Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Immigration Today. I'm Elizabeth Trifonis, and today we're breaking down policies, stories, and issues that matter. You're watching now Media Television.
Welcome to Immigration Today.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: I'm Elizabeth Trifonis. And my guest today, I'm very excited to have Mr. Roger Shindell. He's a longtime healthcare compliance executive and an author and a speaker. He used to live in my neighborhood, actually in Jackson Hole. So I'm happy to visit with him today.
And, Roger, welcome to the show.
What should people know about you? And how does healthcare compliance lead to civic leadership? That's our big leadoff question this morning.
[00:00:42] Speaker C: Well, first of all. Well, thank you for having me.
And first of all, my life has been lived in a variety of different phases.
Just an FYI, started out my career as a farrier. That's how I ended up in Jackson shoeing horses all over the Mountain West.
And when my. When I got married and had a child, I needed to settle down and ended up in compliance. First with Sarbanes Oxley, and then with hipaa.
And then most recently, I've sort of turned in my compliance hat to get involved with civic engagement.
I started a super PAC called Volunteers for Democracy's Future.
I started it. The premise of it is that I feel that many of our politicians have gotten away from embracing their oath of office and protecting the Constitution.
It all came to a head for me last year when I started seeing individuals being pulled off the street by unmarked cars and masked law enforcement folks and essentially being disappeared.
Some were here illegally, others were citizens, some had been shot.
And my background is Jewish, and so I lost family in the Holocaust.
This feels somewhat like that.
My age, I lived through Kent State and assassinations in the 60s.
Kennedy, the two Kennedys, and Martin Luther King and Bobby Seale.
And I just woke up one day and said, I understand how our country got here.
And so I felt like I needed to do something.
And that was the genesis of Volunteers for Democracy's Future.
And that's why I transitioned from compliance into social responsibility and politics.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Can you explain? I think some people know this, but maybe not everybody. What is a super pac?
[00:03:12] Speaker A: What.
[00:03:12] Speaker B: What is its function and how does it.
How does it go about.
[00:03:15] Speaker C: Super PAC raises money for political campaigns.
Ever since Citizens United, it's been able to give unlimited money to campaigns. We do it a little bit differently. We don't support any particular campaign.
We support concepts around campaign issues. So we get involved in a race not by supporting a particular candidate, but by using the same kind of techniques that the Republicans have used so successfully over the last couple of election cycles.
So PACs are a way to raise money. Again, typically they promote specific campaigns and provide money to the campaign.
We don't do that, but that's legally what they're designed to do.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: You touched on this already, but can you clarify what Volunteers of Democracy, what's the mission of this super pac? What's the goal?
[00:04:28] Speaker C: Sure. So it's Volunteers for Democracy's Future.
The number four df.com anybody wants to go look at it.
We have two programs or initiatives that we're involved in. The first, we call Project 67.
And the idea is between now and the 2028 election cycle to get a 67% 67 seat majority in the U.S. senate. And with that kind of majority, we can go ahead and promulgate constitutional amendments, pass legislation to put back in place safeguards to the Constitution.
We don't promote any particular policy objective except constitutional protection.
And so voting rights is one.
The Supreme Court needs some issues to be addressed. And so Project 67 is an initiative to get the super majority required to basically repair our democracy that for years has been, I would say, floundering and moving away from the expectations and the design of the founders.
Outside of election cycles, we have another project that we work on. We call it the Accountability Project.
And that is a project to attempt to get elected officials to uphold their oath of office when it comes to protecting the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic.
And so between election cycles, we want to basically promote the idea of again supporting and living by the oath of office at every level of government, from local politicians all the way up to national politicians.
We have two organizations. One is called Volunteers for Democracy's Future PAC.
And then we have another one which is a 501C4, which is more about education than it is supporting specific candidates. And one of the differences between the two is this is where Citizens United came in. The 501C4 is is what's called dark money because the donors are not publicly disclosed.
So when you have large donors who want to donate money but don't want to be known for having made the donation for a variety of either political or business purposes, they donate through a 501C4 which is a not for profit, but keeps their donation private and not disclosed except under some extraordinary circumstances. Whereas with the super pac, donors are all disclosed by name.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: I hear a lot of times from people that, oh, my vote doesn't matter. I can't change anything. It's not this sort of, I can't be effective. I can't impact change. And I think I know your answer to this. But is that true? And how can people get involved and how can they get involved with this organization?
[00:08:11] Speaker C: Sure. Well, get involved with our organization. Again, you can go to v number4df.com and you can volunteer, you can donate, you can get educated.
So that's our organization. But the question does your vote count?
Let me answer that in two different ways.
The first is votes, even at the local level, matter.
So for example, right now we're going through a time where books are being banned and they're being banned by school boards.
And so if you believe that books should not be banned, for example, you can get involved at school board meetings, running for the school board.
So you can get involved at the local level.
All the way up from in my neck of the woods, we have county supervisors who come up for reelection and those are the ones that make decisions about what goes on in your county. And yet you have city boards and as I said, you have.
Library boards, you have school boards. So there are many areas at the local level you can get involved in. And my recommendation is take an issue that you're passionate about and find the local entity that addresses that issue and get involved by going to meetings, potentially running for a seat on one of their boards and have your voice heard.
Now, when you move to the federal level, I would argue that your vote matters. If you remember back To George H. Bush's first election, that election was decided by 240 votes in Florida.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: That's right.
Law school. Then I remember the chads in Florida. That's right.
[00:10:14] Speaker C: Then even in the last election, the election was determined by 35,000 votes over five different states.
So everybody believes that their vote doesn't matter. And that's what we've been led to believe. I mean, there's a reason for that because we only have about 40% of the eligible population going out and voting in a presidential election.
Except for Obama, who was an outlier where he was way over 50%, we tend to be stuck at that 40% range.
And so if you don't vote, you're giving up your agency to someone else.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: Thank you, Roger. I'm going to stop you there in the segment. We're going to need to take a break. But I want to come back to that 40% here shortly. We'll be right back.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: We'll be right back with more insight, context and useful information about immigration law and life. Stay with us on immigration today.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Elizabeth.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: And we're back. I'M Elizabeth Trifonis and this is Immigration Today on NOW Media Television. Let's continue the conversation.
Welcome back to Immigration Today.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: I'm Elizabeth Trifonis. Stay connected to this show and all your NOW Media TV favorites, live or on demand, anytime you like. Download the free Now Media TV app on Roku or iOS.
I always stumble over the iOS for all of your favorite programming in English and Spanish. If you if you're on the move, you can catch the podcast version at www.nowmedia.tv.
business, lifestyle, culture, finance, law and beyond. NOW Media TV is streaming around the clock and ready whenever you are.
I'm talking with Roger Shindell and about civics and getting involved and voting. And when we last left off, I did cut him off unnecessarily. But I want to come back to this. 40% of people are voting.
That seems like that means that our elected officials may be totally different if we actually got involved.
Can you expound on that and our civic responsibility?
[00:12:28] Speaker C: Well, the United States is actually an outlier in democracies when it comes to voting.
Many democracies require you to vote.
We, for some reason over the years, have decided and there's a political reason for it, because I don't want to get into why, but we are trying to limit the number of voters for political reasons. And it has to do with if you're not going to argue on the basis of your ideas, the only way you can get into office is to hold the vote down.
One of the outcomes of that is someone in office who's running. So an incumbent has almost a 90% chance of being reelected.
That's because we only have about 40% of the voting population actually voting.
And that's broken down into roughly three groups, all of equal size, Democrats, Republicans and independents.
And they tend to be older voters or, you know, older population.
Younger voters vote at much less numbers than older voters do.
And the younger voters are giving up their, as I said earlier, giving up their agency. They're giving the right to determine the country they live in to someone else and typically someone who's already in office.
And instead of trying to suppress the vote, we should be encouraging it. For example, state of Washington, I believe I have this right, that whenever you get a driver's license, you're automatically registered to vote.
Everybody can vote by mail.
I know that today we keep hearing that voting by mail has fraud and whatnot associated with it, which is absolutely untrue. Every study has shown that the amount of fraud at the federal level in a presidential election is 000000 5%.
So that out of the hundreds of millions of votes that get cast, less than 30 are not.
Intended to vote. And I'm going to get another topic here, only one or two are people who are non citizens that are voting.
Non citizen voting is illegal, but it's not a problem. And all the, the talk about what we need to do to make sure non citizens don't vote is really a solution in search of a problem.
And the problem is that by requiring the way the, the proposals are stated, they really become a poll tax. I mean I think everybody should be able to, you have to demonstrate that in fact they're a citizen and should vote. And that's great. But if you're going to do that, you should issue at no cost and in as easily accessible way as possible a voter ID card.
There are people out there whose names have changed, who don't have birth certificates, were not born in a hospital, and the laws are designed to call those folks out of the voter rolls. And that's the purpose of these proposals. It isn't to get people to vote. And with a 40% voter participation we should be doing everything we can to get more and more people to vote.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: I've done criminal defense here now for two decades. I've had exactly one fraudulent vote, criminal, criminal case.
And it was somebody who believed they were prior convicted felon and believed that their voter rights had been reinstated and went and voted.
And really what had happened is on the Wyoming Department of Corrections website, the law had changed and the information they put on the website was fairly misleading that their rights had been reinstated.
But that's the thing, for all the, all the times that I hear about this, we can't do mail in and there's all this fraud. I just, I've never seen it. I've seen it once in 21 years.
[00:17:15] Speaker C: Well, the Heritage foundation, which is a right leaning organization, did a study where they looked at presidential elections for the past 35 years. And you can imagine the hundreds of millions of votes that were cast in the last 35 years. They found 35 incidents of inappropriate voting and out of Those they found 12 were non citizen votes.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Fascinating.
[00:17:46] Speaker C: So we're talking about a billion votes being cast and having 12 votes that were non citizens.
As you just said, where's the problem?
Right?
[00:18:00] Speaker B: And really the civic accountability responsibility is just as simple as knowing we need to show up and mark however we want to mark our ballot or even just submit it, sometimes even blank or with a writing candidate that we prefer I like to tell people that on the local level, who you're voting for, for sheriff and prosecutor are pretty paramount positions. It impacts how we are enforcing law, who we're actually detaining, are we working with ice, are we acknowledging agreements with them? And that has a pretty massive impact for just two small elected positions on the local level.
How do you advise people to try to get involved and to have even not just voting, but an educated vote?
[00:18:54] Speaker C: One of the things I've been pushing and volunteers Democracy's Future has been pushing is there has been an effort to get people to believe that voting can't be trusted, that there's fraud and abuse in the voting process.
My solution and what I tell people is whichever side of the equator you are on that issue, whether you believe that voting is safe, secure and there isn't fraud, or you believe that there's fraud in voting, go out and become a poll worker.
Then train as a poll worker, see what actually happens. There was down in Georgia, a classic case, two poll workers were accused of falsifying votes because on the cameras, because all the voting activity is recorded, they were shown to be passing something back and forth, looked like it was a jump drive and their lives were ruined because they were accused of voter fraud. Turned out they were passing Tic Tacs back and forth.
So, you know, people who don't believe in the voting system really should go out and participate in the process.
So don't believe what people are telling you, that everything that we do is you.
You can't believe what people say anymore. There's too much noise out there. It's too easy to say something that's inaccurate.
You need to go out and see for yourself. You need to do the research. And again, the one thing you can do is go out and be a poll worker or be a poll watcher. And even if you just go through the training so you can see what happens during the election, they don't have the time, you know, to be a poll worker because you have a 9 to 5 job that you can't get out of to go vote. At least you'll understand the process and can make a rational decision as to whether you should believe the outcome of any particular election.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: That'd be a poll worker. Do I reach out to the county clerk or who do I flag for that?
[00:21:15] Speaker C: So you can reach out to the county. Typically, at least in Iowa, where I'm familiar, poll elections are run by the auditor.
But if you call, you can, you can get the right person, but you can also volunteer through each local party.
So you can call the Democrats, you can call the Republicans, you can call the Green Party, and they'll all get you to the right place so that you can go ahead and volunteer to be a poll watcher or a poll worker.
Thank you.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: My guest today is Roger Shindell, and we are going to take a small break and we'll be right back to continue the conversation.
[00:21:55] Speaker A: We'll be right back with more insight, context and useful information about immigration law and life. Stay with us on Immigration today.
And we're back. I'm Elizabeth Trifonis and this is Immigration TODAY on NOW Media Television. Let's continue the conversation.
Welcome back.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: I'm Elizabeth Trifonis and my guest today is Roger Shindell. We've been talking about civic accountability and getting involved.
We left off talking about even being a poll worker, but on the break, Mr. Shindell and I were talking about some immigration things. We're actually from the same neighborhood here and I know that Mr. Shindell got involved Super PACs and your organization in response to some of the things we've been seeing here on the streets.
And, and it is happening. We just this week. I'll be, I'll be going to see her at the Aurora Detention center tonight and tomorrow. But we did have an individual who was taken from the bus stop by unidentified people and put into the back of an unmarked car.
And it kind of was billed as her being resistant to arrest. And I keep telling people, you know, it's not resisting arrest when you feel like you're being kidnapped to want to have your kidnappers identify themselves. I mean, it's a very, you know, things are happening and we need to get involved.
But with that, I think you were, we were talking about, you know, what do we do for security? And maybe you could frame the question a little bit better because it's a big conversation.
[00:23:40] Speaker C: Yeah. So one of the things I think about one things we talk about is and how we refer to these folks has changed over the years.
I guess right now we talk to talk about undocumented workers.
I like to tell a little story. I think it's a two stories. I think they're a little bit funny, but they, they sort of raise the, the specter of what, you know, what we're talking about. So way back when, when I was first starting out, I worked on ranches and I was working on a ranch down in Arizona and I worked with a lot of undocumented workers.
And we were one day, I remember we were out in the field and we were irrigating lemon trees.
And I was out there with about half a dozen fellow workers.
And all of a sudden I turned around and I was out there by myself.
And then literally within five minutes, an INS truck came running down the road and drove up to the bunkhouse, looked around and left. And as soon as they left, all the workers came back out of the desert and. And went back to work. And they must have had someone who is watching out, you know, for them for ins.
Second story that. That I think is in Jackson. I lived there during the Clinton years. I saw Elizabeth, this before we started.
And one day INS came to town and arrested a number of workers.
But the result was that all the other workers disappeared. And for two weeks, every hotel and every restaurant was closed down.
So we don't.
And when I talk to people today, they say, well, you know, these damn illegals, they shouldn't be here in Iowa. This happened during COVID I always ask them, which of your kids, which of your family are going to go work in a packing plant?
Because my kids aren't.
Your kids aren't.
We need people to come do these jobs that we're not willing to do and to say, well, you know, if we don't have undocumented workers, Americans will take those jobs. No, they won't.
I mean, no one. I mean, I've worked in a packing plant. It's disgusting, hot, dirty, smelly, awful work.
No one would ever do it if they had another opportunity. But you have folks that come to this country to better themselves who will take those jobs. I mean, when my ancestors came from Eastern Europe, they started out in sweat houses, New York City, but that was sort of the first step of the American dream.
And I don't understand why we want to shut that off. Only because people are not coming into this country in the appropriate way, because we have a immigration System that for 25 years, probably longer than this, 30 years, has been completely broken.
Doesn't work, it won't fix it, the politicians won't fix it. And so now we have this situation where we've gone way overboard and we're not treating people humanely, but we need to have workers come into the country.
These folks participate in our economy to a large extent. I don't recall the actual number that they contribute to gdp, but it's an enormous number.
And if they're not here, jobs aren't getting done. But I, I talked to people in Iowa now who are having trouble with the harvest because they don't have workers.
They had trouble planting because they didn't have workers.
And these were typically, you know, undocumented workers because the system doesn't allow them to be documented.
So, but then not treating them humanely, I mean, it's a, a very big complicated issue that really needs to be addressed in a non political way. And I would guess I'd ask you, Elizabeth, because that's the world you live in.
What do we do?
[00:28:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: I say often that we actually agree on far more than we disagree about this issue.
Why the divisiveness and why the brokenness? There's a payoff somewhere.
This is all made up. Immigration law, like any law, is from our imaginations and from our politicians. And if we don't like it, we can change it, they can change it. We can demand that they change it.
We've gotten close sometimes to some immigration reform, but it continues to be broken. And now what we're seeing too is not only are the doors to coming lawfully closing more and more and becoming more arduous or requiring more money or more education, which are not the jobs that necessarily end up being our dishwasher or our support staff in our hospitality industry, those avenues are being closed off. Yet you still have humans who are seeking opportunity and safety and so they're going to do what they need to do to survive. But what we're seeing now though, with the detentions, particularly from the interior of the country, we know that of the folks that are being taken out of Wyoming and detained, that the administration has quotas and they are most certainly bullying people in the immigration court to accept their voluntary departure under guard. And roughly 70 to 75% of them don't have a criminal history at all.
And I don't know why we would want to get rid of a hard working dishwasher with no criminal history that we need them.
Where's the payoff? What's the end goal to that?
It's not something I understand, but the idea of American business was always that the business person and government, government wouldn't interfere with your business endeavor and your opportunity to grow your business. That's sort of founding principle of our country, right?
So why can't I keep my dishwasher who's not a criminal? I don't have an answer for that.
I, you know, there's a lot of statistical studies and economic studies that communities with immigrant populations are safer and more economically robust.
And there's also a lot of data that perhaps the undocumented worker who's paying into the Social Security system, who can never take those Benefits is the only reason why people are still receiving Social Security benefits at this time.
I don't want to be, you know, conspiracy theory, but sometimes we got to follow where the money's going. I suppose we know that there's quite a bit of money housing bodies.
[00:30:58] Speaker C: You asked the question, what's the payoff?
And if we look at the last presidential election, we had this whole tiff. And I find it a bit amusing about Haitians eating cats.
And I find it amusing because back in the 80s, 70s, when hung people from, you know, Vietnam were coming over to Seattle, there was a whole to do about cats and dogs in Seattle disappearing because the hung people were. They thought they had gone to heaven because they had food running wild all over the streets. But what happened in Ohio, it's about a culture war. It's how people got their base agitated to go out and vote.
And I remember the vice president, who wasn't the vice president at the time, but said when asked why was he telling this lie about the Haitians eating cats, he said, well, sometimes you have to get people talking about the topic, but it's like, what topic? What are you talking about?
It's.
And part of it goes back to what you. What you alluded to before. Elizabeth, you know, how do you become an educated voter? You can either listen to the crazy or you can go out and find out for yourself.
I mean, one of the things the Internet does, although you have to be careful what you. What you look at, you can't silo yourself in, in one channel or another, but all the information you need to educate yourself is out there.
But getting back to, you know, what I do and what I'm involved in, you can't take anything at face value. You have to look at the source. You have to look who's behind the source. Why are they saying what they're saying? But there are still organizations out there, many of them, that are attempting to publish the truth.
Now, truth is facts.
You can argue about the outcome, but a fact, for the most part, is a fact. I mean, I was trained as a physiologist in science, and I understand that there's normative versus positive. We can only interpret what we see from what we already know until we have new information.
But still, that's the best information out there, and you need to delve into the facts. You should always be asking people, is that an opinion or is that a fact?
And if it's an opinion, you need to understand this. An opinion. If it's a fact, you should be able to take it to the bank and put some agency into it. And for this whole conversation about immigrants, you need to, as you said, separate the fact from opinion.
And the opinion is out there because it politically helps someone achieve their political goal.
[00:34:03] Speaker B: Roger, thank you so much for that.
When we come back, I'd like to continue that line of thought and that conversation because what we're doing right now is getting facts, exchanging information.
The conversation is worth having.
And we'll be right back.
[00:34:22] Speaker A: We'll be right back with more insight, context and useful information about immigration law and life. Stay with us on IMMIGRATION today.
And we're back. I'm Elizabeth Trifonis, and this is IMMIGRATION TODAY on NOW Media Television. Let's continue the conversation.
Welcome back to IMMIGRATION today.
[00:34:41] Speaker B: Stay connected to this show and all your NOW MEDIA TV favorites, live or on demand anytime you like. Download the Free Now Media TV app on Roku or iOS and unlock bilingual programming in English and Spanish. If you're on the move, you can catch the podcast version at www.nowmediatv.tv. it's business, lifestyle, culture, finance, law and beyond. NOW Media TV is streaming around the clock and ready whenever you are. And I'm talking with Roger Shindell. And on the break, you made the comment that this was like being in 1984, George Orwell's book, which I did read, I actually referenced it on a law essay for entrance exams. It's coming to mind.
But what do you mean BY we're in 1984, for starters?
[00:35:34] Speaker C: Well, we're in a situation where all the information we get is siloed and is developed to promote a specific position.
And it's not fact based, it's opinion based with an agenda behind it. And in 1984, it was the government that was doing it. And I would almost argue if you kept up with the news for the last few days, that our government now is trying to do that where there were journalists who were barred from reporting in the White House because the administration didn't like the way they were being reported on.
So they they removed their press credentials, launched their own TV station to promote the kind of information they want to push out as opposed to having a free, unregulated press.
And that is exactly what the premise of 1984 was, that if you control the narrative, if you control the information, you control not only history but the future.
[00:36:56] Speaker B: Are we doomed? Can we possibly get out of that?
[00:37:01] Speaker C: Well, to quote or to paraphrase Winston Churchill, Americans do the right thing after they've done all the wrong things.
So, yes, I think we can get out of it if we can make some changes.
And I think, and this is my opinion, that fundamentally we need to have two changes. One, we live in a siloed world that has been amplified by social media.
And we're now beginning to see what social media does to younger kids, and that that needs to be regulated. It's a nuance in the law that social media isn't regulated the way broadcast TV is. I think we should regulate the same way. Truth in advertising, that kind of thing can't just get on TV and outright lie. And we saw what happened when Fox News did that, and they end up paying almost a billion dollars in fines.
So that's one thing is social media.
The other thing is, when I was going through public school back in the 50s and 60s, one of the goals of public education was to teach critical thinking, learn how to process information.
Somewhere along the way, we've turned our public schools into trade schools, where we're trying to teach people a trade and a trade that there probably won't be a job for. I remember back in the 80s, everybody was pushing on, you know, become a programmer, become a coder. And what happened? All the coding jobs left the United States for cheaper population in India. So all these people were trained as coders and then couldn't find jobs. I think we've lost the ability to critically evaluate information, and that should be one of the tenants of our public education system, starting in kindergarten, all the way up through graduating high school.
Other thing we used to have was a civics course.
Or you learned about your government.
We don't have those anymore. We're so focused on teaching people a trade that we stopped educating them. And I think we need to go back to actually educating our kids. So they learn how to read, they learn how to write, they learn about history, they learn about math, they can, you know, read at an appropriate level. They learn civics, they learn how to critically evaluate information. I think to be a citizen, all those are important.
The other thing, and I can't believe, tell my friends, I can't believe having grown up during the Vietnam War and the draft, that I would ever say this, but I think that every high school graduate should do two years of some kind of service, whether it be in the military or some other kind of government program where people from different backgrounds all have to learn how to get along. You can't stay in your own silo. You have to learn how to deal with other people.
And the military has always been, you know, starting with, I'M having a moment.
But the military was the first organization to truly become integrated, and that was a benefit to society.
And we don't do that anymore. We don't move out of our silos. We, we stay with the same social media channels, we stay with the same group of people. We never understand what other people's lives are like. One of the things in my life I think is. Made me who I was is I've. I've lived so many different life experiences. You know, working with, with undocumented workers, working in rural areas. I had a job once where the closest town was 50 miles away, and the town only had a gas station and a post office and a bar all in the same building. And a real throwback to, you know, the, the 19th century. But, you know, it taught me how to get along with people. And I can walk into any situation today and sit down in a bar in the middle of nowhere and talk horses or cattle with someone, or, you know, go to a World bank symposium and talk economics with someone and, and that's a benefit to know what other people's lives have been like and we've lost that.
[00:41:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we talked about it on another break a little bit. People ask me how I would change the immigration system or what would be different. And I like to remind people that I'm sitting with a human being when
[00:42:09] Speaker A: I'm with my client.
[00:42:10] Speaker B: And that changes it. That connectedness when you have to hold space with a real person as opposed to what the statistics or the numbers or the latest meme or whatever it is is coming through about the situation, it dynamically changes something when you have that human connectedness.
We'll see, see what the AI and critical thinking does now.
[00:42:35] Speaker C: The other thing that we've missed. Sorry to interrupt.
[00:42:38] Speaker B: No, please.
[00:42:40] Speaker C: We've lost multi generational families.
Used to be, you know, that you had your parents, you had your cousins, you had your aunts and uncles, you had your grandparents all living together, basically same neighborhood, interacting all the time.
That's gone away and the government is actually forcing it to go away. I mean, why can't we pay people, grandparents take care of their grandkids. I mean, we have an issue with daycare and having enough daycare. There's a whole population out there that can take care of kids and we're not using it. And as you said earlier, the incentive structure is difficult to understand anymore why we make decisions at a governmental level that aren't to benefit the population.
I know why, but it's beyond me that we Let that happen. And that goes back to the 40% of people voting. Right. You don't like it, you got to go out and vote.
[00:43:49] Speaker B: Right?
[00:43:49] Speaker C: That's our, that's our agency. That's how we can change anything, you know, in our lives.
[00:43:54] Speaker B: And will you remind people how to get back in touch with you? You said it in the earlier segment, but I'd like to remind folks, where can they find this information and get involved?
[00:44:04] Speaker C: Sure. You go to our website, which is the number four df dot com.
You can go on any social media channels like X or Blue Sky, YouTube, Google, and it's all the same B4DF.
And we'd love to have you explore what we do and potentially volunteer. And of course, as Zoo Pack involved in elections, we're always looking for donations. We're not for profit.
And our support staff doesn't take any money.
All the money that we raise goes to fund our programs.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: I think kind of circling back the themes are, right. To get involved, you simply need to start.
Right.
Watching a program like this or having a conversation with another neighbor who is now in a different place, making sure we have those connections, being a poll worker, seeing the process for yourself.
But 40%, that certainly means 60% of us could do, do better and we can move it forward, not be stuck in 1984.
[00:45:22] Speaker C: And remember, for the younger folks, it's the oldest, the elder population that votes.
The 40% that vote are primarily 50 and over.
So, you know, you want your grandparents managing your life. That's what you're allowing them to do, right?
[00:45:41] Speaker B: Be careful what you inherit if you're just standing by.
[00:45:44] Speaker C: Right, Exactly.
[00:45:47] Speaker B: Roger, I really appreciate the conversation with you today.
I think we covered a lot of topics and I thank you so much for your time. I like to always remind people, you know, to use your rights, you have to first know what they are.
And that's what we're trying to achieve in this program.
And I wish you all the best. Thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:46:10] Speaker C: Well, thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
