Transcript of #251 Secretary Sean Duffy - NASA is Going Back to the Moon for the First Time in 54 Years

Secretary Sean Duffy. Welcome to the show.

It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.

It's good to have you. It's good to be here. It's good to be here. We were actually supposed to do this what? About a month ago. Month ago. Then the Charlie Kirk assassination happened, and so we had to push it. I just wanted to say that I thought that spoke a lot about your character. I know you guys were friends, and It sounds like he was closer with your wife than you, but a lot of people in politics would have loved to have come on the show and made it all about them with that going on. To get that message that you just wanted to go and be with the family and be supportive. I mean, that's what this fucking country is all about. It's nice to see that.

It happened, and then the next day, I was supposed to be with you. I was supposed to leave moments after the shooting. And you were generous to say, We'll push it. We're good. Which I'm grateful for that. And we made this happen. I appreciate you having me back. That you took that very well. So thank you.

My pleasure. My pleasure. So acting Secretary of Department of Transportation and Active Secretary of NASA, correct? Or NASA Administrator.

I'm the Secretary of Transportation and the acting Administrator of NASA. I get this short window of time until the President appoints someone into the full-time role. Yeah, it's been great.

It's been busy, really busy. And a husband and a father of nine. How the hell do you manage all this?

Sean, I'm grayer than you are. Listen, it's been a great... To serve this president has been really awesome. Then to also be a father and to navigate that back and forth. Again, I think our first role as men is to be good fathers. Again, I had this in Congress. You get to run, you get to serve your country, you do it every two years, you get to pass legislation, you're part of the conversation in a different way. I get a huge influence on how America works at DOT. I'm able to set a mission at NASA, all really important stuff. But I always think about at the end of life, as you sit on your deathbed, what do you think about? Do you think about the bill you passed? Do you think about the road you built? Do you think about the mission that you helped send our second effort to get to the moon? Do you think about those things on your deathbed?

I doubt it.

I doubt it. You think about your family and what relationship did I have? How did I raise my kids? Those are the people that you have around you. And so as I do all of this, which I'm so grateful that the President has given me this great honor to serve, and I think this is the most historic administration in American history, if and not least since the middle of the 1800s and the Civil War. To be part of this is an amazing honor, and the fact that we're going to do so much so quickly with this President has been very cool. But I don't lose focus on the fact that the most important thing is my family and the most meaningful thing to my life and to what I do on this Earth is to raise good kids, to hopefully raise them well, not to go to Harvard. I always think about what is the mission of kids? Not Harvard, but to heaven. That's what we want to do with our kids.

Man, I love hearing that. I love hearing that. Thank you for saying that. I want to do a life story on you, start from childhood, talk about where you came from, your road to being Secretary and Administrator, and in that, some fatherhood device. But everybody starts off with an introduction here. So guys, Did I approve the introduction?

Did I get it? You've got quite the arc here.

Secretary Sean Duffy. 20th United States Secretary of Transportation, Overseeing critical infrastructure, aviation, and automotive policies. Also, the interim administrator of NASA, stepping into the role in July of 2025 to guide America's space exploration, competed in the Lumberjack World Championships, a reality TV pioneer, having started MTV's The Real World, Boston in 1997, and Road Rules, All Stars in 1998, where you met your future wife. A former prosecutor serving as district Attorney for Ashton County, Wisconsin. A former US congressman representing Wisconsin's seventh district from 2011 to 2019, a media personality and commentator, having worked as a CNN contributor and co-host of Bottom Line on Fox Business, husband of Rachel, and father of nine children, and most importantly, you're a Christian.

Catholic. Catholic.

We had talked about how we rescheduled this interview after the Charlie Kirk assassination. And man, just lots of stuff going on in the news right now. The government shut down. I mean, we're seeing flights delayed. We always see flights delayed.

We do. But it's going to get better. We've had problems, but it can't fix it overnight. But we are going to fix that as we come into the next two, three, four years. It's going to be great.

Perfect. I think something that is on everybody's mind right now is the 3i atlas object. It supposedly might be extraterrestrial. You got any thoughts on this? I mean, Polymarket says there's a 4% chance that the interstellar object is confirmed aliens?

If it walks like a comet, it quacks like a comet, it's probably a comet, I would say, right? Polymarket This might be a little bit off, but we have some great pictures of it, and we're going to release those pictures. But the government shutdown has... There's a whole bunch of rules that come into play with the shutdown on what we can and can't do. When we open back up, we're going to send pictures tears out of the comment, and I think everybody will love it, enjoy it. But we feel pretty good that it's not extraterrestrial.

Is the government going to open back up?

I think so. At some point, well, maybe before Christmas. We're coming up to some real pain points of Snap benefits and health care benefits, subsidies that come in that Democrats truly care about. And when those benefits don't go out, On top of air traffic slowing down throughout the country because controllers are, listen, we'll maybe talk about this more, but controllers, it's oftentimes paycheck to paycheck, and especially the young ones, they're looking at taking other jobs. There's a number of pain points that I think Democrats are going to have to give up their push to have illegals get health care benefits and open the government up and have a conversation and negotiate.

Yeah. With this object, going back to that real quick, the three-eye atlas object, what is the fear? What's the spend going on about this?

I think social media can take off, and you can have people come out with credibility and make claims. But what the claims are and what we have seen at NASA don't match up. I think humans love conspiracy theories. By the way, conspiracy theories these days oftentimes come to be true when we're talking about Democrats. That's right. But this is one that is actually a conspiracy theory. I don't know. I think people get fascinated with extraterrestrial life and what's out there. This is one of those issues that people have been able to lean into and let their imaginations expand and think it could be something that what we're seeing, it is not. It's just a comment. It's a comment.

It's going to pass by, no big deal. It'll fly to a fly-by. Just like all the other ones.

But it will have been an exciting time thinking about what it could have been. But it's not, Sean.

Right on. Well, so got a couple of gifts here for you. Okay. First off, everybody gets these.

The famous gummies.

Vigilance League, Gummy Bearers made in the... Actually made in Michigan. We just had a long talk about Michigan. Yeah, made in Michigan. Still legal in all 50 states.

I love it.

Thank you. Rfk made an exception for us, I guess. Then I got something else for you, too. This is a little more sentimental. When I was giving you the studio tour earlier, you had asked about who gave me that rosary that's up there. I told you that's from my friend Dom Rizzo. He's a former Seal Team 6 guy. I told you he makes these rosaries, and they call them the Warriors Rosaries for protection. So thought you might like that.

That is beautiful. Thank you. You're welcome. Those who aren't Catholic, by the way, the power of the rosary, remarkable. Great protector. Can I give you a gift? Absolutely. Let me give you a little history. So I'm from Northern Wisconsin. And at the turn of the last century, end of the 1800s, America is moving westward, right? Major expansion throughout the country. And they needed wood to to build the country. And all the wood came from Northern Michigan. And as they moved westward, it was Northern Wisconsin, where these massive white pine stands of timber. And these lumberjacks would come through first with axes, and then they had revolutions to saws that made them be able to cut faster. And so what they would do is they would cut all winter long, and they cut in the winter because when it's pretty rough to cut in the summer and mosquitoes, but they would cut all winter long They didn't have tractors and trucks. They would have to use ice roads to haul all these logs to the river's edge. They would stockpile all logs on the river's edge all winter long. The spring would come, and they would dam up the river, and they would dump all the logs in the river, and they would float them because they didn't have roads.

They'd float them down to a sawmill town, and they would saw them up and then distribute it out across the country so we could build America. In Northern Wisconsin, we In my small town where I was born and raised, we had a couple of years where we produced the most board feet of lumber in the whole country. Our communities up there were built around logging. These people that would come in and log and cuddle all winter long. And so from that, we've developed these modern-day Lumberjack sports. And so you might see this on ESPN7 at 4: 00 in the morning, Lumberjack sports. So it's log rolling, a log in the water where two guys are on competing against each other to get the other one-off. Only rule is you can't cross the center line. And as the match goes on, the log gets smaller in diameter, which means it floats lower in the water and spins that much faster. It's log rolling. Then we have speed climbing. It's a race up and down. It's for 60, 90, sometimes on the West Coast, it would be 100 feet high, but it's a race up. And so it'll take 16 seconds to get up the tree, and you have just these spurs on your feet.

In a steel core hemp rope. You're running vertical up the tree, stepping and throwing, and then you'll hit a lion or a cowbell. Then, in essence, you keep your rope on the tree and you kick your feet out and you'll freefall. If you're not great, you can freefall 10 feet, but if you're good, you can freefall 20, 25 feet at a time. You'll hit the tree with a spur three, maybe four times coming down, which is the bull riding of the rodeo. Then we have chopping and sewing. In these modern-day sports, you might think of a lumberjack as a big fat, burly, suspender-wearing guy. The guys that compete now, they're the most amazing athletes. No kidding. I've seen these. Rock solid. Awesome. So I could give you a pair of log rolling cleats. I could give you a steel core hemp rope. I could give you a saw. But I thought to give Sean Ryan the great gift of Lumberjack Sports, which, by the way, the Lumberjack World Championships are in this small town in northern Wisconsin. Every summer, people... World Championships, it's US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. I'm not going to play you a song because I don't have any music talent.

So we're coming to Nashville, and I had my buddy bring us one of our axes from Northern Wisconsin. I thought, no better way to carry it then in a guitar case. This is like a six, six and a half pound, Razor sharp Australian speed ax. You can shave with them. This is what the guys use to just hammer through these pieces of wood. The accuracy at which they hit the wood and blow through it is remarkable. And these things are so sharp. So listen, be careful. Don't cut yourself.

Wow, look at that.

And so that's what we use today to to compete in Lumberjack sports. So you now have your own competitive speed ax. I'm sure it's going to find a place of prominence somewhere in there.

This will be in there. Man, this is awesome. Pretty cool. I'm sorry.

This is your That a little different. It's Americana. This is part of American history. Very cool. That I think is very cool. You want to side it a little bit?

Side it a little bit. Put it down there. Yeah.

Thank you. You're welcome.

This is awesome. I love it.

You can go it back. If you use it, it'll dull up. You have to stone it. So there you go.

Thank you.

That's awesome. Maybe we bring the show. You can come to Northern Wisconsin. We'll take you out on the lake. Maybe come see a Lumberjack World Championship.

Hell, yes. I would love that.

Yeah. Good guys.

So is that what you competed in?

So I grew up competing in these sports. So So I grew up in small town America. Again, this is late '70s through the '80s, where it was a different era. So all summer long, I would ride my bike from my house to what's called Lumberjack Bowl, where you might take diving lessons or what lessons people might go play soccer. We would go log roll all summer long. And so I'd ride my bike to Lumberjack Bowl, and I'd have a couple of lessons on a Thursday and a a Tuesday and a Thursday or a Monday and a Wednesday. But I would spend four days there. We'd get there 9: 00 in the morning, we'd stay till 2: 00 in the afternoon, and we'd just hang out with our friends, and we'd log roll all day long. So that was my summer. And from there, there was these exhibitions that would travel around the country, and sometimes the world. But when I was young, I would do these exhibitions for Lumberjack Sports. And it was usually in Wisconsin, in Illinois, and I would stay close to home when I was 16 years old. But we would travel around show these skills of the old-time Lumberjack.

Yeah, so I did that. Then I competed. I put myself through undergrad in law school by doing these sports. It's a pretty cool part of America.

Yeah, I'll say. I don't know any Lumberjacks.

You do now? I do now. But I was doing- Is this what all the kids up there want to do? A lot of them do. Yeah. It's awesome. Not all of them, but we have little pockets around the country. So you'll see in Idaho, there's a pocket. In Nova Scotia, Canada, there's a pocket of log rollers. In speed climbers, we get a lot of them from the West Coast because now the bigger trees are on the West Coast, and the spotted owl affected their ability to log on the West Coast. But we still have a lot of guys who learned how to climb, then they chop. So I grew up doing this.

Was Was this ever a career for you?

Or was this not a career?

It was not a career. Or was this strictly sports?

It was sport, and I also could make money at it. I'd do the competitions, but then I'd also do these exhibitions where I'd travel and get paid to be on the road. We'd drive these big trucks that had these... We'd take probably 45-foot trees with us on these extended trailers, and we'd get there, and we'd have the pool company come and put the trees in. So we'd climb, we'd build a tank and log and then the flatbed trailer would be the stage for the chopping and the sawing. And it's like a 45-minute roadshow that we would do, and we do three shows a day, which, by the way, you get in really good shape. I mean, you're cranking it when you're on the road. I was young and buff and tough, and I loved it, and I saw a lot of the country by doing the shows. But I went recently, my wife works for Fox & Friends, and so Fox & Friends was going to do a segment out of the Lumberjack World Championships for the weekend show. So I brought in these young speed climbers. They come in there, and I had just turned 50.

I'm like, Yeah, bring them in. I'm going to be part of the exhibition, and all three of us are going to climb for the show. I'm like, Yeah, I'm a little older and fatter than I used to be. They're going to beat me up, but I still have my down. I came down fast. To which we climb up and they beat me, and I do a bail and try to come down fast like I did when I was 28 years old. When you come down, your hands are around the tree. By the way, your hands get so hot. You have to get a heat resistant material on the back of your glove. Other, you'll burn the back of your hands because your hands are around the rope, but your hands are on the tree coming down. I'm swinging to the side, my arms up in the air. I hit the I had, which I've done a million times. This time, I hit the ground, I'm like, Oh, my God, son of a man, I could barely talk. I flipped and broke my shoulder. Damn. So the lesson of the story is don't...

Welcome to 50.

Don't do what you did when you're 28. Son of a gun. Anyway, I grew up doing this. When I applied for the real world, I did Lumberjack videos. I was doing Lumberjack Sports. I'd flown to California. Back in the day, I would turn the camera on. There's no editing. I'd turn the camera on and I'm like, All right, I'm in Minneapolis leaving law school and I'm going to LA. Then I'm like, I'm in LA. This is a dirty, shitty city. Then I went up to the competition that we had. It still is, by the way. It still is. It's probably dirtier and more violent than it was back then. And then I did this. I showed them speed climbing and log rolling, and I sent it in. So this was my pathway into reality TV, Muslim Marjolex Sports. Wow. My pathway to law school, my pathway to see the country. So I love it. It's this part of America, this America history that I think is so cool. And again, the sports are the speed at which people can go through a piece of wood, or they can climb up and down a tree, or I think the coolest is truly log rolling.

The log is flush with the water, and two big guys are standing on it and they're going out of town. Most people are like, How in the hell can you stand on the log if no one was on it, let alone with someone else on it? And the skill is immense. A lot of people start when they're young, and the hand-eye coordination, the balance. Anyway, that's.

Were your parents into this? Were your siblings into this?

My older siblings were started, and they would bring us down. But my older brother was very much into it. So we'd go down together. We'd ride our bikes down together. And so he's three years older than I am. And he focused on log rolling. He was a four-time, five-time. He won the title that many times in log rolling. He was very good. And I couldn't log roll. I never got in the top three, but I focused on speed climbing. So I liked the speed climbing. Again, it's a little bit of the bull riding of the rodeo. It's the most exciting sport, I think, in Lumberjack sports. And I focused on that, and I won the 90-foot race a couple of times and the 60-foot three times. So, yeah, it was a great part of my life. I still go back and watch the competitions now. It's a really cool part of my life, but also of, I think, American history.

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The older ones did.

You have nine kids?

I have nine kids. Nine kids. The older ones log rolled a little bit. But once I out of Hayward, where we have the facility, I tried to get them in. But the further I moved away, the harder it was to do. So the little ones do not- You mean there's not a lot of Lumberjack schools in DC? There's not, no. Can I tell you what happens. I stand corrected. We had this innovative couple that developed, instead of a log, we're using Western red cedar for these log rolling logs, and they're very voyant. They'll float high. So you can get two people that just doesn't sink to the bottom of the pond or the river. They developed a, not kevlar, but a composite material to make a fake log that behaves like a log. It's light, but you fill it up with water. Now a lot of YMCA's around the country have log rolling schools because they have these fake logs that they can easily move around when they don't have water. But then you put water in them and they behave like a real log. We have YMCA's throughout the country that actually are doing this, which is pretty neat.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Right on.

It's a little different.

What else were you into growing up? Other than being... Actually, what age did you start lumber jacking?

I started log rolling when I was probably six years old. I started speed climbing when I was... I started to learn how to do when I was 14, 15, 16. That was the middle teen years. But at least I grew up in small town America. I had 10 brothers and sisters. I was the 10th of 11. We have a big hockey family, so I grew up playing hockey. All my older brothers played hockey. My uncle was in the Hockey Hall of Fame. He was on the 1952 or 1954 Olympic Hockey team, so hockey was a big part of our lives. So yeah, I played hockey. And yeah, that was Ikey, and Lomond Jacksports was about it. I played Little League, baseball. We didn't have soccer back then in small town America. It's not what it is today. We didn't play football. We didn't start football until your freshman year in high school. I know they start much younger now, but I had broke my leg before my freshman year. So that put me out for my freshman year, and I just didn't pick it up my sophomore year.

You were the 10th out of 11 kids? Yeah. How was it being the 10th out of 11 kids? It was great.

It was awesome. Was it? Yeah.

But did they have any time for you at all?

No. It's what's interesting, and I see this in my own life. So your parents, when you're a new parents, I think you make mistakes, right? You've never done it before. You don't know how to do it. There was a time when we had these extended families and your parents would help you figure out how to raise your kids. And we were clannish as people. And now, because we all live in different parts of the country, we're figuring out how to parent on our own, right? We're new to it. I think my parents probably made, they were stricter, probably made more mistakes with the older kids. By the time they got to me, they were pretty chill. They're pretty great. I did shit that I think my older siblings hadn't done, they would have been in big trouble. But so I had better parents. They had more money. Again, I think they were a little bit tiring of parenthood, too, so maybe they were a little more relaxed as well. But I think they were better parents for me when I came through versus when the first ones came through. They were older, more mature, more just they're more chill parents.

Makes sense. I think as you and I see this with my own kids, we get better, we make mistakes, and we improve. We get do-overs with every child that you have, you got to do it differently. I was pretty intense with the first ones, and I'm a lot more chill with the ones that are in the house right now. But it's interesting. This happened with my older siblings, and it'll happen with my own kids. My kids will come, I'm like, What the hell? You got to take charge. They can't do that. You can't let them do that. I'll be like, Yeah, it's fine. But they noticed the difference in the way we parent today versus with the way we parented them. And my older siblings would see the same thing with us. They'd be like, You guys let them get away with murder. But I do think it's nice to come at the end of the lineup with big families.

Right on. So here's a question for you. Having nine kids, I mean, how do you... But you said that the ages are 26 to 6.

26 to 6, yeah.

So about a two-year spread in between? Yeah. How do you divvy up-time for nine kids and a wife?

That's a great question. I think even from being in my own family, time is precious, and it's hard to give time to everybody. And time can be an issue. And many times, instead of individual time, you're having some more group time. And I think all kids yearn for more time from their parents. And So you could argue that's a drawback to a big family. But I think kids learn a lot from being in a big family. You have to help. Two parents can't do everything. And the older kids become far more mature and responsible because they have to participate in helping with the younger ones. My older siblings now will talk about how they had to change my diaper and wipe my rear end, and they give me a bunch of shit now about that. But But yeah, I think for me now, I have to be thoughtful about how do I spend my time and how do I make sure I get back and pick up where I left off with them. If I'm honest, my wife has to pick up a big portion of what happens in the house. When I have the benefit of serving, and I do, it's the greatest honor to serve the country, but also serve with this president, my wife has to then pick up the mother and father job when I'm not there.

I think that can be really hard because there is a role for a husband, there is a role for a wife, there's a role for a man, there's a role for a woman, and we do different things, and we behave differently, we discipline different. That is one of the challenges. When I come home, I try to lean into my job as a dad and try to give individual time with all of them. Right now, I think I have five at home right now. So I have two in college, two are out and are married. They got married young. They have one grandchild. So when you only have- Hold your grandchild. Six months, eight months? No, 10 months. Six months? She's out in California. Adorable little girl. And that's one of the problems, We'd love to see her more, our grandchild. But again, when we all live in these different places, I think it's harder to do that, which for me, as I was like, You know what? I want to have a farm. I like to have all my kids around me. I do think family is living together is really great. I don't know if they'll go for that or not, but I would like to have...

I like my kids. I like my wife. I want to spend more time with them. If they were with us in the same area, it would be fantastic. In Wisconsin, in a small town, so I don't live there. So there's three or four of us that don't live in this small town, but everyone else lives in this small town, like 2,000 people. It's a late community, so a lot of people come in in the summer. A lot of people come in to cross country ski and bike. It's a beautiful area. But most of my siblings live there. And I think there's something very special when they all have their own relationships, and their spouses will have relationships, and they have relationships with my parents. I lost my mom a little over a year ago. She passed away. Sorry to hear that. Yeah. By the way, when you lose a parent, unless you do it, it's very hard, and especially, I think your mom. But what was cool with... She was in church, and she fell, and she broke her hip in late December. And she went up to Duluth, and she was in the hospital up there for a number of months, and then she came home for a number of months, and then she went to extended care for a number of months.

But if she was 89, and when you break your hip or your upper thigh, at that age, it I mean, it's really hard to recover from that. But with a big family and everyone living in this area, my dad spent... My dad's 91. He's going to be 92. Active, he runs, he bikes. He is the most active 91-year-old, sharp, awesome specimen. Hopefully, I get his jeans. But everybody would rotate time with my dad, with my mom. There was someone with her every single day, and not just my father, but one of the kids was coming up. If you look at end of life and what she had when she passed away, she had all of these people around through all of the time she spent in the hospital, which was about six, seven months. My father and kids were coming through and working together to care for their mother, giving back to her what she had given to them. It was beautiful. It was hard, but it was a beautiful thing because a lot of people, they don't have anyone with them. They're by themselves. There's no one there. She didn't work. She was a stay-at-home mom, and my dad was a lawyer and did some small town real estate development.

But she gave us her life. We were her. We were her works product. Again, like any family. We're all dysfunctional, and there's fights here and there's fights there. But in the end, if you look at what really matters, that she had all of her kids come and be with her and share time so my dad wasn't with her. And again, it wasn't easy because they were an hour and a half away when they're up in Duluth from our small town. Or at her house, people would do schedules and who's going to take what shift versus another shift. And then in extended care, it was I think if you look at the meaning of life and what families mean, I think for me, it all came full circle of, What are we doing? What's the purpose? And for me, I saw a lot of purpose in what she had because of what she had built. And there's a conversation now about, Have kids, have a family, don't delay it, find love. And she did that and had all these kids. And it's not always easy, but in the end, she had the most beautiful experience as she passed with not being alone, having people all around her all the time.

Man, that is really cool to hear. Thank you for sharing that. And again, I'm sorry to hear about your mom.

Wow.

What a way to go.

Yeah.

You don't hear that very often.

You don't. I know a number of doctors who deal with people at end of life. I know a lot of people who give hospice care for end of life. It makes you think about what the purpose of life. But if you have faith and you have a family around you, they will talk about the piece That as someone's going through the dying process, the peace of the person with faith and the person with family, as opposed to the person who's missing one of those components. Usually faith is faith is very calming, but also then family will add to it. And there's a distinct difference because you know where you're going and you know what you've built as you leave this Earth, and that gives people peace. And I think listening to what people say who deal with death a lot should inform us on how we should live our lives, what is the true meaning. I do think, again, it's faith in families. I think the message today, Sean, is so interesting that we're telling young girls Get a job, advance your career. Your career is the most important thing that you have in your life.

I think it's a false promise, man. I think it's a false promise. I don't think it doesn't give you happiness. It doesn't give you money, right? It'll give you colleagues. It might give you personal gratification. But who do you have a cup of coffee with on a Saturday morning? Who do you get to watch a sunset with? Who do you get to share a day in the lake with? Or a rainy day Where you sit in your house. Who do you share that with? You don't share it with your colleagues. It might be fun when you're 34 years old and you don't have to deal with four kids crying at home and changing diapers and taking someone to soccer practice. That might seem fun. But in the end, those colleagues, that corporation, they're not going to be with you at the end. They're not going to go on vacation with you. They're not going to have a cup of coffee with you on Sunday morning. It is the people that you put around you, which is your family, I think that is the most important. I think starting young is important. Have kids. Again, it's not easy.

It's hard. You know this more than anybody.

I started way late.

But hard Hard things bring you joy. Joy doesn't come from the easy layup. Doing hard shit makes you... The joy that comes from that, I think, is remarkable. I'm a firm believer in find love, pursue love, get married, have kids, you're going to be more productive, you'll make more money, you'll be happier. I think a lot of young men now, the guys that watch your show, there's been this revolution of what's happened with young men. The manosphere has been really fascinating to see them leaning into what does it mean to be a strong male, and that these young men are going back to church at a higher rate than girls now.

It is wild, isn't it?

Really cool.

Well, it's shit. We almost lost it.

Yeah.

We legitimately almost lost what the fuck it means to be a man.

It was like this close. It came back in full force because of guys like you that go, I'm going to talk about what does it mean to be a man in this group of great men that will talk about what it means to be a man. It is the chivalry. It's respecting women. By the way, these are very Catholic ideas. We started these ideas in Western civilization, in protecting your family, protecting your kids, and faith is such a big part of it.

Where do you think the resurgence came from?

I think it was the attack on masculinity, calling us toxic.

Yeah, but how long did that go on for?

To long. It was a slow burn, I think. It was a slow burn that came to a crescendo of these attacks on these boys. And when they had an outlet that would actually celebrate them, we talk about how great they are and how great masculinity actually is, they gravitated towards it, and they rejected, right, the you're toxic, and they would gravitate to the celebration. And that's where they leaned into so many people that will talk about it like you do and others.

I never made it a... How do I say this? I just lead by example. I'm not telling people how to be a man. I'm not telling people what it means to be a man. I'm not doing any of that.

Which is more effective than preaching.

I am just leading by example, and that's it. But no, there's a lot of people out there that are talking about that stuff, but I don't do it.

But I think It's all part of an ecosystem of what does it mean to be a man? And again, you can preach it, which that's fine, that's powerful, or you can show up by example. We love it. But either way, I think young men gravitate towards it, and they should, because we should celebrate young men. I think one of the problems today is, again, how does a great young man find a decent girl to marry? I think it's harder to find a good girl. I'm not going to get in trouble for saying that, but again, I think these young girls have been sold a different story. They haven't come back to what these young men have. I hope they, again, how do you find someone that I think that becomes far more challenging. But I will say, and you probably can attest to this, the greatest decision you'll ever make in your life, the most important decision you'll make, outside of, am I going to choose to be a person of faith or not? The number one decision you ever make that will have the greatest impact is not where you go to school, not what job I pick, not where I live in the country.

It's who do I marry? Who you marry is the greatest decision. By the way, it's oftentimes a crapshoot. We all put our best foot forward as we're dating and we're trying to go through that process. But the most important decision is who you marry, what person are they? Because marriage is, if anyone who's been married knows it's always not sunshine and roses. Marriage is amazing, but it's hard. Like anything, it's hard. It can be hard, but it's beautiful. Do I have someone who's going to stick with me? Do we share values? On life's road, who am I going to journey it with? That decision is the number one most important decision any young man will make or a young woman.

Man, I'm with you on that one. I think a lot of people get that decision. I mean, It's very obvious. A lot of people get that decision wrong. Why do you think they get it wrong?

I don't know that they get it wrong. I think when things can get hard, there's a perception that it's always against sunshine and roses, and it's actually not. You got to disagree. You're going to fight. You're going to have issues that you have to work through. Am I someone who can actually be committed to the marriage and work through those issues? Do I have a partner who's willing to work through those issues as well? If you do, you can make it work. But if you hit the release valve and get out, you You're probably going to find the same situation in the next marriage that you have. Are you willing to stick it out? Because, again, it's the most... My life doesn't exist without my wife. I wouldn't be here without her. I wouldn't have all the greatest things in my life without her. But do we have disagreement? Yeah, we have disagreement. But in the end, and we fight. But in the end, we're not leaving each other. We made a commitment to each other. We are sticking together in No matter what fight we have, there's never a conversation about the release valve.

We got to work through it, but we are in this together. I think if people think about it maybe differently, again, we take away the roses and talk about the of marriage and the disagreement and the agreement and the joy in the fights and make it more realistic and that you have to fight for your marriage, I think we might have better results. I think maybe you can too easily take the easy path. By the way, you might have abuse, too. There's also situations where you probably got to get out of, but many of them are not that.

Yeah, that's a damn good point. I think a lot of people enter into relationships for strictly superficial reasons also, which that never winds up. Turning out good.

It doesn't matter.

How did you meet your wife? I know how you guys met.

I did Reality TV, as you mentioned.

Yeah, that was right at the beginning of Reality TV, right?

Yeah. I was the sixth season of the real world. This is on MTV. Some people might know this, some people might not because MTV has gone down the drain. But they'd pick seven people from all different walks of life, all different viewpoints, all different experiences, and they'd put them in a house and make them live together. And they would just film them for every moment of every day for about six months. And then they'd edit that down to about 22 half-hour episodes. And it was wildly popular. I was on the sixth season of that. My wife was on the third season. But what's interesting is, if you think about it, we gravitate towards and build relationships with people that are very much like us, similar backgrounds, similar beliefs, and that's who we become friends with, that's who we maybe want to live by, that's who we will go have a drink at the bar, we'll throw a cup of coffee with, people like We don't naturally go out and go like, I'm going to go be friends with someone who is from a way different walk of life and way different viewpoints than I have.

Human nature is not built that way. But this show made you live with people who are very different from you. What was actually pretty cool, one of the coolest experiences and learning lessons from me doing the show was wildly different people than me. I'm a lumberjack from Northern Wisconsin who hadn't done a lot of travel. How old were you? I was 24, 25 when I did it. So I was in the middle of law school. I took a year off of law school when I did it. So I was older than most when I did the show. But what I found was that these very different people at First Blush. Today, it was like, we have nothing in common. When you live with someone for six months, you realize you have way more in common than you would think of at First Blush. And it's been pretty instructive for me. Even in politics, you can find common ground with people. You really can. Even at the first blush, you'll be like, We can't work together because you're crazy, man. But the truth is, you actually can, and you share a lot more in common than you might think.

I worked with Maxine Waters. She's a Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. She's pretty far left. We found a way to work together on a number of different pieces of legislation. I always I would argue with her with respect. We would argue on her ideas, and she would argue on my ideas, but I never attacked her personally. I don't think this has to be personal. But we found... And by the way, I needed Democrats to help me, if I was going to pass a bill in the House, to get it asked in the Senate to have a Democrat President sign it. It can't just be like, We're Republicans to control the House. I got a Democrat President, and I think this bill is going to become law. If I actually believe in the law, I need a Democrats to partake with me, which means they had to have a say in it, and we had to work on together. And again, that was the way you could get something done. That, for me, comes back to this real-world experience. And so to your question, my wife did the third season. I did the seventh season, and she had a famous season.

Hers was with one of the first guys on TV. He had AIDS. His name was Pedro. He ended up eventually dying of AIDS. A very sad story. There was a guy named Puck on their show, a bike messenger, snot Rocket, funny, witty, a little crazy guy on their show. So they had a really unique show that she did. Again, I came a couple of years after that. I took a semester off of law school to go do this show. And then at the end of the show, they were like, Hey, we're going to do this special where Real World, which is the seven people that live in the house, are going to do a special on what we call road rules, which was five people. They started off by putting them in an RV, and they would do different missions around the country, and they'd do different missions around the world, and say, Hey, we're going to have one from each of these cast come and do road rules. And they picked me from my cast. They picked Rachel from her cast. I met her at a train station. Everyone was coming in. I was the fifth one of the cast.

She was on the train with other cast members. They came off. Actually, I went on, and basically, Rachel handed me her bag. I've been carrying her ever since with her. I met her. I have my meeting with my wife on TV, and then I was trying to pursue her on the show. She had a boyfriend at the time. She was a little bit successful, but not really. And we hung out a little bit after. It was a three-week show. We hung out a little bit after, and then she was not going to have any of it. She was not. No kidding. She was not in. She was Listen, she was living in LA. She was living this LA life. She had a really horrific car crash before we met. Everyone died but her. So she had had this unique experience that she was coming into. And she was like, This is not At this point, at this stage, you're like, Is this someone that's right for me or not right for me? I guess I fell into the not right for me category. I spent a little time in LA, and I had to go back to Minnesota for law school.

And she had a speech in Milwaukee, and that's when Northwest was flying, and their hub was Minneapolis. So she did the speech in Milwaukee, and she was flying through Minneapolis where I was going to law school. And she had a layover. She's like, Well, let's just be friends. You want to come? Come pick me up. Let's go hang out. So I went and picked her up, and I brought her to this famous little dirty diner in Saint Paul, Minnesota, called the Uptowner, not far from where I live. We had breakfast, we drank coffee, we ended up hanging out for two and a half hours. At the end of the conversation, I shit you not, I'm in the conversation, this girl I had met on the show for three weeks. We hung out a little bit after. She ditched me. She comes to see me in Minnesota, and I'm back in school, and I'm like, whatever. But yeah, we'll go up two and a half hours in drinking coffee after breakfast. She looks at me and says, I love you.

No way. What?

I'm going to marry you. I shit you not. I'm like, Bro. Because the guy, you're like, Whoa. She said she's going to marry me. We started dating. Hold on.

What did you saying to that?

I was like, You're flipping crazy town. What are you talking about? It's interesting to ask, now that we're married for 25 years, she's like, I just thought this is what lovers do. Lovers can sit and have a cup of coffee for a half hours and have this really easy conversation. I think you have good values. It was important that I was Catholic. She was like, You're Catholic, you're nice, you're handsome. I'm going to marry you. Yeah, dude, that was wild. It took me a little while to wrap my head around that. But that's how bold she was. She was very bold. A year and a half later, we were married.

Right on.

Yeah, right on. Wow. I'd like to take credit for that, but that was... She was... By the way, and obviously, I'd been pursuing her, but I got dissed in the process. Damn. I was telling you before the show, we're the first reality TV couple, and we are the most fertile of any reality TV couple with nine kids. But I can't see what's interesting, too, Sean, is we have- You're literally the first reality couple to marry?

Yeah.

Wow. Because we're at the start of reality TV, right? Yeah. We're the first ones to get married and the first ones to... Again, the only one was to have all these kids.

Do you guys watch reality TV together now?

She does more than I do. What are you guys watching? She loves the Housewives. She'll watch the Housewives. So I got stuck watching the Housewives for a while because she has it on all the time.

You guys aren't watching Love is Blind, are you?

I think this sounds familiar. She might watch that, too.

Oh, shit. Here we go.

Yeah. He's Have you not heard of this shit? No, he has, but don't-My wife is obsessed.

She's obsessed with this. So they bring out, they pick all these people, I don't know, 10 guys, 10 girls, something like this. And they do this blind dating where they go in these rooms. So it'd be like if we put a curtain across this room. Females over here, males over here. They talk to each other through the curtain, but you know what I mean? You can't see them. So you go through and you date all these people, and then you have to get engaged without seeing the person. Would you have done this?

Hell no. That's not my jam. I want to see them.

Well, then they get engaged, and then after they get engaged, then they meet, they get to see them. That's dumb. Oh, it's fucking awesome. No. It's a train wreck. Do This is what I love about reality. Come on. I'm ashamed to say it. Yes, I've seen almost all of them. I mean, I can't watch mainstream media anymore. Right. But- So Love is Blind. Yeah, so we watch Love is Blind. Then they dump all these... Then there's the pool party where they dump everybody into the fucking pool party. Of course, there's plenty of booze, and then Then they all meet the people, you know what I mean? Oh, I remember talking to you. Oh, and then they start getting jealous and the affairs start to... It's fucking amazing.

Do people get married out of this? Oh, yeah. They will? Yeah.

That's an eye. I I don't know how many of them have actually lasted, but they'll get married. Then, yeah. They marry on the show? Yeah. You get engaged, then they dump everybody in and they all live together. Then the person that you get engaged with, you go to their house and meet their family, and you live together in an apartment, and then at the end, they get married.

I watched a few of the... What's the one with the rose ceremonies? What is it? The rose ceremonies, the... God, come on. Whatever that loved one was. The Bachelor. The Bachelor. So old school, I'd watch those with her. But it is interesting what's happened. You would spend all this money on the scripts and writing and actors, and the reality TV side of things is very appealing, whether it's the social media influencer versus people that are doing reality TV. The real component of TV and how people behave and the decisions that they make is really great television. It is. And we were the start of that on Real World. So good for you. You sit down and you watch Love is Fall with your wife.

My wife watches it. I fall asleep.

I think that's bullshit. Your wife is like, That's bullshit. Tron loves the show. I got it. I got it. He makes me sit down with him.

Maybe three seasons or so, and I was just like, Man, this is so addicting watching this fucking train, getting ready to happen over and over and over. Who would do this?

But if we're going to celebrate relationships, celebrate love, if we're going to do it through love is blind, so be it.

Yeah. That's great. Well, no shit. So two-time reality TV star.

Then I did a special as well where they do these competitions. They picked real-world teams and road-world teams. They had to compete against each other, and we had to vote people off of our shows. So it became contentious. And I had a partner from my show, Elka. We ended up winning. At the time, I had no money. I was like, I won two cars. I won $150,000. It was great. Nice. So I did that one as well. But they've They come back and asked us to do more shows. Now what they've done is Paramount-Recently? Yeah. Paramount is doing... They're bringing cast back to spend two or three weeks together to then film them today. Now they're all older and grayer and fatter, and they're going to film them to relive what happened in the past and catch up with where they are right now. But the deal is everyone on your show has to say yes to it. And they asked our cast to do it, and I was the only one who said no. And they were going to pay fairly well. And for a lot of people, they needed the money. And I felt I couldn't do it because I don't trust liberal producers There's liberal editors.

I'm a target. They don't agree with my politics. This is in the midst of Trump. They hate Trump. Why would I put myself in that environment? And I don't need your money. So I didn't do it. And I think my cast was frustrated at me.

And we have a comet getting ready to slam into Earth.

Yeah, exactly. I have bigger problems.

No shit. So they wanted you to do this.

Yeah. Some have asked for us to have the family do part of it as well. And we haven't said yes to it. We're so busy right now. I'm overwhelmed busy. My wife does the weekend show on Fox. She does a Spanish show as well. And so we don't have time to do it. Maybe at one point, I don't know, maybe we would do it, but right now we're not in trust.

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The conversation goes like this. They want us to do a reality TV show. Someone's going to be like, Are you interested in the conversation? And Rachel, my wife, says, No. And I say, How much? We don't get beyond her no. But I think the kids would be interested in it. I think they would think it would be fun. By the way, the problem is you get older kids and they go back and watch the episodes and they'll... Oh, man. If you do this stuff, just know that it'll come back to haunt you. Your kids will watch what you did when you were their age. They'll tell me, My season It was boring. Rachel's was great. They'll bring back different scenes and things she said and throw them at her, which will really piss her off. I bet. I don't know that they're really into doing it, but I thought it was neat that we went through this process. It seems like the country has moved. By the way, it was very innocent back then, too. It's gotten really debauchrous. The grade of the debauchery today, the grade of the radiance, it was pretty innocent back then.

And you're having conversations that someone in the '90s was having about their careers and their love life. And it was far more natural. And it's grown into something different that I think I think it would be harder to do as a young adult, and I think more- It's like controlled chaos now. It's controlled, yeah. Yes.

We have an idea of which direction it's going to go.

A hundred %. So I don't I'd recommend that they do it. Yeah. That has come up with the kids, and the older ones, I have one son who's like, Hell, no, you should not know. I got another one that's like, Well, that'd be fun and we could do it and be great. We're a big family, and we have a lot of fun together. But now the boss says, We're not going to do it, so we're not going to do it. I think it's When we talk about our kids, we talked about getting it right, making mistakes, and then figuring out how you do things differently. My first one went to the University of Chicago. I raised a great little Catholic smart girl, went to U Chicago, great school, and it was right at the start of COVID. She had made a comment about communism has killed more people than COVID will, or she had some made some analogy because we're dealing with some of the leftist stuff in the country, and people lost their minds. She had death threats. The school, instead of reaching out to her, they had gone to the people who feel threatened by her comments and had a conversation with them.

But she turned out to be a great little conservative. My son went to University of Madison, turned out to be a great Catholic young man. He went during COVID, and he's like, freaking. He did a year, and he's like, I'm out of here. I'm going to go try to make movies in California, which he's done and he's been successful. But from that, we've said, you know what? We have two little kids. You put your heart and your soul in your kids, and you try to raise them really well and make them upstanding little people. You try to give them the faith and give them the value. Then you send them to college and you see these kids that come from these great families, and they come back from college, and it's like, What the hell happened to that kid? They're They're woke and radicalized, and they're saying all this crazy shit. And so as we've seen that, we're like, You know what? We're not going to do that. I'm not going to invest in all the work and effort I put into my child. I'm not going to send them to potentially be radicalized in these institutions that have professionalized radicalizing young kids, young minds.

And so now what we do is I say, Okay, here's the deal. You're 18, you're applying for college. You can go wherever you want. That's your choice. It's like you're going to be an adult. You can pick. If you want me and your mom to help pay, these are the 10 schools you can pick from. Ten schools that we know that when you come back, you'll have a great education, and they support the values that we taught them. But why would I risk giving my child over to these radicals?

What are those 10 schools?

We have a list, but Hillsdale is on there. The one that our kids go to is the University.

Hillsdale is awesome.

Awesome. Fantastic. Liberty is one of them, but ours go to the University of Dallas. It's a Catholic school, like a great books. It's a 1950s education where they actually expand the minds and horizons of your kids, and it's truly Catholic. I know when I send my young adult there, they're going to come back even better than when I sent them out. I have two there right now. One's a senior, one's a freshman. Well, maybe to a lesser extent, Notre Dame, but Notre Dame has some problems. But we put a list together for them and we let them pick. But to go to the University of Wisconsin, say Madison, I'm not going to do that. And again, it's fun. These kids want to go. It's Club Med. They got beautiful gyms and swimming pools, and the football games are amazing. It's a really great experience. But what the hell am I sending them to college for? That's not the purpose is to have a great time in the great sorority or fraternity is to get an education and to support the values that we've instilled in them. We've just been like, We're not going to do it anymore.

I think more parents have to make better decisions about who they're willing to turn their young mind that they help. Again, you know this. He put a lot of love and effort into it. Not going to risk it anymore with the crazy- Did you guys homeschool at all? No.

No.

We just thought it's pretty wild. Kids was hard. But I know a lot of people with big families do it. We did not. But we've sent ours to Catholic schools. And by the way, sometimes Catholic schools are just public school light. We moved to New Jersey three years ago because Rachel does the show in New York City. We found the most amazing Catholic school in New Jersey, in Booton, New Jersey. It is awesome. And so when I got this job, I was going to move the family to DC. And Rachel could go back and forth on the and we'd all be there together. We didn't do that because I don't think I could match the school that the kids are in in New Jersey. And so because of the school, they stayed. And that's a decision that Rachel and I made. And then I'm the one that goes back and forth as opposed to just her on the weekend. But it was an evolving conversation. But again, making sure that we have kids that go even in the K through 12 school where they get the value that we teach them at home. I think a lot of parents at the dinner table, which, by the way, dinner is, I think, important.

We have dinner as much as possible. They love to sit down for dinner and have a conversation and put phones away. But you don't have to rewire them. They don't come home at dinner and tell you the crazy shit they learned at school, and you have to rewire them, reprogram them. No, it's like they had instruction that fits with what we teach them. That makes sense.

It makes perfect sense. A lot of parents are I'm one of them. We're thinking about these things. At least for now, we've chosen the homeschool route. We're preschool, though, so we better figure it out before I think homeschool is great, and the curriculums for homeschool are awesome.

But if you go to your school and the gay pride flag is bigger than the American flag, you got a freaking problem, right? Or if you tell me that you're going to raise a global citizen, You got a problem. And that's the shit we deal with in the school system. Whatever happened in math and science and English, the public school was made for those things, not this cultural revolution. And the cultural revolution is alive and well in most of these schools. And I'm like, you should have none of it. That's why I hope that we're successful in this administration. We should have the dollars that attach to the kid, not the dollars attached to the school. And if we do that, I think, competition. And I think parents would make way different choices with where they send their kids. Because, again, the pathway to success is a great education, and they have been great values as a human being. And the public school in many places doesn't offer that.

Yeah.

So are we going to homeschool when they get to kindergarten, first grade?

I mean, never know. This is our first year trying it, but that seems to be the direction we're heading. That's what I'm hoping for.

I love it.

Yeah. I've seen a lot of... So this area of Tennessee is like a homeschool mecca, and I see a difference. I can definitely see a difference between kids that are homeschooled and kids that are in the system.

Do you see that the homeschool parents will then get together with kids, where the kids so the kids have social interaction? There's a whole structure around it, right? You'll homeschool, but then you'll do things with other homeschool families.

Yeah, there's plenty. I think the whole myth about homeschool kids being socially awkward and weird, I think that has just been decimated. But when I see the homeschool crowd, those kids just have... They seem to have a lot more confidence. They ask better questions. They're better in conversation, way beyond their peers at the same age. I think that's the stuff that just really builds a great character.

My son-in-law just announced today that he's running for Congress in my old Congressional seat. It's an open seat. He was homeschooled, I think, until eighth grade. Then he went to high school in Walsh, Wisconsin, met my daughter. They dated a little bit in high school, and then dated in college, and they got married young. One of the most well-adjusted, nice young men you'll ever meet, confident, Being a nice human being that is well-adjusted and can talk to people. I think it probably comes from his homeschooling up till eighth grade.

That's cool to hear. That's cool to hear. Let's get back to How did you get into politics?

I went to college, went to law school, did reality TV. I was You said you had left the faith a little bit. I was probably not the best Catholic that was out there at that phase of my life. We come back to it, and it's important that we come back to it. I always knew I wanted to come back to small town in Hayward, Wisconsin. And I came back and I worked with my dad and his local practice for about a year. Then an opportunity existed 60 miles north of my hometown, where there was a woman who was going to take a leave, and I was able to get a job as a special prosecutor to fill her spot where she was going to have a baby. And so I learned how to be a prosecutor. And the guy that was the DA, a small office, two people, he I ended up taking another job. We had a Republican governor at the time. He appointed me into this job as the DA of Ashland County, and very liberal area, right? But I was a crunchy con. I was on the health food co-op board, but I was like, Listen, I'm a conservative.

I'm a Republican. No one ever ran against me. So I did it almost 10 years as the DA, but that was public service. But I never had to go out and campaign. I never had to go shake and bake, and just no one ran against me, and I was able to keep the job. So that was my first experience with public life, but it didn't really have to run anything. And When in 2008, so going back a number of years, but Barack Obama wins. Democrats control the House, the Senate. And in Wisconsin, they had the governorship and they had the assembly in the Senate. So Democrats control everything in my life. And it felt really shitty. It was not good. The country is going in the wrong direction. My state is going in the wrong direction. And Democrats are riding high. It's not a great time to be a Republican. But I thought a couple of things. One, history of politics will tell you that if that is the environment today, the next election is going to be really good for the minority party. There was that. And the guy that was my congressman that I was going to run against, he was the chairman of Appropriations.

So at that time, Appropriations, incredibly powerful. He had been there for 42 years. So he was elected in 1969. So before Man landed on the moon and before Woodstock, he was a member of Congress. And Republicans had run against him, but they had never been successful. So I'm like, you know what? And by the way, back then, they passed a stimulus bill because that was after the '08 crisis. And so the stimulus was $800 billion, which, by the way, is like, I wish the size of some of the bills that Democrats passed were that small again. So I would have said, I'm going to run. I may not win, but I'm going to flip and hold them accountable. I'm going to hold them accountable for these shitty votes, and no one ever holds them accountable. When Obamacare passed, he was in the speaker's chair with the gavel, and I'm like, You know what? I'm going to run. And I got in the race. And so what's hard is when you run, In a seat like this where you have a 42-year incumbent, no one believes you can win. Nobody believed. Everyone actually said, You're dumb.

This is foolish. My friends were telling me, This is foolish. You can't do. You're a lamb to slaughter. My wife was like, Hell, no, we can do this. I had a friend who was involved in politics who told me, Don't run, but if you do run, I'll help you out. And so literally, it was me and Rachel. I think I had five kids at the time. I got noticed that she told me a month into the campaign that she was pregnant with her sixth baby, and I worked my ass off. So I was the DA during the day. I'd get in my car. There's no team. We're the team. I drive myself, and I have a big district, I have about a third of the state of Wisconsin. I'm driving three hours, do an event, drive three hours home, get home late, sleep, go to the office in the morning, do DA work, and again, the same thing the next day. And I'm trying to raise money. People don't want to give money to a race. They don't think you can win. But so half my battle was selling people on the fact that we can win this race.

We're going to win. This is why we can win. These are the numbers. And by sheer force, for me, I think I raised $139,000 in my first quarter, which was at the time really good. Still is actually a decent number. Then I raised like 159,000 in the second quarter. So I was raising money and people were buying in. But this is all like local money, small towns, people given, businessmen that are like, this young kid's crazy, but I think he can actually, maybe he can do it. And so that was the story of our campaign. I started to hire people after about eight months into the campaign after driving myself. And I got Sarah Palin to... I got Sarah Palin's endorsement. I had Red State, write about me. We're trying to get all of these people to try to build some energy around the campaign. And then as we got into 2010, which is the race I was actually running in, that's when it was like, oh, shit, this is going to be a good year. This is a good year for Republicans. We saw the tide turning, and this guy I was running against ended up, he saw the rate on the wall.

I was going to beat him. He retired. And so then the seat was open. A state senator, Democrat, got in the race. It was the most targeted race in the country that year. They spent a ton of money against me. My kids would watch the ads. They would give me feedback on the ads. They would take some of the lines. Does dad really hate old people? Why does dad want to take jobs away from Wisconsin? You know the ads. But in the end, through sheer hard work in a great cycle, I flipped a seat that was 42 years Democrat. The next two races were really hard as well. I would shake so many hands that I would get a callus between my thumb and my pointer finger.

As a lumberjack?

No. Those calluses are on my hand. I had the back of my hand from people grabbing my hand from shaking hands. I would get a callus, and I went everywhere. In the primary, I ran against a farmer who is a... He's a strawberry farmer, and he's a Mennonite guy. And he's a little bit crazy, but he knew how to work. And so I had to match his work ethic. So I had to match him and how hard he worked. So I just like, that's what you do. That's all you do is campaign. You're everywhere All the time. We do dairy breakfast in Wisconsin. I would sit at the line where people have to pay for breakfast, and I'd just shake hands. Then someone might want to stop and talk to me, and I'd walk with them and talk, and then I'd shake hands. If someone wants to talk, I'd walk and talk. What's interesting is if you shake someone's hand, it takes a second, but people get an instant read on you. I like him, I don't like him. They're nice, they're not nice, they're honest, they're not honest. Just by shaking hands, people are like, I met him.

I think he's nice. I liked him. So I had this big race and I won and had the honor of a lifetime to go to Washington. Dick Cheney met her. We had this massive class We had this 87 new members of Congress, which was just mammoth. And Dick Cheney, who I'm not a big fan of right now, but Dick Cheney, who was the former vice president, a former house member, came and talked to us and he said, Obviously, I've done a lot of things. I've been the Secretary of Defense, I'm the Vice President. But the greatest win you'll ever have, the greatest political moment you'll ever have in your life is the one you have right now. To win a seating the House was the coolest experience I I had in my political career. But it was really... I walked into the House chamber with my wife. By the way, I had never been in the Capitol in my life. My class in Hayward, Wisconsin, didn't take a tour into the Capitol. So the first time I went into the US Capitol was as a congressman-elect. We had a dinner in Statuary Hall for all the new members.

And then the speaker or John Boehner, who was going to be the speaker, was like, Do you guys want to go see the House chamber? I'm like, Where in the hell is the house chamber. It was like, right down the hall. I have no idea. We walk into the house chamber, and I started to cry. I worked so hard to get there. To be in, again, maybe we think less of it today, but I had cried when I got in there. It was so much work, so much effort. Then to represent people, that they put the faith in you, it's a really cool honor.

That's cool to hear. Yeah. A lot of dark stuff going on in the world right now, and it's to the point where I don't even believe my own eyes anymore because I cannot verify what people are saying about all the political violence, the division. I partner with this production company called Ironclad, and we're doing an eight-part audio series on PSYOPs, on why foreign countries, governments, maybe even our own government, would conduct a PSYOP on its own people. I just think that this series is going to be extremely important because it's going to open the eyes of people on why these things happen. You can head over to sciopshow. Com. Order it today. I think you're going to get a lot of this. Who's pulling the strings? Who's pulling them? I'd like to invite you to gain access to an exclusive experience on Vigilance Lead Patreon. Our patrons are the driving force behind the success of this show, and their support allows us to keep doing what we do. Depending on the tier you choose, you'll get access to benefits like behind-the-scenes footage before each interview, early access to episodes, end of the month live Zoom calls with me, exclusive merch, and more.

Join us and become a patron starting at just $5 a month by visiting patreon. Com/vigilanceleads. That's Patreon. Com/vigilanceelite. How did you wind up Secretary of Transportation?

I did. I served for nine and a half years, and we were going to have our ninth baby. And when we... Again, I slept in my office, right? So you sleep in a cot or blow up mattress in your office, you go to the house, gym, you shower, you come back, you have your suits there. You spend four days, three nights, four days living on a mattress, showering in the gym. It's an honor, but that does get a little bit old. Right now, they've switched the model. They give congressmen a stipend to stay in a hotel. But we were going to have, we found out, Rachel's pregnant, baby number nine, and And then she called me after she had done some testing. I'm like, Listen, there's a pretty good chance your baby is going to have down syndrome. Okay. And by the way, that's the greatest gift in her life. But at that time, you don't You don't know what it is. What does this mean for us? By the way, some try to talk to us about having an abortion. Like, get the fuck out of here. No, we're not. We're having this baby.

And then as we went in further, they're like, this baby has a heart problem. There's a heart defect as well. And so as I got in to the summer, the baby was born. Her name is Valentina at the end of September. But in the summer, I'm like, I can't do this. This is too much because Rachel has all the at home. All the kids are at home. We're in baby number nine, and I'm in Congress. I'm going back and forth, flying to Wisconsin. I'm like, I got to get out. She's like, No, we can do this. You can stay. We can make it happen. She's a scrapper and a fighter. It was one of the few moments where I'm like, No, we're getting out. She did not want us to get out. It created some tension in our marriage for a little while because she was like, No, you should stay. At some point, I think as men, I know what we can and can't do. I know what's pulling at our family. So I announced I'm getting out. The baby came early, and At that point, I took a job with CNN, and I signed a two-year deal with CNN, which, by the way, I had done a lot of CNN.

I had supported the President in 2016. One of the few members that would go on and support President Trump, defended him, pushed for him. Not many people would do it in 2016. They didn't think about him then as they think about him today, but I was one of the only guys that would go do that. So CNN offered me a job. They were not very nice to me at CNN. They didn't treat Republicans very well. I worked at Fox, too. Fox treats Democrats very well. That's not the way I was treated at CNN. So I did a year at CNN, and I asked to get out of the contract. They agreed. I didn't do the full two years. Signed with Fox just as a contributor. I did that for a couple of years and then got a show on Fox business called The Bottom Line. I did that for two years with Dagen McDonald, who I love to death. She's wonderful. And then as the President was going through his selection process, I thought this was going to be historic, but it is historic. I wanted to serve with him. I made the pitch, and he went through the analysis, and I was blessed that he picked me to be the Secretary of Transportation.

And by the way, Sean, if you said, Where do you want to serve? Before I was inside and sitting on the outside, there's a number of things I would have thought about of where I want to go. I got the best department. If you ask me to switch with anybody right now, switch with any other secretary, whose job would you like but yours? President Trump gave me the best job in all the cabinet.

Really?

A hundred %.

Why do you say that?

Because we build shit. We make people's lives better. So everybody loves infrastructure. Even Democrats like roads and bridges. Democrats like new airports, Democrats like air traffic controllers. There's a wide agreement on what we do. And if we do it well, If I can take 20 minutes off your commute because I've helped deal with congestion, I gave you 20 minutes back with your kids, either for dinner or for lunch, or I got you back home in time to have a cup of coffee with your wife. If your flight isn't delayed or your flight isn't canceled, I'm giving people time back to be with the people that they love. And so that for me is exciting, and that's what I get to do. I don't think The last administration showed up and did much. Maybe that's a really good thing. But we're moving fast, making a true difference in the way the Department operates. So there's a deep state. I believe that. You have bureaucrats that fight the duly elected President and his cabinet. In my department, I have people that are in roads or in motor carriers. They're there Because they love it. I don't have a lot of people fighting me.

I do have some, but they actually buy into the mission. If I can figure out a way of how can we build more roads and bridges, how can we build them safer, how can we build them faster? They buy into it. They love that because that's what they want to do. So I don't have the problems that other departments have, and I have, I think, a great way to make their life better.

What are some of the problems you're facing?

Right now with TOT, we're trying to rebuild the air traffic control system. I get there, we have the DCA air crash on my first full day on the job.

That was your first day on the job?

First full day. I was sworn in by Clarence Thomas. The night before, at 5: 30 at night, I went and toured the Department. I hadn't been there yet. Did a tour of the Department. You got to stay out until you're in. Got sworn in. Went home. We're staying in hotels in DC. The next day, I did a ceremonial throwing in with JD Vance and go to the Department in there, setting up my office, getting things organized. I go home, go to bed. And as I'm laying in bed, I get the notice that the crash happened. So it was my first full day. And Yeah. By the way, we had DCA. That was on a Wednesday. On Friday, the business jet crashed in the downtown Philadelphia. Then the no-TAM system, which is the notice to airmen, which will give you can't fly without this system up and running. That crashed. The Motley Crue plane crashed in Arizona. We had the crash in Alaska, then a crash in Toronto, in Canada. All these things happened. I'm like, holy shit. The people were like, what have you broke? I'm like, I just got here. I didn't change anything.

But I think all of the mismanagement from the last four years all of a sudden came to fruition in our first days there. And it made me think, I'm going to, I'm going to fix it. No one sat down and said, there's a huge problem. All this shit's really We don't have enough controllers. There wasn't a playbook. No one laid a playbook out for me. It was me actually polling to get information to then go, so all of it's old? Everything is crappy? We got to do the whole thing? And no one has a plan to bring in more air traffic controllers? So that's been the most challenging to actually think through, how do we do it? Because it's complicated. How do we do it? Then I had to sell the Congress on, Give me the money to do it. Make a big investment in me and the FAA. By the way, they've given money in the past, and they've squandered the money. They've made promises, but they never deliver. So I'm asking them in a take a leap of faith on me. I'm like, This is the number one, two, three, and four job of what I'm doing.

Trust me, please. I'm going to do it. By the way, you don't have a choice not to trust me because if you don't do it now, it's only going to get worse. And they did. And so now we're starting that process of taking the years it's going to take to rebuild the infrastructure of American air traffic control. It should be state of the art. We're going to build a state of the art system.

We got a lot of stuff to talk about in a short amount of time. But one of the things that I found interesting that wasn't in the... It's not even in my outline, but I think it's important for everybody to hear is when we were talking about updating the infrastructure in the air traffic controller towers. I mean, can you just go... This is how fucking bad this shit is.

So I was telling-This is like our power grid. This is like the power grid. That's right.

I mean, it's just...

The problem with it is Americans think their government is competent, and their government is going to take care of the grid. They're going to take care of air traffic control. I don't have to think about it because I know, of course, that's what they do. They take care of this shit. And the truth is, they don't. They don't take care of it. So you think back to 1980s in our copper phone lines, the phone lines that we would... You're too old for this, but the rotary phone in the dial-up phone, like landline phones, those copper wires that we used in the '80s to call people is the infrastructure we use for our communication system in air traffic control. Now, the whole world has migrated from copper to new fiber fast wires. Everybody has done that years ago, and we're still on this old shit. And so that's job number one. But connecting, taking out the copper and putting in the fiber, I still on both ends of the fiber have really old equipment. We can lay the fiber, but in the interim, we have to slow down the fiber, ratchet it to make the equipment think that it's still running on copper.

We got to slow it until we can upgrade the equipment on either end and the software on either end of the fiber. So again, we have companies that know how to do this. That's great. We need new radios, new voice switches. We need new everything. We need new- Everything. Everything.

So my question is rather than... I already asked this at breakfast, but I would think anybody listening would have the same question. If you can't, I mean, what is the point of redoing copper wire to fiber and then doing all the computer equipment that's inside the tower, why not just build a new tower and just do this all at once?

So in Nashville, they're going to build a new tower, right? They have a new location for a tower. But in many of these airports, there's one place for a tower. And to rebuild a tower becomes really challenging, right?

Can't they just build it right next to where the old one is?

Then it affects the line of sight, and they got to be able to see around. The airport. And by the way, really expensive. These towers are not cheap. I've asked for 31. 5 billion. About 12 billion of that, roughly, is for the bricks mortars. So you have the tower at the airport, then you go to a ring and you have a Treycon that controls the airspace outside of the airport. And then from there, you have in- route centers that control the airspace across the country. All of these are really old. So if you tell me to go rebuild every center, Treycon, and tower, shit, we're talking a ton of money. I can barely get them to give me the 31 billion. So I have to go with the oldest towers, the oldest Treycons, and the oldest centers, and build those. I don't have the money to redo every tower in the country. I mean, and we're talking thousands of towers. So then the problem is I've got a tower. It's operational. It's controlling the airspace, and it's got all... By the way, it's a piecemeal together. And I have to then develop a plan to how do I come in and rip the old shit out, put the new equipment in, all the while keeping the airspace operational and keeping it safe.

It becomes very complicated very quickly, which is why no one's done it. I'm like, We're not going to let hard problems stop us from doing what's necessary to keep Americans safe. And so we're going to do that. And again, the safety component is real. You got to make sure that, again, these systems can't go down because I have planes in the air that rely on that system. And so the software we use is, you know.

What else is fucked up? I mean, I've been talking about the power grid for years. I mean, the Department of Transportation, it's just not something that's ever really popped up on my radar. And then you talk about this this morning, and I'm like, fuck, man.

What else is out there?

I mean, and that's not even all transportation. That's just air traffic controllers. We got sea, land, space, and then all the other administrators out there that are new, that are coming in, that are like, I can't even imagine what Wright is thinking walking into that job. People at least know about how fucked up the power grid is. Yeah. What else is there? We talk about... I just spent a lot of time with Secretary of the Army, Driskill. He's trying to unfuck all of that. It's just everywhere you look.

It's decades of shit, decades of mismanagement, decades of a lack of focus on the right things. And what's great about President Trump is, literally, I'm like, This is broken. This is how I want to fix it. And his gut is amazing. He He might go like, I'm like, Okay, I'm going to run this through the process. But a lot of times, he'll say, Do it. Do it. You're good. I'm like, Shit, yeah. And that he backs us up. He's trying to move at a way different speed Actually, he's not trying. He is moving at a way different speed. And that gives us, Carp Lange, to move at a way different speed. We have now a little over three years to get all of this shit done and to move really fast and really safe. And that's what we're doing. But again, passing the buck because you want to just be a secretary, you want to be a leader, but you don't want to lead. I think that's a lot of what's happened. And so I think we've been wildly successful in the policies we've instituted. But it's because we show up every day and we try.

We try really hard, but just try to do what's right by way of the American people. And even don't layer in the... There's a lot of political fights that we need to have, and politics is there. But a lot of this stuff is just do what's right by the American people. Make it better for the people. Keep the politics out. Like air traffic control, no politics. Let's build roads and bridges. Keep the politics out. Let's build them as fast as we can. I need the Congress to help. Roads and bridges are so expensive. They take so long. You look at what China does. Remarkable how fast they build projects. But we have so many regulations around how we build, so much permitting around how we build. Even if we're going to build over, we have a road, we're going to redo it, we got to go a new permitting. So if the Congress would help us restructure that, we can spend money so much more effectively and build so much more with the same amount of money. But again, you look at our airports, you travel anywhere in the world. Beautiful airports. Our airports are shit because we haven't reinvested in our airports, and it becomes so much more expensive in America, and it doesn't have to be.

And it takes forever. I think there might have been a point where-Was there ever a plan?

Was there ever a plan? I mean, Was there ever a plan? I mean, I notice this shit everywhere I go. It's like driving down the road. I've done a lot of traveling because of the podcast. Now we're going to a lot of different countries. I think we're pretty close the same age you grow up, and it's like, This is the best country in the world. This is the best country in the world. Well, I'll tell you what, you drive down the fucking highway in just about any state here, you see all the trash and shit all over the road, then you go to some of these other countries, and you're like, I don't know, man. Some of the infrastructure over here looks a little bit nicer. The roads are a little better.

You got a tight cap on this water, Sean.

But you wouldn't wait to buy fire insurance when your house is already on fire, right? Why wait to help protect your money. I'm sure you're aware, but things are looking pretty dicey out there. With the economy, global tensions, domestic tensions, AI, you name it, are you surprised that gold just hit another record high and the price of silver is surging? This is why I've partnered with the award-winning company Gold Co. They can help you safeguard your savings with precious metals, and they make the process incredibly easy. So if you're ready to help protect everything you've worked hard for, go to seanlikesgold. Com. You'll get Gold Co's free 2025 Gold and Silver Kit, and you could qualify for up to 10% in free bonus Silver. It's seriously the best offer out there, hands down. Visit seanlikesgold. Com one more time. That's seanlikesgold. Com. Performance may vary. You should always consult with your financial and tax professionals. What I'm asking is, is there some budget budget or schedule on how much money should be reinvested in? Airport, public transportation, trains.

Our budget is over $100 billion. When you get a gallon of gas, you pay a gas tax that comes to the federal government. We redistribute a lot of that back to the states. We keep some of it to then give out and grant money for big projects that need to be done. And so But then you have EVs that don't pay taxes, right? Evs don't pay a gas tax. The money we bring into the trust fund isn't enough to cover the infrastructure needs that the country has. I think part of the solution is you need more money, but part of the solution is you can do these projects for way less money. You can do them way faster. Let's fix truly the permitting process that takes forever just drives up the cost of these projects, number one. Number two, if you put all these requirements on me that I have to have all these environmental climate change studies and shit on the project, and then you add on to that that I have to have I got a DEI. I got a contract based on someone's race or their sex. All of these things are driving up the cost of a project.

And if we could say, Listen, we're not going to consider, again, if you're a disadvantaged business, that's great. We want to have small business be able to compete for big projects. I'm all in favor of that. But enough of the racial, sexual stuff, enough of the climate stuff. If we can fix the permitting, we can build faster and with about the same amount of money, and we can fix the country. But we've shackled ourselves. We become immobile. We can't build shit in this country anymore, and that becomes the problem. And so we're talking about the consequence of the bad policy. So let's not deal with the cost and the project. Let's go back to, as Kamala Harris would say, the root cause, which is the structure on which we're forced to build, which is it just doesn't work. Does that make sense?

What about safety and public transportation? I mean, it wasn't long ago. I don't know. Maybe there's even still I mean, National Guard. I think it was National Guard that was activated in the New York City subway system. I mean, we just saw that poor Ukrainian girl get stabbed in the neck several times. Nobody helped her. She bleeds out. I I mean, does that fall under you? Does public transportation safety fall under?

Or the Daniel Penny- Daniel Penny. In New York. If you take a step back, you're a liberal, right? And you're a liberal who doesn't like cars. Cars emit carbon. Carbon is climate change, right? So I want everybody on public transportation. That's what they want. I think it's more about control as well, but they want everyone or more people on public transportation. And so if you're a liberal and you had any common sense, you'd say, Well, if I want more people to ride on public transportation, I should make it really safe. I should make it really clean. I should make it beautiful. It should be the greatest experience. So Sean Ryan and his family, if they have public transportation, they actually want to take it because they're going to get to where they're going much faster. It's going to be much quicker. They're not going to get stuck in traffic. So they want to take public transportation. Or Sean would say, I feel really comfortable actually sending my wife and my two kids on a train into the city because I know they're going to be safe. I know that their lives are not in danger.

I feel comfortable sending them. But that's not the story of a American public transit. New York, what these cities have done is they've allowed the criminal element to converge down into the subways and on public transportation. And so you get repeat offenders, you get violent, mentally ill, people who are on this system, riding with the very good people who paid for it, and it's not safe. And so people don't want to ride it. I'm fighting with liberal cities, trying to tell them, Listen, if you don't make your system safe, we're not going to fund you. If you don't clean it up, we're not going to fund you. And I get resistance over that. That's actually really good politics. Good politics is make your trains clean and safe, and everyone's going to want to ride them. Everyone's going to love you as a politician. Why in the hell am I sitting in DC telling you to make your train system safe? One of the biggest complaints I get is from riders, whether it's in Chicago or in New York or in Boston, complaining about how unsafe the system is. There's fear jumpers, and it's riddled with criminals.

That should not be the American story. And so we are working, again, the way I spend my money from Joe Biden and the requirements make it a little more challenging, but I can pull money, but I don't run them. The local communities run them. But with the new money that's going to go out under this administration, there's going to be requirements, strict requirements on how they They need to provide safety to their citizens and their riders. But we have to have this conversation is idiotic. We have trains in Philadelphia. They're starting on fire, busses that start on fire. We have to look at, do we take them out of service? Do we shut down the whole system? Do I put 15,000 more people on the road because they can't figure out how to run a safe system? It's a failure of liberal policies in liberal cities that we see in just one microcosm of public transportation. And I think these mayors would be heroes if they would just pay some attention to making these systems safer and better.

So how does it work then? I mean, if you're funding them, can you just break down the funding, how it works? I mean, if you're funding them, couldn't you also just fund security for them as well? Or how How does it work?

On the federal system, on Amtrak, we have federal officers that work for us on Amtrak. But these systems, like New York's subway system, bus system is the MTA. They provide their own security, the city does, to the system. So they have to hire the law enforcement to put them on the trains. They're the ones that have to collect the tolls. They're the ones that have to develop, do we want to do an expansion? When do we need new cars? They'll come to us and say, Well, we want this much money to do this project, or We want our share, by the way, I told you the gas tax. A portion of the gas tax actually goes to public transportation. The trust fund for roads and bridges of the gas tax, which the money should go to, we don't have enough money. The question becomes, why are we sending this to public transit? Maybe we should put this all on roads as opposed to carving off 20% to go to public transit. That's a different conversation. I look at the money that we do give them, and I'm willing to have conversations to drive public safety.

If not, I threaten them with holding the cash. They've improved, but they have to get better. But it's also local money, so city money, it's state money, and it's our money. But our money is a big part of it. But they're in charge running their system. We'll do oversight. We do safety inspections, and we also help fund. And that's the leverage point that we can use. Does that make sense?

What is the pushback from... What do they even say? Hey, somebody just got stabbed to death on your public transit system. Could you make it a little safer? I mean, the entire world just saw this young blonde Ukrainian girl get stabbed in the neck. Could you clean it up a little bit? How the fuck do you... How do they push back against that?

That response has been different. They've actually just... Because they had no cash bail, they've changed their They changed the law to now be able to keep some of these violent offenders behind bars when they have pending crimes instead of letting them out. So this is directly tied into the criminal justice system and the And the liberal idea that we don't want to incarcerate people. We want to let everybody out, no bail. They're back on the streets, back in the subways, recommitting crimes. You've seen with President Trump in DC, by bringing in the National Guard, there's just a small cohort of people that create all the problems. You take them off the street, you take their guns off the street, and lo and behold, the city becomes a much safer place. So law enforcement actually works, but it's been this liberal idea of no cash bail, soft on crime prosecutors that have driven more of the problems in the subway system. And again, the subway system is not meant for the mentally ill. That's not their home. That's not their shelter. The cities have to figure out something else to do with the mentally ill. How do I treat them?

How do I house them? But the subway system is not a place for the homeless or for the mentally ill. And liberals have a hard time wrapping their head around that. So they complain. They'll tell me they're safe. They tell me that I'm crazy. But again, there's story after story of violent crimes on these systems, and the answer is really easy. Again, prosecute criminals, put criminals behind bars, stop the fair jumping, kick out the homeless. The solution is not complicated. It's very, very easy. It's just that their liberal ideology won't let them do it. And then that becomes the problem. Man, man.

Let's talk about we're seeing more and more EVs and autonomous vehicles. Is it the Robo taxi? Yeah. Is that Tesla's new taxi? We're seeing these self-driving cars, and just all this autonomous vehicles, they're massive right now. What is just public road systems? In What do they look like in 5 to 10 years as we continue to move down the autonomous vehicle?

We're on the cusp of the most transformative time period in American travel. Things are going to change faster, and in the tenure I have at DOT than any time, I think, in recent history. And so to talk about that. So again, autonomous technology has been remarkable. It's advancing at incredible speed. So we lose about 40, 42,000 lives a year on the road. Way too many. I do think that this technology can help people pick up their phones. I'm grabbing my phone and I'm driving and a text comes in or I'm texting someone. This is the shit that kills people, right? Or people drink and drive. So I do think the autonomous technology is going to radically improve safety on the roadway. I want people choose what they want, but you might find a time when you don't buy a car, which that's not me. I always have a car. I like the freedom of having my own car, and I want to drive my own car. Maybe that's generational, but that's freedom. But there might be a time when you don't need one and just you're going to have an autonomous vehicle come by and pick you up and drop you off.

And when you're going to a grocery shop and you're going to call one back and you're going to get in and you're going to go home. Or you might lease your car out into the marketplace that someone can rent it from you and it's autonomous. I think the Uber model with autonomous model is going to change the way people use vehicles.

Do you think it's going to be a lot of people How do I say it? A lot more people without a car?

It could be, or it could drive for those who are on the cusp. It'll make it less expensive and more user-friendly, potentially. We do have the potential with technology. If you look- So you think that a lot more people are going to be gravitating towards public transportation than owning their own vehicles? No. So I'm saying that you'd have an Uber model, but Ubers don't have drivers. Ubers are using autonomous vehicles, and their fleet could be... I'm just using Uber as an example. Uber could have their own fleet, but you could lease your vehicle into the Uber fleet, and they're all running autonomously.

I mean, that's considered public transportation, isn't it?

Yeah. Well, I don't know if I call Uber public. I mean, I think public transportation is when the public provides transportation with busses and trains. This is a private company providing private transit.

I mean, with the stuff that we're seeing, Elon come up with, robo-taxis, all these things. I mean, are we going to start seeing those as public transportation? No bus drivers, school busses? A hundred %.

And it would be some of the modeling that I've seen, it would be cheaper. Move people. You're not driving this big bus around in hopes that someone might want to get on it. And then you're picking up and dropping people off the route. That's not actually where they want to go. You might more cost-effectively be able to use this autonomous technology to take people from where they are to where they actually want to go and do it cheaper than using the bus system to do it. So, yeah, we could have a public transportation component as well. But also on the congestion side, again, there's a whole conversation that we have to have about how this information is used and the security of the information in individual liberty, which I am very concerned about. But if we set that aside, which I would never set it aside, but just for the conversation's sake, you could have vehicles. When we look at the congestion on our streets and our roads, you can have this technology bring vehicles much closer together and move more vehicles on the same roadway because of the technology on those vehicles. So we could reduce congestion, remarkably, with this technology.

So that would be interesting as this is all developed. And my job is to, as the technology evolves, I'm the Goldilocks, right? I can't let regulation go too far, where if bad things happen, people get hurt, then it's going to set us back 5 or 10 years. And I It might be too slow because the innovators will then go somewhere else. This innovation will happen in a different country. I have to be just right. It's an art, not a science of making sure I'm changing our rules and regulations as the technology evolves and making sure it's safe for people. But again, I want that innovation to happen here. I want autonomous vehicle technology to be deployed from the US around the world. I don't want Chinese autonomous technology to be deployed in the US. That's a national security risk and threat for us. We do not want that. But what's also going to change, and by the way, so you already have it. I think it's in Austin, Tesla is already doing this with the Robotaxi, and we're going to see this. How does it go there? And you'll see more deployment around the country.

But drone deliveries. Drones are going to radically change the way your products move. We're going to take vehicles off the street, and right now, they're about three and a half pound deliveries to five pound deliveries. But drones are going to deliver a ton of stuff to people, whether you want to get a hot cup of coffee in the morning, whether you need medicine from the drug store, whether you went shopping and you forgot to grab something at the store. Drone delivery is going to radically change the way products move. I want that technology to be American technology, which means I have to get the regulation Then you've seen these eVitals, these Ubers in the air, the electric helicopter. You haven't seen these?

I think I've seen these.

Okay, you got to check it out. This is the next tranche of air mobility.

This is actually happening right now?

Oh, shit. Yeah. Yes, 100 %.

Where?

So we're testing them around the country, but there's a big test facility down in Texas. So what will happen is, again, Joe B, beta, we got a number of big investments have gone into these evitals. And there There's different ranges on these, right? They can go 30 miles, 100 miles. But if you think of DC, you'll be able to go from downtown DC, if they let you fly in downtown DC, or I could even say from Reagan Airport out to Dulles. It's the cost of a Uber black, and they are, you can put five people on them. They're all different models. You can come right down. And so you need a pilot in them now. Eventually, those will be autonomous as well.

You need a pilot in them now?

Right now, we have not certified them. They're going through the certification process now. We'll start off with pilots. I think they'll be autonomous at one point. You'll be able to call one of these Uber human drones. They come down, we'll pick you up and take you 40 miles, 30 miles, and do it quick. Wow. And so when I talked about the airspace and modernization, we have more planes in the airspace right now. This is going to make it just that much more complicated. There's going to be more users of the airspace, and then you throw drones in as well. It's very, very complicated. And by the way, the US has the most complicated airspace in the world. We have more planes than anywhere. No one has what we have. More complicated, more complex, more airplanes. We're going to add into that, which is why we need to make sure we have this system brand new, and we need state-of-the-art technology running it so we can get more efficient, not deploy more assets into the airspace and then have more delays.

Yeah. I was going to ask that. The autonomous stuff, we're now making fighter that are outperforming world-class fighter pilots autonomously. And so then when I hear that, I just had a friend saying on from Shield AI who just did the big unveiling of the expat. When you see stuff like that come out, it's like, Oh, man, commercial pilots, done. We have something that's going to to form an F-22, but we're not autonomously doing commercial airlines yet. It's done, right? It's done. And then when you're talking about all these drones, I'm I was thinking, all right, what is the sky going to look like when nobody's going to Walgreens, nobody's going to Walmart, nobody's going to the grocery store, and everything is being delivered by drones? I mean, you already see all the Amazon delivery vehicles and UPS and FedEx, they're everywhere. And so what's the sky look like when delivery has become fully autonomous? And then you're going to have to have to deconflict all the commercial and private airlines from all those drones. And so if you don't make those autonomous, then we're going to have a lot of human error, a lot more human error than we have right now because the skies are going to be more crowded.

So I would think it's just a matter of time before all commercial, anything that leaves the ground is autonomous.

So I think as you have more acceptance for autonomous vehicles, which probably make people feel that that's one threshold, the autonomous, eVitals, these Ubers in the air. I don't know that people are going to want to get on a jetliner and have it autonomous. I just said that maybe one day, I think that's the last tranche. I I think people want to have a pilot on their airplane. Do you think so? I do. I know. I do. I want a pilot. The eVital, yeah, I'd probably do that with autonomous. But on the jet, I want a pilot. Now it's all becoming far more automated, and there's far more technology.

I don't know, man. Then we had all that DAI shit. We got all these people that are being pilots. It's never been a fucking pilot. I might lean towards the autonomous version, to be honest with you.

You mentioned the fighter jet stuff. I read an article about how the autonomous fighter jet versus the ace American pilots, they'll take risks that the pilot won't. They'll do shit that no pilot would do, taking risks that no pilot would take, which makes them that much better in the airspace. Which truly is wild. And again, this is your space. But you think about the future of warfighting and the revolution that's going to happen on how battles are fought. Everything is going to change. And even I mentioned drones. So drones have amazing commercial benefits to America. But on the flip side, there's a substantial national security risk to drones. And so how do you marry those two things together? How do we let the commercial side evolve, but also share the concern for these are actually very dangerous tools that can be used to harm the country? And we're working through that right now, and there's good debate rates that happen, and we have to have the technology here, but we have to be smart about how we do it. And you have government all working together to figure out what that balance is.

Let's talk about ship building a little bit. I didn't realize that ship building fell under DOT as well. That's a topic that we talk about quite a bit here.

So I have roads, bridges, semis, pipelines, ports, Pipelines, too.

Huh?

Airports, airplanes. Yeah, we regulate all the equipment on cars on the safety side. I don't know what else I'm We have trains, public transportation. So it's a huge Department. But I think if you look at what's happened in global shipbuilding, we We've lost the industry here, and I think it comes back to there's a number of factors. One of it was regulation. Other labor factors came into play, but it went overseas, right? We're in South Korea, a huge producer. But Then China one day, says, We want to build ships. And shit, in less than 10 years, they're a global powerhouse in ship building.

Yeah, I think US is less than 1 % of global ship building capacity. China is over 50 %. That's right.

And so then the question becomes, is that a problem?

I'd say that's a big problem.

It's a big freaking problem, right? What's interesting is like, Trump saw that. It's like, Hell, no. We're going to build ships in America again. Or even steel. You need to produce steel in your country or you're screwed, right? So we're navigating the President's priorities around ship building, which are ours as well. But we forgot how to do it. We don't know how to do it well, and it's more expensive to do it here right now. What we have to do is then we need investments from government to bring in industries, US companies with foreign partners that know to do this and set up shop to start building here. And I think there's a number of ways we can bring in the revenue to pay for it, we can take it off the shipping industry itself, even the foreign carriers or the foreign ships to pay for it. But we're working with commerce on that and with OMB to figure out how we're going to accomplish the President's goals to make sure we build in America again, because this is a huge risk. There was a time that we owned the seas, man. We were the best.

We built all the ships. We sailed the ships with the best sailors. It was critically important for our national defense, and we just gave it up. We just stopped doing it. And again, we had dumb people in government that didn't see the risks of letting these industries go. And now we deal with the consequence of now, how do we build it back? How do we reinvigorate these industries? And it's going to take us time. It's going to take us money. But it's important for long term viability.

You know what's interesting? I don't know if you have any insight to this, but when we talk about the allocation of taxes and how bad the energy grid is in the country and a lot of the challenges that you're facing as Secretary of Transportation, where has all the fucking money gone that has been allotted to all these different organizations and institutions for years and years and years? I'm unaware of any major improvements in our power structure. I'm familiar in any major improvements in our roads or our bridges and our ship building and any of the stuff that we've talked about. We just talked about the air traffic controlling towers. We're Where did all the money go? There's been zero improvements, at least that I've seen.

I love that you talk about the grid because...

It's a fucking trocious.

What happens? The grid goes down. A lot of people die. Oh, yeah. A lot of people die. And again, there hasn't been someone to say, Hey, I'm going to grab that. I'm going to fix it. So I'll give you-Not only that, there's been money allocated for these institutions.

Where did it go?

Okay, so I can only tell you our experience. So air traffic control. I'm just going to give you this one. 20 years ago, they said, We need a new brand of air traffic control system. We're going to call it next gen, next generation of... I think the Congress spent $20 billion on this. They didn't do shit. They spent the money. They had ideas. They did white papers. They talked about it. It took so freaking long that the technology they were looking at deploying, it took so long to study it, so long to even think about developing it and get the regulation right for it. By the time they might be ready to deploy the technology, it was already freaking old. It was already old shit. Again, you have to be thoughtful on having the best technology, but you have to be able to build off the technology that you deploy. And It's $20 billion wasted. And now I sit here and go, okay, but we have to do it. That's why we have to do it fast and do it right. So I bet the same thing happened with the grid. People piss away the money.

They're not smart. They're not thoughtful, they're not strategic. And so we sit here with... But again, if you don't watch your show, who knows if the grid is shit? I think most people think, Oh, no, the government, they won't let that happen. The grid's got to be Great. They're me. Like, no, of course, they look out for us. They do the right stuff. And lo and behold, you're like, Yeah, no, it's pretty actually vulnerable. It's a problem. So I think that's it. So back to ship building, it's The President set in it as a priority. And when he says it, I think most people go, Yeah, actually, that probably is really important. We probably should build ships in America. Let's figure out how to do it.

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I have the Merchant Marine Academy. The This is a national academy. They need a commission from a member of Congress or a senator to go to the academy. It's the schools for free. We want these excellent US mariners in our fleet that if the military needs assistance, we can pull these great mariners to the academy, pull them into the government, into the Navy. The They also provide the support. They're the support mission for the military as well, providing a lot of the equipment and assets that you need as you're deploying around the world. So really important young people. I found out that in the last administration, the kids at the academy went four months without hot water. How can they not have hot water? Well, the last administration wanted to have electric boilers, and The electric boilers don't work. You need to have the oil or the natural gas boilers that actually provide heat. So they couldn't figure out the electric boilers for this massive campus, and the kids went without hot water. And by the way, they were like, we're tough and we're strong. We're the Merchand Marine. We don't have hot water. Their dishwasher broke.

And so they were eating off paper plates and paper forks. At a US Service Academy, this is the way these young men and women have been treated. And they're the most amazing young men and women. I'm like, holy... I have faith in America when I see those young people at that academy and how hard they work. It's a great school, but it's just neglect. We've neglected our country. We've neglected the infrastructure of our country, and we spent a ton of money. We're 37 trillion dollars in debt. And you're like, what the hell have we gotten for all this money? Where are the roads and bridges? They spent a trillion $800 billion in that infrastructure package I told you that my former congressman who I ran against, he championed. It was all supposed to go to roads and bridges. And then we had the Build Back Better Inflation Reduction Act. We sent a ton of money to roads and bridges. So outside of the normal funding, we put $2 trillion into road and bridge funding. I'm like, Where the fric are the roads and bridges? What the hell did you do with the money? Because I don't see beautiful infrastructure structure in this country.

You're spending the money, but I think Americans have to demand we get something back for it. I want a new grid. I want new airports. I want new roads. I want this shit to work. But to do that, you have to elect smart people who are not focused on DEI and climate. They're actually focused on providing for the American people, delivering for the American people. I don't think that's been the model. President Trump has absolutely flipped it on and said, No, We give deliverables.

Excuse me. What can Americans expect improvement-wise from Department of Transportation in the next three years?

So you're going to see us build faster, right? We're going to build infrastructure faster. We are going to push safety on our transit systems. We're not going to fund transit systems that aren't We're going to make their system safer for their ridership. I'd like to see high-speed rail in America. I really would. It's possible. There's a project now Brightline West that goes from Las Vegas to LA. It's somewhat over budget, but there's a real opportunity to have high-speed rail here. I think we should have it, but we should be able to build it at a reasonable cost. You mentioned I cut the California high-speed rail. It It was going to be a $100 billion project. They spent $16 billion and hadn't laid one track. I mean, just pissed away the money. I think you're going to see air traffic control way better. It's going to take me time. I can't fix this stuff overnight, but you're going to see massive improvements in air travel. And you're going to see the way people and products move in this country radically change. The autonomous vehicles, the Ivatels, and the drones will substantially change as We implement these new rules.

We talked about road safety. I don't know if you followed this, but we have all of these truck drivers that don't speak English, number one. Number two, The Democrats do a great job of contrarian laws. So we have truck drivers that are getting what's called a non-domiciled CDL. Foreigners can get a non-domiciled CDL, Commercial Driver's license, and drive truck in America. And it was really made for if you come from Tennessee and go to Wisconsin, you're non-domiciled in Wisconsin because you're from Tennessee, you can get a non-domiciled CDL in Wisconsin. It was four American citizens going from one state to the next. They've contorted it to let all these 10, 15 million people that have come into the country actually get a commercial driver's license, and they can drive a tanker, they can drive a school bus. And we're seeing these crashes around the country of people who are foreigners, that the licenses were issued unlawfully in places like California. A lot of them can't speak English, which is a requirement under the law. And so we're pushing to make sure that we actually have states follow the law and we keep our road safer because we don't have people who can't understand the language, and they have a CDL that has been issued to them that's unlawful, and they actually don't have the skill sets to be driving a big rig in America.

That's the stuff that I think will change. It's safety-driven, it's speed-driven. And again, I think it's going to be a revolutionary time in the next three and a half years.

So we'll see those. We will definitely see these improvements before this administration's time.

100 %. I think you'll see in your airport, you'll see these eVital pads. You'll see a pad there And maybe as you have people take trains and cars into the city, you might say by the end of this three years, you have a service that will go from the airport to a port in downtown.

Oh, that's not just DC?

Oh, no. So these will be deployed everywhere. You'll take a five-minute ride from the airport, and you'll be in the city in Nashville. And there you said, you're good to go. Yeah, they'll be everywhere.

So what do they call these?

Ibitals? Yeah.

So what is there going to be? Like a station full of a bunch of these things that all go to and from the airport?

Yeah.

Just a huge parking lot?

They'll be running back and forth after to get charged up, yeah. But It'll be like...

Will people park around them? Yep. You know what I mean? Like an airport, you park your car, get on the plane.

Or I'll park somewhere in the city and I'll take one out to the airport, get off and go on to the jetway and get on my flight. Or I got off my flight and I'll go get in one and I'll go into the city. If you're in New York, you'll go from Manhattan and you'll fly out to Long Island. And the choppers are loud. You barely hear them. They're pretty fast. You're up and you're over and you're out. Cheaper, faster, moving people.

That's cool. Yeah. That's cool. Let's move into some NASA stuff. Sure. You got a lot going on. Nine kids, husband, Secretary of Transportation, and NASA Administrator. So what are your plans with NASA?

So the President put me in as the interim NASA Administrator until he picks the actual administrator. So here's the problem had been, without someone in the role, the organization languishes. And so he said, go in, give a direction, and let's start to move, which is exactly what I've done. And again, a couple of the big things that we have to do is we have to get to the moon, and we have to have a replacement for the international space station. Those are the two big top priorities that we have right now. Number one is we got to get the moon right, then we're going to have to figure out what we do for our second space station. And so That's exactly what I've done. We had a situation where- Why haven't we been to the fucking moon? Well, we have been. Why haven't we been back to the moon? How long? It'll be 54 years.

54 years. We just went, we're like, we don't need to explore that anymore.

I think that there was- It was in there.

Box checked.

Yeah, it was expensive. It was expensive to go to the moon. And then it was also we'd done it. And there was more focus on lower Earth orbit. We wanted to evolve that technology. And so, again, the Chinese want to go to the moon. So at the South Pole of the moon, there's ice. And ice means oxygen, ice means water, ice means life. That's a key component. And the Chinese are trying to get there. We want to beat them back to the moon. And again, we're not going to go with our 1970s landers. It's going to be a lot bigger, bolder missions. But what's important is what we learn in the mission to the moon and how we do it on the moon and how we have sustained human life on the moon, how we have a base on the moon. What we learn there is going to help us get to Mars and beyond. That is the way station, the stepping stone to go out and explore other places in the universe. And so I think the organization wasn't focused. The last administration, they were trying to pivot NASA from human space exploration, which is, by the way, NASA is the only one that does human space exploration.

No other agency does that, right? They were trying to turn it into a climate change DEI organization. Actually, I brought you a book. Oh, boy. This is what they spent a couple of million dollars on a number of different comic books. This is one that is the The First Woman in space. No problem with The First Woman in Space, but it's a book that is full of DEI engender crap, as opposed to saying, I don't care what your color is. I don't care what your gender is. I want the best astronauts on these missions. That's what I want. And millions of dollars was spent on books like this at NASA.

Millions of dollars.

As opposed to thinking of millions of dollars to invest in science and technology that's going to get us to the moon before the Chinese. And so what we've had is, again, you got to think about this. So 10 years ago, I don't think anyone would have envisioned that we would have a space economy like we have right now. And SpaceX and Elon Musk revolutionized how we think about commercial space. I don't know how much it used to cost to get a satellite into space, but it was really expensive. What SpaceX has done has brought the cost down. I mean, for a small satellite, it's going to cost you $300,000 for a little bigger one, it's going to cost you a million dollars. But companies can get satellites into space way cheaper than ever before. But no one would have thought about the space economy, but for this evolution in rocket, rocket technology, Elon's ability to reuse rockets, all fantastic, right? And so right now, it's a $600 billion business. We'll be at a trillion dollars in short order. It's the fastest-growing part of the US economy, actually, is this part of it. And it's really important for our national security side of the aisle.

We're civil, but there's a national security component to it as well. But on the flip side, there's I told you, we're going back to the moon in early February, first time in 54 years. It's called early February. Early February is in a couple of months.

Four months.

Four months. Do you know what the mission is called?

No.

Exactly. Do you know what Apollo is? What Apollo was? The Apollo missions.

What do you mean?

So NASA's Apollo mission. That was our mission to the moon. Everyone around the world knew what it was. Everyone knew NASA. Everyone Everyone knew what we were about at NASA and the Apollo missions to the moon. Everyone knew the space shuttals, the shuttle missions. Everyone knew what we did. And we are about to send first time in 54 years, Artemis 2, back to the moon. I bet you 97% of Americans have no idea that we're doing it and no idea what it is. It's a huge problem. So NASA lives off the fumes of what they did in the past. They're We're not living off what we're doing in the future. What's the vision for the future of NASA? What are the future missions? Where are we going?

Wait, so we're going back to the moon in four months, in February.

We're not going to land. We're going out and around the moon and coming back. Why are we doing that? What's that?

What are we going to learn from that?

So we're testing the technology. You want to take things in steps. You just don't want to do everything in one step. You want to go through a stepping stone process. And this is we're going go back, right? Out and around, come back.

Well, we did take a step 54 years ago. We did.

But there's a reason to go back.

No, I'm with you. Yeah. Shouldn't the next step be a little bit bigger than the first?

Oh, it will. So we're going to stay this time, right? That is the key component. And so we give a directive for surface vision technology, right? So we can have power on the surface of the We think we can get that done by 2030, and you can have sustained human life. Missions, bringing products, equipment to the moon surface, those don't have to be manned. But, yes, it's going to be cool. There's Helium 3 on the moon, an amazing power source. If you bring some of that back to Earth.

So that's 100% true. There's Helium. Helium-3. We've had conflicting reports on that. We've heard that China is mining helium 3 off the moon, actually, right now?

I don't know about that, but I think we want access to this remarkable power source. So again, that's just one component of what you might get from the moon. You're doing this better than I do. There was a time that, I don't know who said this, but he who controls the seas controls the world. There was a time that that was, I think he who controls space controls the world. And I think part of that is the moon component and making sure that we're the ones that are there. And we do things differently. We have all of these international partners that are working with us that believe in transparency and openness about what we're doing and how we're doing it. Chinese have a very different model. There's no separation between the civil and military sides of their space. And again, do we want to seed? I don't know, in your military experience, should we seed the moon to the Chinese? And are there any national security risks to that? Do I want to find out? I don't really want to find that out. But the point is we're late. We're delayed in our mission to the moon.

And so what I've said is we're going to open this up and let different companies compete to see who can get us there first. I want to get there before the Chinese number one, and I want to get there before President Trump leaves office. That's what President Trump wants as well. He's given that directive. And so when you have companies compete, America wins. I got two really rich guys that have space companies that want to compete against each other. And when they do, there's going to be great evolution in technology and a great race, not just against China, but against American companies to see who's going to get the honor of doing it first, of putting American astronauts back on the moon. At this time, it's going to be almost 60 years since the last time we were there.

Man. It's pretty cool. So in February, we're going around the moon. Yeah. Have we ever done that before?

Yeah, we did that. Well, we did that back in the '70s, right? We were there. But we're going with way bigger equipment, way more sophisticated equipment this time, which means it's more complicated. The complication of what we're trying to do today is different than what we did in the '70s just because of the evolution of the technology. And so it's good to... And by the way, the The technology that SpaceX is working on with their vision on how we get to the lunar surface with their landers is what we're going to actually need to get to Mars. What we're doing with vision technology on the lunar surface and the work we're doing on nuclear propulsion is also how you're going to get us to Mars and back again. So a lot is happening, but you had this agency that was adrift, that wasn't really focused. I've tried in the short tenure I'm going to have there is to give it focus, give it a direction, and inspire it. And part of my job, too, is I got to sell the missions. If America And then you're like, We're going back to the moon? In February, we're like, What?

Like, Holy shit. It's like dumb and dumb-er. We landed on the moon. We're like, Holy shit. It's amazing. And I think that's the mission. I think Maybe there's opportunities, too, to partner with... The greatest brand in the world is NASA. Global national brand, NASA is premium. I think we can partner. We can't take partnership money at NASA, but we could partner with companies, and in the partnership, we get them to advertise their product, but also our mission, because Americans need to know what we're doing, why we're doing it. When Americans know about it and they care about it, then the Congress cares about it and the Congress funds it. Again, I think that's a really important part of what the role is, what I've done, and the next administrator will have to do as well, is you got to sell a mission, you got to sell You got to sell the vision. You got to stop living off the past. Let's inspire people for the future. I want the eight-year-old kid somewhere in Missouri to not be like, We did this in 1970. That was great. No, I want them to go, This is what we're doing right now.

In my time, the cool shit that NASA is doing, I want to do that, too. I want to be part of that. I want to give my life to this organization, this mission. I want to be an astronaut myself. But that takes us talking about it and talking about it passionately and effectively to let America know what it is and what we're doing.

Can you talk a little bit? If I heard this correctly, you have Blue Origin and SpaceX pitted against each that had to land somebody on the moon. Did I hear that right? You did. How did you incentivize them for that?

So again, I've... Spacex, remarkable. They've reenvisioned how... I hate to use it, reenvisioned because I feel like I'm a Democrat. Reenvision, but space launches and made it an incredibly profitable company. So SpaceX had the contract to get us to the moon. They were supposed to get us there in 24. They then pushed the contract back to 27. And about five weeks ago, they came back and said, Well, no, it's not 27. It's going to be the end of 28. Well, if this keeps getting pushed back, should we going to beat the Chinese? Or we're not going to get there in President Trump's term. That's a problem. So I asked, I said, SpaceX, listen, if you guys need us to modify your contract to help you accelerate your mission to the moon for us, let us know what you need. And I told them as well, I'm going to talk to others about, can they do it faster? So I talked to Blue Origin. Because they have a later... I'm talking about Artemis III when we land on the moon. Spacex has Artemis IV landing on the moon. Blue Origin has Artemis V landing on the moon.

They're working on a lander. I said, Hey, is there any way you could pull up your lander to get us to the moon faster. Then I asked some others as well. Blue came back and said, We think we can do this by the summer of '28. Wow. You have to modify our current contract. I'm like, Yeah, we'll do that. I'm going to modify X's contract. I announced, We're going to open it up and we're going to let these companies compete. Whoever can do it first and fastest and the best, we're going to take. We did. What's great now is you have SpaceX really focused on this mission to the moon. You have Blue really focused on their mission to the moon. And you have two really rich guys that own these companies that are very competitive, that are going to compete. And America is going to win in this. We win because of this competition. And we're going to put out a request for information for others to see if they have better, bold, big ideas that could also get there faster, and we'll see what they come back with. I haven't done that yet because Blue and SpaceX have current contracts with us to land on the moon, so I'm able to modify those contracts and do it right now, as opposed to engaging others that might have great ideas.

I can only do that after the shutdown ends.

Wow.

So it's an exciting time. Good thinking.

Was that your idea?

Yeah.

Nice thinking.

Well, this end with the team. Can we do this? Should we do this? How can we help SpaceX? How can we engage Blue? But again, I'm the one who said, I'm going to call the ball and we're going to do this. And the President loves competition. The President wants America to in. And so the race is on, right? And they're both passionate about it. So, yeah, it's a good thing. It doesn't come without me taking some heat. I don't know why it took me to get to this point. When the first contracts were set up, it should have been a competition to begin with. We should have not picked one. We should have had a couple of companies compete for us. That happened at the start of the Biden administration. But Yeah, it's going to be great.

I'm excited. I want to see what February is all about. That'll be... Man, I had no idea we were doing that.

The Artemis two astronauts. I've got to know them. That's the ones that are going. Amazing. You should have them on the show. You should go to Houston and sit down with them. You're going to love them. Some of the smart... It makes your country proud. So three Americans, one Canadian that are on this mission, smart, great people. The training they go through. By the way, during the shutdown, we made sure it's like, Listen, we're not going to shut down our mission to the moon. You can't stop that and start it. The safety of the mission is critical. So all the science and all the movement around this Artemis II mission is fully funded and fully functional right now, not being affected by the shutdown. But we have the rocket We've just put the capsule on top of the rocket. In December, we're going to roll the rocket out to the launch pad, goes through all this testing. And it was supposed to go in April. We think it's going to go in February. And Yeah, it's a roughly 10-day mission out to the moon and back. By the way, the capsule is so small. If you want, if you go down there, we'll put you in the capsule to see where they live for all these days.

Not big. Wow. They have to know each other. I'm like, So where do you use the restroom? What the hell? How does this work? And you had to see how it's constructed and the size of it. They love to sit down and talk to you. We'll set that up.

I would love to do it.

Thank you. Then if you can read some more literature on the woke coloring books and comic books from NASA.

I will. Any other aspirations or anything you want to talk about with NASA?

After that, we got to focus on what we do on lower Earth orbit and the replacement to the space station. Do we have corporate partners? We have to be an anchor at NASA, but we need to see if we can get more private capital in. We want to have sustained Americans in lower Earth orbit. So that's in the works now. It's been paused a little bit during the shutdown, but we have to get those contracts and that competition out there. That's important. We have a restructure that's going to come. Again, I think I want the right leaders, with the right leaders, with the right teams, to accomplish the missions. Sometimes you can get bloat. If you have a conference call with 250 people on the conference call, there's a problem. No decision is going to be made with 250 people on a conference call. That's some of the shit that happens. So we are We're going to restructure the leadership. We're going to restructure the organization with people who are mission-driven, that are accountable. I think that part of it will be really important to make sure that this is more successful than it's been in the past.

You mentioned, I've told them, I don't want to be the administrator. I can't be the administrator of NASA. I'm never asked to be the administrator of NASA. I have said, though, and I've asked people to think about it, I think that if NASA was under DOT, I've suggested that's a good thing. Some people have been like, That's a good idea. Some people are like, I hate that idea, but it's my job to put it out there. Here's the problem. People are trying to preserve NASA. Nasa is broken. It has been like, what has NASA done that you're proud of in the last 15 years, in the last 20 years?

Can't think of anything.

Twenty-five years ago, it was a space station. That was pretty cool. It's an elegant, beautiful machine. That's pretty great. What What are we doing? And so they're preserving a model. I do think you have to... Don't send it to DOT. Send it to commerce. You want a secretary that's going to fight for it, that's going to advocate for it, has presidential engagement on it. It sits out there with an administrator, and it can be pushed and shoved and cajoled in ways that I think hasn't benefited it. And so to have someone... Again, by the way, it would never It's been under my term anyway. But I think under a future DOT Secretary or a future Commerce Secretary, it can't go under war. That's a problem for us. But you need to have different leadership, different engagement. The model that we're using right now hasn't given us results. We spend a lot of money, but what the hell have you gotten for it? We have some cool science missions. Actually, we do. But big things that inspire people, we're not doing it. We are going to now. But the President is in the process. He'll pick someone to lead the organization, and I'll be 100% supportive, and we'll move seamlessly forward.

But the moments that I have at NASA, I'm not going to I'm not going to waste a day. I haven't wasted a day. I think we've done more in 10 weeks than has happened in the last 10 years to get the organization aligned behind what's critical, which is this mission to the moon. I think even with this competition, it's going to bear fruit in the coming years.

That's awesome to hear. Do you think Jared Isaacsman has a chance to get that slot?

Yeah, I know the President has talked to him. I've talked to him. So, yeah, of course. This is not the top of mind for the President. He's over there driving seven or eight peace deals. I had a text from him. He's like, I'm bringing trillions money back to the US. The amount he fights to get investment here, money here, peace deals there. But he'll pick someone, and I think he'll pick someone that's great, that'll lead it forward, and we'll be successful as a country. That's good to hear.

Well, Secretary, I know you have a flight to catch her pretty soon, so we're going to have to end this.

But I tell you what, just one leg. Can I give you a warning?

Yeah.

You go out, then you start swinging that ax, you'll chop your leg off. Okay? So just be careful, all right? I don't want to hear like, Sean Ryan lost a leg or like, chopped a toe off or something. So just be careful.

If that happens, I'll send it back to you.

The toe? I'm going to send you a toe that you chop off. Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate. It's been a blast.

Oh, man. It was an honor to have you here. So thank you for making me. You're awesome, Mark. Cheers. Me. Awesome. Cheers.