Fix This： Infrastructure & Environment ｜ Gregg Hurwitz and Rick Geddes ｜ EP 207 (bzMTlBddJ-E)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bzMTlBddJ-E

It seems like we can get very little same discussion in mainstream media about the role, for instance, that regulation plays and how to strike the balance. And you’re so clear about it. Of course, we need to protect the environment. Of course, we care about species and extinction and disruptions to the habitat. But we also can’t take six years to build an overpass in New York City. It’s just not going to be functional. We want to retain an economy that simultaneously serves the needs of the people who are released well off, because they’re the ones who will pay the price for those delays fundamentally. Absolutely. Another way of saying that, Jordan, is all these delays and cost. It’s like a regressive tax, right? In other words, economists would think about it as an implicit tax that disproportionately hurts the poor. Hi, everybody. I’m very pleased today to have with me two people, Dr. Rick Geddes. The timing is really perfect because the Biden infrastructure bill just passed. And Dr. Geddes is an expert on infrastructure development. And so it’s exactly a propitious time to have this conversation about the details associated with infrastructure, what it is and how it might be renewed and what obstacles there are and so forth. And he’s a well-recognized expert in this particular area. He holds a joint appointment in both the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy and in the Economics Department at Cornell. He’s a member of the graduate fields of systems engineering, regional science and economics. He’s founding director of the Cornell Program in Infrastructure Policy. He’s also a non-resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. I suppose that puts him somewhat to the right of center. That’s relevant for reasons we’ll find out later. Rick’s research centers on the funding, financing and permitting of major infrastructure projects. His publications have appeared in a variety of academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics, and the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, among others. He’s author of the 2011 American Enterprise Institute book entitled The Road to Renewal, Private Investment in U.S. Transportation Infrastructure. He holds MA and PhD degrees in economics from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in economics and finance from Towson State University. And I also have with me as a co-host today, Greg Hurwitz. Greg was a student of mine at Harvard years ago and we’ve remained in close touch ever since. He’s the New York Times number one international best-selling author of 23 thrillers, including the Orphan X series. His novels have won numerous literary awards and have been published in 33 languages. Greg was a guest on this podcast. It was season four, episode two, an episode entitled Build a Better Democrat. And he sits, I would say, center left. And so we have two viewpoints. I don’t exactly know where I sit and many people have many opinions about that. So, but Greg is also interested in policy development and is influential in… His views are influential on the center left, let’s put it that way. And we spent a lot of time discussing practical issues, including what might political parties concentrate on reasonably intelligently to pull the discussion back to the moderate and productive center. And we figured that infrastructure was definitely at least in principle, one of those things that might be regarded as non-objectionable and useful by people on both sides of the political spectrum, assuming that they’re not so extreme that you can’t just talk to them at all. So I invited Greg today for the same reason that I invited Dr. Gettys, is I hope to learn something about infrastructure development from someone who spent his whole life studying it. And Greg’s here for exactly the same reason. And so thank you very much, Dr. Gettys, for agreeing to talk to us today. And I’m looking forward to it. So how did you get interested in it? Like why infrastructure for you? And maybe you can lay out what it is as far as you’re concerned, why it’s so crucial and what… But also what got you interested in it? Yeah. So thank you, Jordan. I’m very honored to be invited to join the show and excited. People are talking about infrastructure, particularly with a policy bent. I have to go way back in time, Jordan. I wrote a paper on the U.S. Postal Service back in college at Towson State, now Towson University in Baltimore, and got interested in economics in college and attended graduate school for my master’s in… That must have made you popular with the girls, eh? That concentration. Yeah, just really popular with them. But I wrote my dissertation back in Chicago on the regulation of electricity companies, investor-owned electricity companies. So I was always interested in regulation of industry and ended up sort of writing in the area of electric utility regulation and ownership, different ownership forms to deliver electricity, and circled back on the Postal Service, in fact. And I talked at Fordham in the Bronx before coming to Cornell, my work at Fordham focused on postal policy around the world and postal regulation. And then, Jordan, in the 0405 academic year, if we can go back that far, I was invited to join the Council of Economic Advisors in the White House as a senior economist, what’s called a senior economist. And that year was precipitous for infrastructure policy because Congress was passing a highway reauthorization bill. And that’s actually important for what just happened in Congress now. And what happens is every five or six years, Congress reauthorizes spending out of the Federal Highway Trust Fund. So every time you buy a gallon of gasoline in the United States, 18.4 cents goes to the federal government. If you buy diesel fuel, it’s 24.4 cents. And Congress just kind of stores that up in the Highway Trust Fund until it reauthorizes spending out to the states every five or six years. So that year, 0405, was the Safety-Loo. That was the name of the bill, the Safety-Loo Highway Bill. And the executive branch was asked to weigh in on a whole set of issues related to highways, roads, bridges, tunnels. And it included things like environmental permitting, tolling of the interstate highway system or of other roads, public-private partnerships or private investment in infrastructure, which is the topic I wrote the book on that you have, because the executive branch is being hit with all sorts of policy issues. As a result of that, Jordan, President George W. Bush invited me to be a member of a commission that was created in the Safety-Loo Highway Bill. We called ourselves Section 1909 Commission, because that was the section. It was literally called the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission. Because the Federal Highway Program, Jordan, very interesting in the United States, started by President Eisenhower back in 56, greatly increased the federal gas tax to pay for the design and construction of the U.S. interstate highway system. But by the 90s, it was largely complete. But the point was, you know, they’re still collecting the gas and diesel fuel taxes. And what’s the point of the program if you’re, you know, basically have a complete system? So the purpose of this commission was to kind of study that question. And I got exposed to even more of these issues, Jordan, by serving on that commission. And we put out a report to Congress called Transportation for Tomorrow. I’m kind of laughing because it was put out in 2008 just as the global financial system was melting down. We never got the attention that we hoped, but we did have some impact. But Jordan, I came to realize the importance of these issues and how in some sense understudied they were. And in particular, by economics departments, right? Back in my day in college, almost every economics department had a transportation economist. And that slowly went by the wayside. And the transportation policy issues really were not being studied. How come it went by the wayside? I mean, in Canada, it was infrastructure that delivered this country. It was a railroad that tied us together. So infrastructure actually is at the basis of our country. When I go down to the States and I see that interstate highway system that was built between the 50s and the 90s, that bloody thing is a miracle. And it’s an economic miracle as well. I don’t think it could be built today. Maybe I’m cynical about that. It could not. OK, why do you say that? Why could it not be built today, given how crucial that piece of infrastructure is? So one of the issues that we study, one of the things that I became interested in, we actually just put out a working paper a couple of days ago through my CPIP program here at Cornell, is called NEPA. And that’s the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which is a broad act where you have to file an environmental impact statement, an EIS, in order to design and construct a new facility, expand an old facility, do almost anything. And part of the reason why I say that, Jordan, is because the NEPA process has become much, much larger to the point where it can slow down projects routinely for a decade. Right? I think the average might be five. We have in our research paper. So let me push you on that. Maybe Greg can jump in here too. So now the Biden administration has decided to make infrastructure, renovation and renewal. Yes. One of its primary focuses. And Greg and I were both talking to a Republican congressman a while back and asked him what impediments he might see to its implementation. And he raised the same issue that you just described, which is that the red tape surrounding infrastructure renewal is now so dense that it’s not obvious what can actually be done. And so this actually puts the people, say, on the center left in somewhat of a conundrum because on the one hand, they want to build infrastructure, not least to serve the interests of the poor and the working class. Absolutely. Because the rich can’t take infrastructure for themselves, let’s say. But if the regulatory structure is such that these projects are actually not practically implementable, well, is that a reasonable criticism that you’re levying? Now, is it reasonable to place you politically on the moderate right, let’s say? And how does that influence your thinking about such things? I mean, Jordan, I come from a classical liberal libertarian Scottish enlightenment, neo-classical economics. I have my doctorate from Chicago, right, in sort of one of the golden years, I would say, of Chicago economics. I guess you could place me wherever you want given that information. But yeah, I take a basic market-oriented approach. I mean, I wrote a book on increased private participation in the delivery of public services, which is a huge issue globally. How the private sector that has capital, that has technology, that has management expertise, that has experience around the world can help to deliver public, what are fundamentally public goods and services. So I think it’s fair to put me slightly affiliated with American enterprise, slightly to the right of the center on this. But I do want to go back to this, Jordan, because I think it’s a really interesting point that people should be aware of. So you’ve heard the adage that time is money, right? Time is money. That is really true in infrastructure. If you delay a project by five or seven years because of the NEPA process, right, then you just increase the costs enormously. I mean, you can double the cost or something of that nature. And so what’s happening now, it’s actually very interesting. I think you’ll find this very interesting. During the Trump administration, there were folks in the White House who suggested a new model for NEPA, and it’s called the One Federal Decision, right? One Federal Decision. And that is the idea that you would have a lead federal agency. So you wouldn’t have the Environmental Protection Agency and you’d have Native American Burial Grounds, and you might have some other, all these different agencies that have to weigh in for project approval. So one agency would take the lead in shepherding the proposal, right, through the federal process. And that agency could actually, if the other agencies were dragging their feet, would have the power basically to make a decision for them. The situation now, Jordan, is one agency will hand the proposal off to another, and that’ll hand it off to another and off to another. And as you can see, it slows down the process enormously. And I believe that in the bill that was signed by or voted on by the House late on Friday night, the One Federal Decision language is in the bill, right? But on the other hand, there’s folks within the Biden administration who are trying to walk back some of the Trump era reforms with regard to expediting the environmental impact statement process, right? So I think we all want to protect the environment. We all want to protect endangered species. We want to protect the water, the air, Native American burial grounds, you know, and so on. But there has to be some limit on how much time can be spent, you know, on these things before you either say yes or no, basically. So there’s a bit of pulls, things are being pulled in two different directions with the bill basically saying, we’re going to do one federal decision and that’s going to be a big reform of the NEPA process that policy people like me love. And then there’s another pull within the administration to kind of repeal some of the Trump era reforms on this. So one of the big things we would like to see is some it hasn’t really been reformed since 1970, which is a long time ago. And there’s, as you know, Jordan, an ecosystem of lawyers and consultants, et cetera, in Washington that have built up around the NEPA process. And they they, you know, that whole thing slows it down. So so that would be one sort of major reform that we think would expedite infrastructure delivery in the United States, you know, speed it up and essentially do it at lower cost. And so, you know, we’re hopeful that that’s when the president signs the bill, that that’ll be, you know, part of it and we’ll see some changes. But in answer to your original question, Jordan, things I think are so cumbersome at this stage that you could never build the interstate highway system in the United States today the way you did in the 50s and 60s. Yes, sir. The Chinese announced 150 nuclear plants today, I think today or yesterday. Well, yeah, that’s that’s their plan. And so, Greg, you had a question. Well, I was thinking, you know, one of the things Jordan and I talk about sometimes is the aim that we strive for in our in our mutual work is to try and get people arguing and talking about the right things, at least right versus how so much conversation goes. And I was really struck by even something that is as seemingly uncontroversial as infrastructure. There’s very little discussion in the media in conversations around this topic with any sophistication, like even something like infrastructure to me has been pushed into such sort of gridlock that any discussion of regulation from the left is viewed as, you know, corporations trying to roll back stuff so they can dump toxins into oceans and make more profit. Rather than that being able to be framed and described as you’re doing it, everybody has an intuitive sense of that anyone who’s ever done a remodel or had a home project. Everyone knows the cost and the expense of anything that takes longer and how onerous that is and how many layers. You know, part of what the from the messaging perspective is how do we, you know, yet again, it’s another example about how the working class small businesses and the poor are being held hostage by a messaging apparatus from both sides that has sort of distilled the argument into sort of tribal warfare on either side. It seems like we can get very little same discussion in mainstream media about the role, for instance, that regulation plays and how to strike the balance and you’re so clear about it. You know, of course, we need to, you know, protect the environment. Of course, we care about, you know, species and extinction and disruptions to the habitat. We also can’t take six years to build an overpass in New York City. It’s just not going to be functional. Not not remain not retain an economy that simultaneously serves the needs of the people who are released well off because they’re the ones who will pay the price for those delays fundamentally. Absolutely. Another way of saying that Jordan is all these delays and cost. It’s, it’s like a regressive tax, right? In other words, it’s a tax we economists would think about it as an implicit tax that disproportionately hurts the poor. You know, why does it look almost all the time? Why disproportionately hurts the poor? Well, I mean, these these facilities, you know, let’s go back and and and talk about the actual facilities, you know, the actual infrastructure, right? That we’re talking about, as I stress, it provides basic public goods and services. So mobility, getting getting to school, getting to your work, you know, getting to your community activities, right? The the history of infrastructure is that this is goes 200 years back in the US Postal Service is the history of trying to provide all communities with access, right? Or being sure that no communities are left out. That goes back to the horse post, right? When when you were delivering letters and cards and newspapers by horse. And the goal in the United States was that all communities should have access to a post office, right? And the history of infrastructure in the United States, universal landline telephones. There was a Farms to Markets movement where we tried to pave rural roads because farmers couldn’t get their their harvest to the market, you know, in time on dirt roads that were full of mud. So there was this this Farms to Markets. There was electrification during the Roosevelt year, rural electrification. So there’s always this this and we see it now with broadband, right? Right now, I was going to say our broadband access consistently in our polling. We go out often into the 37 congressional districts decided by five points. We really want to see what people think to cut through it and consistently rural broadband tests through the roof as a necessity, right? It is the new those are the new information highways, right? It’s the new it is the new infrastructure system and we see a huge demand and need for that. Well, and think of all the educational opportunities that provides as well and increasingly so. And so, OK, so let me ask you another kind of technical question. Just please go ahead. The whole is universal access. And that includes the poorest communities, right? Rural communities or urban communities. It’s always been across sectors, this goal of everybody having access. And that’s fundamentally what the infrastructure is about. OK, so do you think so? Here’s a proposition, twofold proposition. The most important thing that might be done to rectify absolute poverty and maybe to mitigate relative poverty would be the provision of energy as cheaply as possible. And the second most important would be the universal provision of efficient infrastructure. Is that a reasonable prop? Are those propositions reasonable from the perspective of an economist? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely crucial. I would I would say that the energy infrastructure, the energy is part of the infrastructure, the generating distribution and transmission capacity you need to get power right to people. That’s a crucial. We kind of the you know, the extension of that is we don’t like to live in a society where some communities are systematically don’t have these things right. I think everybody should have heat. Everybody should have electric. Everybody should have mobility right in your community. So I would say absolutely. You know, and that’s that’s why having these things. There’s this big notion of equity, right, which is kind of kind of this this amorphous term and some of us are bothered by the lack of definition. And I think the infrastructure, it is used generally. I think it’s this old notion of universal service, universal access where all it’s it’s equitable for all communities to have this. And of course, I’m a consider myself to be an old time regulatory economist. And I’m always harping on how these issues have been studied for a century or longer in the you know, to provide these basic services as the technology evolves. And of course, with this zoom call, we know how important broadband Internet access is and kids need to have it for school and people need to have it for work. And so we don’t want either urban pockets to be left without it, you know, or rural. So Jordan, I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but but there’s a certain level of power that we need. Well, the other thing that I’ve thought a lot about is Pareto distribution problems. And so you know, the fact that money, for example, does tend to end up in the hands of fewer and fewer people, you have to fight very hard to not have that happen. But that doesn’t seem to me to be the case with infrastructure, because, well, it can’t happen that way. You can’t hoard the highways, you can’t hoard the electrical grid. And even if you did, it wouldn’t do you any good. And so if you are okay, if you are actually devoted to serving those who are oppressed and excluded at the bottom of the socio economic and power hierarchies, then I can’t think of a way to facilitate equitable distribution of valuable resources, especially energy, because energy is work. I can’t think of a better way of doing that than to concentrate on infrastructure development. And so then that brings us to the next problem that’s going to be a big one for this infrastructure bill is like, As pressure ramps up in relationship to climate change, and the environmental concerns that go along with that, there’s going to be more and more pressure on infrastructure development, like in terms of regulating and suppressing it for that matter. And so that’s a real tension on the left, I think, because the left tends to be more concerned, let’s say with broad scale environmental issues, but theoretically also, they’re concerned with the poor. And there’s a big tension there. And so do you have some sense of how those mutual goals might be brought into alignment with one another instead of acting in an antagonistic manner? So, George, I think you’ve hit on one of the most important and underappreciated issues in infrastructure policy, and I kind of regret that I didn’t spend more time in my book that you have on this. But I’ve been studying this for 15 years now, and I would say there’s been a slow revolution going on in the technology of infrastructure delivery. Right. And some of those things make the front page of the New York Times, and that’s driverless cars, right, and the Hyperloop and things like that. But there’s a whole host of other technologies that have been developed in the universities, in the labs, in the startups that stand to transform the way infrastructure delivery, infrastructure is operated and delivered in the United States. Let me give you a couple examples. One is smart stoplights. Okay, smart stoplights. I had a kind of a little briefing of this by the folks at Carnegie Mellon recently. And it’s a stoplight, right, with different colors, but it has a camera and a sensor attached to it so that the lights are not just on a rope timer. They actually change in response to the traffic that’s actually at the intersection. So many drivers have had the experience of going to a rural road and there’s a red light and because they’re good people, they stop and wait there, and there’s no traffic in the other direction. And they just know that if the light knew that I was sitting there, it would turn green. What turns out the technology has existed for a decade to sense the cars actually at the intersection and change the lights optimally in response to the traffic at the intersection. Jordan, they have it now to the point where they can sense pedestrians and include pedestrians in the changing of the light. They have it to dog, they can tell a dog, they can tell a person in a wheelchair, and they can just change the optimize the changing of the colors to maximize the flow through the intersection. So stop and think for a minute how much gasoline you would say if you did that, how much fuel, how much frustration, how much time, how much pollution, just had smart stoplights. Now there’s something in the bill that’s a pilot program to help with that, right? But the problem, Jordan, is not the technology. The problem is the adoption, right? It’s getting the people who own the stoplights, who might be a small town like where I am in Ithaca, where it could be a county, it could be a city, but it’s highly atomized in the United States. But getting them to overcome their risk aversion, and I understand that totally. They’re risk averse to new technologies. They’re afraid of it. They don’t what we call headline risk. You’re the mayor, and you’re afraid you’re going to wake up tomorrow and find that there’s been a giant crash because these stoplights malfunctioned, right? But we’ve got to somehow overcome that risk aversion to get them to adopt these new technologies. Well, so one of the things you’re saying is that part of the infrastructure messaging, and I don’t mean messaging in the cynical way, you know, because I would hope that the messaging is actually associated with the underlying policies, so it’s a straight game. But if infrastructure development means replacing inefficient use of resources with efficient use of resources, that should be a net gain on the economic side. Yes. So for poor people, plus it should have environmental benefits. Yes, so the left and the right should come together. Exactly. Okay, okay, okay, okay. So how about priorities? Like you give the highway systems in this book, for example, in the US, I think it’s a D and the bridge is a C minus. That’s American Society of Civil Engineers. Right. So if you were going to rank order infrastructure priorities in the United States, I know that’s a big task, but you’ve thought about this for a long time. Like what’s really broken? Where’s the biggest bang for the buck? So, yeah, let me, wow, that is a great question. You know, the American Society of Civil Engineers has done a great job of pointing to the inadequate, the deferred maintenance, right, in the United States. So the bottom line is I think the US has done a good job of designing and constructing and building out new networks to ensure that all communities are connected, right? The interstate highway system, the state routes, the local streets, you know, in infrastructure, same thing across, you know, across sectors. But we’ve done a very, so we’re good at building shiny new things, but we’re very poor at taking care of what we have already. And I think there’s political incentives, right? If you want to be reelected, you want the ribbon cutting ceremony with the big scissors, right? But it doesn’t get you reelected if you say we put five millimeters of asphalt on that bridge over there, even though the civil engineers are telling you, you need to resurface that bridge. So there’s a problem with the political incentives that have led to these trillions of dollars, you know, of deferred maintenance. And I think in the bill, so of course, one of the things I hope on- And that’s part of the debt, that’s part of the debt, that deferred maintenance, even if it’s not calculated as part of the debt. That’s also part of messaging failure, you know, as you’re describing the stoplights. And that’s like the Send City stuff, right? You can plug in, like the stoplights also have so many other aspects, there’s charging stations and different security. They can alert to gunshots, like there’s so much in it that’s efficient. And to me, I just hear that as a, you know, obviously, being somebody who’s more involved with the messaging side of it. But that seems to me to get somewhere like Ithaca to adopt that it has to be framed as an environmental imperative. Like, do you want to cut gasoline costs? Here’s how we do it. Here’s how the city is cleaner. Here’s where the money will skew to other people. There’s a way that that has to be packaged and sold that’s outside of the norm. I think the thing that we see increasingly is that we, you know, the way that the information, the way that information moves now and polarizes and is sold, we expect politicians to also have to figure out how to be TikTok stars that they know exactly how to sell everything in some magical fashion. And the lack of a proper messaging apparatus around some of this stuff is really costly. And people tend to forget that that’s just as essential as figuring out the problems. If you can’t sell them and communicate to people in real concrete terms, the ways it will affect their lives and their communities, it doesn’t get adopted. Yeah, so that’s also an infrastructure problem in some sense, right? And a non-trivial one at that. So how do you make these things sexy? I mean, I made a joke about that at the beginning. You know that these tend to be regarded as dry discussions, but they’re not. They’re the real details of actual policy, the real details of actual politics. And what we’re laying out here at the moment is a vision that something like, well, how does enhanced efficiency, like, why is that a problem for anyone? Well, it’s more efficient. Why is that a problem for anyone? Also, no, we’re real quick. Also, this is where ideologies and by that, I don’t just mean far left and far right. I also mean, like, classically conservative and classically liberal. This is where they come to die in a good way in the solution of a problem. Like if we can have this conversation about specifically how this makes people’s lives better, maybe that’s a solution that 70% conservative, 30% liberal when it comes to some application, maybe. And so we’re not going to be able to do that. And so what’s so important about boiling them down to this and figuring out how to talk about it is a lot of the useless ideological overlay to specific problems that concretely help the working class and the poor and actually make headway for community environment. And that’s also, you know, clean fields and streams, right? We’re not just talking global warming. We’re talking about literal the communities that people live in that they fish in that small businesses are run in. You know, that’s where all the rubber meets the road. Well, Greg, it might be a rule of thumb that if the discussion is occurring at a level where all that’s happening is ideological argument, then the problem actually hasn’t been specified clearly enough to move towards solution. It might be a good philosophical rule of thumb. Well, then you also see who’s in your way, right? Is it bureaucrats? Is it businesses that are legitimately looking to override regulation for ill motivation? If once it gets boiled down, you get a very clear lay of what the strategic field looks like for pushing something through. So Jordan, I want to address your just a few minutes ago, you said who could be against greater efficiency, right? And I think this in some sense to Greg’s point should be the ultimate bipartisan issue, right? I’m not sure. With all due respect, I’m not sure engineers are the greatest on the messaging piece of this. I love them to death. But there is this issue. So let me give you two other examples I want to get off my chest. And, you know, there ain’t the saying there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. But the closest thing to a free lunch in economics is technological adoption, right? So one great example, I think is completely underappreciated. I, you know, we’re all concerned about climate change, and it’s methane emissions at wastewater treatment plants, right? So a lot of wastewater treatment plants, particularly in the eastern United States, are old. Ours here in Ithaca was over 100 years old, and they’re open settling ponds for solid waste. Well, guess what happens? The methane from that process just goes into the atmosphere, which is a very bad greenhouse gas. So what you can do and what the city of Ithaca did, where we are, the mayor is a Cornell graduate, was partner with a private company. In this case, it’s Johnson Controls to install a digester. And I’ve had the tour. The digester looks like a giant tennis ball. It’s a big white sphere with a plunger. They capture the methane from the natural process of breaking down the solids. They use the methane to turn turbines that Johnson Control installed, three of them, at 120,000 RPMs. They’re very, very efficient. They make electricity. They capture the methane so it doesn’t go into the atmosphere. It doesn’t cause climate change. They instead use that to create electricity, so they offset other generating sources. Now our wastewater treatment plant sells power to the grid. Instead of using power from the grid to run the plant, they sell power to the grid. It’s a win-win-win, right? To the point where they’re going to, I believe they’re going to install another digester, and they’re actually taking waste from other surrounding communities to process here, right? They charge something called a tipping fee, right? The city doesn’t do that for free. They do that for a charge. And so this should be done at scale in the United States, where this is where you have to have a private sector company, because it’s technologically challenging to install this and install the generating capacities, micro generators, to get them to work properly. But now we have taken a hundred-year plan with private sector. Oh, the other thing I should say is how do you pay for this, right? If you’re the mayor, everybody’s cash strapped. So guess what? Johnson Controls was able to pay for the installation of the digester by getting a share of the lowered electric bill. So think about that. They knew that our wastewater treatment electric bill was going to go down. They said, just give us a share of the electric bill. We will bond against that savings and we’ll pay for the installation of the technology. Well, you’ve just got the mayor’s ear, right? So I don’t understand why we can’t replicate that across the United States. There should be no open wastewater treatment settling ponds that are 100 years old, emitting methane that could be used to power the plant and power the city. So this, I don’t know if it’s a messaging or a, I don’t know what it is. Well, who’s really good at messaging or corporations, right? They’re really good at it. You can turn on the TV, look at what ExxonMobil does, right? And so it’s really interesting because in a certain way as you lay it out, if there is a for-profit aspect to this from private industry that benefits cities at no cost to get something in place that also earns cities money, it seems to me like that’s a perfect union for private and public interface. And so somebody, it seems to me like the most immediate driver for that would be for the private corporation to figure out how to package and sell that to other cities. That’s a bigger driver to me, I think, than trying to convince layers of bureaucracy and governments why this makes sense and to adopt it through city boards or councils or however that works. Well, I would presume that’s also partly why in your book, this Road to Renewal, that you also stress the utility of public-private joint ventures. Yes. Okay, so here’s a couple of things we’ve sketched out is, well, let’s go for efficiency because that’s going to serve us on the environmental front, but it’s also going to be economically efficient. And then we could also point out there’s a big argument always going on ideologically in some sense between Malthusian biologists and enthusiastic economists. And the Malthusian biologists insist, well, there are limits to growth, everything has a maximal carrying capacity, we can’t exceed that. And there are Malthusian catastrophes, but the economists come in and say, yeah, well, wait a minute, one of the ways that we can solve that is by doing more with less. And we’re really good at that. And we’re getting faster and faster at being better and better at it. And I think the economists, to my way of thinking, the economists are the optimists, and I think they have the upper hand in the argument. But this is a perfect marriage of those two things in some sense, because it means that the optimal infrastructure plans please both sides. It’s like, yeah, this is going to be better for the environment. Plus it will make poor people wealthier. So how is that not exactly what we should be aiming for? And then, well, the messaging issue, well, that’s a pretty easy message to sell, especially if it’s true. And so let’s go into the public private issue a bit. Can I give you guys a third example before we go to the public private? Because this, Jordan, gets directly to the point you just made, right? I emphasize stoplights before. Now I’m going to emphasize streetlights, right? On parking lots, you have the roads where you have the street to illuminate the thing at night. The thing now that’s the methane capture equivalent for streetlights, we talk about stoplights, is LED conversions. So if you fly over a parking lot in your plane at night, you see this yellowish color from the bulbs, this old pressurized sodium incandescent technology is very old. LEDs in streetlights are so much more efficient that you could, again, you can install the bulbs, you can install the new towers, and you can do it at virtually no cost to the city by the savings on the electric bill. But there’s so much more efficient that you get you get more lumens, right? You get more brightness. And this was done in the city of Detroit, I believe that Paris did this, but think about the effects of that right, you have more brightness that reduces crime that reduces pedestrian accidents that reduces car accidents at night. This this helps communities at at almost no cost to the jurisdiction that is installing them. And you can do other things like you can hang 5G, what they call pizza boxes, which are 5G transmitters on those towers, and you start to deliver higher speed internet. At the same time, you’re improving the lighting. So there’s there’s all these innovations that are completely underappreciated in this debate. And I have to say I’m somewhat frustrated that there’s not more focus on these opportunities. So that in fact, I think the streetlights is what I was thinking about for the charging of cars and other things rather than the stoplights, which was your earlier example. But a quick question for you while we’re on specifics, which is this you said that it’s it’s Johnson Industries, that controls Johnson. So what is it? I mean, so clearly they have an outreach business development off it. Like, what do you think the impediments are to them going and pitching this and just having explosive growth? If in fact, all of these things line out, you’ve assessed them. I’m just I’m just curious, like why they can’t move from that from city to town to city to town. I think they can. I mean, it’s a that’s a really interesting question, Greg. The case to get that I’m pretty sure is what we call an unsolicited proposal. Right. So it’s not like the city of it. They can say, hey, we want somebody to do methane capture our wastewater treatment plant. I’m pretty sure Johnson Controls studied the situation and approached the city and said you guys should do this. Right. One thing again is, you know, it’s the United States and it’s this this frankly Balkanized system of delivery in many in many sectors. And they’re they’re a bit jealous of they want local control. Right. And they’re a bit afraid. I think they’re so small. A lot of these wastewater treatment systems are small. They’re afraid of a big company. Right. So it has it has to be done properly. I don’t really have a good answer to your to your question, Greg. But I think smart public policy and this gets to Jordan’s point about public private cooperation. How can we do that better? Right. Smart public would encourage this encourage this. OK, well, some of it is a matter of decreasing distrust. You know, I mean, for a public private partnership to work, the private sector has to trust the public sector and the public sector has to trust the private sector. And then for that to be marketable to the population at large, people have to believe that the institutions are fundamentally sound. And that would mean the governmental institutions, which the left tends to take for granted as being sound. Not always. It depends on who’s who’s in power. But I think that’s the point. Also, the private institutions, which the right tend to take for granted as as sound. But there isn’t any reason that we couldn’t reconfigure our beliefs, at least to some degree, and think, well, look, we could all we can unite in the pursuit of the efficiency and environmental cleanliness. Right. It’s like where the hell’s the problem with that? And one of the things that’s quite disturbing to me when I look at the United States is when I travel from Canada to the United States, I’m always happy to be in the States. I go to New York City and I look at I was in Manhattan this week. And I think this bloody place is the truth is it’s such a miracle. Like there are 7 million people there crammed onto this island. And it’s clean. Like it’s actually clean. How do you do this? This is impossible. It’s such a bloody miracle. And then I see the country like riving itself apart and tearing itself apart with his struggles and not noticing that it’s really pretty damn good and your institutions work remarkably well and like what’s all the paranoia about folks and well, those are discussions that Greg and I have had on on other issues and So this issue of trust Greg seems to me to be central to this in part is like and also the the provision of something like An optimistic vision which would be well, we don’t have to it’s not limits to growth It’s not it’s not the Rome Club in 1968 saying we’re gonna be overpopulated by the year 2000 and we got to shut all this down It’s like no we can solve the environmental problem and we can solve the economic problem And if we do them properly, we’re gonna solve both better and faster. Yes, and I think that’s actually realistic Yes, it’s happening in certain cases. I mean I’m giving you examples of where all these technologies are being it’s not a there’s no silver bullet It’s it’s not this is the real world, but it’s it’s a win-win-win And it needs to happen. Let me say something Jordan that and Greg I just love your reactions so I’ve been studying the infrastructure delivery around the world and I’m pretty sure that in developed countries and many developing countries The United States is dead last in public private cooperation If you go to France, they have an office of partnerships the French word for that in Paris that that Automatically assumes that the public and private sector will Come together to deliver the infrastructure Jordan the way the canals and in France were delivered in the 17th century Was through a pub. That was the way you move freight back then was through a public private partnership It was through a concession if you go to Canada where you are Canada is one of the world’s leaders in public private partnership You guys have these what are called PPP units for Ontario has one Quebec has one, you know, I could just and then there’s a national one and it’s all to facilitate public private cooperation I spent a year on sabbatical in Australia As a Fulbright scholar to study their infrastructure delivery every state in Australia, New South Wales The Queensland you know gone they all have an office of a PPP unit or an office of partnerships And then they have a federal one that’s called infrastructure Australia to facilitate public private cooperation And the United States the two sides are just completely suspicious of each other, but we’re supposed to be capitalist do you think that’s because that the the General and generally speaking that liberals have distrust of private business and conservatives have distrust of government I mean, do you think those are the drivers of why? Yeah, so Greg it’s that’s a really good question. I think there’s probably a Book that but here’s here’s my quick answer So the United States you have to go go then to the financing of infrastructure this it sounds opaque But this is one of the most I think important issues and I’ll get the details The United States I’ve talked to people around the world is the only country I’m aware of that has this tax treatment of it a publicly issued debt Alright, so that’s tax exempt municipal bonds, right? So what that means is if you’re the bondholder you buy the bonds you do not pay federal tax on the income Okay. Now think of what that does So if you’re the issuer say you’re the city of Ithaca and you’re the mayor and you issue bonds to pay for a new Bridge and you have to issue ten hundred million dollars of bonds You get a lower interest rate because their tax exempt municipal bonds, right? So this pushes infrastructure delivery in the United States away from public private partnerships, right? And this is now a multi trillion dollar market. It pushes it away from public private partnerships and towards public sector only delivery Do you think there’s any possibility that that could be modified or is that an impossible task? So Jordan that’s that is a multi trillion dollar financial market on Wall Street now The the political forces that are going to protect, you know are going to protect that tax exemption are very strong But it’s in the bill Jordan what they have the trick the people in Washington have recognized this problem We call it an unlevel cost of capital playing field where the tax treatment artificially lowers Hold on a second. Sorry the the tax treatment artificially lowers the cost of capital meaning the cost of money Right, if it’s if it’s a tax exempt municipal bond, that’s not issued by a private Company, right? So in the bill they have something called private activity bonds or pads and what that does is it extends that that tax exemption? to pump to privately issued debt through a PPP Now now I could go into the detail. What did you call that? What was it was private private activity bond? Have private activity bonds, please do not confuse it with a bab Which is a build America bond. It’s different The the real the real action is in the pads the private activity bonds The United States Treasury is jealous of the fist of the public fisc, right? And so they don’t like to give tax exemption So the the old law was 15 billion dollar cap, right? The total amount of issuance of tabs with 15 billion during the new bill would double it to 30 So so people like us say that’s great. It’s not enough But the 50 they hit the 15 billion dollar cap the tabs were so popular at least the bill doubled Right, and we would like to see it. It’s only for transportation I think we would like to see pebs the cap on pebs increased and also be used for other things like water or power whatever the you know, those things are but economists do not like to see Economic decisions distorted by tax law, right? And i’m getting to craigs point I think I think the united states is kind of behind us because it’s so easy to just use taxes at municipal bonds If you’re a public owner of infrastructure to say the heck with the ppp, right? You guys are going to have taxable debt. That’s going to cost me more I’m just going to go with tax exempt muni debt. And so it’s it’s this odd Thing that has caused, you know, supposedly free enterprise america to be kind of adverse to private cooperation in infrastructure delivery is that why you think that It’s almost like the larger forces the foundational forces Are skewed from this tax perspective and so for something to break through it’s got to be wildly innovative and um immediately profit driven like the example with johnson and the methane Right. It has to be something that’s so innovative and so tip of the arrow That it can offer a solution that doesn’t rely on the bigger sort of capital raise with the tax ramifications And so yeah, if there’s stuff that’s in between if there’s stuff that requires a bigger investment of capital up front It seems like that’s where it will get caught versus a situation like that where a private company can come in hard in exchange for a for a forever share of a percentage of profit Which makes it worth the while No, I I think I think that’s right greg and i’m not i want to be clear. I’m not faulting the the public owners, you know The mayors I think it’s mostly the mayors it could be county executives or governors But really it seems like the mayors are the people who are dealing with most of this and i’ve heard stories greg Where where they’ll be they’ll they have to do a new project, right? They have to finance it they will have two groups coming from the same bank From the same bank the one group is pushing taxis have municipal bonds and the other group is pushing public private partnerships And the mayor just says look my interest payments my service on the debt’s going to be a lot lower with the Taxis and municipal bond group so i’m going to do that, you know, and it’s almost like a fiscal Okay, so why is that? Okay. Why is that bad though? Let’s go into that because if he’s saving money doing that and and the project is going to go ahead anyways Then why not take that route? What’s the cost of not rectifying this? So jordan the cost is a crowds out private participation Because the private folks cannot compete a lot of these things are levered, you know, it’s 80 percent debt 20 equity And they can’t they just cannot compete with this artificially low cost of capital from munis Okay, and so what’s the problem? What’s the problem with leaving? Okay So what’s the problem with just leaving it in the hands of the of the government? Okay Now we talked about messaging and if so, what’s the problem there exactly? So jordan you don’t get the innovation You don’t get you don’t get the risk-bearing benefits of including the private partners there one thing They’re good at risk management. You do not get the new technologies The other thing I should have harped on more in that book is what’s called the the life cycle asset maintenance And that means if you do a ppp you wrap the design and construction in with the operation over maybe 25 or 30 years so that means the contract requires The public owner to keep the infrastructure up Right, and this is one of the things that I har the united states last time I checked is a relatively wealthy country Why is our infrastructure degraded? It’s because we haven’t done the operation and maintenance over the life of the facility the way the civil engineers told you to So so it’s called a dbo. So the incentives are wrong. I mean not what that means is fundamentally incentives are wrong, right? So screwed up. Yeah, they’re all screwed up. I mean and I I have Said in every venue I can to do to wrap those things together a bundle The term is to bundle design and construction that could be renovation But bundle it in with o and m with operation and maintenance and the poor bless their hearts the port authority Of new york and new jersey you mentioned new york have the authority to do this on their own The new gothles bridge i’ve had a tour. It’s a hundred year bridge. It’s built to last 100 years Beautiful bridge is a dbomb. It’s a design build operate maintain contract Over 25 or 30 years. I forget the exact and there’s up. There’s other facilities I think maybe it’s the new laguardia terminal is a dbomb contract So jordan what answer your question that I think the tax system unit that was very good for the united states in this developmental stage, but now it’s it’s become a You know a problem right an albatross in some sense because it crowds out these Private Partnerships that the rest of the world canada is the leader, you know The rest of the world has been using it states In terms of messaging one of the things you did in your book is you pointed to a lot of projects that were really radically successful and so i’m kind of imagining a messaging campaign where You know, there’s some focus like an ad a focus on a project that really worked and some discussion of why this worked And what work means, you know, it’s more efficient. It’s cheaper. It’s better for the environment. Everybody wins. That’s pretty good And and then and then to scaffold that up Upward to include larger and larger projects that have exactly the same sort of aim It would be something like that. But so would it be possible because this book’s somewhat old Can you think of a number of projects you talked about the methane capture system Are there projects that could be profitably assessed that have been radically successful that work on all fronts? That would be that could be used as detailed templates for messaging going forward with infrastructure development Would that be a good approach because it kind of ties the high to the low, right? absolutely, and so Yes, I mean so one of the things um, I have researched you you might appreciate in nature I’m very proud of that because of the general interest readership of nature and science, right with two great great people Peter crampton who actually his father was was dean of the law school here He grew up in ithaca and axel oakenfels and axels at the university of cologne and the nature paper lays out how Road pricing right pricing the use of the road which a pilot project is in the bill That was just signed by the house of representatives could help to alleviate and in fact eliminate traffic congestion But people don’t talk. Oh my god. What would we do without traffic congestion? We’d live it’d be a utopia Yeah, well people spend like an hour a day people’s people spend like a half time job in traffic congestion This is not a trivial problem It’s unbelievably economic drain and it’s terribly polluting but jordan look look at what what do they do? What’s the first thing that you hear when people say this road is congestion they say build another lane build build another highway, right? And there’s economic research that shows it’s what called induced demand It is the the fact that you have added a lane Adds to the demand on the highway the developer says oh, there’s a new interstate highway here I’m going to put a housing development in well, what does that do to the interstate highway? It adds to congestion and so so they’re always looking for these capacity expansions Or they’re looking for new and wild technologies, right? I love the hyperloop, you know, they’re saying let’s do a hyperloop but the economics 101 joy The first semester of micro economics provides the answer where the problem is that the price of the road Space is zero, right? It’s a free good So it’s just like if you have a pile of free bananas and a pile of price bananas at the grocery store People are going to take the free bananas and they’re going to be gone Right and so it’s an artificial free too because it’s not free because people are paying for it with their time Well, it’s the old soviet system. It’s queuing. Yeah, you queue so with a lot of these With a lot of these problems systemically i’m just trying to think through how this works, you know with people making decisions I’m not as familiar with with you know Mayor offices though i’m though i’m somewhat but I mean so there’s a couple things We’re back to the age-old problem of term limits, right? Because if you’re making a choice on which Tax which is going to be more tax efficient for your Two years four years for whatever your term is it’s going to make sense in the short term But not in the long term and so to overcome that People mayors have to be armed with a whole different story that they’re able to tell and market and draw voters with Because under current circumstances and you know, the other thing that I think about that I I don’t think any one of us is going to have an answer To immediately but I just thought I would raise it that we’re seeing everywhere I’m sure you see it in all of your ventures is people are so busy scrambling to keep up with I’m going to call it corruption and by that I don’t mean overt corruption I mean all the nonsense and clogging that goes into The act of being let’s say a politician right the amount of fundraising can get right the congestion that there is no time To consider and to weigh things out in a way that involves bigger picture innovative thinking So the easiest thing is to just pull the lever on what you’ve been doing all along Right, and i’m seeing that a lot what you’re saying to adopt new technology to sell it Somebody has to really understand that they have to go into it like the methane capture They have to go into private business. They have to figure out what regulations need to be cleared To figure out how to package that and sell that and no one’s going to get fired And when congressmen are spending 25 hours a week Uh fundraising because they have to how the hell are they going to take the time to dig into something at this level of detail? And that’s that’s more like congestion than corruption really Right, it’s easy to it’s easy to be cynical about that, but it’s not helpful But also nobody gets fired if you pull a lever on something everyone’s been doing for 50 years 75 years where you get Fired as if you have and you advocate for that partnership and it turns into a disaster And so there’s a lot of ways that people are risk averse based on the system And I think you know for me, I hate to sound like you know a hammer where everything’s a nail But you know the only contribution really that I can offer that significant is on the storytelling front which is Messaging which for me messaging is distinct from propaganda if you can get the messaging right sometimes you can get the policy right? Yeah, but craig let me let me uh, you know extend that a little bit And this gets to jordan’s point These are great, you know great people It’s been wonderful for me to interact with the people who actually own and operate and have responsibility for infrastructure, right? Um, why why why why has it been wonderful because because they they they really care about the public services, right? They’re really trying to provide clean water. They’re really trying to you know, make make the The roads work there. They’re you know, and a mayor, you know has got 50, you know 15 different things Every day, you know, that’s a problem whether it’s interacting with the police or the potholes or You know at inethicates dealing with cordell, you know, and I I really do think that that they try Their best, you know, it’s a hard job I mean to be the person who is in charge of this by the way the u.s. Interstate highway system Zero of it is owned by the federal government. It’s entirely owned by a state states And that means if you’re a governor you have the responsibility for operating it maintaining it policing it Taking care of the dead animals Resurfacing it taking care of the signage and the line paint. I mean, it’s a it’s a big job And I think a lot particularly and it’s not glamorous It’s not glamorous But great nobody wants to go first Nobody wants to go first You don’t want to be the mayor of charleston and you install the smart stop lights and then everything screws up, right? So this is why I think pilot projects, you know, whatever the technology is pilots so Geeks like me and other academics can study the pilots write about them produce, you know reports and saying this is what did well This is what did poorly. This is what you the mayor of syracuse, you know, or wherever you are should do But but there’s really this risk aversion while in these pilot projects and partly what the engineers and the economists should be thinking About too is is not only you know do these work and what are the outcomes economically? but is there a way of constructing an incentive system around the successful project so that the people who took the risk are Rewarded for having taken the risk and so that that becomes part of their political capital because without that being solved Solving the other problems isn’t going to be sufficient because they’re just punished for mistakes. They’re not rewarded for movement forward It’s it’s so true. So true not to keep harping on methane capture, but it’s such a compelling and concrete thing I mean part of how I would think if if for johnson if they’re going to target that is to Do a breakdown and say here’s how much money the city made. Here’s how much time they saved Here’s how much right revenue is generated. Here’s their cost basis I mean all these things can be broken down and handed off in a way. That’s a neat package of like We can make an investment. Here’s how much money that you’ll make in an ongoing way and here’s a small slice of it That’s a reasonable reward for a company who’s taking the the expense up front Yeah, so greg, let me let me say one thing about that Let me get get back to the screen here This is an interesting left of center right of center thing, you know in some cases, right? Uh for interest to improve infrastructure delivery. We cannot avoid the p-word And the p-word is privatization, right? And so I have because of who I am i’m not in a company or anything Some of these infrastructure companies are happy to talk to me about what they think the best policies for the methane capture example You could do a long-term lease so you could lease out the operation of the wastewater treatment for 50 years a long time And the companies say we could do things if we own that plant, right? In terms of you know Just all these sort of cutting-edge technologies that we will not do even with a 50-year lease, right? 50 years is pretty long and that’s not selling the wastewater treatment plant. You’re just taking a part of it Right. The other thing I learned the other day is uh, gordon might find this of interest I used to think the only privately owned bridge in the united states was the ambassador bridge across from us to canada Which is owned by a family and and has duty free and tolls and everything else I recently learned from one of my board members Bob helman, uh who invests in this there’s like seven or eight private private bridges So these are bridges. They’re toll bridges. They’re part of the network They’re they’re they’re operating commercially. They’re operated like a private business, but there there’s some Aspect of infrastructure communications where if you can just say it’s privatization that ends the conversation Yeah, and I think that’s a mistake because economics, uh, actually oliver williamson who won a nobel prize And economics, uh pointed to this a lot of these are commercial activities where you can You know, you can have the private sector in there operating it commercially And you get better service quality you get proper asset maintenance you get incorporation of new technologies So so so I want to avoid the demagoguery if you’re a politician and one of the things you want to ask yourself is like How many things do you actually want to be responsible? That’s right It’s like why not farm some of this out to competent people? It’s the only way and that’s just part of this efficiency issue You know as the scale of my operations have grown The only way i’ve been able to manage that Is to make sure that I have competent people around me and then give them their fiefdom and I do not micromanage It’s like you can either do this or you can’t if you can’t i’m going to find someone else right away Because this has to be done But if you can do it good do it and then I can go do something else that I can do or that I want to Do and and that that distribution is like why wouldn’t you capitalize on the on the uh, uh Willingness of private companies to bear some of the damn risk and to help you with the messaging go ahead greg some good news for you jordan, which is trudeau has offered to privatize all of jordan peterson corporations, so You’re gonna have some he’s just eager to take it all over so that could take a lot of work off your plate number one Yeah, okay, well the other thing here that I was thinking about, uh Rick when you were talking about this privatization, right? That’s another big scary word like deregulation certain cases that everybody talking about selling the roads right right right and so But it but what’s so ridiculous about it as with regulation, you know Which I I learned in a recent conversation how black and white my own thinking was on it And i’ve been trying to research to kind of crack that open But it removes all the benefit for the huge the immense gray area in between Right of all the ways that privatization can be there can be partial there can be split partnership There’s a hundred different ways to skew deals and I was thinking about what you’re saying just in In simplest terms about how this functions and it’s like it’s like when we buy solar, right? I’ve now put solar panels on two houses, right? I don’t want to own it for 25 years I’d rather the company owned like we sit down and we look at all these things You can own it out right and you’re responsible for maintenance I don’t want to be responsible for maintenance of solar panels like i’m a i’m i’d rather sit my office in type, right? Right and so it’s like what you know, there’s concrete ways that people can kind of understand this That are in structures that are that are all around us all the time And so, you know, what’s a particular interest to me about the the situation in ithaca is that it’s a balance between the two, right? There’s aspects that seem that are privatized and there’s aspects that aren’t and you know creative This gets back to this gets back to something that we touched on earlier, which is well What’s the proper antidote to ideological start ideological struggle and for that strategy? Well, yeah It looks like it’s something like nuance is like if you if you well if you specify the problem look Let me tell you something For like for professors that were negotiating for with the university for their grant application like their initial startup grant before they go to grant I said look if you want to maximize the amount of money the university is going to give you Detail out all of the equipment you need with the costs like down to thousand dollars five hundred dollars a hundred Make a detailed list and get everything you want and you will get every cent and the reason for that is Well, how are they going to say no? It’s like you don’t need this piece of five hundred dollar equipment No Of course, that’s that’s not going to happen. Now if you ask for five hundred thousand dollars, they’re going to say how about 250 But if you do a detailed summary of everything you need for your research down to the micro details It’s like you just get it And it’s the same thing here is like it could easily be that if we find ourselves in general in a conversation That’s tilting in an ideological direction. What that means is we’ve got the level of analysis specified, you know Or we’re dealing with with bad faith players, but we might just have the level of analysis improperly specified Because who’s going to argue with the methane plant? You know who’s going to argue with that also lack of after action reports meaning that you know You have new orleans blow out and everybody knows about it But if it doesn’t nobody’s going to hear about it and I think that there’s a failure in In messaging to prescribe the roads not taken and failures that are averted in potential expenses and costs for it So like how useful would it be for somebody to say I put this much money into reinforcing a bridge? This hurricane came it didn’t get knocked down. Here’s how many people would be delayed for how long? Here’s the expense that we would have here is what would happen to insurance premiums And we need to figure out how to convey back to people because I think that You know, that’s a thorny problem because prevention is a lot less sexy than cure, right? It’s really a big problem because the thing is is that most well most things work all the time And so pointing to something and say hey look at how that’s working. It’s like well, yeah almost everything works Thank god for that But it’s it’s very difficult for people to get people excited about predictability Even though that’s what everybody wants It’s the same rules that you’re talking about with nuance though because how you get people excited is specifics, right? So right here’s a hurricane that came through it was you know, I don’t know how hurricanes are rated Here’s what would have happened to the bridge. Here’s what that means in concrete terms Like there’s a way to spell a narrative that everybody can feel good about it I mean one of the things that we’re looking at increasingly and in messaging and politics is is What’s called like the good boy good girl effect that people are so exhausted from being told that they do anything right, right? They feel like they’re killing themselves. They’re working. They’re trying to stay up with groceries They’re trying to follow rules when people aren’t they’re trying to play by the rules You know be law-abiding and no one’s coming along telling them that they’re doing a good job And I think that this yeah, they’re saying often instead that their participants they’re unwitting participants into corrupt and malevolent system That’s doomed for failure. Yeah, great. I’m breaking my back to do this and that’s the message Some motivation Likewise with infrastructure, right? It’s do we want another catastrophe? The bridges are crumbling there’s all this stuff and I think that that a shot of Of a of an after-action report about some innovation that got made and to detail its success gives people some role in agency In their interaction it brings government back to them It brings the notions of infrastructure and their city functioning around them back to them as opposed to everything Yeah, well, and it’s not like you americans don’t like success stories Because you do you know Well, one of the things that’s really interesting from a canadian perspective to go down to the u.s Is how cinematic the culture is like everything’s like a big movie new york city is like that It’s like it’s just cinematic everywhere and your culture is immensely powerful in generating motivational narratives It’s second to none in that and everyone ever all right. Well, that’s why america is so dominant culturally And so much of the messaging is positive. It’s oh, it’s six I mean look at the marvel movies just as an example That’s a multi-billion dollar franchise and that’s all aiming upward like it’s all positive. You’re so good at that It’s just ridiculous And it and so it doesn’t seem to me to be impossible to do something like celebration of well this methane treatment plant Yeah, for example and to elevate it up to to Elevate it up to something worthy of of genuine and deep admiration because it really is that it is that it’s like how good is that? Yeah, let me say something about greg’s point It’s it’s a really good point about about messaging and again, you know this this is um I think the the disconnect between the engineering and the communications people because the engineers will report the improvements in terms of metrics They’ll say well, well we get you know, so many hundreds of cars per hour across this lane with this new facility You know and that that doesn’t It doesn’t sell you know, but but that it’s not a story The story is the story is a single mother who can now get to work and back to her kids an hour earlier That’s the story and then you talk about that in terms of how many hours a week and how many hours a year and what? That time spent with kids like what she was able to do with her family that she couldn’t yes precisely that yes Yes, and engineers well the thing there’s a reason for that too, you know because Engineers are temperamentally different from those who would communicate so engineers are fundamentally interested in things Yes, that’s part and and the communicative types are fundamentally interested in people And so the engineers are going to say they are interested in things. It’s like well, here’s a bunch of things stories Well, that doesn’t work. It’s not a story. Yeah, and so it’s not surprising We’ll add methane man to the marvel universe. Yeah But like the methane it’s not and there’s other things gases But but the point is is this is like the ultimate it should be the ultimate bipartisan You know opportunity to come together and say look, you know, we we need we have the technology We have right exactly. We have the technology. That’s the six million dollar man Not it’s not a question of developing something in a lab. It’s patented. It’s proven. It’s there It’s ready to be deployed Can’t we just come together and say this is a win-win-win? And then advertise somehow figure out how to message so the joan jane six pack Can say this is an improvement in our life, right? We we you know, we we You know in we get benefits from this and and you know We need to figure out a way to help the engineers And people actually care who are in the political and the private realm that we do get benefits from this because this idea That’s so cynical, you know The right looks at government and thinks oh, it’s full of corrupt people only up for themselves And then the left looks at businesses say well, it’s only it’s all full of corrupt people only out for themselves It’s like it’s simply not true. That is like there’s corruption in every endeavor But it’s a small percentage of the endeavor in a functioning country and the idea that everybody is only self-interested. That’s Well, first of all, that’s a confession Not a theory and second it’s simply not true Like the more people i’ve met the more i’ve been struck by the fact that there’s so many good people working on both sides of an argument And they’re working for high and noble Purposes and high and noble purposes exist no, so no cynicism man. That’s that’s such a cop-out It’s better than naivety But in addition, you know complementary to an academic career which you’re familiar with It’s been a joy to get involved in real infrastructure Because these are people who actually care about whether the subways in new york work or the bus systems You know work or the water is clean or if wastewater treatment plants are you know are operational? I mean they really do care right and so for me I get site visits I get to see the stuff in construction You can tell that they care you can tell that they care because they’re paying attention to details that matter They’re real. It’s real. It really matters if the sewage system works and you think well, that’s not that interesting It’s kind of beneath me. It’s like of course the sewage system is beneath you like obviously but It’s a mark of caring to make those things work and everyone knows what it’s like to bring a plumber into your house Who’s a good plumber? Yeah, it’s like you’re so happy. He’s there It’s like great and he’s got his business and it’s going fine and he comes in and he doesn’t rip you off on the Bill and he actually fixes it and it’s not going to screw up again. It’s like and it’s a good interchange It’s you know, you’re happy to have someone like that in your house. Absolutely And that’s so many plumbing problems the first time we bought a house that I feel like our Trusted plumber was like part of the family Like figure out his favorite his favorite thing to drink at like cocktail hour at the end of the day I mean he was in there It’s unbelievable how reliant we are skilled skilled trades people and working people who do their job. Well, it’s just it’s unbelievable Yeah, but take take that greg and multiply it by 10, right? So one of our affiliates is patrick foyer who was the head of the new york of the port authority of new york and new jersey But then he was made head of the mta And guess what happened covid hit right the fair box revenues of the the mta in new york were down by like 90 percent And here’s a guy who’s been appointed by the governor to do that And you know, this is your moment to step up to the plate You gotta you gotta still pay your workers. You gotta keep the system running, but your fair box revenue just dropped by 90 Because the quarantine So so think of that, right? I couldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t be able to sleep But patrick was able to take it through and pull it out somehow pull it out the other end Right and manage all this crap that was going on on the new york city subway system You know partly because the virus I mean, that’s amazing I was stunned when I went to new york city to manhattan, you know It looked like it did five years ago, except it was cleaner. I thought And then I I noticed that while everybody was just back on the streets. This is just reopened I thought how just think about this that city was shut down for 18 months And it still works It’s like what the hell that’s a miracle that’s an absolute miracle And if everyone was corrupt and power-seeking and malevolent and only out for themselves, that is not how that city would look. No No, and it is amazing given the the level of activity and the density and the restaurants and the waste and the You know, it’s it’s amazing. It’s amazing. It does work But but you know, like as I said jordan at the outset I come from this you know neoclassical free enterprise kind of Perspective but the longer i’ve been dealing with infrastructure the more respect and admiration I have for the public people who have you know are dedicated largely dedicating their careers to making this stuff work They really do have a public interest You know desire Embedded in them which which is nice, right? It’s it’s nice to see that and they they take their job They could all make more money in the private sector probably Yeah, definitely these and be easier You know and and the rewards would be bigger and there might be more security I mean look what greg and I went to washington four years ago and one of the things we did was host a couple of lunches and we had relatively junior democrat congress people and republican congress people just come to lunch because they don’t get a chance to meet each other partly because They’re raising money 25 hours a week And and plus they’re up for re-election in two years like these are busy people Right and so the first thing we did was just had everybody introduce themselves and talk for five minutes It was like why are you doing this? That was the question and you could not tell the democrats from the republicans every story was the same It was like well, you know I’m kind of a serious person and I would really like to serve my country and I felt that although I had other Opportunities that this was worth the sacrifice and I was hoping I could come to washington and really make a difference And right like you listen to eight people say that and these aren’t trivial people and they’re not grandstanding because there’s no audience It’s like they’re just saying what it is and you can be cynical about that if you want But you’re a fool if you are because that means you’re cynical about the most noble ambitions of Of people who are making a genuine sacrifice. These are hard jobs And so and it’s so nice to hear from you that you’ve been in the trenches working on these practical projects and the consequence for you Is that you’ve become like more optimistic and pleased with the characters of the people you’re dealing with. Yes. Yes Let me be clear jordan there, you know, we should be clear There are cases where infrastructure delivery is rife with corruption and there’s the old odublek in brazil You may be familiar with that scandal in south america big it’s brazilian construction company was bribing You know public officials to to be the winning bidder and prime ministers went to prison, you know So it’s not it’s not some pure. It’s the real world of humanity, right? It’s it’s it’s not a pure thing, but I think that’s the exception rather than the rule Well psychopaths are three percent of the population Not 97. Yeah, and they never get above five percent before they’re culled essentially One to five percent and and the basic the the stable Point of psychopathy prevalence is three percent And so the idea that it’s just malevolent power seeking that drives Hierarchical organizations is just wrong in the face of it because otherwise there’d be way more psychopaths and they’d be way more successful So so yeah, these are exceptions especially in highly functioning societies and the u.s I mean there isn’t a society that’s ever been more highly functioning than the u.s all things considered Wow, so i’m glad to hear that. Well, I don’t think it’s I don’t I don’t think that’s an unreasonable proposition. I mean It’s it’s an it’s the economic driver in some sense of innovation throughout the free world I mean, there’s other countries that are doing well But you know the america is really a kind of epicenter and everyone knows it And so it’s and it’s huge. I mean 300 million people that that’s a lot of middle class people, man Well, there is no silicon valley of germany, right? I mean to some extent Right. Well in silicon silicon valley and maybe in countries Do can do beautifully for sure. I mean the thing that people tend to forget about america is It’s like all of europe in one place. I mean like the the disparate cultures Climates, you know perspectives values communities that are held together. It’s pretty extraordinary I mean, that’s another and the diversity of government and the distribution of powers It’s a complex place. And so the fact that it functions as well as it does all the time I mean and a good index of that you don’t think your systems are functioning well They well have you plugged something into your outlet in your house lately? And it has it how often does that not work? And that’s a complicated system almost always worse I do want to tell you Maybe jordan will appreciate this a european friend I think she was from austria came to new york, right? You know to visit it was it was her first time and um, you know She had uh, you know her reaction Was america she said americans aren’t anything And I couldn’t understand what what she was saying. She said americans aren’t this was after her visit She said americans aren’t anything what she meant is, you know, it’s they’re not In new york, right? They’re not just latin. They’re not asian. They’re not it’s like this big mishmash, right? It’s like a un meeting So, you know if you look at new york city, of course, it’s different across the country But in a lot of places there’s no unique You know, it’s a bunch of cultures thrown in together We live my wife and I lived at 55th and ninth avenue in hell’s kitchen for five years I think there were 15 different ethnic restaurants within a short walk of our of our unit Right, so it’s this big mess What upsets me probably more than anything with the way that the the cultural conversation has gotten so Tribalized is that it removes the conversations about diversity From being joyful and there’s so many ways that it’s it’s such a driver of joy when when when when you have friends and community and family and food and culture and music from across all of these different categories and I’m finding people are increasingly constrained about how they even know how to talk about that Is the one thing, you know, and then the other thing is of course not to detour us off into Cultural territory because I know jordan gets really uncomfortable discussing those things publicly Um But you know people people also start to start to view it that there’s like one set of spokespeople from every community Like I I know people who only know woke latinos like how limited is your world if the only people who? Who you know are one particular cross-section of a community. Yeah And so they’re so diverse craig the oh, yeah, they’re from belize. They’re from andorra’s they’re from mexico I mean and they’re they’re all quite they’re padama, you know costa rica I mean i’m shocked at how if you talk to those folks how differently they view themselves Right. Oh, yeah, I mean that was one of the the great um joys of doing Political out, you know, I did a lot of political outreach and conversations Ramping up to 2020 but it’s like, you know top people talk about You know just to use for an example the hispanic vote and it’s like are we talking california versus texas versus cuban americans? Versus argentina like There’s such a range and there’s so much there’s so much like what troubles me so much is the dampening down Of the discussion in ways that are joyful because that’s always what wins hearts and minds is what wins, you know The biggest thing that well, I won’t get on a I won’t get on a soap rock So let’s go back to some concrete realities so to speak given we’re talking about infrastructure, right rick Priorities like that’s always difficult what what’s really broken that should be fixed Like first and for the biggest bang for the environment and for and for efficiency in your estimation Well, so so jordan, there’s a couple of big projects That that just must be done the gate you you visit in new york the gateway tunnel About a 13 billion dollar project. They’re the rail tunnels that run under the hudson river and they’re owned by amtrak But new jersey transit uses them during the peak commute. There’s about one train per minute that goes through there They are over a hundred years old probably 110. They are in dire need of being Improved of just there’s a new alignment just being almost replaced eastside access jordan in in new york is the long island railroad coming into the city there’s there’s a huge project that needs to uh to streamline that There’s a rail tunnel in baltimore city where i’m from that’s from the civil war that’s too low for the Trains to go through because it was designed during the civil war and then that needs to be raised So I would say a few of these let’s say mega projects need to be done. The second thing jordan is um Deferred maintenance we just need to upgrade it. It could be airports. It could be dens It could be levies. It could be seaports. It could be electrical systems I mean just across we need to prioritize where deferred maintenance has gotten to be, you know a huge problem And you know and address that and the third one jordan i’d say is is we need to have some initiative greg could help with this some initiative to have a not not a Developing technology but an adoption of technology just like a wave of technological adoption and infrastructure And you know, there’s all this stuff where people you know are they’re aware of this new This technology and the latest app and all that sort of stuff But all of this, um a lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about with smart stoplights smart streetlights I could go go on about liners for water pipes that will renovate water pipes that attend to the cost um There needs to be some broad initiative. Maybe we could do it with when the president signs the bill To say let’s just have a big initiative focused on this This is the ultimate bipartisan thing because it will reduce greenhouse gas. It will reduce, you know, uh, Diesel emissions are horrible Gas emissions are are bad It will improve the efficiency of our infrastructure and it’s there on the table It’s just somehow we can back maybe backstop the risk of the asset owners Whether it’s a county or a city or a state or whoever it is the city Backstop their risk somehow. I don’t know. Let’s just have some Initiative To help these folks get the technology adopted and jordan. I would say that’s number one. All right, great I think that’s a good place to stop I hope that we can have a conversation like this again and and also to talk more Maybe we can organize this in some manner about how to ally The proper direction of the infrastructure project with the messaging So that and and we’ve outlined some of that today, which I thought was extremely useful and so thank you very much both of you for participating today and uh, Definitely, let’s talk again. Maybe in a month and a month and a half or something like that. I’m happy to talk Great. Great. Yeah, this was this was a pleasure. Thank you rick. Good to meet you. Greg. Good to meet you. Thanks, greg I’m happy to talk at any time You