Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back to the Price youe Pay. I'm Roger Shindell. We ask when government and our big business decides who made the decision, who benefits, who pays, and whether the evidence holds up. You're watching now Media tv.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Welcome to the Price youe Pay. I'm Roger Shindell. This is my premiere episode.
Before I ask anyone else to sit in this chair to defend an idea, challenge an assumption or explain policy, I thought I'd start by telling you what this show means to me, why I created it, and why I think the conversation matters.
Name of the show is the price you pay. It's really about consequences.
Each decision has a price.
Sometimes I make decisions and I choose to pay the price.
Sometimes someone else makes the decision and I live with the consequences.
That's especially true when it comes to politics and public policy.
The decisions made in Washington or at the state Capitol.
But the consequences don't stay there.
Eventually they show up in someone else's kitchen table. They show up in the price of groceries and whether a family can afford health care and whether a young person can buy a house, whether an older parent can afford long term care, whether workers feel secure or whether family can retire without being afraid of what comes next.
That's where I want this show to live. Where political discussions become real life consequences.
I created the price you pay because I became frustrated with the way we talk about important issues.
We spend an enormous amount of time arguing about Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, capitalism and socialism.
And we're very quick to decide which team an idea belongs to.
But we're much slower to ask the question what matters?
What does actually mean to me, my family, my business, my community, and to people whose lives may look nothing like the lives of the people who designed the policy.
Labels are convenient.
They're a good way to stop thinking. If I can call an ideal socialist, fascist, communist, radical, conservative or progressive. I may feel though I've explained it, but I haven't, I've simply put a label on it.
Governing is harder than applying a label. And consequences don't care what the label was that we use.
So the idea behind the show is pretty simple. Politicians and politics have consequences.
And those consequences matter more than the political label that we attach to them.
I want to begin with the person paying the price and work backwards.
Who made the decision?
Why was it made? Who benefits? Who gets hurt?
What does it cost? Who pays today and who may be paying 10 years from now?
And do the people making the promise ever follow through?
That doesn't mean every episode will produce an easy answer.
Frankly, I hope that they don't. But the show will follow a few principles. You you'll hear often two sides, one question, equal time.
Facts are not the same as opinions.
I want people with different opinions and points of view to have enough time to explain what they actually believe, not just repeat a slogan.
I want them to challenge each other, but I also want them to listen. And what I want you is to hear the strongest version of both arguments.
If we're going to disagree, we should at least disagree with what the other person really believes, not some caricature of it. I also want to be clear about my role. I'm not here to tell you what to think. I have opinions. My guests will have opinions.
We'll also hear factual claims, and those claims should be tested, questioned and supported. My job is not to hand you a conclusion.
My job is to give you the facts, perspective, content and questions you need to hear to reach your own conclusion.
And the agreement is not the price of admission. You don't have to share my politics, my assumptions, or my life experience to find something useful here.
If two people disagree about taxes, immigration, health care, energy, technology regulations, or anything else, I want to know what each believes and will happen if we follow their plan. And then I want to follow the consequences.
A proposal can sound comprehensive and still create a burden on someone that's not intended.
It can sound efficient and simply shift the cost to someone with less power.
Policy can create a real benefit and a real downside at the same time.
And that's where the interesting conversation begins.
I also want us to stop treating compromise as a weakness and certainly as proof.
Sometimes two important values really do. Complete and no choice protects both of them completely.
Sometimes the best we can do is decide which trade off we're willing to accept, make the choice honestly, and be willing to reconsider it when the facts change.
Why does this matter now?
Because we become very good at picking sides and pretty bad at listening.
We're encouraged to treat disagreement as proof that the other person is ignorant, immoral, dangerous, not worth talking to.
This may feel good, but in the moment. But it solves almost nothing.
And I believe it helps tear this country apart. I would rather ask what are you proposing?
Who does it help? Who does it hurt? What will it cost? What are the trade offs? What will happen if it works? What will happen if it fails?
And what happened years later when the headline is gone but real people are still living with the decisions?
Those are not Democratic questions or Republican questions. They're questions of accountability.
Accountability takes patience.
It means staying with a question long enough to discover that the first answer may not be the whole answer. It means separating what a policy is supposed to do from what it can do.
It means being willing to admit that sometimes we value creates. The value we create is a burden and a burden we did not expect.
Or that a cost we feared was smaller than we assumed.
You can't do that in a slogan or 30 second shouting match. That's exactly why I wanted a long term show. For me, the critical idea is the price you pay is that the cost doesn't disappear just because we move it. If government spends less, the need may still exist and someone else may have to meet it. If a business cuts one cost, someone may absorb it. If we solve today's problems by creating a larger one tomorrow. The price didn't disappear. We delayed it, we hid it, or we handed it to someone else.
That's why the question behind the show is so simple and I hope, impossible to avoid.
Who actually pays the cost?
In the next segment, I want to become personal to you. My life has taken me through some very different worlds. Ranches, horses, economics, business, healthcare, government regulations. Each one taught me something about the distance between a policy written on paper and the consequences of someone living with it.
We'll take a short break and when I come back, I want to talk about the experience that shaped this show and about the price I know personally the price of success.
When the currency is time,
[00:08:33] Speaker A: the decision may be theirs, the price may be yours. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the Price youe Pay. I'm Roger Shindell. Let's get past the talking points and back to the evidence.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: Welcome back to the Price youe Pay.
Stay connected to the show and every other NOW Media TV favorite, live or on demand, anytime you like.
Download the free Now Media TV app on Roku or iOS and unlock non stop bilingual programming in English and Spanish on the move.
Catch the podcast version at www.nowmedia.tv.
from business and news to lifestyle, culture and beyond, Now Media TV is a streaming around the clock.
Ready whenever you are.
I'm Roger Shindell and this is the Price youe Pay.
Before the break, I talked about the central idea behind the show. Decisions have consequences and the best place to begin is often with the person who has to live with them.
I didn't come to this view from one job or one classroom.
I've lived a pretty unconventional life and I think that has a lot to do with how I approach these conversations.
I worked on ranches. I've been A farrier, a wrangler, a wilderness guide.
I went back to school, studied physiology and then economics. I built businesses and had to make payroll. I've watched friends die. I've worked in health care and spent years dealing with government regulations. I've mucked out septic tanks and I've spoken at conferences sponsored by the World Bank.
This vast array of experiences put me in a very different room with different people who sometimes had almost nothing in common.
And even though they were living under the same economy, the same laws and the same political decisions, when you move between worlds like that, you notice something. At least I did.
A policy can sound perfectly reasonable from a distance and look completely different to the person who has to live with it.
An idea can be elegant in theory and a mess in practice.
A rule can solve one problem and create two more.
A decision can make perfect sense in the person designing the system while imposing a cost that the person never sees.
And after a while, you begin to recognize when someone is gaming the system for their own benefit.
These gaps between what was intended and what actually happens has always interested me.
It also made me skeptical of answers that only work from 30,000ft from a distance.
A policy may be in line in a budget or a sentence in a regulation, but up close it may mean making payroll, postponing a purchase, spending hours on paperwork, making a medical choice, or having a difficult conversation around the kitchen table.
I want the show to move between these two views so we can see both sides intention and the real result.
Economics gave me one way to think about choices, incentives, scarcity and trade offs. Health care and government regulation gave me another.
Science taught me to evaluate information and ask whether the evidence actually supports the conclusion.
And the earlier parts of my life taught me something else it was which is just as valuable.
Respect for work that's physical, immediate and impossible to understand from a spreadsheet.
No one of these perspectives is enough by itself.
That's why I want different kinds of people on the show.
I want the expert who understands the system and the person who has to live inside of it.
I want policymakers who can explain what a rule was supposed to accomplish.
And the business owner, worker, patient, caregiver, parent, immigrant or retiree who can tell us what happened when that rule reached real life.
My own experience also taught me that not every price is political.
Some prices are personal.
If you ask what price I've been paid for my success, my answer is time.
I've worked hard and I'm proud of what I accomplished. I But there's one thing none of us can take back, and that's time.
There were periods when the business came first because I believed it had to.
Some of those choices probably were necessary.
Looking back, others weren't.
It's one of the difficult things about price. You don't always know what something really costs while you're paying for it.
Sometimes the invoice doesn't arrive until years later.
At the time, the sacrifice feels perfectly rational.
The problem is urgent. The deadline can't move, the deal can't wait.
The business needs you.
Opportunity may never come again.
So you give it another meeting, another evening, another weekend, another trip, another year.
Then enough time passes, and you realize some opportunities do really come again.
Some business problems were never as important as they seemed.
But some people, in some moments, don't come around with a second chance.
That changed the way I think about urgency and importance.
Business problems are very good at making themselves feel urgent. In reality, most are not.
The harder discipline is recognizing what is truly important before time makes the choice for you.
Was the price worth it?
Some of it was, Some of it was not.
That's the most honest answer I can give.
I've had the opportunities and experiences I would not trade.
Working gave me purpose, challenges, relationships, knowledge and a chance to build something that mattered.
But it's also moments I would gladly trade some professional accomplishments to have back.
We often talk about success as if the result proves the sacrifice was justified.
We see the company, we see the title, the political career, the money, the achievement or the public recognition.
We don't see all the prices behind it, the risks, the failures, the relationships that got less attention than they should, the opportunities turned down and the hours that could only be spent once.
And because the outcome looked successful, we assume the price must have been worth it.
I don't think that's necessarily true.
Success is not free.
Ambition isn't free.
Public policy is not free.
Even some things worthwhile usually require us to give, to give up something else.
The challenge is not to pretend that there's no cost.
The challenge is to see the cost clearly enough to decide whether we're willing to pay for it.
That's the connection between my story and the show.
I'm interested in connections and choices and conscious choices.
If I understand the cost and decide the goal is worth the sacrifice, that's one thing.
If I just keep paying because I never stop to ask, what was it costing me, that's something very different.
The same is true for government.
We may decide that a policy goal is worth a significant price, and reasonable people can disagree.
But we should identify the price honestly.
We should know who's paying it. And we should ask whether the people carrying the burden had any meaningful voice in the decision.
In the next segment, I want to take the idea a step further.
How do we know when the price is becoming too high?
What do we misunderstand about ambition and sacrifice?
And what happens when reaching the objective begins to destroy the very reason we wanted to reach it?
[00:17:38] Speaker A: The decision may be theirs. The price may be yours. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the Price you Pay. I'm Roger Shindell. Let's get past the talking points and back to the evidence.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: Welcome back to the Price youe Pay. I'm Roger Shindell.
We've talked about why I created the show and about the personal experiences behind it.
Now I want to ask a question that applies to a career, a business, a family and public policy.
How do you know when the price has become too high?
My answer is the price is too high when achieving the objective begins to destroy the reason you wanted to achieve it in the first place.
It sounds simple, but you know it isn't.
Suppose someone says, I worked this hard to create financial security for my family.
That's a legitimate goal.
If pursuing that security becomes so time consuming that the family itself is damaged or lost, then the strategy has begun to defeat the purpose.
And I can speak to that personally.
On paper, it may look like success.
The income is higher, the company is bigger, the title is better.
If the original reason for doing all this has been undermined, we have to be willing to ask whether the price became too high.
But I think we misunderstood the success, ambition, sacrifice.
Because we focus on the result, we can see and ignore the costs. We can't.
We see business that survived, not all the ideas that failed before it.
We see the person at the top.
Not every relationship risk, disappointment or road not taken.
We see political victory, but we never see the people who spent years living with those trade offs.
This is not an argument against ambition.
And ambition can be a powerful force.
It's not an argument against sacrifice.
Anything difficult and worthwhile requires sacrifice.
It's an argument for understanding the sacrifice before we romanticize it.
And one of the hardest lessons to learn is this.
The person who makes a decision is not always the person who pays for it.
That's obvious in public policy.
A legislator can cast a vote and leave the chamber. An agency writes a regulation, a court issues a decision.
The person you voted for fails to keep a promise.
The decision maker may honestly believe that they are solving a problem or they may simply be trying to gain or hold more power.
Either way, the full price shows up somewhere else in a form that never appeared in the original calculation.
That doesn't automatically mean the decision was wrong.
Every serious policy involves trade offs.
My point is that we need to work and look for trade offs instead of pretending they don't exist.
And I want to apply that standard. Whether I like the proposal or I hate it. It's easy to hunt for hidden costs in an idea we already oppose.
The real test is whether we look just at a hard decision for hidden costs and an idea we support in this show is going to mean anything.
That discipline has to work both ways.
So when I look at a proposal, I want to walk through a series of questions.
First, what problem are we actually trying to solve?
If we can't define the problem, how can we know whether the solution worked?
Second, who benefits?
It may be a large group, it may be a small group, or it may be society as a whole.
But let us identify the benefit instead of simply assuming it and then be able to measure it.
Third, who pays the price? May be money, time, opportunity, risk, freedom, paperwork, higher prices, lower benefits, or something harder to see.
Sometimes a person who benefits also pays.
Sometimes the cost lands on someone else entirely.
A policy can look cheap in year one and become very expensive later on.
A business decision can improve the the quarterly numbers and create a problem five years from now.
A personal choice can feel manageable today and look very different in hindsight.
Fifth, what's the alternative?
Too often public debate compares a proposal with a perfection.
Real choices are usually between imperfect options.
If I reject one approach, I'll have to ask what happens if we do nothing? And what price comes with that choice?
And finally, who has a voice?
If the people who bear the greatest consequences were never part of the conversation, we ought to wonder what decision makers missed.
Those are the questions I want the price you pay to ask without deciding the answer before the conversation even begins.
The format matters because fairness matters. Two sides, one question, equal time.
That doesn't mean every issue has only two opinions, or that every claim has equal evidence behind means that when people disagree, each one should have a real opportunity to make the strongest case they can.
I don't want interruption to be for entertainment.
I don't want the point to be catching someone with a gotcha question, a five second mistake.
I want enough time to understand how intelligent people can look at the same facts and reach very different conclusions.
Then I want to test those conclusions against the consequences.
If someone wants to spend more I want to know what we're buying, who benefits, how we pay for it, and what do we give up.
If someone wants to spend less, I want to know what the cost really disappears and what cost merely moves.
If someone possesses a new rule or proposes a new rule, what problem does it solve and what burden does it create?
If someone wants to remove a rule, what freedom does that restore or what protection might we lose?
The point is not to assume government is always the answer or always the problem.
It's not to assume markets are always fair or always unfair.
It's not to assume experts are always right or that one person's lived experience tells us everything.
The point is to keep asking questions until the trade offs become visible.
I want viewers to question assumptions, including mine.
I'll consider an episode successful if someone watches and says, I'm not sure I agree with Roger, but I hadn't considered that I'll have to consider it.
Or just as successful if someone listens to a guest they expected to dislike and come away understanding why that person sees the issue differently.
Understanding is not agreement.
We can understand an argument and still reject it. But disagreement becomes much more useful when we can identify the real cost, the real benefit, the values underneath the choice.
In the final segment, I want to tell you who I hope to bring into these conversations, the questions I expect to ask again and again have, and what I hope to take away from every episode. Because that's the purpose of the price you pay. It's not to make you think like me. It's not to make it harder for all of us to ignore the person who has to live with the consequences.
[00:27:12] Speaker A: The decision may be theirs. The price may be yours. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the Price youe Pay. I'm Roger Shindell. Let's get past the talking points and back to the evidence.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Welcome back to the Price youe Pay.
Stay connected to this show and every NOW Media TV favorite live or on demand, anytime you like.
Download the free Now Media TV app on Roku or iOS and unlock non stop bilingual programming in English and Spanish on the move. Catch the podcast version at www.nowmedia.tv.
from business and news to lifestyle, culture and beyond, Now Media TV is streaming around the clock.
Ready whenever you are.
I'm Roger Shindell and this is the final segment of our premiere episode, the price you Pay.
I want to close by looking ahead at the people I want you to meet, the stories this show will tell, and the questions underneath almost every conversation will have.
When I think about the future Guests. I want people who know something and people who have lived something.
Experts matter, policymakers matter.
Economists, lawyers, doctors, businessmen and political leaders can help us understand how systems work.
My decisions get made, why decisions get made, what choices are available and what evidence supports the argument.
But expertise is only part of the story.
I also want to hear from people who actually pay the price.
I want the small business owner who can tell us what a regulation or economic change looks like from inside their company.
I want the caregiver trying to help an older patient when the family has no idea how to pay for long term care.
I want the patient who can tell us what health care policy means when it stops being theoretical.
I want the worker, the parent, the immigrant, the retiree, and the person whose life becomes part of a policy debate even though nobody ever invited them into the room.
Sometimes the person living with a policy understands something the people who wrote it don't.
That doesn't mean lived experience replaces evidence.
One story doesn't tell us what happens everywhere. But a story can expose consequences a spreadsheet may have missed. And it can show us where a policy that looks clean on paper becomes complicated in a kitchen, a workplace, a hospital room, or a family decision.
That's why I want the show to be move back and forth between systems and people.
And the questions we ask keep coming back to this who actually pays the price if you propose a policy, someone benefits and someone pays.
Sometimes it's the same person, often it's not.
I want to know who pays how much, when and whether that person has any voice in the decision.
I also want to know what the alternatives cost.
Saying no one has a price. Doing nothing always has consequences.
Keeping the status quo is still a choice.
We're not looking for a magical option here with no trade offs.
We're trying to see the trade offs and clearly enough to understand which piece, what price we're willing to accept.
That's where the debate format matters. Two sides, one question, equal time.
Something that we used to have in our political dialogue but has disappeared in our immediate social media environment we currently live live in.
I want opposing views to meet in a long format that rewards clarity, not volume. I want people to explain why their position matters, challenge the other side, and respond to the consequences the other person identifies.
But I also want us to be able to say that's a fair point.
And when it's through disagreement doesn't require us to give up our convictions.
It requires enough confidence in what we believe to hear the other side accurately.
And we want to work both with opinions and with facts and differentiate between the two and be able to prove facts that we say are facts.
We'll have an episode about policies and economics, but also business, technology, culture and other issues. Because questions will always come up.
Questions will be predictable. We can bring the same discipline to all of them. What's the problem?
What's the competing solutions?
Who benefits? Who pays?
What are the risks?
What do we gain?
What happens if we're wrong?
And what happens to the people who are not in the room when the decision was being made?
I also want to make a commitment to you about evidence.
You will hear opinions on the show.
You'll hear judgments and disagreements about values.
Those belong in the public conversation.
But a factual claim is different from an opinion.
Facts should be verifiable. Claims should be open to challenge. And if the evidence changes, we should be willing to change what we say.
That standard applies to every guest and applies to me.
I'll not get every question right. Not every guest will persuade you.
Not every episode will end in agreement.
What we do expect is an honest effort to get past the talking points and follow the consequences.
So what should you earn about every episode? I don't need you to leave agreeing with me. I would rather you leave with a better question.
Maybe you'll say, I haven't considered that cost.
Maybe you'll still disagree, but understand why other sides believe what they do.
Maybe you'll see a trade off in policy you supported. Maybe you'll discover that a policy you oppose addresses a problem you had underestimated.
That's the kind of reconsideration I want the show to create.
After this premiere, I would like to hear somebody say, I never thought about that.
Who actually pays the price and the way before, because that's the whole show.
Behind almost every political argument, economic policy, business decision or social issue, someone makes a decision and somebody else may have to live with it.
Sometimes it may be the same person.
Very often they're not. The price you pay is about finding that person's understanding and their decision, hearing competing ideas about what should be done and telling the story of the consequences.
I also want to leave the room. I want to leave room for humility.
Some problems have no opinion without a real cost.
Good people can look at the same risks and weigh them differently. And sometimes the most responsible answer is, I don't know yet.
I need more information.
I think we need to give ourselves more permission to say that.
Certainly certainty makes powerful television, but curiosity makes better citizens.
So as we begin, here is my promise to you.
I'll ask difficult questions. I'll invite people who disagree.
I'll give each side room to make a case.
I'll ask what evidence supports the claims that we hear.
And I'll keep bringing the conversation back to the people who live with the consequences.
Not because every decision is bad, not because every cost can be avoided, but because every serious choice deserves an honest accounting. What did we gain?
What did we give up? Who decided? Who benefited?
Who has the voice?
Who actually paid the price?
So before we end, I want to spend a few minutes on how I got here with this show.
It came out of a political PAC and other political organization I founded called Volunteers for Democracy's Future.
The genesis was that is believing. We live in an environment now where politicians are not living up to their oath of office.
We're a bipartisan group looking to support politicians who will actually live up to their oath of office, putting their citizens that they represent first and not putting their own self ingratiation first.
We don't support any particular candidate, we don't support any particular policy. What we do support are policies that will strengthen and repair our democracy. As you can see in the graphic next to me, we see a broken flag that needs to be prepared.
Our first project is a project we call Project 67.
And the goal is to get a 67 majority in the US Senate of People that will uphold their oath of office, that will put the people first, that will protect democracy.
Subsequent to that, when the election cycle is over, we have another program we're launching called the Accountability Project.
And that is once people are in office, we need to hold them accountable, make sure they do what they said they were going to do, and again, put the people that they represent first.
It should be the order used to be country, state, individual.
It seems to me that what we have now is individual, individual, individual.
And my goal and my organization's goal is to bring us back to a point where we're putting country first. We're representing the individuals in each state for senators, each district for Congress people, and bring our discourse back to a point where disagreement is not the enemy.
Right now, when someone disagrees, what you hear is that other group, that other opinion is the enemy trying to destroy our country.
Those are the labels that the price you pay is trying to get around and what Volunteers for Democracy's Future is looking to bring to the table.
Anybody who's interested in joining us, you can go to our website.
You see it on the screen www.vthenumber4df.com.
You can follow us on Facebook, you can follow us on Blue sky, you can follow us on Instagram, you can follow us on X and become part of the conversation with us. We're always looking for people who want to have that conversation, want to join us in our efforts to bring back a political system that actually promotes the welfare of the majority of the citizens that have voted for those individuals.
Roger I'm Roger Shindell.
Thank you for joining me for the premiere of the Price youe Pay.
Next time, we'll begin putting these questions to our guests in competing ideas and to the policies that shape our everyday lives.
Two sides, one question, equal time. And whenever a decision sounds simple, I hope we remember to ask the question that makes it real.
Who actually pays the price?
