important thing that's happened in the Middle East in 50 or 60 years.

And the Abraham Accords with it. What it did is basically it took Israel and 4 or 5 key countries in the Middle East, most importantly for the agreements, the UAE and IT. And it created a dynamic where there would be a warm peace, where it wouldn't just be not being at war, but actually trading. And I'm going to tell you exactly what's going to happen within the first year or two of the Trump administration.

Saudi Arabia is going to join the Abraham Accords, and the Middle East is going to become one of the more stable and prosperous regions on the planet. So the Trump administration is going to build on the great success of the Abraham Accords, bring Saudi Arabia in, and we're going to have a much more peaceful and prosperous Middle East and by extension, a safer world.

So there's a lot of reasons to be, optimistic. That's great. Dean. Glenn, we we covered a ton of areas today. Is there anything else you'd love to discuss before we wrap? We're we're just it's a great blessing to be in the state of Texas when all of this is going on. Right now, we have you. I used to say we have the strongest economy, in the country, and every fact bears that out from all the economic development awards, the most jobs created.

But then you look at the fact that now we're, a $2.6 trillion economy or we're the strongest economy on the planet. When you take a look at the growth of our GDP and our jobs. But now that space is going to be headquartered in the state of Texas, I like to say we have the strongest economy in the galaxy, in the galaxy.

So let's just keep it. Let's keep it going. The Texas Way is a great model nationally. And, you know, we're just, blessed to be in the state of Texas and and we're in, we're in the land of opportunity and honored to run the state chamber of commerce. I love it. Yeah. We're so happy to be here as a business.

It's such a friendly state for for us. So thank you so much for joining us, Glenn. And then you tell everyone your handles so they can go follow you on all of your adventures. Yeah. So my daughters know that I do something. I'm on Instagram, which is Glenn Hamer, Glenn Miller, same same Onex and just my name. I do a lot on LinkedIn.

Glenn Hammer, just two ns and Glenn one man and hammer. And that's pretty much what I do across the, social media spectrum. Wonderful. I love to play on, hammer time. So we will name this episode Hammer Time as well. And thank you. Thank you again for joining. I'm excited to hear your thoughts in the New year.

Always an honor to be on the show and look forward to being back on. Thank you Laura. Thank you. Very nice.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business, the show where we dive deep into the world of policy politics with the people who make it all happen. I'm Laura Carr, your host. And today we have two special guests who are working behind the scenes to shape the future of Texas. Joining us together are Laura Stowe and Christina Masters. Christina is the chief of staff for state rep Claudia Ordaz of El Paso.

She served as a Capitol staffer for three sessions and was previously at the Austin City Council, where Stowe is chief of staff to Senator Angela Paxton. The Senate District eight is an Austin native. Trinity University grad active in state government in 2008. She discovered her passion for the legislative process at a state agency. Today, we'll explore their unique perspectives from both House and Senate and discusses upcoming legislative session, gaining valuable insights into how advocacy and collaboration work in Texas politics.

So grab your coffee, settle in, and get ready for a conversation you don't want to miss. Okay, well, thank you so much for coming on the Bills and Business podcast. I'm so excited to talk to Christina and Laura here today a little bit more about, this legislative session and how they like to be communicated with with advocacy groups, lobbyists, all the above.

And we've got both parties represented today and both state Senate and House chambers. So, thank you so much for joining today ladies. I'm happy to be here with my favorite Laura’s. Laura squared love Christina working with her.

Laura squared I love it. Well, ladies, for those that don't know you, you want to share just a little bit about your background, how you became chief of staff in the House and Senate. Yeah, I'll go first. I started my career outside the building, and it was a lot of jobs where I had to ask for help.

Which being an advocate and working inside the building was really intimidating. And sometimes you don't understand why things happen the way that they do, or why something is going really slowly, or why and meeting just felt really off and unsuccessful. And I kind of got to a point in my career where I said, I want to be on the other side of the desk here, and I want to be providing help and me.

And it gave me a completely different perspective of what other people are experiencing coming in and what it's like internally, like what red tape or bureaucracy or politics are delaying sometimes good policies, or sometimes stopping bad policies. And it has given me a totally different perspective. And I've been, I've completed three sessions, in the Capitol.

I worked for representatives on Howard and Austin, and then I have done two sessions with Representatives Claudia or Dijon and Hasso. I also got to work on the local government level with masters and council member. So it's been great. I love government service. It's, really fulfilling and satisfying to me to be able to help people.

And it's it's a really cool, fun, frustrating place to be. But I love the people that I live there, and I love being able to, you know, be helpful and, you know, help us all kind of the ideals of government service of like the good jobs that, that people want to offer to them. I love that great.

And Laura. How did you get to the chair now? Well, it was, several years ago that, I was at a state agency. I've been, a long time state employee, and I've worked for four different agencies, but, got to do the fiscal notes and kind of fell in love with that process and procedures and, and wanted to, to get more involved.

And so, first worked in government relations and 84th session and at 85th as well as an agency. And, Senator Paxton was going to run. I was really excited. And so I got to help someone with that campaign. And, so I've been working in her office since 2019 and just been really blessed to, to get to know that district.

And we just had some amazing constituents and just, being able to support the senator. Like Christina said, it's very fulfilling and kind of being in that position to, to make sense of it all for, for those on the outside is it's just a great feeling. And, just enjoy enjoy the people. And the process and y'all are two people that I, that I greatly enjoy and so happy to, to be able to to speak with you today.

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I love it. Yes. We, very fun time last session all together. So it's been great having those colleagues. And I know it's this time right now is, you know, bill filings began a couple of weeks back. And how would you say this time differs from the start of session for you in your office, in your day to day?

What, what do those days look like now and then in session? How do they take shared? Sure. So it's been it's been pretty busy. It hasn't felt like we had much of an inner. So we're kind of just all racing to the session, trying to get our bill drives, trying to meet with as many stakeholders as we can and, and get get our legislation in the best position possible.

But we're running out of time. There's not enough time in the day to get everything accomplished, to be to be honest. And the volume is is high with was meeting request and I think that will continue in this session. And so just kind of managing and prioritizing kind of the urgent and important is really important. But it'll be I think, a very fast and furious session for sure.

That I hope it's fast. It's fast here. We've, we've been under the understanding that no matter what leadership we have on the House, I that work is going to be going sooner, which I am actually really excited about. That is something, I feel like there's this lag time where you have so much energy and you really want to start being productive.

And so I love that we may be starting work a little bit earlier. Somebody is going to be coaching me for saying about it. But I'm excited for that. I also have had the same feeling we were talking about this earlier. That with all the bills that have been filed so far, I think that there's just been a lot more lobby energy and advocacy energy than I've seen in the past.

At this time, usually once we start heading toward Thanksgiving, things are pretty quiet, but I felt that they've really been picking up. People are still asking me for meetings next week and then answer questions for me. And, I'm glad for that because I feel like there's a lot of work to do, and I feel the, you know, the countdown for coming, before the session starts and I want to meet with everybody to I want to feel like we're in a really good place.

And so many people have really great ideas right now, and I'm just feeling so much more energy, than than last session. I definitely feel like it shifted a lot. Yeah, I definitely feel the same in my role. Obviously a lot of my partners are in the lobby world or advocacy world. So when they're working, we're working and there are a lot of, over the weekend meetings that we had and, people are excited and buzzing and busy and rumors of just even more bills than ever filed this session.

So we'll see. What kind of does that typical day look like in session for you, or is there a typical day, a day all different? I think that's one thing we have in common. No day is the same, you know, and the Capitol and, and the different offices. But, it's just very it's just very busy day.

And I try to explain this for I'm sure you've been interviewing, you know, for the winter office that's, you know, very standard question that we get asked by them. And I'm like, it depends on the month. It depends on the week, because we have so many deadlines that it means our priorities are shifting all the time. When we think about, you know, for the viewers of your podcast, when is the time to build relationships?

It's now and it's the beginning of January. If you haven't already started, you're behind. And it's I would say we really start picking up and we're, we're deep into bills and committee hearings, you know, mid-February. So you have between now and then to really get on our radar, I start I start getting phase blind by the time we have made.

So if you've met with me for, you know, three minutes one time in February, and then you're back again in May to talk about the same bill that's now maybe hit the floor. I've probably forgotten you. Like we need so many people that if you really want to build relationships with office right now, when my brain is still able to make connections, is the time to do it.

If you know there's going to be an issue that you know is close to our hearts in our office, or is going to be on our committee, now is the time to talk to me about it so I can have better memory retention than I will at the end of April or beginning of May. You know, by the time when it's time for the like the last week of May, I might come and to somewhere right and barely functioning.

So this is really the time to to do meet and greet and start building those relationships, which I think a lot of a lot of folks have. And I think they've done a good job of kind of getting in and meeting the new staff, because that's the other thing is we have a lot of new staff that comes on board right before session, during session.

And you know what I tell staff that I said is, you know, January, February, kind of get your bearings. And then by by March, I mean, we're hitting the committees hard. We, April and May on the floor. And so it's kind of just, a marathon to keep, keep pushing through. But, it is a unique place and, blessed to be here.

It's definitely fun. I think the the record for me was like nine. I met with nine advocates and lobbyists in a day last session, and I just remember having this giant stack of cards on my desk and thinking, wow, we saw. And it was all in different topics, and it's a very unique and fun place. What would you say is the biggest differentiator from somebody who, advocates, advocates and, lobbies effectively to you what makes them a good lobbyist?

Honesty is the most important thing to me. I have, if people are giving me the punches and minuses of their bill, thank you so much for doing that, because I'm always going to ask you, okay, who opposes your bill? Because I do. I talk to both sides on pretty much I mean, on every issue. I try to get one thing from everybody on both sides, and I really appreciate honesty from lobbyists.

I have had some meetings where, a lobbyist, you know, in front of their client told me that the chair of a committee was, you know, supporting their bill. And then I called the clerk of that committee, and they have, you know, called the person a liar. And I you know, that that is awful for the client and for me, it puts me in an uncomfortable position.

So the next time you're following up with me, because I can't trust you. And so, really, honesty is so important to me. And I would also say, come with me. Give me a one pager, and then send it to me electronically afterwards, because I want to refer to what you're talking about in that moment. But also I do keep all of our one pagers and we upload it into our elements and again, it's like a management system.

So if I don't have to go in and take that piece of paper ID and scan a double sided piece of paper and upload it somewhere, if you've already sent it to me in a file that makes that gets out a ton of stamps and save some time. So I love both things. And I know that lobbyists will probably hate that, but in-person visits are honestly the best.

And if you can send me a text or email and just ask for those 15 minutes, I will do my darndest to give it to you, because it is the most effective for me and somebody who likes to see things and touch things and be able to ask questions interactively. We want to say that a phone call or I might have something else going on in that moment, or a text message.

Sometimes they're just not great. They don't feel very interactive. And I do like to ask questions if I have that opportunity. So, unfortunately lobbyists. Yeah, that those 15 minutes I like and I like when they come to my office and have a conversation with me, I always appreciate that. But one feature is incredibly important because, again, you can be giving it to me now and I might not need it for a couple of weeks, but I love having something to be able to give a what.

I agree with all of the above. And I often ask, you know, could you send that to me? And that's much appreciated. Because there is there's just a lot going on and it may just be something I need to share with another staff member. Or like you said, check in with the committee, make sure that's the case.

But transparency is just, essential. And just having that trust, goes a really long way. We might not agree on everything all the time. Or, you know, there may be, you know, things that come up where we just can't move forward with that bill, but at least I know know what those hiccups are. And if I see it later, you know, maybe something that can be resolved in the future.

So, I really appreciate people that that do that and come prepared. And like you said, you know, being able to ask questions and, and sometimes there's a lot of nuances. And so oftentimes will they'll get back to you pretty quickly with that, precise information. And then you can, you can save that for your records. So that's all of the things, the all those things.

Yeah. I'm really sorry, but yeah, if you want to be like top tier echelon lobbyist, you have to do everything. But there are people out there who are hustlers and they are doing that. And so if you're coming to me, you know, if you're just texting me about a bill versus somebody who spent those 15 minutes with me and gave you a one pager on it, I have so much more information from that person, and it's going to be lopsided.

And there are lobbyists out there that are doing a really just all of that and, that they are going to have a bigger impact. You both mentioned in person meetings are critical. Do you think that kind of those personal relationships outside of session are important? And or do they have impact in how you work through session with them at all?

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I'd say definitely. I mean, there's there's been many times where these, these lobbyists are the experts have been around a really long time. And I'll often, you know, as their opinion on something that's coming through that may not be our bill, but could be, tangential to something we're working on and something the lobbyist is working on and just kind of building that kind of relationship and trust that we talked about before.

I mean, that's that's who I'm going to ask, right? I'm going to ask somebody that I have a good rapport with. But the, I know what what they tell me is that is the truth and nothing but the truth. So that there and I will say, there's so many like she was saying, there's so many lobbyists that are just killing and doing amazing work and, really respect what they do.

They don't always get the best wraps wrap. So I will say in Texas, anyway, I think we have some very fine lobbyists that that are doing great work. Absolutely. I, I love not only, you know, we kind of have a reciprocal relationship in in certain ways. They're coming to ask and they're asking for us to talk to our bosses about a bill, or even if it's a final bill or whatever it is.

But I use lobbyists expertise and their connections all the time. I will touch somebody and say, do you have this person's number? Who's the expert in this area? And it is really nice to have already have built a relationship with somebody who is well-connected and is happy to help you, happy to send a number over or make an introduction for you, because we're putting ourselves in vulnerable situations, too.

Sometimes, and we're having to kind of blindly email people, and maybe try end up trying to learn something about an area we don't know a lot about. And so that's also vulnerable. And so when I have good relationships with, with lobbyists and advocate, I really appreciate the people that I know that I can trust and feel comfortable to help me with the things that I need help with.

And so I do my job at a small, for sure, mentioned communication styles as well. You know, in May everything is up in the air and in crazy time in Texas. But what's your preferred communication method with anybody on the outside trying to contact you during session? Is it email? Is it a text or is it just flagging you down the hallway?

What's an appropriate combination? I prefer email just to kind of set up, set up that in-person meeting just to make sure that I'm available, you know, to meet with them, if it's urgent. And I always tell people, call me call or text, but I prefer email to just kind of have that running chain going, and that I don't know if you feel similarly.

I think it kind of just depends on what that communication is like. The, the urgency of it. Yeah. I think like drop ins are kind of hard sometimes. Sometimes I've got like, I'm, I'm having a good conversation with somebody and somebody else drops it and it can get a little bit overwhelming to, to try to juggle everybody. Our bosses are really on the floor and lobbyists know that.

So it kind of also this means a lot to to take a lot of meetings. Yeah. And just sending a quick text to me and asking can I drop in for a 15 minutes? I appreciate that so much. Emails, I appreciate it with if we've had a good conversation and I then get an email summarizing what we just talked about, that is the best.

Because I can't remember all the details sometimes. Yeah. And yes, we only have 15 minutes with you and I, about 15 minutes and another 15 minutes. And it's hard to keep details straight sometimes. So I love a summary email without having a full on page attachment. And I would say even for right now, the things that are the most helpful, I think a general philosophy is to come to us with, specific suggestions rather than just complaints.

When people come and they say, you know, the foster care system needs to be fixed, I want to know how specifically what kind of legislation specifically, it would be really helpful. And so when lobbyists or advocates come prepared, we need a bill that does XYZ. I believe that is so much more effective of a 15 minute meeting than just telling me something is broken.

And if you're an expert or you're being paid by an expert to represent them, I want really solid ideas. And that is going to make our meeting, and our relationship go a lot easier, I think, and be more more effective and productive very much. I agree with that. Suggestions, are very helpful during session. And so it gets really busy.

And like she said, if they're an expert then please let us know. And you know, we can also vet that language through, our own channels. But but yeah, that is very much appreciated. Okay, so you mentioned coming prepared with the documents. How much is too much? Do you want a full bill packet with talking points, one page or an amendment.

What is your preferred method of that? Do you want to do that yourself, or would you like a lobbyist to come prepared with all that information? The more the merrier for me. I don't need, you know, 50 page spelled out reports and, you know, put that give give me that link so I can click on it.

We don't need to kill more trees or, like, kill your back. I'm going to backpack all these reports around. I tell you, like a one pager. If you've got suggested language that you know of an amendment or whatever it is that you'd like, that's wonderful. I've had some lobbyists even be incredibly helpful if they've come to me, pitched a bill to me, and they've given me suggestive language, all the things are like, I will hope you know, right here you'll be.

And I, for example, do you need suggested language for that in your systems, with your questions, with that, and if I can run something by them, it makes me more confident in what I'm doing, what I'm writing to have a second set of eyes. As a chief, I don't always have a second set of eyes. To be able to do all the writing, that it is a little quieter to do.

So the more offers of help and, to get something right, I more I would agree with that. I think, more, you know, information is helpful, I think for the reports and stuff like that. Just kind of having a week a give you have a PDF that has that ability to just have that link is really helpful.

And I think I, I really appreciate like if you're referencing like an old agency report or, a survey or study, that's helpful in pushing this bill and, and, and having that link, like you said, is, is really helpful. And I don't need a giant packet. But you know, anything that you give us is, as time saved and we can kind of go in and hone in and make sure that it's reflective of how our boss would, would want it to, to sound like.

But, and in this instance, more is better. Yeah. Do you think that most lobbyists or cognizant of your boss's priorities and thoughts and factor that in they're pitching essentially to me, I think that they, you know, they spend a lot of time watching, just like we do the floor and and having a lot of, you know, candid conversations with our bosses, even sometimes where we might not be be around.

So they I think they do have a good sense. You know what what our bosses are kind of looking at. And so, and I will say that that's a successful pitch is like when you're kind of aligning it already with her priorities. It's, it's super helpful, to, to have that already done. But yeah, I think that they do in my, and my, opinion and what is what are your thoughts.

Yeah. I had a great meeting the other day with someone who came prepared and they had print out it was an author's, tongue commissioner, and they had printed out district information. And, you know, in parts of, you know, the wait list for childcare, for daycare facilities for every member's district. So I had a very specific snapshot of what my boss's district was like.

And I haven't seen a ton of people do that. And when they do that, that's great. I love to have that. And then on the flip side, I want to see the Texas overview. I want both things. And so I know this is helpful, but am I going to see a snapshot of what the small problem is when there's also the larger problem.

So I do like both things. But I love when people have done something that is district specific, because if I give my boss something that is Texas all she will always ask me about once the El Paso perspective on that, is is a disproportional out here, there's a disproportionately high or low. And so I love when people have come prepared, you know, knowing what my boss is going to want to see, which is why, and see what's going on in her district.

I would say sometimes, you know, for a less effective meeting, I feel like lobbyists know this, but sometimes they're also rallying, you know, X day, you know, a certain, you know, it's it's childcare day or whatever. And they're bringing in a group of ten people and let's say, which is understandable, somebody who may not travel nine hours from El Paso until they've pulled in, some people from Fort Worth or Houston or wherever.

And so hitting up all the members on my committee, sometimes those folks come in and they just are clueless. They don't they don't know what's going on in the house, and they can only kind of pitch me what's happening in their community. And that's fine, too. And I love when those people are, you know, have you still got an overview of bullet points of of what's important?

You can still give me that really good quality 15 minute pitch. On why something is important. I think sometimes we get those larger groups, don't come in and are not sure how to have an effective meeting with them off others, whether it's, you know, they're locally represented or from somewhere else. Yeah. And I really appreciate when those people are really well trained on their own pictures.

I think sometimes they might get a candidate that morning and they don't actually know what it means. And if you try to ask any questions that are kind of dumbfounded about it and, you know, unfortunately those are not great meetings and I feel bad for them for having traveled all the way. And I feel like I haven't learned anything.

And it's got to be kind of defeating for them to. And so I really appreciate when lobbyist I really talk to some of these groups that they're representing. When a successful meeting looks like, one of the points that you want to hear and be able to give them some background information so they can kind of respond to me when I've got questions I try not to like really need a little concern, certainly, but sometimes they they're not really sure what the bills are advocating for my contact.

It's really hard. And then, you know, you kind of feel like if instead some time I've, I've had some groups ask me, to be on a panel of, of staff to talk about these things and train advocate, find like what a successful meeting looks like. I'm always going to do to do that. So, yeah, I think that, like, you know, people who are in the building every day, you know, know these things and, you know, just being cognizant of people who are not who don't even have a day.

If you're working with a group like that to give them some training, to not let them go. Okay. So is there a time that either of you had where you have completely changed your mind on a topic from meeting, I definitely faced this assumption. I would have new lobbyists come in and there would be a topic that I never even read anything about, and I then, you know, got five different perspectives that day in my actual opinion on that change.

And have you guys faced that at all in these crazy times? I think maybe perspective is broadened based on the meetings. I don't know if I've ever had just like a complete shift. But I definitely appreciate hearing kind of, all sides of it. And you all, and that and that helps us when we're, you know, on the floor and, you know, people are asking different questions.

And, so I think that is really helpful. But no, I don't think I've ever I don't know if anyone's ever seen maybe this session does this, we have to be kind of jewels of all trades in our in our world, you don't get to be experts. A lot of the times on what we're doing. And, yeah, we have to wear so many different hats on so many different policy topics.

Like what you mentioned. Having eight meetings on a topic is kind of a normal thing, and we can't be experts on everything. And I have definitely had times where, you know, especially in an area maybe was not, as informed about that. I've had somebody come in and give me the perspective and I said, yeah, that'll make sense.

I can understand that. And then I've had somebody come in the next day and give me a completely different angle of how a bill is going to impact a group that I didn't even consider would be impacted by a bill. They're like, ooh. And when I have those kind of moments and I'm not sure what I, what I want to recommend to my boss, I will take those beautiful one pagers.

I'll put both on there and I will, you know, kind of call other officers out on that committee. And we were able to have more information than maybe what I got. And I will also recommend to my boss, go talk to this representative who is a subject matter expert. You know, maybe it's a family law issue or a veterinarian issue.

You know, go talk to that expert who's already on the floor and has dug into this and get their opinion, because I'm a little bit stuck out here to recommend here. And that's a good point. As we we have such varied offense or, you know, House members and Senate members that have their own lane of expertise. And so same, you know, just kind of being able to point them.

And that to the right member to kind of talk those different perspectives out is super helpful. So we're we're blessed to have, you know, so many, you know, various professions that are all represented and, and one don't the reason people do it, they want to change your mind. Right? A lot of times they want you to continue on the path you're on.

Sometimes they want to completely change your mind. So what would you say is the most persuasive, tool? Is it the data? Is it, you know, having that relationship and being a convincing, you know, speaker, what do you think is the most convincing and persuasive, for you? I think what we talked to me and I agree with what we talked about earlier, is just kind of that transparency and giving us the pros and cons, because, you know, it's great to be persuasive when you're, you know, doing talking points, but but just talking candidly, I don't necessarily want to be persuaded.

I just kind of want to know as much as possible about the subject, I would think, and what those effects could be and who, you know, who's the best folks to include in on this conversation and gets stakeholders together? Maybe. But I think, another book version frequency in that. Love it. Absolutely. If something is going to be harmful to a specific community, that is a red flag for me on any level, and I will always give that to my boss.

Even if I think kind of the good outweighs the bad in a certain way sometimes. Yeah, I've gotten a bill and it's like, well, you know, this is going to be bad for this group and this is going to be good for this group. And if you don't partake in this, then that same group, you know, flip side and you're kind of like, okay, I will donate to support this group in this group.

But it could be, like it can be some really strange positions. You find your soul, you know, you don't really if you're not thinking about day to day, but is very impactful for maybe these two groups of people. So it can be, can be like harm mitigation sometimes it is it is such a, it's such a strange space to be in.

And so you think we have like a, like a red, yellow, green light system of the way that we send over our recommendations. And we got some yellows in there. Right. And it's kind of either like a vote your conscience or as I said, go talk to this person about it. And I have I will be honest and put a yellow down if I, if I'm really kind of stuck on something and I will, I will put my perspective.

In there for my boss. It can be it can be tricky. And I don't know that how she makes up her mind at that point. I think she goes and she has a lot of conversations to, you know, we all kind of get our reports on all sides and she'll take all the information she has and, and vote and do the vote.

But they don't always have as much time as that, you know, to make those decisions. So I think sometimes people think they need to go directly to the member every time. Which staff are actually I think we have a lot more, input than they can. They realize sometimes for sure. I think a lot of people on the outside of things sometimes don't realize how bipartisan.

Actually, most bills do pass. In both chambers and very smoothly through the process and agreed on by both sides. So how has it, how does it differ when you're having somebody who advocate to you more for a bipartisan type of legislation? Does that change how they, communicate with you? Do you think?

I always look at one of the things I do, I always look up at committee vote and I'll see. I mean, as you say, most of the times it passes easier or whatnot through the committee. If I see there's a dissenter to go in and look out for who that is, and I'll ask them why they dissented. If it's something that's not really clear to me.

So I always check that out. I feel like that's kind of a red flag, because it is so common for everything to go through committee really easily. And if I see you decide if I if a staffer can't tell me why or without on the witness list who is opposed to something and reach out to them. Because you do have so many options in this.

Yeah, I think, I think that's one of the beautiful things about the Texas legislature is there are so many bills that they go across with support on, you know, on all sides. And, it really honestly makes things move more quickly. I think, you know, the bills that, just filled a lot of, you know, pushing the ball in the right direction and that we kind of all agree on, is really key.

I don't, I don't I don't know if I've noticed them approaching it completely different. I do think sometimes they will say like, oh, this person voted against it because of all along. So I mean, that's helpful, right? It's helpful to know, you know, a little more background and there's just as we talked about this limited time.

So I think, important thing that, you know, the lobbyists do bring is kind of they talk to more offices and I will never have time to talk to. So I appreciate kind of getting that feedback on, you know, I talked to this office and they they had these concerns or they were really excited about this bill. And so that's helpful to know.

And then, you know, it could be bipartisan that their timing and different, you know, parties office or not. And either way, I find it, really helpful. Laura, such a good point. How much more mobile was lobbyist are than we are? We are stuck behind our desks or sitting at a meeting tables so much. And when they are able to kind of freely move about the building than we are, it can be a huge asset for us to, you know, to help sell some of the bill that they asked us to, you know, that that they ask for help with or whatnot, for them to be able to, to engage from, from other

offices, you know, did you know that that that this office is really, you know, selling out childcare this session? And Bob's has gotten really into it and had a really, really great tour of a daycare, and he wants to get involved and wants to help. And wow, that information is really helpful. You know, we I feel like I don't right now we get to move around the line to get to me and talk to a lot of people.

But I feel so just talking to my office staff in such a more than I would like to be. And so it's really nice when, lobbyists can kind of help share information and make connections. That's a final words of advice, to lobbyists out there to make sure they retain, you know, credibility and trust in any of that.

You know, I heard, somebody asked an interesting question in a group I was in the other day. It was because they first we were talking to lobbyists about how to better engage with us and, how we can engage with them better. So. And somebody said how, you know, I feel like lobbyists will, you know, take us for coffee or, you know, do nice things for us.

How can we thank lobbyists for the work that they're doing? And the response was, tell our boss or our client that we're doing a good job. That is like the best thing that you can that you can do in this person's mind. And I thought that is such a great response, and it's so true. And it's also true.

On the flip side, you know, if I you know, it's so get we don't get you know, this is and I think this is a thankless job by any means. But we interact with so many people and you know, we can get yelled at a lot or just our time can be abused a lot and we can't really burns out too.

And if if a lobbyist wants to show you that they're gleeful, that is also for us. I think the best thing that they can do is go tell my boss if they think that I'm doing a good job, go tell other people that they think I'm a good staffer to work with. You know, reputation is everything in this culture, and it is everything while you're working in the building.

And everything. If you want to transition out of the building, that is so vital for us. And I think that, you know, both both sides are true. If you think I'm doing a good job, please tell someone you can take a good job. If it's a free thing you can do. And, it really goes a long way.

And, you know, we can you can keep me going for like, a whole day. If somebody like, gives me a compliment like that. I really appreciate when people tell me that they think I'm doing a good job or that they appreciate my time, I you it's about. Yeah. I really appreciate you sharing that. It's that's, interesting to know.

I mean, I'm not surprised, but that's, that's a great way to kind of reciprocate that, that relationship that you built. And, we're all kind of here in the trenches together. And, as much as we can all kind of, work in tandem and kind of work together and, be supportive of, like, yeah, you're. And I'll tell anyone that I know the question is great to work with Lauren.

Good to hear you. That's like that's like such a you don't think about it as being something that's not important. But you're right. Like there's really long days. And if someone said, oh, I had really good things with you. Oh that does that does feel good. Especially today. That helps. That helps right today. So, I really appreciate you sharing that.

Everybody knows everybody in this room. So reputation is stability. And so I'm shifting gears a little bit. What would you say is the hardest thing to keep up with during the legislative session for each of you. And I know it may be different each, chamber as well. Just, to me it's like getting the pace, like getting, getting, getting ready for that.

I think we're kind of. And one in some respects in a good position because things have been, like you said, there's just been a lot more movement this session. We've got 65% more bills file this session than last session. So we and the volume to me is, I think what's going to be, a challenge, to kind of move, make sure that everything that we want to move is moving and keeping track of all the other balls that are moving is, I think it's a, it's a lot.

And then just kind of the time management, to me, it's like the urgent and the important and trying to make sure everything gets, gets done. And I think you probably feel similarly that it's it kind of just hits all at once. And one day you're just like, oh, wow. Well, your session has officially begun. Well, we all need, you know, if, if in the past, honestly, it's going to be different this time around.

And, if we filed around 7000 bills ish, you know, during the session, we passed like one 1200 ish, and all those numbers are going to be totally different aspects this session. But it gets overwhelming at the volume, the breadth and depth of some of these bills is a lot. You know, we had some incredibly important bills, you know, like public education, finance, HB three of a few sessions ago.

You know, I think about this huge omnibus bills that are so detailed and has so much information in it, versus, you know, some of these other smaller bills and they're all hitting the floor and sometimes the same day, and it can be very overwhelming to, keep pace with the number of bills that are hitting the floor that are important.

And everybody, you know, they all start hitting their deadlines to lobbyists start recognizing, oh, we're down to a few days or my bill is dead. And so everybody's urgency is probably in different places. I think right now it's more like, okay, we're waiting for all of our drafts to come back. I saw that I'm missing so many jobs that I want to file for council.

And I think, it just to the mountains and, the firehose of bills that it's coming through and the things that are so important to other people sometimes are a little more backbreaking for me in moments. And I, I feel bad and I can't, like, be 100% present for a meeting when I've got a million other things going on.

And so that always is like a guilty party for me in those moments. Okay, ladies, a couple last, last columns here. What are your biggest challenges that you're seeing, for yourselves in your offices coming up this session? I think, as we said again, ten times the number of bills, and then you're going to be a lot to pull through.

I would also say, you know, there is I wish there's a little more clarity from leadership in the House, you know, a little more direction of what we're going to be doing. And I think we have some larger issues that we can expect coming down the pipeline, but there's still kind of a lot of uncertainty, at least, from where I'm sitting.

So it's kind of hard to know. I kind of never think that any two sessions are the same. And any predictions, that people have had, I think I've always been wrong, especially my own predictions. So I stopped doing that. And every, every session has a little bit of a different challenge, a little bit of a different flavor to it.

So it's kind of fun to know exactly what to expect. Expect the unexpected. I said, that's exactly what I was going to say. It's like, that's kind of the, if there was a motto for a session, then for. For what? To, as soon as you think you know it's going to happen, it will, will change.

So, yeah, I think the like you said, the biggest challenge is just kind of keeping up with such a heavy volume and just there's so many big issues and needs to be met in Texas. We were so blessed with, a lot of great natural resources and amazing, you know, talent and professionals here. But there's definitely some gaps that that have been brought to light.

So, tackling all the inner, hearings was, was chat was a challenge in the Senate. And then we were we're just kind of concluding those and those reports will go out, but there's just a lot to get done. So I think, just kind of managing our time because we are constrained to that 140 days. So, I think time constraints, will be a challenge.

Absolutely. Any pieces of advice to anybody looking to get in a position like yours?

Are, you know, there are some real hustlers that I have seen in my time. There have been folks who have, like, print out their resume years and essentially gone door to door. And I've been in offices that I've been private that person because you get to meet them immediately face to face and then out there hustling.

And I love that, even one of the people that I hired was a nanny for somebody who works in the building and said, you should go door to door, and that's that's what she did as well. And then how she and the framing for the building and so kind of love those unexpected touches. And if somebody, you know, I think a lot of positions are getting filled right now, unfortunately.

So if you're thinking about working here in January, either you know, on an internship level or, a more traditional level, get out there immediately. Because I think a lot of offices and hopefully not reach out to a freshman office, they don't swear in until January 14th and they don't get their budget till then. And so you're kind of the last ones on the hook to hire.

And there's a lot of freshmen this year. So I think starting with their offices is also probably best intended my way to where to be hiring advice in session. So I'll be in there probably asking to take a nap on your couch. So, yeah, definitely send them my way. There's any really promising individuals who are interested in being attacked.

Yeah, I agree with that. Amazing kind of also doing like just introducing yourself to anyone that's working in the capital and kind of getting to know the lay of the land and, kind of will help place you in like the office that you will be the most successful at. And I mean, things move really quickly here and people move on and, to different positions.

So kind of being a known quantity and knowing what, what you want to do and what you're interested in, kind of your, you know, top policy positions, if you will, is helpful, that folks can kind of refer to, you know, can refer to you in those, openings, arrive. And like you said, January is is a big, big date.

And, just getting your resume circulating early, is super helpful. Absolutely. Any words of advice or wisdom for obvious interacting with anybody who later I think, you know, like I said, the the tech, the lobbyist in Texas, I think, you know, once I've worked with them has all been kind of great to work with and all have their, have a high level of expertise or able to connect to really a lot of those who do.

So I mean, the biggest thing I think is just to, to kind of be mindful of, of the time, that that staff spends with you and kind of be mindful of, you know, the time that they're doing that as time that they can do something else. So, and I don't know, many of them are, but just just to be respectful of time and, and kind of our own constraints.

And we all have, you know, only 24 hours in a day. So we we are all doing our best. And so, I think I think that's good to just keep in mind as, as the, as the session, keeps on rolling. So we also, as I kind of started off talking about sometimes you don't understand until you're in the building why things take as long as they do.

And we're also feeling the same time crunch as they are. You know, if there's a bill that they're really supportive of and they're frustrated that it's not moving faster and they're wanting to know why something is not moving, there are sometimes so many things that maybe are kind of internal conversations that we're having with other offices that we can't share all the time.

Right? And we also, you know, want to be successful in our offices. We also want to Pasco. So I think we also have a lot of other things that we want to get done during sessions, a lot of meetings, constituent meetings. We're also doing casework. We're doing so many things during fashion. And and so yeah, I think sometimes people can feel frustrated when they don't know what it is in the building.

And even some folks are maybe in the building three years ago. And things have changed a lot. And our time demands have changed. And so the urgency of which people feel things are definitely change a lot in society that wants immediacy. Like the Texas Capitol crawls along so we don't have to get to move as fast as we would like either.

And so it's a lower risk point just by being patient with us and understanding, like we also are having really long hours and we also have a lot of pressure is on ourselves. And we also we're going home to our families at night. You know, we are ours are different. And somebody is there to kind of essentially do a 9 to 5 or even they might have a long night or two.

We're doing really long nights, like 16 hours, like police have never gone home. It's four in the morning, you know, it can be really, really late. And then we're back, you know, for a hearing at 8 a.m., you know, so it can be really long and tedious and arduous for us, too. So just understanding and having some grace, if we're being a bit snippy one day or tired one day or whatever, you know, slowly start going through, once we hit May, it's just, we appreciate people's saying, well, you got me beat.

The time I think 230 is the latest ice date, and I've fallen asleep on my desk a little more before that. So I was like, I was home already. She actually didn't realize I was still there, and I was like, no, I'm waiting for you guys to finish. You know? It's like, no, it can be. It's a it's it's a lot.

It's I just remember sitting on the floor, you know, we're we're sitting in our offices too. And yeah, I can get really long. Well hoping for the best session for both of you and and run into you. Any last thoughts before we wrap up? It's been a really great conversation. The one thing I wanted to highlight is just one thing that, that made the session just so much better and goes go so well as just amazing staff.

And, I'm so blessed for the, the staff that we have. And of course we miss miss Lauren was on staff, but we we have her in spirit always. And, it's just so important to, have the, the right folks around you guys. You. So we're here all the time. And so, having, people that you can depend on rely on, you know, they know their staff and they, they take it really seriously, and they have a servant's heart, and, and they're all, you know, embodying and and moving forward, the senators or the House members goal.

And, I mean, it's it's just such a blessing to have have great staff and I, I by sure you will agree, they may also have some useful energy. I don't have. And it can be hard sometimes they're they're learning to they're also there to get something out of session. And their goals are maybe even a little different than mine or my bosses.

You know, they're there to grow professionally. There's a lot of people are there for the first time. And, you know, sometimes when you see how the sausage is made, it can be kind of soul crushing. And so we're all there to to be supportive of each other. Some people like they, you know, you see them down, they do a session, they don't come back and they learn that about themselves.

Other people staying safe, saying, and it's really wonderful. When you see folks that have caught the bug and, yes, they would be absolutely nothing without our staff. They keep me sane and protected, and they keep my boss sane and protected. And, I mean, our building, our building would absolutely not be able to function with, all of the people sitting in the actual offices day in and day out.

Definitely grateful for that. And I think also we kind of touched upon, you know, the bipartisan nature of our bills. We've got a lot people are friends in this building right by staff. Talk to each other. I swear, if staff were actually, you know, taking all the boots and, and doing things, we would get so much more dialog.

We would we would have really great bills, really great policy. We are so bipartisan in our friendships. And, you know, I think people think that we are a lot more siloed as offices when we actually are. We all do communicate with each other and talk with each other and enjoy each other's company. And so I'm definitely really fortunate to be able to know my whereas and all the and all these other really wonderful people that I think sometimes people don't recognize that, we all do know each other and we all are friends and we love to work together.

I love an excuse to work with any other office that I can. And so just really grateful for all the people that I just met along the way and look forward to. Oh, thanks for such a fun discussion today, ladies. And I know a lot of people see you in the building during session and I'm really grateful to have you.

So thanks for coming on those minutes. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Let's make sure to subscribe for more insights like this. Thanks, everyone.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business. I'm your host, Laura Carr. And today we're joined by Ryan Brannan. Ryan’s the founder and principal of the Brandon Firm a highly respected government affairs firm. It means both experience in legislative and regulatory spaces. He's here to provide some insights on the session's challenges and priorities and Ryan serve Texas from multiple angles. As a three time gubernatorial appointee under both Governor Greg Abbott and Governor Rick Perry, and a former Worker's Compensation Commissioner, he's also an adviser to Governor Rick Perry on his budget policy.

And his expertise spans a broad range of issues, including appropriations, public health insurance, transportation, and infrastructure. So today, we'll be talking about Texas projected budget increase and how this additional funding could impact states priorities, including Ryan's client expertise. We'll also touch on the broader shift to the right that the Texas legislature has gone in, and how new legislators may influence the spending of these surplus funds.

Ryan, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to have you here. And for those who don't know, we used to work together for two years, so it's always good to have a little reunion with you. It is. And thank you for having me. It's great to see you too, Laura. You know, it's funny you mention that. I enjoy working with you.

Now look at you. You're all grown up, like, proud POA moment over here was when I introduced you as a keynote speaker, one of my clients' conferences. So congratulations. And thank you. Thanks for having me. It's good to see you. I was so much fun. And it's always fun to, you know, be working with you again in any capacity.

So it's very good. So, Ryan, for those who don't know you, please tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure. So, Ryan Brandon, contract lobbyist. Been around the Texas Capitol since 2009 when I moved down to Austin. First career job was for Kay Bailey Hutchison in DC. We'll say a few years before that, and, just, really loving all the Capitol crowd and the people and representing clients, and it's, like, doing exactly what I wanted to be doing when I moved down here.

So it's pretty great. Awesome. What's an exciting time to be in Austin and around the capital and working in this field? We just had this amazing, kind of, you know, crazy election year. In general, we had a bloodbath in the primary. We had this, you know, kind of sweep in, this most recent election. So how's everything going with you on the business side?

It's going great. And you're. And you're right. It is. There's a lot going on right now. Right? We just had the election or have, they're filing bills now. So it's really here that we're coming back in January. And, you know, it's just there's a lot, a lot happening with that. Big budget surplus.

We have a new federal, presidential, administration, a lot of new faces in the Texas capital, some changes at the local level as well. So, a lot to keep, keep track of. Well, you mentioned the budget and projections in January, where it was going to be going up 23% this year, roughly. How is that going to start impacting you this session?

Yeah, we'll see how much it ends up going up by the time we get there. But projections are still holding us to what they were in January. Happy of how it will impact me, I think will depend a lot on what the legislature decides to spend those funds on. Last session, they did a phenomenal job, spending a lot of that money on one-time needs rather than ongoing needs that will be become new programs, new, new, ongoing expenses and appropriations for the state.

And if we don't have the surplus that we have this time, we had last time, that could then become a real problem for the state. So, they passed significant infrastructure bills, dedicating a lot of funding to all sorts of infrastructure transportation, including the ports, which was something they don't normally fund very well. Or have in, in the past, I should say, we had the they're still doing the broadband rollout.

There was a water fund. Done. Conservation fund. So really there's, there's a lot of infrastructure, much needed infrastructure, I should say to, a lot of the infrastructure too. I mean, I'll use the Port of Galveston, for example, later 200 next year. Wow. Pretty amazing. And, you know, they have some equipment out there that looks like it might have been here 200 years ago.

So, you know, the state funding the the port master plan is a part of it, allowed Galveston to fund two projects, three projects, two of which have already broken ground on and that's already creating jobs for economic development. And, you know, more tourism money, too. So those are just great things that you don't need to continue to spend on an ongoing basis in order to get really great results from the state.

So, we'll we'll see what they do this time. But I think if they continue to keep a good eye on the funds like they did last time, I think the state of Texas will be a great and great shape to continue the economic dominance that they've been having. Right? So a few years ago, I remember, I was at a panel with several agency heads, and, and statewide leaders and, the conversation this was pre winter storm pre pre Covid I believe.

And the question presented in the Q&A at the and was why is everybody moving to Texas. Why are all these companies moved to Texas? Of course there's several different reasons for probably a myriad of reasons really. But I did it. And you did it. Yeah. Welcome. Welcome back to Texas again. And, the answer that came from the the officials was because they know we have reliable infrastructure that our electric grid works, that we have water.

And literally less than a year later, none of that was true. But the thing is, they're still coming. You have greater demand on a lot of that infrastructure. I mean,USLege AI right? I was using a lot of electricity or not yet, but, yeah, we'll have to start kind of looking at those things as we get bigger and scale for sure.

For sure. Well, sure. And of course not you, but AI in general, I general absolutely no, I'm sure you've got it all down because you've got the storage, cloud storage facilities and all that that are taking up tons of electricity. You know, that's going to stop anytime soon. So, you know, using those funds to make sure that we can keep our infrastructure in place and keep the economy humming, I think is one way that the legislature can really help the state.

Well, as a former commissioner of a state agency, how do you see this budget impacting those agencies and programs? Great question. And I think it depends on the agency. There are several agencies that are funded out of, you know, dedicated funding streams that probably won't have as much of an impact. But if you look at larger agencies, you know, you look at both.

Why we start with HHSC, they're the biggest one. So again, with the time, with the changes that are happening right now, not just at the state level, but the federal level, at the local level. You know, I think there's a potential anyway for some unprecedented change. So, you know, President Trump, president elect Trump on the campaign trail, talked about using block grants for Medicaid funding.

Well, that would free up the state to get very innovative with a lot of their approaches. And, and, which actually takes me to another way that the state can really help. And, you know, we're wasting billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse, different programs on that point to figure anybody. It's all over. But there are solutions out there to capture a lot of that.

That money before it ever leaves the state, particularly if it's federal pass-through funds, let's say the feds do. Let's just use Medicaid as an example. Again, not putting anybody. But if the feds do things, innovative things like block grants for the states and Texas receive those funds, then they can do new programs, new ways to prevent waste, fraud and abuse.

And and then you're not having to go chase those funds and try and recover them if they never leave the state in the first place. And that could save billions of dollars a year right there, which could then be used to fund some of the pet projects like the border wall or, you know, school choice or whatever state leadership decides to spend the money on.

And that would also reduce the burden, ongoing burden on the state government. So, I mean, those are two ways right away, innovative solutions without, looking at not spending waste, fraud and abuse money that's coming out of the state, spending those the funds they do have this time, on one time, things are ongoing. Things. And then you can look at it at a program level, too.

So another state agency, and I'm not thinking of anybody. These are just the two big ones. Agency. And then the next biggest one. But they, you know, they have programs that are designed to help school districts, supposed to be more of a last resort. Like if you can't find what you need on the private market, and you come to the state to get it, and we see it in a lot of insurance products.

But, this one is just an example. And what the state has done the last two cycles is actually, fund the school districts that are with the state or help shore up their funding, and not the school districts that aren't with the state that are getting their services from the private sector. So it's had a reverse incentive in the market.

You have more schools wanting to get those additional funds from the state. And by the way, may or may not be legal at our, not going there. But if I was one of the school districts that didn't get additional funds from the state, I I'd be upset. But really have the reverse incentive. Now, you're taking this program that was for the insurer of last resort, and you're convincing all the school districts to come get in because they're getting additional funds at reduced rates.

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But it's not real. It's being propped up. It's not smart, not market rate, when really the state should be trying to convince as many schools as they can to get out of that state insurance of last resort. And, you know, that's been done 10 to $20 million over the last two years. So on a grander scale, it's a lot smaller than the billions you're talking about with HHCC.

But you start looking around, combine all this stuff, and you can make some real positive changes for Texas. Talk about lowering your taxes as a result of that. Everything else. And it's obviously not just us, right? I mean, Elon Musk, it is what they call it Department of Government Efficiency and Efficiency. So I mean, the things they're looking at everywhere.

And if you could start saving billions of dollars a year and you have billions of dollars in surplus, you can really start looking at some of these solutions. I don't want to say eliminate the property taxes, but, I mean, maybe government efficiency is definitely something we're looking into as well as we scale and helping with how we're working with state agencies and other other government organizations, it's going to be exciting to see how we can help.

I love what you're doing, the efficiency. Thank you. Well, you mentioned a lot here. One of the pieces that I want to kind of go back on is like aging infrastructure. You mentioned with just the ports specifically, I know that you work with them, but what role do you see? Kind of other special projects and infrastructure projects playing in this session in Texas future, as is it's a massive deal.

It's massive everywhere. And again, this is another cross-section of the different levels of government, right? So, they put in billions of dollars into infrastructure investment. And that's not just ports. I mentioned ports as example. The roads. I mean, it could be land ports two. Right. Like you look out at Laredo or El Paso, these are huge ports, trucks, people, everything else.

And especially with, again, with the federal focus on the border now coming at you today, announcing a lot of stuff. We'll see if that actually happens, what they're talking about doing. But, if they didn't, there's good. They're going to need some support there. And then the roads build roads. And I learned something recently. This is a little off topic, but, you know, you know me.

I'm such a policy nerd when it comes to this stuff. Local governments budget differently. There's, like you and I do with our project. So, like, if you buy streetlights, there's not an ongoing, depreciation put into place. And so over time, those assets diminish and they need to be replaced. And a lot of that is part of the infrastructure issues that we're facing all across the state.

So if you can use these funds that aren't in the budget, for one time, you know, you could have streetlights, for example, and that's what, 25, 30 years. So if you could fund streetlights, you just say, you know, 30 years worth of stuff. So I probably have the best examples, street lights. But but just to get the point across on how these funds can be used, but the again, looking at the, the, the tiers of government, federal, state and local, let's say you're funding, roads that go across, I don't know, crisscross across the state.

You know, how do you create those roads? Right. You got to have trucks, you gotta have concrete. You gotta have got to be able to get the concrete. You gotta to be able to get to the site. And there's a lot that goes on there. And, you know, if you've got a concrete plant here under one set of regulations, but then that particular plant is in a different places.

And their cost of doing business changes all those different, different places. And it's really hard to keep the cost low so that you could do more of these projects with the same amount of funds. And, you know, one example is, I heard about a, not a concrete plan, although they have a they have their own, kind of fight going on right now, which is probably why they came to.

Sure. But like, you know, there's, you know, a plant up in, it's not concrete, so they don't want to. I know, got to. Yeah. I don't want to call, you know, but these folks that live in, emergency services just voted to increase the tax base 2%. Well, all the marketing for that was this low cost.

The average homeowner, or $7 a year. Sounds sounds great. I want emergency services on fire. And if I going to pay seven bucks a year, I'll do it. That doesn't take into account businesses commercial. So that's $7 a year for you and me and our house, for this business. Might be as much as 40, 50 grand a month.

And that, really stymies economic development and growth. So, it's looking at all these different levels. Because of the legislators and the decision makers are doing the Lord's work, trying to trying to figure out the best way forward. And obviously, there's there's a lot of, stakeholder participation, but we're on the front end. You know, we got another six months to talk about this before the final budget comes out.

Before before they adjourned signing, I, so it'll be it'll be interesting to see. And it's very exciting. And luckily, I'll be able to track all those bills, because of your bill tracking service. But this I know it's awesome. And it's been great the last couple weeks of go filing. I love it. Well, you mentioned a lot in regards to stability and things that the government and the members can do.

You've mentioned six months. We've got like, yep, seven, eight more months, the discussions and and exciting time. So what do you think some things that you know, the legislature can do to promote continued economic stability. Yeah, I think there's a lot they can do. And, and hearing what I've mentioned like so examples of local government doing some things, but there's a lot of local governments doing.

Right. And there's a lot of local governments that want to do it right. And, you know, Austin is always the easy one to point out, right? But, with at a time when the state and literally the rest of the country moved in one direction, Austin doubled down the other direction. They only had one city council member that was pushing for any kind of government accountability.

She was voted out of office. And another district, they had an avowed, socialists for the Democratic Socialists of America win. So the city of Austin, their city council, took a hard political turn. And, Kurt was of God bless. And they do the Lord's work, and they're just trying to hold the thing together. I mean, there was a song that came out during Covid that is called, God Bless the people trying to hold this town together.

Every time I hear. Yeah, we're all we're all rooting for you. But, you know, there there are one of the reasons why there were a lot there's a lot of bills filed at the legislature, to rein in some of this. There's no control. Of course, there's always a bad apple that rules and for everybody. And a lot of times, you know, that's the case.

Yeah. Mentioned Austin. I'm sure it's not always them, but for every one of them there's 100 people doing it. Right. And so it's, it's yeah. Trying to work through all those very complex policy issues. But obviously the decision makers have gotten gotten it right so far. I mean, I'm sure there'll be steps through there, but I mean, you look at all those trophies behind the governor's desk.

There's, the governor's trophies, the Governor's Cup, those for the state that created the most jobs in the year before. I think there's I'm guessing with like 15 or 16 in or out. I mean, it's we're doing something right. And so it's just making sure that we can keep up with with what we're doing. How do you keep up with I know you track local, state and federal.

How do you keep up with all that during session? Well, I have a, a couple great apps. One of them is called us Live Studies. I don't know if you've heard of it, so. Okay. Yeah. And that's a good question. And I'm glad you asked that, because I used to have you to help me, keep track of all that stuff.

And then. And then it looks like you found a virtual assistant to do all that. I just did what I didn't want to do. It was so annoying at frustrating. Absolutely. All empty as well with the local side, because that's very hard to find transparency and do. And it's the area we're looking to go into. So, it's just a lot to keep track of the now new administration and the federal level.

So curious. Yeah. What else you what else you do. Yeah. Yeah, it depends on obviously I get hired to represent my client's best interests, and what they're trying to get accomplished. So, I, I think they're the best. And what they're trying to get accomplished is just best for the state of Texas. I'm sure other people don't see you the same way.

But the best part about our process is you can get together and try and navigate the best way forward. And that's true at every and every level. I mean, we just actually had my neighborhood, just had their local elections and switched over the board because the previous board disagreed with what our neighborhood was trying to do. And that went to an election.

91% of the neighborhood voted, for this to happen, and I was following along with that one. You were helping me out with that. So I try to I try to bring that stuff to you were help me out with. We have a speaker series. We do. You know, I think, I don't want to predict, I certainly don't want my name predicting that's a game.

But you know, that that has the potential for a lot of change as well. And we have a lot of new faces anyway, there are a lot of them came in on a wing of change, in the primary, particularly over the border. A couple of other issues. School choice was, was one that was turned into a primary issue.

And so, you know, I think a lot of them are very hungry to get started with, making these changes. Certainly some of them have more experience than others. I think there's one that runs a bunch of different businesses. You could probably be a great person who like that on some of these appropriations issues. And so I think whenever there's new faces, a lot of it's education.

But, you know, when you first came on, started a lot of years of education there. Just so same with them. And I know a lot of the, a lot of the legislators in the House were just here for a bunch of workshops and things like that. And so they're learning, and it's focusing. So, you know, the first day of bill filing, this time there's more bills that were filed than any other session.

Yeah. And that doesn't include these new people because they can't file goes yet today until they get sorted. And so usually when new members come in they have a lot of ideas and some of their ideas are good and some of them, aren't. But nobody ever wants to hear their babies ugly. So that's, you know, so we'll see.

I think, you know, it's properly focused. I think the new energy, could be something that is really beneficial for the state. I think, you know, if, if the house devolves into bomb throwing and, name calling and everything like that, I, I don't think that helps anybody. So hopefully we can we can we can pull everybody together and get what needs to be done to keep Texas Tech.

I love it. So you've mentioned that there's going to be a new shift. We know there's a lot of new faces this session. So how do you see this new cohort of people influencing priorities this session, if at all? That's a great question. And I think one that everybody that is observing, this election cycle is wondering, I'm actually kind of advising my clients to temper expectations for the moment as to what can get done in this environment.

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But there's a lot of grass on the field between now and when they gavel in. And so there's plenty of time for a lot of these issues that are perceived to work themselves out. And, and I think they will do it, I think I think we'll get there. We have, some great statesmen that are and, solid staff positions, leadership changes, within, the governor's office appear to be good, although I'm not saying the previous guys.

And in fact, I'm friends with several of them. Don't step aside. Yeah. And you know that we had some changes, turnover in the speaker's office, too. And a lot of those people have worked together in the past, which I think is going to help. Again, I'm not saying that they're better or worse in their job.

I think everybody is doing a great job. But I think it does help that there's prior relationships and working, experience with each other. We'll see if that stays. Obviously, you have a lot of the new faces or, ran primaries against, do you come into the group for, the speaker? But I do think, we got a couple months to figure it out.

At the end of the day, fresh fruit, refreshment. No offense to the freshmen, but, you know, it's, it's hard to pass legislation in the state at all, let alone if you're still trying to figure out where the bathroom is in the building. And there's a lot to learn. And, so I think there's a, I think there's a great opportunity to get some really good things done for Texas this session, hoping that, that comes to fruition and we'll find out what happens on them.

And they javelin. First, two things they do or pick a speaker in the House and pick the House rules. So, lots of unknown the next couple months there are and again, thank you to your original point. That's why it's such an interesting time right now with a lot going on. There's just a lot I know we got the holidays.

I don't know how we are going to be able to do it. It's an exciting time. I will say. I know you said there's a lot they have to learn. You mentioned just knowing which which way to go to the bathroom. Where's the where's the speaker's office. Right. They have to learn all those things. Oh, you never your first few times and again it's no, no, it's the same I can't imagine for a new member.

And I know there's been a lot of talk of reform and transparency. And do you think that that's kind of, you know, we're seeing on the federal level and nationwide this government efficiency? Are you seeing that trend in Texas, too? Yes, yes, I think so. I know there's a big push for the, especially on on the local level.

It seems like there's really I mean, you had the Death Star bill last session. Love it or hate it, no comment, but it is. It was designed to, kind of level the patchwork quilt of regulations that I mentioned earlier. And with the different areas having, you know, different tax rates, different regulatory requirements or anything like that, to, to make it easier for businesses.

So do they continue forward with that? Do they kind of say, well, maybe we went too far over here remains to be seen. But those are definitely issues that they're looking at. I know there's been a lot of discussion on property tax and, property tax reform. There's some discussion on special purpose districts. And, you know, this is a they're gonna create all these taxing entities, and then they kind of forget about them, and they just keep raising taxes on everybody.

And so, you know, ultimately, it's finding ways to reduce the tax burden on Texans so that they can continue to live in prosperity. And I think we've outlined several great ways that they could do that. But I one time expenditures on things like infrastructure, looking at reducing waste, fund fraud and abuse and the current expenses and and then also additionally, you know, reducing some programs that aren't supposed to be big in the first place.

It's not just federal or the states definitely looking at those things. And I think if they can do that again, they've got a real shot at reducing the property tax burden on Texans. And then, you know, really, CDL would be great. It would be great. You mentioned kind of local government, mixed in with state government and how kind of what role do you see the state playing in addressing some of the local issues we're seeing?

You know, less funding for the police and law enforcement and issues at the border, all that. Well, that's a great question. And, I say the obviously these things are real issues, right? It it's really the federal government's job to secure the border. I mean, it's one of the three things the government really has to do, and is with, and so the state ended up having to pay a lot of those costs, which, you know, doesn't help with the budget.

But when a lot of these funds are, they're not supposed to pay for out of the general revenue or scraped are from wherever the funding mechanism was. Goes, goes to those places. So, you know, in Austin when, all of that was going on with our police department and the reduction and, troops and the defund the police and the state government to come in and patrol parts of the streets of Austin, which, you know, I was glad to see recently that the, the Police Association was able to get a contract with the city again.

I think Kirk's doing the Lord's work is they're trying to trying to, keep that town together, as the song goes. But, you know, and it's not fixed, and it's up to us. The police department is down. 300 policemen. Morale is all time low. You know, so I think there's places like that where. Yeah, the state could look at.

Why is morale? Why? Why? You know, what's what one of the underlying causes of this that we can fix. And, you know, but the problem with the state is, typically, anyway, unless you can figure out different ways than they are possible. But as a general rule, the state has a hammer, not a scalpel. So, if one municipality is to doing something they shouldn't be doing, chances are a lot of other municipalities that aren't doing anything wrong, are going to get caught up in that.

So it's finding that balance and figuring out where the state can come in. That makes this whole process so exciting, right? You know, you take all the ideas from all over the state, all the experts, all the different stakeholders and interested parties, the taxpayers, the citizens. And you roll them into the ball and you stick them in one building for five months and see what comes out.

And, you know, they don't always get it right. We do have clean up bills and things like that, but for the most part, the process works and it's been working in the state for a long, long time. Well, that makes me happy to hear the faith in the system. I love that that makes me very happy. Well, Ryan, you have given so much expertise to us today and your insights and the budgets, predictions for the legislative session, what's happening, local state government talking a little bit about, you know, Medicaid and opportunities and challenges you're dealing with.

Any final thoughts or, you know, anything unique you'd like to add about the session coming up? I just wanted to say, you know, thank you for the Oracle email or I learned everything I know about lobbying from working with you. So, it's been a great pleasure. Well, you could definitely end with a tale. What was your favorite experience working together and shared years ago?

My favorite. Yeah. Your favorite story? Oh, man, how do I how do I narrow it down to one favorite experience? There was a there was a cacophony of experiences, Laura, that were all wonderful in their own unique ways. I want to jump right now is when we were talking about. I think it's pretty early on.

You may be able to the question. So the back backstory of what was going on in your life at the time, but, you and, you come in and we were talking about, maintaining professionalism, and you were saying that you were going to be, you know, focusing on that and making sure that you, you presented yourself in a professional manner.

And then, we walked outside and you showed me your new license plate. It said p a r t a y. And, as I read it, you looked over, you know, potato just like that. And, that one. And that was a good 30s you could not stop loving. And then I got you love about it.

I mean, you mentioned my number one. Yeah, that. No, that's a really good one. And I remember it because there's so many stories about that license plate. But all right. Especially now that I know how party ended up. Yeah. Our happy party wagon. The party with the Capitol grounds. I can't keep it a secret, Ryan. People found out.

That's why I'm not ashamed to tell the story. Okay. Because I'm glad I picked that story. I I'm glad you did, actually, because so many people, one person I didn't even know in the capital goes to me. Oh. Yeah. I heard about your car, and I just thought, no. So anyone who doesn't know I totaled my car in the capital grounds.

Is there anyone separate that picture? Yes, I'll include it in there. I will just say be careful when you badging, guys, and that's not always going to protect you. That vehicle had a lot of stories that it did. Yeah. I remember for years we were driving back from an event, in the Fort Worth area, and it was you were driving and it was pouring down rain and.

Yeah. So I had to get back for something. So we pulled over and I drove and I get all the way back to Austin, and pull up next to the Capitol, and, I start getting phone calls. Said, is that your car parts? Hey, I'm like, of course. So said a lot of mileage in that vehicle.

And it was, a lot of road trips. And we did a lot at Texas, where I went for the World Wide Texas tour or my Texas tour. Good times. Right. Oh, well, thank you for joining. And would you like to shout yourself out where people can find you if they need a fabulous lobbyist like yourself? Happy to do so.

Thank you. Laura. Yeah. Ryan Brannan, Brandon Elle.com, office just around the corner from here at the Capitol. But if you need me over the next five months, just knock on the front door of the Capitol and I'll open it and let you in. Thank you, Ryan, I appreciate it. And make sure to subscribe to.

Stay tuned. Thanks so much. Thanks for.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business. I'm your host, Laura Carr. And today we're diving into the fast paced world of advocacy with a true expert Jay Propes. Jay is a seasoned political and strategic consultant and lobbyist with over 30 years of experience in public affairs, government relations at both state and federal levels. Jay began his career on Capitol Hill like me, working for Congressman Rahul.

In 1992, he moved often and spent eight years running the Texas Optimal Logical Association, advocating on behalf of nearly 900 Texas physicians and surgeons before the Texas Legislature, agencies and U.S. Congress. Today, Jay is a partner at Mercury Public Affairs. He's here to share insight on the demand for real time, accurate information and how it's fundamentally transformed advocacy work over the years.

We'll discuss how this impacts lobbyists, lawmakers, business leaders, and stay on top of the legislature. There's a lot of updates and crucial, challenging things. More than ever before. Thank you so much Jay for joining us today. True expert in advocacy and public affairs. This is Jay Propes. Jay Propes has a deep understanding of the shifts happening in the legislative landscape and Jay.

I'm very excited to welcome you to the show. Thank you. Good to be here. Yes. How has your first week of bill filing been so far? Well, we won the first day, but, you know, we've seen 1400 or so, 1500 bills. The last time I saw, some old fan favorites, some, refile bills that will not be heard in this session as they've not been in previous sessions.

Some grand ideas. Some, continue banging in the head against the wall. And some ideas. That kind of change changed hands from, from year to year. I saw, there was a constitutional amendment filed to allow for initiative in referenda, in the state filed by Senator Nathan Johnson, which I imagine will get approved by a lot of, Republicans saying, that's a bad idea and it's not what we do.

But until 1996, it was in the GOP platform in this state to have initiative and referenda. So what you have is when you're in there, what you perceive to be a permanent majority, you don't want it when you're in what's perceived to be a very likely permanent minority. You want it. So that's one of those things change, priorities over the years.

Well, Jay, I know I gave you a good, introduction of your bio, but can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? Well, you don't already know. I've been fortunate to to be here in Austin and the capital community, for, since 1992. And, worked in Congress prior to that, after I graduated from college.

And, have, seen, maturation and sophistication of both the inside and outside of the capital, seeing from where it really was the same 2 or 300 people every day to, people participating in the process that never go in again and participate meaningfully. I've seen communication at, and kind of an air cover and, 50,000ft level become a lot more important than the shoe leather in the hallway everyday and more impactful and, seeing a lot more people serving in the legislature who have lived in Texas less time than I've been a lobbyist in Texas, which is a change to that didn't happen very much.

I'm excited to talk to you more about that with your expertise and experience, and how advocacy has changed over the years, and lobbying from an expert like you. So, I know that you've mentioned and we've talked about this a lot, is your, constant, having to constantly update, your clients, your stakeholders and members. How are you keeping up with the dramatic, you know, the sheer volume of information is coming in all the time.

Well, you have to be more. You have to not only be aware of the information that's available, but you have to be cognizant of the fact that most things are obsolete as soon as you press send or print. In fact, it's almost misleading to provide, reports and things like that to clients anymore because it's meaningless except to be a historical narrative, anymore.

And also, when I started in this business long ago, information was updated when someone else provided it, probably 15 years or so ago, close to 20. Members of the legislature and your staff started being able to curate and receive information, on your issues, on issues that were important to them, that you might be in a position of having to either defend or explain or negate.

When you go in to visit with someone, it's not just the information you gave them or someone on the other side of your issue. There's a lot more information inputted because of, easy access and the fact that the information, it's not just Google searches anymore and Google alerts, information is delivered and curated to these people from different sources.

And you have to be aware of what's out there. So how is it compare to when you started out, what the process looked like to now? And what's the biggest cause of that shift, do you think? It's the cheapness of circulating information. It's seriously, was it as expensive as printing and distributing back then, which was both expensive and slow and manipulable as far as who got what kind of information?

You have to assume now that if you put something out there, the people who are supportive and against you are going to have the same information, the same time and the ability to react to it simultaneously. That was not the case before. It is. It's always been difficult to keep a secret around the castle because people just keep their just can't keep their mouths closed.

Now, it's the the electronic information is going to make things so fast, that there are immediate and you have to have the right information because secret is not going to work. Absolutely. And yet social media and then just AI technology and new technologies, one like ours, obviously this is a big, use case of ours is keeping people up to speed.

So how has I changed the way you do lobbying and advocacy work? I would say, it's replace some of the manual work that we all used to do to look at how, different members reacted to different issues and how they voted with other members on certain issues. That used to be a very manual, process, to try to line up different votes and different clusters of, of elections, and elected officials and how they reacted.

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I does that and has for several sessions now, made that automated. Also, you can go see the bill filing today. You can put that in AI, machine of any of the other ones that are available, but you can create your own, template through them. You can say you can pull up a bill, find out what states similar legislation has been considered in in the past year, what groups testified for in favor and against them.

And you've got your your path to to get to work on on what you need to do. You're killing a bill or passing it. That was not available for that was a very, heavy, research intensive kind of thing where you had to go through everyone's own state legislative website to figure out how to use those, digest that information and line them up.

That's done. The click never used to make it easy for you. So how do you see that changing? This is the early days of AI. So in the next 5 to 10 years, how do you think that's going to change the game of lobbying? I personally think it'll change a lot. I think it's going to it's going to require that lobbyists who have not really thought it important before to become experts on their clients issues to do so, they have to be able to answer questions as if their client was standing there with them, because they may not have the opportunity again, and the information could change before they get that opportunity again.

There are some people who, who actually, have built very successful practices on just being almost, introducer of their clients to legislators and letting the client serve as the, as the, as the expert. There's not time for that anymore because you're not going to have that that many chances interaction. You better be ready with the information and and the same information that people who don't want you to succeed have.

That's already changed a lot. Interesting. And do you think that the transparency is an overall good and help to the business? In general, I think it certainly serves the legislators and staff a whole lot more to be able to compare apples to apples with the quality of information. They're getting interesting. And now with just the sheer volume of bills, and we're hearing rumors of upwards of 20,000 bills being filed this session.

I'm not sure if that's from I, it as well as, you know, with bill drafting potential use cases, you know, how have they been able to draft out many more bills. But that's more than, double, almost double last session with around 11,000 bills filed last session. And then that's almost the same amount. That's more than double the federal government what they found year.

So we do that in six months. How are you preparing for this influx of bills at unprecedented rate? Well, first of all, well, there is a number of bills filed. I think every session there's increasingly more duplicate bills or near duplicate bills because it just gets easier and easier to follow. Bill, before you actually had to have a council draft, you had to have blue backs.

You had to have hard copies filed with the clerk here. Now it's point click. There's no there's a diligence to it. The the barriers to entry as it were. So you don't have a council attorney going, hey, I'm already drafting this for somebody else. Do you really want to do this meeting? Are you going to take my time to do this twice?

Now it's just the same copy we're going to file to for the, you know, younger audience. If they are listening, what has been what was the process like back then compared to now? Very manual, very deliberate. And cost a lot more investment, of the office. And every bill was filed because of them. There was some, true, ownership issues.

If you got a mail file, if somebody filed a duplicate, it was something of an insult. It's not now. It's just part of it. You expected, and most of the time that people will file Bill without a whole lot of, contemplation about it, because it really doesn't take that much out of their staff anymore. They used to take quite a bit of staff work to get a bill ready to file.

Absolutely. Even from, you know, 12 years ago when I started on Capitol Hill, too, it was a lot more work and fewer pieces. So interesting. How do you think is going to change the game the most, the session in terms of the legislative process? That's a good question. It depends on on how the legislature tries to use it and how comfortable they are.

And, learning from other states if they want to use what's happened in other states as a, as a roadmap for themselves, if they want to, to, you know, deny themselves that or make sure that they're not, influenced by that, it'll be, less impactful. I think, for legislative staff who have trouble keeping up with where their members are in committees, I think it's going to be easier for staff to keep abreast of things that are happening in committees that they're interested in, but that their particular legislator is not a member of, that it has been in the past.

I think that's going to be a big change. I think so, too. I'm excited for it. As a former staffer, that was actually the reason I started to use language, was trying to make sure I was keeping up with what was happening in all the different committees and then rulemaking process with state agency meetings. There's just you can't be everywhere at once.

So I do think that that's a big advantage. When I was on the Senate side, I would always be I don't even know my bill was up in the House today and it would be so frustrating. So I do think that's a huge, that's an exciting one. I'm excited to see what the staff think of that. So, speaking of kind of, you know, you're using so many different, softwares, I know you're more tech savvy than most.

What do you see? As you know, how are you keeping this information accurate as well as timely in general? Well, that's why you're never going to replace the human input on this, because only you know, if you just allow things to be generated by an AI, function, then it's going to be accurate to a point, and then just going to start making assumptions that it makes from from other points of reference.

And also the legislative world has terms of art that I still doesn't quite grasp and will misunderstand and apply wrongly. You still have to have your own, you know, ability to discern what's correct and what's not and what's important, what's not. You can't just have you know, word salads of, of stuff just because it to be generated and say all of that's important.

You know, I've seen it a lot already, and you can tell us that things are AI generated. There's a whole lot of superfluous information that misses the strong and the most poignant points you're trying to make if you let it be like that. So the real thing about that, I can see with, AI being helpful is it will, if you know how to tune it to, to help you, it will help you make sure that you miss less.

But if you try to make it, tell your story, if you make it, do your work for you and generate your story, you're going to wind up with, with, a lot of white noise. Yeah. You see it already? Yeah. I couldn't agree more. That human side of things is going to be more valuable than ever. I don't see, replacing communications and lobbying anytime soon.

The need for in-person communication and just discussion is bigger than ever. So, we've definitely talked about a little bit of AI's impact, but, what are kind of the practical benefits you see from legislative tracking and public affairs with AI and maybe some of the tools that you're using that are helping you right now? I think and again, AI is thorough to a fault, right?

It produces more, data and input than you need so that you don't miss anything. You're you still want to have to sift through quite a bit, of information. And, and there's really no good way for that to be done, except to know from your experience, your, knowledge, how to apply that. And, again, you can tell the difference if people don't know, the difference in that.

But I think the ability to keep an eye on and an ear to a lot more geographies, meetings, people, new sources all the same, and get them curated to you to help, to help make your points. AI is already been a big help to that. If you know how to use it. And I think even if you don't use it again, you need to be very familiar with the tools that are available out there so that you know what is being generated in your sphere.

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Even if you choose not to use drones because they're being used somewhere in your world. Absolutely. Customization. It does a really good job at if you can become a prompt engineer and figure out how to exactly create it, I find that's a great use. But one of the pieces I'm most fascinated by is machine learning and how it can handle.

I can handle really large amounts of data that we could never have even simply sifted through before. How do you feel about, you know, predictive analytics, how that's going to impact potentially decisions you make in the future? I know there's something we're working on right now is creating things that can predict outcomes. How do you feel about that going into the future?

I think that is, probably one of the least reliable applications, in this world because, as I was told a long time ago here as a lobbyist, your job is to find out is to, is to get legislators to do what your client needs. But for their reasons, you have to know their reasons. And when 181 legislators there for 400 reasons, and they are from different perspectives and different points of view and their own experience or knowledge, and there is no way really to do predictive analytics.

Which one of those reasons is the most important on any one day to, to, to guide their decision making? So that's, that's why the interpersonal relationships are always going to be key. I was going to say the human element, you knowing those people is going to be important. Hence I change the way you interact with different groups or stakeholders.

And I'm not I haven't, let I haven't taken that tact on things. I haven't, I don't let I generate email responses for me. I do not, let it, do anything other than get me started on, articles I have to write or, or any kind of whitepapers that you provide. I ask it to aggregate things for white papers.

I don't ever ask it to respond to communications, but that's for for right now. What kind of implications do you see for transparency and policymaking? Well, I think the opposite is probably true on transparency there. As you're able to engineer things, you'll be able to create obfuscation and red herrings that misdirect people, and be able to create, artificial, large model learning of those.

And you have to be you have to be mindful of that. It's already out there. It's what, what in Twitter or to, to informational research. And so I think you're gonna see a lot more of that. And you have to be, again, discerning or you just say whichever one has the most papers, pages generated must be correct.

Not true. One of the, concerns I've seen and poor use case for I was, kind of responses and laughs to the capital staff. So does an influx of, you know, emails coming to staff on petitions and things like that. So I'm wondering how that's going to be this first session with, you know, a lot of information getting generated like that.

It's funny. You know, it's an annoyance that's ever worked in a legislative office has been, the recipient of, A postcard campaign or somewhere. The same postcard comes from 2000 people, and maybe 500 of them are in your district, and all that stuff is just an annoyance. So I'm going to have to enter all these addresses and create some sort of response from my boss to them.

But when you get 2000, I generated communications that the people whose name on it may not even be aware that they were sent, and they are either inaccurate or incomplete or misleading. I think people are going to find it insulting. And if you're behind the effort to just paper up someone's office with AI generated communications, you may get you may show the client that you created all these different contacts, but you're not certain claim you're insulting those the legislators and staff and as if they don't know that this is just generated to create more input for them, without more volume, without more value, volume without value.

And I think it'll be hard to differentiate who is a genuine constituent. Need to, just a potential kind of hacker and fake, account completely. Yeah, there's definitely some interesting ways, that's being used. How, do you think, you know, from your personal experience, people can start preparing for this next wave of advocacy and the changes that we're about to see?

I really think it should. People should, should sign up for and and test themselves against different AI, modalities. Okay. And like I said, they may find one that really helps them and helps them, organize and, and, put some dynamism into their own work that makes it easier to stay updated. On the other hand, they need to know and recognize the tools that are used to create those red herrings and the false information against their own clients interest.

There's a rhythm and rhyme to it, and you recognize it when you see it. It's good, good advice. So I'm a bit of a sci fi nerd personally. Where do you see us five, ten years from now? With the Technol technological advancements? I think, there's going to be, a time where we have to get to better trust in and, in technology.

And if we step back from that a little bit, but the whole about, two times the, allegations of election fraud and things like that, that, that just because we wanted to be able to count votes quickly and, and make sure people knew outcomes that were allegations of, of, you know, manipulation and things like that. I think there's going to come a time when we'll have several states and will go where there'll be mobile voting from your from your electronic device.

You won't be standing in line anymore. There's a that's that. Experian experiments already been pretty successful among military votes. And I think when you start seeing that, you'll see participation, not only will it go up, but it will also vacillate. A lot more people will actually decide if it's about the same effort to vote is not vote.

You may have some people intentionally stay out of elections. I think that kind of thing is going to have more impact. And I think people will, will have more relevance to, to things like the legislature. I don't know what percentage of Texans even know where the legislature is in, in session, but it's a lot more impactful on their lives than Congress is.

Just like their county commissioners court is more impactful on their lives in Congress, and they just don't get the following on it. As much as I think there'll be more people following local governments, because it will be, no matter the size of the city, or county, I think there will be access to that information more immediately, more correctly, to the citizens.

I think that's going to happen pretty quickly. That's exciting. Yeah. It's something we're trying to do with local government. Jay, any of the things you'd like to discuss on this before we kind of start doing closing? Just, I as much automation and electronic enhancement and and all the things that have changed in my career, it still is a hard thing for me to see some of the great writers that come out of the Capitol come out the Capitol staff.

I'm just amazed at, the talent that is still there. And I think that's always going to be important. And, I hope, I hope that working in the Capitol helps people have that skill. Turn to a on that skill. Because, it's not you can get by with that these days, but, someone has to be able to continue to craft and and, and make a meaningful message that is salient and, has some commonality to it that everybody can understand.

And I think that's still something worth doing. AI is not replacing that. In fact, it is putting more, like I said, volume with that value around it. I agree, I think it's going to be more respect for organic content. I saw a new use case recently for an app that, allowed you to clone yourself and generate new content by typing in a script, and it would make a video for you.

People are going to know those things are fake, and I think it's going to come with this more craving for, you know, authentic journalism, real writing, real person content or podcast long form where people can hear what people are actually saying. So I do agree. I think there's some good, definitely good things with it. And then it's more for handling some of the more, you know, mundane tasks.

But very interesting to have you. Okay. Thank you so much for for being on the show and for sharing your insights that so much wisdom with, with all your background. So anything else you want to add about the ledge coming up before we close out? They're all different, and they all tend to be like a mosaic that the pieces fall into.

And it's only when you get back and look at it that it all makes sense. You don't have the ability, and I doesn't have the ability to project those pieces ahead of time. And, that's, that's one of the individuals, in this process and this legislature in this business will always be the people that make that that come together.

I'm glad you're involved in that and the pleasure to be working with you. So thank you again. And to our listeners, remember to subscribe to Bills and Business. And, Jay, where can they find you if they want to do, join your conversation where you can find me and all our team at Mercury llc.com. Oh, thank you, thank you.

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Welcome to Bills and Business, your go to podcast for the latest developments in Texas legislation in business. I'm Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege for Texas Startup and very happy to be partnering with TV for the start of our news organization. Today, I'll be speaking with Megan Mauro, executive vice president of the Texas Association of Business, about something you might find surprising from the business community second chance hiring.

Specifically, we'll be talking about the Texas Second Chance Employers Coalition by the TV Foundation starting in 2021. Okay. I'm very excited to have you again on the podcast. I'm so excited to welcome Megan Mauro, executive vice president of the Texas Association of Business. And, Megan, it has been so fun working with you so far with Texas Chamber Business News and, you know, our lunch we had a couple months ago has blossomed into now podcast.

And so it's just been such a pleasure working with you. Thank you for coming on today. Well, thank you so much for having me. And it's been great working with you. And I was really just got this idea from our CEO and talking to you over that lunch. And I knew that if anyone could make it happen, it would be the U.S. lunch team.

And to be so happy to be here. So I would love to know a little bit more about the Texas Second Chance Hire Coalition. And if you could explain to our listeners what that, what that is. Yeah. So second chance hiring is simply businesses that hire people that have either been impacted by the criminal justice system or have been formerly incarcerated.

I know this is an issue you're really passionate about, so I would love to hear more about your background so our listeners know how you got involved in the Second Chance Hiring Coalition? Absolutely. I would love to answer that. So I don't have a background in criminal justice policy at all. And the good thing about working for a broad business association, like to be, is you get to work on a lot of things.

There's a lot of things I'm passionate about. And this one, I am on a personal level because we've all made mistakes. I know I've made mistakes. So that's for a different podcast. Those in business after dark. Shh. uhm, so coming soon. And so but really, we've all made mistakes. Either we got away with it or we just got lucky, with the consequences.

But, I just think it's really important for people to get that second chance when they want it. And so, personally, I'm compassionate about it professionally. It's great for business, and it's the best of both worlds, but all of it. Speaking with my business hat on always. And then to be studying. Because there is a fine line there.

You know, like what policies they support as far as protecting employers, but also allowing them and encouraging them to choose hiring practices that that benefit their their organization. Can you explain a little bit about the TV Foundation? And just for our listeners to it's been it is. Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for asking now, because it does get a little bit confusing.

So we're the Texas Association business for the State Chamber of Commerce for a CS6 organization. And our number one goal is to advocate for business issues across the state of the Texas Capitol. Now we do have a TV foundation, which is a, pure education arm where we educate communities and businesses on certain areas of interest. But it is not an advocacy organization.

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We do work hand-in-hand with each other, and our Second Chance Hiring coalition is through the TV Foundation, and we'll talk more about that. So I recently read, your opinion piece on the Texas Second Chance Coalition. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about it and and what it is? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a second chance employers coalition that's national.

Of course, Texas being Texas. Our members wanted something of our own, which is very important in Texas is a large state. And so this coalition brings employers together that are already implementing second chance hiring initiatives or interested in doing so, and want to be connected with businesses that have done so successfully to learn best practices is and when did you and maybe get involved in this?

And what was that all about three years ago, and a couple of our members brought it forward. So, specifically, I know appreciate the shout out, JP Morgan Chase. As you may know, I, Jamie Dimon, their CEO, has been very vocal and outspoken on the national level about the how they, implement hiring and value that as a, business organization.

And so they really, helped bring this initiative to UAB and, we apply for grants to get seed funding. So thank you, JP Morgan Chase. And then we, we brought in the coalition of different trade groups across our industry representatives across the state, but also businesses in Texas that are operating, successful second chance hiring initiatives.

I know this is something that's changed people listening to their perspective on all the time. What is kind of, you know, change the perspective of a lot of businesses that you've seen lately and hiring new people from who have been incarcerated before. Yeah. Well, I really think that, you know, the information that is out there. And what workforce, you mean, and, the skills that people get while they're incarcerated and when they're reentering the workforce.

And so, and then also hearing from other businesses like JP Morgan Chase, Union Pacific, who are very open about, their second chance hiring initiatives and how it's been helpful for their business. Bottom line. So you mentioned there was a book, that was written by an economist to work for the large scale commercial banks. What was that book?

And I'm glad you asked. It's, top talent cattle. This is one of my favorite books, and I'm not an economist, but I read this and pretend that I am, but it's pretty fascinating. So listeners are probably wondering, you know, we're at work. We're a business organization that represents employers. And for decades we've advocated that employers dictate how they run their businesses, whether that's their internal practices or hiring practices.

So with this coalition, we really, it's it's it's to help bring employers together that I've already implemented that without advocating, you know, for mandates on what employers can do. But this book is by this economist, he works for a large kind of a commercial bank, and he's not a criminal justice focused economist. He's looking at what's best for business.

What he found out was in the United States for a losing a million people a year in our workforce. Right. So that's not available anymore. However we do. And it's really as you can imagine, we're not having kids as many or as early as our character, our grandparents were. And there's some other factors there that I won't get into.

But that's kind of the overall picture. And then we have 70 million people that have been touched by the, the, justice or the justice impacted. Right? Like touched by different processes in some way. So is there any chance hiring isn't hiring prisoners? I mean, some companies do that, may do that constructively. But it's anyone that has, any type of encounter with the criminal justice system or has been incarcerated before.

And so that number, like I said, is 70 million. Why not tap into that talent base, and, and use it to your advantage, as a business. Not to sound harsh or cold, but you and I do represent business. To fulfill your workforce needs of skilled individuals that are loyal and want to work. That is very fascinating.

I'm sure a lot of people are gonna ask this, but how do you filter, you know, the level of crime that someone has committed? Yeah, it's up to the business. So some businesses, and I know this from work with their Second Chance Coalition members. Right. So these are organizations that have implemented these practices. So some their process looks a little bit like, hey, we're not going to include that question in the application.

You ever been convicted or committed a crime. So instead of including that every applicant get to go through the interview process. And that's where they can be asked that question. If if they do answer that question as they would check a box, they have the opportunity to explain what happened instead of just their application being thrown away.

And then some companies have you check that box and so whatever, you know is on your record, but still, meet with you and it's just up to the company on on what? You know, their boundaries are are, what folks center not expect as far as, you know, what's on your record or and how that will impact the position that they're being hired for.

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So as a business owner myself, I'm curious to how businesses can benefit, and our listeners from implementing these practices. Yeah. So, this book is also interesting because the author, the economist. Yeah, that's how he's he's always writing and speaking from the business economic perspective, which is fascinating because typically when people are speaking, they're working on criminal justice issues.

It's not in my perspective. But back to your question. He and I've met with these businesses who who tell me this. And in his book, he gives really great examples as well, because he's traveled around the country and met with businesses who implement these practices. And they'll tell you, and there's even studies by Sherm that the national or the Society of Human Resources, association national level, there's you're going to have or most of the time what we see is it's going to be a very loyal, dedicated employee that knows that they have, you know, they provided a second chance.

And these people want to work, they want to work. And you're going to see that their retention rates are a lot lower. And, and the companies are more engaged with their community as well. And really it because a lot of the community education that goes around someone who's openly speaking about second chance hiring, and it's not in all cases, you know, everyone's everyone cases are different.

The the way that businesses operate, you know, you have different experiences. But that's really the great thing. And the importance of the coalition is that people can talk to each other. And maybe Union Pacific says, hey, we were doing it this way and it wasn't working out. So we changed our hiring practice to this, and that's been working a lot better.

And those businesses are able to communicate with each other and share mistakes. So maybe not everyone has to go through the same thing. Interesting. So what would you say are the main goals that the coalition is looking to achieve? So really educating businesses on best practices, bringing people together and educating communities online businesses that do this, like I don't think a lot of people are realizing that we're losing so many people a year in the United States.

You know, he's a million a year. We're we're not gaining in the workforce. And that there is a way, to allow everyone to be productive or allow more people to be productive. And businesses can play a big role in that if they choose to do so. As I said, TV has operated for decades representing employers. We always will.

And we want employers to choose their, you know, hiring practices. And, this is just a way for them to decide if they want to do that. And we'll be here to support and educate. Wonderful. Yeah. Not me. Anything else? So how can a business owner get involved if they want to start looking using these processes, they can go to our website.

So we have a web page that has, more about the Texas Tech and Chance Employers Coalition. And they can do it. Anyone can join. You don't have to be a member of Tab. And the more people that join the coalition, the better for the members of the coalition. As is always the case with the coalition.

But there's also some resources there as well from the state. So this is pretty interesting. In the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the Texas Workforce Commission and Windham School District, which is the district that serves the TDC in Texas. They're all very aware. And so we meet regularly with them. And this is a priority, really for the state agencies.

Even the Texas Workforce Commission has started having an annual conference on reentry. And so that's pretty cool. And, there's a lot of resources that are already out there by the great state of Texas that we have compiled on our landing page as well. And our goal for the coalition is to continue building those resources so both companies can benefit.

And also people looking for work can benefit. Well, thank you so much for a lot of your lightning comments on this topic. That's definitely new to me and I appreciate that. I'm sure, for our listeners to this has been a really enlightening episode, and I learned a lot from what you brought up. I mean, I have to read the book, so I'd love to borrow that from you and any other comments as we close out the segment.

Well, I do encourage everybody to read the book. The author, Jeffrey Christian, who is now a friend of mine, because we through our coalition, we were able to invite him to be a guest presenter, on our first regional event in San Antonio, last summer. And then besides that, he also does a way better job of articulating that than I do.

But I just want to highlight that the reason why an employer, you know, we represent employers or the Texas Association of Business, and I just want to say making more, concisely, this is a workforce issue, and it's a business issue. Workforce is a business issue. And second chances really provide wins across the board. So I think I mentioned this earlier about reducing recidivism.

You know, someone has a job when they reenter, they're less likely to go back to prison. And I think that's pretty obvious. Why? And then, you know, allowing people in the great state of Texas to provide for themselves and their families. And then with my business hat on, very strong employers being on staff to times, you know, and that's what employers want.

And, it just affects everybody. Well, thank you again. Again, it's a pleasure working with you. I appreciate you coming on the podcast. And yeah, thank you for our listeners for tuning in. And be sure to subscribe for future episodes.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business podcast that has guests in the Texas legislature and business community all talking about the political shifts in shaping Texas. I'm your host, Laura Carr, co-founder of USLege and TXLege. Today, we have a special episode for you as we look ahead to this upcoming general election. Joining me is Jeff Blaylock, the founder of Texas Elects and now, or senior news editor at TXLege News.

Jeff's a well-known elections expert with over 25 years experience in political analysis campaigns, government and advocacy. Here's our conversation. Jeff, I'm so glad to have you here. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and it's been so fun working with you. But I'm sure our viewers are going to love to hear all your thoughts about elections.

So welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Glad to be here. Yes. Well, how has it been, being back in Texas? It's always good to be back in Texas. You know, I was in Austin for a number of years. So it's the blueberry in the bowl of tomato soup that is Texas. And so I wasn't in any competitive districts.

I didn't get the same election runoff experience a lot of other people got. But now I'm in a swing congressional district in New Mexico. We get 20 mail pieces a day. We get three block walkers a day. We actually had to put a sign on the door that said we already voted. Trying to keep the block walkers away.

It kind of works. Not always good for them. Good for them. Appreciate the persistence. Well, I know that it's been on the top of everyone's mind lately. Just the Texas Democrat's kind of historic losing streak in Texas. And I would really like to kind of dive deeper into that with you. So over the last decade, you know, Democrats in Texas have faced a lot of challenges, especially winning statewide.

And we have a lot of elections up now. So what do you see as the primary factors contributing to this trend we're seeing? Well, we're going on 30 years. If, if the trend holds through this election since a Democrat last won statewide in Texas. So it was 1994. Every other state in the country, including some that are far redder than Texas is, has elected a Democrat statewide since Texas last did it.

I think the overall issue, really, for the Democrats is that the brand is broken in the state of Texas, for many years. Texas was blue in the modern sense of blue and red. And there was a lot of support for Democrats in rural areas of Texas that is completely evaporated. And now the challenge is trying to overcome all those rural votes in the urban areas.

And to this point, they have not found a formula to put together the right coalition of voters in the right numbers to overcome what is now a rural red wall. We're seeing a lot of demographic shifts in Texas as well. I mean, I was someone who moved here, from DC in 2021. We had a huge influx of people for moving from all across the states in the world.

Around that time as well. So how do you see that potentially impacting this election and then also into the future? Well, certainly there are in every election, there are a number of new voters interested in a fairly large number in a state as large as Texas. But the issue is that they vote at such a much lower rate than the then folks who have been here and have been voting for.

We used to just, I used to think of it in this terms, like, if you you vote regularly, you're much more likely to vote again. That's, hashtag analysis there. Very smart stuff. And so folks who are new to the state, we don't have a record really to look at, to see where how they voted.

But we do know, as they don't vote anywhere near as often as or as to the same percentage, as people who've been here before. And so if you're voting, if your coalition to win depends upon new voters, you need a very large number of them in order to get enough who actually vote to make any difference. Well, then let's jump into the, you know, the U.S. Senate race, which is really on a lot of people's minds.

You got Senator Ted Cruz, and we got Representative Cullen. All right. So let's talk a little bit more about that. What are your predictions and what are your thoughts on that election? Being close? Well, you know, I think the national the national narrative about it being close is is a little off. I think it's not as close as it as as folks are making it out to be, but it will probably be closer than most of the rest of the statewide races in the state.

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There's, such a narrowing between the top and bottom performing, people of any party in the state because of the prevalence of what we used to call, single punch, straight white state party voting, that's gone above the effects of it are still there, and that we see a tremendous number of people who will vote only Republican or vote only Democrat.

And as long as there's not much crossover, there's not much, independence in those votes. It just simply becomes a which party's got more voters out there. And at the moment, and for quite some time now, it's been the Republican Party. You mentioned this. You don't think it's going to be as close as people seem? Why do you think that is?

Well, I think that the, better O'Rourke, Ted Cruz race was probably the high water mark for Democrats in certainly in the last, you know, since 1998. So certainly the last few years. And Beto had a lot more energy in that campaign. He had a fair amount more money and a lot more, just a lot better circumstance.

Given the fact that in 2018, Beto O'Rourke was running against a Trump White House and against that policy and what those policies in Washington calling all red is having to run away from, the Biden White House. So that dynamic alone, I think, is going to make this race, farther apart, than what happened in 2018.

But there's also a little less money behind all red. And I think just the overall conditions for Republicans, in terms of having what I call that rural red wall, they're still there. So the fact that Colin. All right, as a candidate hasn't changed that fact. There's still that million or so votes that has to be made up somewhere.

And I don't see him doing it. You mentioned the money in these elections. And I've noticed the, you know, the trends that we we discuss all the time are Senator Ted Cruz is consistently not, received as much helping finance, you know, donations. So what, would you say is, is happening here where a candidate is not receiving, you know, as much money and being outperformed by the Democrat yet still not, not winning.

Yeah. So, you know, money doesn't always buy everything. Money helps. And generally speaking, the candidate with the most money, tends to do fairly well. But in this case, we're not really talking about money. We're talking about party ID. And that's a much stronger, force than, campaign finances when it comes to a general election.

We're talking a primary election. The money has a lot to do with it. The candidate with the most campaign resources, hits, gets into the, runoff or wins the primary outright at a very high rate. But now we're talking about party ID and better. O'Rourke spent, you know, $80 million in 2018 to finish one and a quarter percentage points ahead of a Court of Criminal Appeals candidate who spent nothing.

Wow. Yeah. So, speaking of those numbers, you know those exactly from Beto a works, election. And then Colin all runs. I know by those is 80.2. I think Collins is somewhere around 56, 58 million at this point. Probably a little higher. I imagine that report was from a few weeks ago. But that that marginal spending doesn't seem to make any real difference.

With the party IDs being so strong for voters here in Texas. Interesting. Well, in addition to the money and all those things, obviously we've had a lot of impacts in the statewide elections and House and Senate, with the school choice positions and then also the historic impeachment trial of the attorney general. So how as though have those affected, you know, the primary election all the way through to now, if, if any, by were quite a factor in the Republican primaries in particular, that there seemed to be two very divisive issues.

In the past we have seen more conservative challengers to more moderate Republican incumbents, but there hasn't been a galvanizing issue. And this particular legislative session created two. You pointed out the school choice votes, and the choice on the House side to impeach, General Paxton and send those charges over to the Senate. Those became very important in terms of Republican challengers.

You know, we had ten Republican incumbents ousted in the primary. We had five more ousted and run off with several others who just retired rather than, face that kind of a primary election. So it was a huge force there in terms of the general election. I don't believe that it's relevant. I really I mean, there are not most of the races where school choice in particular was a factor in the primary are in safe Republican districts now.

So it won't be it won't be a factor in that case. You might see in a couple of cases, where the districts are much closer in terms of their partizan balance. You could see, some mailers about school choice, for the Democratic side being that this, this candidate over here is going to vote for this, and we don't like it.

But by and large, I don't think it's either of those is going to be an issue. When you look over at General Paxton in the in the impeachment that was such a Partizan issue, the Democrats were almost entirely behind it, in favor of it. And so that's now not even a factor. Interesting. And I know that, you know, voter turnout has kind of shifted in the, you know, southern border and West Texas a lot more conservative and and on the Republican side.

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So how do you think that's going to change the landscape this election? Well, I think it will continue. We've seen a rather dramatic shift in South Texas, toward Republican candidates, even though Democrats are still winning. And a lot of those counties, they're winning by far smaller margins. And I think in some cases that we will actually see Republicans overtake them, in in parts of South Texas, we already know that House district 80, which was represented by Traci King, a Democrat from Batesville, for a number of years, he stepped back, he retired.

And that this district we now have rated, as safe Republican because it is just in an area of rural South Texas, and that's very strongly Republican. So I think we will continue to see, South Texas become redder. And that adds to the challenge of the Democrats statewide, because now they have to make up that vote deficit, too.

That used to be a vote surplus, and it's becoming a vote deficit that they will also have to find a way to make up in the cities. So far, they have been able to do that. Interesting. And do you think that that is surely just border policy or what do you think the reason for that is? I like this a lot of it.

Yeah, I really do. I you know, the Republicans, particularly since 2016, have been, able to use, immigration, and, and border situation, border politics to their advantage. And that seems to really be, reflected in the votes that are going on down there and in the voter trends. I think that those voters seem to be really tired of what they perceive as the situation, with the border or what they experienced down there.

And so that does seem to be a driving element, in this change. And then you have a group of people that are by, you know, social and cultural tradition, a little bit more conservative, than some of the rest of this of, of the Democratic base. And so having them drift toward Republicans, and in some cases move quite headlong into Republicans really makes sense, from a value standpoint, even though for many, many decades they have been very strongly, Democratic, in their support up until about 2016.

Absolutely. And, and so we've kind of seen this trend of moving more conservative. What are your predictions for this election? We're seeing in the primary, you know, we had what everyone was calling a bloodbath. Are you expecting anything like that, this general election? No, because there's not enough seats for that to even be possible. You know, as I said, we've got so many seats in the legislature that are rated safe Republican or safe Democrat.

Partizan, control of the chambers is not a question that's not in play. So with only a handful of seats that are available, there isn't really an opportunity for there to be a Partizan bloodbath. The state's just simply not that competitive. So we might be talking about, you know, 1 or 2 or maybe three incumbents being defeated, in this general election.

All, all the action was in March, and I do you think there'll be any surprises at all? There's always surprises, but sometimes the surprises there isn't a surprise. I think the surprise at this point would be, you know, if, if we looked at, like, Senate, the Senate district with Morgan Lamb and tears running in South Texas, if that were like a 5 or 6 point victory for the Democrats, that I think would be surprising because I think it will be much closer than that.

And it wouldn't surprise me to see. And also win that seat. But I think, generally speaking, unless there is a coalition of voters that doesn't typically vote, that turns out in an inordinately larger numbers and all points in one direction. So all Republican or all Democrat, I don't see a really big surprise out there. It could still happen, of course.

So I the column surprises. Yes. But that's just not what the numbers seem to be indicating. It's not what the voter trends have been. And, you know, if you have to, if you have to rely on a coalition of voters who don't normally vote to win new elections, you're not going to win elections for sure. Well, going into kind of more of the legislative session now, knowing this landscape, where do you see what are your predictions for this upcoming session?

What's on the agenda? And most important, what's on the agenda will be whatever is on primary voters minds in March of 2026. I think that we we've kind of established that that's where the action is in these districts. The fewer districts that are competitive in November, the more they become competitive in March. And so I believe that we will see a number of what I would consider to be, you know, social conservative priorities, you know, such as, abortion restrictions such as election security, such as school choice and those kinds of, of issues that seem to move the electorate in March of this year.

And we would project would move them again in March of 2026. So I think that's the that's the starting point for the session. And then the budget, because you got to have one of those after this election. We know politics doesn't really stop never. So going into the speaker race, we've had a lot of new people put their hat in the ring for this election.

What do you see the outcome there being? Any thoughts on predictions? Well, the speaker's race is a bunch of inside baseball. And this is not a this is not an election that the voters participate in directly because they have elected the people who make this choice. And the 150 members of the legislature will make it. We have the incumbent, David Phelan.

And we have several challengers, seem to be kind of coalescing around David Clarke of Tarrant County, but that it's a little early to kind of lock in that that second challenger. But what folks should understand about a speaker's election is that all 150 members have a vote in this, not just one caucus or the other.

So to the extent that the Democratic caucus, which will be in the mid 60s to upper 60s, the extent that that caucus holds together, that's a very powerful bloc of votes. To elect a speaker when you need a total of 76. So if Phelan can hang on to most of the most or all of the Democratic Bloc, he doesn't need a whole lot of the Republican caucus in order to keep the gavel, which means that anyone who's challenging him from the right needs almost the entire Republican caucus to hold together in order to get to 76.

That may happen because I said, you know, we've got the primary being the big driver, folks already know that supporting Phelan will generate a primary opponent almost automatically on the Republican side. So that's a calculus that the members will have to make. So to get to 76, you know, you would need almost the entire Republican caucus if you were challenging Phelan.

So it won't be a Democratic speaker. But those Democrats still need to vote for somebody. Presumably it would be Dade Phelan, or if one of the other candidates offers a better, better deal for them. From a policy and chairmanship perspective, pretty sure they won't. No one else will do that. That's part of the reason for challenging him in the first place is to get rid of Democratic chairs, and pursue a more conservative agenda so that locks any challenger, whether it's David Cook or Tom all of a sudden, or someone else.

And in needing 76 out of the Republican caucus, to get the gavel, that's a tall order. It's not impossible. But it's it's going to be a strong challenge, for that candidate to do. And feeling still has the power of incumbency, and the ability to make promises to the Democratic caucus that his challenger probably can't make.

And what does that process look like come January 14th, beginning of session? What is the election process look like now? Sadly, the election for speaker is usually not dramatic at all because every week it's been nailed down. And so they are either voted in by acclamation or it's 146 to 2 or something like that. So I think all that inside baseball will happen before they convene and we should enter the session, with not only a good idea of who was speaker, but knowing who has the votes to be speaker.

My guess is a number of candidates, including, you know, cook will have numbers, and say they have numbers and they may, may have been told by members that they have it. It's not unusual. And speaker's rights for multiple candidates to have been told by at least 76 people that they have their vote. That's not how it's going to work in the end.

But that's how it works in the beginning. But I think all that palace intrigue will have worked itself out before the session convenes. And, I do see the house organizing itself along a fairly normal schedule. And I think we'll see a situation like in the US Congress where we went for several days and multiple speaker votes.

It just it's just not where this chamber is. I think we'll have a speaker before the session begins. The bigger issue to me statewide isn't so much do we have a new speaker? It's if Trump is elected back to the white House, do we have a new attorney general or a new governor or a new lieutenant governor?

Because there are promotions, from the state offices up to the federal officers reading my mind, Jeff, that is definitely what I was going to bring up was just this presidential election, how this is going to impact potentially the statewide, races and, and what that would even look like if there were some appointments, just like you mentioned, the attorney general getting appointed to a position in the federal government.

What do you see there happening on the state level? Well, I guess it depends on who it was. Not which office is elevated as to what happens if it's Abbott. And of course, do Hurst would become governor and then the Senate would select among their number a new lieutenant governor. Same thing would happen if Do Hurst were selected to not do her stop.

New start. I would say that I said that twice since Dan Patrick do her time on. That's okay. All right. Ask the question again. This. Okay. I'll probably just use that same question. That little clip too. Okay. So it's just going to just start the answer over. Okay. How do you see the, the role of the statewide positions changing if, if President Trump were to be elected.

So part of that's going to depend entirely on which person is elevated. If it's the governor that's elevated, then it would be, the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick would become governor. And then the the senators would pick among their number a new lieutenant governor. If it is someone like General Abbott who's elevated, then, Governor Abbott would get to choose a successor, which would give him considerable sway over what would happen next.

And then that person would, along with the other statewide officers, be up for election in 2026. So the voters wouldn't have really an opportunity to have a say in that until that next election. So if if assuming Abbott remains governor and someone else who's elevated, he has a lot of power and influence in that decision. If it's Abbott himself who's elevated, then it becomes more of, the same insider baseball you see in the House happening in the Senate.

Again. How about the attorney general? There's definitely been some talks of him being elevated. If President Trump were to be reelected, certainly. And that would that would created an opening for Governor Abbott to, to raise someone else into that position. And that person would have a significant advantage toward keeping the office in 2026. Interesting times were and a lot of unknowns.

Yes. Any other thoughts to share before we wrap up today? It's been a pleasure having you on and talking, but any other thoughts on this upcoming election you want to share? We've seen some fairly strong turnout so far in terms of early voting, and what we know is that people who voted in the primaries are turning out in fairly large numbers compared to to people who have not.

And at this point, the Republican primary voters have about a 700,000 or so vote advantage over Democratic primary voters. And of course, it's not to say that that is the exact part of the balance of the vote, but it's very strong, I would suspect. So we are already seeing, you know, there's a significant number, significant surplus of Republican vote in early voting.

We also probably, assume we will assume that the early vote is the high watermark for Democratic candidates in the election, because Republicans tend to turnout better on Election Day than Democrats do. So if we get to the end of early voting, we get to 7:00 on Election Day and the early numbers are out. That's probably the the peak of where the Democrats are going to sit, and then they will start to drop down.

So if they're already under 50, they're won't get above 50. If they're above 50, then we have some interesting things to happen. It's definitely going to be interesting on a on a federal level on a, on a statewide level. And I'm excited to see it. And you live tweeting with you on election night. So I so appreciate you coming on and sharing all this.

And Jeff, how can people find you if they want to hear more about you other than text ledge news where they can find you? I'm on the Twitters at Jeff Blaylock. But I tend to focus that on fantasy football. And the numbers there, it's also a numbers game. But I do support and stuff.

There will be on election. Wonderful. Well, thank you for being on. And thanks for listening to bills and Business and look forward to having you back next time. Make sure to subscribe.

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Welcome back to Bills and Business, Texas Legislative News. I'm your host, Laura Carr, and extremely excited to have our guest today, Representative Claudia Ordaz. Welcome. Rep.Ordaz, Rep. Ordaz has been a key player in the Texas House since 2020? So Rep. Ordaz a Texas Democrat known for her bipartisan work and her dedication to the Texas Economic Development and health care.

He recently returned from Mexico City, where she witnessed the inauguration of Mexico's first female president. And today we'll be discussing the unique opportunities between Texas and a border state. Her vision for economic development and her ability to work across party lines in the legislature. So welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. Very so happy you're doing this.

Thank you. We need we need more of these fun conversations. I mean, it could just, you know, you know, how the world is. And so we need more of this. So I'm really happy you're doing. Thank you so much. Well, I'm so happy you're here. And you made it back from all of your travels and Florida just now. So are you okay if you make it back off?

It's like surviving, not thriving. No. I'm just, you know, I'm I'm. I'm blessed. To be back in Texas. It was a it was a whirlwind. No pun intended. I just came back from Florida. My mother, is is living there part time, and, you know, they just they just, suffered through a tremendous storm, another hurricane, just back to back.

But everybody's safe and sound. Everybody's good. Thankfully. But it was, it was quite scary to to kind of see it all and then for sure. But right before that, it was an incredible trip. Yes. I'm in Mexico City, so we're still all just reeling through it. It was an exhausting trip, but it was a very productive one, so I'm so hopeful and excited about the future with Mexico and Texas and lots of good things.

Excited to chat more about it today with you, and I'm glad your family is is okay in Florida. I know. Yeah, our thoughts and prayers are with everybody there right now. So really, really do appreciate that. But yeah, let's start with your trip to Mexico in general. Like how was that seeing the First Female get inaugurated? It's amazing.

You know, it was the energy. It was incredible. Just so many people there to witness such a historic event. And it's just hopefully we'll see some of that here. The United States where, you know, seeing this trend, the the fear schemes, at the table. No, but, Claudia, Shubham and her team are just phenomenal. I mean, she, she understands Mexico, of course, but she also understands the relationship with Texas and the United States.

And her team is just impeccable and phenomenal. And so I've heard her speak several times, about just that partnership with Texas. She understands that she gets it. And so this is just a prime opportunity for Texas. It really is for us to kind of do that reset, that we need, when it comes to Mexico and our relationships with with them, I mean, we we would not be the economic powerhouse today if it were not for Mexico.

But Tab, I mean, they just they just ran us to the ground. I mean, I, we, I think back to back to back meetings, but great meetings with key stakeholders, all across energy, you name it, at the industry with government leaders, to really just get a good understanding and a forecast of what it's going to look like in the future.

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So it was great to have the best delegation there. It was close to like 50 of us that went, and so I'm so glad people got to see Mexico in a different light other than just a border wall, if that makes sense. So it was just it was just, so productive. So I'm so thankful to the Texas Association of Business and all the work that they did to bring that delegation there.

We had by far the best delegation because we're Texas, of course. Of course. Exactly. So speaking of the border, you represent El Paso. Yeah. Which is, a very large and expansive, we call it God's country. Nice. I need to come down and visit. I really want to come to. I have to take you to Lucas's outlet. Yes.

They are in my district. Yeah. So I will take you there. They, We have the outlet there. So you can get boots at a really good, really good deal. It's so dangerous for me. That is dangerous. But I love that. So, Yeah. Tell me a little bit more. You have, you know, your home district to Fort Bliss, which is the second largest military base to, New Mexico in the US.

And so it sits right on the border there. So El Paso is kind of that unique position as well, being a hub as well. So as far as kind of the key opportunities you see for growth and things for El Paso in the economy over the next years. What do you see now changing with Texas-Mexico border trade and being sitting in that position right on the border?

I think I'll Paso is just uniquely positioned. I know we're we joke because, I mean, it's just it feels like we're in another state sometimes because of how far we are. It's like a nine hour drive. And I've made that drive way too many times, with my pups and all. And it's just it's how you really shows you how vast the state of Texas is.

But. Yeah. But, you know, El Paso is really uniquely positioned. I mean, we're right next to New Mexico, throws away from Mexico. And so we call ourselves, a border plex region. We're the sixth largest city in the state of Texas, the 19th in the country. So there's a lot happening in El Paso.

But, yeah, we're in a different time zone. We have mountains, so. Yeah, but but other than that, though, we have the second largest port of entry, and in El Paso, next to Laredo. And so the trade, the relationship with Mexico is vital. And it key, and we just left the transportation hearing right now, what we're talking about, how vital it is to invest in our infrastructure to ensure that all of these goods are crossing, that we're all getting our avocados, we're all getting a no, no, no, no.

But in reality, there's so many goods. Mexico is our number one trade partner. And as I mentioned earlier, we would not be the powerhouse we are today if it were not for Mexico. So. And El Paso is at the center of it. I mean, we're growing, at a at a large pace, like the, like the whole state of Texas.

And so we really need to talk about real policy solutions on how we're going to help keep that trade alive. And what we're going to be doing to ensure that we're going to make both of our countries prosperous for for the future. Right. And Texas, Mexico have such deep roots tied together culturally, economically. What kind of role do you see as, you know, strengthening that Texas Mexico relationship?

Yeah. So we just coming from this Mexico City, right? There's a lot of opportunity that we can be doing together. And it really starts with just changing the narrative as well. I mean, in my honest opinion, I think it's really shortsighted that we're just so focused on a wall when there's so much more that we can be doing when it comes to our our sister in Mexico and what we're going to be doing to ensure that we're thinking about the future of both Texas and Mexico and our kids and so on and so forth.

But it really starts with good policy, ensuring that we're providing the right resources in the right place to ensure that goods are crossing faster, people are crossing faster. I mean, it's it's to me, it's a common sense policy, solution on what we can, what we can be doing, when it comes to energy infrastructure, water infrastructure together, and especially after Covid, I mean, we had, so many businesses are still suffering and hurt.

And now you're seeing a lot of these companies trying to, we call it nurturing French hiring, trying to bring their companies closer to home. And when you look at the border, it's just it's a prime place for that. Texas is a business friendly state. We welcome people with open arms, and especially along the border community, when you have these major ports of entry six just in El Paso alone.

Like I said, the second largest next to Laredo. And so down south. And so there's a lot of opportunity here and there's a lot of momentum, when it comes to this. So I'm hopeful that we're going to continue this conversation in the coming session. I feel very good about it. And to be being, really at the center of it and really helping drive those discussions and the narrative.

And I love that. And you mentioned, you know, good policy. So one of those, pieces was a bill that you passed last session was made in Texas. Bill. So one fun thing we do is we want to show some clips here of last session. And so your bill, HB 2194, I'm going to play here. When it did pass on the floor.

Let's take a look. The chair recognizes Miss Ordaz to explain the bill.

Mr. speaker, members, we're going to try to liven up the mood in this chamber. Ladies, what do we say? How much is that it? That's it. I think you're supposed to pass. Okay. Thank you, thank you. All products that are made in Alaska, California, Connecticut, Indiana, Ohio and Virginia all have labeling standards as citizens. No, they are buying items that are genuinely made in those states.

It's time that we do the same in Texas. This legislation will create a made in Texas labeling standard when the maturity of a product is made in Texas, this bill will allow Texans to easily recognize and support products like our sentence, our Stetson hats here, and our Lou Casey boots. And this will bring enthusiasm and excitement for our state products, for our small and large businesses.

It will not cost any state funds and will bring even more Texas pride to our products. Member. As I move passage, the question occurs on pass immigration is B21 on four. All in favor say aye. Opposed? Nay. The ayes have it HB two one non force passing harassment I love this clip I love us spiced up. Was this in April.

That's when things were a little tense. Yeah. So I was we go out there and our hats and that was Doc Anderson's hat and and Cecil Bell's and so no, you cannot wear hats on the House floor. It is it is forbidden and is not a thing. And so you just see here just going around like, what is going on, take those hats off.

And we just blamed it on on Metcalf. We're like the chairman said we could do it. And there is like in getting scolding. But it's those moments that are just so special. But that's the majority of the work that we do in Texas is this bipartisan fashion, this this is what the Texas House of Representatives is. And so for the for the most part, right.

And so, it's hard when you see things get kind of bogged down and polarized. You know, topics that that can divide us as a, as members. So those are the good times. I that that's a lot more than you think. Tell us a little bit more about the bill. How does it help Texas businesses?

I'm a Texas business as well. Would love to get a made in Texas label. You would like to. Yeah. And that's the whole thing right? Is so we have so much pride. And just as I mentioned in there, I mean, there all these other states have this labeling standard. I'm like and when Christina and I, we're, we're going over this where like, how does Texas not have one.

That's insane. I mean, you, you know how excited exciting the made in the USA one is. But I still think Texas has even more pride than that. And so it's just it's just a it's a good it's just a good, incentive for small businesses for, you know, micro-businesses large businesses, to really take pride in, in what they're doing to be a Texan and having the majority of our products made in Texas.

So it's exciting. And you hear the governor saying it all the time, you know, it's just a thing it made in Texas. So we're very proud of it. So that's one of the that's one of the fun bills. That was that was a good one there. Yeah. What's been the response from, you know, small businesses and manufacturers. Oh yeah.

They're just like ready. They're like how do we get this? What are we going to do. So it's being deployed by the governor's office. And so under their economic development department. And so there's this is just excited. So I'm I'm really looking forward to how it's going to how it's all going to play out. So good Bill I'm very excited about it I love it.

Yeah. Made in Texas over here. So, you have a great reputation of being able to work across party lines. So, you know, as a Democrat in Texas, working with Republicans, having, you know, authors, joint authors, how, how do you think, you know, you've got to this point and do this so. Well? Yeah, I mean, it's we are the one piece of advice that I was given is like, don't get married to your bills because they'll they're going to die.

And the first thing I did was practically was I felt like I was married to these bills. So. And it's not just me, it's it's our entire team in our office. So we're very we try to be very strategic about a whole slew of things, try to think of things that you wouldn't think of because when we hear, oh, it's a common sense, Bill, that there's no such thing.

And it's it's just it is very difficult to pass a bill. And being a Democrat, too, it could be it can be difficult during these times. So we try our best and we really we're really thoughtful on who we ask to be part of it, understanding people's passions and backgrounds because that's, that's really what it is.

At the end of the day, it's just it's all about relationships. And I consider us a family. And the Texas house dysfunctional sometimes we all have our our our nuts. All of us. We're all we're all a little crazy, but it is like a big family. And so it's just important to see people beyond just, you know, if you're a Democrat or a Republican, we're all we're all, you know, we all have lives back home.

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I'll have stories to tell. And so it's just it's great to actually get to know my colleagues just aside from politics. Right. And so we all have more things in common than you would think. And so especially on bills like Made in Texas, I mean, you saw Chairwoman Button up there with me. I forgot who the the joint authors were on that bill with me, but I think the majority of them were Republican.

And the same thing on the, on the on the Senate side, it was, oh, yeah. Chairmen, chairmen, Hughes. And so it was just it was a good it was just a really good bill. And even when it comes to women's health care, you can find commonality is I mean, we passed the only contraception, bill last legislative session.

That was a very difficult bill to pass. But again, it's just those measures and those those policies, good policies that make sense. And so Senator Paxton was a big help for us on on the Senate side. And we're so grateful and thankful to that bill. Is now a lot of day and helping so many women, especially rural women, that just they just need their, their contraception.

It's just it's just it's it was one of those comments on schools. But we do that a lot and that's one of them. So I love that. So what advice would you give to, you know, new members coming in on the, on the Democrat side and this really polarized time, right. An election year, presidential election year. What advice would you give them?

So every, session we try to get, me and colleague, Republican Holly, we try to get, you know, freshmen together, in a bipartisan nature. So last session, it was, Shelby Slawson and I, and we just really kind of just sit down and have, you know, get to know people and really just try to talk them through the process because it's so different the moment you just walk into the building and you're not just on Twitter and, you know, behind a screen and you're able to see people face to face and it's like, okay, these people aren't evil.

Like, you know, they were just, you know, yeah. You see them on social media. Exactly. And so I think once you get into the building, just kind of a lot of that changes. And then you start just figuring out how important it is that we all need each other. I mean, we can't it can't just be one side or the other.

We have to come together. That's the only way we're going to get the business done of the state. And so, you people coming in, we'll will realize that at some point because you're not going to pass anything and then you can't deliver anything for your constituents. So it's just let's put the Partizan politics aside, you know, and let's just get to business.

And so I think that's that will be learned for for a lot of folks coming in. We all we all go through it. So that's a great way to look at it. Working working together. Yeah. We have to. What are you most excited about? For this coming session? I am very excited about people are like, are you like, they're like, you know, are we are we excited?

I'm like, I'm very excited about next session. We're we have just our office, has just a lot of momentum coming off from last session. And we're just excited about about our legislative agenda, the work that we're doing on, you know, economic development. Just when it comes to workforce development, early childhood education, women's health, there's a lot of momentum that we're still filling from last session.

And yes, there's a lot of politics at play, but I feel very good about it. I know we're going to be strong, in the house. And so, we'll come together once we get the speaker politics aside, and we just have to get to work. And I'm very I'm just I'm thrilled about it. So, we'll see how it goes.

People are like, really? Are we really? So it's been continuing. We've had a two year session. It feels actually so very cool. Long, long term. What are some of your constituents most excited for you to accomplish? Yeah. So back home it's jobs, jobs, jobs, workforce development jobs jobs. You know. So those are the sixth largest city in the state of Texas.

At one point, I mean, we were exporting more young talent than any other major city in the nation. Wow. Yeah it was it will pass El Paso Sterling. And so it's it's not it's not good for us. And so what I kept hearing was a common theme for at least El Paso. Of course, like, entertainment, you know, quality of life, you know, good schools, and of course, jobs.

And so I'm always thinking in that, in looking at the legislature through that lens is how we're going to provide more jobs, you know, for not only Texans, but, of course, El Pasoans to retain as much talent as we possibly can. And so we are a hub for manufacturing. I mean, we're the number five, in the nation.

And so we're providing a lot of those jobs. Like I was talking earlier about all the French rain. You're showing a lot of companies moving to Texas, but to El Paso. Right. And so that we have a lot of land, it's vast. And then we have an incredible workforce. And so I'm really just centered around that on how we can ensure that we're tying all of this when it comes to education, like I said, workforce development, and ensuring that we're doing all that we can to to create really a quality of life for our for our constituents in El Paso.