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

Sean Duffy is the 20th U. S. Secretary of Transportation, confirmed by the Senate in January 2025 and sworn in on January 28, 2025. A former Republican Congressman representing Wisconsin's 7th District from 2011 to 2019, Duffy served on the House Financial Services Committee and chaired its Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. Before politics, he was a district attorney in Ashland County with a 90% conviction rate, a champion lumberjack winning titles like the 1994 Lumberjack World Championship in speed climbing, and a reality TV star on MTV's The Real World: Boston(1997) and Road Rules: All Stars (1998). Post-Congress, Duffy worked as a lobbyist at BGR Group, co-hosted Fox Business's The Bottom Line, and contributed to CNN before his Cabinet appointment. As Secretary, he has prioritized safety reforms following incidents like a 2025 mid-air collision, opposed congestion pricing in New York by threatening federal fund cuts over subway crime, and advocated for reverting fuel economy standards while restricting funds to non-compliant local governments on immigration policies. Since July 9, 2025, he also serves as acting NASA administrator. A graduate of St. Mary's College of Maryland (marketing) and William Mitchell College of Law, Duffy co-authored All American Christmas (2021) with his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy. Father of nine, he champions family values, conservative policies, and infrastructure innovation. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://shawnlikesgold.com Secretary Sean Duffy Links: X - https://x.com/SeanDuffyWI IG - https://www.instagram.com/secduffy Department of Transportation - https://www.transportation.gov/office-of-secretary Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Secretary Sean Duffy, welcome to the show.

• 1:08Speaker 03

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

• 1:09Shawn Ryan?

  It's good to have you. It's good to have you.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  It's good to be had.

• 1:12Shawn Ryan?

  So, yeah, so we were actually supposed to do this, what, about a month ago?

• 1:16Speaker 03

  A month ago.

• 1:17Shawn Ryan?

  And then, you know, the Charlie Kirk assassination happened and so we had to push it. And, you know, I just, 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 you was closer with your wife than you, but, you know, a lot of, 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. And, and so to see, you know, to get that message that, that you just wanted to go and be with the family and be supportive, I mean, that's what this fucking country's all about. It's nice to see that.

• 1:52Speaker 03

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

• 2:09Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure, my pleasure. But, um, so, Acting Secretary of Department of Transportation and Active Secretary of NASA, correct?

• 2:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21Shawn Ryan?

  NASA Administrator.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  So I'm the Secretary of Transportation and the Acting Administrator of NASA. So I get this short window of time until the President appoints someone into the full-time role. And yeah, no, it's been, it's been great. It's been busy.

• 2:35Shawn Ryan?

  And a, and a husband and a father of nine. How the hell do you manage all this?

• 2:41Speaker 03

  Sean, I'm great, I'm greater than you are. Um, listen, it's, it's been, it's been a great, um, it's been, I, to serve this President has been really awesome. And then to also be a father and to, and to navigate that back and forth. Again, I think our first role as men is to be good fathers, you know? And again, I had this in Congress. It's, you get a 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, 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, um, as you sit on your deathbed,

• 3:26Speaker 03

  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 know, you helped send, you know, our second, our second effort to get to the moon? Do you think about those things on your deathbed?

• 3:39Shawn Ryan?

  I doubt it.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  I doubt it. You think about your family and what kind of relationship did I have? How did I raise my kids? Those are the people that you have around you. Um, and so as I do all of this, uh, which I'm so grateful that the President has given me this great honor to serve. I, and I think, I think this is the most historic administration in American history, if at not least since, um, since the middle of the 1800s and the Civil War. To be part of this is an amazing honor and the fact that we get 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, is my family and the most meaningful thing.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  To my life and to what I do on this earth is is to raise good kids, to hopefully raise them well, not to go to Harvard. I was thinking about what is the mission of kids? Not Harvard, but to heaven. That's what we want to do with our kids.

• 4:34Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I love hearing that. I love hearing that. Thank you for saying that. And we'll get into. So I want to do a life story on you, start from childhood, kind of, you know, talk about where you came from, your road to being secretary and administrator and in that, you know, some fatherhood device. So, but everybody starts off with an introduction here. So got.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Did I prove the introduction? Did I get it?

• 5:02Shawn Ryan?

  You've got, 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 starred in 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

• 5:44Shawn Ryan?

  for Ashland County, Wisconsin, a former US Congressman representing Wisconsin's 7th District from 2011 to 2019, a media personality and commentator, having worked as a CNN contributor, contributor and co-host of The Bottom Line on Fox Business, husband to Rachel and father of nine children, and most importantly, you're a Christian, Catholic.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, Catholic.

• 6:10Shawn Ryan?

  So, and, and, yeah, we had talked about, you know, how we rescheduled this interview.

• 6:19Shawn Ryan?

  You know, 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.

• 6:30Speaker 03

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

• 6:41Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect, perfect. You know, I think something that that, you know, is kind of on everybody's mind right now is the Three Eye Atlas object that supposedly might be extraterrestrial. You got any thoughts on this? I mean, Polly Market says there's a 4% chance that the intercellar object is confirmed aliens.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  If it if it walks like a comet and quacks like a comet, it's probably a comet, I would say, right? So Polly Markets might be a little bit off, but we have some great pictures of it. And we're gonna 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. And so when we open back up, we're gonna send pictures out of of the comment. And I think everybody will love it, enjoy it. But yeah, no, we feel we feel pretty good that it's it's not extraterrestrial.

• 7:39Shawn Ryan?

  Is the government gonna open back up?

• 7:42Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 7:42Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that's

• 7:43Speaker 03

  At some point, well, maybe before Christmas.

• 7:45Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe before

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I think it we're coming up to some real pain points of SNAP benefits and healthcare benefits subsidies that come in that Democrats truly care about. And when those when those benefits don't go out, on top of air traffic slowing down throughout the country because controllers are this listener will maybe talk about this more, but controllers, it's oftentimes paycheck to paycheck, and especially the young ones. They're looking to take another jobs. And so there's a number of pain points that I think Democrats are going to have to give up their push to to have illegals get healthcare benefits and open the government up and have a conversation and negotiate.

• 8:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. With this, I'm just with this object, going back to that real quick, this what the three I Atlas object, what is, what is the fear? What's, what's the spin going on about this?

• 8:37Speaker 03

  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. Right? And so I think humans love conspiracy theories. Right? By the way, conspiracy theories these days oftentimes come to be true when we're talking about Democrats. But this is one that is actually a conspiracy theory. So, yeah, I don't know. I think people, I mean, I think people get fascinated with extraterrestrial life and, you know, what's out there? And this is one of those issues that people have been able to lean into and, and let their

• 9:18Speaker 03

  imaginations expand and think it could be something that what we're seeing it is not.

• 9:25Shawn Ryan?

  It's just a comment.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  It's a comment.

• 9:26Shawn Ryan?

  It's gonna pass by, no big deal.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Fly to fly by.

• 9:29Shawn Ryan?

  Just like all the other ones.

• 9:31Speaker 03

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

• 9:35Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, right on. Well, so got a couple of gifts here for you.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 9:41Shawn Ryan?

  So first off, everybody gets, everybody gets these.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  The famous gummies?

• 9:48Shawn Ryan?

  Vigilantly gummy bearers made in the, actually made in Michigan. We just had a, yeah, we just had a long talk about Michigan. So, yeah, made in Michigan, still legal in all 50 states.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  I love it. Thank you.

• 10:02Shawn Ryan?

  RFK made an exception for us, I guess. And then I got something else for you, too. So.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 10:07Shawn Ryan?

  This is a little more sentimental, so. When I was giving you the studio tour earlier, you had asked about, you know, who put, who gave me that rosary that's up there. And I told you that's from my friend Dom Razzo. He's a former SEAL Team Six guy. And so I told you, he makes these rosaries and they call them the Warriors rosaries for protection. So I thought you might like that.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  That is beautiful. Thank you.

• 10:34Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Those who aren't Catholic, by the way, the power of the rosary, remarkable. Great protector. Can I give you a gift?

• 10:43Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  So 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, 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, to saws that made them be able to cut faster. And so what they would do is they would, they would cut all winter long. And they cut in the, cut in the winter because when it's pretty rough to cut in the, in the

• 11:27Speaker 03

  summer and mosquitoes, but they would cut all winter long. And 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 the 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'd saw them up and then distribute it out across the country. So we could build America, right? And so in Northern Wisconsin, we had the, 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. So our whole, our communities up there were built around logging. And these

• 12:11Speaker 03

  people that would come in and, and, and log and cut all, all, all winter long. And so from that, we've developed these modern day lumberjack sports. And so you might see this on ESPN seven at four o'clock in the morning lumberjack sports. So it's log rolling, a log in the water where two guys are on it 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.

• 12:44Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  Then we have speed. I mean, it's a race up and down. It's for 60, 90, sometimes on the west coast, it'd be 100 feet high, but it's a race up. And so it'll take, you know, 16 seconds to get up the tree and you have just these spurs on your feet and a steel core hemp rope. And so you're, you're running vertical up the tree, stepping and throwing, and then you'll hit a line or a cowbell. And then in essence, you, you, you keep your rope on the, on the tree and you kick your feet out and you'll, you'll free fall. If you're not great, you can free fall 10 feet, but if you're good, you can free fall, you know, 20, 25 feet at a time. So you'll hit the tree with a spur, you know, three, maybe four times coming down, which is kind of this is the bull riding of the

• 13:30Speaker 03

  rodeo. And then we have chopping and sawing in these modern day sports. You might think of a lumberjack as a big fat burly, suspender wearing guy. The guys that compete now like they're the most amazing athletes.

• 13:43Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  They're just.

• 13:45Shawn Ryan?

  I've seen these. I've seen these.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  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, 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, and so world championships, it's US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. So I didn't, I'm not going to play you a song because I don't have any music talent. But it, so we came, we're coming to Nashville and I had my buddy bring us one of our axes from, from northern Wisconsin. I thought no better way to carry it than in a, in a guitar case. So this is a, like a six, six and a half pound razor sharp.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  Australian speed axe and I mean you can shave with them. And uh this is what the guys use to just hammer through these pieces of wood and um the accuracy at which they they they hit the wood and blow through it is remarkable and these things are so sharp so listen be careful.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Don't cut yourself.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Wow, look at that. And so uh that's what we use today to Holy shit. To compete in lumberjack sports so uh you now have your own competitive speed axe. I'm sure it's gonna find a place of prominence somewhere. So be in there. Yeah, this is awesome. Pretty cool. Thank you.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  The little difference is it's Americana. This is part of American history. Very cool. And is um that I think is very cool. You really want to say it a little bit?

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Goes down there.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. This is awesome.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  I love it. You go the you you go up back. If you use it'll it'll dull up. You have to stone it so there you go. Thank you. That's awesome. I so I just maybe we bring the show and you can come to northern Wisconsin. We'll take you out on the lake. Maybe come see a lumberjack bowl championships. Hell yes, I would love that. Yeah, good guys. So is that what you competed in? So I grew up competing in these sports um. So this so I when I grew so I grew up in small town, America. Again, this is nineteen late late seventies through the eighties where it was a different era. So all summer long I would ride my bike from my house to what's called lumberjack bowl.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Where like 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, you know, on a Thursday and a Tuesday and a Thursday or a Monday and a Wednesday. But I would spend four days there. We'd get there nine in the morning, we'd stay until two 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 world, around the country and sometimes the world. But I would, when I was young, I would, I would do these exhibitions for lumberjack sports. And it was usually in Wisconsin, in Illinois, and I would

• 16:57Speaker 03

  stay close to home when I was 16 years old. But we would travel around and show these, show these skills of the old time lumberjack. And yeah, so as I did that, I, then I competed. I put myself through undergrad and law school by doing these sports. So it's, it's a, it's a pretty cool part of America.

• 17:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'll say, man, that's, I don't know any lumberjacks.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  You do now.

• 17:21Shawn Ryan?

  I do now.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  But I was, but it's, I was, so I can't tell you. So I was doing.

• 17:25Shawn Ryan?

  So is this like what all the kids up there want to do?

• 17:28Speaker 03

  A lot of them do, yeah.

• 17:29Shawn Ryan?

  It's awesome.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  Not all of them. But we have little pockets around, around the country. So you'll see, in Idaho, there's a pocket. In Nova Scotia, Canada, there's a pocket of, of log rollers. And speed climbers, we get a lot of them from the West Coast because now they, the bigger trees are on the West Coast and, you know, the, the spotted owl affected their ability to log in the West Coast. But we still have a lot of guys who learned, you know, how to climb and then they chop. And, and so, yeah, but so I, so I grew up doing this.

• 17:59Shawn Ryan?

  Was this, was this ever a career for you?

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Not a career.

• 18:04Shawn Ryan?

  Or is this strictly a sport?

• 18:05Speaker 03

  It was sport and I also could make money at it. So 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. Driving these, we'd, we'd drive these big trucks that had these, we'd, we'd take probably 45 foot trees with us on these extended trailers. And we'd get there and they would, we'd have the pole company come and put the trees in. So we'd climb, we'd build a tank and log roll. And then the flatbed trailer would be the stage for the chopping and the sawing. And so we'd, and it's like a 45 minute road show that we would do. And we'd do three shows a day, which by the way, you get in really good shape. I mean, you're, you're cranking it when you're on the road. So I was, I was young and buff and, and tough and I loved

• 18:50Speaker 03

  it. And I saw a lot of, a lot of the country by doing the shows. But I went back, recently, I, my wife works for Fox and Friends. And so Fox and Friends was gonna do a segment out of the Lumberjack World Championships for the, for the weekend show. So I brought in these young, you know, speed climbers, you know, they come in there and I'm just turned 50. I'm like, yeah, bring them in and I'm gonna be Bring them in. I'm gonna be part of the exhibition and, you know, we're gonna, all three of us are gonna climb for the show. And I'm like, yeah, they, I'm a little older and fatter than I used to be. They're gonna beat me up, but I still have my down. Like I came down fast and I, to which we climb up and they, yeah, they beat me and I do a bail and try to come down fast like I did when I was,

• 19:35Speaker 03

  you know, 28 years old. And when you come down, you're, I mean, so you have your hands, your hands are around the tree. And by the way, it gets, your hands get so hot. You have to get a heat resistant material on the back of your glove. Otherwise you'll, you'll, you'll burn the back of your hands because your hands are around the rope, but your hands are on the tree coming down. So I'm swinging to the side, my hands, my, my arms up in the air. I hit the pad, which I've done a million times. This time I'm like, I hit the ground, like, oh my God, I could barely talk. I flipped and broke my shoulder. Damn. So that lesson of the story is don't. Welcome to 50.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Don't, don't do what you did in your 28. Son of a, son of a gun. Yeah. So anyway, but it's, but this is, so I grew up, I grew up doing this when I, when I, when I applied for the real world, I did a, I did lumberjack videos. I was, I was doing lumberjack sports, had flown to California. And I was, um, so back in the day, like I would turn the camera, like there's no editing. I'd turn the camera on and I'm like, all right, I'm, I'm in Minneapolis, leaving law school and I'm going to, you know, LA. And then I'm like, I'm in LA, I'm, you know, this is a dirty, shitty city. And then I went up to the competition that we had. Still is, by the way. It just still is. It's probably dirtier and more violent than it was back then. And then I did this, you know, I showed them speed climbing and log rolling and I sent it in.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  And that was, so this was my pathway into reality TV was lumberjack sports. Wow. My pathway to law school, my pathway to see the country. So it's like, I love it. It's, again, it's, it's, it's this part of America, this America history that I think is so cool. And again, the sports are, the, the, 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 most, the coolest is truly log rolling. I mean, the, the log is flush with the water and two big guys are standing on it and they're going to town. Like most people are like, how in the hell can you stand on the log, you know? If no one was on it, let alone with someone else on it. And the skill is immense.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  A lot of people start when they're young and the hand-eye coordination, the balance. So anyway, that's, yeah.

• 21:46Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, so were your parents into this? Were your siblings into this?

• 21:50Speaker 03

  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, 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 then I, but I focused on speed climbing. So I liked the, the speed climate. Again, it's, it's a little bit of the bull riding of the rodeo. It's the most exciting sport, I think, in lumberjack sports.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  And so 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, it was, it was a great part of my life. I still go back and watch the competitions now. It's, it's a really cool part of my life, but also of, I think, American history. Out of Hayward, where again, we have, we have the, you have the facility. I tried to get them in, but the further I moved away, the harder it was to do. So the, the little ones do not.

• 23:00Shawn Ryan?

  You mean, there's not a lot of lumberjack schools in DC?

• 23:02Speaker 03

  There's not, no. But can I tell you what happens? So this is, it's, so I stand corrected. So what's, we had this, this innovative couple that developed, instead of a log, like we're using Western red cedar for these log rolling logs. And they're very buoyant. They'll, they'll float high. And so you can get two people on them and it just doesn't sink to the bottom of the, 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 and it's light, but you fill it up with water. And so 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.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  But then you put water in them and they behave like a real log. So, yeah, so we have YMCA's throughout the country that actually are doing this, which is pretty neat.

• 23:55Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Right on.

• 24:00Shawn Ryan?

  So what else were you into growing up? Other than being, what, actually, what age did you start lumberjacking?

• 24:08Speaker 03

  So I started log rolling when I was probably six years old. I started speed climbing when I was four, I started to learn how to do when I was 14, 15, you know, 16, yeah, so that was like the, the, 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. Um, we have a big hockey family, so I grew up playing hockey. All, all my older brothers played hockey. My uncle was, is in the Hockey Hall of Fame. He, uh, he was on the 1952 or 1954 Olympic hockey team. So hockey was a big part of, of our lives. Um, so yeah, played hockey. And, you know, we, yeah, that was, hockey and lumberjack sports was about it. I played a little, I played little league,

• 24:53Speaker 03

  uh, baseball. We didn't have soccer back then in small town America. Um, it's not what it is today. We had, um, you know, and we've, so, yeah, we didn't, didn't play football. We didn't start football until uh, the, your freshman year in high school. I know they start much younger now, but I'd broke my leg before my freshman year. So that put me out for my freshman year and I just didn't, didn't pick it up my, my sophomore year.

• 25:19Shawn Ryan?

  You, you were the 10th out of 11 kids?

• 25:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:22Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how was it being the, the 10th out of 11 kids?

• 25:27Speaker 03

  It was great. It was awesome.

• 25:28Shawn Ryan?

  Was it?

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:29Shawn Ryan?

  But do they have any time for you at all?

• 25:31Speaker 03

  So I, no, it's what's interesting. And I see this in my own life. So your parents, um, when you're new parents, I think you make mistakes, right? You've never done it before. You don't know how to do it. There was probably, there was a time when we had um, these extended families and your, that your parents would help you figure out how to raise your kids. And it was, we were kind of clanish 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. And so I think my parents probably made, or stricter, probably made more mistakes with the older kids. By the time they got to me, they were pretty chill, right? They're pretty great. I did shit that I think my older siblings had done, they would have been like in big trouble.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  But so I had better parents. They had more money. And now, they were, again, I think they were a little bit tiring of parenthood too. So maybe they're 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, yeah, they were more chill parents.

• 26:38Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  And 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 get to do it differently. So 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 gotta, you gotta take charge. They can't do that. You can't let them do that. And I'll be like, nah, it's fine. But they noticed the difference in the way we parent today versus the way we parented them. And my older siblings would see the same thing with us.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:33Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 27:37Shawn Ryan?

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• 28:21Shawn Ryan?

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• 28:37Shawn Ryan?

  So here's a question for I mean, having nine kids, I mean, how do you, how do you, but you said that the ages are 26 to six?

• 28:46Speaker 03

  26 to six, yeah.

• 28:48Shawn Ryan?

  So about a two-year spread in between?

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:53Shawn Ryan?

  How do you, I mean, how do you, how do you divvy up time for nine kids and a wife?

• 29:00Speaker 03

  That's a, that's a, that's a great question. I think even from, 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, some more group time. And I think all kids yearn for more time from their parents. And so you could argue that's, that's a drawback to a big family. But I think kids learn a lot from being in a big family. They have to, you have to help. Two parents can't do everything and, and the older kids become far more mature and responsible because they have to participate in, in helping with the younger ones.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  My older ones now, 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, um, but, um, yeah, I think it's, I, I, for me now, it's, it's, 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? And if I'm honest, my wife has to pick up a big portion of, of what happens in the house. So when I have the benefit of serving and I do, it's, it's like the greatest honor to serve the country, but also serve with this president.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  My wife has to then pick up the mother and father job when I'm not there. And 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. And that is one of the challenges. And so when I come home, I try to lean into my job as a dad and try to give individual time with all of them. And right now, I have, 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. I have one grandchild.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  So when you only have- How old's 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 too. 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 families 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. And if they were with us in the same area, would be fantastic.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  So again, in Wisconsin, I'm 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. Okay? But everyone else lives in this small town, like 2,000 people. It's a lake community, so a lot of people come in in the summer. A lot of people will 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. But so I lost my mom a little over a year ago. She passed away. Sorry to hear that. Yeah, she was, by the way, when you lose a parent, unless you do it,

• 32:33Speaker 03

  it's not, it's very hard and especially, I think, your mom.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  But what was cool with, she, she, she, she fell, 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, 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 eighty-nine and when they, when you break, you know, your, your hip or your upper thigh, at that age, it's, I mean, it's, 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 ninety-one, he's gonna be ninety-two.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Active, he runs, he bikes, he liked, he is the most active ninety-one-year-old, sharp, awesome, you know, specimen. I get, hopefully I get his genes. But everybody would rotate time with my dad, with my mom. So there was someone with her every single day. And not just my father, but one of the kids was coming up. And if you look at end of, end of life and what she had when she passed away, she had all of these people around her through all of the, the, the time she spent in the hospital, which was about, you know, six, seven months.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  My father and kids were coming through and working together to care for their mother, giving, giving back to her what she had given to them. And it was a really, it was beautiful, it was beautiful, it was hard, but it was a beautiful thing that, you know, cause a lot of people will, they don't have anyone with them, they're by themselves. There's, there's no one, there's no one there. And 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, like we were her, we were her works product. And again, like any family, we're all dysfunctional and there's fights here and there's fights there.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  But in the end, if you look at what really matters, that she had all of her, all of her kids come and be with her and share time. So my dad wasn't alone with her. And again, it wasn't easy, cause 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, do schedules and who's gonna take what shift versus another shift. And then in extended care, it was.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  I think if you look at the meaning of life and what families mean, that was, that was, I think for me, it all came full circle of, what are we, what are we doing? Like, what do, 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, as she passed with, with not being alone, having people all around her all the time.

• 35:45Shawn Ryan?

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

• 35:53Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. What a way to go.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:57Shawn Ryan?

  You don't hear that very often.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  You, you, you don't, and you know what? I, I know a number of doctors who deal with people at end of life. And 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

• 36:14Speaker 03

  if you have faith and you have a family around you, they will talk about the peace that as someone's going through the dying process, the peace of the person with faith and the person with family as the person, 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.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  Because you know where you're going and you know what you've built as, 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, what is the true meaning? And I do think it, again, it's, it's, it's faith and, it's faith and families. And I think the message today, Sean, is so interesting that we're telling young girls, get a job.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Advance your career. Your career is the most important thing that you have in your life.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  And 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, it'll 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? You know, who do you get to share a day on 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. You know, it'd be fun when you're 34 years old and like you don't have to deal with four kids crying at home and changing diapers and you're 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.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  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. And I think starting young is important. Have kids. And again, it's not easy, right? It's hard, but hard, and you know this and you know this more than anybody. I started way late. But hard things, but hard things give you, hard things bring you joy, right? Joy doesn't come from the easy layup. Doing hard shit makes you, the joy that comes from that, I think, is remarkable. So I'm a firm believer in find love, pursue love, get married, have kids. You'll be more productive. You'll make more money.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  You'll be happier. And I just, I think a lot of young men now, I mean, the guys that watch your show, this has been a whole, this revolution of what's happened with young men. The manosphere has been really fascinating to see them leaning into what is, what, 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. Oh, it's shit. We almost lost it. Yeah.

• 39:11Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we legitimately almost lost what the fuck it means to be a man.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  And but it's come back.

• 39:17Shawn Ryan?

  It was like this close.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  And it came back in full force because of guys like you that go, I'm gonna talk about what what does it mean to be a man in this this group of of great men that'll talk about what it means to be a man. And it's it's it is, you know, the chivalry, it's respecting women, it's these, 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.

• 39:43Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you think the resurgence came from?

• 39:46Speaker 03

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

• 39:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but how long did that go on for?

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Too long.

• 39:53Shawn Ryan?

  Was it?

• 39:54Speaker 03

  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, would 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, you know, so many people that will talk about it, like you do, and and others.

• 40:23Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I never really, I don't, I don't really, I never made it a, how do I say this?

• 40:32Shawn Ryan?

  I just lead by example.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:34Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Which is more effective than.

• 40:41Shawn Ryan?

  I'm just.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Preaching.

• 40:43Shawn Ryan?

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

• 40:51Speaker 03

  But it's, but I think it's it's all part of an ecosystem of

• 40:57Speaker 03

  who are, what does it mean to be a man? And again, you can, you can preach it, which that's fine. That's powerful. Or you can, you can, you can show up by example.

• 41:08Shawn Ryan?

  You live it.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  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 a great young man find a decent?

• 41:23Speaker 03

  Girl to marry, right? That's, I think the way, it's harder to find a good girl. I'm gonna get in trouble for saying that, but again, I think there's, these young girls have been sold a different story. They haven't, they haven't come back to what these young men have. And yeah, I hope they, again, how do you, how do you find someone? 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 my, choose to, you know, be a person of faith or not, the number one decision you'll ever make that'll 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?

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Who you marry is the greatest decision. And by the way, it's often times a crap shoot, right? We're all, we all put our best foot forward as we're dating and we're trying to, you know, go through that process. But the most important decision is who you marry? What kind of person are they? Are they gonna, again, because marriages, if anyone who's been married knows, it's always not sunshine and roses. Marriage is, it's amazing. But it's hard, like anything, it's hard. It can be hard, but it's beautiful. And do I have someone who's gonna stick with me? Do we share values? On, on life's road, who am I gonna, who am I gonna journey it with? That decision is the number one most important decision any young man will make, or a young woman.

• 42:48Shawn Ryan?

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

• 42:58Speaker 03

  I don't know that they get it. I think, I think when things can get hard, there's, there's a perception that it's always, again, sunshine and roses. And it's actually not. It can be, you, you, you gotta disagree. You're gonna fight, you're gonna, you're gonna have issues that you have to work through. And do I have a, 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? And if you, if you, if you do, you can make it work. But if, if you, you know, hit the release valve and get out. You're probably gonna find the same situation in the next marriage that you have. Are you willing to stick it out?

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Because again, it's the most like I couldn't. 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, you know, do we have disagreement? Yeah, we have disagreement. But in the end, there's, and we'll, and we fight. But in the end, we're not leaving each other. We made a commitment to each other. We are sticking together. And no matter what fight we have, there's never a conversation about the release valve. Like this is like, we gotta work through it. But we are in this together. And I think if people think about it maybe differently. Again, we take away the roses and talk about the beauty of marriage and the disagreement

• 44:24Speaker 03

  and the agreement and the joy and 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 it's the, you can take, you can too easily take the easy path. And by the way, you might have abuse. There's also situations where you probably gotta get out of. But many of them are not that.

• 44:48Shawn Ryan?

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

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Doesn't.

• 45:03Shawn Ryan?

  But, but, but like, so how did you meet your wife? I know how you guys met, but.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  So, so I did, I did a, I did reality TV, as you mentioned.

• 45:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, that was right at the, that was like the beginning of reality TV, right?

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I was, I was the sixth season of The Real World, so Real World. So 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, you know, put them in a house and make them live together. And they would just film them for, you know, 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. And I was on the, I was on the, the, the sixth season of that. My wife was on the third season. And what was interesting is if you think about it,

• 46:03Speaker 03

  we actually, 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, you know, will go have a drink at the bar with or a cup of coffee with. People like us. We don't, we don't naturally go out and go like, I'm gonna go be friends with someone who is from a way different walk of life and way different, you know, viewpoints than I have. Like we just, human nature is not built that way. But this show made you live with people who are very different from you. And what was actually pretty cool, one of the coolest experiences and learning lessons for me doing the show was wildly different people than me.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Like 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, when I did the show. But what I found was that these very different people at first blush, today it was like, we have like nothing in common. When you live with someone for, for, 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, we can't work together. Cause you're, you're crazy, man. You're like, you're like.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  But the truth is, you actually can. And you share a lot more in common than you might think. I mean, 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 treated 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 passed in the Senate, to have a Democrat president sign it. Like, it can't just be like, Republicans control the House, I got a Democrat president, and I think this bill is going to become law.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  If I actually believe in the law, I needed Democrats to partake with me, which means they had to have a say in it, and we had to work on it 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. Very sad story. There was a guy named Puck on their show, you know, Bike Messenger, Snot Rocket, you know, funny, witty, a little crazy guy on their show.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  So they had a really unique show that she did. Again, I came a couple of years after that. I took a year off, 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 who 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 did different missions around the world. And so they were going to have one from each of these casts come and do Road Rules. And they picked me from my cast, they picked Rachel from her cast. And, yeah, I met her at a train station. Everyone was coming in.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  I was the fifth one of the cast. She was on the train with other cast members that came off. Actually, I went on, and basically Rachel handed me her bag. I've been carrying it ever since with her. So I met her, so I have my meeting with my wife on TV and then I was, I was, I was, I was trying to pursue her on the show. I was, and she had a boyfriend at the time. She was a little bit successful, but not really. And we hung out a little bit after, there's, there's, it was a three week show. We hung out a little bit after and then she was like, not gonna have any of it, right? She was not. No kidding. She do, she was not in, she was like, she was living in LA. She was like, living

• 50:24Speaker 03

  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, and she was like, this is not, you're not, at this, at this age, you're kind of like, is this someone that's right for me or not right for me? I guess I fell under the not right for me category. And so 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 flew to, did the speech in Milwaukee and she was flying

• 51:06Speaker 03

  through Minneapolis where I was going to law school. And she, she had a layover. She's like, well, let's just, we'll just be friends. Wanna come, come pick me up. Let's go, let's go hang out. So I went and picked her up and I brought her to this famous little dirty diner in St. Paul, Minnesota called The Uptowner, not far from where I live. We had breakfast. We drank coffee. We ended up hanging out for like two and a half hours. And at the end of the conversation, shit you not, I mean, 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,

• 51:53Speaker 03

  "I love you." No way. What? "I'm gonna marry you."

• 51:58Speaker 03

  I shit you not, I'm like, oh, like as a guy, you're like, whoa. She said she's gonna marry me. So we started dating.

• 52:06Shawn Ryan?

  Hold on, what did you say to that?

• 52:08Speaker 03

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

• 52:50Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, right on.

• 52:52Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  So, um, 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, I got, I got dissed in the process. But, yes.

• 53:06Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  So that's, so that's, so I was telling you before the show, so we are, we're the first reality TV couple. Um, and we are the most fertile, um, of any reality TV couple with nine kids. But can I tell you what's interesting too, Sean, is we, is we-

• 53:21Shawn Ryan?

  You're literally the first reality couple to marry?

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:24Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, no shit.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Because we're at the start of reality TV, right?

• 53:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  We're the first ones, uh, to get married and the first ones to, like, again, the only ones to have all these kids.

• 53:34Shawn Ryan?

  Do you guys watch reality TV together now?

• 53:36Speaker 03

  She does more than I do.

• 53:37Shawn Ryan?

  Who do you guys watch it?

• 53:38Speaker 03

  She loves The Housewives, right? She'll watch The Housewives. So I got stuck watching The Housewives for a while because she has it on all the time.

• 53:44Shawn Ryan?

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

• 53:47Speaker 03

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

• 53:49Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit, here we go.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. What's, what, what?

• 53:54Shawn Ryan?

  Have you not heard of this shit?

• 53:55Speaker 03

  You know, I've, yes, but don't.

• 53:56Shawn Ryan?

  My wife's obsessed. She's obsessed with this. So they put, they bring out, they pick all these people, right? I don't know, 10 guys, 10 girls, something like this.

• 54:07Shawn Ryan?

  And they do like this blind dating where they both, they go in these rooms. So it'd be like if we put a curtain.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:14Shawn Ryan?

  Across this room, females over here, males over here. They talk to each other through the curtain, but they don't, you know what I mean? You can't see them and then, and then you have, so you go through and you date all these people and then you, and then, then you have to get engaged without seeing the person. Would you have done this?

• 54:33Speaker 03

  Hell no, hell no. That's not my jam. I wanna see them.

• 54:39Shawn Ryan?

  Well, then, then they get engaged and then after they get engaged, then they meet. They get to see them and then they.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  It's dumb.

• 54:47Shawn Ryan?

  And then, oh, it's fucking awesome.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  No.

• 54:50Shawn Ryan?

  This is like a total, it's a train wreck.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  Do you, do you?

• 54:52Shawn Ryan?

  This is what I love about reality.

• 54:56Shawn Ryan?

  Come on. I'm ashamed to say it, yes, I've seen almost all of them. So.

• 55:04Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I can't watch mainstream media anymore, but, but. So, yeah, so we watch Love is Blind. So they, so then they dump all these, you know, then there's the pool party where everybody, they dump everybody into the fucking pool party. Of course, there's plenty of booze and then, and then they all meet the people, you know what I mean? That, oh, I remember talking to you. Oh, and then they start getting jealous and, you know, the affairs start to, it's fucking amazing.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Do they, do they, and do people get married out of this?

• 55:34Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  They will.

• 55:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 55:37Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know how many of them have actually lasted, but they'll get married. So then, yeah, so.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  They marry on the show?

• 55:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so you get engaged, then you, then they dump everybody in and they all live together. Then they, 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.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  So I watched, I watched a few of the, what's the one with the, the rose ceremonies?

• 56:02Shawn Ryan?

  What is it?

• 56:02Speaker 03

  The rose ceremonies, the, uh, God, come on, the, um, whatever that loved one was. The Bachelor, The Bachelor.

• 56:09Shawn Ryan?

  The Bachelor.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  So, old school, I'd watch, I'd watch those with her. But it's int- but it is interesting what's happened. You would spend all this money on, on, on the scripts and the writing and actors. And the reality TV side of things is very appealing, whether it's the social media influencer versus, you know, people that are doing reality TV. Those are the real component of TV and how people behave and the decisions that they make. It's really, it's, it's great television.

• 56:39Shawn Ryan?

  It is.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  And we were the star, we were the star of that on, on Real World. So good for you, like you do, you sit down and you'll watch Love is Blind with your wife.

• 56:48Shawn Ryan?

  My wife watches, I fall asleep.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  I think that's bullshit. Your, your wife is like, that's bullshit. Sean loves the show.

• 56:54Shawn Ryan?

  I got it, I got it. I got into it for-

• 56:57Speaker 03

  He makes me sit down with him.

• 56:57Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe like, three seasons or so, and I was just like, man, this is like, so addicting, watching this fucking train. Get rid of it, happen over and over and over. Who would do this?

• 57:07Speaker 03

  But if we're gonna celebrate relationships, celebrate love, if we're gonna do it through Love is Blind, so be it.

• 57:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  Great.

• 57:14Shawn Ryan?

  Well, no shit. So two-time, two-time reality TV star.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  So three, then I, then I did a special as well, where they, they had, they did the, now they do these competitions. They had, 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, and at the time, like, I had no money. I was like, I won two cars, I won like, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I won, it was, yeah, it was pretty, it was great.

• 57:49Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  I was, so I did that one as well. But they've come back and asked us to do more shows.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  They just, so now what they've done is-

• 57:59Shawn Ryan?

  Recently?

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So Paramount is doing, um, like, they're, they're bringing casts back to spend, like, two or three weeks together, to then film them today. Now they're all older and grayer and fatter, and they're gonna film them to kind of 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.

• 58:22Speaker 03

  And they asked our cast to do it, and I was the only one who said no. And the reason, I mean, I wanted, and they were gonna pay fairly well. And for a lot of people, they needed the money. And I was, I felt, I think, this is in the midst of Trump, they hate Trump. Like, why would I put myself in that environment? And I don't need your money. Um, so I didn't do it, and I think my cast was frustrated at me.

• 58:42Shawn Ryan?

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

• 58:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I had bigger problems.

• 58:49Shawn Ryan?

  No shit, so they're, they wanted you to do this?

• 58:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, they've asked, some have asked for us to do our, um, you know, do, kind of have the family do, do part of it as well. And we just, we haven't said yes to it. And again, we're so busy right now. But I'm like, I'm overwhelmed, busy. Uh, my wife does the weekend show on Fox. She does a Spanish show as well. And so, yeah, 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 interested.

• 59:18Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that's, you know, that's an interesting point with nine kids. I mean, what did, have you talked about that with your kids?

• 59:27Speaker 03

  So, yeah, so the conversation goes like this. They want us to do a reality TV show. Someone's gonna be like, this, are you interested in the conversation? And Rachel, my wife, says, no. And I say, how much?

• 59:45Speaker 03

  How much? What are the, and we don't get beyond her, no. So we do, uh, but I think the kids would be interested in it. I think they would think it's, it's, um, it would be fun. They, by the way, the, the problem is you get older kids and they go back and watch the episodes and they'll...

• 1:00:01Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  That's, if you do this stuff, just know that it'll, it'll come back to haunt you. Your kids will watch what you did when, when you were their age. And they, they'll tell me Maya's season was boring, Rachel's was great. And they'll bring back different scenes and things she said and throw them at her, which will really piss her off.

• 1:00:20Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet.

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  But yes, so I don't know that they're, I don't know that they're really into to doing it. But they thought it was neat that we kind of went through this process.

• 1:00:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  You know, it seemed that the country has moved. By the way, it was very innocent back then, too. Like, it's gotten really debaucherous.

• 1:00:36Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  The greater the debauchery today, the greater the radiance. It was, it was pretty innocent back then. And you're having conversations that, that, you know, someone in the 90s was having about their careers and, you know, their love life and, you know, it was far more natural. And it's, it's kind of grown into something different that I think is, I think it would be harder to do as, as a young adult and I think more.

• 1:01:02Shawn Ryan?

  It's like controlled chaos now.

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  It's controlled, yeah, yes.

• 1:01:06Shawn Ryan?

  We have an idea of where, which direction it's gonna go.

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  Hundred percent.

• 1:01:10Shawn Ryan?

  So, yeah.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  So I don't know that I'd recommend that, that they, they do it.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, but I can, so the kid, that has come up with the kids and the older ones, like I have one son who's like, hell, no, you should not know. And I got another one who's like, well, that'd be kind of fun and we could do it and be great. And we're a big family and we're, you know, we have a lot of fun together. So, but no, the boss says, we're not gonna do it, so we're not gonna do it. But it's, I can, I think it's, when we talk about our kids, I, so I, we talked about getting, getting, getting it right, making mistakes and then figuring out how you do things differently. So my first one went to the University of Chicago. I raised a great little Catholic, smart girl, went to U Chicago, great school.

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  And it was right at the start of COVID. And she had made a comment about communism is, communism has killed more people than COVID will. Or she had some, made some analogy, because we're dealing with, you know, some of the leftist stuff in the country. And people lost their minds, like she had death threats. And the school, instead of reaching out to her, they had gone to, to the people who feel threatened by her comments.

• 1:02:27Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  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, a great Catholic young man. He went during COVID and he's like, frick, did a, did a year and he's like, I'm out of here. I'm gonna go try to make movies in California, which he's done and he's been successful. But from that, we've kind of said, you know what? We, and you know, this, you, we have two little kids. Like you put your heart and your soul into your kids and you try to raise them really well. And make them upstanding little people. And you try to give them the faith and give them the value. And 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?

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  They're like, they're woke and radicalized and like they're saying all this crazy shit. And so as we've seen that, we're like, you know what? We're not gonna do that. Like, I'm not gonna invest, you know, in all the work and effort I put into my child. I'm not gonna 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. Like, that's your choice. Like, you're gonna 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. 10 schools that we know that when you come back, you'll have a great education and they

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  support the values that we taught them. But why would I risk giving my child over to these radicals? What are those 10 schools? So, we have a list, but it's Hillsdale's on there. The one that our kids go to is the university- Hillsdale's 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 like, it's a 1950's 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 gonna come back even better than when I sent them out. And so I have two there right now.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  One's a senior, one's a freshman. You know, 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 like, I'm not gonna do that. I mean, and again, it's fun. Like, we like, if these kids wanna go, it's a Club Med, it's, you know, they got beautiful gyms and swimming pools and, you know, the football games are amazing. Like, it's a really great experience. But what the hell am I sending them to college for? Like, that's not the purpose, is to have a great time in the great sorority or fraternity, it's to get an education and to support the values that we've instilled in them. And so, we've just been like, we're not gonna do it anymore.

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  Like, and I think more parents have to make better decisions about who they're willing to turn their young, the young mind that they, again, you know this, he takes, put a lot of love and effort into it.

• 1:05:33Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  Not gonna risk it anymore with the crazy.

• 1:05:36Shawn Ryan?

  Did you guys homeschool at all?

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:05:38Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  We just thought we, it's pretty wild, nine 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, I was gonna, when I got this job, I was going to move the family to DC. And Rachel could go back and forth on the weekends 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.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  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, and I mean, it's, it's, it's 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's, 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.

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  No, it's like, they, they, they had instruction that fits with what we teach them. That makes sense.

• 1:07:09Shawn Ryan?

  It makes perfect sense. I mean, a lot of parents are, or I'm one of them, are thinking about these things. We've, we've, at least for, for now, we've chosen the homeschool route. I mean, we're, we're preschool though, you know, so we figure. Better figure it out before.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  I think homeschool is great and the curriculums for homeschool are are awesome. But if you go to your school and and the gay pride flag is bigger than the American flag, you got a fricking problem, right?

• 1:07:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  Or if you tell me that you're going to raise a global citizen, you got a problem. And that's the that's the shit we deal with in the in the school system. Again, whatever happened to math and science and English and like that's what the public school was made for 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. No, 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.

• 1:08:10Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  And if we do that, I think competition and parents, I think parents would make way different choices with where they send their kids because again, the the pathway to success is a is a great education and they have great values as a human being. And the public school in many places doesn't offer that.

• 1:08:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  So you're gonna so we get a homeschool when they get to to kindergarten, first grade?

• 1:08:34Shawn Ryan?

  I I I mean, never know. This is our first year trying it, but I mean, that's that seems to be the direction of my head and that's what I'm hoping for.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Shawn Ryan?

  So.

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 1:08:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I just I've seen a lot of, so this area of Tennessee is like 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 and.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

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

• 1:09:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, there's plenty. I mean, the I think the whole, I think the whole myth about homeschool kids being, you know, socially awkward and weird are, I think that has just been decimated. But I mean, from when I see the homeschool crowd, those kids just have.

• 1:09:41Shawn Ryan?

  They seem to have a lot more confidence. They ask better questions. They're better in conversation, way beyond their peers, you know, the same age. And I think, you know, I think that's the kind of stuff that just really builds a great character.

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  So my, um, my son-in-law just announced today that he's running for Congress in my old congressional seat. It's an open seat. And he was homeschooled, I think, until eighth grade. And then he went to high school in Wausau, 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. And that's have to be, being a nice human being, they's well-adjusted and can talk to people. And I think it probably comes from his homeschooling up till eighth grade.

• 1:10:38Shawn Ryan?

  That's cool to hear. That's cool to hear. Well, let's get back to you. How did you get into politics?

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  So I was, um, so I, I went to college, was in law school, did reality TV. I was, you know, you'd said you've kind of 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, we, we come back to it. It's important that we come back to it. But I, so I came back. I always knew I wanted to come back to my 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, of my hometown where there was a woman who was gonna take a leave.

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  And I was able to get a job as a special prosecutor to fill her spot while she was going to have a baby. And so I just learned how to be a prosecutor. And the guy that was the DA, small office, two, two people. He ended up taking another job. A Republican governor at the time. He appointed me into this job as the DA of Ashland County. And very, very liberal area.

• 1:11:53Speaker 03

  Right, but I was a, I was, I was kind of a crunchy con. I was, I was on the, the, the health food, you know, uh, co-op board. Um, but I was like, this, I'm a conservative. I'm a, I'm a Republican. No one ever ran against me. So I did a, uh, 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, you know, shake and bake. And this, 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, it didn't really have to run anything.

• 1:12:25Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  And, and when, in 2008, so going back a number of years, but Barack Obama wins. Democrats controlled the House, the Senate. And in Wisconsin, they were, they had the governorship and they had the assembly in the Senate. So Democrats controlled everything in my life. And it felt really shitty. It was not good. Like it didn't, like the country's going in the wrong direction. My state's going in the wrong direction. And, you know, Democrats are riding high. It's, you know, it's, you know, 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

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  good for the minority party. There was that. And the guy that I was gonna, that was my congressman that I was gonna run against, he was the chairman of appropriations. So at that time appropriations incredibly powerful. Um, 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, there was, they passed a stimulus bill. Cause that was after the 08 crisis. And so the stimulus bill was $800 billion, which by the way, is like, I wish the size of some of the bills that Democrats

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  passed were that small again. So I decided I'm gonna run, right? I'm, I may not win, but I'm gonna flip and hold them accountable. I'm gonna 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 gonna run. And uh, I got in the race. And so what's hard is when you run, um, In a seat like this where you have a 42-year incumbent, no one believes you can win. Nope, nobody believed. Everyone actually said, "You're dumb. This is foolish." Like, my friends were telling me, "This is foolish. You can't do it. You're a lamb to slaughter." And my wife was like, "Hell, no, we can do this." And so I had a friend who was involved in politics,

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  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 like, a month into the campaign that she was pregnant with our sixth baby. And I worked my ass off. So I was the DA during the day. I'd get in my car, like, there's no, there's no team. Like, I'm like, 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.

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  They don't think you can win. But I, so half my battle was selling people on the fact that we can win this race. We're gonna win. This is why we can win. These are the numbers. And by sheer force, I, you know, I raised, you know, 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, local money, small towns, people giving, 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.

• 1:16:00Speaker 03

  I, I started to hire people after about eight months into the campaign, after driving myself. And we got, I got Sarah Palin to, like, we, I had Sarah Palin's endorsement. I had, you know, Red State write about me. We're trying to get all of these people to try to build some, some, some energy around the campaign.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  And then, as we got into 2010, which was the race I was actually running in, that's when it was like, oh shit, this is gonna 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 writing on the wall, I was gonna 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. Like, my kids would watch the ads. They would give me, they'd give me feedback on the ads. They would take some of the line, "Does Dad really hate old people?

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  Does Dad really, why does everyone take jobs away from Wisconsin?" Like, that's the, you know, you know the ads. But in the end, through sheer hard work and a great cycle, I flipped a seat that was 42 years Democrat. Wow. And the next two races were really hard as well. So I like, I worked my, so I would shake so many hands that I would get a callus in the, in the, in between my thumb and my pointer finger. As a lumberjack? No, so those, those, those calluses are on my hand. I had the back of my hand from people grabbing my hand from shaking hands. Wow. I would get a callus. And I went everywhere.

• 1:17:46Speaker 03

  I, in the primary, I ran against a farmer who was a, he's a strawberry farmer. And he's kind of 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 was like, I had to match him and how hard he worked. So I just, like, that's what you do. Like, 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, for breakfast, and I'd just, I'd shake hands. And then someone might wanna stop and talk to me. And I would walk with them and talk. And then I'd shake hands. And someone wants to talk, I'd walk and talk. And you know what? What's interesting is if you shake someone's hand...

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  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. And so just by shaking hands, people are like, I met him. I think he's kind of 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 our, so we had this massive class. We had this like eighty-seven new members of Congress, which is 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 in and talked to us and he said, "Obviously, I've done a lot of things. I've been the Secretary of Defense, I've been Vice President,

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  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 seat in the House was the coolest experience I've had in my political career." But it was, it was really, I walked into the House chamber with my wife. I had, by the way, I'd never been in the Capitol in my life. Never got to, like, my, 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 the, 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's the House chamber?" It's like right down the hall. Like, I have no idea.

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  We walk into the House chamber and I started to cry. I worked so hard to get there. And to be, and again, maybe we think less of it today, but I cried when I got in there. It was, it was so much work, so much effort. And then to represent people, that they put the faith in you, it's a, it's a really cool honor. That's cool to hear. Yeah.

• 1:21:41Shawn Ryan?

  See you later.

• 1:21:45Shawn Ryan?

  We'll install this building. What do you think, Sean?

• 1:21:49Shawn Ryan?

  We're high.

• 1:22:03Shawn Ryan?

  How did you wind up Secretary of Transportation?

• 1:22:08Speaker 03

  So I did, I did. So I served for nine and a half years. And we were gonna have our ninth baby. And when we, again, I slept in my office, right? So you sleep in a cot or a blow-up mattress in your office. You go to the house gym, you shower, you come back, you have your suits there. You know, you spend four days, three nights, four days, you know, living on a mattress, showering in the gym. That does, 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.

• 1:22:48Speaker 03

  So we, we...

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  But we were gonna have, we found out Rachel's pregnant, baby number nine. And then she called me after she had done some testing, like, listen, there's a pretty good chance your baby is gonna have Down's syndrome. Okay, by the way, it's the greatest gift in our life, but at that time, it's, you don't know what it is, you know, what does this mean for us, right? By the way, some tried to talk to us about having an abortion, like, get the fuck out of here, like, no, we're having this baby. And then as we went in further, they're like, ah, this baby has a heart problem, there's a heart defect as well. And so as I got into the summers, the baby was born, her name is Valentina, at the end

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  of September, but in the summer, I'm like, I can't do this, like, this is, this is too much, because Rachel has all the kids at home, all the kids are at home, we're in a baby number nine, and I'm in Congress, I'm going back and forth, flying to Wisconsin, and I'm like, we got, I gotta get out. She's like, no, we can do this, you can stay, we can make it happen, I can, she's like, she's a scrapper and a fighter. And it was one of the few moments where I'm like, no, we're getting out. And she didn't, she did not want us to get out. And we, it created, it created some tension in our marriage for a little while, because she was like, no, you should stay. And at some point, I think as men, we're like, I know what we can and can't do, I

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  know what, what's pulling at our family. And so I announced I'm getting out. The baby came early, and I, 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'd 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, there was, he was not, 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. Okay, I worked at Fox too. Fox treats Democrats very well.

• 1:25:03Speaker 03

  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 with, for two years with Dagan McDowell, who I love to death. She's wonderful. And then, as the president was going through, you know, his selection process, you know, I wanted to, I want, I thought this was going to be historic and, but it is historic. I wanted to serve with him. And so, I made the pitch and, you know, he went through the analysis and I was blessed that he picked me to be the Secretary of Transportation.

• 1:25:46Speaker 03

  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. I got, if you asked me to switch with anybody right now, switch with any other secretary, whose job would you like but yours? When, I got the, I have the, President Trump gave me the best job in all the cabinet. Really? Hundred percent. Why do you say that? Because we build shit. We make people's lives better. I'm able to, so everybody loves infrastructure. Everybody, even Democrats like roads and bridges. Democrats like new airports.

• 1:26:29Speaker 03

  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, you know, 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 is, that for me is exciting. And that's what I get to, I get to do. And there's, there's, I don't think the last administration showed up and did much.

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  Maybe that's a really good thing. But yeah, we're moving, we're moving fast, making, making a true difference in the way the department operates. And I got it. So there's a, there's a, 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, I have people that are like in, in, in roads or in motor carriers. They're there because like, they love it. Like they, I don't have a lot of people fighting me. I do have some, but they actually buy into the mission. And 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? Like they buy into it, like they, like they love that because that's what they want to do.

• 1:28:00Speaker 03

  So I don't have the problems that other, other, other departments have. And I have, I think, a, a great way to make their life better.

• 1:28:10Shawn Ryan?

  What are some of the problems you're facing?

• 1:28:13Speaker 03

  Right now with T O T, so just, so we're, we're, we're trying to rebuild the air traffic control system, right? So we, I, I get there, we have the D C A air crash on my first full day on the job.

• 1:28:29Shawn Ryan?

  That was your first day on the job?

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  First full day, I was sworn, I was sworn in by Clarence Thomas. The, the, the night before, like 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, until you're in, got sworn in.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  Went home, you know, it was we're staying in hotels in DC. The next day I did a ceremonial showing in with J D Vance and go to the department. In there, you know, 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's my first full day. And yeah, that's, that's, by the way, we had, we had, we had DCA. That was on, that was on a Wednesday. On Friday, the, the business jet crashed in the downtown Philadelphia. Then the NOTAM system, which is the notice to airmen, which will give, you can't fly without

• 1:29:30Speaker 03

  this, this system up and running, that crashed. The Motley Crue plane crashed in, in, in Arizona. We had the crash in, in Alaska, then a crash in, in, in Toronto in Canada. Like all these things happened. I'm like, holy shit, like what? Like, and people are like, what if you broke? I'm like, I just got here. I didn't, 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. And I didn't, like, no one sat down and said, there's a huge problem. All this shit's really old, like you gotta, we don't have enough controllers.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Like, there wasn't a playbook, like no one laid a playbook out for me. It was me actually pulling to get information to then go, so like all of it's old? Like everything is crappy? I gotta, we gotta 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, to actually think through, how do we do it? Like, it's complicated. How do we do it? And then I had to sell the Congress on, give me the, give me the money to do it. Make a big investment. In me and the FAA, and by the way, they've given money in the past and they've squandered the money. Like, they made promises, but they never deliver. And so I'm asking them

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  to 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 gonna 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 gonna get worse. And they did. And so now we're starting that process of, you know, taking the years it's gonna take to rebuild the infrastructure of American air traffic control. It should be state of the art. We're gonna build a state of the art system.

• 1:31:26Shawn Ryan?

  You know, we had, we've got a lot of stuff to talk about in a short amount of time, but you know, 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, like, this is how fucking bad this shit is.

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  So, um,

• 1:31:57Shawn Ryan?

  This is like our power grid.

• 1:31:58Speaker 03

  This is like the power grid, that's right.

• 1:32:00Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's just...

• 1:32:03Speaker 03

  The problem with it is Americans think their government is competent, and their government's gonna take care of the grid. They're gonna take care of air traffic control. Like, I don't have to think about it, because I know, like, 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 and our copper phone lines. The phone lines that we would, you're too old for this, but the rotary phone and 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

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  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, right? But connecting, taking out the copper and putting in the fiber. I still, on both ends of the fiber, have really old equipment. And so we can lay the fiber, but in the interim, we have to slow down the fiber, ratchet it down to make the equipment think that it's still running on copper. Right? You've 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, right? That's, that's great.

• 1:33:26Speaker 03

  We need new radios, new voice switches. We have the.

• 1:33:30Shawn Ryan?

  They do everything.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  We need new.

• 1:33:33Shawn Ryan?

  Everything.

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  Everything.

• 1:33:36Shawn Ryan?

  And so my question is, rather than, I mean, 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 the, all the computer equipment that's inside the tower? And why not just build a new tower and just do this all at once?

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  So in, so in Nashville, they're going to build a new tower, right? There's a, 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?

• 1:34:19Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:34:23Speaker 03

  It affects the line of sight and they got to be able to see around the airport. And by the way, really expensive. Really, like these towers are not cheap. So I have, I've asked for 31 and a half billion. About 12 billion of that roughly is for the bricks and mortars for, we have, so you have, you have the tower at the airport, then you go to Ring and you have a Tricon that controls the airspace outside of the, the, 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, every center, TRACON

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  and tower, shit, we're, 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 TRACONS and the oldest centers and build those. Right? I don't have the money to redo every tower in the country. I mean, and we're talking, you know, thousands of towers. So, 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 just, it's piecemeal together. Right? 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,

• 1:35:46Speaker 03

  keep the airspace operational and keeping it safe. Right? Which, I mean, it becomes very complicated very quickly, which is why no one's done it. And 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 it's, and again, the safety component is real. You've 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, yeah, the software we use is, you know.

• 1:36:16Shawn Ryan?

  But what else is like, what else is fucked up? I mean, I've been talking about the power grid for years. I mean, the Department of Transportation is 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, like.

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  What else is out there?

• 1:36:34Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah, that's, I mean, and that's just, that's not even all transportation. That's just air traffic controllers. We got.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  That's just one small.

• 1:36:41Shawn Ryan?

  And.

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:43Shawn Ryan?

  Space.

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  Everything.

• 1:36:45Shawn Ryan?

  And then all the other, all the other administrators out there that are new, that are coming in, that are like, oh, I mean, I can't, I can't even imagine what right is thinking.

• 1:36:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:55Shawn Ryan?

  You know, walking into that job. I mean, that's, people at least know about how fucked up the, the power grid is.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:04Shawn Ryan?

  What else is there? What else is, I mean, we're talking about, I mean, I just spent a lot of time with, with Secretary of the Army, Driscoll. He's trying to unfuck all of that and it's, it's just.

• 1:37:19Speaker 03

  It's decades.

• 1:37:20Shawn Ryan?

  It's everywhere you look.

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  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, I think, literally, I'm like, this is broken. This is how I want to fix it. And his gut is amazing. He'll, he'll, he'll, he might go like, I'm like, okay, I'll, I'm gonna 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 he, that he backs us up, he's, 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 carte blanche to move at a way different speed.

• 1:38:04Speaker 03

  We have now a little over three years to get all of this shit done. And to move really fast and really safe. And, and that's what, that's what we're doing. But again, passing the buck, because you, 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, I think we've been, we've been wildly successful in the, in, in the policies we've instituted. But it's because we show up every day and we try. We try really hard, but just, just, just try to do what's right by way of the American people. And even, don't layer in the, a lot of this, there's, there's a lot of political fights that we need to have. And politics is there.

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  But a lot of this stuff is, just do what's right by the American people. Make it better for the people. Politics don't have to, keep the politics out. Like air traffic control, no politics. Let's build roads and bridges. Keep the politics out, let's, let's, let's build them as fast as we can. I need the Congress to help. So, 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 gonna build over a, we have a, we have a road, we're gonna, we're gonna redo it. We gotta go new permitting. So if we could, if the Congress would help us restructure that, we can spend money so much more effectively.

• 1:39:33Speaker 03

  It's our 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, it takes forever. And I think there might have been a point where.

• 1:39:43Shawn Ryan?

  Was there ever a plan? I mean, let's.

• 1:39:47Shawn Ryan?

  Was there ever a plan to re- I mean, I notice this shit everywhere I go. It's like, I mean, look, driving down the road, I mean,

• 1:39:55Shawn Ryan?

  done a lot of traveling because of the podcast. Now we've gone to a lot of different countries and I mean, and you know, I mean, I think we're pretty close to the same age you grew 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. So the infrastructure over here looks a little bit nicer. The roads are a little better.

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  You gotta take cap on this water, Sean.

• 1:40:24Shawn Ryan?

  Oh. But, you know, I mean, so what I'm asking is, I mean, isn't there, is there some kind of budget or schedule on how much money should be reinvested in airports, public transportation, trains?

• 1:40:40Speaker 03

  So we, so, um, we, our budget's over a hundred billion dollars. Um, we, 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 like big projects that need to be done.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  And so, but then you have EVs that don't pay taxes, right? EVs don't pay a gas tax.

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

  The money we bring into the trust fund isn't enough to cover the infrastructure needs that the country has.

• 1:41:15Speaker 03

  And 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 could do them way faster. Let's fix truly the permitting process that takes forever. Just drives up the cost of, of these projects. Number one. And number two, if you put all these requirements on me that I have to, that I have to have all these environmental, you know, climate change studies and shit on the project. And then you add on to that that I have to have DEI. I got a, I got a contract based on someone's race or their sex. All of these things are driving up the cost of a project.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  And if we could say, listen, we're not going to consider, again, if you're a disadvantaged business, that's great, and 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, the, the climate stuff. And if we can fix the permitting, shit, we can, if we build, we can build faster and with about the same amount of money and we can fix the country. But, but we've, we've, we've shackled ourselves because we've become immobile. We can't build shit in this country anymore. And that becomes the problem. And so we're talking about, you know, the, the, um, the consequence of the bad policy. So let's not deal with, you know, about the, the, the, the cost and the projects.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  Let's, let's go back to the, as Kamala Harris would say, the root cause, which is the structure on which we're forced to build, which is, which is, it just doesn't work. Does that make sense?

• 1:42:52Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. What about, what about safety in public transportation? I mean, it wasn't long ago, I think, I don't, maybe there's even still there. I mean, National Guard, I think it was National Guard that was, you know, kind of 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 mean, it's, it's, what do, does that fall under you? Does public transportation safety fall under?

• 1:43:23Speaker 03

  So that, so that, or the Daniel Penny?

• 1:43:26Shawn Ryan?

  Daniel Penny?

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  In, in New York. So, um, so just 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 like, I want everybody on public transportation. Like, that's, 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.

• 1:44:10Speaker 03

  It's gonna, it's gonna be much quicker. They're not gonna get stuck in traffic. So they wanna 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 gonna be safe. I know that their lives are not in danger. I feel comfortable sending them. But that's not the story of American public transit. New York, I mean, what, what, what these cities have done is they've, 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.

• 1:44:51Speaker 03

  And it's not safe. And so people don't wanna ride it. Um, and I, I, I'm fighting with liberal cities, trying to tell them, listen, if you don't make your system safe, we're not gonna fund you. Right? If you don't clean it up, we're not gonna fund you. And I get resistance over that. Like, that, that's actually really good politi-, good politics is make your trains clean and safe. And everyone's gonna wanna ride them. Everyone's gonna love you as a politician. Why in the hell am I sitting in DC telling you to make your, your train system safe? One of the biggest complaints I get is from riders on, whether it's in Chicago or in New York or in Boston,

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  complaining about, I want to save the system. There's fair jumpers and, you know, it's, it's riddled with criminals. That's, that, that should not be the American story. And so we are, we are working, again, I'm, the way I spend my money under, from, from Joe Biden and the requirements make it a little more challenging, but I can pull money. But they're, I don't run them. The, the local communities run them. But with the new money that's gonna go out under this administration, there's gonna be requirements, stricter requirements on how they need to provide safety to their citizens and their riders. But this is the, that, we have to have this conversation is idiotic. We have, we have, uh, trains in Philadelphia. They're starting on fire. Buses, they're starting on fire.

• 1:46:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:46:45Shawn Ryan?

  So how does it work then? I mean, if you're funding them, who, 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 did they, how does it work?

• 1:47:02Speaker 03

  So, so on the, on the federal system, I have, on Amtrak, we have federal officers that work for us on Amtrak. But, 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, right? So they, 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, that have to develop, you know, do we want to do an expansion? When do we need new cars? And so, and they'll come to us and say, well, we, we, we want this much money to do this project.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Or, you know, we want, we want our share, by the way, of the, 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, you know, 20% to go to public transit. That's a different conversation. But, so I look at the money that we do give them and I'm, I'm willing to have conversations to drive public safety. And if not, I threaten them with withholding the cash. And they've improved, but they have to, 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.

• 1:48:29Speaker 03

  But they're, they're in charge of running their system. We'll do oversight, right? We do safety inspections. And we also help fund. And that's how, that's a leverage point that we can use. Does that make sense?

• 1:48:43Shawn Ryan?

  What is the pushback from?

• 1:48:46Shawn Ryan?

  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, how the fuck do you? How do they, how do they push back against that?

• 1:49:07Speaker 03

  That's, that, that response has been different. Right? They've, they've actually just, because they had no cash bail.

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  They've, they've changed their, their, they've 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, this is directly tied into the criminal justice system and the, and the liberal idea that, you know, we don't want to incarcerate people. We want to let everybody out. No bail. And 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

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  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, that's, that's not their home. That's not their shelter. The cities have to figure out something else to do with, with, with, with the mentally ill. How do I treat them? How do I house them? But it's, 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 still tell me they're safe. They tell me that, you know, 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 fare jumping, kick out the homeless.

• 1:50:45Speaker 03

  I mean, this is, it's not, these are not, we don't need, the solution's not complicated. It's very, very easy. It's just that their, their liberal ideology won't let them do it. And then that becomes, that becomes the problem.

• 1:50:57Shawn Ryan?

  Man. Man.

• 1:51:01Shawn Ryan?

  Let's, let's, let's, let's talk about, I mean, you know, we're seeing more and more EVs and autonomous vehicles and, and, you know, I mean, the, the, was it the robo taxi?

• 1:51:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:12Shawn Ryan?

  Is that the, is that Tesla's new, you know, taxi? And, and so we're seeing these self-driving cars and I just, all this autonomous vehicles is, they're massive right now. And so what, what is the, what is the, what is transport, what is just public road systems? I mean, what do they look like in five to 10 years as we continue to move down the autonomous vehicle?

• 1:51:36Speaker 03

  So we're, we're on the cusp of the most transformative time period in American travel. It's, it's, things are going to change faster and then, in, in the tenure I have at DOT than any, any time, I think, in recent history. And so to talk about that, so, um, again, auton- autonomous technology has been remarkable. It's been, it's, it's advancing, um, at incredible speed. So we lose about 40, 42,000 lives a year on the road. Way too many. Um, I do think that, uh, this technology can help. Again, people pick up their phones, all like, I'm grabbing my phone and I'm driving and a text comes in or, you know, I'm texting someone, like, this is the shit that kills people.

• 1:52:21Speaker 03

  Right? Or people drink and drive. So I do think the autonomous technology is going to, um, radically improve safety on the roadway. Um, I want people to choose what they, what they want, but you might find a time when you don't buy a car, which, but that's not me. I'll always have a car. Like, I like the freedom of having my own car and I want to drive my own car. Like, maybe that's generational, but that's freedom. But there would be a time where you don't need one and just, you're going to have an autonomous vehicle come by and pick you up and, you know, drop you off. And when you go into 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, um, from you and it's autonomous.

• 1:53:04Speaker 03

  So I think, I think the, the Uber model with autonomous model is going to change the way people use vehicles.

• 1:53:12Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:53:19Speaker 03

  It could be. Or it could drive the, for those who are on the cusp, it'll make that, it'll make it less expensive and more user-friendly potentially. We do have the potential of tech, with technology, if you look.

• 1:53:35Shawn Ryan?

  So you, you think that a lot more people are gonna be gravitating towards public transportation? Than owning their own vehicles?

• 1:53:43Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:54:01Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:54:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it would, well, I don't know if I'd call Uber public, I mean, I think public transportation is when the public provides transportation with buses. And, and, and trains, this is a private company providing public, uh, private, private transit.

• 1:54:17Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, with these, with the stuff that we're seeing, you know, Elon come up with robo taxis, all these things, I mean, are we gonna start seeing those as, as public transportation? No bus drivers?

• 1:54:28Speaker 03

  You could.

• 1:54:29Shawn Ryan?

  School buses?

• 1:54:30Speaker 03

  Hundred percent. And it would be, it would, it, 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 wanna get on it. And then you're picking up and dropping people off, off the route that's not actually where they wanna go. You might more cost effectively be able to use this autonomous technology to, to take people from where they are to where they actually wanna go and do it cheaper than, you know, using the bus system to do it. So yeah, that we could have a public transportation component as well. But also on the congestion side, again, there, there's a whole conversation that we have to have about how this information is used and the security of the information and individual liberty, which I am very concerned about.

• 1:55:15Speaker 03

  But if we set that aside, which I would never set it aside, but just for the conversation's sake, you could have vehicles, you know, when we look at the congestion on, on, on our, 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'll be interesting as this is all developed and my, my job is. To, as the technology evolves, I'm kind of the Goldilocks, right? I can't, I can't let regulation go too far. Where if bad things happen, people get hurt, then it's going to set us back, you know,

• 1:55:59Speaker 03

  five or 10 years. And I can't 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, right? And it's a, it's a 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, 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 else is, what's also going to change? And we're, and by the way, so we, you already have, I think it's in Austin.

• 1:56:42Speaker 03

  Tesla's already doing this with the robotaxi and we're going to see this, you know, how does it go there? And you'll see more deployment around, around the country. But, but drone deliveries. Drones are going to radically change the way your products move. I'm going to take vehicles off the street. And right now they're about three and a half pound deliveries to five pound deliveries. But yeah, 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, from the drugstore, whether you went shopping and, you know, you forgot to grab something at the store. Drone, drone delivery is, is going to radically change the way products move.

• 1:57:26Speaker 03

  And I want that technology to be American technology, which means I have to get the regulation right. And then you've seen these eVTOLs, these Ubers in the air, the electric, this electric helicopter. You haven't seen these?

• 1:57:39Shawn Ryan?

  I think, I think I've seen, I think I've seen these.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  Okay, you gotta check it out. So this is, so this is the next tranche of air mobility.

• 1:57:48Shawn Ryan?

  Is this actually happening right now?

• 1:57:50Speaker 03

  Oh shit, yeah, like this, yes, 100%.

• 1:57:52Shawn Ryan?

  Where?

• 1:57:54Speaker 03

  So we're testing them around the country, but you know, there's a, there's a big test facility down in, down in Texas. So what'll happen is, again, joby beta, we had a number of, I mean, big investments have gone into, into these, into these eVTOLs. And you will, there's, there's different ranges on these, right? They can go 30 miles, some 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, all different

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  models, and come right down. And so you need a pilot in them now. Eventually, those will be autonomous as well.

• 1:58:47Shawn Ryan?

  You need a pilot in them now?

• 1:58:49Speaker 03

  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 that come down, will pick you up and take you 40 miles, 30 miles, and do a quick.

• 1:59:11Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:59:11Speaker 03

  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, the most complicated airspace in the world. We have more planes than any, like, no one has what we have. More complicated, more complex, more airplanes, we're even, 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.

• 1:59:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, who's gonna be, who's gonna ask that? I mean, the autonomous stuff, I mean, that's, we're now making fighter jets that are outperforming world-class fighter pilots autonomously. And so then, you know, when I hear that, I mean, I just had Brendan Sang on from Shield AI, who just did the, you know, big unveiling of the X-Bat. And...

• 2:00:20Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, when you see stuff like that come out, it's it's like, oh, man, like, commercial pilots. Done. Done. We have something that's going to outperform an F-22, but we're not autonomously doing commercial airlines yet. That's I mean, it's done, right? It's done.

• 2:00:42Shawn Ryan?

  And then when you when you're talking about all these drones and all the I mean, I'm just 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. Nobody 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 deliveries become fully autonomous? And then you're going to have to have to de-conflict 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

• 2:01:26Shawn Ryan?

  going to be more crowded. So I would think it's just a matter of time before all commercial before anything that leaves the ground is autonomous.

• 2:01:37Speaker 03

  So I think as you as you have more acceptance for autonomous vehicles, which probably make people feel that that's that's one threshold, the autonomous eVTOLs, 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 I that maybe one day, I think that's the last tranche. I think people want to have a pilot on their airplane.

• 2:02:04Shawn Ryan?

  You think so?

• 2:02:05Speaker 03

  I do. I know I do. I want a pilot. I the the eVTOL, yeah, I'd probably do that with autonomous.

• 2:02:15Speaker 03

  But on the jet, hmm, I want a pilot. Now, it's all becoming far more automated and there's far more technology. You know, you can.

• 2:02:24Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, man. Then we had all that DAI shit. We got all these people that are being pilots that should never have been a fucking pilot.

• 2:02:31Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:02:32Shawn Ryan?

  I might lean towards the autonomous version, to be honest with you, but.

• 2:02:36Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, but you mentioned the fighter jet stuff. I mean, it was like I read an article about how the autonomous fighter jet versus the ace American pilots, they'll take risks that the pilot won't, right? They'll do shit that no pilot would do, taking risks that no pilot would take, which makes them that much, that much better in the airspace, which truly is wild. And again, if this is your space, but you think about, about the future of, of warfighting and how is, I mean, the revolution that's going to happen on how battles are fought is, is everything is, everything is going to change. And even I mentioned drones.

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  So drones have amazing commercial benefits to America. But on the flip side, there's a substantial national security risk to drones, right? 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, there's good debates 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.

• 2:03:55Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm. Let's talk about shipbuilding a little bit. I mean, I didn't, I didn't realize that shipbuilding fell under DOT as well. I mean, that's a, that's a topic that we talked, talk about quite a bit here.

• 2:04:07Speaker 03

  So we have, by the way, so I have, I have roads, bridges, semis, pipelines, ports.

• 2:04:17Shawn Ryan?

  Pipelines too, huh?

• 2:04:18Speaker 03

  Airports, airplanes.

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, we regulate, we regulate all the equipment on cars on the, on the safety side.

• 2:04:30Speaker 03

  Everyone else I'm, I'm leaving, we have, we have trains, public transportation. So yeah, it's a huge, it's a huge department. But I think if you look at what's happened in global shipbuilding, you know, you had the, you know, you, we, we've lost the industry here and I think it comes back to those number of factors. One of it was regulation, other labor factors came into play, but it went overseas, right? We're in, you know, South Korea, a huge producer. But then China one day says, we want to build ships and shit in, you know, less than 10 years, they're a global powerhouse in shipbuilding.

• 2:05:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I think US is less than 1% of global shipbuilding capacity. China is over 50%.

• 2:05:14Speaker 03

  That's right. And so then the question becomes, is that a problem?

• 2:05:19Shawn Ryan?

  I'd say that's a big problem.

• 2:05:20Speaker 03

  A big friggin' problem, right? It's like, I mean, so what's interesting is like Trump saw that and it's like, hell no. We're like, we're going to build ships in America again, or even steel. You need, you need to produce steel in your country or you're screwed, right? So, um, so we're navigating, you know, the, the president's priorities are on shipbuilding, which are ours as well.

• 2:05:42Speaker 03

  But we forgot how to do it, like, we don't know how to do it well. And it's more expensive to do it here right now. And so what we have to do is then we, we need investments from government to bring in industries, US companies with foreign partners that know how 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. Where, where we can take it, we can take it off the shipping industry itself, even the foreign, the foreign carriers or the, um, the, the foreign ships to pay for it. But, um, that, we're working with Congress on that and with, um,

• 2:06:25Speaker 03

  With O M B to 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 like we owned the seas, man, like we were the best. We had we built all the ships. We sailed the ships with the best sailors like this. It was it was critically important for our national defense and we just kind of gave it up. We just kind of 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.

• 2:07:09Shawn Ryan?

  You know, what's what's you know what's interesting? I don't know if you have any insight to this, but I mean, when we talk about, you know, the allocation of taxes and, you know, how bad the energy grid is in the is in the country and a lot of the challenges that you're facing as Secretary of Transportation, I mean, 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 mean, we haven't seen any, I mean, I don't, I'm unaware of any major improvements in our power structure. I'm familiar in any

• 2:07:48Shawn Ryan?

  major improvements in in our roads or our bridges and our shipbuilding and any of the stuff that we've talked about. I mean, we just talked about the air traffic controlling towers. Where did all the fucking money go? There's been zero improvements, at least that I've seen.

• 2:08:07Speaker 03

  And I love that you talk about the grid because I mean,

• 2:08:10Shawn Ryan?

  It's a fucking atrocious.

• 2:08:11Speaker 03

  And what happens? The grid goes down? Like, a lot of people die. A lot of people die. And again, that 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, I don't.

• 2:08:28Shawn Ryan?

  Not only that, not only that, there's been money allocated, you know, for these institutions. Where did it go?

• 2:08:35Speaker 03

  So, okay, so I can only tell you our experience. So, air traffic control. I'm just going to give you this one. Twenty years ago, they said, "We need a new brand new air traffic control system. We're gonna call it next gen, next generation of..." I think the Congress spent $20 billion on this. They didn't do shit. Like, 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

• 2:09:18Speaker 03

  technology, it was already freaking old. Like, the money, $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, they're not smart, they're not thoughtful, they're not strategic. And so, we sit here with, but again, who knows, if you don't watch your show, who knows that the grid is shit? Like, I think most people think, "Oh no, the government, they won't let that happen. The grid's gotta be great." Jeez. They're mean, like, 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."

• 2:10:02Speaker 03

  So I think that's, so back to shipbuilding, it's, it's the president setting it as a priority. And when he says it, I think most people go like, "Yeah, actually, that probably is really important. We probably should build ships in America. Let's figure out how to do it." I have the Merchant Marine Academy. So, this is, 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 school's for free, and we have, we want these excellent US mariners in our fleet that if the, if the military needs assistance, we can pull these great mariners into the

• 2:10:41Speaker 03

  academy, pull them in to the, pull them into the government, into the Navy. And, yeah, and they also provide the support for, 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.

• 2:11:05Speaker 03

  I found out that in the last administration, the kids at the academy went four months without hot water. I'm like, well, huh? How can they not have hot water? Well, the last administration wanted to have electric boilers. And 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, wow, like we're tough and we're strong. Like we were the merchant marine. We don't have hot water. Their dishwasher broke. And so they they were eating on paper plates and paper forks. At a US service academy, this is the way these young men and women have been treated.

• 2:11:50Speaker 03

  And they're the most amazing young men and women. I'm like, holy shit. I'm I'm I'm I have faith in America when I see those young people at that academy and how hard they work. It's a great school. And 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 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 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, you know, Inflation Reduction Act.

• 2:12:35Speaker 03

  That, I mean, it's been 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 frick are the roads and bridges? Like, what the hell did you do with the money? Because I don't I don't see beautiful infrastructure 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 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 on providing for the American people, delivering for the American people. And I just don't I don't think that's been the model. And President Trump has absolutely flipped it on its head.

• 2:13:18Speaker 03

  It's like, no, we are we give deliverables.

• 2:13:22Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm. What so? Excuse me. What can what can Americans expect?

• 2:13:31Shawn Ryan?

  Improvement wise from Department of Transportation in the next three years.

• 2:13:36Speaker 03

  So you're gonna see us build faster, right? We're gonna build infrastructure faster. We are gonna push safety on our transit systems. You know, we're not gonna fund transit systems that aren't gonna make their systems safer for their ridership. We're gonna, I'd like to see high-speed rail in America. I really would. It's possible. There's a project now, Bright Line 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 it should be, we should be able to build it at a reasonable cost. We shouldn't, you mentioned I cut the California high-speed rail.

• 2:14:20Speaker 03

  It was gonna be a hundred billion dollar project. They spent sixteen billion dollars and hadn't laid one track. I mean, just pissed away the money. I think you're gonna see air traffic control way better. It's gonna take me time. Like, I can't fix this stuff overnight, but you're gonna see massive improvements in air travel. And you're gonna see the way people and products move in this country radically change. The autonomous vehicles, the eVTOLs and the drones will substantially change as we implement these new rules. We're also gonna, 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.

• 2:15:03Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15:04Speaker 03

  And number two, the Democrats do a great job of contorting 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 for American citizens going from one state to the next. They've contorted it to let all these Ten, fifteen 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.

• 2:15:48Speaker 03

  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, we're pushing to make sure that we've, we actually have states follow the law and we keep our roads safer because we don't have people who can't, they can't understand the language and they have a CDL that has been issued to them. It's that's unlawful and they actually don't have the skill sets to be driving a big rig in America. Like that's, that's the stuff that I think will change and it's safety driven, it's speed driven.

• 2:16:27Speaker 03

  And again, I think it's going to be, it's going to be a revolutionary time in the next, you know, three and a half years.

• 2:16:35Shawn Ryan?

  So we'll, we'll see those, we will definitely see these improvements before this administration.

• 2:16:42Speaker 03

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. I think you'll see in your airport, you'll see these eVTOL 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'll go from the airport to a port in downtown.

• 2:17:01Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, is this, that's not just DC.

• 2:17:03Speaker 03

  Oh, no, so this, these will be deployed everywhere. You'll, you'll, you'll take a, a five minute ride from the airport and you'll be in the city in Nashville. And there you sit, you're good to go. Yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna be, they'll be everywhere.

• 2:17:19Shawn Ryan?

  So what, what do they call these eVTOLs?

• 2:17:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:22Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 2:17:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:29Shawn Ryan?

  Just a huge parking lot?

• 2:17:31Speaker 03

  They'll, they'll, they'll be running back and forth out to, to get charged up. Yeah. But it'll be, it'll be like, um.

• 2:17:38Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe will people park around them?

• 2:17:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:17:41Shawn Ryan?

  You know what I mean? Like a, like a, like an airport, park your car, get on the plane?

• 2:17:45Speaker 03

  Or, or, or better, I'll park, I'll, I'll park somewhere in the city and I'll, I'll take one out to the airport. Get off and go onto the jetway and get on my, 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, you'll, you'll go from Manhattan and you'll, you know, fly out to Long Island. And these, it's not a, the choppers are loud. These are, you barely hear them. They're pretty fast. You're up and you're over and you're out. Cheaper, faster, um, moving people.

• 2:18:17Shawn Ryan?

  That's cool.

• 2:18:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:18Shawn Ryan?

  That's cool.

• 2:18:21Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into some NASA stuff.

• 2:18:23Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:18:23Shawn Ryan?

  Man, you got a lot going on. Nine kids, husband. Secretary of Transportation and NASA Administrator. What are, what, so what is, what are your plans with NASA?

• 2:18:36Speaker 03

  So the, the president put me in as the interim NASA Administrator. Until he picks the actual administrator. And the, so here's the, the, the problem has, had been it, without someone in the role, it, the, 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, um, we have to get to the moon. And we have to have a replacement for the International Space Station. Right? Those are the, those are the two big top priorities that we have right now. Number one is that we, we gotta get the moon right. Then we're gonna have to figure out what we do for our second space station.

• 2:19:20Speaker 03

  And so that's exactly what I've done. Um, we, so we had a, we had a situation where, um.

• 2:19:26Shawn Ryan?

  Why, why haven't we been to the fucking moon?

• 2:19:29Speaker 03

  Well, we have been.

• 2:19:30Shawn Ryan?

  Why haven't we been back to the moon? How long?

• 2:19:35Speaker 03

  It'll be 54 years.

• 2:19:36Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:19:40Speaker 03

  I, I think that there was, there was.

• 2:19:42Shawn Ryan?

  It was in there, box checked.

• 2:19:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was expensive. It was expensive to go to the moon. And then it was also, um, we done it. And there was more focus on lower earth orbit. Right? We wanted to evolve that technology.

• 2:19:59Speaker 03

  And 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. Right. So you have, I mean, that's the, 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, that is the way station, the stepping stone to go out

• 2:20:43Speaker 03

  and explore other, other places in the universe. And so I think we were, the organization wasn't focused. The last administration hadn't, they were trying to pivot NASA into, 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. I just, actually, I brought you a book.

• 2:21:12Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:21:13Speaker 03

  So this is, this is what, it's got a couple million dollars and a number of different comic books. So this is one that is the first woman in space. And there, but no problem with the first woman in space, but it's, it's, it's a, 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, on books like this at NASA.

• 2:21:52Shawn Ryan?

  Millions of dollars.

• 2:21:53Speaker 03

  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, what we've had is, again, so think about this. So 10 years ago.

• 2:22:10Speaker 03

  I don't think anyone would have envisioned that we'd have a space economy like we have right now. And SpaceX and Elon Musk revolutionized kind of 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 is brought the cost down. I mean, for a small satellite, I think it's going to cost you $300,000. For a little bigger one, it's going to cost you a million dollars. But people can get, 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,

• 2:22:52Speaker 03

  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 is in a couple of months. Yep. Four months. Four months. Do you know what the mission's called? No. Exactly.

• 2:23:37Speaker 03

  Do you know what Apollo is? What Apollo was? The Apollo missions. What do you mean? So NASA's Apollo mission. Brought us, that was our mission to the moon, right? Everyone around the world knew what it was. Everyone knew NASA, everyone knew what we were about at NASA and the Apollo missions to the moon. Everyone knew the space shuttles, right? 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. And 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.

• 2:24:17Speaker 03

  So NASA lives off the fumes of what they did in the past. They'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?

• 2:24:28Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:24:32Speaker 03

  We're not gonna land. We're going out and around the moon and coming back.

• 2:24:35Shawn Ryan?

  Why are we doing that?

• 2:24:36Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 2:24:37Shawn Ryan?

  What are we gonna learn from that?

• 2:24:39Speaker 03

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

• 2:24:54Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we did take a step 54 years ago.

• 2:24:56Speaker 03

  We did. But there's a, but there's a reason to, there is a reason to go back.

• 2:25:01Shawn Ryan?

  No, I'm, I'm with you.

• 2:25:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:03Shawn Ryan?

  Shouldn't the next step be a little bit bigger than the first?

• 2:25:06Speaker 03

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

• 2:25:40Shawn Ryan?

  So that's 100% true. There's helium.

• 2:25:43Speaker 03

  Helium-3.

• 2:25:44Shawn Ryan?

  We've had, we've had conflicting reports on that. We've heard that China is mining helium-3 off the moon, actually, right now.

• 2:25:53Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't know about that. But I think we want access to this remarkable power source, right? So again, that's just one, that's just one component of, um, of what you might get from the moon. You're doing this better than I do. There was a time that, I, 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 come, we, we do things differently, right? 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.

• 2:26:38Speaker 03

  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 cede? Do I don't know if within your military experience, should we cede 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 but the 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 gonna, we're gonna open this up and let different companies compete to see who can get us there first. Right? 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.

• 2:27:22Speaker 03

  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. Which is pretty cool. So in February, we're going around the moon. Yep. Have we ever done that before? Yeah, we did that. Well, we did that back in the 70s. Right? We were there. But this is, we're gonna go, I mean, we're going with way bigger equipment,

• 2:28:05Speaker 03

  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 in in the 70s, just because of the evolution of the technology. And so it's good to, it's, and by the way, what we, 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 to get to to Mars. What we're doing with vision technology on the on the lunar surface and the work we're doing on nuclear propulsion is also how you're going to get us to the to Mars and back again.

• 2:28:46Speaker 03

  So a lot is happening, but you had this agency that was adrift, that wasn't really focused. And 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 gotta, I gotta sell the missions. If America, and you're like, we're going back to the moon? In February, we're like, what? Like, holy shit. It's like Dumb and Dumber. We landed on the moon. It's amazing. And that's, and I think that's, that's the mission. I think there's opportunities to, to partner with, one of the, the greatest brand in the world is NASA. Global national brand.

• 2:29:29Speaker 03

  NASA is, is, 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. And when Americans know about it and they care about it, then the Congress cares about it and the Congress funds it. And again, I think, I think that's a really important part of, of what the role is. What, what I've done and the next administrator will have to do as well is you gotta sell a mission. You gotta sell, you gotta sell the vision. You gotta stop living off the past. Let's, let's inspire people for the future.

• 2:30:09Speaker 03

  I want the, I want the, I want the eight-year-old kid, you know, in somewhere in Missouri to not be like, we did this in 1970, that was great. No, like, I want them to go, this is what we're doing right now. Like, in my time, the cool shit that NASA's doing, I wanna do that too. Like, I wanna be part of that. I wanna give my life to this, you know, to this organization, this mission. I wanna 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.

• 2:30:42Shawn Ryan?

  Can you talk a little bit, I mean, so you, you have, if I heard this correctly, you have Blue Origin and SpaceX pitted against each other to land somebody on the moon. Did I hear that right?

• 2:30:53Speaker 03

  You did.

• 2:30:54Shawn Ryan?

  How did you incentivize them for that?

• 2:30:56Speaker 03

  So, again, I've, SpaceX, remarkable. Like, they've, they've re-envisioned how, I hate to use the word re-envision, because I feel like I'm a Democrat. Re-envisioned, 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, shit, are we going to beat the Chinese? Or but 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,

• 2:31:41Speaker 03

  how 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. Hey, because they, but they have a later. So I'm talking about Artemis 3 when we land on the moon. SpaceX has Artemis 4 landing on the moon. Blue Origin has Artemis 5 landing on the moon. So they're working on a lander. So I said, hey, is there any way you could pull up your, your lander to get us to the moon faster? And then I asked some others as well. And Blue came back and said, we think we can do this by the summer of, of, of 28. Wow. And you, you have to modify our current contract. I'm like, yeah, we'll do that.

• 2:32:24Speaker 03

  And I'm going to modify X's contract. So I announced, we're going to have a, 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. And so we did. And 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, that are going to compete. And America's going to win in this. We, we win because of this competition. And we're going to, 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.

• 2:33:07Speaker 03

  I haven't done that yet because Blue and SpaceX have current contracts with us to land on the moon. So I was able to, 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, it's an exciting time. Good thinking. Was that your idea? Yeah. Nice thinking. Well, this end with the team, we go like, can we do this? Should we do this? If these, you know, what, how can we help SpaceX? How can, you know, how can we engage Blue? But again, I'm the one who said, I'm gonna call the ball and we're gonna do this. And the president loves competition. The president wants America to win.

• 2:33:51Speaker 03

  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 companies compete for us. That happened at the start of the Biden administration. And, but, yeah, it's gonna be great.

• 2:34:25Shawn Ryan?

  I'm excited. I'm excited. I wanna see what February's all about. That'll be, man, I had no idea we were doing that.

• 2:34:33Speaker 03

  So the Artemis 2 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 gonna 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, you can't, we're not gonna shut down our mission to the moon. You can't stop that and start it. The safety of the mission is critical. So that whole, all the science and all the movement around this Artemis 2 mission is

• 2:35:14Speaker 03

  fully funded and fully functional right now, not being affected by the shutdown. But we have the rocket, right? We've just put the capsule on top of the rocket. In December, we're gonna 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 gonna 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 go down there, we'll put you in the capsule, see where they live for all these days. Not big. They have to know each other. So where do you use the restroom? Like, what the hell? Like, how does this, how does this work?

• 2:35:55Speaker 03

  And, yeah, to see how, how it's constructed and the size of it. They'd love to sit down and talk to you. We'll set that up.

• 2:36:02Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I would love to do it.

• 2:36:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:04Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 2:36:05Speaker 03

  And then if you can read some more literature on, you know, the, the woke coloring books and comic books from NASA.

• 2:36:13Shawn Ryan?

  I will, I will. Well, any other, um, any other aspirations or anything you want to talk about with NASA?

• 2:36:21Speaker 03

  Uh, after that, we're gonna, we're gonna, um, we gotta focus on what we do on lower earth orbit, you know, and the replacement to the space station. Do we have corporate partners that, you know, we have to, we have to be an anchor at NASA? But we need to see if we can get more private capital in, right? We want to have sustained, you know, Americans in lower earth orbit. So that's, 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 gonna come. Again, I think, I want the right leaders, want the right leaders, with the right teams

• 2:37:06Speaker 03

  to accomplish the missions. Sometimes you can get bloat, and if you have a conference call with 250 people, people on the conference call, there's a problem. No decision's gonna be made with 250 people on a conference call. That's some of the shit that happens.

• 2:37:19Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:37:20Speaker 03

  So we are going to, we're gonna, we're gonna restructure the leadership. We're gonna restructure the organization with people who are, are mission-driven, that are accountable. And I think that part of it will be really important to, to make sure that this, this is more successful than it's been in the past. You mentioned like, so I took, I don't, I've told, I've, I don't want to be the administrator, I can't be the administrator of NASA. I'm not asked, never asked to be the administrator of NASA. I have said, though, I, 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 was my job to put it out there. Here's the problem. People are trying to preserve NASA.

• 2:38:05Speaker 03

  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?

• 2:38:12Shawn Ryan?

  Can't think of anything.

• 2:38:14Speaker 03

  25 years ago was a space station. That's, that's pretty cool. It's a elegant, beautiful machine. Like, that's pretty great. Like, what is, what are we doing? And so they're preserving a model. I do think you have to, again, don't send it to DOT, send it to Commerce. Then 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 as, with an administrator, and it can be, it can be pushed and shoved and cajoled in ways that I think hasn't benefited it. And so to have someone, again, don't, by the way, it would never happen under my term

• 2:38:51Speaker 03

  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? Again, we have some cool science missions, we actually, we do. But big things that inspire people? We're not doing it. We are going to now. So that's been, but, you know, the president's in the process. He'll, he'll pick someone to, to lead the organization and I'll be 100, 100% supportive and we'll, we'll move, you know, we'll move seamlessly forward.

• 2:39:33Speaker 03

  But the moments that I have at NASA, I'm not going to, I'm not going to waste a day. Haven't wasted a day. I think we've done more in, 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. And I think even with this competition, it's going to, it's going to, it's going to bear fruit in the coming years.

• 2:39:56Shawn Ryan?

  Good, that's, that's awesome to hear. Do you think, do you think Jared Isaacson has a chance of getting that slot?

• 2:40:04Speaker 03

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

• 2:40:37Shawn Ryan?

  It's good to hear.

• 2:40:38Speaker 03

  With NASA.

• 2:40:39Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:40:46Speaker 03

  Can I tell you what, just one, can I give you a warning?

• 2:40:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:49Speaker 03

  Don't, like, you go out there and you start swinging that axe, 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.

• 2:41:03Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:41:05Speaker 03

  The toe, I'm sending you a toe that you chop off.

• 2:41:08Shawn Ryan?

  But...

• 2:41:09Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me, man, I appreciate it, it's been a blast.

• 2:41:11Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man, it was an honor to have you here, so thank you for making it.

• 2:41:15Speaker 03

  Awesome, bro. Cheers.

• 2:41:28Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching Sean Ryan's show from, if you get anything out of this, please like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, please leave us a review on Apple and Spotify Podcasts.