The Extra Mile Podcast
Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney

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Don't be a turkey. Remain alert this Thanksgiving.

[Music and Intro]

(Paul Katool) Welcome into another edition of the Extra Mile Podcast presented by the Mississippi Department of Transportation. I'm MDOT Deputy Director of Public Affairs, Paul Katool, and as always, I'm joined by my co-host, Will Craft. He is the Director of Public Affairs here at the agency.

Really excited. We have a great guest for you today. We have Commissioner Mike Chaney, who is the Mississippi Commissioner of Insurance and the State Fire Marshal. Don't forget that last part. I didn't know about that until yesterday. Uh, Commissioner Chaney, thank you so much for joining us. We'll give the give our listeners a little bit of information about you. Uh, just elected your fifth term in office. Big deal there.

(Mike Chaney) Fifth term in office. That's correct.

(Paul) Love it. And previously served 15 years in the Senate and House in the legislature.

(Mike) That's correct. So, I've got, um, for a guy that was going to retire after four years back in, um, ‘92, um, I'm still here. And I may catch up with my good friend, um, Dick Hall, who's now deceased, but Dick used to kid me a little bit about “you trying to break my record of service.” I said, “No, I just got caught up, and I can't get loose.”

(Paul) Absolutely. Absolutely love it. So, listen, we're recording this episode about a week before Thanksgiving. So, let's, tell us, what are you and your family up to for the Thanksgiving holidays? Any traditions there?

(Mike) Well, we've got, um, you know, we've got three children, eight grandkids. Two of the kids do not live in Mississippi. We have one in Ethiopia. Uh, she and her husband and grandchildren are with the State Department and, um, uh, our oldest child is a college professor and an Episcopal priest in Savannah, Georgia.

So, we're going to Tupelo, Mississippi, uh, to have Thanksgiving with my brother and, uh, my sister’s coming over and, uh, a little-known deal about, um, me. Very few people know this, but my dad was a right-of-way engineer for the, uh, Highway Department, uh, many, many years ago under Roy Adams.

(Will) Yeah, okay.

(Mike) Uh, a long time ago, and, um, he, he was actually, um, the, uh, uh, junior engineer on the first, uh, concrete road that they build in, uh, in Mississippi up in Verona. And uh, on the first maca, they called it macadam at that time, which was asphalt. And so –

(Will) I knew none of that.

(Mike) – a lot of long history. So, I know I've been around, uh, Department of Transportation for a long, I just don't talk about it.

(Will) Sure not. Very cool. You got, you got a lot on your plate over there at insurance. And speaking of that, that's one thing kind of wanted jump right into here. Your office handles a lot of stuff.

(Mike) We really do. We handle, uh, Will, we handle, uh, not only insurance, and I'm talking about property and casual homeowners’ insurance, health insurance, regulat - these are regulations that we handle. Uh, we try to make certain that rates on homeowners’ insurance do not, and automobile insurance do not go outta sight. And automobile insurance, we're gonna circle back into and how it fits into DOT.

Um, so a lot of what we do is regulation of the industry to be certain they solve it. They can pay a claim if it's a valid claim filed by a consumer. And the other thing that we do is to be certain that we protect consumers. The statute is pretty clear. It's really simple. It says we'll regulate them, make sure they solve it. Take care of consumers, if in doubt, take care of consumers. So, we do a lot of consumer emphasis, uh, on, at our department. And, and doing that, we get saddled a lot of times with things that were not insurance related, such as elevators.

So, we, we are in charge of elevators throughout the state, and there are well over 10,000 elevators in the state. So, let's say you have six elevators in the Department of Transportation building in Jackson. Uh, if they don't operate, we're responsible for being certain they operate. And when they gave me that deal, I didn't really do this, but say the tongue in cheek, we made them redo the elevators in the Capitol during the session. So, they had to roll, walk three flights of stairs. You got to get even with the ledger- and being an ex-legislator, I joke about it, but those elevators needed to be fixed. They were, they were bad off.

So, we do elevators. We do, um, uh, smoke and burglary alarms. If you got a keypad on it, you, you have to check them out, folks out. So, we, we do background checks, fingerprinting, uh, through the fire marshal division. Uh, we also, um, regulate propane, uh, in the state except for these weird tanks, 15-gallon tanks, but we make certain that the tanks are safe. That's part of, part of our mission at the fire academy to train people how to do that and a mission at the uh, fire marshal's office to do the inspection on the LP gas side.

So, we get involved in a whole lot of things. Uh, just, uh, we, we don't get heavily involved in the transportation side but the, with the consumers involved. And in addition to all of that, then we inspect all the public buildings in the state for building codes and building code violations. I'm very, um, hesitant about, uh, infringing upon, uh, local governments and entities. I'm talking about municipalities. Just the simple thing to say we don't infringe on municipalities or county agencies, uh, on building codes. If we can help it. We all, we'll only go in on building codes, uh, when we're requested, if we can help it.

And we've had cases like the Eudora Welty Library in Jackson that I did go into because of some really safety factors. It wasn't over so much of a fire, it was over the fact that the roof had been leaking and they fixed the roof and, uh, it held water and the water sagged the roof and the leaks had made the books all wet and, uh, that adds poundage to the floor, the second floor, and the building was buckling. And if you had, um, thousands of pounds of second story fall on the first story where children are in, then you've got a problem. So, I closed it down for three days. City of Jackson was not happy with me, but now the building’s closed because - we didn't condemn it. It had the emergency operations for Hinds County in it. But what's unusual about that is that, um, we kept trying to keep them safe and it was a nightmare. So, that building will probably be torn down. I'm not sure what the plans are by the city, but if, if we're smart, we'd leave it as a, uh, park area so you could see the, uh, civil rights and, um, the museums.
The Two Museums, as we call it in the state. It'd be an easy place to see.

So, and I've got a whole other litany of things, like bail agents. We regulate bail agents. Uh, it's just amazing what we do. Annuities. We do just about, um, regulate way more than you would know about. And, and, and in doing that, we touch the life of every Mississippian, uh, in the state. So, if you've got 3 million citizens, you're going to touch them in one shape, form or fashion, uh, from before they're born with health insurance on prenatal care until after they die with burial insurance. So, somewhere along that line, their lives are touched by what we do at the office of the Department of Insurance.

And I have to be careful not to shoot from the hip as people say, when you make a decision, you've got to be aware of the cause and effect of what you do today. Uh, how it will affect somebody five, 10 years down the road. Uh, we're a little different from the executive. We're really part of the executive branch, but we're not. We're not legislative and we're not judicial, although we get into the judicial side when we have hearings for agents, you know, we issue about 750,000 licenses a year for certificates of authority and agents and et cetera. That's all, almost as many driver's licenses y'all have in the state, Will.

(Will) Right. Yeah.

(Mike) That’s a lot.

(Will) That debris falling from our ceiling. I’ll tell you.

(Paul) That is a lot going on there.

(Will) I know. I, uh, and a lot of those I have heard or touched on before, I guess, in some form or fashion. I used to work upstairs over there, uh, in a different, uh, agency, but, uh, similar office space to you guys. One that I had absolutely no idea though, the elevators thing. Now that's totally, I had never heard that before.

(Mike) Well, uh, we, I was in a board meeting earlier this morning on the State Health Plan, and so one of the other things that we do, uh, even for state employees, which would be all the people here in this building, and the employees of the Department of Transportation, we, uh, through the board, regulate the rates and the benefits for the State Health Plan.

(Will) Okay.

(Mike) There's a lot of misnomers out there. You hear people saying, well, they gave us a raise. Teachers will say “we got a raise, and, um, immediately they raised our insurance premium.” That is absolutely just not true. Uh, we, we had a 5 percent increase, but the employee gets the insurance free, and the increase was on the family if you have a family of kids on it. But their raise was $6,000, and that pales in comparison to $20 or $220 a year. It just, it's, it's, it's a way to, somebody puts the wrong spin on it.

(Will) Just finished up open enrollment, uh, not unlike most everybody else, uh, and so a lot of that's very familiar to me right now, looking through some of those.

(Paul) Oh yeah. For sure. So, kind of piggy-backing off, off of that question. So, any kind of future plans or projects that the Insurance Department are really looking to afford, looking forward to the legislative session? Anything you have your eyes on?

(Mike) One of the things that we do have our eye on is trying to fix the issues that we have on the Gulf Coast with our hurricanes and the building codes that you have there because we're the building code enforcer de facto. Uh, you don't really have someone to enforce building codes, although the Fire Marshal Division inspects public buildings to be certain they're up to code.

And, uh, we have emphasis on a mitigation program. That means to go in and strengthen homes on the Gulf Coast and maybe throughout the state, uh, where you make them safer. In case you have a category three hurricane, they're still there. You can come back to them. And, uh, the other part of that is that when you mitigate a home, you lower their insurance rates and you save lives potentially. Uh, we've, we did a program like this in 2009, but, uh, for various reasons, uh, we didn't move forward with it and most of that was legislative and the lack of money we've got streams of dollars that are there. So, mitigation is one big deal on the Gulf Coast.

Uh, we're looking at programs for, uh, poultry home houses. Um, you know, poultry is the number one agriculture product in this state next to, uh, timber. And, uh, if you can't raise a little chickens and uh, all that kind of stuff, or hatch them, or whatever you want to call it. You got to have insurance for those houses, and a house will cost you $300,000, and most farmers will have four or five. And to get insurance, and you got Tornado's Alley here in Mississippi, you've got to be able to tie those roofs down. And then you get into uh, the older buildings were built with steel purlins to hold the roof up. Chicken manure produces ammonia, ammonia causes metal to corrode. So, you got all kind of issues on codes and, and trying to figure out how you keep those people productive and keep the economy going.

Every time we do something with insurance, it affects the economy. To put it simple, if you try to borrow money to do a project, whether it's building a building or whatever project you have, the banks are going to require you to have insurance. You can't insure it, you can't finance it. Bottom line.

(Will) That's very true. I hadn't thought about it that way. This may be a little bit outside of the box here, but I'm curious, I'm sure you've got an opinion on this. Talking about mortgage rates, do you see those coming down in the future?

(Mike) Mortgage rates, uh, will probably, you've got some peaks in rates right now, I think they're back up, some of them are up as high as 7 percent. Um, when they were low, back down in the 3 and 4 percent range, um, I told a lot of people, you better take advantage of it. This may not come around for a long time, but I think rates will settle back down somewhere around 5.6. What you have to look at on a rate side for buying a home is the, uh, discounted rate of what we used to call LIBO or the international rates.

So, let's say that the federal rate is 3%. You need 3.5 percent to make money on the spread. So, it'll be about a 6.5 percent is what you're looking at. And people don't correlate. Even I, as old as I am, have trouble correlating that when interest rates go up, bond prices go down. Bond prices go up, interest rates go down.
Uh, it's just, it's a crazy world we live in. And then, uh, if you're looking at retirement, you work for the State of Mississippi, or even if you don't work for the state, uh, most people have missed some of the best market news and in six months, although the market cratered during COVID for various reasons, you see, uh, uh, the increases have come back.

So, uh, they say you have, uh, what we've got calls and puts in the market. Puts is where you gamble that markets will go down. Calls is where you bet that they'll go up. And, uh, there were more puts than there were calls. And when people have to cover those puts, the market goes up. So, economists will say when you have too many puts out there, the market goes up. It's a driver of a great economy that's coming up. And, of course, the economic news has been good for us this week in this country. So, uh, we're looking at a 3.2 percent, uh, consumer price index versus an estimate of 3.3. And when you look at a estimate of that nature, uh, it says that the economy is pretty robust and pretty strong.

So, the consumer prices are dropping and that happens because the demand has gone down. And it's the supply and demand. Same thing works in insurance. So, correlate that to insurance. I have to recruit companies to come in to compete against each other. You have competitions, rates go down.

(Will) I'm all for the competition in that business. Let's get those rates down.

(Mike) And that affects automobile rates, and automobile rates are affected by transportation modes in the state. So, if you got bad roads out here, Paul and Will, uh, you got a problem. You know, I live in Vicksburg, been in Vicksburg over 50 years. I grew up in Tupelo. Um, but I drive just about five days a week. A hundred miles a day, back and forth. It's a good time for me to, I do books, audio books. Uh, and plus when I walk every day, I get a mile of walking in every day. And I do an audio book, so I'll do a book a week. And uh, I used to listen to talk radio, but it infuriated me. I found out I was doing what my neighbors were doing, beating the dash.

But, the biggest problem I see on the transportation side is not the Department of Transportation, but the enforcement of traffic laws on the interstate. Truckers, by and large, they're good people. But you have folks, when they get in, they block two lanes of traffic, and you've got double, um, what we call dual trucks on the road, and they sway back and forth, and you got some young kid driving from Warren County or from Texas across towards, going east from west, and they're texting on their phone. I would say that nine out of the ten people that pass me on the interstate are all texting and driving. Young people can do it with a knee. I can't text at all and drive. But I can answer the phone because I got a steering wheel and I got hands-free. That's an issue for insurance and for the state of Mississippi to try to enforce people not to text and drive.

So, we use something in insurance called telematics. Uh, where it plugs into your car's smart device, and it tells you if they brake too much, they drive too much, and it can almost predict through AI whether or not they're on the phone texting because it determines. And um, I don't know who comes up with these jingles y'all put up on the interstate, but man, I love them. I love them.

(Will) It's a team effort.

(Paul) It is a team effort. Always glad to get some good positive feedback on that for sure. For sure.

(Will) We've got the campaign going right now actually for the 12 days of Christmas.

(Mike) Let me tell you why I brought that up. My wife and I went down Friday morning, which was a holiday for Veterans Day for the state, to Hattiesburg and my, my old desk mate, Tom King, former Commissioner here at the, uh, well, still is Commissioner until the end of December, uh, received an outstanding, uh, Citizen’s Award as a veteran, um, in Hattiesburg. And I went down to introduce him. Tim's, Tom's just a great, great man in my opinion.

He was my desk mate for eight years in the Senate. And I loved him because he always kept peanut butter crackers in his desk. And when he would go up to the well to speak sometime, I'd get in his drawer and he'd say, leave that alone. But Tom, Tom was just a great guy. Tom and I, and, and by the way, Willie Nelson - uh, Willie Nelson - Willie Simmons, Willie Simmons, uh, the three of us were in the Senate together.

And, um, Willie's a Vietnam vet. Tom's a Vietnam veteran. He was, uh, in the Air Force, uh, he was a military police, uh, as we call them in the Army, but, um, he was Air Police, is what they call them in the Air Force. And I was in Vietnam, um, as a ground pounder, as they call it, uh, up in Charlie Combat Base. So, we were all there about the same time, and then not many of us, uh, left that are Vietnam vets. So, I think we may be the only three veterans left in state government that I'm aware of that served in Vietnam. Wow. Um, Mack Huddleston was one. Mack was a helicopter pilot and a veterinarian from Pontotoc. And, uh, Mack passed away - one of the finest. It's just, you know, you just got good, good fine people that we've, we've had in government. And they, and they make a difference.

(Will) There was a book with the Mississippi veterans from Vietnam, wasn't there? We did that?

(Mike) Yeah, we did a book under Governor Phil Bryant back the 50th anniversary of us coming home. We were the last state to do one. Mack was instrumental in helping us. Uh, the governor asked me to be on that committee, which we were on. They got a picture of the day I came home at, um, I think I was at Thompson new airbase coming home.

Uh, interesting story that the public didn't know much about this. I don't know if I should tell it or not, but I had acquired an AK-47, and they wouldn't let me bring it home. They took it away from me, and I swear, uh, Sonny Montgomery had one, the only one in the U.S. Capitol was over his room, and I used to tell him when I'd go up and see him. Sonny was a great guy. Um, “that's my AK-47.” He said, “no, it's not either. It's my AK-47.”

But Sonny, the reason I bring him up is he came over on Christmas Day to, uh, have dinner with us in, uh, 1968. And, um, I was a mischievous, uh, platoon sergeant. So, we, we put up a sign, uh, Paul Townsend from Belzoni and I did that said, um, “Merry Christmas, go to hell Ole Miss, Merry Christmas from Mississippi State.” And Sonny landed at 10:30 in the morning and they were trying to tear the sign down. I've got a picture of it, but it was really funny. We did it. They, they put us on, on, uh, what we call CQ on the 24th of December and Paul and I were determined to get even with, uh, our first sergeant.

(Will) I think mission accomplished.

(Mike) Mission was accomplished. Uh, and, and I bring up, uh, Sonny Montgomery's name because he did a lot for us in trying to develop transportation. You've got to have good infrastructure in this state. If you're going to have economic development, and we work a lot with the Department of Transportation things like deer safety, uh, weather reports, which we, we become, you know, you’re weather man at the Department of Insurance, whether you like it or not. I never cared much about the weather, except whether we would have enough water to duck hunt. But now I really worry about whether we have uh, too much water or floods and things like, uh, are the roadways passible, uh, the automobile safety side.

(Will) Coming up in potentially winter weather with the ice.

(Mike) And we work with y'all on things like deer safety and, you know, you put fences up. And that's a big deal for us. We got more deer in Mississippi now than they say we had in the last four or five hundred years.

(Paul) Wow.

(Mike) I know I got a lot in my front yard where we live and, um, it's not unusual to see 8 or 10 in the front yard eating my brown grass because there's been no rain lately.

(Paul) There's 38 - around 3,800 crashes, deer-related crashes a year according to our information. So, and it's, I guess you did a video with our executive director last year, Brad White, on, on this very subject and you're saying when this happ- when you, if you hit a deer, you got, uh, got to contact your agent, right?

(Mike) You got to call your insurance agent. Don't try to avoid a deer. You know, the problem is people want to avoid a deer and they will move and when they do, you lose control of the vehicle.

(Will) Sure.

(Mike) And, um, I know, um, our youngest daughter, this was years ago, she had heard me preach this. If you see a deer, don't try to avoid hitting him. Try to slow down so, get him across and blow your horn. Hopefully he'll move. She had a deer start across the road. She blew her horn and he stopped. So, she, he just barely sideswiped her on, on the passenger side, on the, on the bumper. And she pulled over. She was just in hysterics and calling me and she said “it worked! I didn't hit him and I didn't tear the car up, daddy.” I, she was more concerned about the car, you know.

(Will) Well, that's perfect. Yeah.

(Mike) But at least it worked. It avoided some deer. You don't want a deer coming through your windshield –

(Will) Right.

(Mike) – at 55 miles an hour.

(Will) Or jerk the steering wheel real quick at 55.

(Mike) Jerk the steering wheel and you hit a tree. So, deer are unpredictable, especially when they're faced with glaring headlights. They'll jump across. When I go home, I cut off the interstate at Bovina. Uh, for people on the Gulf Coast that hear this thing, they'll say, where's Bovina? Bovina means cows. It's where they sell cows. And I take a back road that saves me about seven miles of traveling on the interstate. And there are always deer there, so it takes me 12 minutes to go seven miles.

(Will) Wow.

(Mike) Oh, that's the quickest I can make it. And usually I will take, I just take it really slow. No more than 30 because there's so many deer. They come across the road and I think they all know my truck to kind of wave ahead of them.
But deer, deer are unpredictable. Um, high beam headlights there, you should have them on when there's no incoming traffic because you can see better with that. Uh, they better illuminate the eyes of the deer and that's the best way to see a deer. If you, especially if you're going to say from Madison, uh, to Clinton, or from Clinton to Madison on, on the Natchez Trace. You'll see, you always see deer. Those deer are smart. They stay off the roadway.

(Will) They do seem like they're smart.

(Mike) They’re smart. They learn. Um, I wish they weren't so smart and avoided being shot sometime. I don't deer hunt anymore. I quit hunting after I got back from the military, but, but in a, in a case you hit a deer, uh, try to avoid going near or touching the animal because a frightened or deer if you get out to see how they're doing, somebody behind you may hit you and a deer has got sharp hooves, and if they hit you, you could get cut up. You just don't want to get near them.

That's way more information than you want on a podcast but um, you should call your police or you can call 911, say you hit a deer, and the board of supervisors in the county would generally come out and get the deer and, uh, take it. Uh, they may take it to a processor. They used to take it and feed the inmates in jail, but I don't know if they still do that or not, I've kind of gotten out of that bailiwick.

(Will) Yeah, I'm not sure either.

(Mike) Yeah, it's, uh, we, we got crazy laws.

(Will) Yeah.

(Mike) Um, so, uh, oh. I'm trying to remember, uh, I think the National Safety Council says that roadways, uh, when you have your bright lights on, are usually have a visibility of about 500 feet with high beam lights. So, that's, that's the reason we say use high beam if there's no oncoming traffic, but remember to dim your lights if you have oncoming traffic. Um, that's, that's a pretty good deal on deer.

(Will) Yeah, that's good.

(Mike) Now, anti, you want to talk about anti-littering?

(Will) Absolutely.

(Mike) That is my pet peeve.

(Will) Please, tell us.

(Mike) Um, I take tag numbers down. I've got a, um, very few people know this, but I, on my, in my truck, I've got a, looks like a rear-view mirror, but it's got a, uh, uh, camera.

(Will) Yeah. Dash cam.

(Mike) Yeah, dash cam, but it's not a dash cam, and I've got one. I've got, I'm updating it to have a rear cam off of my rear member so I can see front and back and record it on the USB. But when I see people throwing trash out, I know my local sheriff. I just want to say “don't do that.” And then you get pickups, and you'll see trash flying out of the back of a pickup. I'm guilty of that happening to me before.

(Will) I think we all probably are.

(Mike) Yeah. And you know, you got a deer corn bag laying on the back of your truck, and I see them fly out and I don't I don't feed deer, but they eat up all my blueberries, but we need a campaign to stop litter in this state.

(Will) Well, you know, we're so, we just wrapped up our kind of three months, uh, first stab at it, putting out the anti-litter. The whole thing is, you know, uh, “don't trash Mississippi. Please, you know, please don't trash Mississippi.” And it's just one of those things, it's a culture change, where it has to be an unforgivable, you know, a thing that I'm just not supposed to do and I know better, you know. And until I think we get that way I don't know. We may still be having to pick up litter.

(Mike) Y'all may not remember this, uh, Paul and Will, but, uh, there was a campaign by Pat Fordyce's “I'm not your mama.”

(Will) Very much so!

(Mike) Pick your trash up.

(Will) I, uh, I don't think we'll ever top the success of that campaign, but we are definitely trying.

(Paul) We’ll try. We’ll try.

(Mike) I know, I know, I know Hunter, one of her children, that Hunter says, and she meant it, too. She'd grab me by the ear and help her, help pick up trash. Uh, uh, just, it was a good campaign. It worked for a while. So y'all said y'all had something y'all want to ask me some, some first.

(Will) Oh yeah, man, you know, we're going to get into some fun questions here for you. Um, all that good stuff and, and work that goes on. You guys have a lot on your plate. We appreciate everything that you do. We'll, uh, we'll, we'll take it a little easy here on you and throw two softballs, uh, here at the end. So, uh, as you said, you spend a lot of time driving around the state, going to different places. Uh, you got to eat. Uh, do you have maybe a, uh, a hole-in-the-wall spot somewhere that you don't get too often that you just….?

(Mike) Well, you know, I love the Mayflower.

(Will) Oh yeah.

(Mike) And we're worried about it staying open and they're closed on Monday and Tuesday now. But uh, Dips down in, you don't know where Dips and Zips is located?

(Will) Oh yeah, now Zips in Magee, yeah.

(Mike) Do you know where Zips is?

(Paul) I do not.

(Will) Absolutely.

(Mike) You missed it. Paul, you need to go down there.

(Will) We can make that happen now.

(Paul) I will.

(Will) I don't know if we have had a Zips mentioned on the episode.

(Mike) I knew Brad White, your director here, back when he was still wet behind the ears, as we would say.

(Will) Very much.

(Mike) And um, he, that's one of his best places to eat. Now Brad's known to pick good eating places.

(Will) He does.

(Mike) So, get him to take you to Zips. Zip In and Zip Out.
It's a little off the, maybe 150 feet off the main, that's main drag on 49. That's a great place to eat. Um-

(Will) We'll definitely make that happen.

(Mike) Don't get the blue plate, get the hamburger.

(Will) That’s right.

(Paul) Okay.

(Will) Gotta get the hamburger loaded up with a zip sauce. Get the battered fries. I have, uh, eaten many meals there. Long, long time ago, David Windham, uh, he used to own the place. You could come in, those of us, his daughter, Lauren, graduated with me, high school, uh, same class. You'd go in and flip a quarter. You know, if it was heads, you paid nothing. If it was tails, you paid double.

(Mike) He had two, he had a two-tailed coin. I know what he had.

(Will) Yeah, exactly right! He was doing that every time.

(Mike) I knew Windham.

(Will) Yeah, good dude, man.

(Mike) He is.

(Will) It's a great spot, man. We will definitely make that happen. And then the other one, Paul, you want to take the second half for us there?

(Paul) Sure, sure. You know, we talk at Public Affairs at the water cooler about food, like Will just mentioned, and then of course music. So is there a concert or like a musician, one of your favorites from, uh, on your list?

(Mike) Y'all been spying on me?

(Will) Absolutely.

(Paul) No. Never.

(Will) No, never.

(Mike) Well, I, my wife and I did go to Willie Nelson about three or four weeks ago.

(Will) Was it a good show?

(Mike) It was incredibly great show. I, um, I didn't have my bandana on. I thought I'd be a lot, a little out of kilter, but we had tickets down on the front row and, um, Mayor Butch Lee, um, saw me come in and, um, one of the, one of the Aldermen-at-Large works at the department, Sharon Womack. She's one of our chief investigators. And, uh, he said, “Commissioner, you don't want to sit down there. Your eardrums won't work tomorrow.” So, I set up in the Brandon box and it was an incredible show. And, uh, saw a lot of young 40- year-olds next to me celebrating birthdays, and they had their red bandanas on.

(Will) Yep.

(Paul) Love it.

(Mike) You know, what's amazing to see Willie Nelson, 90 years old, playing a guitar, sitting there and moving those fingers around. And I have trouble holding a pen sometimes. This guy is amazing to me. Of course, I love Willie.

(Paul) He's great. And I was there too. Saw Jeff Ely, our Chief of Staff.

(Will) Here we go.

(Paul) Christy Cheek from HR.

(Will) All the people were there, man.

(Paul) It was a great show, and I just had to go. I was like, you know, he's getting up there. Um, you know, who knows how many more chances you see Willie Nelson?

(Mike) Paul, what's that backup band that he used, and the harmonica player from both bands for…?

(Paul) Goodness. You know, I don't know.

(Mike) The Advent brothers or something?

(Paul) The Avett Brothers!

(Mike) The Avett Brothers. Those guys out of North Carolina?

(Paul) Believe so. Asheville perhaps? Something like that.

(Mike) They are super good. Super good.

(Will) Very much so.

(Paul) That's awesome.

(Will) That is great suggestions for food and music right there today. Zips and Willie Nelson. It's a pretty good day. You can't really beat those.

(Paul) Can't beat that combo. Commissioner Chaney, this was an awesome episode. Entertaining. I feel like me and Will both learned a ton. Our listeners, viewers will too. So, thank you for joining us.

(Mike) Thank you. Appreciate it. Appreciate the work that y'all do at the Department of Transportation.

(Paul) Yes, sir. Likewise, over there.

So, we just want to thank those viewers, our listeners, for tuning into The Extra Mile Podcast. You can watch and listen to episodes by visiting GoMDOT.com/theextramile. Follow us on social media. @MississippiDOT is the handle there. We want to thank our editor, Drew Hall, who does the hard work behind the scenes to make this show happen. And remember, drive smart out there on Mississippi highways.