Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2352 - James Talarico
Uploaded: 2025-07-18T17:00:46.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2352 - James Talarico' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2352 - James Talarico' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-18. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2352 - James Talarico

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe
Rogan podcast by night, all day!
How are you, James? You too, well, how are you? Very good, nice to meet you. It's
nice to meet you, thanks for having me.
My pleasure. I found out about you from my friend Brian Simpson. He was in the
green room of the comedy mothership and he was telling me how excited he was
about you.
He said he watched some lecture, I think it was probably, not a lecture, a
speech you were giving about the Ten Commandments in schools.
And so then I watched it and I said, oh, okay, this is very interesting. So I
thought we'd have a cool conversation.
Yeah, well, I'm just honored to be here. Thanks for including me.
Thank you. I'm honored to have you. It's always interesting to see a person who
is a Christian who is not for the Ten Commandments in schools.
Sure, yeah.
And I think you made a very compelling argument, you know?
Yeah, you know, I've gotten that a lot. People who are like, you're in seminary,
you're studying to become a minister, why wouldn't you want the Ten Commandments
in every classroom?
So I recognize that it's kind of a weird position to be in. But I grew up in a
tradition that cherished the separation of church and state, not just because
it protects the church or protects democracy, but it is what allows this
democracy to happen where we can all have different faith traditions and live
together in peace.
And so any attempt to erode that boundary, I feel like I have a special
obligation to speak out against it.
And so I told my colleagues that I thought the bill was unconstitutional, I
thought the bill was un-American, but I went one step further and I said I
thought the bill was unchristian, which again, probably sounds weird to people,
but in all of Jesus' teachings, he's always focused on the outsider, the outcast,
the person who's left out or the person who's different.
And so as a Christian, I think my concern is for the Muslim kid and the Jewish
kid, the Hindu kid, the atheist kid who's sitting in the classroom who now has
a poster on the wall forced by the government that says, you know, your
religion is inferior or you're not welcome here.
And I just think if Jesus saw that, he would weep for those students and would
demand that we love them as ourselves.
And so that's why I kind of spoke out against the bill on theological grounds,
not just constitutional grounds.
So what is the bill?
Can you explain?
Yeah.
So the bill forces every teacher in the state to display the Ten Commandments
in their classrooms.
Is this even in private schools?
It's only public schools because that's really where we have authority as the
state legislature.
And the bill, this is going to sound weird, but it even specifies how big the
poster is, the dimensions of it.
It has to be in a conspicuous place.
It's basically the size of a sheet of paper, regular sheet of paper.
The idea is they didn't want anyone to make it too small to where someone
wouldn't read it.
But the bill says that the school doesn't have to spend money on it.
It can be donated.
And, you know, that sounds fine to most people until you realize there's this
huge network of Christian nationalist organizations that are already preparing
to flood every school with these Ten Commandments posters for all of their
classrooms.
So the donation thing sounds like it's kind of innocuous until you realize that
the donations are already ready to go from all these outside groups.
So there's going to be legal challenges, of course.
But, you know, if it's not struck down on the courts, every teacher is going to
have to put up the Ten Commandments in their classroom against their wills,
even if they don't want to.
I mean, I just, again, speaking as a Christian, if we have to force people to
put up a poster, to me, that means that we have a dead religion, a religion
that no longer moves people, a religion that no longer speaks to people's
hearts.
If we have to prove our legitimacy by micromanaging what teachers put up in
their classroom, I mean, to me, that means we have a real crisis in our faith.
We should be leading by example, not by mandate.
How did this get proposed and what is the support for it?
Well, the support is pretty broad within the Republican caucus.
Again, I serve in the state.
Is it universal, essentially?
Yeah, I don't think there was a single Republican who voted against it this
time around.
And again, I serve in the state legislature.
A lot of people think that I'm a congressman.
I serve here in Austin at the state capitol.
What is your position?
So I'm a state representative.
So I serve, there are two chambers, just like the federal government, a Senate
and a House.
I serve in the House, in the State House.
So the Republicans have a majority in the House and in the Senate.
I'm a member of the Democratic Party.
So I literally can't get anything done without working on a bipartisan basis.
It's actually a blessing in this modern era where we're all tribalized and
polarized that
I am forced to work with people who have completely different views than I do.
And actually, you get to know them.
In D.C., from what I hear, I've only been to D.C. a few times in my life.
But from what I hear, you're really kind of separated physically from your
colleagues.
You don't spend a lot of time talking to each other anymore.
It's a lot of fundraising and events and not really a lot of relationship
building.
In the state capitol, you don't have the same media scrutiny, the same
spotlight.
So we can still get to know each other and go out to eat with each other and
meet each other's families.
And I actually think it's something that we could benefit from at the national
level is that kind of camaraderie and professional working relationships with
people across the aisle.
Kelsey Gabbard told me she tried to do a lot of that when she was a congresswoman.
And she said it was very difficult and she would get pushback from other
Democrats.
Yeah.
The system doesn't encourage that at the national level.
Here, you know, we do not I think in D.C., the minority party appoints the
committee chairs and or ranking members here in the state level.
The Speaker of the House who is elected by Republicans and Democrats, that's
the person who decides what committee you're on and, you know, what bills you
can get passed.
And so in some ways that forces you to be loyal to the body rather than loyal
to your party or your caucus.
Again, I'm proud to be part of the Democratic caucus, but I can't I literally
can't get anything done if I don't have some kind of Republican support.
And so that just and I get a lot, you know, I'm able to pass a lot of bills as
a Democrat.
And it's because I have good relationships with with my colleagues on the other
side of the aisle.
But, yeah, on the Ten Commandments issue, it kind of became one of these
culture war fights.
And so there wasn't room to to have kind of an honest conversation about when
did this get proposed?
So it originally got proposed two years ago in 2023 during the regular session.
I spoke out against the bill.
I kind of kicked up a bunch of dust about the bill and it went over all over
social media.
And I think that pressure ended up delaying the bill enough to where it died on
the deadline.
So it didn't pass.
Then it came back this session, 2025, and eventually passed both chambers and
got signed by the governor.
So unless it's stopped in the courts, it's going to be law in the state of
Texas.
And I, you know, here's what I try.
I try to always I try to always take someone's argument at face value and
assume best intentions.
This is this is how I'm able to work in a place like the legislature here in
Texas, because I try to listen to what someone's argument is.
And if I'm being charitable, the best argument for this is that the kids are
not all right.
Young people are growing up without the structure of faith, whether it's the
Christian faith or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism, whatever it may be.
Students are just less religious than they once were.
People are less religious than they once were.
We know that's a fact.
And and so this rise in mental health issues, anxiety, depression among young
people, there are folks out there.
And I would even put myself in this camp who say it's that children are growing
up in an incoherent universe.
There's not a tradition, a story that helps helps them make sense of their
lives in a profound, almost cosmic way, which is necessary for human beings.
I mean, no matter who you are, you need that that structure and that that
meaning in your life.
And so I recognize that that is that is a problem.
But what I firmly and passionately believe is that the government forcing
teachers to put up a poster actually makes that problem worse.
Because I think and again, I was a middle school teacher before I became a
politician.
So I know I know students, they have the best BS detector around, right?
They they are now going to I think this bill will create a whole new generation
of atheists who think that my religion, my faith tradition, that means
everything to me, is more about power than it is about love.
And they already kind of think that.
I mean, young people already think that about religion.
I think this is just going to confirm just the worst people's worst inclinations
and impulses about organized religion.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
And it just doesn't make sense that we've always had a separation of church and
state.
It's been very important.
And that this imposing this on kids in school, in non-religious schools, just
seems kind of crazy.
Well, and the staunchest defenders for the separation of church and state
throughout American history were Protestant Christians, Baptists in particular,
right?
I mean, the letter Jefferson writes where he first uses that phrase, a wall of
separation between church and state, was to the Danbury Baptists.
Because, I mean, these Protestants were fleeing Europe as religious minorities,
right?
I mean, this is kind of essential to the founding of this country, was
religious freedom.
And so those Christians understood that once the government starts preaching
your religion, starts making decisions about your faith, that that doesn't lead
anywhere good.
And so we should be very suspicious of the state usurping the role of pastors
and Sunday school teachers.
I mean, if you want to deepen your faith, we have churches on every street
corner.
A lot of them don't have a lot of people in them, right?
We've got mosques and temples and synagogues that have a ton of room in them.
And so why would we have the government start to teach kids about or preach a
certain religion when we have houses of worship that can do that?
Yeah.
I think it's also a really important point you made earlier, that if you try to
force kids into doing things, they don't like to do it.
Correct.
And especially if you try to force kids that are secular and they come from
households that maybe are atheists or agnostic, and then you have this on the
wall and you impose it on them.
Yeah.
They're going to think about it like a lot of – they think about a lot of
other government BS.
As they should.
Yeah.
I mean, I honestly think that Christianity has a lot to share with the world at
this moment of kind of crisis everywhere.
But this, again, is giving Christianity and religious people broadly a bad name.
Because this is what people think about religious people, that we're more
interested in imposing our faith or our values or our beliefs on others instead
of living it out ourselves.
Yeah.
What do you think this is in response to?
Like, why do you think they're trying to impose this?
What is – like, what would make them want to put this in schools?
I think fear.
Fear.
And I get that fear.
I just – I want to acknowledge that I also feel this fear that, you know, I
look across my church on Sunday mornings and I see a lot of gray hair.
I worry about the future of my church, of m