Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and his wife Rachel are going on a road trip with all nine of their kids, Avida, Xavier Jack, Lucia Belen, John Paul, Paloma, Maria Victoria, Margarita, Patrick Miguel and Valentina, and they would like to bring you along with them. What a beautiful family. Duffy hails from reality TV so of course they're making a YouTube series out of it. You can watch the trailer now. Parts of it look like AI but it's mostly real. We're encouraging everyone to go take a road trip to celebrate America's 250th birthday. They meet American iCars. Now my young friend, what an absolute pleasure. They meet Kid Rock. I haven't seen everything there is to see. There's drama. What's going on here? She's in the hospital, they put an IV in her. Enough of the sad stuff though, it's gonna be fun. But if you're asking, wait, did I, the American taxpayer pay for our Secretary of Transportation to go on a road trip with his family? You didn't. But on Today Explained from Vox, you might not like who did. We did it! What's up y'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, 7-time WNBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is and mom. A community for athletes, game changers and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey everybody, Sue Bird here. This week on A Touch More, I'm celebrating the start of the WNBA by breaking down what I saw on opening weekend. And we have NBC's one and only Maria Taylor to talk about her boundary breaking career in sports journalism, the NBA playoffs and her thoughts on which teams have the best chance of making the WNBA finals. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. I wore my boots at John Rich Gaming. They're very sexy. Today explained, Sean Ramos for him here to tell you about Sean Duffy or as we call him in my house, other Sean, Will Gottsake, and wrote about him for The Atlantic. We started with the most important question. Can you name all of his children? I can't. He's got nine of them. Why is Sean Duffy taking his nine children and his wife on a road trip across the country for YouTube? Ostensibly, it's to celebrate America's 250th birthday. When I reached out to the Department of Transportation about this, they were adamant that it was part of Duffy's official responsibilities here. It makes a kind of sense for him to promote the birthday in this way since he has this background in reality TV. That's how he met his wife. Sean flirted with me all the time. Part of me thinks he likes me. I still have this physical attraction and I want to have this relationship with it. They were on The Real World, the quintessential 90s reality show. This is the true story. Whatever, a seven string. And this thing is pitched as a kind of reality show too. Welcome to Montana. The Duffys, they've got tons of kids. I think they have like 11 kids. Nine. Nine, eleven, something. Is there a difference? The Duffy family and their nine kids, they go across the country. They're excited about going at the Rocky steps. Oh, I am. I am. They filmed over seven months and they're there to see the sights and appreciate American landmarks. How did you live in Boston? You don't know any like fun things to do in Boston. I believe in your piece you link to an attempt over at Rolling Stone to tally the cost of Sean Duffy's road trip that he didn't pay for. Do you recall how much this would cost an average American? Just in terms of gas alone? Right, in gas alone, Rolling Stone is saying that his particular route that he took with his family would cost $1,300 in gas money. And if you have like nine kids as he does and you have to get what, like three hotel rooms every time you stop, we're talking about several grand to take this trip that he took and didn't pay for. Yeah, that's a lot of like, I don't know, string cheese to whatever people eat in the backseat of their cars these days. So I think this reality show has chafed for a couple reasons. The first is the price of gas. Prices are rising as the Iran war creates oil supply shocks. The average price for a gallon of regular topping $4.50. That's about $1.30 higher than last Memorial Day. You have to plan your excursions now like in advance. Americans might see this and say, I want to take a road trip, but it's too expensive. They can't. Which is largely to do with the Iran war and the energy crisis that has kind of resulted from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. That is for many Americans directly attributable to a decision made by this administration. One of the things that I think Duffy had said when he was promoting this on Fox and Friends is that road trips can fit into any kind of budget. You could go for two hours. You could drive for two days. You could do a day trip. It fits any budget. But also he's advertising this like grand experience. And so I think the timing issue kind of chafes for a lot of people. The second issue is the funding aspect of this. It was funded by a nonprofit called the Great American Road Trip. This organization was funded by a group of transportation industry companies that Duffy oversees, which included Boeing, which included Toyota, United Airlines, Royal Caribbean, among others. And in the four minute trailer for this thing, you can see a giant Toyota logo. You can see a cruise ship. Politico got a hold of the pitch deck for the nonprofit, which explicitly pitched potential donors on the perks that they might receive if they gave a certain amount of money. So like for example, if you give a million dollars, you're a platinum partner. If you give 500,000 dollars, you're a gold partner. Let me actually read it out directly. Let me find the quote because it's quite explicit. Platinum partners get logo placement in up to 10 produced video features, opportunity for strategically placed speaking roles within program segments aligned with a narrative and production plan, branding across media placements. Stuff like that, right? There's a kind of explicit like this will be given to you if you give us X amount of money. And so part of the controversy around this show is that it's being indirectly funded by companies that Duffy oversees. And when companies do things that directly or indirectly benefit their regulator, there are questions as to why they're doing them. But I guess there's two ways of looking at this, right? It's like one is this is wildly inappropriate and unnecessary. And the other is like, well, if they were going to do this anyway, better Toyota foot the bill than like me. Where did people land when this trailer dropped and so clearly was brought to you by Toyota? On the one hand, if it's work, which the Department of Transportation is saying that it was, then the American taxpayers should fund it. But right, as you're saying Duffy and the department are saying, don't worry guys, this wasn't funded by the government. This wasn't funded by the American taxpayer. But in fact, that's why they should worry. You know, like RFK has a podcast, which is presumably funded by the American taxpayer. We're paying for an RFK podcast. Oh, you didn't know about this? Hey everybody, I'm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You're HHS secretary and welcome to the Secretary Kennedy podcast. What are the interesting ways that this administration tends to pitch itself is like through the lens of the showmen, right? Like there's a kind of media element to any presidential administration, but of course to an administration with a showman really in the top job. And Duffy, you know, in some ways a reality show around a great American road trip makes a lot of sense, right? Like Duffy and his wife have this background in TV. Duffy's a charismatic guy. His kids seem great. You know, road trips are great. It should work. But right, the questions around the funding and around the timing are just making it a little bit hard to swallow for a lot of people. It is an embarrassment. A seven month road trip for the Secretary of Transportation? Well, we're paying his salary. He's going to do some work. He's on a vacation that's filmed and funded by Boeing and Toyota, which allegedly gave a million dollars a piece for them to drive around. Is it legal for Sean Duffy to pay for his family to go on a road trip in a Toyota on a cruise ship that's presumably sponsoring said road trip from a vehicle manufacturer that's sponsoring said road trip? Is this all above board in terms of, I don't know, government ethics, government rules, regulations? Let me put it this way. The question of whether it's legal is, I think, less relevant than this sort of like perennial blurring of the line that happens in this administration between kind of public and private funding. This is like the road trip version of the ballroom. Exactly, right. Trump kind of set the tone for this. Executive branch employees are not supposed to accept gifts from companies they oversee. Duffy is not directly accepting a gift from companies he oversees, but he's accepting a gift through a pass-through nonprofit. So there's a question as to whether it violates those rules. I genuinely don't know whether it does, but certainly people are raising the alarm about that. Is part of the controversy also that he was doing this instead of like, I don't know, his job? Well, that's the other aspect of this, right? Is that like over the past year, Duffy has been the face of several huge PR fiascos in the American transportation industry. Two government shutdowns. As you all know, we're going through a shutdown right now, and in that shutdown, government employees don't get paid. Both of which led to widespread chaos at American airports. Facilities are low staff, which means we have significant delays. Huge cutbacks on TSA. They're doing their job, right? They're screening all the necessary people, but it's just taking a longer period of time. You had huge lines. The reasons why we have such long lines is when we have, you know, more TSA agents that call out than previous, you know, issues with flight controllers. The school that trains air traffic controllers in Oklahoma City shut down and didn't ramp up fast enough. You had a fatal crash. When Americans take off in airplanes, they should expect to land at their destination. And Duffy was the face of all this. He was the one taking the fall for it as the top guy. He could sort of use the good press is I guess what I'm trying to say. And yet he's not attracting the kind of good press with this that I think maybe he thought he might. Like he was also filming this promo video at the same time as these shutdowns were going on, at the same time that airports were in crisis. Let's just, I don't know, give everyone here the benefit of the doubt for a second. And I don't know, assume that this was well intentioned and above board. What are we supposed to take away from this series? He pitched it as like a civic experience. And he's right to say that road trips are or can be a civic experience. You see parts of the country that you wouldn't otherwise see. You get to experience this country's great diversity, you know, even like eating at a diner with your kids. Like, I don't know, like it can be a family experience, which I know is part of how he's pitched it to. What we're supposed to be getting is I think both sort of like an ad for what makes this country great, the places that make it great, the people that make it great. Duffy, I think also on Twitter has said, The radical miserable left has noticed our awesome Great American Road Trip trailer, dot, dot, dot. And they hate it. It's too wholesome. It's too patriotic. It's too joyful. And then in a different tweet, he said, Taking a road trip in America is a civic experience. For decades, our kids have been told they should be ashamed of our country and its founders. It's time to push back on those Marxist narratives. What? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Sean, fellow Sean here, everyone knows that having a family and taking a road trip is a part of the American experience. Marxist or not, what? Who needed a reminder that you can get in your car and take a road trip? If anything, people can't do it because we're at war with Iran. Right. It's like road trips are great, as you're saying. Like no one is anti-road trip. Where is the anti-road trip coalition? I want to see the anti-road trip coalition. It's just that like people aren't necessarily as able to take a road trip as they might ordinarily be. How's it? Tell me about your, I want to hear about your road trip experience. I don't have a car because I'm a Marxist. Right. You're definitionally a Marxist if you don't have a car. I mean, listen, cars are expensive. That's unreal. The trailer for Sean's Great American Road Trip suggests that we Americans should be hitting our world-class national parks this summer. But Sean's Great American Plain Boss has been slashing the budgets at said parks. We're going to ask how they're doing in light of the cuts when today explained is back. Support for the show comes from Upwork. Forget about downwork because there are lots of clever ways businesses speed up their growth. Sometimes Upwork says, that just means they delegate smarter. Upwork can help you delegate smarter by bringing in expert freelance help fast so you can delegate and keep it moving. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire and pay expert freelancers. You can find specialized talent across web and software development, data analytics, marketing, business operations and more. You can browse profiles, review past work and get help scoping the role. That way you can hire with confidence. Upwork says they also have business plus, which gives you access to the top 1% of talent on their platform. 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Well, I remember, I wasn't a kid who took a lot of road trips to parks with my family in a wagon, in a station wagon, but I remember distinctly the first time I went to a national park. I did a road trip from northern Minnesota to Big Bend National Park when I was a geology major in college. It was the first time I had seen that part of the country and I was astounded by the beauty of Big Bend and the ability to see into Mexico, which I thought was amazing having grown up very far from Mexico. So it was a game changer and we had little javelinas running through our campsite and I learned a lot about the geology of the park and that park is famous for its geology, so it was a real eye-opener. Stephanie Pearson's trip to Big Bend inspired her to become a journalist. She's been writing for Outside Magazine for decades and has authored two books on our national parks. We asked her how the parks are doing in light of big cuts from the Trump administration. Well, it's a moving target. There's a lot happening in parks right now. There is almost a quarter of full-time national park staff have lost their jobs. That's more than 4,000 positions. You're proposing a 38% cut to parks facilities operation and maintenance. These are the road crews, things like that. A 35% cut for support staff and over 50% of funding for resource stewardship. To me, that is just a recipe for disaster. When you lose a quarter of your park staff, what do you end up losing? Well, I think a lot of the public-facing people will still be there, so people may not necessarily notice it. They're still going to be greeted at visitor kiosks. They're still going to have information people, but where they're really diminishing is in, say, scientists who are biologists who are studying the flora and fauna or the wildlife. I mean, people who are critical pieces of these parks who are trying to balance visitation with wildlife, for example. The visitor experience is what most people are focusing on, but frankly, I'm much more worried about the condition of the resources, both natural and cultural, and the condition of the infrastructure, and it's not sustainable. If you're cutting a third of the budget, you're effectively dismantling the protections of this place. You're dismantling a lot of the National Parks Service. Also, infrastructure people, people who are taking care of the parks and maintaining them. The workforces stretch so thin this season that nearly all staffers, including scientists, are required to take turns checking people in and cleaning campground toilets. Trails are going to have more litter. The trash cans will be emptied less frequently. You know, these things feel like small things if you talk about them individually. In aggregate is the fracturing of the foundation of the National Parks System that is entrusted with the democratic ideals of our country. It's amazing what the National Parks Service staff is continuing to do, and anyone who sees someone in a National Parks Service uniform should probably go up and give them a hug or, you know, a high-five or something. You got to ask before you give them a hug. Yeah, exactly. You want to make their lives even worse. Yeah, I'm from the Midwest. I know that's probably bad advice, but I think their jobs are really hard right now. But for example, Yosemite National Park, I think the first weekend of May, it took an hour and a half to get to the entrance to the park for people. And so then when they got in the park, what is also happening is they've lifted all the reservation systems in some of these iconic parks, Yosemite being one of them, Glacier National Park being another one. Some parks will rely on real-time traffic controls, parking limits, and shuttle systems instead of reservations. Advocacy groups warn that the change could strain staff and damage park resources. And critics worry this summer could become pretty chaotic. Park officials say they're trying their best to manage the crowd with more traffic control and shuttles. There are parks that are in the system that are a lot less visited, but for these iconic parks where everyone seems to want to go all the time, there's going to be a lot of people and a lot of people who want to see the same things that you do. So just come prepared or maybe go in the fall. You think this could be an added incentive to get out there this summer and see these parks despite the gas prices because it's America 250 and the parks are being ruined, so you may as well see them before they're trashed. Well, it almost breaks my heart to even think that. I still have some hope. I have hope that they will not be trashed. I have hope that people on both sides of the aisle understand the value of these parks. It almost makes me tearful. It does make me tearful. I am a proponent of understanding our American history because there's so much to offer through these parks and you're going to gain some understanding when you visit, you know, ancestral Pueblo and land in New Mexico, you know, where you see the geology of Big Bend National Park. You know, so I just, yeah, I am really hopeful that people understand the value of these places and really use their voices to, you know, like in Big Beg and National Park right now. I mean, that's a perfect example. People are rallying around the fact that they're writing a, trying to build a border wall through it. People have rallied on both sides of the aisle to say, we do not want a border wall in Big Bend National Park. And so I think that there is hope that people will rise to this occasion. Oh my gosh, is this place real? I feel like I keep asking myself that question. Micah Meyer has been to every single National Park in America. The guys are loading up the boats so we can head about 12 to 15 miles to the border of Yukon-Charlie River's National Preserve. We asked them on to tell you about some of the most underrated destinations our country has to offer. Here we go, around the Big Bend. The Northwest. One of my favorites in the Northwest is the John Day fossil beds National Monument. There's a unit called the Painted Hills Unit, which has these incredible red stripes that cut through the Earth. And whether you live in Seattle or Portland, you can access it within a day's drive. And you're not going to have any of the crowds that you'll experience at Maloneer or at Olympic. And it's just one of the most otherworldly places I've seen up there. The Southwest. For the Southwest, I would not go to Soarro National Park. But if you go a few more hours away to Organ Pike Cactus National Monument, the cactuses are way cooler looking. There is way more epic hikes. There's way more epic vistas and views. The Southeast. If you are in the Southeast, I would skip the crowds of the Everglades and hop a short flight over to the Virgin Islands, where there is an island off the island of St. Croix, which is called Buck Island Reef National Monument. And it's a natural turtle nesting ground that you can actually snorkel underwater down a trail that the Park Service has made. It's incredible. And it's not going to be crowded because most people, when they go to the Virgin Islands, go to Virgin Islands National Park, which is the majority of the island of St. John. The Midwest. Through the Twin Cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul, there is a 72-mile river corridor called the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. And it is federally protected riverfront that is full of places to fish and hike and run and see amazing wildlife. And it's one that I actually go on a daily run every day. And I often listen to your podcast, Sean, today. Get out of town! Oh my gosh. The Northeast. So Acadia is a really popular one, but really close to there, far from the crowds, is the end of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, which starts in Georgia and runs all the way up to the center of Maine. And you don't have to do the whole thing, but in just one day, you could go hike the final few miles to the center of Maine, and you can actually see people finishing their months-long trek. And it's this super cool experience, just as a day tripper, to get to meet these folks, to talk to them. You usually smell them before you see them because they haven't showered in so long. But you get to the top of this mountain and you get to witness people complete a historic National Park Service Trail and feel just a little bit of that for yourself. And his favorite? My favorite National Park Service site in the whole system is in Utah. And when I wrote a blog ranking all of Utah's Park Service sites, I got a lot of flak because My number one was not Zion. It was not Bryce. It was not Arches. Behind me in Dinosaur National Monument, you see some of the most diverse and expansive views of my entire journey so far. But because it's a national monument in not a capital N, capital P national park, most people haven't heard of this site. Like, if tomorrow Congress upgraded it to Dinosaur National Park, it would get millions of visitors. But that's just because most people think America's park system is only the 63 capital N, 63 capital and capital P parks. They don't realize that it's over 400 sites and so Dinosaur National Monument only gets 7% as many visitors as nearby Rocky Mountain National Park or Zion National Park But I think it's the best that the entire National Park system has to offer all in one less visited sites Where you for example can touch a dinosaur bone if you would like Sean. I would like Micah. I would like I Think too often we feel like we have to take a flight out west or go somewhere far flung to experience an amazing piece of nature but every single State and territory in America has at least one National Park Service site so before you do anything else this summer go visit your local in-state or in-territory parks And then think about the far places that you have to pay a bunch of gas to get to Mike Amir today explain listener Patriot Stephanie Pearson who you heard from earlier is the author of a hundred great American parks and 100 hikes of a lifetime USA Find him wherever you find your books and even earlier in the show you heard from will gotsaken. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic He also writes their daily newsletter the Atlantic Daily check it out Ariana Spurru and Peter Ballin on Rosen made the show today with help from Amanal Sadi David Taddish or Bridger Dunnigan and Gabriel Dunnitas Parklife You Support for the program today comes from Vanguard to all the financial advisors listening Vanguard wants you to listen up Finding real value and fixed income is easy the bond market is enormous as you know Complicated as you suspect and in a lot of cases not especially Transparent hmm plenty of firms will hand you a few Headline grabbing funds and leave it at that but Vanguard says they take a different approach Vanguard says their bond offerings are built with Institutional quality standards in mind and for them that's more than just marketing language It means giving advisors access to a deep lineup of high quality products including more than 80 bond funds managed by a global team of over 200 sector specialists analysts and traders so if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and Also year out Vanguard says you can go see the record for yourself at vanguard comm slash audio That's vanguard comm slash audio all investing is subject to risk people Vanguard marketing corporation distributor You
