Latest / Coconut Justice / CJP #31: Chris Volpe - Senate Candidate for Ohio

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CJP #31: Chris Volpe - Senate Candidate for Ohio · Coconut Justice

• speaker-0: Hey, what's good? Chris Volpe is a local small business owner, teacher, healthcare professional, game developer, and artist. We had so much in common, we had to call the conversation early because he had to go take care of his best friend that has a serious case of cancer. Let that sink in. This is my conversation with Chris Volpe. Before we get into it, remember to go to coconutjustice.com to get you some clothes that I think would look good on you. Let's go. Welcome back, everybody. We're here. We're going to be talking to the Senate candidate coming out of Ohio. He is a creative and he's a business owner. He's all those good things that I wish I could be when I grow up. You guys? Chris Volpe. speaker-1: How you doing, man? Thanks for having me. speaker-0: Doing good, man. How are you? speaker-1: ⁓ I'm all right. I will ⁓ I'm gonna preface this by saying I think I just picked up the flu, so I may not be a hundred percent, but I'm here and excited to have a conversation with you. speaker-0: How's it going in Ohio? ⁓ speaker-1: ⁓ man, it's it's wild. Ohio's been at the center of a lot of ⁓ a lot of things in the news and ⁓ including ice. ⁓ we had an ICE ⁓ come in ⁓ last month and so there was a bunch of protests ⁓ and rallies. I participated in some. ⁓ there's a wr bunch of stuff around education that's going on right now. And of course, ⁓ the Senate race, which is heating up because this is one of the potentially winnable Democratic ⁓ Senate ⁓ races going on. around ⁓ the country and so that's garnered a lot of ⁓ attention and I'm sure we will I'm sure we'll get way into it. But the Ohio is sort of you know the the joke is Ohio is the heart of it all and it seems like right now it is it is the center of a lot of stuff. But of course we can't forget as we sit here what's going on in ⁓ Minnesota. So speaker-0: Yeah, there's a lot happening. ⁓ and I I I'm starting to preface things by saying I I go into every conversation with just a little bit of patience and a little bit of whatever word. yeah, tell me. speaker-1: Can introduce a word? So ⁓ I always use the term patience and grace. I think we have to give people some patience and we have to give them grace because ⁓ we're in we're in a hard moment right now. speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ and that's that's just how I like I I like to tell people it's okay, I understand. Okay. You have your own path, you know, I have mine. Let's share some stories. I'm not gonna judge you. And hopefully you don't judge me, and we can hopefully find some some some solutions at the end of the conversation, or at least feel better about what's happening. speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think general, ⁓ we're all kind of in roughly the same space. ⁓ the and the research proves this out. You look at every issue, including like incredibly complex and heated issues, and the vast majority of the country is roughly in the same spot. It's just we've been kind of like marketed to ⁓ there was a really interesting survey, I don't know if this is maybe a decade or so ago, and it asked people, ⁓ you know, what do you think of a variety of like top political issues? And ⁓ it turns out we're all in the same space, but then they asked the same questions, but they identified the policy. So instead of being like, Hey, how do you feel about ⁓ allowing children to be on insurance until the age of 26? They would ask, How do you feel about Barack Obama's plan to allow children to be on? And as soon as you insert a political party or a politician, the answer falls apart. Yeah, it falls apart. So it it's it's one of those things where we are all we literally are. in the same boat literally and figuratively, but we've allowed people to convince us otherwise. ⁓ and I think that is one of the main issues we're having ⁓ at this particular moment. speaker-0: Yeah. If it I've seen those videos where they say, What's your stance on Affordable Care Act? And everyone's like, ⁓ yeah, every the medicine should be affordable. What do you think about Obamacare? ⁓ take that all the way out. You're like, Yeah, come on, man. speaker-1: Yeah, it's it's the same thing when you see the signs like, you know, keep the government out of my Medicare. And there's like then what do you have? You have a sign on the street. That's all you have if your government's not involved in your Medicare. speaker-0: Yeah. 'Cause Medicare is government. speaker-1: Yeah. It's a government facilitated, government run, government paid for system. I I think that's one of the things that drives me crazy too is ⁓ this idea that probably and apologize. I we're we're off to the races here on this conversation. So stop me if I'm going in and speaker-0: We have plenty that I have for the I have the rest of the day. We can be speaker-1: Okay. ⁓ but this idea that the government can't do anything and it just it fails at everything it does, it's just like it's categorically and historically just completely untrue. And I'm not advocating that government needs to do everything and be involved in everything, but this idea speaker-0: It doesn't need oversight. speaker-1: ⁓ yeah, absolutely. ⁓ but this idea that it's a complete failure is just it's just ludicrous. And if you look at the systems, I mean, you know, the military, the post office, I mean, there's numerous governmental systems. ⁓ you know, I I I I people rip on the post office, for example, but like we have the most sophisticated post office in the world. Like, name me another country with th this many people, 350 million people that runs their postal service as effectively as the United States, or at least used to, I think. I think we're about to see what it looks like when a country doesn't have a good postal service. But ⁓ it's just it's just ludicrous. And like the VA, the postal service, you know, a lot of these these systems have for the users that use them are incredibly popular. Medicare, ⁓ you know, you're talking about like ninety to ninety five percent approval rates on most of these ⁓ systems. So speaker-0: Yeah. ⁓ I had a conversation with Carlos Alvarez Aranos and he does political work all around the world. And he he gets frustrated with people from the United States complaining all the time. He says, you have a postal service that works. When your when your government writes a check, it doesn't bounce. speaker-1: Yeah, and speaker-0: And it's yeah, not at the moment. And it's crazy that people fight fought back against that. ⁓ you think that, you know, the the the sign of a of a good government is that the postal work or that the post office works? And I'm like, that's one of the signs, yeah. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. And and and another thing, like this is this is ⁓ I kind of poke on my libertarian friends. ⁓ and I should I should emphasize like so I'm running as a Democrat and I use that phrasing very specifically. I'm running as a Democrat because I view this position as a job and I'm running for a job, but like I don't associate being a Democrat with like my sense of identity, right? It's it's a political party and it's just like you know, there's there's things I like about it. And ⁓ happy to talk about the things I don't like about it. ⁓ but ⁓ I'll poke fun at kind of my libertarian friends sometimes, ⁓ because and and you know, maybe some of the ⁓ folks on the right, but like you don't realize how much of our system and our economy is propped up. We're talking about the postal service here, but like UPS and FedEx depend on the postal service to function. You know, they are they're not their own entities that are just running out there. You know, they they do a lot of ⁓ their shipping through the postal service. They use a lot of the infrastructure that was built, you know, to accommodate the postal service. And so all of these things are layered on top of each other. And when you start chipping away at the foundation of those things, you're gonna get a lot of cascading issues that are really gonna cause problems down the line. You mentioned, you know, how are things going in Ohio? I don't know if you've been following, but Ohio. just passed a ⁓ a change to our voting law so that the ballots have to be in the ballots have to be in to the election board by the ⁓ the the deadline which is the the date of the election as opposed to being postmarked which is also something that's happening at the federal level right so it's that's something that the federal government's attempting to do and that's something that Ohio has been doing ⁓ or just recently has been pushing and it looks like ⁓ I haven't I haven't followed up in the past week, but it looks like that's probably going to come to fruition for this voting cycle potentially. And you know, everyone's like, well, you know, you should be able to get your votes in and blah blah blah. If you can't get your vote in by the thing, I was like, Well, first of all, you don't control what the trucks do, right? You might, you might you might have sent your thing in seven days ago, but if the trucks get delayed or there's a weather emergency or God forbid, like an intentional attack on you know our UPS trucks. Then that's gonna delay it. But the other thing that nobody is thinking about or talking about is that postmarking is the foundation for our commerce system. So think about your electricity bills and all that stuff. The postmark is considered the time in which the thing is submitted because back Yeah, exactly. And it which links back to what you said. The reason we use the postmark is because there's a trust, there's a trust in the government and the UPS. speaker-0: Not they charge you late fees? speaker-1: That once you hand your item to the United States Postal Service, that is as good as handing it directly to your electric company or your cell phone company or whatever. And now there is there's gonna be a lot of ambiguity. It's like, well, you know, the a lot of these companies might be like, Well, you know, you if you can't get it in for the elections, then you know, now you have to get it in for our cell phone and then they'll start charging you late fees or it's it's just gonna create all this ambiguity where that before. There was one understanding, which is that the postmark is that is the date, right? I don't think a lot of people are thinking about that right now, the mess it's gonna potentially make. speaker-0: Right? Mm-hmm. ⁓ go back to how ⁓ how the government is very instrumental in corporate america's success here's a couple companies i don't know if anyone has ever heard of these but there's a company that ⁓ depends greatly on the income ⁓ given by the government there's a there's a couple of them one of them is called spacex and one of them is called chat gpt speaker-1: Are those new? I've never heard speaker-0: before. Yeah. One of them, I think one of them they make like airplanes, maybe, maybe spaceships. I don't know. And then the other one, I think it's like a chat room or something. speaker-1: ⁓ like an AOL form? speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like a chat room. Like you can go and you can have conversations with your friends or make believe friends, you know. Those companies, those companies greatly benefit from the government's ⁓ financial ⁓ interest, we'll say. Sure. So when people say government doesn't work and all this stuff, well Neither would these private companies if it wasn't for the government helping them develop these ideas. speaker-1: You want to hear my spiel on it? Which I suppose you do since I'm on your show. But yeah, I I think I think that again, this goes back to the cascading thing, which and ⁓ my thing is so I I'll use Amazon as an example. They're easy to kind of pick on right now, right? But like if you sit down and really think about do you think Amazon could exist without the tens of trillions of dollars of infrastructure investment in security investment and innovation? speaker-0: Give it to me. speaker-1: That we have made as a people over the past 50 years. Like, I don't care how smart you think Jeff Bezos is, he's not out there pouring concrete to make the roads, right? So think think of think about this. Like, you've got your roads, bridges, airports, seaports, your police departments, your fire departments, your military, which provides a sense of security and stability. The internet, which was a DARPA ⁓ governmental project. So speaker-0: That help you get to work safely. speaker-1: Yeah, like all all of this stuff. The the USPS again, the postal service in the early days of Amazon, right? Where they were s selling books when they were a book vendor. speaker-0: Netflix when they were mailing when they were actually mailing DVDs to you. speaker-1: Yeah, like all of these, all of these resources that we as a society have put into our system that have allowed folks like your Jeff Bo Bezos's or you know Bill Gates and and whatnot, ⁓ your Steve Jobs with Apple, like not a single one of these companies would exist without that infrastructure. And that's great. That's part of what makes America amazing, is that we have this giant like workshop. That you can come and and make use of and and grab different tools and whatnot. And I think where we are now is that a lot of folks are simply saying that, like, hey, that's great that you have made this successful company and that you're worth, you know, X number of billions of dollars. All we're expecting is when you take the hammer back, you know, you pay for the resources that you use, right? And that that allows us to further invest in. To our society. And when you look at ⁓ what I think is is widely considered to be sort of the most ⁓ infrastructure, like like public infrastructure, you're looking at the post-World War II, so we'll say 45 to like late 60s, that that like that period of time where there was giant, giant ⁓ infrastructure ⁓ investments, and that allowed people I mean, even people like you and me, I'm I'm a small business owner to just be like, Hey, I want to go try this business because I know that these resources are available to me. I don't know if the business is gonna work. Probably not. Most small businesses don't work, but speaker-0: But you won't know if unless you take that chance. speaker-1: Yeah, you gotta try it. And by having these things, and it's something as simple as roads and sidewalks and stuff. Like you're not gonna go drive 45 minutes on a dirt road. I mean, some people will, but most folks are not in that position where they can drive 45 minutes to an hour on a dirt road to go to their job. So as we create the this infrastructure, and again, like in Ohio, there's a lot of conversations about various taxes. It's like how many, how many hours do you think Amazon trucks Put on the road, right? How many miles are they putting on the road? Like a lot, right? Yeah. So every day, every second, these companies are making use of this ginormous investment that we have put into society, which is great. That's what we should be doing. But then when it comes their time to to pay, because they saw success from those investments, they're like, Well, hold up a minute. Yada yada job creation and whatever. And I'm just like, Come on. Like it it and that's one of the things that's really speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: Bothers me if you can tell I'm getting a little heated here. Is we see this time and time again over human history. This is not a uniquely American problem, is that when people get into positions of power, they begin to stack the deck so the leverage is in their favor. They begin to make it easier for their children to get into really important schools and more difficult for other people to get into these schools. Like this is not a new thing. And I say this all the time, as scary as speaker-0: Go. That's what we're here for. speaker-1: We are in this moment in American history, it's sort of like the dumbest of the dumb. It's greed and selfishness and you know, quests for power. It's it's a human story as old as time. And what I want to do, and what I think we should be doing, is creating a vision for the future that's like, hey, every child that grows up is going to have access to all of these resources so that. We can find who's going to be the next Steve Jobs or I don't know, Einstein or Frida Kahlo or whoever, right? And that they are not going to get stopped in their tracks by an errant sickness that makes their so their family cannot afford to send you to college. Or, you know, you get struck by I mentioned in the green room, but my my friends got stage four cancer. He's only 46. And this is he has a type of cancer that normally you get in your mid to late 60s. So this site of dropped on him like a bomb, right? Yeah. And and now he's like, he was a programmer. He's one of the smartest people I know. But he just he admits he because of the drugs and the cancer, he just doesn't have the mental dexterity to do the coding work that he used to do. And I watch him walk through these, and we talk about this. I watch him walk through the healthcare system. And it's it's gross what we make these people do as they're going through the this extremely challenging time. But anyway, answer your question, I I think that we should be investing heavily in our infrastructure and our people that allows the successes like your Amazons and your Apples and your whatever to come to fruition. And then the expectation is when you've utilized the workshop to build whatever you're building, that you come back and you replace the tools so that the next generation can do it. speaker-0: Right. I always explain it the the the government like a gym. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: ⁓ everyone pays the membership. And when someone is abusing the equipment and someone is using the bathroom in the pool, you have to be like, Hey, what are you what are you doing? Number one, you have to pay your membership, which are your taxes, and then stop ruining the environment that we're trying to utilize to make our lives better. Totally. speaker-1: It's it's funny you say because I I work one day a week at my local gym. I work the front desk and then I I mop up and stuff ⁓ at the end of the night. But yeah. And the the gym's ⁓ just as a side thing, I the I have a community gym. So it's a it's a small like one unit gym. It's not like a big LA fitness or whatever. Sure. And it really is one of those those third spaces, those community spaces that people talk about. You see folks, they come in and they you know, they're they're working out, but they're also chatting. And just the other week ⁓ I had a guy come in, never seen him before, and he was like, ⁓ hey, ⁓ how much is it for for one day? And we have this one day pass that you can buy. It's like, ⁓ he's like, Okay. And he pulls out it's like a sock within a sock within a sock within a sock that has his money in it. And the back of my mind, I'm like, ⁓ I think this guy is homeless. And and we s we just sort of start talking and and he he pays the fee. He was there for probably like Four or five hours. He worked out. He used the shower facilities. He kind of cleaned his his stuff. So for him, it was a opportunity to not only improve his health and his lifestyle, but a chance to kind of clean up and get recalibrated. And also it happened to be like one of the coldest days that we had in Columbus. So just being able to get out of the cold for four or five hours was was a huge deal. And, you know, we're seeing a lot of those third third spaces start to disappear ⁓ and everything's being replaced by this it it truly transactional approach to life and commerce. And ⁓ I don't know if you've been to Vegas lately. I went to Vegas last year for the the Dice. It's a video game ⁓ expo like conference thing. And man, I used to love going to Vegas, but I when I went there, everything was crazy expensive. And it's just you're getting nickel and dimed. For every little thing. I was like, I don't want to live in that world. I don't want to live in a world where everything I'm doing requires payment of some kind. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. And then not even reinvesting in the community. speaker-1: ⁓ sure. Yeah. That that money barrels out. And you know, that I think that's one of the issues about so, you know, Nevada and Vegas, like how they have very lax tax policies, I guess you wanna if you want to call them that. ⁓ Ohio is having a conversation right now about removing property taxes for for homes. And I just guys, unless you are wealthy, like You are not gonna benefit from removing property taxes. And and you know, I I try to talk to people so ⁓ speaker-0: Because how does how does education get financed? It's just that simple. speaker-1: Well how do any of these things get financed? speaker-0: And then what's what's crazy is they tell you we don't need a department of education. And then they tell you you're dumb and lazy, but then they go somewhere else to pick up the workers that are going to do the work that coming that are coming from countries that we probably subsidize in some way, shape, or form. But then those countries are investing in education. Why aren't we doing that here? speaker-1: ⁓ I mean the answer is greed. I mean that that's the answer. Like there's a lot of there's a lot of people. Yeah, there's a lot of people look look at the the healthcare system, right? My my friend has been delayed at least I'm gonna say at least two or if not three times on his physical therapy because it got it got delayed because of insurance. Insurance wouldn't approve it. His at-home physical therapy just had a ⁓ partial hip replacement because of cancer in the bone. And and it's just like everything has to be this argument, this fight. Yeah. And over the past 20, 25 years, more and more of the burden of existence has been placed on the lower and middle classes. Yeah. While the benefit of the benefits ⁓ of ⁓ innovation and and progress have gone to the to the top. And it's one of those things where it's like, Yeah, I hate to say this, but I think this is the reality. And correct me if I'm I'm wrong or you see it differently. I think since probably the mid-70s to early eighties, we've been fooled into thinking that things are really moving in a positive direction because we've gotten a lot of like that's the period like globalization kind of happened. And so we were able to get like all these products for cheaper. And we started to see a lot of tech, ⁓ so like EVs, radios, cars, computers, all that stuff. We started to see a lot of tech really come down in price. So the quality of what you were able to get was much better for the price point. And I think that kind of convinced a lot of us that we were moving along and we were heading in a good direction. But it it's almost like it is sort of this con game where you know, don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Cause as we're sitting around looking at our cool TVs, our jobs are being shipped overseas, our benefits are being reduced. Like my my ex-wife, she worked at IBM, used to have a pension. Like her mom worked in the tech space, ⁓ CompuServe. I don't know if you remember CompuServe or not, but she she worked okay. So she she worked there. That was a Columbus place. And you know, they had these like great pensions and benefits and stuff. And then of course the pensions moved over to like 401ks. Now IBM is phasing out four ⁓ one Ks, and now they're doing these like retirement savings accounts. speaker-0: I speaker-1: Which in essence are like just high yield savings accounts that like IBM maybe throws some money into. The the the benefits of being a part of the corporate world are slowly being removed. And then the burden is being placed on us. And I think that's an important part of there was a great article like a decade ago ⁓ talking about the cost of being poor. But in essence, that's that's what's happening. It's not just about being poor, but it's like, hey, speaker-0: Like you know. speaker-1: You have your health insurance, right? But if your health insurance decides to deny something, what do you have to do? You have to spend potentially hours on the phone calling doctors, calling the insurance, filling out the forms, like all of that burden that used to be on the insurance companies and on the providers in some way has now been shifted to us. So there's this like obfuscated hash value when people talk about the costs of things. That isn't being considered because you having to waste two hours on the phone with an insurance company, there's no cost of that, right? Like nobody's being like, well, your hourly rate is blah, blah, blah. For most of these calculations, that number is zero, but it's not zero to you. Right. That's two hours of your life. Right. Yeah. That's the most valuable thing. You could be making money, you could be spending time with your children. You could be spending, God forbid, spending time with your sick family member. speaker-0: But I could be doing something else. speaker-1: Who you were on the phone with to bro in the first place. Right. So so think about all these things as you're you're thinking about the the monetary aspects. It's it's one of the arguments that ⁓ home health caregivers and ⁓ stay at home mothers have been making for a long time, which is there is a cost to staying home and taking care of your children. There is a real cost. I I am I'm at my apartment now. But I'm only here a couple hours a day now because I'm I'm at my friend's house taking care of him. I'm there. If if you say like I'm sleeping for eight hours and I'm over here for two hours to take care of my dog and my cat and make sure everything's cool, the remaining 10, 12, 14 hours, I'm over there helping him out. And I'm I'm fortunate in that my main job I can do remotely, but that's still time. And there's plenty of time where I've I've had to. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: You know, stop working to assist him with something. And I'm not getting paid for any of this. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: Sorry, I went on a ramp there for a moment. speaker-0: ⁓ no, no, no, no. You're absolutely fine. I'm trying to process all of that. ⁓ Yeah, and I make it speaker-1: One more thing, just real fast. Just to I just ⁓ remembered this, but the other thing that I think people forget, particularly in this sort of like free market sort of world, there's there's two things. One is that every major advancement in discovery and innovation is spearheaded by the government, whether that's the monarchy or the state or whatever, you know, Christopher Columbus crossing the ocean, like all the the East India trading company, like all of these things going into space. Because corporations do not invest in things that don't have a clear ROI on them. ⁓ speaker-0: Why that's why you see Kung Fu Panda 30. They refuse to do anything new. That's why everyone is pissed off with Hollywood. They refuse to do anything new. Marvel movies. It's always something, something three or four. speaker-1: Yeah. So you just you just I mean look at look at the going to the moon, for example. Yeah. So we look at that as like a space race so that we could get to the moon. Really, it was like a military job on the side because we were in the middle of the cold cold war and ⁓ our you know we were worried about Russia and it it was pretty clear that whoever could get you know, military superiority in orbit would win any potential war, right? Like if you can rain down fire from orbit and they can't hit you back. ⁓ and so we invested a lot of money as sort of like a military effort, but there was a giant scientific benefit that we got from that. Like just the the that that time we spent attempting to figure out how to get to the moon also incurred tons of innovation. Which was then used by the corporate world in a variety of different ways. ⁓ and so when you look at that initial phase of the free market, you need a large entity like a government to be able to take those risks and invest in innovations that we're not sure has an ROI. Like, let's do research and development on. You know, I don't know, mRNA vaccines right now or something, right? Where we're not sure what the ROI might be. ⁓ we can talk about mRNA vaccine research as well. ⁓ but that's really important. And then the other thing that I I always ask people who are like super free market is like, okay, so how do you square killing the government off with Adam Smith? Because ⁓ Smith In Wealth of Nations, which is where you get like the invisible hand and and all those terms from. In the first frigging chapter, in the first couple of chapters, he is very clear that you need a strong government to provide guide rails. Because if you don't, then corporate power will always supersede our better angels. And you need you need to bulwark against that because otherwise these large corporations will just start to do. what they do. And then I don't know if you saw the EPA thing where the A EPA is no longer going to look at health and life as a part of their determination for like, so what the hell are you looking at then? speaker-0: And this is and this is what happens when you let corporate people take over the government. They all the first thing they do is start cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting. And I'm not saying that government can't be more efficient. What I am saying is if you work for a corporation, they will lay off a bunch of people and give you the responsibility of all of their jobs. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: And either you do it or you go without a job. speaker-1: Yeah. And and I I'm I'm gonna I was gonna say push back, but I'm not pushing back on you. I I agree. I'm gonna yes and you're we'll improv here. Because all this talk about government efficiency, it's like, yes, that is that is a benchmark. So anybody who's like, well, the government's a hot mess, I was like, first of all, it's not. And and people on the left always feel like they have to preface this by like, well, the government can be more efficient. I was like, Yeah. But the reality is that our government is actually incredibly efficient. There's a lot of corruption that goes on in certain aspects of it. But like let's look at Medicaid, for example, because that's under ⁓ constant threat, right? The fraud and abuse rate for Medicaid last year, I guess this would be 2024, last year, 14 days ago, ⁓ was 5.09%. So think about that. Out of every 90 or out of every hundred people on Medicaid, 95 of them are getting it in the way that they should have, as was determined by. You know, the the regulations, right? So, you know, that's the first question is like, are you really gonna cut 95 people off of their Medicaid so that five people who are taking advantage of the system don't get it? Like that seems like a ludicrous spa spot to me. But it's actually worse than that. Because do you know what the largest contributor to fraud and abuse is in Medicaid? speaker-0: ⁓ isn't it Tim Scott from Florida? Isn't it him? speaker-1: So it's not even Medicaid recipients. The largest contributor to fraud and abuse out of that 5.09% is illegal and improper billing, which happens on the provider's end. That is from the hospitals and the doctors and the in the ⁓ various health systems. Yeah. So that's that that accounts for about 80%. So you're looking at about 1% of the fraud and abuse happening in Medicaid. Is because of people getting it when they shouldn't get it. And I'm like, if you can get any system to a one to two percent fraud and abuse rate, that is exceptional. There's not a dude, I there's not a a large corporation, you know, a top 500 corporation in the United States that's running at a one to two percent inefficiency rate. Like yeah, most of these companies are running at 10 to 20 percent and their inefficiency rates. So The idea that the government is not efficient is just a bold-faced lie. And it's part of this marketing thing that the right has been doing since the 80s. And it's the same where it's like, well, they're the pragmatic ones. They're the ones that know how to run the bit the ⁓ business and keep the government lean and efficient. I was like, there is not a piece of historical data in the United States over the past 40 years that indicates that. By every metric, Democratic presidencies are better. And again, I'm not like Yeah, ⁓ you're talking about unemployment, generally inflation, with the exception of of ⁓ COVID, obviously. every metric, right? We can talk about that. And again, I'm not over here like raw, rah Democrats. Like, I think the reason that we are in this situation right now, there the Democrats contributed to this situation. Like it this didn't just fall out of the sky, right? Like we are here because of decades, generations of policy decisions that have put us in this space. And the Democratic Party is culpable in many ways to that. But if you're actually interested in the truth ⁓ and making this country better, then you need to look at it with an open open eyes. and you realize that these these cut, cut, cut austerity processes don't work. They just cut us off at the knees. And right now, China, man, China was on the verge of like collapse. I don't know if you were if you followed their housing. Stuff that was going on in ⁓ like 2015 to 2020. ⁓ like a lot of their major ⁓ housing and construction projects were like shell games, you know, like they they they were selling houses that hadn't been built yet so that they could finance the next batch of houses. We gave them such a windfall by what we're doing now. Like we they would probably have been very, very close to being in a like an economic collapse. Yeah. Except now they are able to rebuild the relationships with all of our allies that we've thrown under the bus. Yep. And it's it's it's so unfortunate and it's so unnecessary. speaker-0: Yeah. All of this gets bundled up, and we can go back to those ⁓ those comments that you're talking about about the 70s and 80s. I've been looking into this and what that phenomenon is, and it's the deindustrialization of the United States. So what they did was they decided America is going to be where everything is invented and everything, you know, all the For the most part, you know, we love each other that much. Everything is gonna all the cool stuff is gonna be made here. And then whatever we invent here is gonna go, we're gonna make it in China, in India, Taiwan, right? So speaker-1: Yeah, that's why you the like designed by Apple. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. But made in China. Exactly. But they forgot to tell the normal people, hey, this is what's happening. So everyone, all the normal people were still going to factory jobs. Those are being sent out, but nobody said anything. People kept doing all the all their, you know, they're living their life the way that they have been. And nobody told them that this is the this is the this is the move that the United States is doing. speaker-1: Yep. speaker-0: We're gonna be a bunch of brainiacs and then we're gonna have everyone else make our stuff. And it's gonna end up being cheaper, la la la. They never invested in education. So then how are we going to invent all the cool stuff if the majority of our population is not educated? speaker-1: Sure. Yeah, that that would have worked had we appropriately taxed the benefits on those ⁓ innovations and then reinvested that money back into things like education, ⁓ healthcare and and our infrastructure. ⁓ yeah, you're you're ⁓ absolutely right. And I I think a lot of this, I mean, a AI is like the encapsulation of that idea, but at like warp speed, right? It's like hyperdrive. And again, I think I think a lot of the United States, like we've lucked out on a lot of things. So even after World War Two, for example, while the rest of the world was like literally rebuilding, we got to jump ahead on our production and innovation. So we receive speaker-0: Just that, but we we took some of ⁓ Germany's smartest rocket scientists. Yeah, so we we we beefed up real good. speaker-1: ⁓ absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Like, yeah, we we became a ⁓ center of science and industry, and we could spend all of them the sort of the money and the benefits that we accrued through the war machine that we created to build ourselves up instead of like having to rebuild our buildings and schools and redo all of our sewage lines and electrical grid and everything because we weren't attacked, right? You know, outside of Pearl Harbor, obviously. But ⁓ that that is a huge benefit that gave us. a multiple decade advantage, a head start on on a lot of this stuff. And so I think we had all of these things kind of come into place where it was like sunshine and rainbows. And I'm not saying I think a lot of ⁓ folks, particularly older folks, tend to be like, well, you know, we had to go to the Vietnam War and we had to do the Korea War. And when I'm like, I get all that. I'm not saying that like you were walking around and everybody had a puppy in their arms and you know that's not what I'm saying. But what I am Yeah. speaker-0: We understand that. Yeah. speaker-1: But what I am saying is that there was a lot of barriers that exist now for ⁓ so I'm a first year millennial, the millennial generation, Gen Z and certainly Gen Alpha that did not exist when you were growing up. And and certain things, so you know, in in the 70s and 80s, ⁓ the housing, your house would be four to five times your salary, right? And now people will be looking at us, well, it's still roughly four to five times your salary right now. It's actually a little bit, it's like eight or nine times your salary, depending on where you're at. But the difference is the scale. When when you were in the nineteen eighties, four to five times your salary might be a thirty to fifty thousand dollar home and you're making, you know, fifteen, twenty grand. I'm talking on the lower scale here, right? speaker-0: Sure, sure. Normal people. speaker-1: Yeah, just like yeah, normal folks, right? Yeah. So that's cool. But if you're making forty or fifty thousand dollars now and the average home is four hundred to five hundred thousand dollars, like that gap is gigantic because out of your forty or fifty thousand dollars, you are losing at least fifty percent of that just on existing, right? Paying your rent, your health insurance, your your food, and all that. So the the the scale of this is just Gotten totally out of whack. I I had a conversation with a gentleman, I don't know, a month ago. So I was born in 1981. My dad ⁓ was going through med school in the early 80s. And I I I said this to him. I was like, look, in 1981, you could go to a public university, you could work full-time during the summer and part-time during like spring breaks and stuff. You could pay for your tuition, your room and board, and your food. And you'd end up somewhere five to seven thousand dollars benefit, like in savings. If you did that today, you'd be in the hole 20 grand for doing the exact same amount of work, right? But it's again worse than that because if you look at the statistics, I know I I hate being the bear of bad news here. I'm generally a pretty positive guy. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. We're gonna we're gonna tell happy stories in in a little speaker-1: Yeah, that yeah, that'll that'll be the back half. ⁓ but it's actually worse than that because if you look at students, their expectations starting at millennials and going down to Gen Z, they have better high school graduation rates, they have better ⁓ military access, better volunteerism, they do more extracurricular activities, they have better ⁓ college graduation rates. So the amount of work required for folks in my generation and younger to even be able to get into college was is so much higher than it was in the early 80s. So it's not just about test scores. It's about, I mean, I don't know if you have kids or not, but like they have to volunteer, right? You have to go and do these extracurricular activities. Like name me a kid that isn't doing at least one sporting activity and generally one creative activity like art or music or something, right? And speaker-0: Some will go do like public works too. speaker-1: Yeah, exactly. Volunteerism and all sorts of stuff. Like those have become a requirement to get into college now. So all our children, our younger folks are doing as much as was required for our older people, and then some just to have a chance at getting into the same spot. And then when they finally get their degree, they're saddled with, you know, fifty to a hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt, which just did not exist. you know, back in in the 80s. And so that's the thing that bothers me. I I have this thing that if somebody is telling you something, right, if you assume they're not an idiot and that they're a smart, capable, intelligent adult, then you should listen to what they are saying to you. And I think right now there's a lot of people, particularly folks who for whatever reason are sort of stuck in their ways, that like you'll tell them stuff and they just won't believe you. And then my response is like, Well, do you think I'm an idiot? Do you think I'm lying to you? Do you think I'm trying to trick you? Like, what is it about this conversation that is leading you to not believe the things that I'm telling you? Because I'm not trying to trick you. Like, I'm not trying to pull one over on you. I'm talking about what it's like out there. Why do you refuse to believe it? Yeah. And and I think that ⁓ for a lot of younger folks, they're finding that very frustrating. speaker-0: Yeah, especially these days. When I was a kid, you would look at an adult and you would you could almost take it for granted that that you know that they loved America, that they that they that they knew what they were talking about. And now we have a situation where we can't even we can't even trust the people that are in office. You you have all the information and we still can't trust you. speaker-1: Hmm. Yeah. Well and now now they're cooking the information too. speaker-0: And and they're just straight up lying to us. Like this thing that's happening there that happened in in Minneapolis. again, good poor Minneapolis jeepers. Can you guys get to break? ⁓ but Miss Good, Miss Good, I forget her first name. Renee Good, thank you. we saw the video, and you're telling us lies. speaker-1: Renee. speaker-0: It's not we can't and it's and it sucks. Kids, it's not always like this. I promise you, it's not always like this. We just got we got in this it it it's the the the bad way of doing things, it's their last gasp. Because now we have internet, we have folks like Chris running for office that that's the it it These games that they're playing and they're the how they're manipulating our society is just bonkers and it's wrong. And again, young folks, this is just not how it's done. It's never been done like this. speaker-1: Y yes, yes, and that it's it has never been done like this. Like this moment is a very specific and dangerous moment in American history. However, I I think it is also fair to say that the folks that have are currently in power are the ones that got us into this situation. Like if we were part of a healthy democracy, a healthy country, Trump would have been like an eight percent candidate. And would have gotten kicked to the curb. speaker-0: Trump would have been some crazy dude on the subway talking dumb stuff. It would have never been this this crazy. speaker-1: Totally. But the thing I I like to remind people of, again, I always say I I don't know. I don't know is this a swearing podcast or not? speaker-0: Yeah, let it rip. We're a doll. speaker-1: Okay. I always say I don't know shit about shit. I just say things. But I remind people that MAGA Republicans, like in in I'm talking the 2015, 2016 era, like they had legitimate grievances. Like they had real issues that were not being addressed and were being just shoved under the rug, as did people on the left, as did all Americans. And all of our politicians got us into this mess, whether through Selfishness or greed or incompetence or idiocy or whatever, like we would have never been in this. I say this all the time, but like if the Democrats actually fought for and passed the things they claim to hold as values, they would never lose an election again. And yet we keep getting stuck in this position over and over again. If you are watching the show and you are a Democrat, you should be absolutely irate. That the Democratic Party does not have a leader right now. Like you should be writing it's it's disgusting. You should be writing the the DNC, the DCC, your your ⁓ state and county reps and calling them because can you imagine Microsoft not having a CEO for over a year? Like who is leading this this multi-billion dollar global organization? Who is leading this? What are the values of this? speaker-0: Change? speaker-1: Why are they not being pushed? Right. So again, I want to make sure my my critiques to the Democratic Party are like constructive critiques, right? Because right now the two are not equal in terms of their attempted danger. But I just want to remind people that voters aren't stupid. They see what people say and then they don't do it and they feel it. Dude, I the past Four months, I have had to worry about paying my rent three of those months. And I I can't and I'm a guy with two master's degrees that owns my own business and I am struggling. I live in a one bedroom apartment and I'm struggling. And like I just I talk to people all the time that are just they do not know how they're gonna do it. My ex wife has been out of work for over a year. ⁓ two of my people that are ⁓ that I've worked with very, very closely are out have been out of work for eight, nine months. Like it's Bad out there. speaker-0: Me too. I haven't had a full time job since 2017 because of H1B visas. speaker-1: Okay. Yeah. And it it's it's it's crazy. It's crazy right now. And so I I I keep trying to remind people because I go to a lot of democratic establishment events and the conversation's always around like, ⁓ we have a communications problem. We have a you know a marketing messaging problem. And I'm like, what if you just have a getting things done problem? Right. speaker-0: You have a what if you have a ooh, I got distracted by this big ass check problem. speaker-1: Yeah. It's like here's an idea. Why don't you put up candidates that don't sound like friggin' robots? And then when they get elected, why don't they do the thing that's that they say they're gonna do? Like healthcare again. It is twenty twenty six. We have not had a real conversation about universal health care since two thousand and ten when Obamacare was passed. It comes up every so often and people kinda talk about concept. Yeah. Yeah, we all have concepts. Like Bernie Sanders is the only one banging his head against the wall over here, right? speaker-0: of a plan. speaker-1: I'm being slightly hyperbolic here for fun, but but the fact remains it's like people, ⁓ I don't know if you saw the the article, ⁓ I think it was yesterday or maybe two days ago about how ⁓ this is this is the largest switch of party affiliations of younger people to independence that we've ever had in American history. Yeah. ⁓ younger people do not want to be involved in the Democrat or the Republican Party. And I think that's fair, man. I am r I am running as a Democrat for the Senate in Ohio and I am unbelievably frustrated with the Democratic Party. They have been freezing me out consistently. And speaker-0: That is such a consistent message that's honestly pissing me off. speaker-1: It should. speaker-0: How are you gonna have a team and you know I I I speak in sports. How are you gonna have a baseball team? speaker-1: I've been getting into NFL lately, so speaker-0: ⁓ even better. How about my bears? ⁓ speaker-1: The Bears aren't so funny, funny thing, this has nothing to do with anything, but ⁓ I'm I don't I don't really know NFL football that much, but myself and three friends decided to do just like a little pool. And the win the winner, the other three are gonna buy them a dinner of their choice at a restaurant. And so I chose my teams mostly based on cities I really liked and animals I thought were cool. Going into the playoffs, I have the Bears, the Seahawks, the Patriots, and the Broncos. speaker-0: Ha ha ha ha ha. speaker-1: I have the top two in each conference and my friends are just like, What in the hell? You have no idea what you're doing. And you have the top two seeds in both conferences. I was like, Yep, I'm looking forward to my steak dinner. speaker-0: Do you know well you're in Ohio, so you might have heard. do you know what's going on with the Browns? With the sugar Sanders thing? speaker-1: The stadium. You're talking ⁓ you're talking about the stadium? speaker-0: No, I'm talking about the quarterback, Shadur Sanders. Okay, so what happened? You know, Shadur Sanders is ⁓ Deion Sanders' son. And he was Shador was in college last year, and he was really good. He was supposed to go in the first round of the NFL draft last year. ⁓ but instead he basically it's speaker-1: ⁓ no, no, no, I didn't. What's going on? Okay. speaker-0: We're finding out he basically got blackballed because apparently Dion makes people nervous. But so he got blackballed. He went in the seventh round. He got the job at ⁓ for Cleveland. So he was the he was the third string quarterback. The guy who was supposed to go in the first round was third string. The second string quarterback for the Browns was also in the same draft pool. But he went in like the I don't remember, maybe the third round. I think maybe he got picked on the third round. Cleveland refused to play Shadur. They refused to play him, even though he they had the one guy, I forget who they started out the year with, but they had an older, more established quarterback play, but then he was older, so he got hurt. So they let the third round kid take over. He got hurt, and then Shadur came and just started, he just started balling out. speaker-1: Nice. speaker-0: I feel like how the Cleveland Browns treated Shador Sanders is how the Democrats treat different people that are running for office. You guys are getting blackballed because I'm assuming you're not taking corporate money. I'm assuming you don't you say no to APAC. I'm assuming that there's these other things. You speak in normal people words. speaker-1: try. Yeah. So I so I think that this without sounding too cynical. So first of all, yeah, I don't I don't take any lobbyist money and I don't think any corporate money. ⁓ I actually I'm gonna do a video about how I don't even do call time, which is like an anathema because we I looked it up the the average ⁓ congressional candidate spends more than four hours a day on what's called call time, which is calling donors to get money. Yep. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: So just think about that. If you're spending that's yeah, let's let's just say 20 hours a week conservatively, what are you not doing in the 20 hours? You are not interviewing, you are not talking to constituents, you are not talking to to or you're not trying to figure out how you can help people, you're not educating yourself on the top issues of of the moment. speaker-0: That's day. And you're not educating other people in Congress so they understand? This is what's happening in Columbus. This is what's happening in Ohio. Happening in Miami. What's happening in Sonoma? speaker-1: You're not Yep. So I'm I'm I'm not doing I don't do call time. I'm not doing any of that. My goal is to do a grassroots campaign and and have support from people as I talk to them and I get to know them better. But to but to your point, yeah, I agree. I mean, just look at what's going on in Ohio, right? So Sherrod Brown jumped in the race. I was the first actively running Democrat in the race before I was three months or so before Sherid Brown jumped him. Chuck Schumer came from DC. Didn't send any of us an email, right? Like when you file to be a candidate, like your email address is public record. Like, didn't reach out to any of the other Senate candidates, decided Sherrod Brown was going to be the guy. And I was like, first of all, why didn't they send any of the rest of us emails? Like, even if it was to get us into a room to talk about how we can support Sherrod Brown, why I didn't get an email. No one got an email, right? Yeah. And then as soon as Sherrod Brown entered the race, the entire infrastructure just seized up. The donors. The the county groups, ⁓ the Ohio Democratic Party all seized up and made it almost impossible to get anywhere. And the way I keep trying to, for some reason, I think this is a natural human thing, but I think it's also a politics thing. I get sort of brushed off a lot because they're like, ⁓ you're you're just new. You got to make your your way through the democratic system, or you're running for Senate. Of course you're gonna want this. And I was like, look, guys. I am telling you these things because whether I run for Senate or not, these are still problems the Democratic Party has. These are inefficiencies that the Democratic Party has. Whether I get hit by a bus tomorrow, doesn't matter. These things still exist. So to answer your point, the metaphor that I kind of use is what we should be doing, we the royal we that as a Democratic Party, we should be inviting people into the theater and putting them on stage and giving them an opportunity to. Show themselves. Right now, we're not even open, we're not even invited into the building. And so I have this little joke that I kind of use, ⁓ where I'll go around to people and I'll be like, ⁓ man, have you heard of Barack Obama before? As a joke, right? Like everyone's heard of Barack Obama. Yeah. But the point is, did you know who Barack Obama was before his big speech at the DNC? Yeah. And the answer was no, right? Nobody knew who Barack Obama was. You know, he he he had a pretty strong following in Illinois and Chicago and he was he was a popular guy in various circles, but he wasn't like, you know, up there or whatever, right? Yeah. Until he was given whatever it was, like a 10 minute slot to to really inspire people. We should be doing that all the time. Yeah. Why this is another thing. Why doesn't when you apply to be a a candidate, I say apply like it's a job, right? speaker-0: Nationally. speaker-1: When you when you file to be a candidate, yeah, it is. The Ohio Democratic Party should email you and be like, hey, we want to have a phone call. Here's your onboarding packet. Here is ⁓ a connection to all of the county chairs and their email addresses. Here's a connection to all the local and national media that's relevant to your campaign. Here is a connection to possible donors that could assist you. Like instead, we have 1500, 2000 candidates all over the country. All doing the same thing and it's completely inefficient. Let me give you an example. When I first started, I reached out to the Ohio Democratic Party. I was like, Hey, can you get me a list of all the county chairs? So I could reach out to them. And they're like, ⁓ I don't know if we have that. I'm like, You don't have a list of all the county chairs? And they're like, Well, I'm sure it's on some like this is literally what he said to me. ⁓ I'm sure it's on some Excel file somewhere. And I was like, Okay. So do you know what I did? I and my team made a list. speaker-0: I do. speaker-1: Of all the county chairs. I have a list of all the 88 counties in Ohio, who's the chair and their email contact. And now I've got candidates coming up to me asking for that list. And do you know what I do? I give it to them for free. Because the point here is to effectively create a pushback that will be successful about what's going on right now. And as a small business guy, when I see the way that the Democratic Party functions, it drives me crazy. And again, I try not to be a cynical man, but I've been told this. The first thing I was told when I filed to be in the Senate, ⁓ over coffee, establishment Democrat, first thing he told me is don't waste your time with the Democratic Party. Just get started going out there talking to people. Damn. And I'll and and I kind of didn't listen to him. And he was right. I wasted a lot of time that I could have spent doing other things. And it just I think, not I think, I know. We can do better than this. We can create a party that can be super effective, responsive to people, and fighter of our values. And if the party can't do that, then I gotta be honest, maybe it's time for a new party, or it's time to route the party and fix it from the inside. Because that is not, in my opinion, that is not an acceptable answer. And the last thing someone told me once. ⁓ this is the cynical thing. He's like the thing you have to remember is that all parties, all political parties, Democrat and Republican, their first priority is to survive. And that means that they will do whatever they think is beneficial to ensure their survival, even if that means going against the values that they claim to purport. And I don't want to live in that America, personally. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, I don't either. I I I I'm ⁓ Gen X. I was born in seventy-two. So I remember a lot of things before things took a hard turn. And we used to have American Pride, and it was about speaker-1: In the before times. speaker-0: the United States and and who we were as the leader of the world. And the, you know, the the the shining city in the hill and all that stuff. Like I remember when we were working as a team towards that. And then again somewhere in the 70s and 80s, it just these these business people turned into career politicians and now we can't shake them. It's like, it's like United States caught the herpes and we just can't get rid of these guys. speaker-1: Yeah. I there's a that's an interesting analogy, sure. yeah, I think that there's a lot of things that are going on with that. And we can dig into it if you want. One of the things I do remind people of a as like a maybe a cause for hope is like the folks that we have in leadership right now, this is not gonna sound good when I say it, but they're all opportunistic cowards. All like almost all of our leadership in Congress right now. Are just opportunistic cowards and they are trying to get theirs in whatever way they can. And they have set the system up in a way that benefits them. So again, like I'm running as a Democrat, I need to collect a thousand signatures to be on the ballot. If I was running as an independent, I would need to collect more than 5,000 signatures. Like the system is set up in a way that benefits the the people in power. Yeah. The nice thing about that though is the thing with opportunistic cowards is they're really easy. To move in the direction that you need them to go in. And that's something that Donald Trump is acutely aware of. He understands how to create that thread because these people painting with a broad brush here, most of these people don't really have a value system to stand on. ⁓ and you know, Congress, like our leadership, they're supposed to be the best of us, right? Like they're supposed to be out there advocating and learning this stuff so that the rest of us can go and live our lives. And you're telling me that like. I don't know, Lindsay Graham is the best of us. Lauren Boebert, you know, like these people Marjorie Taylor Green. I know she's supposedly seen the light or whatever. Pete Hegsef, you know, Christy Gnome. These people are not the best of us right now. And we should expect better from them. And unfortunately, I think it's gonna require it's gonna require some crowbars to to lift out the the rotted wood. ⁓ To get us out of this. But I I think it is very doable. And what I'm seeing with younger folks in particular is that they you mentioned this American pride thing. They don't feel that in the way that you did and and I did, in a sense, where there was a sense of like, well, America's always had its issues, but it felt like we were at least trying to strive towards something better. Yeah. And to be honest, I think we are better, even with what's going on now. This is probably. The best time to ever be alive in general. speaker-0: Hands down. Hands down. Is the coolest put coolest time ever. speaker-1: Yeah, and and like we've got like our medical advancements and stuff. Like it's not equally distributed and there's a lot of issues that we need to fix. But, you know, rewind 200 years and you didn't even have anesthesia, right? Like so there's there's a lot of benefits in the world that we've got now. But the younger generation, I remember I I talked to a young woman. This was at one of the first no either no kings or fifty fifty one protests. And I was just asking her what's on her mind. ⁓ at the protest and she was like, you know what? I am sick of us getting caught in this thirty day conversation. Every time somebody mentions like trans rights or Palestine or whatever, she's like, I wanna start winning fucking elections. Yeah. And I think that the younger generation is at a point where they haven't the social contract for them is broken and they're not like the the wool has been removed from their eyes, right? And now they want They want to actively work on making the world a better place. And anybody who is not g willing to do that, you can you can jump on the train and be a part of it. But you know, we're not gonna waste any yeah, we're not gonna waste any time on you right now. And I say that all the time to my Republican and maybe more conservative folks. It's like, look, at the end of the day, I am not asking you for anything. I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I'm not even trying to convince you to vote for me. What I'm asking you to do is trust that I am going to try to work and make your life better. Even though we're not going to agree on everything, that I am going to actively work to make your life better. And if you can trust me on that, I think we can do some amazing things together. And if for whatever reason you can't, then that's fine too. And you go and do your thing, right? And no matter what happens, if I get elected or if I don't, or maybe I get elected in the future or whatever it is. I am still gonna spend my time trying to make your life better. speaker-0: Why did you choose to run for Senate instead of House? speaker-1: ⁓ so one, because we have a special election in Ohio. So this is J.D. Vance's Senate seat. So for for those who don't know, J.D. Vance might have heard of him, our vice president. He was a senator from Ohio. And when he became vice president, so he he filled the spot for two years. And then when he became vice president, our governor Mike DeWine ⁓ put John Houston for two years in that space. The remaining two years of that Senate spot is up this year. And so I was sitting around thinking, I was like, well, this was in February of last year. You know, coming off that election, I think a lot of people were just completely distraught. I was feeling it too. I'm just like, why is nobody doing anything? You know, you mentioned you mentioned adults like an hour ago. I like, where are the adults in the room here? Yeah. And I was just so disappointed by the leadership of the Republican Party and of course the the Democratic Party. And I was like, well, why don't I start looking at how I can be involved in making my state and community better? And I started doing some just like looking around. I was like, ⁓ yeah, we have a special election coming up. That's really interesting. And, you know, I I feel like I I have a lot of real world experience as a small business leader, healthcare. I was in ⁓ security for a while. I I'm I would put my tech understanding against anyone in Congress any day of the week. And so I and nobody, nobody had run for or nobody had ⁓ applied to be in the special election for the Senate. And I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna do it and see what happens. And so I filed and then I started reaching out to people and I started doing, you know, ⁓ town halls and podcasts and interviews and just going out and meeting people at protests and wherever. And and it felt like this was a really good time. To have some new blood and new ideas enter into the mix. And so that's that's where I got. And you know, you you ask about the the compared to the house. It's not like I get asked this question a lot. And and usually people that are in the political sphere, I can tell where they're coming from, right? Because they view the Senate as this like endpoint in this long career in politics. But I don't want to be in Congress until I'm 70. I'm doing this because I want to serve my country and make my state and my country a better place. And so I've I figure in my mind I'll run for this special election. That'll be two years, and then we got to run for the full term. So I'll run for that again, assuming you know I ⁓ get elected. So you're now looking at a a partial term and maybe one full term. And depending on how that goes, maybe I might run for a second full term. And then I'm coming back home to the world that I love, to my To my family, to my my business that I've created, this industry that I've built here in Ohio. I'm not getting into politics because it's my job. And I think that's another important distinction that we're starting to see with a lot of, I mean, you're interviewing a lot of folks these days. A lot of folks are entering politics who are not politicians and they don't view it as a career, right? Yeah. speaker-0: They don't want to be a politician. speaker-1: And and the thing you gotta remember is a lot of the the politicians that have been around for a while that run for House or Senate seats, this is their job. It's their only job. And if they lose, yeah, they don't have a career. If I lose, I just go back to the life that I have and and work with the speaker-0: It's their career. What part of small business owner do you not understand? speaker-1: So I've I view this as as a part of p my public service and how I can try to make this country a better place. And we're in a very particular time right now that I think needs more folks stepping up and helping. And again, whether they're successful or not, I mean, if you look at the reality is Sherry Brown's probably gonna clean my clock, right? Like I mean, he is he's got he's fundraising a ton, he has the democratic establishment. I can't even get email responses sometimes ⁓ from the the Democratic Party. But that doesn't mean I can't be there to push messages and and policies that aren't being talked about. It doesn't mean that I can't bring in younger or unaffiliated voters into the Democratic Party potentially. And then those those folks that come with me as a coalition can start forcing, I would hope, the Democratic Party to start being better. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: What's my hope for? speaker-0: What's your what's your small business? speaker-1: ⁓ so I I actually I've got like five businesses, but I own ⁓ not that I own, I've I got like five jobs. ⁓ so I I started as I was leaving healthcare, I was actually I was working at OSU's medical center and I at the the ⁓ innovation studio that I was working at got downsized. ⁓ and so as I was doing that, I was also trying to maybe go through to med school, but I'd also been doing this video game and software company on the side. And so when I got ⁓ reduction enforced from OSU. I was like, well, I could get another job at OSU, but I've also been doing this thing on the side. Maybe I'll see what this like entrepreneur thing is everyone's talking about. So this would have been 20, 2013. ⁓ and ⁓ I just started doing that. I did I didn't, you know, we didn't have clients or employees or anything ⁓ initially. And then I just started doing it and ⁓ I've been involved now in it since 2013. I also started ⁓ GDEX, which is my gaming ⁓ expo. It's the largest professional development expo in the Midwest. I started that from scratch. ⁓ I also teach. I teach at Columbus State ⁓ full-time, as well as ⁓ several other universities I've taught at ⁓ here in Ohio. And I just kind of really enjoyed building this business and building this industry in Ohio. I I I created I've created a lot of stuff that did not exist in Ohio or the Midwest before I started working on it and my team, you know, all the love to my team that has has been with me this whole time. And so I just kept kind of doing that. So yeah, I've got a video game and software company ⁓ that called Multivarious that ⁓ I'm super proud of. ⁓ it's it's hard times out in the tech world right now and the video game world, but ⁓ my team is great, but the community is great. And ⁓ I've learned a ton. Like I I know what it's like to own a small business. I I know what it's like to live in this economy. That I d I j I honestly don't think a lot of our congressional leadership understands what it's like to live in this world right now. speaker-0: Yeah, I talk about that often. There's this financial wall that they refuse to take a look over. So there's the wall, and then they're just worried about what's happening on this side of the wall. They're not worried about what's happening on the they thank God that they're not on the other side of the wall of the money wall. But they're they're you know they're not worried about it. That they are trying to raise kids. You know, the good ones. They're trying to raise kids. They're trying to continue to make money so they don't struggle and all that stuff. But we have some folks that the folks on this side of the wall need to be more boisterous. We need to say this is not good. And just because I don't have a lot of money doesn't mean I don't get to say, I don't get a say so in in my future. speaker-1: Totally. I th I think America is I mean America is by its nature all of ours. And if you whether you view it as a country or a society or a culture or even a business, we are all owners in in the American experiment. And speaker-0: And this is my this is my corny tagline to exactly what you're saying. It's in the name, US, US. It's in the name. speaker-1: Yeah. Co Columbus uses that too. Columbus. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, the the thing that kind of kills me is like well, there's many things, but the people that are best set up, the the rich, the powerful, the large corporations, they can make our life heaven on earth if they wanted to. You know, and and and half the time I I say this as like when you talk about a fair and equitable tax rate, for example, it's like All we're asking is for these people to be like a little less greedy. Not even that much less greedy. Like just a little less greedy. We're not asking for a mansion on every corner. speaker-0: We don't want to turn this bitch into socialism. We don't want to turn it into ⁓ communism. None of that. We want you to be a team player. Really all we're asking you to do. speaker-1: Yeah. Absolutely. Some acknowledgement that you got to where you are because of the resources and opportunities and efforts that other people have provided you. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a great video. speaker-0: Ten million dollars that your dad gave you doesn't hurt either. speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, of course. ⁓ but Arnold Schwarzenegger has a great ⁓ video. I don't know if it was a commencement address or whatever, but he talks about how he hates the term self-made man because he exists because of all the people that have given him help and breaks over the years that have allowed him. And that goes back to where we're talking about with the Democratic Party. Give these people an opportunity to show to show themselves, to showcase what they're capable of doing. And I I think ultimately that's what America is about. ⁓ and and we can create a system. I'm a real big fan of aligned incentives. So if we can get everybody's incentives aligned in the same direction, then we'll be unstoppable. If we take our tax money in a fair and equitable way and use it to invest in infrastructure, healthcare, education, protection, then that creates the opportunities for more and more people. To start businesses and become successful and yada yada. And then when they see that success, that's then reinvested back into the country, which then allows more people to do it. And then eventually we create this perpetual machine that keeps going. And the funny thing is, we know this is possible because this is what rich people do all the time. This is how they function. They take the resources that were provided to them or given to them, they invest it into other vehicles that allow a return. And then they take that return and they they put it into the next thing. That's why it's easier to make money when you have money because you can invest in opportunities and you don't have to spend your time to do it. Right. Like your money makes more money than you ever can as an individual. What we want to do is remove the greed and corruption from that process so that when that person gets in the cycle and becomes wealthy or successful, that they can't then use that wealth and success. To hinder the people coming along behind them. speaker-0: Right. I'm gonna take it to the streets. I'm from the hood. speaker-1: Okay. Wh which hood is this? speaker-0: ⁓ I'm from Chicago. Originally from Chicago. spent some time in Russia. You know, yeah. ⁓ the Cubs, you know. speaker-1: For there. speaker-0: There has always been over policing. There has always been over surveillance. There has always been ⁓ my community doesn't play well with cops because cops don't play well with us. You're the one in charge, but yet you're mistreating us. And then folks that don't understand or that don't come from that life, they look at us and they judge us. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: at the same standards that they have around them. You have better schools than we do. You have better grocery stores. Well, let me say you have grocery stores. We have liquor stores. You have good schools. We got buildings. We'll call them schools. And then when the cops come and do what they do and mistreat us and all those things, then you look at us like it's our fault. And then you look at the drug dealers and you look at the thieves, you look at the the murderers and all that stuff and you think it's all of us. The majority of us, I say this all the time, the majority of the people that are in the inner city, I cannot tear them out of a church to save my life. If you were to invest in those communities and raise those communities up to the levels at which there's a lot of folks out here that are living pretty good. Now the police don't have to go in and start fucking people up the way that they do because the the the the culture is different, the mentality is different. How are you gonna make us go through the gauntlet of underfunded schools, shitty neighborhoods, ⁓ violent police officers? And then finally, when we get to the other side, that's my story. I made it all the way to Silicon Valley. speaker-1: Sure. speaker-0: All by myself. ⁓ you know, the conversation that we had before, you know. But for the most part, I paid for my school. My parents didn't give me money for school. I had to do, I had to go into the army to pay for the school. And then after that, after that ran out, I had to pay for more school. I worked and I did all the things. And now I'm in Silicon Valley, and here we are. We find out that H1B visas exist and now the jobs are missing and they're leaving and all that stuff. All that to say. It's weird how I can go from absolutely nothing in the streets, come up to Silicon Valley, and nobody cared until now we're finding out that all of these jobs are starting to go to China and India and all those places. And this whole time, the shortcut would have been if we would have invested in schools and we invest in those communities, actually, actually investing and letting them have grocery stores. Something as simple as that. speaker-1: Sure. speaker-0: Proper proper nutrition, proper education, all of those things, if you can get the black and brown communities to tap back in and to and to co sign and to want to be a part of this system that has neglected them this whole time. The only way to do that is investing in those properly investing in those communities and letting those communities grow. That way we can start to regulate or not regulate, but that way we can start to find a solution to why the cops think that they can walk into these neighborhoods and fuck us up. If I'm walking around with a with a science book, I'm assuming that cops aren't going well, these days you just don't even know anymore, but it doesn't matter anymore. But again, you turn around and you judge the black and brown communities for living like that, but that's how we have to live. This bootstrap thing that doesn't work. Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah. You know the you know the the bootstrap pull it yourself up from your bootstraps. I yeah I I love that because that's like the the basics of this idea, right? But like that phrase is a satirical phrase, it's supposed to illustrate that you can't lift yourself up by your bootstraps. Like that's the origins, that's the purpose of that phrase is that it's ridiculous to ask somebody to lift yeah, it's it's it's ridiculous to ask somebody to lift themselves up from their bootstraps, it's not something that can be done, and so I I always kind of like that because like You know, it's like even even the the the core ethos that you're saying, you don't even understand. Like you don't even understand that the core thing of your belief. ⁓ yeah, I I agree. I I 100% ⁓ sorry, I didn't know if you were finished. I sort of jumped up. I I think like if if we could make a major inroads on just handling like each community, so you have e like racial communities, you have geographic communities, so each community broadly. speaker-0: ⁓ no, no, no, go for it, go for it. speaker-1: But if you started with just taking care of poverty, the amount of societal benefit that you would incur would be astounding. If you can get it so that single mothers are not reliant on Snap to be able to feed their children, ⁓ you mentioned food, like food deserts are a real thing. And like the thing with poverty is that it hits. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: Everyone. It even though it it impacts different racial groups and and gender groups and stuff in different ways, everybody is touched by poverty. So, for example, in Ohio, there was a lot of talk around fentanyl and in Appalachia, right? I mean, that that's you know, JD Vance was outing that thing for a long time. ⁓ predominantly white in Appalachia, and they got hit hard by jobs going overseas and then factories closing down and then access to education began to really hurt. Like, you know, ⁓ talk about DEI, you know, we were yelling about DEI for six months or whatever it was last year. The biggest recipients of DEI and food stamps are white women. You know, like these these these policies and these programs that we put into place that has, I think again, from marketing You know, this welfare queen idea that we started to see in the early 80s, the early to mid eighties. That welfare queen idea, when you hear that, there's a specific connotation that is there, right? And it's not rural white women. And that was done intentionally to create this sense of other. But the reality is, is that, and I think we're starting to see this. Ohio is really gonna be hurting when this big, beautiful bill. kicks in full force and we start seeing the rural hospitals begin to to close down, our rural communities are going to take it in the face. And again, it's all unnecessary. And this goes back to the reinvestment in the infrastructure. Like we could wipe out poverty next week if we really wanted to. ⁓ think about homelessness. I don't know if you know this, but there's currently about 30 vacant homes. In the country, just sitting around. Nobody's in them, not doing anything for every homeless person that we have. So we theoretically, if we wanted to, we could house every homeless person in this country and still have 29 vacant homes sitting around, right? Like it's it's one of those, excuse me, it's one of those things where when you really stop and think about it, you have to ask yourself, like, what the hell are we doing here? Like, what is the goal we're trying to achieve? Is the goal that a bunch of investment firms and you know venture capitalists and whoever can own all this property and just sit on it until the price is right, which makes it impossible for normal folks like you and me to find a house or my business to to go get an office? Like, is that the kind of country that we want to build? Like we should be reinvesting in our people, in our infrastructure every single day. speaker-0: And we're seeing it in red states. So be careful, Ohio, because in red states, ⁓ there's a lot of farmers that are losing the farm. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Yep, totally. speaker-0: And then come to find out, JD Vance has a website that's kind of like Airbnb for farmers. What the farms, then they rent the farms out. speaker-1: Yep. Yep. They scoop. So I say this all the time in Ohio. I looked it up because I was just kind of curious. You know, we're a quote unquote red state, even though when I was growing up, we were a firmly purple state. But I just kind of looked it up. I was like, ⁓ how of the past, how many years were Republican control? And out of the past 33 years, I was just asking out of the past 33 years, how many of those years do you think were a Republican prefecta? Governor, state house, and state senate out of those thirty three years in Ohio. speaker-0: In Ohio? ⁓ Ohio's been beaten. It Ohio's been hurting my heart for a little while now. Because if it wasn't Florida, it was Ohio. So ⁓ speaker-1: out of thirty three years. speaker-0: I'll I'll give you a good five. speaker-1: Five? No, it's it's 27. In Ohio, 27 of the past 33 years have been completely owned, owned by a Republican governor, Republican Senate, and Republican state. That's crazy. Out of those remaining six or so years, how many of those do you think were a trifecta for Democrats? speaker-0: None. speaker-1: Zero. Right. Yeah. So when we sit around and and I say this to conservative people, I'm like, look, take the politics out of it for a second, right? I know that's hard because you got to defend your tribe and yada yada yada. Sure. But if you looked at something and you're like, for the past 33 years, ⁓ sorry, my dog just showed up. For the past thirty-three ⁓ out of the past thirty-three years, twenty-seven of those have been completely run by Republicans. That should cue you in. The fact that these policies are not working and the fact that the remaining six, zero of them had a democratic trifecta. So it's not about politics, it's just obvious. Like, hey, we gave the keys to these people, and this is the result we're getting. Maybe we should stop giving the keys to these people. The other thing I just remind people is like when I say something like that, I am not. Simultaneously saying that the Democratic Party is going to solve all of our problems. Again, there's a lot of things we need to have real retrospective conversations about the party. But if you keep doing the same thing, you're going to get the same results. And I think any reasonable person looks at Ohio and been like, hey, if out of the past 33 years, all of them are more or less under total Republican control. This is the results we're getting. We just dropped in the US News and Worlds report from thirty-sixth to thirty-eighth. So we're now in the bottom quartile, bottom twenty-five percent of states. And like I love this state. Yeah. You know, like why are we why are we failing by every conceivable metric? And now with these EPA changes, like I I seriously worry about our environment. I mean, Ohio is the place not once, but twice did our water catch on fire. That should tell you something. If your water's catching on fire, like you're doing something wrong. speaker-0: ⁓ my goodness. I am so tired of hearing that. I hang out with ⁓ I hang out with ⁓ environmentalists. ⁓ so I I I get a lot of information. I it's not that environmentalism isn't my main focus. My main focus is ⁓ I wanna I wanna I wanna improve education, I wanna make speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: Okay. I would and by improving education, I would love to make it more accessible. It's not any harder than. speaker-1: I think I think it should be free. I think every I think every adult should be given a free public four year public ⁓ or associates if you want, ⁓ education or vocational training program. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah. ⁓ I was in ⁓ when I was in the in the military, I ⁓ I lived in Germany. And they have a system out there, you know, they make a bunch of smart people. But they their system is you know, as you're going through the system, you know what kids are gonna be doctors and you know what kids need to stay in blue collar. It's By the time you get to eighth grade, it's you kind of know. And then from there, it's you're either gonna be on the on the track to, you know, university or the trades. Mix that with if you are in Cuba, in Cuba you can go from kindergarten to doctor. ⁓ look at the baby. Yeah, mine is cute. What kind of dog is she? speaker-1: Got her hair at that time. ⁓ she's a Yorkie poodle mix. ⁓ we f we found her like twelve years ago running down the highway in the middle of a blizzard. ⁓ no. Yeah. She's gonna turn ⁓ she's gonna turn fourteen in two months. speaker-0: Cute, she still looks like a puppy. speaker-1: I know. She's she's great. She's the easiest dog in the world. speaker-0: Yeah. So yeah, if you take if you take the approach from Germany and mix it with Cuba, because you can go from kindergarten to like your doctorate, ⁓ we w that's the system. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: It's it we we see it being done. It's not rocket science. speaker-1: Yeah. This is one of the things that I always like that for some reason Americans like to believe we're the only people to have ever encountered these problems. And somehow there's no answers. Like there are plenty of other countries around the world that have been testing out different solutions to things. ⁓ and it's funny enough, ⁓ Volpe our sort of ⁓ family motto has always been knowledge is no weight to carry. And that that idea means like the the more you learn, there's never a burden on learning more things. And ⁓ our speaker-0: Anything, it's a wonderful platform. It helps you elevate. speaker-1: Absolutely. I mean, there's there's consistent stories of people getting themselves out of bad situations by education. And actually one one of the in developing nations, but all ⁓ this applies everywhere, but in developing nations, like the single best thing you can do if you want to move a country from like a struggling developing nation into one that potentially can thrive is you educate your young women. If you can get if you can educate ⁓ everyone, but in particular your young women. It opens up the doors for opportunities for numerous, numerous things. And on top of that, one of the things that kills me with this assault on education is this idea that everything has to be this job training program. And that's not what higher education is supposed to be. And it never was. Yes, it's supposed to teach you the skills to do whatever the thing you're doing is, but it's also about turning you into a good citizen, understanding. You know, the globe and and what's happening around you, understanding the humanities so that you can be a better person. You know, and it's it's not just about getting you a job. And unfortunately, I think that over time it's become more and more of the talking point because colleges become so expensive. And when it becomes expensive, then you have to really start thinking about the ROI. But that's not what the purpose is. And I'll remind people. That the humanities, arts, literature, music, storytelling, that is what people live for. So you can argue that like STEM is how we live and allows us to live, but the arts and humanities are why we live. That's that's what people gravitate towards. I I talk about COVID. What did everybody do when COVID came? And we were scared and we were locked up in our houses. We resorted to the arts, right? We started watching shows and playing video games and listening to music and I don't know, baking bread or whatever. speaker-0: I started, yeah. I started watching people started early on in COVID. I started watching people losing their minds and I saw them starting to go back to, you know, if I had to start all over again, what would it be? And there's a lot of people getting back into design and painting and stuff like that. So on this very channel, you will see tutorials because I was like, if you guys want to learn, I'm here to teach. And you can learn about Photoshop and Illustrator and and and animate and all the Adobe stuff. I was doing all of that because I saw you guys freaking out. speaker-1: Yeah. Nice. I I tell people I was like, look, if if there's like a handful of things I could tell you that no matter what you do, you should learn. I think having a basic understanding of Photoshop, video editing, and web development, those three things alone are like, and I don't mean like you don't have to be super sophisticated, but just knowing how to like throw an image into Photoshop and resize it real quick or crop it like being able to create a quick video and throw like because those things allow you to share your experiences with the rest of the world in a way that if you can learn those skill sets, puts you above in almost every possible job puts you above. speaker-0: And if you don't have Photoshop money, go to Photoph E A dot com. It's online Photoshop for free. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So ⁓ yeah, there's a there's a bunch of free versions for a lot of those things. And also like you can use Google Services got some of the stuff. I I wanted to bring up something just real interesting. You you brought before we before I so rudely interrupted you. No, go for it. You you had you had brought up ⁓ something, but ha have you ever heard of the Monopoly experiment? Do you know about that? Like Monopoly the g the game. speaker-0: Yeah, I think so. I think they they wasn't it where they they were they were watching kids play and they saw the the people get super aggressive so they weren't even gonna speaker-1: Sort of. So what what it is is they did a variety of experiments using Monopoly as a game. And what they would do is they would ⁓ some cases strategically and some cases arbitrarily, they would give players different benefits or negatives. And what they found is that this goes back to your ⁓ your comment about, you know, making it in life and nobody helped you, yada yada. What they found is that the people that would inherently end In better positions because they got an extra thousand dollars at the start of the game, or you know, they were allowed to avoid certain pitfalls like going to jail and stuff, that they would still believe that they were the better player and that they were doing it and that the rest of you are losing because you suck, right? And it really illustrates this like fallacy of human humanity, where even when given all of the benefits in the world, without stopping to self-reflect on how you got there. It's really easy for you to convince yourself that you are doing better than everyone else because there's some in inherent part of you that's better. You work harder. speaker-0: ⁓ because you're standing on the shoulders of giants. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you know, I I had a I I had a really this I won't say who it was with, but I had this conversation once. I was like one of the flast people to get the student loan forgiveness through the ⁓ PSLF, the public service loan forgiveness. Nice. Congratulations. And in order to do that, you have to work full time at a qualifying public institution like a hospital or a ⁓ college or university or whatever. You have to work full time ⁓ for over a decade, for a decade while paying your student loans. So you pay your student loans for a decade at their normal rate. And then you have to work in there. And then you can qualify for this public service loan forgiveness. I I actually worked for over a decade. Now keep in mind I was working full time as a teacher while also working full time at my business. While also working at some other stuff. So this full-time gig I had teaching was an addition to my other stuff, right? So it was a lot of work. And last year, December 24th, I got the email that I qualified and that my loans were going to be forgiven. And I was just like, ⁓ thank God. Like such a relief to do it. And then somebody that I was with was just like, they're like, Well, where's my speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: Where's my forgiveness? I've been paying taxes for you know 40 years. When am I gonna get my student loan forgiveness or my benefit or whatever? And like that blew my mind that first of all, on like Christmas Eve, you're even gonna bring that up. Like, you can't just say, congrats and be happy for me. Right. You had to make it about you. But then on top of that, I had to work for over a day, I had to work my butt off for over a decade to qualify for those. And the student loan thing was going back and forth through the courts. So I didn't even know if I was going to get it, right? I thought I had maybe missed the opportunity to get it. But then on top of that, I didn't even realize this until like two months ago. I was thinking about it while I was driving down the street because that's it, it stuck with me. This thing, I was like, ⁓ my God, you had the GI Bill. You did get your student loan forgiveness. Right. You got a government program that gave you student loan forgiveness. Because you participated in the GI program and you were in the military for four years. So, like, even in his mind, he didn't equate the benefit that I had received from a government program putting in my time to do it to the benefit. In his mind, he worked for everything he got and nobody ever helped him. And then it occurred to me, no, you got the GI program. A government program that existed. speaker-0: Isn't that crazy? Yeah. speaker-1: To help you out to remove your student loans so that you could enter into life in, and I would argue that the GI program is actually better than the PSLF because you at you exit earlier in life with no student loans. Yeah. You know, and you get paid while you are, it's not much, but you're getting paid while you are a military member, and you can then qualify for military member benefits and things like that. So I would argue that that's a better program, but that's not really the point, right? Like that's the minutiae between spending four years full time in the military or 10 years full-time in teaching. Like you know, they're they're not apples to apples comparisons. Right. But it just it just kind of blew my mind that folks in general, unless you take the time to really stop and look about your life and how you got there, it's really easy to lose sight of all the benefits that have been there supporting you along the way. speaker-0: Or the jealousy that comes with d watching people win. Just because it's not you winning don't mean that winning is bad. Like I'm glad. I am happy that you found a way to improve your life, improve your education, and you were able to to mitigate the the financial damage that was about to happen. speaker-1: Sure. Well, I appreciate that. And I I mean I I I think of it like I say this. I've been paying taxes since I was like 15, 16 year old years old. I've been working, right? I pay every school levy I I I vote yes on. I don't have any children. I vote for every library levy. I I use the library once or twice a year. I vote for all the public transit you know levy. speaker-0: On the library tip, do you have the app called Hoopla? Yeah, okay. Everybody, there's an app called Hoopla, H-O-O-P-L-A. If you get that app, ⁓ you might have to go to the local library and get your library card, but then you have access to TV shows, movies, books, audiobooks. speaker-1: I do, yep. speaker-0: There's a couple other things that are happening. speaker-1: Yeah, there's I I think newspaper ⁓ subscriptions as well. Yeah. So yeah. speaker-0: Like take advantage of that. That's what that's those are the programs that are available. So when Rich people tell you that ⁓ that the government is a waste of time and all that stuff. There are people who are not driven by money that are trying to make your life easier by doing things like having the the hoopla app available. Now you have books and magazines, all kinds of stuff available to you for free. speaker-1: Totally. Absolutely. And like it'll connect to your Kindle so you can read stuff on your Kindle if you've got it. Yeah. At the end of the day, a lot of this stuff is just trying to make the world better for you to get you closer to a lifestyle or at least a way of navigating the world that wealthy people just have on default. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: I think there's this idea that wealthy people are like working 60, 80 hours, like this grind culture. The vast majority of super wealthy people, and even just like moderately rich people, they aren't doing that. They're sitting around, they've got all the time in the world, they can go do what they want. ⁓ there's a really I would actually I recommend this. There's a documentary called Born Rich. Have you ever heard of it? It's from the early two thousands. speaker-0: No, but I'm about to check it out later this afternoon. speaker-1: I think it's on YouTube. It was for a while. So interestingly, ⁓ Wanka Trump is on it or Ivan Ivanka Trump, yeah. The the I don't think Donald is in it, but his daughter is. Yeah. But anyway, it's this documentary, and I I can't remember the guy's name, but he's like an heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune, and he's about to turn like 18 or 21 and then inherit he's gonna inherit like a biz bazillion dollars, right? Yeah, and he records himself in the like Weeks or months leading up to this. And it's really interesting. And one of the things that's always stuck with me is he interviews his dad, who has never really had a real job. Like he's inherited the Johnson and Johnson money, his father. And what does his father do all day? He sits on some boards and you know, he helps and like volunteering and stuff. But most of his day is spent reading, hanging out with friends and family, going to the country club. Like that is how most wealthy people. spend their time. They are not doing this 80 hour a week grind. And again, yeah, exactly. What we are saying is that we don't even, I'm not even asking for everybody to have that. Although in a Star Trek utopian world, that would be lovely. I'm just saying we shouldn't have to be starving and we shouldn't have to be worried about paying for our medical bills or paying for rent. Did you hear about that that kid who died kid, he was a younger man who died because he speaker-0: At least one parent in the house. speaker-1: Chose to pay his rent over filling his prescriptions. This was in the past like two or three weeks. And he ended up dying. ⁓ and it's just we should not be putting people in this position in the wealthiest country to ever exist in the history of the world. It is ghastly what our health insurance system is doing. It is reprehensible what our education system is doing. And we deserve better and we can do better. And it's not about the money. We have the money. I looked it up. I looked it up the yesterday. The top 20% of our population. This is and this is again, it's gonna be one of those that's even worse than that kind of thing. The top 20% of our population earns about nine to ten trillion dollars a year. But it's actually worse than that because that's income, right? And most wealthy people, they don't earn income the traditional way that we do, they leverage their debt and their assets. In a way so that they can pull in debt, which at low interest rates, which is not taxable. And then they use that leveraged debt to pay themselves or invest or do whatever they want to do. Right. So it's not like schmucks like us who go and work and then we get our our money and we do something with it. speaker-0: We're working for the guy who's making himself all by himself. speaker-1: Yeah. And so when you when you think about the the the like the average ⁓ spending in the in the country, we have enough money, like I think our I think our government spending is gonna be about seven trillion, seven to eight trillion this year because a lot of because of the big beautiful bill and we're incurring a lot of like debt. But the the top twenty percent earn more every year. Than our entire country does. You could take I I did this another calculation. I love these fun little calculations, right? And I I this was in in May when we were talking about Doge. And I was like, at that time, I think Elon Musk was worth about $380, $400 billion. You could take $300 billion of that, and that money would cover over half a million people in this country from birth to age 65. It would cover their health insurance. And again, it's actually worse than that because you could take that money and invest it over time and cover a lot more people than the 500,000. So my my point is, and I think it ends up if you just spent it all, I think it ends up being about 18 million people. That's one person's value. So we have the money, we just choose not to allocate it. In the way. And that's an that's a very, very important thing I I want people to understand is that the money exists. What we are doing now is shuffling it towards the wealthy and large corporations, which inherently means we are taking it away from lower and middle class homes. There's no way, like there's no way you can take the money and give it to somebody without it coming from someone else. And right now it is going to the wealthy and it is being taken from Everyone else. speaker-0: I like to point this out too. you know, when you start talking about improving the lower class, it always makes the rich people super nervous. Right? ⁓ you're gonna take my money, blah, blah, blah. They should pull themselves up by the bootstraps. I say, okay, fine. How about we don't bomb one country? Sure. What if we don't bomb what if we don't bomb Nigeria and then we took that money and bought some books? speaker-1: Well man, did you I don't know if you saw again, how much of Trump can you actually trust, right? But did you see they want to move the military budget up to one point five trillion? Which is, I mean, almost doubling it. speaker-0: And who who do you think is gonna take those slots, those soldier slots? Who do you think is gonna take those slots? It's us. I just got done telling you. I wanted to improve my life. I was tired of being poor, so I joined the military. Yeah. Right. And then you have what's her name? the she used to work, ⁓ God, really pretty blonde. ⁓ but she gets mad, she got mad on TV because She says Santa Claus is white, all this stuff. What's her name? ⁓ anyway, when they were talking about when they were talking about having troops in Venezuela and having troops all over the world, she went on and she got nervous. She got upset because she doesn't want her kids to go do that. ⁓ so fuck me then. speaker-1: ⁓ of course. Yeah, dude. Totally. Another ⁓ video I really suggest. It's ⁓ Nick Hannawar. I forget I don't know if you how you pronounce his last name. It's H A N A U E R. It's ⁓ it's a TED talk he gave. It's a really interesting one. I don't know what he's up to now. For all I know, he could, you know, I'm just I just remember the TED talk, so I'm not sure what he's been up to these days. But his TED talk, in essence, is about how ⁓ growing wealth inequality. ⁓ he's giving a talk from his perspective as a rich guy to other rich people. And he's trying to convince them that it's in their self interest to start paying more taxes and to start investing into the country. Because at the end of the day, when the wealth inequality hits that tipping point, the pitchforks are going come out. And so he's making a selfish claim that we should be taxing more and investing more because when that happens, you know, we've seen what happens historically ⁓ in those situations. And again, I'm not advocating for violence. I'm not saying we should do that. I'm just saying, yeah. speaker-0: We have the capability. This society. This society has the capability of fixing it. And we're talking about, we're talking about, you know, going again, going back to some of the issues that I have had to deal with. Sometimes there's a gap in income. Sometimes $7.50 just doesn't reach. And you have this, just this a couple bucks, whether or not you can get on that bus to go to work. There's a couple bucks that's going to change your world. And sometimes those couple bucks that are missing makes you make a decision. Maybe you stole something from the grocery store because you were hungry. And now you have a record. And now it's a slippery slope. I would set up actually having a society that you you know, and I'm not saying that you can walk in the grocery store and just grab as many apples as you want, but speaker-1: Totally. speaker-0: Having a society that is making money. So then you don't have to worry about do I buy an apple or do guy do I get on the terrain to go to work? speaker-1: Absolutely. Again, I totally recommend that article about the cost of being poor. It's a really, really insightful article if you find it. Yeah, I I think that's a really astute ⁓ comment. And one of the things that I mention is I look at we're getting caught in this like socialism, communism, capitalism conversation. And I think that we get caught in the minutia these things. And then 30 minutes later you realize like nobody actually said anything of value and you didn't really get anywhere. And I look at at those. The thing to remember is those are economic systems, right? They're not governmental systems. Like they are they they do involve the government and how the government kind of functions a little bit. But when you really think about it, they're like tools, right? Like capitalism is good at some things and terrible at other things. Socialism is good at some things and terrible at other things. Just like a hammer is good at certain things, you would never use a hammer as a screwdriver, right? And I think it's really important for us to understand that. Capitalism strengths are in creating a system that incentivizes progress and innovation and a what's supposed to be sort of a fair exchange of goods and services. And that's what it does. It's terrible about future looking, it's very short term, and it doesn't care about the mechanisms of creating that value, which most of the time is people. And that's where you can come in with something like socialism or whatever, when you can realize, like, okay, we'll provide guardrails on capitalism. A lot of people consider capitalism a chainsaw in this metaphor, where chainsaws are very, very valuable, but they're also very, very dangerous. So you need to put on guardrails and understand how to best use a chainsaw. And I think that's kind of where we could at least start moving in the short term is like, let's focus on creating a free market. Using capitalism the best way we can, then step back and understand that we have to be mindful of the dangers that capitalism represents and then use what capitalism generates as value and profit and innovation. Use that back in the system to benefit all of us. But we should not be riding on the coattails of capitalism because we think that's the end all be all. Right. And I think I think AI. We haven't talked about that at all, but AI right now is one of those moments that could really blow up in our face in a like globally devastating way. speaker-0: And this is what's crazy, being a tech guy. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: I see AI coming and it's already, you know, it's already affected my life. ⁓ both for the good and bad. But AI is coming, and Congress is full of people who are in their 70s and 80s. These folks were around before VCRs. These these folks who were around speaker-1: Me too me too. speaker-0: AM FM radio when you had to wait to watch things. And when you if you missed a show, you just missed it. Like you there's no speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: Things are changing so quickly with the exception of the government, the people in the government. speaker-1: Yep. Yeah, I I I agree. You know, remember when we had to watch a show at a particular time on TV and like Yeah, Thursday night at ten o'clock and then yeah talk about it the next day. Yeah, totally. I am kind of glad that streaming services it does drive me crazy, but I I I'm glad that streaming services are doing weekly drops instead of all at once. Cause it gives chance for like everyone to kind of watch it and talk about it and although every time an episode ends, I'm just like, I want to watch the next one. But speaker-0: And the family would get together. speaker-1: Yeah, the the thing I'm worried about with AI is that well there's a couple of things but ⁓ and please I I we've been running for about two hours, so if you need to stop, let me know. But speaker-0: I'm here I'm here until you have to go. speaker-1: So the foundation of AI, this is the problematic part of it. It's not even about the technology itself. Although that we have to be concerned about because we don't really know the full implications of what AI when we talk about AI, we're talking about like a generalized intelligent AI, right? And one, we're not even sure if that's possible, right? I don't we don't know if we can make computer people like we think we can, but the AI that we have right now is not actual AI. It's it's just marketing speak. For AI. Yeah. It's it's like a pattern recognition system is really what it is. Mm-hmm. So we don't even Yeah. So we don't even know if it's possible, which is fine. Like that's what innovation is, that's what progress is. But also speaker-0: Yes, encyclopedia. speaker-1: Even if we make it and it's successful, the end result is that it's just gonna replace a lot of people's jobs. So we're firing all these people right now to invest in AI so that whoever owns the AI can just fire a bunch of people. So how are we gonna handle that? But the scary part is that for the past 25 years, you have all these VCs, hedge funds, these institutional funders, and these ⁓ tech companies. Have invested in all of this new and alternative tech like blockchain and augmented reality and all the simulation stuff. And none of it's really paid off. Right. So they've lost a butt ton of money over the past 25 years. And for a lot of these VCs and hedge funds, this is it. If this doesn't pay off for them, they are gone. And so they are making extremely risky bets. They are shoveling tons of money into this system. into these into these tech companies. And these tech companies, because they're trying to you know limit their risk, they're selling and trading goods and services amongst themselves. So like you know, Google might give actually we just saw Apple's using Google for their AI system now. So they're they're trading AI stuff and cloud services and all the system stuff. It's like a shell game that's moving around right now. Yeah. So the the the way I I the metaphor I use is if you imagine there's a train And that train is barreling down the tracks, and we are building the tracks while the train is barreling. And you've got these hedge funds just shoveling coal into the train. So it's speeding up and speeding up and speeding up. Yeah. They don't care where this train is going. They don't even know where this train is going. It could be going right through your living room and they don't care. And if it derails, the potential downside of that could be catastrophic to our economy. Imagine all these VC firms collapsing, and then all these tech firms will start to collapse because they've made a bet on their friend. And then now their friend needs to call in the debt or the services that they leveraged against this other thing. And the potential that this could all fall apart in a catastrophic way is very real. But the upside for AI, whoever can get to a generalized AI first. In essence, can control the global economy. So they are making these insanely risky decisions, and nobody is even looking at it or understands it. And to your point, Congress is so we're still in, you know, the internet's a series of tubes over here for these people, right? They don't know anything about websites or social media, ⁓ blockchain. They don't know anything about any this, right? And so, like my worry is. speaker-0: No they don't. speaker-1: without trying to be too much of a downer, is that this AI bubble could make the housing market look like, you know, this could be like lollipops and rainbows compared to the potential downside if this AI bubble pops. ⁓ and it's at the end of the day, even if it's successful, it's still going to result in lots of people losing their jobs and the world's just not ready for it. Nobody's preparing for it in any meaningful way. speaker-0: And even before the train derails, you know, you said that AI ⁓ is threatening people's jobs. Let's take a step back from even that and say the development of AI has been affecting people's jobs. The US government, the US government has been throwing money into this AI development thing. They're telling you as much. This is not new news. However, The people that are developing AI are not from the United States. This is where the H1B visa thing happens. So we have like imagine, imagine normal people when they say, ⁓ Mexicans are coming to steal our jobs, right? It's the same exact playbook. Except instead of picking apples, we are using Apple computers. It's the same thing. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: So the the so the the the chasing this AI dragon has already demolished people's lives, demolished people's families, done all of that. And this is just the lead up. Because listen to me when I tell you Silicon Valley. Is a lot of folks ⁓ that are contractors here. And the reason why they're doing the reason why we have a bunch of contractors is because we're shoveling all this money and corporate America does what? They optimize and they get as much ⁓ they get as much use value of their daily of their dollar, right? So they're not hiring Americans because speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Value. Yeah. speaker-0: We're too expensive, yet we have to live in this expensive ass country. speaker-1: All the speaker-0: So you're giving all the all of the government money is going to these corporations that are hiring people that don't that aren't originally from here. I'm not mad at the people that are coming here for work. I get it. You need to feed your family, you need to pay your bills. I get it. The bone that I have to pick with is first the corporations that continue to not hire us, and then the government that continues to give them the money to develop this shit. That then in turn we have to turn around and give them thirty dollars a month to fucking use. speaker-1: Absolutely. I I this is again we keep coming back to the same thing here. ⁓ what's ⁓ that statement is like, you know, don't let somebody making forty hour or ⁓ forty hours dollars an hour convince someone making fifteen dollars an hour that they're the problem or whatever. Because it's yeah, it's like you people like you and me, I'm not independently wealthy. I assume you're not, you know, like speaker-0: I am not. You've heard the stories. speaker-1: Just normal, just normal folks like us, right? We don't have the choices. Like we're just trying to survive and take care of our family. We are not the ones making these giant multinational decisions. And so, to your point, we shouldn't have a government that incentivizes poor decision making and poor behavior. ⁓ you got your little one there? speaker-0: Yeah, this is Rosie. Hi. Hi. speaker-1: Because that's that's you know, it's like going and yelling at somebody at McDonald's because their food is too expensive. Like that dude's got nothing to do with it, right? speaker-0: You don't do shit but put fries in the bag. Leave him alone. speaker-1: Yeah, he's trying to do his best to get through the day, just like we are, just like the rest of us are. And I always tell people, like, it's not us against each other, right? It's us against them. And ideally, we should create a society where no one is against anyone, you know. And and so, like we could be working. This is what I'm talking about, my aligned incentives, you know, all engines on full. If we could get everybody moving in the same direction, we would be unstoppable. But the the thing that I I I hate to Remind people of is These larger corporations, very wealthy people, they don't view the world the same way that we do. Because for them, if this whole thing falls apart, they got an out. They'll just bounce, they'll go whatever wherever it is. They're not going to suffer the repercussions of what's going on. Look at the the financial meltdown in 2008, 2009, right? That that existed because I mean it's pretty complex, but the simple thing is that existed because we started to get it. We like America, like Western banks and financial institutions started to get an influx of this money from like the Middle East and other parts of the world who were trying to find ways to invest and spend money because they couldn't do it locally. They they were generating a lot of money through things like oil and other ⁓ products, ⁓ minerals and things like that. And there was no way for them to make money. So they started looking to the West. I'm like, well, what can we put money in? And they're like, Well, we can put money in housing. Housing never, you know, housing always goes. Yeah, you know, you you never lose money on real estate. And so banks started to become incentivized to do more risky maneuvers. And they started to take this money because when somebody shows up and they're like, hey, I've got $10 million sitting around. I don't know where to put it. What should we do? And like, well, why don't we just start bundling up these prime mortgages? And then now we'll start bundling up these like less than prime mortgages. And then now we'll start doing all the subprime stuff. And before you knew it, There were mortgages bundled upon mortgages, bundled upon mortgages that were like trunched into these systems that were being sold left, right, and center. Half the time nobody even knew what the building was you were buying. But they started making these riskier and riskier decisions. And then when it all blew up in their face, which anybody with a basic economics 101 degree would be able to tell you was gonna happen, nobody suffered any penalties. Nobody went to jail for that. Right. So now we're back where we were. 15 years ago because we keep doing the same thing and telling the same lesson and there's no repercussions for bad behavior. And my my worry is again that this is gonna blow up and nobody's gonna suffer for it because the wealthy do not care. Again. speaker-0: Look out for themselves. speaker-1: Yeah, and and here's the thing is like you know, they're not worried about you, right? They're not worried if you're gonna be able to pay for your kids' tuition or cover your costs or your rent or whatever. But again, it's worse than that because they don't even think about us. These super wealthy, unless we're serving them or taking their car for valet, they're not even thinking about us. We are a service provider to them. And so they'll make risky moves if they think it will be. financially advantageous to them. And the the the the way I say this, because I don't want to create division. I think we should be bringing everybody together towards making a an America that is capable of leading for the next century. But in order to do that, we need everybody with intellectual honesty and good faith efforts to do it. And until you are ready to do it, whether it's corporations or the wealthy or corrupt politicians or whatever it is, They are not going to be on board in this process. And when they're ready to be on board, I'm here. Let's do it. But until then, we have to set up systems that prevent this bad behavior from impacting us in in majorly catastrophic ways. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah. And and we need better leaders at the end of the day. We need better leaders. Ones that understand, or let me say it like this ones that ones that understand what the ultimate goal is. And the ultimate goal is to have a society. Again, for me, I would love to see the United States develop itself into a society where we can be seen as. A nation of leaders, right? Going back to the 70s story. If we can if we can actually pull off what we were supposed to be doing, and that's educating and and making people more ⁓ more inventors and stuff like that, exactly how we were supposed to be doing. We're supposed to invent shit and then we have them make it. ⁓ but our leaders speaker-1: Mm. speaker-0: are horseshit. They're in it. They're in it for the bag. They they believe in insider trading. They get derailed. Their their campaign gets derailed by the first check that gets put in front of their face. speaker-1: Way to put it. speaker-0: And it always reminds me, you know, we keep talking about different studies and stuff, but there was a study done where they took a classroom of kids and they divided it in half and they said, You guys are the workers and you guys are the bosses. And the kids that were bosses instantly turned into assholes. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. There's the Stanford prison experiment, which I know has got a lot of like issues that people bring up, but that's another example. Totally. You know, I'm I'm 100% with you. And the way I look at it is, and this is kind of how I've lived my life, is like I want America to be seen as the leader. Like I'm one of the most America first people, like make America great again people you could ever find. The thing is, Donald Trump is not the solution to that. And I The what I want is I want people to look at America, American leadership, American ingenuity, American culture in awe because we've earned it. Because we put in the time and the work to make it true instead of just pretending it's true and expecting everybody else to believe it's true. And that involves us as well. We should be out there working, you, me, everyone else, hand in hand every day, making the fruits of our labor. Right. Yeah. Not just pretending that America is this amazing place. Yeah. You know, inherently Yeah. Yeah. We have to we have to earn it. If we want respect, I just say earned respect. If we want the respect to be the leader in the world, then we need to earn it and we need to live up to our values every day. And that requires work, you know, what what is the the saying they say vigilance is the price of freedom, the price of democracy. We need to be vigilant every day. speaker-0: The speaker-1: And that means we need to be educating ourselves. We need to be taking care of each other. We need to be making sure that we are looking out for the the least of us and putting them in a position that they can become the best of us. Yeah. And if we do that, I actually think we might find that life becomes a lot easier when we're not at each other's throats all the time and we've built a society like you said. speaker-0: Yeah. Think of I I think of I think of the US. I think of the US as the coolest team ever. speaker-1: No Yeah. That's great. I I I'm with you. But it's but at some point, like think about like the coolest kid in high school, right? Like it's cool to hang around him, but like if the coolest kid can't actually do anything, the coolest kid can't help you with your cancer diagnosis or can't fix your car. Yeah. You know, like being cool only lasts for so long. Eventually you need people in the room that actually know how to do stuff. Right. And and I think that that's a that's a super important thing. And I think that America can get there. We need to, I think, humble ourselves a little bit. I think we need to be introspective about who we are and what we want to be. And then we need to set up society and systems that provide for that. Right. One one of the things I'm sure you for, but whenever you talk about like behavior change, that's one of the Things I went to school for in public health, behavior change is really hard. And one of the things that you do when you're losing weight or being more active or maybe trying to save money or whatever, the key to behavior change isn't to depend on your discipline, because your discipline's always going to falter. You're going to get tired, going to get exhausted, you're going to make mistakes. The key is to set up systems that incentivize you to be successful. So if you want to. lose weight, for example, don't buy sugary junk food. Set set things out like ⁓ nuts and fruits out so that when you do get hungry, you can easily grab them. One of the big suggestions if you want to be more active and go to the gym is set your clothes out the night before. Like these are all small, silly things, right? But it decreases that friction. So like you wake up, your clothes are ready to go, you put them on, you go to the gym. We can do that on a societal level where we decrease that friction. We create the path of least resistance to flow everybody into success. And I think I 100% think that we can do that. just so something that that pinged me. Yeah, I I'm assuming you know who Andrew Yang is. He ran for he ran for president, I think what, 2016 or whatever. ⁓ he had this he had this thing that ⁓ I always liked Andrew Yang ⁓ as as a person, I don't know him or anything, but yeah ⁓ He he always had this statement and he's like the the sad thing is is that we are sending the best and the brightest of us instead of working on how to create a better world or improve the environment or anything like that. We have ⁓ doing all these like they're working at these social media companies trying to trick us into engagement, you know. speaker-0: Yeah. Into buying something cheap from China. speaker-1: Yeah, like the the best and the brightest of us are working on all these tech platforms so that they can keep your eyeballs generated. There's a reason why the algorithm shows you stuff that gets you pissed off because it gets you commenting and engaging. Sometimes I'll post a TikTok video about something and I can tell I've gotten on to the MAGA part of the algorithm. Because all the comments will be just like, you're an idiot, blah, blah, blah. Right. Yeah. And I'll I will like all of them and I'll respond to some of them as long as they're not like too off the wall. Because I was like, dude, all you are doing is telling the algorithm to feed me to more people every time you comment on there. Right. And so all this stuff is just it's a waste of time and energy at a large level that we could be spending on improving people's lives. And if we actually did that, we would find out that it's actually way cheaper than we thought it was. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, it's not that it's it's not that tough. We we do more damage with money that could be going to education and to improving. We do more damage around the world. If we were to take that money and invest in us, things would be so much better. I promise you. speaker-1: Again. Yeah. I I always joke. I always joke with people. I was like, look, man, the water over here is really nice. It's real warm over here, right? Like I I do not live my life like I'm upset and stressed right now because of the state of the world, but I don't live my life angry with normal people. I'm not doom scrolling, posting these these things like my friend group is amazing. I have a lovely family. My the people I work with are great. I've cultivated this life around me. That feels supportive and comfortable and is able to kind of like, you know, like I I have this joke. It's like if we have a party, I can have my wallet out on the table and I'm never worried that someone's gonna go into it and steal something. Yeah. And we can do that on a societal level. Like you don't need to live in this world where you're pissed off all the time. Come on over here. The water's great, you know. speaker-0: You know how many racist folks have have met me and then they say, Huh, for one of those people, you're not that bad. speaker-1: Yeah. You're one of the good ones? Yeah, totally. speaker-0: You know, that's shitty, but at least it's a start. speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. It's ⁓ I think we're in this space where I have this saying, which is you don't turn allies into enemies. And I think folks on the left through purity tests and other stuff, again, I'm I'm painting with a broad brush here. Yeah. We have this tendency to turn allies into enemies. You know, they didn't say the right thing or they didn't do the thing in the way that it should have, or whatever. But the reality is is like most people again are just living their lives and I don't know, Carlos. We've been talking here for what, two and a half hours. That's about as much as I know about you, right? So if I don't say something the right way, or if I engage with you in some way that you find to be inappropriate or whatever, just let me know. And I'm I'm happy I'm happy to have a conversation and and be better, you know. You do what you can from, yeah. Yeah, totally. You do what you can until you know better. And then when you know better, you do better, right? Right. So give people speaker-0: Understand where you're coming from. speaker-1: Which I guess wraps around a nice bookend of what you started out with, which was the patience and grace. Give people the patience and grace to find their way to a better, a better place. That doesn't mean you have to tolerate the bad behavior. That doesn't mean that you can't set up clear boundaries and understanding what's acceptable and what's not. But understand that everyone's on their own journey and they're coming to these things. And, you know, there's plenty of people that are in the MAGA world, for example, that this is all they know. They've grown up with this. They have grown up being told over and over again to hate Democrats, to hate lefties. They're out to kill you. They're out to steal your children. And if you can give them a safe place to stand and let them breathe for a second, then they can look around and then be like, ⁓ you're not that bad. This I I have ⁓ I have a friend that I've I've been working with on the campaign, she diehard. MAGA person, diehard conservative Republican, ⁓ for all of her life until she was in her mid-40s. And one of the things that brought her around, there are a bunch of things, but one of the things that brought her around is she made friends with a lesbian woman. And as she began to spend time and hang out with this person, she realized this person was not at all what her internal image of a lefty lesbian person was. And so give folks an opportunity. To stand somewhere. I actually I did this a couple of weeks ago with a lifelong Republican. And I could tell that they were a little bit on edge as we first started talking. And one of the things you can do, this is a this is a great, like, you know, take home homework assignment is when you're engaging in these conversations and somebody says something that might be a little off color, maybe whatever, don't respond with a you're dumb or whatever. Take a step back and be like, ⁓ okay, I hear you. You know, tell me about why you think that way. Because nowadays everybody's so riled up that when they say something, they're waiting, they're on defense, right? They're waiting for you to snap back so that they can snap back at you. Yeah. But if you don't snap back, it lets the steam off a little bit. Yeah. And once you can kind of do that, you'll notice that most people are willing to be open. I had a two hour conversation with that guy, that lifelong Republican, after the first like 10, 15 minutes. We had a great conversation for like two hours. And you know, I don't know if he's gonna vote for me. I don't know. I didn't, you know, I didn't get into that. I mostly was just talking to him and asking him about what he's thinking. And I gently pushed back here and there about certain things. And the thing I want to remind people is like we truly are in our own bubble. So, for example, one of the things he said, he's like, you know, I gotta give it to the Democrats. You guys are just all aligned. You know, whenever you want to do something, you work together and you get it done. And I was like, it's funny you say that because in our it's like herding cats over here. And we view the Republican Party as all aligned. Yeah. And I told him I was like, if you look at the voting patterns of congressional Republicans, they're like 95, 98% voting how Donald Trump wants them to vote. There's never been a Democrat that gets a ninety-five to ninety-eight percent voting record for speaker-0: It don't feel that way. speaker-1: So they're up. Dude, I talked to a Republican guy the other day who didn't know what the Epstein files was about. Like he had heard of them and he understood them, but he in his mind he was like, ⁓ this is something that happened like 10 or 20 years ago. Why are we still talking about it? Like Bill Clinton's in a bunch of it. I'm not going to concern myself. And I was like, You're not going to concern yourself with the sexual exploitation of young women and girls, even if it was 10 or 20 years ago. And with a straight face, he was like, I had no idea this had to do with. sexual exploitation of children. Yeah. I was like what speaker-0: bunch of powerful people that think that they can do something as gross as speaker-1: Totally. And it speaker-0: SA Young Girls and speaker-1: Exactly. And and the reason I'm telling the story is because he legitimately did not know that. It wasn't like he was trying to be obtuse or whatever. Yeah. And so there's a lot of people out there right now that are beginning to see that Donald Trump is in fact a con man. And he does not care about you. And he does not know how any of this stuff works. Yeah. And so we need to lead by example. We need to be fighting. for the values we supposedly purport. And we need to be going to the mattresses every day, talking about how we are going to make your life better and not get caught up in the minutiae nonsense of every conversation about this, that, and the other thing. Mm-hmm. That's my take on it anyway. speaker-0: Yeah. And and again, it's it's breaking that you know, the the the powerful people like to build the the walls to to separate us. And this is one of the wonderful things about technology and social media and stuff like that is that I get to talk to this dude running for Senate in Ohio while I'm living in California. That that statement alone, a brown kid. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: Talking to a white dude running for office. I'm in California. You're in Ohio. Ohio and California don't see eye to eye all the time. speaker-1: Yeah. So a lot of people leave Ohio to go to California. speaker-0: Yeah. But the exposure to each other lets us know that wait, we're way more similar than we are different. We want a lot of the same things. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. joke with people because of the you know maybe it's ⁓ I'm gonna be on like a right libertarian podcast or something and they're like I doubt you know we agree on everything I was like I don't know give me a try you might be surprised what you know where where we land you know like there's there's a lot of there's a lot of ground in the middle and again the reality is is most people if you get rid of the defensiveness politicky part of it there's plenty of conversations to have over a beer or a coffee. And and get aligned, right? You know, I'm probably not gonna agree with Rand Paul on quite a few things, but I bet there's a bunch of stuff that we could work together on as an example. As long as people are coming with good faith and intellectual honesty, which ties back to what you said, we need to start bringing better people into leadership. We really do. And we need to expect more from we need to demand more from the Democratic Party. The way they've been doing things over the past 20 years is not acceptable anymore. If it was ever acceptable. speaker-0: And lately, like w what are you guys even doing anymore? You guys are this is my I this is my stance on the democratic party, the establishment democratic party. You have the Republicans who are money hungry and they're driven by money and and they're taking, taking, taking, and they push, push, push that way. The Democrats know that they're going in the same direction and they know that they're going to the same place, but they play coy with us. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's very Yeah. speaker-0: Instead of saying, no, we can't do that because we're leaving people behind, it's like these establishment democrats, to me, in my eyes, it looks the same. Their platforms look the same. It's just they're just, you know, they're playing hard to get a little bit. speaker-1: Yeah. I'm I'm I'm you probably already know this, but I'll just give you a little like in the back of your mind, a little assignment. ⁓ when you talk to more established Democrats or maybe people in the party and stuff, try to put them in a position to say no and see what they do because you'll notice that politicians rarely say no. They won't give you a straight up answer to something. They're not gonna do it, right? Whatever the thing is you're asking for or whatever. This happens all the time. I'll reach out to people over email and they won't give me a straight answer. And again, I'm a small business guy. So like I don't want to waste your time. If you're not interested in this or you can't do this or whatever, just tell me. Right. And then I'll leave you alone. And people in politics, they never say no because they don't want to cut themselves off from a potential avenue down the road. Right. Right. But they're more than happy to waste my frigging time. They don't care. They don't care if I'm going to spend time. crafting this email that you're never going to respond to or you're going to give me some half-hearted response to. So when people send me emails, I'll just straight up be like, hey man, I I can't do that right now. Or I'll give you a straight up answer to a to a question. Because I don't I don't worry that Carlos Gomez is going to be angry because I said no to him. What I'm more concerned about is that you and I build a relationship that will be fostered over the months and years to come. So that 10 years from now, when you ping me or I ping you and you're like, ⁓ hey, man, can you do me a favor? I have this thing going on. Or Chris, can you join a podcast? Or can you come visit me in California because we're doing some event? I'll be like, yeah, man, I'll be there. Or I'll tell you that I can't be there, right? Like, I'm not gonna waste your time. And that's something that I've really noticed in, I'm sure it happens on the Republican side too, but I've definitely noticed on the Democrat side, they just won't say no. And I find it very I find it very disrespectful because it does waste my time. Yeah. speaker-0: That makes sense. speaker-1: And and something you just pinged on, which I'm again, I'll I'll I'll I guess I'll throw a little shade on Sherrod Brown here. I don't have anything against him, but Sherrod Brown has not, to my knowledge, and I just looked it up real fast. So if someone in the comments, whenever this gets posted, feel free to correct me. But Sherrod Brown has made no comment on Renee Good or the ice shooting that I can see. I haven't seen anything. I just did a quick Google search. I don't see anything. I haven't seen anything on his Facebook. So if he has and I just missed it. Mr. Brown, I apologize. But this is a time where we need to be making statements about these kinds of things. And we need we need to be in the fray. We need to put our bodies on the line. And frankly, Senator Brown, if you aren't in it to win it, it's time to step away and start mentoring other folks, whether it's me or someone else. Start start mentoring folks and getting them in a position that can. And I'll tell you what, man, I'm a pretty quick study. I think I'm a relatively sharp guy and there's very few people that can outwork me. I am not doing this out of the prestige and glory. I'm doing it to be a public servant. And I'm just saying if if you're running and you're not ready to give it all right now, find a way to help in some other way. speaker-0: Yeah. We don't need those emails that don't give us the answer while we have this orange face dude just wreaking havoc on the planet. We need answers. We need speaker-1: We need we need I mean at this point we need something. You know, like it just it's yeah. Any anything anything to start moving these things forward. ⁓ that's why I appreciate you being on the show. I've really enjoyed this conversation. We're almost at three hours. So I'm getting to the point where I gotta wrap up here soon to go ⁓ help my friend. But I have really enjoyed the conversation. I'm happy to talk about in the next couple of minutes if there's anything else you wanna speaker-0: Movement. Anything. speaker-1: Yeah, no, ⁓ I feel like we say thank you. speaker-0: I was gonna say thank you for coming on and and say hi to your friend. Thank you for taking care of your friend. That is like when we talk about leadership and and leading by example, those are I want my leaders to be like that. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah, it's it's weird. I I appreciate it. Thank you. But but it's weird because people have said that to me. They're like, you know, ⁓ you know, thank you for your hard work. But he's been my best friend for over 25 years. Like, what else would I do? Right. Like there is no other option here. He's he's helped me out through any number of things over the years, including being very sick, separating from my wife, like all sorts of stuff. Like there there is no other answer besides me being there. help him out. Yeah. So I just I just feel like there's the reason I say that is there's a lot of people, there's millions, tens of millions of people that are doing exactly what I'm doing and have been doing it for far longer, whether it's a disabled child or a parent or whatever, and they don't get any of the credit or respect. And so I want to just make sure that those folks, anyone listening to this video, you know, I see you and I feel you and and You know, i if there's anything I can do, just let me know. speaker-0: ⁓ last request from me, if you don't mind, give the viewers of this video your pitch as to why we need Chris Volpe in the Senate, in the US Senate. And then and then also follow up with giving your ⁓ your contact details or your website details. speaker-1: Please. Absolutely. Yeah. I to be honest, I think it's I think it's very simple. I think that we need new leadership just all around. We are in a obviously we are in a different political and economic environment than we've ever been in before. And I do not feel personally that we can expect change from the people that got us into this position in the first place. And so what I say to you is I I give you a promise that, like, I'm not always going to agree. speaker-0: The f speaker-1: We're probably gonna have issues that we differ on, but I will be here working every day to make sure that your life is better. And if you can, like I said earlier, if you can trust that I'm gonna go to Washington and have your back, then I think we can do some amazing things. And now is the time. Now is the time for us to step up and be like, hey, the old ways don't work anymore. I appreciate all the hard work for the folks that have built this country. into the positive things, but we need to start making a difference in a different direction because there's nowhere else for us to go. So I'm here building towards a future that I want to live in and that I think will be a place that supports all of us. And you know, maybe you and I, Carl, can have this conversation 10 years from now and we can look back at the amazing work that we did together. So that is my promise to everybody, whether you're in Ohio or not. You can obviously support since I am running for Senate. That's a position that unpacks every state in the country. There's only a hundred senators in this country, and every vote is important. So if you're interested, you can follow me at Volpe for America on all my social medias. Volpefor America.com is my website. I have a contact form on my website and I look at those emails personally and I respond to them personally. I'm trying to be the most accessible senator in the country. So if there's anything I say, like if there's anything I can help you with, or even if you just want to vent for a minute and send me an email, I I will be there, I will read it and I will respond as best I can given given my time. But this is our opportunity, man. Like we need to step up and do it. That that is the only option that we have right now. And I'm willing to do the best I can as I can. And if it's if it's now or if it's in 2028 or whatever it is. You know, now's the time to get involved. So I appreciate being on the show. Really enjoyed the conversation. It was great. speaker-0: Thank you for coming on, taking time out of your busy schedule. Cause I I assume running for Senate is not real fun, not real easy, very time consuming. speaker-1: It is time consuming. And you know, I I actually really enjoy it because at the end of the day, I kind of joke like it's hard and it takes a lot of time and you know costs money. But like I'm not out there shoveling coal, right? Like I'm I get to go out and travel around and meet people and listen to them. I get to check out new parts of Ohio I haven't been to before and try new foods. So at the end of the day, I've actually really enjoyed the process. ⁓ and you know. You ever want to see me, I guess, reach out. Let me know. Yeah, you know where I'm at. speaker-0: We know where you are. Chris Volpe everyone. And with that, we're out. speaker-1: Mm. Coconut chest.