Wake that ass up in the morning the Breakfast Club Morning. Everybody is dj n V Charlemagne to God. We are to Breakfast Club. Angel RII is with us as well, and we have a special guess in the building, the US Secretary of Transportation.
Pete Boody Judge. Welcome back. Thank you, Secretary Pie, it's good to be back.
Good news here.
Before you came in, I was talking about Secretary Pete about his cars, and you were saying that I see some way that he likes the new Mustang, the electric Mustang, and that you They said you were in it.
Yeah, because I thought we should practice what we preached. We're encouraging electric vehicles, and I thought we ought to do that too. So our security detail we had them get a Mustang Mochi, which is how I usually get around when I'm in Washington, and it's great. My favorite part is when they took delivery of it. Part of what standard. You know, they get the keys, they get the paperwork, and then they get a gas card for
buying gas, you know, to reimburse that. And they're never going to need that because it doesn't need any gas. Electric taxpayers will never have to pay for a drop a gas going into that car.
Question, does the Secretary of Transportation have to pay for transportation? Do you get free calls and stuff like that?
Sure, it depends. So if I'm on personal travel then then yeah, obviously that's that's out of my pocket. If it's work travel or if there's you know, security you need to get around, then it's a little different. But yeah, I mean usually you know, you get free calls. I do not get free cars. No, Like I've like, we got a minivan that that you know, if I'm dropping the kids off daycare, that's just our our family car. You know we got I never thought I'd be a
minivan guy, and then you got kids. We very much. It's actually great. Yeah, And it's it's a plug in that one plugs in too, so you can it's a hybrid, so you plug it in, you get maybe thirty forty miles off of the electric and if you go any further than that, like if we're on a road trip, then it switches to game.
You can get a cooler car. You can get like an electric escalade or something. You got the electric suv. You don't have to drive a menis that out? Act like you're from Indiana all your life.
Now I'm literally from Indiana and I'm literally a dad. We're Midwestern dads. I got two kids. I never thought i'd be a minivan guy, but I gotta say it's kind of that's kind of the right answer for us right now.
I'm meant to ask this before we get jump into it. When you talk about the electric grid, right when it comes to all these electric CAUs they're hopefully focusing I guess in the next five years they want all calls
to turn over to electric. Do we have a strong enough grid to hold all those electric cars and all the electric battery cause and everything that we need, and also when people are driving from state to state, is enough to make sure that these people won't run out of electric and be on the side of the roads.
Right, So the honest answer is we cannot run tomorrow's cars on today's grid. But the other part of the answer is that's why we're upgrading the grid and the chargers so presidence goes. By the end of this decade, we want half of new car sales to be electric. We think we can get there. It's not for everybody. It's not for everybody. Overnight prices still need to come down, but we think we can get to half by the
end of the decade. We also have to have about half a million chargers around the country by the end of the decade, and we're funding that. Part of what was in the President's Infrastructure Law is about seven and a half billion dollars that we're using to really do two things. One is where you're talking about, where you go out on a road trip, you know there's going to be a gas station. We got to make sure when you go on a road trip, you know there's
going to be a charging station. But the other piece is we got to make sure there's community charging. So if you live in a single family home where you got a garage, then it's easy. You can just plug in your wall. At our house in Michigan, we just plug it in a regular wallplug. But if you're in an apartment building, if you're in a dense area, and especially if you're in a low or middle income area, then it might not yet be profitable for companies to
put in chargers. So we've got to make sure that we accelerate that process, put a little incentive in to make the economics move in the right direction so that everybody has access because then they have a chance at the savings that come from not having to buy gas. So it's definitely a process the grid has to be upgraded to. But remember it's also complicated and expensive to move millions and millions and millions of gallons of liquid
fuel around this country every day. At the end of the day, in the long run, it's more efficient to move electrons through a so to speak, through transmission lines than it is to move liquids around. But you know this is not going to happen overnight. It's going to be years. We're underway, we're working out.
I have to one questions before we jump inc the electric cost stuff, because this is something that I'm into. They say that those batteries are just as bad.
For the environment as gasoline and fuel. Is Is that true?
No? But there are issues with them, uh, And a lot of the issues have to do with how the materials that go into them are extracted. So we've got to make sure that they are extracted under good labor conditions and their mind appropriately. We're trying to get more of that done in the US. Under the Trump administration, they didn't care a lot about electric vehicles. As you know, China got an edge, and China does not care about things like mining, environmental conditions, or child labor, any of
those other issues. We do. And so we're working to make sure that we get more of these things sourced domestically. But it's a different set of problems, so that those are issues we take them seriously. But the problem with burning regular gas is it's causing the climate to change. That's not the problem that they were worried about on when it comes to batteries. Climate change is getting faster,
it's getting worse. Is real. People can pretend otherwise, and I know there's a lot of oil and gas profits to be protected by pretending otherwise. It's just it's just true. We can see it all around us. And the biggest part of the US economy. Of all these sectors of the economy, the one that puts the most carbon pollution into the air is transportation. So to me is transportation sector.
That means our goal has to be to try to be the biggest part of the solution, and part of that is cars, and big part of that is going electric.
Last question I had was Elon Musk was very mad at you guys. Right, they said that he was giving you guys the middle finger, that he wanted some tax rebates, and you guys wouldn't give them the rebates, so he decided to take the money off of his cars himself.
Right.
That's when the Tesla's were at his lowest at at one time. What should your thought process on that?
And Elon Musk, Look, what they have built a Tesla is extraordinary and that's part of why evs are available. Push the market forward, biggest maker of vvs in the country. Our job is to try to make sure that the industry as a whole does well, and we want to make sure that it does well in America with American workers. And obviously we care about workers having a free and fair choice to join a union, which some auto companies do and some auto companies do not. Past that, we're
not out to put a thumb on the scale. We just need to make sure these cars are safe and we want any business on American soil with American workers making American cars to thrive.
Mayor Pete, you know one of the things that Mayor Pete now, Secretary.
Pete, I'll always answer to Mayor and I.
Love that I think it really prepares you for where you are now. I want to just commend you on the fact that you've been one of the most consistent administration voices.
That have been on this show.
That's right, And I also think that it's really interesting that other than that, the most times I hear about you is when something went wrong in transport to and nine times out of ten, your responsibility is to hold
the folks accountable. You didn't do it, for example, the railroad derailments earlier this year, and it would love for you to talk to the audience about how you responded to the railroad administration responded to those derailments, the fact that they happened regularly every day, but those in particular.
Yes, the one that god the most attention was in February this year in Ohio there was a Norfolk Southern train who was carrying hazardous materials. It derailed and it sent up it in order to prevent an explosion, they actually burned off some of the material that was in there. Thankfully, there were no fatalities there, but it was terrifying for the town there, called East Palestine, and there was a lot of frustration, a lot of anger, and a lot
of misinformation that really terrorized the community. And when that happened, over time, I realized that we had to change the way we approached these Normally, a Secretary of Transportation doesn't go to an active HASTHMAD site or an active crash site, not because people in this job don't care about the issue, but because we have a National Transportation Board Safety Board. It's designed to be independent. They do the investigation, we
do the policy. But what I found was people wanted and needed to see a visible administration figure there, and honestly I was a little slow to see the importance of that given the misinformation that was going on. So I knew that I had to get out there and do something that was a little bit of a break from the norm but was very important so that the people who live in that community knew that they wouldn't have to wait a year for the NTSB report to come out to know that we cared about them and
we were supporting. Now, to be clear, our department was on the ground from the first hours of that incident. It's not like we weren't present or like we forgot, but the information layer and the things that they were being told as they had very legitimate questions like is my house safe? Is the water safe? Which it was, but they needed a testing to prove that is the air safe. The community was so terrorized by that that we had to take additional steps to get good information there.
But here's the other thing that's really important. When I went out there, I wasn't just there to show my face. I was there to talk about safety reforms that we need. That incident woke up a lot of Americans to something people didn't know, which is that all along we have had every single day on average to Arouilda, were about a thousand to rail onents a year in this country, and there's nothing new. In fact, it used to be more. They came down from many thousands a year because of regulations.
People don't always want to hear about regulations. Regulations aren't always popular if they make us safer. And so right now, there's a bill sitting in Congress called the Railway Safety Act, bipartisan bill that would give my department more power to
hold these railroad companies accountable. It would allow us to increase the fines to something that would really get their attention, because right now, a multi billion dollar corporation might not really care that much about the fines at the level that we're allowed to assess if we catch them in a violation other measures around the physical safety of the tank cars that these chemicals move in, And it's just sitting there, and some of the same members of Congress
who couldn't wait to get on TV to try to make a part of an issue out of this still haven't gone on the record on whether they're four or against it. By February, it's going to be a year since that crash happened. And again, there are other derailments, thankfully usually not as serious, but there are other derailments
happening every day. We need those enforcement tools, we need that stepped up action, and we're doing everything we can under the laws as it exists, but we need Congress to do more too.
Is that a limit with the cars that the actual trains can carry, because anybody that lives in seventy five to seven Virginia knows that those trains are going for fifteen to twenty minutes, So is there a limit that maybe we break it up so you wouldn't have that many disriyments.
There's not, but we're looking at the safety issues of that, because now you've got trains that are a mile long, two miles long, three miles long. It is amazing. And this is another thing we're working on right now. There's actually no legal requirement on how many people need to be staffing that train. The railroad industry. Bobby has been pushing to have it be down to one. Imagine one person on a train that's three miles long. We see the back of it, no, I mean we take you
an hour to walk to the back of it. So we were putting through a rule that would establish a minimum staffing standard. But we're also looking at some of the safety implications of trains being that long. Then you have the community implications when I'm in especially in smaller communities, and they have these railroad crossings and you get stuck behind it twenty minutes and it's not crazy for your commute, but sometimes that's an ambulance, you know, Sometimes that's that's
a safety issue. Somebody really needs to get there. But we're also changing that. So we have another part that I love the Presence Infrastructure Plan is we have dollars for railroad crossing elimination. Now we can't get all of them. There's there's one hundreds of thousands of these, but we can go to some of the places. We were in North Dakota and forced North Dakota. They've been trying to get rid of this railroad crossing since I think nineteen
ninety one. Everybody in town when we went there and knew about the spot we were talking about. I think it's forty first Street that just cuts off one part of town where the university is, from another part of town. And we're finally we brought the funding that's going to allow them to eliminate that crossing. We're in Orangeburg, South Carolina. You know a lot about orange We're with the Congressman Cliburn there celebrating work that's going to help there where
you have highways and railways that cut people off. So in addition to holding the railroads accountable, we're also looking at the physical infrastructure here. Now I would be remiss if I did not mention that as we speak, House Republicans are pushing cuts to a program called CHRISSY, the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure Safety Improvement Program, which is one of the main sources of federal dollars we use to improve
the safety of our railroads. I would argue that now is the time to double down on that, not to cut it. And you're going to hear me making a lot of noise about this as they're deciding how to vote.
You know, the other thing you brought up East Palestine, which is not exactly the same as what's happening in the Middle East and Palestine is conflict. There are a lot of folks in the community who feel very strongly about the amount of four and eight dollars that are going overseas to support but aren't feeling that same type of aid and relief in our own communities. Department of Transportation is responsible for some of the relief that can
be provided to the community. So can you talk a little bit about what you all are doing in that regard.
Yeah, we're focused on what we can do with the federal dollars that have been entrusted to us to make everyday life better. It's part of why I'm here in New York.
Yea.
Yeah, So we've got the Hudson Tunnel. This is a ton of hundreds of thousands of people count on this to get their communities from here to New Jersey and beyond. It's one hundred years old. And if there was a problem that took that tunnel out of.
Service, it's one hundred years old than one.
Hundred years old, I think it was. It was finished when Teddy Roosevelt was present.
Connect new jurority dependentation.
Yeah, you've probably been through it very very often, right, and you're going through century old infrastructure. We got one in Baltimore that that we're redoing. It will be known as the Frederick Douglas Tunnel. Right now, it's known as the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel. Well, he said, the Hudson Hudson Yeah, yeah, East River Tunnel needs some work too,
and we're working on that. So and this is a major I mean the Hudson Tunnel piece alone, that's gonna be one of the biggest public works projects in modern American history.
The twenty ninety ten million dollars.
That's just the start we've got. We've got billions more identified in our transit programs, and then we're gonna we're gonna have more announcements to make about that. It's gonna be billions. But yeah, this is two hundred ninety two million dollar piece that's gonna do the concrete casing around Hudson Yards that that's a big piece of it because we really need it. People count on it every day, whether they think about it or not. In fact, our
goal is that people don't have to think about it. Yeah, if you're not thinking about infrastructure, if you're not thinking about whether there's a hole in the road that's going to screw up your car, or whether your train's going to be late because there's a problem in the tunnel, then you can think about whatever else you're dealing with in life. You can think about your job, you can think about your kids, you can think about your.
Faith, especially when you all that traffic that is going to cause because of the construction while we're doing it.
That's not what I had in mind.
But the other thing is if you put back on your mayor p heat, it's not just folks getting to work.
There are folks who are going to work on these projects.
Absolutely, and that's the because, look, some of these projects are going to take a while before they're done, but even during that period, you're talking about where things are you know, delayed or backed up. The jobs that that's creating, and we're working to make sure that that there's fair
access to those jobs. We've heard so many stories from from communities and people who look at you know, the project finally comes to their neighborhood and they say great, but nobody working on this project looks like they're from this neighbor.
My dad is the main one with the bullhorn, this bother yea.
So we've got local higher preferences that that we're now able to do under the law. We've been working with project labor agreements and community benefit agreements. I was in LA their program called Higher LAX specifically for people who are from the same zip code as Lax to get
into these building trade jobs. And some of them, you know, some of them had had been homeless in the past, some of them had had an involvement in the justice system, and we're now making good money educating their kids, buying a home. I mean, these are transformational opportunities when you get some of these construction jobs. So we're really excited about that. Will it take so some of the projects we can do in one construction season, that's going to be years.
Four years more minimal casing, so the concrete casing we think they do in about three years other parts of it are going to go well into the twenty thirties.
It's just that big of a vision when you talk about the overall connection of what's called the Gateway linking all the way there. But that's that's part of what we know you have to do. You have to have a portfolio of projects from ones are going to be done by this year to ones that you know some other Transportation secretary is going to get to cut the ribbon on one day. But that also means a pipeline of work you can expect, and you know, some of
these are a long time coming. The other big one that we're excited about that were announcing the Second Avenue subway, extending that out to one hundred and twenty fifth Street. That neighborhood has been asking for decades to get that kind of subway access and we're finally able to get it done with this kind of fun day and it's
I know that's going to change lives. Yes, the job's working on it, but also just the jobs that people are going to be able to have because they can take advantage of the Transit.
Secretary p There was a rumor that that's been going on probably since I've been alive that in any state that you're in, if the roads are bad and you hit a pothole, you can send the bill to your local or state official and they were replenishing money.
Is that true?
I would not bank on that.
I don't know why people say it every time, because if they say, if you get a flat tie, because if we pay for the roads and it is a pothole and image my tie, that there was a way to get your money back, But that's not true.
Not in any place that I've ever worked as mayor. My sworn enemy was potholes. Right. Mayors hate potholes, Yes, because you see them and you get calls about them, and you're trying.
To fix them, and I'll destroy your call.
So one other thing, I got it, Yes, But they called the pothole tax, right, So sometimes people are paying so much in terms of the cost that you then have to take on because the road's not in good shape. You would have been better off, obviously, would all be better off if the roads were better, which is why we're fixing the roads. And the single biggest piece of
all the funding we have across is trillion dollars. I think that the biggest individual set of investments ties back to the roads and the bridges that go with it, but also we're trying to make the roads last longer. We just cut the ribbon at a facilit We actually have a research facility inside of the dot. We're belonging to the dot. It's in Virginia. We have a few research facilities, but this one. One of the things I saw. There was a test bed where they've laid in different
types of pavement and concrete. If you look at it from in a cross section, that's like a layer cake, and we have three hundred censors through it, and we're going to be able to monitor and measure how it responds to different weather conditions. They have machinery that can test an eyebeam or a piece of concrete until it fails by putting one hundred thousand pounds of pressure on it or simulating a million trucks over the course of
years and years in an accelerated way. So we're trying to be smarter with the technology so that this stuff lasts longer. The big problem is in the spring. What happens is, especially if you're anywhere north of Well certainly anywhere like New York or where I come from. The freeze thaw cycle means you get some water, it gets into those cracks, then it freezes, it expands, it starts to crack the surface, then it melts. Then you get more water getting in there, and it gets worse and worse.
We think we can be much much smarter with our materials and with our technology. I know this isn't considered the sexiest thing, but I love the potential of just making our pavement more durable because it means less potholes, and it means our taxpayer money goes further so we can do more good projects.
Question about the Hudson Tunnel again. With those changes, when that increase the price of traveling, will metro cards go up again?
No, at least not as a result of what we're funding. I don't know what the plans are for MTA or how they're thinking about their fares. I know congestion pricing, which is a state project, that's part of how they're planning to fund some of their work, but no, part of what we're trying to do is provide more of the federal funding because you couldn't raise fares high enough to cover the cost of these, I just can't do a you know, fifteen to twenty billion dollar project on
the strength of the fares. There's there's a lot of money to go around people to stop. You couldn't keep using it. That's why there has to be a federal role. And by the way, I think it's fair game for there to be a federal role because even if you don't use that tunnel every day, we're all living in an economy where if that tunnel was out of service, that would impact the economy all the way back to our house in Michigan.
One of the other things that I think is important.
We of course saw the Supreme Court decimate affirmative action for higher education earlier this year during the summer. I know that a day program at SDA took some hits as well. This attorney that's on these cases is relentless about it. Are you at all concerned about the impacts on the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Program at DOT and how that might impact even some of the companies who are working on projects around the infrastructure.
I am. They're coming after our DV program too. Now, we believe that program is not just good policy, but it's legally sound. We're going to fight for it. We know that it's made a difference in terms of people getting access to these jobs and opportunities that come with it. Just yesterday I was speaking to the National Association of Minority Contractors. They are gearing up, getting ready, and by the way, what they want is a fair shot to compete.
But these are businesses that have been you know, over the years, you look in the past, systematically excluded the whole basis of the dB program. The reason why it has legal footing is that there's been a lot of proof of the disparities that have opened up. And when these businesses do get a fair shot to compete, they can do amazing work and then they create jobs as
they go. So, whether we're talking about AAA to A, which is a small business Administration program, or our own programs that go under the flagship at DBE, we're going to keep pushing because we believe in them. We're doing matchmaking. You think it's like speed dating between investors and businesses that want to grow in this way, we're doing matchmaking between people who are building transit and transportation projects and the businesses that hope to bid on it. And it's
not just. It's not just you know, if you're in heavy construction, it could be you could have an accounting or legal services or professional services business that could benefit from some of the opportunities. We even upped our own goal for the federal contracts from our department, the DOT. We upped it to twenty one percent from a category called sdb's the small Disavantaged Businesses. And we beat that goal, and we're looking at what we can do to turn
the diary higher. So we really believe in this work. I know it's coming under attack. I just don't think those attacks are legally sound. So we're gonna push.
I want to ask you about some some political stuff going on. How do you feel working with the news speak at a house, Mike Johnathan when you hate Gaith.
You know it's my job to try to work with anybody, so I will. It's kind of tough now, yeah, I mean, look, we're joking earlier about my minivan, like it's a strange feeling to be driving our kids are twin two year old to daycare, driving past the Capitol, looking at the dome of the Capitol, knowing that under it sits a speaker who thinks that my marriage ought to be against the laws. I mean not not just not being in favor of marriage, which most people in the country.
Get now, but the anti gay conversion therapy.
The conversion therapy, these laws. I mean, I don't I don't get it. But uh, but maybe he I don't know, maybe maybe we can get through to this guy. I'm not sure I've ever met him, so would you.
Want to do?
We haven't, Like, where did he even come from? Like fifty two rounds later.
They went through a lot of different steps to get to this speaker. But but again, you know, my job is to try to work with anybody. Look, I was a gay mayor in Indiana when Mike Pence was the governor, and and I fought him on on those issues, but I also worked with him on other issues because working together on the economy was the right thing to do for the city. So it's, uh, he's got departmentalized.
I think he takes it a step further than Mike PINNs. I mean he did. The criminalization of gay sex is what he talks about. He says, you know, homosexuality led to the fall of the Roman Empire, Like that's that's a bit different. I think that's a step further than Mike Pinnce.
Yeah, he seems exceptionally committed to that ideology. And I don't know how you reach somebody like that, you know, I saw somebody ask him about his worldview and he said, you know, pick up a Bible and read it, and that's my worldview. But when I pick up, first of all, this country was established by people who didn't want to
live under other people's interpretation of their own religion. But also as a Christian, I pick up a Bible and I get to a place like Proverbs twenty nine, the righteous man knows the cause of the poor, and the wicked regardeth it not. And then I'm thinking about the Speaker of the House who went out of his way to be against the child tax Credit, which when President Biden's American Rescue Plan expanded the child tax credit cut child poverty in half, and when they let it expire,
child poverty doubled. So we know that it was a cause and effect. And I just Reverend Barber, William Barber, somebody I have a lot of respect for him.
Guy.
He sometimes talks about how you see some of these figures out there who have, As he puts it, they talk, they say so much about what God says so little, and so little about what God says so much. I don't know, but we'll see if we can get through to these folks.
You know, it's interested though, right, because you're a politician, but then you're still a human at the end of the day. So that's what you gave was very politically correct answer. But when you and your husband are sitting around, the conversations got to be a lot different. I mean, the guy said that same sex relations are the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even
the strongest republic. Like, I'm trying to figure out, are there are any there anything that disqualifies you from being a politician nowadays? Obviously nothing.
I mean I look at some of the folks running around that house Republican conference, were above and beyond you know that kind of stuff. But but yeah, I mean, the thing I don't understand is sleep. That's our family
he's talking about, you know. And I just got asked about this yesterday too, and I was thinking, you know, chaos is not a bad word to use to describe what it's like around bedtime at our house when we're trying to get our kids ready for bed and we're trying to feed them and there's spaghetti flying and uh, you know, one of them won't take their shoes off and U and one of them needs a diaper change. But like that's our family. Like that's a chaos that
is rooted in love. It's not dark, it's as beautiful, it's it's and that is strengthening. I'm certain that every family, Uh, certainly, I'm certain that our family.
Is part of.
What we have in mind when when we talk about society needing protect people going about their lives, and I think about all the other families that that are terrified right now, and that that maybe you're not in as comfortable a situation as we are. Where where you've got, you know, a governor threatening to take away your kids because you took them to the doctor, to to to to see if you could support them, because they're they're
questioning their identity. How terrifying that is. Do you lose faith a little.
Bit when you think about all the things that you and your husband are thinking, and do.
You lose faith just a little bit?
Because this is our government, it's our government.
It's the only one we got. So if there's a part of it that is disturbing or discouraging, you've got to respond to that with the part of it you believe it. I mean, I can't throw off my hands and complain about the government when I've been given such a prominent role in our government, right, I just have to figure out how to use it to do the most good for the most people, which is my job. And yeah, there are things that are discouraging. Then again,
there are things that are incredibly exciting. Some of the projects that we're doing that people gave up on a long time ago, or I mean, we go to a lot of communities and they still don't believe that the money's actually coming even when we're delivering it, because it's
taken so long that they start to give up. We even got this done bipartisan, I mean, I don't think we had I don't think we had Mike Johnson on board, but we had some Republicans who crossed over and voted with us to get some of this infrastructure stuff done. So have we solved every problem? Definitely not, Or something's going to get worse before they get better. Maybe, But I believe in what we're doing, and I see good things happening around.
Us looking forward to the twenty twenty four election. You're in this role at dot Transportation Secretary. Have you thought about if you'd want to serve in any other capacity under another Biden Harrison administration. I know you're not supposed to necessarily answer this, but you are really smart, have a lot of skill sets that you developed in school as well as as a mayor. There are so many other entities and agencies that could utilize the way that
you think things through. Have you thought about any other role that you'd want to serve in.
I'm pretty absorbed just in the day job that I've got. I love public service, and I serve as the pleasure of the president. I know that, you know, the job I'm doing now is not the kind of.
Job you can do forever answer my question, But.
I also think it's it's got to be the best job in the federal government right now because we're building things that that we you know, we're building the things like my kids are going to be counting on fifty years from now. You know, fifty years from now, my kids will be going through the Hudson Tunnel. That that that we're going to be starting construction on today and being able to be at the forefront of some of
that work is incredibly rewarding. So so yeah, I mean, the only honest answer your question is, I don't know.
Do you think Biden and Heareth is still a winning ticket?
Yeah?
I mean, I gotta be careful I talk about it just because I'm here as secretary, I'm not supposed to talk campaigns. But but what I will say is I believe in the President and the Vice president. I believe in the work we're doing, and I believe in the
results that we're getting. I mean, the I I get that in so many ways, it's been a rough few years for everybody, and I get that we're still kind of coming out of some darkness from COVID to what was going on earlier with inflation, to just the political upheaval and everything that we're seeing in Congress and then the former president. But look at what's happened, like take aviation right right now, we've got a lot of frustration with airlines not being able to keep up with the
tickets they're selling. By the way, it made a lot of progress this year, cancelation's down below normal, still very expensively, and yeah, but that's because the demand has been going up. Right, it was only two and a half years ago that the big conversation about airlines was are they going to go out of business? The big conversation was how much taxpayer funding do we need to put together to make sure that the US aviation sector doesn't collapse? And that
was less than three years ago. It's you know, it's November right now, Folks are starting to think about holiday shopping, Christmas presents. Two years ago, that was just two years ago. We were looking at news stories of ships waiting their turn off the West Coast and the supply chains were so backed up. People were saying Christmas is gonna be canceled. Like, we figured it out, We got through it. We actually had an all time record high that year in terms
of retail sales. But those kinds of things are happening. A thirty five dollars insulent for seniors, and if we didn't get blocked by congressional Republicans, it would be thirty five dollar a month insulent for everybody. And I think we can still get that done. So whether it's our transportation stuff or other sides of the house, like the administration has a lot to be proud of and also a lot of work today.
Can we go back to Mike Johnson for one second. I know you got to go, but were you ever discouraged by Christianity because of the Bible's views on homosexuality? Because a lot of those guys like Mike Johnson, you know, they say they have those views because of what the Bible says. So were you ever personally discouraged? Yeah?
I think every Christian, definitely, every gay Christian has had to contend with the ways in which the Church and scripture have have been sometimes weaponized or or turned against people. But I also think that that at least as I spend time with scripture, there are parts of it that tell you about the wisdom of God, and there are parts of it that tell you about the values that prevailed at the time that it was written. We we we don't think it is outrageous to wear mixed cloth.
We don't subscribe to a lot of things that you're going to see in Leviticus. Even the most devout people don't. Don't think that those codes or ideas tell us how we ought to live today. They tell us how it was viewed as what was viewed as the norm thousands of years ago in the Middle East. But the parts that that that most speak to to me have to do with with protecting those who need to be protected.
They have to do with with infinite love. And Yeah, I think every Christian wrestles with with all of the different things and ideas and forces and and anditions that that.
That are part of that.
But and it's turned a lot of people off from religion. Right at our wedding, our pastor talked about how many people are walking away from religion entirely. Uh. And and yet I think that it can be such a force for good without ever believing that I push, you know, what I believe on anybody else, And while being adamant that no one in this country ought to have to live based on some other guy's interpretation of his own religion.
Yeah, because you referenced with Mike Johnson said earlier about his worldview, So you wanted them a worldview. Pick up the Bible and it's like, could it be possible the Bible is an outdated worldview?
Or you know which chapter and verse are you looking up? When you pick up though, right, he seems to he's fine with doubling child poverty, but he's got a problem with what goes on in other people's bedrooms. I mean, they're picking and choosing more than everybody.
It's kind of hard. It's crazy to just like gain people so much. In your last name is Johnson. Shut up, man, I'm just saying you use that one pete, secretary p used that one file that away, use that you.
Found it away, never to go back.
You appreciate you for you know what you say? You say yo, you know what, Mike Johnson, he needs to look at the tip of the files.
You know what.
I think.
I gotta go cut a river, Secretary. People appreciate you.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Secretary, appreciate you.
Thank you so much.
Oh my goodness, Angela, I think you as well. It's the Breakfast Clove, the morning wake that up in the morning, the Breakfast Club,