The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 207. Fix This： Infrastructure & Environment ｜ Gregg Hurwitz and Rick Geddes

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00:00:51.040 Welcome to the JVP Podcast, Season 4, Episode 64.

00:00:58.720 In this episode, Dad had Greg Hurwitz and Rick Geddes on to talk about the multi-billion dollar infrastructure bill that's currently on the table for the U.S. Congress.

00:01:09.060 Rick Geddes is a professor at Cornell and a well-recognized expert in American infrastructure policy and development.

00:01:14.980 He's the author of The Road to Renewal, Private Investment in U.S. Transportation Structure.

00:01:21.960 Greg Hurwitz served as Dad's co-host today.

00:01:25.660 Greg's a former student of Dad's at Harvard and now a best-selling scriptwriter, producer, and novelist.

00:01:31.740 You might have heard of Orphan X or the Book of Henry.

00:01:34.660 More recently, Greg's been involved in creating moderate political messages for the Democrat Party.

00:01:40.220 That's right. He's trying to bridge the gap between the Democrats and the Republicans.

00:01:45.720 I hope you enjoy this episode.

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00:03:04.040 Hi, everybody.

00:03:23.600 I'm very pleased today to have with me two people, Dr. Rick Geddes.

00:03:27.980 The timing is really perfect because the Biden infrastructure bill just passed, and Dr. Geddes is an expert on infrastructure development,

00:03:39.100 and so it's exactly a propitious time to have this conversation about the details associated with infrastructure,

00:03:45.040 what it is and how it might be renewed and what obstacles there are and so forth.

00:03:50.020 And he's a well-recognized expert in this particular area.

00:03:53.360 He holds a joint appointment in both the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy and in the economics department at Cornell.

00:03:59.800 He's a member of the graduate fields of systems engineering, regional science, and economics.

00:04:05.060 He's founding director of the Cornell Program in Infrastructure Policy.

00:04:09.480 He's also a non-resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

00:04:14.160 I suppose that puts him somewhat to the right of center, and that's relevant for reasons we'll find out later.

00:04:20.020 Rick's research centers on the funding, financing, and permitting of major infrastructure projects.

00:04:25.860 His publications have appeared in a variety of academic journals, including the American Economic Review,

00:04:31.360 the Journal of Regulatory Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics,

00:04:36.540 and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, among others.

00:04:39.580 He's author of the 2011 American Enterprise Institute book entitled The Road to Renewal,

00:04:45.960 Private Investment in U.S. Transportation Infrastructure.

00:04:48.920 He holds MA and PH degrees in economics from the University of Chicago and a BS in economics and finance from Towson State University.

00:04:56.500 And I also have with me, as a co-host today, Greg Hurwitz.

00:05:00.480 Greg was a student of mine at Harvard years ago, and we've remained in close touch ever since.

00:05:05.220 He's the New York Times' number one international best-selling author of 23 thrillers, including the Orphan X series.

00:05:12.780 His novels have won numerous literary awards and have been published in 33 languages.

00:05:16.580 Greg was a guest on this podcast.

00:05:19.720 It was season four, episode two, an episode entitled Build a Better Democrat.

00:05:24.320 And he sits, I would say, center-left.

00:05:27.040 And so we have two viewpoints.

00:05:29.020 I don't exactly know where I sit, and many people have many opinions about that.

00:05:33.060 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.

00:05:43.300 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.

00:05:55.280 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.

00:06:09.820 So, I invited Greg today for the same reason that I invited Dr. Geddes, is I hope to learn something about infrastructure development from someone who spent his whole life studying it.

00:06:20.120 And Greg's here for exactly the same reason.

00:06:22.600 And so, thank you very much, Dr. Geddes, for agreeing to talk to us today.

00:06:27.000 And I'm looking forward to it.

00:06:28.500 So, how did you get interested in, like, why infrastructure for you?

00:06:32.100 And maybe you can lay out what it is, as far as you're concerned, why it's so crucial, but also what got you interested in it.

00:06:39.760 Yeah.

00:06:40.640 So, thank you, Jordan.

00:06:42.100 I'm very honored to be invited to join the show and excited people are talking about infrastructure, particularly with a policy bent.

00:06:51.100 I have to go way back in time, Jordan.

00:06:53.500 And 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 college.

00:07:06.180 That must have made you popular with the girls, eh? 0.55

00:07:08.980 Yeah, just really popular with them.

00:07:13.400 But I wrote my dissertation back in Chicago on the regulation of electricity companies, investor-owned electricity companies.

00:07:20.720 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.

00:07:36.800 And, you know, I taught at Fordham in the Bronx before coming to Cornell, and my work at Fordham focused on postal policy around the world and postal regulation.

00:07:45.980 And then, Jordan, in the 2004-2005 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.

00:07:59.660 And that year was precipitous for infrastructure policy because Congress was passing a highway reauthorization bill.

00:08:06.880 And that's actually important for what just happened in Congress now.

00:08:11.440 And what happens is every five or six years, Congress reauthorizes spending out of the Federal Highway Trust Fund.

00:08:18.560 So, every time you buy a gallon of gasoline in the United States, 18.4 cents goes to the federal government.

00:08:25.140 If you buy diesel fuel, it's 24.4 cents.

00:08:28.000 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.

00:08:37.080 So, that year, 0405, was the safety loo.

00:08:40.560 That was the name of the bill, the safety loo highway bill.

00:08:44.840 And the executive branch was asked to weigh in on a whole set of issues related to highways, roads, bridges, tunnels.

00:08:52.000 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.

00:09:06.760 Because, you know, the executive branch is being hit with all sorts of policy issues.

00:09:12.040 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.

00:09:20.640 We called ourselves Section 1909 Commission, because that was the section.

00:09:25.360 It was literally called the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission.

00:09:30.200 Because the federal highway programs were 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.

00:09:45.700 But by the 90s, it was largely complete.

00:09:47.920 But the point was, you know, they're still collecting the gas and diesel fuel taxes.

00:09:54.580 And what's the point of the program if you're, you know, basically have a complete system?

00:09:59.600 So the purpose of this commission was to kind of study that question.

00:10:03.500 And I got exposed to even more of these issues, Jordan, by serving on that commission.

00:10:08.820 And we put out a report to Congress called Transportation for Tomorrow.

00:10:14.780 I'm kind of laughing because it was put out in 2008, just as the global financial system was melting down.

00:10:21.300 We never got the attention that we hoped, but we did have some impact.

00:10:25.360 But, Jordan, I came to realize the importance of these issues and how, in some sense, understudied they were.

00:10:31.180 And in particular, by economics departments, right?

00:10:34.600 Back in my day in college, almost every economics department had a transportation economist.

00:10:39.940 And that slowly went by the wayside.

00:10:42.440 And the transportation policy issues really were not being studied.

00:10:47.440 How come it went by the wayside?

00:10:50.120 I mean, in Canada, it was infrastructure that delivered this country.

00:10:53.460 It was a railroad that tied us together.

00:10:55.060 So infrastructure, actually, is at the basis of our country.

00:10:58.440 And 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's a miracle.

00:11:05.800 And it's an economic miracle as well.

00:11:07.580 I don't think it could be built today.

00:11:09.160 Maybe I'm cynical about that.

00:11:10.720 It could not.

00:11:12.220 Okay, why do you say that?

00:11:13.600 Why could it not be built today, given how crucial that piece of infrastructure is?

00:11:18.340 So one of the issues that we study, one of the things that I became interested in,

00:11:24.120 we actually just put out a working paper a couple of days ago through my CPIP program here at Cornell, is called NEPA.

00:11:31.740 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,

00:11:43.180 in order to design and construct a new facility, expand an old facility, do almost anything.

00:11:49.660 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?

00:12:01.500 I think the average might be five we have in our research paper.

00:12:04.720 So let me push you on that, and maybe Greg can jump in here, too.

00:12:07.800 Sure.

00:12:08.000 So now, the Biden administration has decided to make infrastructure, renovation, and renewal one of its primary focuses.

00:12:15.740 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.

00:12:25.460 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.

00:12:35.200 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.

00:12:45.700 Absolutely.

00:12:46.280 Because the rich can't take infrastructure for themselves, let's say.

00:12:51.260 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?

00:13:02.660 Now, is it reasonable to place you politically on the moderate right, let's say?

00:13:08.300 And how does that influence your thinking about such things?

00:13:11.960 I mean, Jordan, I come from a classical liberal, libertarian, Scottish Enlightenment, neoclassical economics.

00:13:19.500 I have my doctorate from Chicago, right?

00:13:22.320 And sort of one of the golden years, I would say, of Chicago economics.

00:13:28.600 I guess you could place me wherever you want, given that information.

00:13:36.280 But yeah, I take a basic market-oriented approach.

00:13:39.620 I mean, I wrote a book on increased private participation in the delivery of public services, which is a huge issue globally, right?

00:13:48.840 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.

00:14:01.240 So I think it's fair to put me slightly affiliated with American Enterprise, slightly to the right of the center on this.

00:14:08.220 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.

00:14:13.760 So you've heard the adage that time is money, right?

00:14:17.060 Time is money.

00:14:17.880 That is really true in infrastructure.

00:14:20.320 If you delay a project by five or seven years because of the NEPA process, right, then you just increase the cost enormously.

00:14:31.100 I mean, it could double the cost or something of that nature.

00:14:36.040 And so what's happening now, it's actually very interesting.

00:14:39.340 I think you'll find this very interesting.

00:14:40.720 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?

00:14:51.380 One Federal Decision.

00:14:52.760 And that is the idea that you would have a lead federal agency.

00:14:56.400 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.

00:15:07.140 So one agency would take the lead in shepherding the proposal, right, through the federal process.

00:15:17.420 And that agency could actually, if the other agencies were dragging their feet, would have the power, basically, to make a decision for them.

00:15:25.840 The situation now, Jordan, is one agency will hand the proposal off to another, and that will hand it off to another, and off to another.

00:15:34.240 And as you can see, it slows down the process enormously.

00:15:38.100 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?

00:15:49.340 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?

00:16:04.240 So I think we all want to protect the environment.

00:16:06.400 We all want to protect endangered species.

00:16:08.820 We want to protect the water, the air, Native American burial grounds, you know, and so on.

00:16:13.480 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.

00:16:22.120 So there's a bit of pulls.

00:16:24.960 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.

00:16:36.440 And then there's another pull within the administration to kind of repeal some of the Trump-era reforms on this.

00:16:42.060 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.

00:16:52.700 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 – you know, that whole thing slows it down.

00:17:04.320 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.

00:17:17.580 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.

00:17:26.400 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.

00:17:38.720 Yeah, so the Chinese announced 150 nuclear plants today, I think, today or yesterday.

00:17:43.720 Wow.

00:17:44.720 Yeah, that's their plan.

00:17:46.580 And so, Greg, you had a question.

00:17:48.580 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 mutual work is to try and get people arguing and talking about the right things, at least, right, versus how so much conversation goes.

00:18:02.480 And I was really struck by even something that's as seemingly uncontroversial as infrastructure.

00:18:09.660 There's very little discussion in the media, in conversations around this topic with any sophistication.

00:18:17.800 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.

00:18:31.140 Rather than not being able to be framed and described as you're doing it, everybody has an intuitive sense of that.

00:18:37.040 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 different layers.

00:18:45.000 And, 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.

00:19:06.120 It seems like we can get very little sane discussion in mainstream media about the role, for instance, that regulation plays and how to strike the balance.

00:19:14.600 And you're so clear about it.

00:19:15.980 You know, of course, we need to, you know, protect the environment.

00:19:18.720 Of course, we care about, you know, species and extinction and disruptions to the habitat.

00:19:23.860 But we also can't take six years to build an overpass in New York City.

00:19:28.080 It's just not going to be functional.

00:19:29.360 Not, not and remain, not and retain an economy that simultaneously serves the needs of the people who are released well off.

00:19:37.920 Because they're the ones who will pay the price for those delays fundamentally.

00:19:41.780 Absolutely.

00:19:42.680 Another way of saying that, Jordan, is all these delays and cost, it's, it's like a regressive tax, right?

00:19:49.820 In other words, it's a tax.

00:19:52.300 Economists would think about it as an implicit tax that disproportionately hurts the poor.

00:19:57.160 You know, it's just like almost all the time.

00:19:59.980 Why disproportionately hurts the poor?

00:20:02.720 Well, I mean, these, these facilities, you know, let's go back and, and, and talk about the actual facilities, you know, the, the actual infrastructure, right, that we're talking about.

00:20:13.640 As I stress, it provides basic public goods and services.

00:20:17.160 So mobility, getting, getting to, to school, getting to your work, you know, getting to your community activities, right?

00:20:25.220 The, the, the, the, the history of infrastructure is, and this is, goes 200 years back in the U.S. Postal Service, is the history of trying to provide all communities with access, right?

00:20:37.660 Or, or being sure that no communities are left out.

00:20:40.600 That goes back to the horse post, right?

00:20:43.620 When, when you were delivering letters and, and cards and newspapers by horse.

00:20:47.960 And the, the goal in the United States was that all communities should have access to a post office, right?

00:20:54.580 And, and, and the history of infrastructure in the United States, universal landline telephones.

00:21:00.440 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.

00:21:12.160 So there was this, this farms to markets.

00:21:14.600 There was electrification during the Roosevelt year, rural electrification.

00:21:18.720 So there's always this, this, and we see it now with broadband, right?

00:21:23.020 Yeah, I was going to say our broadband internet access.

00:21:26.260 Consistently in our polling, we go out often into the 37 congressional districts decided by five points.

00:21:33.240 We really want to see what people think to cut through it.

00:21:36.060 And consistently rural broadband tests through the roof as a necessity, right?

00:21:41.000 It is the new, those are the new information highways, right?

00:21:43.840 It's the new, it is the new infrastructure system and we see a huge demand and need for that.

00:21:49.560 Well, and think of all the educational opportunities that provides as well.

00:21:53.440 And increasingly so.

00:21:54.700 And so, okay, so let me ask you another kind of technical question.

00:21:58.320 Please go ahead.

00:21:59.240 The whole was universal access and that's includes the, the, the, the poorest communities, right?

00:22:05.040 Rural communities or urban communities.

00:22:08.040 It's always been across sectors, this goal of everybody having access.

00:22:12.280 And that's fundamentally what the infrastructure is about.

00:22:15.500 Okay.

00:22:16.060 So do you think, so here's a proposition, twofold proposition.

00:22:20.200 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.

00:22:30.480 And the second most important would be the universal provision of efficient infrastructure.

00:22:35.880 Is that a reasonable prop?

00:22:37.500 Are those propositions reasonable from the perspective of an economist?

00:22:41.140 Yes, absolutely.

00:22:42.280 Absolutely crucial.

00:22:43.260 But I would, I would say that the energy infrastructure, the energy is part of the infrastructure, the generating distribution and transmission capacity.

00:22:51.740 You need to get power, right?

00:22:54.160 To people that that's a crucial, we kind of think, 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.

00:23:07.420 Right?

00:23:07.720 We kind of think everybody should have heat, everybody should have electric, everybody should have mobility, right, in your community.

00:23:14.940 So I would say absolutely.

00:23:17.080 You know, and that's why having these things.

00:23:19.460 There's this big notion of equity, right, which is kind of this amorphous term, and some of us are bothered by the lack of definition.

00:23:27.700 But in infrastructure, it is used generally, I think it's this old notion of universal service, universal access, where it's equitable for all communities to have this.

00:23:38.900 And of course, I 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 to provide these basic services as the technology evolves.

00:23:54.220 And now, 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.

00:24:05.140 And so we don't want either urban pockets to be left without it, you know, or rural.

00:24:11.060 So, Jordan, I don't know if I'm answering your question, but there's a certain level of power that we need.

00:24:16.560 Well, the other thing that I've thought a lot about is Pareto distribution problems.

00:24:20.320 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.

00:24:27.980 But that doesn't seem to me to be the case with infrastructure, because, well, it can't happen that way.

00:24:34.440 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.

00:24:39.000 And so, if you are, okay, if you are actually devoted to serving those who are oppressed and excluded at the bottom of the socioeconomic and power hierarchies,

00:24:49.900 then I can't think of a way to facilitate equitable distribution of valuable resources, especially energy, because energy is work.

00:24:57.400 I can't think of a better way of doing that than to concentrate on infrastructure development.

00:25:01.820 And so then that brings us to the next problem that's going to be a big one for this infrastructure bill is like,

00:25:06.520 as pressure ramps up in relationship to climate change and the environmental concerns that go along with that,

00:25:13.360 there's going to be more and more pressure on infrastructure development, like in terms of regulating and suppressing it, for that matter.

00:25:20.060 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.

00:25:27.860 But theoretically, also, they're concerned with the poor.

00:25:31.260 And there's a big tension there.

00:25:32.600 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?

00:25:42.100 So, George, I think you've hit on one of the most important and underappreciated issues in infrastructure policy.

00:25:48.880 And I kind of regret that I didn't spend more time in my book that you have on this.

00:25:54.900 But I've been studying this for 15 years now.

00:25:58.400 And I would say there's been a slow revolution going on in the technology of infrastructure delivery.

00:26:06.000 Right.

00:26:06.520 And some of those things make, you know, the front page of The New York Times, and that's driverless cars.

00:26:12.760 Right.

00:26:13.320 And the Hyperloop and things like that.

00:26:14.760 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.

00:26:31.040 Let me give you a couple examples.

00:26:32.700 One is smart stoplights.

00:26:34.740 OK, smart stoplights.

00:26:35.980 I had a kind of a little briefing of this by the folks at Carnegie Mellon recently.

00:26:41.940 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 rote timer.

00:26:50.920 They actually change in response to the traffic that's actually at the intersection.

00:26:57.280 So many drivers have had the experience of going to a railroad 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.

00:27:06.620 And they just know that if the light knew that I was sitting there, it would turn green.

00:27:10.560 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.

00:27:22.560 Jordan, they have it now to the point where they can sense pedestrians and include pedestrians in the changing of the light.

00:27:29.040 They have it to they can tell a dog, they can tell a person in a wheelchair and they can just change the the optimize the changing of the colors to maximize the flow through the intersection.

00:27:42.020 Now, 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.

00:27:54.320 Now, there's something in the bill that's a pilot program to help with that.

00:27:58.460 Right. But the problem, Jordan, is not the technology.

00:28:01.660 The problem is the adoption. Right.

00:28:04.340 Is 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.

00:28:12.700 But it's highly atomized in the United States.

00:28:17.240 But but getting them to overcome their risk aversion.

00:28:20.920 And I understand that totally. They're risk averse to new technologies.

00:28:24.240 They're afraid of it. They don't what we call headline risk.

00:28:27.340 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.

00:28:34.000 Right. But we've got to somehow overcome that risk aversion to get them to adopt these new technologies.

00:28:39.940 OK, so well, so one of the things you're saying is that part of the infrastructure messaging and 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.

00:28:51.340 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.

00:29:03.360 So for poor people, plus it should have environmental benefits. 0.53

00:29:06.160 So we shouldn't be thinking about it. Exactly.

00:29:08.800 OK, OK, OK, OK.

00:29:10.000 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.

00:29:18.520 And that's American Society of Civil Engineers. Right.

00:29:21.140 So if if you are 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.

00:29:29.820 Like what's really broken? What really where's the and where's the biggest bang for the buck?

00:29:35.140 So, so, yeah, let me. Wow. That is a is a is a great question.

00:29:40.640 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.

00:29:49.660 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.

00:30:01.520 Right. The interstate highway system, the state routes, the local streets, you know, in infrastructure, same thing across, you know, across sectors.

00:30:10.660 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.

00:30:19.320 And I think there's political incentives. Right. If you want to be reelected, you want the ribbon cutting ceremony with the big scissors.

00:30:26.320 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.

00:30:37.860 So there's a problem with the political incentives that have led to these trillions of dollars, you know, of deferred maintenance.

00:30:46.040 And I think in the bill. So, of course, that's part of the debt. That's part of the debt, that deferred maintenance.

00:30:52.860 Even that's also part of this part of that's also part of messaging failure, you know, as you're describing the stoplights.

00:30:57.900 And that's like the send city stuff. Right. You can plug in like the stoplights also have so many other aspects as charging stations and different security.

00:31:06.980 They can alert to gunshots like there's so much in it that's efficient.

00:31:10.960 And to me, I just hear that as a, you know, obviously being somebody who's more involved with the messaging side of it.

00:31:18.520 But that seems to me to get somewhere like Ithaca to adopt that has to be framed as an environmental imperative.

00:31:24.220 Like, do you want to cut gasoline costs? Here's how we do it. Here's how the city is cleaner.

00:31:29.040 Here's where the money will skew to other people. There's a way that that has to be packaged and sold.

00:31:33.120 That's outside of the norm. Right. 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.

00:31:44.360 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.

00:31:51.800 And the lack of a proper messaging apparatus around some of this stuff is really costly.

00:31:58.340 And people tend to forget that that's just as essential as figuring out the problems.

00:32:02.280 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.

00:32:10.120 Yeah. So that's also an infrastructure problem in some sense. Right. And a non-trivial one at that.

00:32:16.200 So how do you make these things sexy? I mean, I made a joke about that at the beginning, you know, that these these tend to be regarded as dry discussions, but they're not.

00:32:26.220 They're they're the real details of actual policy, the real details of actual politics.

00:32:30.300 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?

00:32:37.800 Well, it's more efficient. Go ahead. No, we're real quick.

00:32:41.200 Also, this is where ideologies and by that I don't just mean far left and far right.

00:32:46.840 I also mean, like, classically conservative and classically liberal.

00:32:50.980 This is where they come to die in in a good way in the solution of a problem.

00:32:54.780 Like if we can have this conversation about specifically how this makes people's lives better, maybe that's a solution that 70 percent conservative, 30 percent liberal when it comes to some application, maybe.

00:33:05.880 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.

00:33:22.040 And that's also, you know, clean fields and streams. Right.

00:33:25.660 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.

00:33:33.300 You know, that's where all the rubber meets the road.

00:33:36.280 Well, Greg, it might be a 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.

00:33:48.040 Right. It might be a good.

00:33:49.000 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 for ill motivation?

00:34:00.300 If we could, if once it gets boiled down, it also you get a very clear lay of what the strategic field looks like for pushing something through.

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00:38:20.780 So, Jordan, I want to address your, just a few minutes ago, you said who could be against greater efficiency, right?

00:38:31.520 And I think this, in some sense, to Greg's point, should be the ultimate bipartisan issue, right?

00:38:37.260 I'm not sure, with all due respect, I'm not sure engineers are the greatest on the messaging piece of this.

00:38:44.560 I love them to death, but there is this issue.

00:38:48.380 So, let me give you two other examples I want to get off my chest.

00:38:51.980 And, you know, 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?

00:39:01.140 So, one great example I think is completely underappreciated.

00:39:04.640 You know, we're all concerned about climate change, and it's methane emissions at wastewater treatment plants, right?

00:39:11.820 So, a lot of wastewater treatment plants, particularly in the eastern United States, are old.

00:39:16.720 Ours here in Ithaca was over 100 years old, and they're open settling ponds for solid waste.

00:39:22.880 Well, guess what happens?

00:39:23.920 The methane from that process just goes into the atmosphere, which is a very bad greenhouse gas.

00:39:30.180 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.

00:39:39.380 In this case, it's Johnson Controls, to install a digester.

00:39:43.540 And I've had the tour.

00:39:45.040 The digester looks like a giant tennis ball.

00:39:48.080 It's a big white sear with a plunger.

00:39:51.360 They capture the methane from the natural process of breaking down the solids.

00:39:57.020 They use the methane to turn turbines that Johnson Controls installed, three of them, at 120,000 RPMs.

00:40:04.540 They're very, very efficient.

00:40:07.840 They make electricity.

00:40:09.680 They capture the methane, so it doesn't go into the atmosphere.

00:40:12.760 It doesn't cause climate change.

00:40:15.300 They instead use that to create electricity, so they offset other generating sources.

00:40:20.140 Now, our wastewater treatment plant sells power to the grid.

00:40:23.300 Instead of using power from the grid to run the plant, they sell power to the grid.

00:40:28.640 It's a win-win-win, right, to the point where I believe they're going to install another digester.

00:40:35.660 And they're actually taking waste from other surrounding communities to process here, right?

00:40:40.600 They charge something called a tipping fee, right?

00:40:42.920 The city doesn't do that for free.

00:40:44.600 They do that for a charge.

00:40:45.740 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.

00:41:04.520 But now we have taken a 100-year plant with private sector.

00:41:09.460 Oh, the other thing I should say is how do you pay for this, right?

00:41:13.000 If you're the mayor, everybody's cash-strapped.

00:41:16.820 So guess what?

00:41:17.940 Johnson Controls was able to pay for the installation of the digester by getting a share of the lowered electric bill.

00:41:25.640 So think about that.

00:41:26.580 They knew that our wastewater treatment electric bill was going to go down.

00:41:30.320 They said, just give us a share of the electric bill.

00:41:33.240 We will bond against that savings, and we'll pay for the installation of the technology.

00:41:39.060 Well, you've just got the mayor's ear, right?

00:41:41.840 So I don't understand why we can't replicate that across the United States.

00:41:47.440 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.

00:41:56.960 So this, I don't know if it's a messaging or a, I don't know what it is.

00:42:03.660 Well, who's really good at messaging are corporations, right?

00:42:07.320 They're really good at it.

00:42:08.760 You can turn on the TV, look at what ExxonMobil does, right?

00:42:12.000 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.

00:42:29.520 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.

00:42:39.140 That's a bigger driver to me, I think, than trying to convince layers of bureaucracy and government why this makes sense and to adopt it through city boards or councils or however that works.

00:42:48.880 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.

00:42:58.360 And so maybe we could go into that.

00:42:59.540 Okay, so here's a couple of things we 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.

00:43:09.320 And then we could also point out, like, there's a big argument always going on ideologically in some sense between Malthusian biologists and enthusiastic economists.

00:43:19.160 And the Malthusian biologists insist, well, there are limits to growth, everything has a maximal carrying capacity, we can't exceed that.

00:43:26.220 And there are Malthusian catastrophes, but the economists come and say, yeah, well, wait a minute, one of the ways that we can solve that is by doing more with less.

00:43:34.320 And we're really good at that, and we're getting faster and faster at being better and better at it.

00:43:38.560 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.

00:43:44.200 But this is a perfect marriage of those two things in some sense, because it means that the optimal infrastructure plans please both sides.

00:43:51.960 It's like, yeah, this is going to be better for the environment, plus it will make poor people wealthier.

00:43:58.440 So how is that not exactly what we should be aiming for?

00:44:01.780 And then, well, the messaging issue, well, that's a pretty easy message to sell, especially if it's true.

00:44:07.560 And so let's go into the public-private issue a bit.

00:44:12.120 Can I give, can I give, I want to give you guys a third example before we go to the public-private.

00:44:16.560 Just a tech, because this, Jordan, gets directly to the point you just made, right?

00:44:21.700 I emphasized stoplights before.

00:44:23.720 Now I'm going to emphasize streetlights, right?

00:44:26.560 On parking lots, you have the, or roads where you have the street, you know, to illuminate the thing at night.

00:44:33.200 The thing now that's the methane capture equivalent for streetlights, we talked about stoplights, is LED conversions.

00:44:39.820 So if you fly over a parking lot in your plane at night, you see this yellowish color from the bulbs.

00:44:47.860 This old pressurized sodium incandescent technology is very old.

00:44:54.760 LEDs in streetlights are so much more efficient that you can, again, you can install the bulbs, you can install the new towers,

00:45:03.840 and you can do it at virtually no cost to the city by the savings on the electric bill,

00:45:09.400 but there's so much more efficient that you get, you get more lumens, right?

00:45:13.100 You get more brightness.

00:45:14.700 And this was done in the city of Detroit.

00:45:16.700 I believe that Paris did this, but think about the effects of that, right?

00:45:21.060 You have more brightness that reduces crime, that reduces pedestrian accidents,

00:45:25.140 that reduces car accidents at night.

00:45:28.140 This helps communities at almost no cost to the jurisdiction that is installing them.

00:45:36.880 And you can do other things, like you can hang 5G, what they call pizza boxes,

00:45:41.180 which are 5G transmitters on those towers, and you start to deliver higher speed internet.

00:45:47.580 At the same time, you're improving the lighting.

00:45:50.900 So there's all these innovations that are completely underappreciated in this debate.

00:45:56.320 And I have to say, I'm somewhat frustrated that there's not more focus on these opportunities.

00:46:01.420 So in fact, I think the streetlights is what I was thinking about for the charging of cars and other things,

00:46:06.540 rather than the stoplights, which was your earlier example.

00:46:09.080 But a quick question for you while we're on specifics, which is this.

00:46:12.220 You said that it's Johnson Industries.

00:46:15.080 Johnson Controls.

00:46:16.280 Johnson Controls.

00:46:17.480 I mean, there's a bunch of other companies.

00:46:19.500 I mean, so clearly they have an outreach business development office.

00:46:23.560 Like, what do you think the impediments are to them going and pitching this and just having explosive growth?

00:46:29.040 If, in fact, all of these things line out, you've assessed them.

00:46:32.860 I'm just curious, like, why they can't move from that from city to town to city to town.

00:46:38.540 I think they can.

00:46:39.420 I mean, that's a really interesting question, Greg.

00:46:43.220 The case in Ithaca, I'm pretty sure, is what we call an unsolicited proposal, right?

00:46:47.620 So it's not like the city of Ithaca came and said, hey, we want somebody to do methane capture on our wastewater treatment plant.

00:46:53.840 I'm pretty sure Johnson Controls studied the situation and approached the city and said, you guys should do this, right?

00:47:01.580 One thing, again, is, you know, it's the United States and it's this, frankly, balkanized system of delivery in many sectors.

00:47:09.580 And they're a bit jealous.

00:47:11.620 They want local control, right?

00:47:13.620 And they're a bit afraid.

00:47:15.080 I think they're so small.

00:47:16.340 A lot of these wastewater treatment systems are small.

00:47:18.900 They're afraid of a big company, right?

00:47:21.440 So it has to be done properly.

00:47:23.720 I don't really have a good answer to your question, Greg.

00:47:26.680 But I think smart public policy, and this gets to Jordan's point about public-private cooperation.

00:47:32.320 How can we do that better, right?

00:47:34.340 Smart public would encourage this, encourage this.

00:47:37.860 Okay, well, some of it is a matter of decreasing distrust.

00:47:42.240 You know, I mean, for a public-private partnership to work, the private sector has to trust the public sector,

00:47:47.820 and the public sector has to trust the private sector.

00:47:50.040 And then for that to be marketable to the population at large, people have to believe that the institutions are fundamentally sound.

00:47:56.800 And that would mean the governmental institutions, which the left tends to take for granted as being sound.

00:48:02.000 Not always.

00:48:03.540 It depends on who's in power.

00:48:05.500 But also the private institutions, which the right tend to take for granted as sound.

00:48:11.380 But there isn't any reason that we couldn't reconfigure our beliefs, at least to some degree,

00:48:16.160 and think, well, look, we could all, we could unite in the pursuit of the efficiency and environmental cleanliness.

00:48:21.660 Right.

00:48:21.860 It's like, where the hell is the problem with that?

00:48:23.700 And one of the things that's quite disturbing to me when I look at the United States is,

00:48:28.200 when I travel from Canada to the United States, I'm always happy to be in the States.

00:48:31.940 I go to New York City, and I look at, I was in Manhattan this week, and I think, this bloody place is, it's such a miracle.

00:48:38.180 Like, there's 7 million people there crammed onto this island, and it's clean.

00:48:42.820 Like, it's actually clean.

00:48:44.540 How do you do this?

00:48:45.780 This is impossible.

00:48:47.020 It's such a bloody miracle.

00:48:48.400 It's wonderful.

00:48:48.880 I see the country, like, riveting itself apart and tearing itself apart with its ideological struggles

00:48:54.900 and not noticing that it's really pretty damn good, and your institutions work remarkably well,

00:49:00.760 and, like, what's all the paranoia about folks?

00:49:03.260 And, well, those are discussions that Greg and I have had on other issues.

00:49:07.320 And so this issue of trust, Greg, seems to me to be central to this in part, is like,

00:49:12.200 and also the provision of something like an optimistic vision, which would be,

00:49:15.940 well, we don't have to, it's not limits to growth.

00:49:19.420 It's not the Rome Club in 1968 saying we're going to be overpopulated by the year 2000,

00:49:24.240 and we've got to shut all this down.

00:49:25.940 It's like, no, we can solve the environmental problem, and we can solve the economic problem,

00:49:29.500 and if we do them properly, we're going to solve both better and faster.

00:49:33.180 Yes.

00:49:33.440 And I think that's actually realistic.

00:49:35.460 Yes.

00:49:36.180 It's happening in certain cases.

00:49:37.700 I mean, I'm giving you examples of where all these technologies are being.

00:49:41.420 It's not a, there's no silver bullet.

00:49:43.460 It's, it's not, this is the real world.

00:49:45.280 But it's, it's a win-win-win, and it needs to happen.

00:49:48.480 Let me say something, Jordan, and Greg, I just love your reactions.

00:49:52.160 So I've been studying the infrastructure delivery around the world,

00:49:55.480 and I'm pretty sure that in developed countries, and many developing countries,

00:50:01.860 the United States is dead last in public-private cooperation.

00:50:06.140 If you go to France, they have an Office of Partnerships, the French word for that,

00:50:10.680 in Paris, that, that automatically assumes that the public and private sector will come together

00:50:17.740 to deliver the infrastructure.

00:50:19.640 Jordan, the way the canals in France were delivered in the 17th century was through a,

00:50:25.720 that was the way you moved freight back then, was through a public-private partnership.

00:50:30.520 It was through a concession.

00:50:31.980 If you go to Canada, where you are, Canada is one of the world's leaders in public-private partnership.

00:50:38.940 You guys have these, what are called PPP units.

00:50:42.700 For Ontario has one, Quebec has one, you know, I could just go on.

00:50:46.880 And then there's a national one, and it's all to facilitate public-private cooperation.

00:50:51.600 I spent a year on sabbatical in Australia as a Fulbright scholar to study their infrastructure delivery.

00:50:59.380 Every state in Australia, New South Wales, Queensland, you know, go on,

00:51:05.880 they all have an office of, a PPP unit or an office of partnerships,

00:51:10.620 and then they have a federal one that's called Infrastructure Australia

00:51:14.380 to facilitate public-private cooperation.

00:51:17.260 And the United States, the two sides are just completely suspicious of each other,

00:51:22.540 but we're supposed to be capitalists.

00:51:24.600 Do you think that's because the, generally speaking,

00:51:28.980 that liberals have distrust of private business and conservatives have distrust of government?

00:51:32.900 I mean, do you think those are the drivers of why?

00:51:36.460 Yeah, so Greg, that's a really good question.

00:51:39.260 I think there's probably a book, but here's my quick answer.

00:51:43.980 So the United States, you have to go then to the financing of infrastructure.

00:51:49.700 This, it sounds opaque, but this is one of the most, I think, important issues.

00:51:54.180 And I'll get to the details.

00:51:55.700 The United States, I've talked to people around the world,

00:51:59.340 is the only country I'm aware of that has this tax treatment of publicly issued debt.

00:52:05.340 All right, so that's tax-exempt municipal bonds, right?

00:52:07.980 So what that means is if you're the bondholder, you buy the bonds, you do not pay federal tax on the income.

00:52:14.820 Okay, now think of what that does.

00:52:16.300 So if you're the issuer, say you're the city of Ithaca, and you're the mayor,

00:52:19.820 and you issue bonds to pay for a new bridge, and you have to issue $100 million of bonds,

00:52:27.960 you get a lower interest rate because they're tax-exempt municipal bonds, right?

00:52:33.140 So this pushes infrastructure delivery in the United States away from public-private partnerships, right?

00:52:39.800 And this is now a multi-trillion-dollar market.

00:52:42.320 It pushes it away from public-private partnerships and towards public-sector-only delivery.

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00:54:21.340 Do you think there's any possibility that that could be modified, or is that an impossible task?

00:54:26.340 So, Jordan, that is a multi-trillion dollar financial market on Wall Street now.

00:54:32.600 The political forces that are going to protect that tax exemption are very strong.

00:54:40.980 But it's in the bill, Jordan, the people in Washington have recognized this problem.

00:54:47.860 We call it an unlevel cost of capital playing field, where the tax treatment artificially lowers.

00:54:54.680 Hold on a second.

00:54:55.780 Sorry.

00:54:56.440 The tax treatment artificially lowers the cost of capital, meaning the cost of money,

00:55:01.440 right, if it's a tax-exempt municipal bond that's not issued by a private company, right?

00:55:09.340 So, in the bill, they have something called private activity bonds, or PABs.

00:55:13.940 And what that does is it extends that tax exemption to privately issued debt through a PPP.

00:55:21.680 Now, I could go into the details.

00:55:23.640 What did you call that?

00:55:24.600 What was it?

00:55:25.120 It was private?

00:55:25.880 Private activity bond, PAB.

00:55:28.660 Private activity bonds.

00:55:29.900 Please do not confuse it with a BAB, which is a Build America bond.

00:55:35.380 It's different.

00:55:36.780 The real action is in the PABs, the private activity bonds.

00:55:41.000 The United States Treasury is jealous of the public fisk, right?

00:55:46.320 And so, they don't like to give tax exemptions.

00:55:48.340 So, the old law was $15 billion cap, right?

00:55:52.260 The total amount of issuance of PABs was $15 billion.

00:55:55.480 Jordan, the new bill would double it to $30.

00:55:57.480 So, people like us say, that's great.

00:56:00.200 It's not enough.

00:56:01.500 But they hit the $15 billion cap that PABs were so popular.

00:56:05.880 At least the bill doubles it, right?

00:56:08.460 And we would like to see it.

00:56:09.520 It's only for transportation, I think.

00:56:11.540 We would like to see PABs, the cap on PABs increased, and also use it for other things like water or power, whatever those things are.

00:56:21.900 But economists do not like to see economic decisions distorted by tax law, right?

00:56:28.860 And I'm getting to Greg's point.

00:56:30.360 I think the United States is kind of behind this because it's so easy to just use tax exempt municipal bonds.

00:56:37.740 If you're a public owner of infrastructure and to say, the heck with the PPP, right?

00:56:42.500 You guys are going to have taxable debt.

00:56:44.200 That's going to cost me more.

00:56:46.200 I'm just going to go with tax exempt muni debt.

00:56:48.740 And so, it's this odd thing that has caused supposedly free enterprise America to be kind of adverse to private cooperation and infrastructure delivery.

00:57:00.640 Is that why you think that it's almost like the larger forces, the foundational forces are skewed from this tax perspective?

00:57:10.340 And so, for something to break through, it's got to be wildly innovative and immediately profit-driven, like the example with Johnson and the methane, right?

00:57:20.860 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.

00:57:30.640 And so, 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 forever share of a percentage of profit, which makes it worthwhile.

00:57:48.500 No, I think that's right, Greg.

00:57:50.740 And I want to be clear, I'm not faulting the public owners.

00:57:54.240 You know, the mayors, I think it's mostly the mayors.

00:57:58.140 It could be county executives or governors, but really it seems like the mayors are the people who are dealing with most of this.

00:58:05.120 And I've heard stories, Greg, where they'll be, they have to do a new project, right?

00:58:10.140 And they have to finance it.

00:58:11.440 They will have two groups coming from the same bank, from the same bank.

00:58:16.220 The one group is pushing tax exempt municipal bonds, and the other group is pushing public-private partnerships.

00:58:21.960 And the mayor just says, look, my interest payments, my service on the debt is going to be a lot lower with the tax exempt municipal bond group.

00:58:29.600 So, I'm going to do that.

00:58:30.880 You know, and it's almost like a fiscal.

00:58:32.860 Okay, so why is that, okay, why is that bad, though?

00:58:35.580 Let's go into that.

00:58:36.600 Because if he's saving money doing that, and the project is going to go ahead anyways, then why not take that route?

00:58:41.880 What's the cost of not rectifying this?

00:58:44.000 So, Jordan, the cost is it crowds out private participation, because the private folks cannot compete.

00:58:51.680 A lot of these things are levered.

00:58:53.500 You know, it's 80% debt, 20% equity.

00:58:56.140 And they can't, they just cannot compete with this artificially low cost of capital from munis.

00:59:02.840 Okay, and so what's the problem?

00:59:04.360 What's the problem with leaving?

00:59:05.740 Okay, so what's the problem with just leaving it in the hands of the government?

00:59:08.900 Now, we talked about messaging.

00:59:11.960 So, what's the problem there, exactly?

00:59:14.100 So, Jordan, you don't get the innovation.

00:59:16.620 You don't get the risk-bearing benefits of including the private partners.

00:59:21.060 One thing, they're good at risk management.

00:59:23.160 You do not get the new technologies.

00:59:25.360 The other thing I should have harped on more in that book is what's called the lifecycle asset maintenance.

00:59:30.960 And that means if you do a PPP, you wrap the design and construction in with the operation over maybe 25 or 30 years.

00:59:39.820 So, that means the contract requires the public owner to keep the infrastructure up, right?

00:59:46.060 And this is one of the things that I harped.

00:59:47.900 The United States, last time I checked, is a relatively wealthy country.

00:59:51.260 Why is our infrastructure degraded?

00:59:53.600 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.

01:00:00.960 So, it's called a DBOF.

01:00:02.680 So, the incentives are wrong.

01:00:04.140 I mean, what that means is fundamentally the incentives are wrong, right? 0.51

01:00:07.040 They're all screwed up.

01:00:07.880 Yeah. 1.00

01:00:08.240 They're all screwed up.

01:00:09.580 I mean, and I have said in every venue I can to wrap those things together or bundle.

01:00:17.240 The term is to bundle design and construction.

01:00:20.100 That could be renovation.

01:00:21.740 But bundle it in with O&M, with operation and maintenance.

01:00:25.500 And bless their hearts, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,

01:00:29.420 you mentioned New York, have the authority to do this on their own.

01:00:33.360 The new Gothels Bridge, I've had a tour.

01:00:36.020 It's a 100-year bridge.

01:00:37.220 It's built to last 100 years.

01:00:38.700 Beautiful bridge.

01:00:40.060 It's a DBOF.

01:00:41.040 It's a design, build, operate, maintain contract over 25 or 30 years.

01:00:46.160 I forget the exact.

01:00:47.080 And there's other facilities.

01:00:49.100 I think maybe it's the new LaGuardia Terminal is a DBOF contract.

01:00:53.580 So, Jordan, to answer your question, I think the tax immunity debt was very good for the

01:00:58.980 United States in this developmental stage.

01:01:02.160 But now it's become a, you know, a problem, right?

01:01:07.820 An albatross in some sense, because it crowds out these private partnerships that the rest

01:01:15.880 of the world, Canada is the leader, you know, the rest of the world has been using in spades.

01:01:21.320 In terms of messaging, one of the things you did in your book is you pointed to a lot of

01:01:24.600 projects that were really radically successful.

01:01:26.680 And so I'm kind of imagining a messaging campaign where, you know, there's some focus, like

01:01:32.080 an ad, a focus on a project that really worked, and some discussion of why this worked and

01:01:36.460 what work means, you know, it's more efficient, it's cheaper, it's better for the environment,

01:01:39.840 everybody wins, that's pretty good.

01:01:41.680 And then to scaffold that up, upward, to include larger and larger projects that have exactly

01:01:49.160 the same sort of aim, it would be something like that.

01:01:51.320 But so would it be possible, because this book's somewhat old, can you think of a

01:01:56.580 number of projects, you talked about the methane capture system, are there projects that could

01:02:01.120 be profitably assessed, that have been radically successful, that work on all fronts, that

01:02:06.000 would be, that could be used as detailed templates for messaging going forward with

01:02:10.780 infrastructure development?

01:02:11.880 Would that be a good approach?

01:02:13.240 Because it kind of ties the high to the low, right?

01:02:16.040 Absolutely.

01:02:16.620 And so, yes, I mean, so one of the things I have research you, you might appreciate in

01:02:23.080 nature, I'm very proud of that, because of the general interest, readership of nature

01:02:27.760 and science, right?

01:02:29.160 With two great people, Peter Crampton, who actually, his father was dean of the law school

01:02:35.420 here, he grew up in Ithaca, and Axel Oakenfels, and Axel's at the University of Cologne, and

01:02:40.280 the nature paper lays out how road pricing, right?

01:02:44.860 Pricing the use of the road, which a pilot project is in the bill that was just signed by

01:02:49.480 the House of Representatives, could help to alleviate and, in fact, eliminate traffic

01:02:53.840 congestion.

01:02:54.920 But people don't talk.

01:02:55.880 Oh, my God, what would we do without traffic congestion?

01:02:59.920 We'd live, it'd be a utopia.

01:03:03.420 Yeah, well, people spend like an hour a day, people, people spend like a half time job in

01:03:08.760 traffic congestion.

01:03:09.660 This is not a trivial problem.

01:03:11.500 It's unbelievably economic drain, and it's terribly polluting.

01:03:15.160 But Jordan, look, look at what, what do they do?

01:03:17.080 What's the first thing that you hear when people say this road is congestion?

01:03:20.760 They say, build another lane, build another highway, right?

01:03:24.740 And there's economic research that shows it's what's called induced demand.

01:03:29.320 It is the fact that you have added a lane adds to the demand on the highway.

01:03:34.420 The developer says, oh, there's a new interstate highway here.

01:03:37.280 I'm going to put a housing development in.

01:03:39.480 Well, what does that do to the interstate highway?

01:03:41.180 It adds to congestion.

01:03:42.460 And so they're always looking for these capacity expansions, or they're looking for new and

01:03:48.440 wild technologies, right?

01:03:50.460 I love the hyperloop.

01:03:51.620 You know, they're saying, let's do a hyperloop.

01:03:53.360 But the economics 101, Jordan, the first semester of microeconomics provides the answer, where

01:04:00.780 the problem is that the price of the road space is zero, right?

01:04:05.240 It's a free good.

01:04:06.340 So it's just like if you have a pile of free bananas and a pile of price bananas at the

01:04:10.740 grocery store, people are going to take the free bananas and they're going to be gone.

01:04:15.220 Right.

01:04:15.480 And so it's an artificial free too, because it's not free because people are paying for

01:04:19.480 it with their time.

01:04:20.400 Well, it's the old Soviet system.

01:04:22.380 It's queuing.

01:04:23.420 Yeah, yeah.

01:04:23.740 You queue.

01:04:24.620 So with a lot of these problems systemically, I'm just trying to think through how this works,

01:04:30.620 you know, with people making decisions.

01:04:32.540 I'm not as familiar with, you know, mayor offices, though I'm somewhat.

01:04:37.440 But I mean, so there's a couple of things.

01:04:39.080 We're back to the age old problem of term limits, right?

01:04:41.640 Because if you're making a choice on which tax, which is going to be more tax efficient

01:04:46.300 for your two years, four years, for whatever your term is, it's going to make sense in the

01:04:51.480 short term, but not in the long term.

01:04:52.900 And so to overcome that, people, mayors have to be armed with a whole different story that

01:04:58.460 they're able to tell and market and draw voters with, because under current circumstances.

01:05:03.240 And, you know, the other thing that I think about that I don't think any one of us is going

01:05:07.680 to have an answer to immediately, but I just thought I would raise it that we're seeing

01:05:11.960 everywhere.

01:05:12.800 I'm sure you see it in all of your ventures is people are so busy scrambling to keep up

01:05:19.980 with.

01:05:21.540 I'm going to call it corruption.

01:05:22.940 And by that, I don't mean overt corruption.

01:05:24.580 I mean, all the nonsense and clogging that goes into the act of being, let's say, a 1.00

01:05:29.840 politician, right?

01:05:30.800 The amount of fundraising can get right.

01:05:32.880 The congestion that there is no time to consider and to weigh things out in a way that involves

01:05:38.780 bigger picture, innovative thinking.

01:05:40.540 So the easiest thing is to just pull the lever on what you've been doing all along, right?

01:05:44.740 And I'm seeing that a lot in what you're saying to adopt new technology to sell it.

01:05:48.760 Somebody has to really understand that they have to go into it like the methane capture.

01:05:52.340 They have to go into private business.

01:05:53.840 They have to figure out what regulations need to be cleared to figure out how to package

01:05:57.640 that and sell that. 0.97

01:05:59.180 And no one's going to get fired.

01:06:01.020 And when congressmen are spending 25 hours a week fundraising because they have to, how

01:06:06.520 the hell are they going to take the time to dig into something at this level of detail?

01:06:10.180 And that's more like congestion than corruption, really.

01:06:13.940 It's easy to be cynical about that, but it's not helpful.

01:06:17.420 But also nobody gets fired if you pull a lever on something everyone's been doing for 50

01:06:21.840 years, 75 years.

01:06:23.060 Where you get fired is if you have and you advocate for that partnership and it turns

01:06:26.940 into a disaster.

01:06:28.280 And so there's a lot of ways that people are risk averse based on the system.

01:06:32.440 And I think for me, I hate to sound like a hammer where everything's a nail, but the

01:06:37.720 only contribution really that I can offer that's significant is on the storytelling front,

01:06:42.200 which is messaging, which for me, messaging is distinct from propaganda.

01:06:45.840 If you can get the messaging right, sometimes you can get the policy right.

01:06:49.180 Yeah.

01:06:49.380 But Greg, let me, let me, you know, expand that a little bit.

01:06:53.460 And this gets to Jordan's point.

01:06:55.480 These are great, you know, great people.

01:06:57.500 It's been wonderful for me to interact with the people who actually own and operate and

01:07:01.180 have responsibility for infrastructure, right?

01:07:05.280 Why, why, why, why has it been wonderful?

01:07:08.520 Because, because they, they, they really care about the public services, right?

01:07:12.720 They're really trying to provide clean water.

01:07:15.520 They're really trying to, you know, make, make the, the roads work there.

01:07:20.240 They're, you know, and a mayor, you know, has got 50, you know, 15 different things every

01:07:26.160 day, you know, that's a problem, whether it's interacting with the police or the potholes

01:07:31.780 or, you know, in Ithaca, it's dealing with Cornell, you know, and I, I really do think

01:07:37.940 that, that, that they try their best, you know, it's a hard job.

01:07:42.360 I mean, to be the person who is in charge of this, by the way, the U S interstate highway

01:07:47.480 system, zero of it is owned by the federal government.

01:07:51.180 It's entirely owned by a state states.

01:07:53.320 And that means if you're a governor, you have the responsibility for operating it, maintaining

01:07:58.480 it, policing it, taking care of the dead animals, resurfacing it, taking care of the

01:08:04.640 signage and the line paint, I mean, it's a, it's a big job.

01:08:08.600 And I think a lot particularly glamorous, but it's not glamorous, but Greg, nobody wants

01:08:15.360 to go first.

01:08:16.500 Nobody wants to go first.

01:08:18.120 You don't want to be the mayor of Charleston and you install the smart stoplights and then

01:08:22.540 everything screws up.

01:08:23.580 Right.

01:08:24.360 So you, this is why I think pilot projects, you know, whatever the technology is pilots.

01:08:30.260 So geeks like me and other academics can study the pilots, write about them, produce, you

01:08:37.360 know, reports and saying, this is what did well, this is what did poorly.

01:08:40.640 This is what you, the mayor of Syracuse, you know, or wherever you are should do, but, but

01:08:46.900 there's really this risk aversion.

01:08:48.920 Well, in these pilot projects, then partly what the engineers and the economists should be

01:08:53.780 thinking about too, is, is not only, you know, do these work and what are the outcomes

01:08:58.240 economically, but is there a way of constructing an incentive system around the successful project

01:09:03.380 so that the people who took the risk are rewarded for having taken the risk.

01:09:08.200 And so that that becomes part of their political capital, because without that being solved,

01:09:12.880 solving the other problems isn't going to be sufficient because they're just punished

01:09:16.080 for mistakes.

01:09:16.740 They're not rewarded for movement forward.

01:09:18.960 It's so true. 0.84

01:09:20.520 So true.

01:09:21.260 Not to keep harping on methane capture, but it's such a compelling and concrete thing.

01:09:25.600 Part of how I would think if, if for Johnson, if they're going to target that is to do a

01:09:31.400 breakdown and say, here's how much money the city made.

01:09:34.760 Here's how much time they saved.

01:09:36.120 Here's how much revenue is generated.

01:09:38.780 Here's their cost basis.

01:09:40.160 I mean, all these things can be broken down and handed off in a way that's a neat package

01:09:44.040 of like, we can make an investment.

01:09:46.140 Here's how much money that you'll make in an ongoing way.

01:09:48.220 And here's a small slice of it.

01:09:49.560 That's a reasonable reward for a company who's taking the expense upfront.

01:09:53.940 Yeah.

01:09:55.140 So Greg, let me, let me say one thing about that.

01:09:58.820 Let me get, get back to the screen here.

01:10:03.540 This is an interesting left of center, right of center thing.

01:10:08.100 You know, in some cases, right.

01:10:11.480 For infrastructure to improve infrastructure delivery, we cannot avoid the P word.

01:10:15.820 And the P word is privatization.

01:10:18.300 Right.

01:10:18.580 And so I have, because of who I am, I'm not in a company or anything.

01:10:24.120 Some of these infrastructure companies are happy to talk to me about what they think the

01:10:27.660 best policies for the methane capture example, you could do a long-term lease.

01:10:31.980 So you could lease out the operation of the wastewater treatment for 50 years, a long time.

01:10:37.460 And the companies say, we could do things if we own that plant, right.

01:10:43.860 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.

01:10:51.500 50 years is pretty long.

01:10:53.560 And that's not selling the wastewater treatment plant.

01:10:56.160 You're just taking a part of it.

01:10:58.340 Right.

01:10:58.500 The other thing I learned the other day is, Jordan might find this of interest, I used to think the only privately owned bridge in the United States was the Ambassador Bridge across from the U.S. to Canada, which is owned by a family and has duty-free and tolls and everything else.

01:11:13.240 I recently learned from one of my board members, Bob Hellman, who invests in this, there's like seven or eight private bridges.

01:11:21.860 So these are bridges.

01:11:22.940 They're toll bridges.

01:11:23.800 They're part of the network.

01:11:25.720 They're operated commercially.

01:11:27.260 They're operated like a private business.

01:11:30.460 But there's some aspect of infrastructure communications where if you can just say it's privatization, that ends the conversation.

01:11:39.000 And I think that's a mistake because economics, actually, Oliver Williamson, who won a Nobel Prize in economics, pointed to this.

01:11:47.320 A lot of these are commercial activities where you can have the private sector in there operating it commercially.

01:11:54.220 And you get better service quality, you get proper asset maintenance, you get incorporation of new technologies.

01:12:01.140 So I want to avoid the demagoguery.

01:12:04.340 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?

01:12:10.920 That's right.

01:12:11.360 It's like, why not farm some of this out to competent people?

01:12:15.100 It's the only way.

01:12:15.840 And that's just part of this efficiency issue.

01:12:17.480 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.

01:12:27.100 And I do not micromanage.

01:12:28.460 It's like, you can either do this or you can't.

01:12:31.000 If you can't, I'm going to find someone else right away because this has to be done.

01:12:33.860 But if you can do it, good, do it.

01:12:36.240 And then I can go do something else that I can do or that I want to do.

01:12:39.480 And that distribution, it's like, why wouldn't you capitalize on the willingness of private companies to bear some of the damn risk and to help you with the messaging? 0.73

01:12:49.760 Go ahead, Greg.

01:12:50.300 Some good news for you, Jordan, which is Trudeau has offered to privatize all of Jordan Peterson Corporation.

01:12:55.900 So you're going to have some – he's just eager to take it all over.

01:12:59.940 So that could take a lot of work off your plate, number one.

01:13:02.200 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:13:02.700 OK.

01:13:03.060 Well, good.

01:13:03.380 I'm glad to hear that.

01:13:04.300 I was thinking about, Rick, when you were talking about this privatization, right?

01:13:09.200 That's another big, scary word like deregulation.

01:13:11.720 And in certain cases, I'm not talking about selling the roads.

01:13:14.460 Right, right, right.

01:13:14.980 But what's so ridiculous about it, as with regulation, which 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.

01:13:27.640 But it removes all the benefit for the immense gray area in between, right, of all the ways that privatization can be – there can be partial, there can be split partners.

01:13:37.880 There's a hundred different ways to skew deals.

01:13:39.880 And I was thinking about what you're saying just in simplest terms about how this functions, and it's like when we buy solar, right?

01:13:47.420 I've now put solar panels on two houses, right?

01:13:50.380 Yeah.

01:13:50.540 I don't want to own it for 25 years.

01:13:52.460 I'd rather the company own – like we sit down and we look at all these things.

01:13:55.760 You can own it outright, and you're responsible for maintenance.

01:13:57.860 Yeah.

01:13:57.980 I don't want to be responsible for maintenance of solar panels.

01:14:00.880 Like I'd rather sit in my office and type, right?

01:14:04.340 Right.

01:14:04.540 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 all around us all the time.

01:14:12.320 And so, you know, what's of particular interest to me about the situation in Ithaca is that it's a balance between the two, right?

01:14:18.900 There's aspects that seem that are privatized, and there's aspects that aren't.

01:14:22.560 And, you know, creative yield structures –

01:14:24.980 That's the book.

01:14:25.540 This gets back to – this gets back to something that we touched on earlier, which is, well, what's the proper antidote to ideological struggle and tip-for-tap strategy?

01:14:35.240 Well, yeah, it looks like it's something like nuance.

01:14:38.060 It's like if you – well, if you specify the problem – look, let me tell you something.

01:14:42.100 Something like nuance.

01:14:43.560 I like that.

01:14:44.320 For professors that were negotiating with the university for their grant application, like their initial startup grant before they got a grant, I said, look, if you want to maximize the amount of money the university is going to give you,

01:14:56.140 detail out all of the equipment you need with the costs, like down to $1,000, $500, $100.

01:15:03.260 Make a detailed list and get everything you want, and you will get every cent.

01:15:07.140 And the reason for that is, well, how are they going to say no?

01:15:09.820 It's like, you don't need this piece of $500 equipment.

01:15:13.220 No.

01:15:14.160 Of course, that's not going to happen.

01:15:15.800 Now, if you ask for $500,000, they're going to say, how about $250?

01:15:19.360 But if you do a detailed summary of everything you need for your research down to the micro details,

01:15:24.360 it's like, you just get it.

01:15:26.740 And it's the same thing here.

01:15:27.980 It's like, it could easily be that if we find ourselves in general in a conversation that's tilting in an ideological direction,

01:15:34.340 what that means is we've got the level of analysis specified.

01:15:37.100 You know, or we're dealing with bad faith players.

01:15:39.740 But we might just have the level of analysis improperly specified.

01:15:43.420 Because who's going to argue with the methane plant?

01:15:45.720 You know, who's going to argue with that?

01:15:46.960 Also, lack of after-action reports, meaning that, you know, you have New Orleans blowout and everybody knows about it.

01:15:53.680 But if it doesn't, nobody's going to hear about it.

01:15:55.640 And I think that there's a failure in messaging to prescribe the roads not taken and failures that are averted in potential expenses and costs for it.

01:16:04.460 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.

01:16:12.760 Here's how many people would be delayed for how long.

01:16:15.020 Here's the expense that we would have.

01:16:16.520 Here's what would happen to insurance premiums.

01:16:18.400 And we need to figure out how to convey back to people, because I think that...

01:16:22.200 Yeah, well, that's a thorny problem, because prevention is a lot less sexy than cure, right?

01:16:26.980 It's really a big problem, because the thing is that most, well, most things work all the time.

01:16:32.220 And so pointing to something and saying, hey, look at how that's working.

01:16:35.060 It's like, well, yeah, almost everything works.

01:16:37.880 Thank God for that.

01:16:38.720 But it's very difficult for people to get people excited about predictability, even though that's what everybody wants.

01:16:45.320 It's the same rules that you're talking about with nuance, though, because how you get people excited is specifics, right?

01:16:51.780 So here's a hurricane that came through.

01:16:53.960 It was, you know, I don't know how hurricanes are rated.

01:16:56.400 Here's what would have happened to the bridge.

01:16:58.220 Here's what that means in concrete terms.

01:16:59.880 Like, there's a way to spell a narrative that everybody can feel good about it.

01:17:03.560 I mean, one of the things that we're looking at increasingly in messaging and politics is what's called, like, the good boy, good girl effect.

01:17:12.140 That people are so exhausted from being told that they do anything right, right?

01:17:15.900 They feel like they're killing themselves.

01:17:17.800 They're working.

01:17:18.660 They're trying to stay up with groceries.

01:17:19.880 They're trying to follow rules when people aren't.

01:17:21.800 They're trying to play by the rules, you know, be law abiding.

01:17:24.960 And no one's coming along telling them that they're doing a good job.

01:17:27.380 And I think that this.

01:17:28.480 Yeah, they're saying often instead that they're participants, they're unwitting participants in a corrupt and malevolent system that's doomed for failure.

01:17:35.180 Yeah, great.

01:17:36.080 I'm breaking my back to do this.

01:17:37.920 And that's the message I get.

01:17:39.400 Some motivation.

01:17:40.360 Likewise, with infrastructure, right?

01:17:42.920 It's do we want another catastrophe?

01:17:45.160 The bridges are crumbling.

01:17:46.340 There's all this stuff.

01:17:47.080 And I think that a shot of of an after action report about some innovation that got made and to detail its success gives people some role and agency in their interaction.

01:17:58.480 It brings government back to them.

01:17:59.980 It brings the notions of infrastructure and their city functioning around them back to them as opposed to everything.

01:18:04.100 Yeah, well, and it's not like you Americans don't like success stories because you do.

01:18:08.740 You know, I mean, 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.

01:18:15.940 Like everything's like a big movie.

01:18:17.380 New York City is like that.

01:18:18.580 It's like it's just cinematic everywhere.

01:18:20.600 And your culture is immensely powerful in generating motivational narratives.

01:18:26.100 It's second to none in that.

01:18:27.980 And everyone ever all around.

01:18:29.180 Well, that's why America is so dominant culturally.

01:18:31.580 And so much of the messaging is positive.

01:18:34.500 It's it's I mean, look at the Marvel movies just as an example.

01:18:38.300 That's a multi-billion dollar franchise.

01:18:40.440 And that's all aiming upward like it's all positive.

01:18:43.760 You're so good at that. 0.99

01:18:44.880 It's just ridiculous. 0.56

01:18:45.760 And it and so it doesn't seem to me to be impossible to do something like celebration of, well, this methane treatment plant, for example, and to elevate it up to to elevate it up to something worthy of genuine and deep admiration, because it really is that it is that it's like, how good is that?

01:19:03.100 Yeah, let me say something about Greg's point.

01:19:06.360 It's a really good point about about messaging.

01:19:08.740 And again, you know, this this is I think the the disconnect between the engineering and the communications people, because the engineers will report the improvements in terms of metrics.

01:19:19.180 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.

01:19:31.860 The story is the story is a single mother who can now get to work and back to her kids an hour earlier.

01:19:37.960 That's the story.

01:19:38.980 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.

01:19:44.560 Like what she was able to do with her family that she couldn't.

01:19:47.360 Yes, precisely that.

01:19:48.760 Yes, yes.

01:19:49.200 And engineers.

01:19:49.920 Well, the thing there's a reason for that, too, you know, because engineers are temperamentally different from those who would communicate.

01:19:55.960 So engineers are fundamentally interested in things.

01:19:59.100 Yes, that's part.

01:19:59.860 And and the communicative types are fundamentally interested in people.

01:20:03.820 And so the engineers are going to say they are interested in things.

01:20:06.580 It's like, oh, here's a bunch of things stories.

01:20:08.560 Well, that doesn't work.

01:20:09.880 It's not a story.

01:20:11.080 Yeah.

01:20:11.360 And so it's not surprising.

01:20:12.460 We'll add methane man to the Marvel universe.

01:20:15.020 Yeah.

01:20:16.860 Something.

01:20:17.640 I mean, but like the methane and there's other thing gases.

01:20:21.840 But 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.

01:20:36.120 We have the money.

01:20:37.060 We have the technology.

01:20:38.240 That's a six million dollar man.

01:20:39.580 It's not it's not a question of developing something in a lab.

01:20:43.240 It's patented.

01:20:44.260 It's proven.

01:20:44.900 It's there.

01:20:46.000 It's ready to be deployed.

01:20:48.140 Can't we just come together and say this is a win, win, win?

01:20:50.820 And and then advertise somehow figure out how to message so the Joe and Jane six pack can say this is an improvement in our life.

01:20:59.140 Right.

01:20:59.900 We you know, we we you know, we get benefits from this 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.

01:21:20.140 And then the left looks at businesses say, well, it's only it's all full of corrupt people only out for themselves.

01:21:24.860 And it's like it's simply not true.

01:21:26.320 That is like there's corruption in every endeavor, but it's a small percentage of the endeavor in a functioning country.

01:21:31.980 And the idea that everybody is only self-interested, that's well, first of all, that's a confession, not a theory.

01:21:39.000 And second, it's simply not true.

01:21:41.040 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.

01:21:47.780 And they're working for high and noble purposes and high and noble purposes exist.

01:21:53.180 No.

01:21:53.460 So no cynicism, man.

01:21:55.320 That's such a cop out.

01:21:56.720 It's better than naivety.

01:21:58.040 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.

01:22:05.420 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.

01:22:17.940 I mean, they really do care.

01:22:19.220 Right.

01:22:19.900 And so for me, I get site visits.

01:22:21.440 I get to see the stuff in construction.

01:22:23.440 It's you can tell that they care.

01:22:24.820 You can tell that they care because they're paying attention to details that matter.

01:22:29.080 They're real.

01:22:30.100 It's real.

01:22:30.660 It's really matters if the sewage system works.

01:22:33.420 And you think, well, that's not that interesting.

01:22:35.300 It's kind of beneath me.

01:22:36.460 It's like, of course, the sewage system is beneath you, like, obviously.

01:22:39.460 But it's a mark of caring to make those things work.

01:22:43.160 And everyone knows what it's like to bring a plumber into your house who's a good plumber.

01:22:46.880 Yeah.

01:22:47.180 It's like, you're so happy he's there.

01:22:48.540 It's like, great.

01:22:49.160 And he's got his business and it's going fine.

01:22:51.000 And he comes in and he doesn't rip you off on the bill and he actually fixes it.

01:22:55.040 And it's not going to screw up again.

01:22:56.480 It's like, and it's a good interchange.

01:22:58.480 It's, you know, you're happy to have someone like that in your house.

01:23:01.580 Absolutely.

01:23:02.520 And that's so many plumbing problems.

01:23:05.200 The first time we bought a house that I feel like our trusted plumber was like part of the family.

01:23:10.860 Like figure out his favorite, his favorite thing to drink at like cocktail hour at the end of the day.

01:23:15.440 I mean, he was in there.

01:23:16.360 We're, it's unbelievable how reliant we are on skilled, skilled trades people and working people who do their job well.

01:23:23.440 It's just, it's unbelievable.

01:23:24.700 Yeah, but take, take that, Greg, and multiply it by 10, right?

01:23:28.240 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.

01:23:34.440 But then he was made head of the MTA.

01:23:37.160 And guess what happened?

01:23:38.280 COVID hit, right?

01:23:39.740 The Fairbox revenues of the MTA in New York were down by like 90%.

01:23:44.880 And here's a guy who's been appointed by the governor to do that.

01:23:49.660 And, you know, this is your moment to step up to the plate.

01:23:53.080 You got to, you got to still pay your workers.

01:23:55.260 You got to keep the system running.

01:23:56.860 But your Fairbox revenue just dropped by 90% because of the quarantine.

01:24:01.080 So, so think of that, right?

01:24:03.080 I couldn't sleep.

01:24:04.120 I wouldn't be able to sleep.

01:24:05.260 But Patrick was able to take it through and pull it out, somehow pull it out the other end, right?

01:24:11.600 And manage all this crap that was going on on the New York City subway system, you know, partly because of the virus.

01:24:18.760 I mean, that's amazing.

01:24:20.220 I was stunned when I went to New York City, to Manhattan.

01:24:23.140 You know, it looked like it did five years ago, except it was cleaner.

01:24:25.600 And I thought, and then I noticed that, well, everybody was just back on the streets.

01:24:30.600 This had just reopened.

01:24:31.600 I thought, just think about this.

01:24:33.340 That city was shut down for 18 months, and it still works.

01:24:37.600 It's like, what the hell?

01:24:39.020 That's a miracle.

01:24:39.880 That's an absolute miracle.

01:24:41.340 And if everyone was corrupt and power-seeking and malevolent and only out for themselves, that is not how that city would look.

01:24:47.140 No.

01:24:48.060 No.

01:24:48.500 And it is amazing, given the level of activity and the density and the restaurants and the waste and the, you know, it's amazing.

01:24:56.100 It's amazing it does work.

01:24:57.440 But, you know, as I said, Jordan, at the outset, I come from this, you know, neoclassical free enterprise kind of perspective.

01:25:04.680 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 largely dedicating their careers to making this stuff work.

01:25:17.280 They really do have a public interest, you know, desire embedded in them, which is nice, right?

01:25:25.020 It's nice to see that.

01:25:26.780 And they take their job.

01:25:28.140 They could all make more money in the private sector, probably.

01:25:31.240 Yeah, definitely.

01:25:31.800 But they've chosen these paths.

01:25:32.760 And be easier, you know, and the rewards would be bigger, and there might be more security.

01:25:37.320 I mean, look, when 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 congresspeople and Republican congresspeople.

01:25:47.160 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.

01:25:52.280 And plus, they're up for re-election in two years.

01:25:54.740 Like, these are busy people.

01:25:56.220 Right.

01:25:56.400 And so the first thing we did was just had everybody introduce themselves and talk for five minutes.

01:26:00.620 It was like, why are you doing this?

01:26:02.600 That was the question.

01:26:03.640 And you could not tell the Democrats from the Republicans.

01:26:06.820 Every story was the same.

01:26:08.180 It was like, well, you know, I'm kind of a serious person, and I would really like to serve my country.

01:26:12.900 And I felt that, although I had other opportunities, that this was worth a sacrifice, and I was hoping I could come to Washington and really make a difference.

01:26:19.660 Right.

01:26:19.960 Like, you listen to eight people say that, and these aren't trivial people, and they're not grandstanding, because there's no audience.

01:26:25.620 It's like, they're just saying what it is. 0.96

01:26:27.580 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 people who are making a genuine sacrifice.

01:26:36.640 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. 0.97

01:26:49.940 Yes.

01:26:50.560 Yes.

01:26:51.640 Let me be clear, Jordan.

01:26:52.900 You know, we should be clear.

01:26:54.660 There are cases where infrastructure delivery is rife with corruption, and there's Odebrecht in Brazil.

01:27:00.840 You may be familiar with that scandal in South America, a big, it's a Brazilian construction company who's bribing, you know, public officials to be the winning bidder, and prime ministers went to prison.

01:27:12.160 You know, so it's not, it's not some pure, it's the real world of humanity, right?

01:27:16.840 It's, it's, it's not a pure thing, but I think that's the exception rather than the rule.

01:27:21.380 Well, psychopaths are 3% of the population, not 97%.

01:27:25.800 Yeah, and they never get above 5% before they're culled, essentially.

01:27:29.340 Wow.

01:27:29.940 1% to 5%, and, and the basic, the, the, the, the, the stable point of psychopathy prevalence is 3%, 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.

01:27:46.340 Mm-hmm.

01:27:46.760 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.

01:27:56.360 Wow.

01:27:56.720 So.

01:27:57.400 I'm glad to hear that.

01:27:58.200 Well, I don't think it's, I don't, I don't think that's an unreasonable proposition.

01:28:01.860 I mean, the, it's, it's an, it's the economic driver in some sense of innovation throughout the free world.

01:28:07.780 I mean, there's other countries that are doing well, but, you know, the, America's really a kind of epicenter, and everyone knows it.

01:28:13.480 And so it's, and it's huge.

01:28:15.080 I mean, 300 million people, that, that's a lot of middle-class people, man.

01:28:19.360 Well, there, there is no Silicon Valley of Germany, right? 0.78

01:28:22.240 I mean, to some extent.

01:28:24.680 Right.

01:28:25.120 Well, in Silicon, Silicon Valley, exactly.

01:28:27.400 Scandinavian countries do, can do beautifully, for sure.

01:28:31.380 I mean, the thing that people tend to forget about America is, it's like all of Europe in one place.

01:28:36.640 I mean, like the, the disparate cultures, climates, you know, perspectives, values, communities that are held together.

01:28:43.620 It's pretty extraordinary.

01:28:45.180 I mean, that's another thing.

01:28:46.000 Well, and the diversity of government and the distribution of powers, it's a complex place.

01:28:50.180 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, eh?

01:28:58.220 Well, have you plugged something into your outlet in your house lately?

01:29:01.680 And has it, how often does that not work?

01:29:04.460 And that's a complicated system, man.

01:29:06.160 Almost always works.

01:29:07.100 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?

01:29:15.960 You know, to visit, and it was, it was her first time.

01:29:18.560 And, you know, she had, you know, her reaction was America, she said, Americans aren't anything.

01:29:28.100 And I couldn't understand what she was saying.

01:29:30.380 She said, Americans aren't, this was after her visit. 0.86

01:29:33.020 She said, Americans aren't anything.

01:29:34.460 What she meant is, you know, it's, they're not in New York, right?

01:29:39.300 They're not just Latin, they're not Asian, they're not, it's like this big mishmash, right? 1.00

01:29:43.360 It's like a UN meeting.

01:29:44.580 So, 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.

01:29:54.840 We live, my wife and I lived at 55th and 9th Avenue in Hell's Kitchen for five years.

01:29:59.300 I think there were 15 different ethnic restaurants within a short walk of our, of our unit.

01:30:04.860 And so it's this big mess.

01:30:08.620 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.

01:30:24.080 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.

01:30:36.540 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.

01:30:47.680 Cause I know Jordan gets really uncomfortable discussing those things publicly.

01:30:51.960 But, you know, people, people also start to start to view it, that there's like one set of spokespeople from every community.

01:30:58.860 Like I know people who only know woke Latinos, like how limited is your world? 1.00

01:31:03.420 If the only people who, who, you know, are one particular cross-section of a community.

01:31:08.180 Yeah.

01:31:08.980 And so they're so diverse, Greg.

01:31:11.800 Oh yeah.

01:31:12.660 They're from Belize.

01:31:13.760 They're from Honduras.

01:31:14.600 They're from Mexico.

01:31:15.200 I mean, and they're, they're all quite, they're Panama, you know, Costa Rica.

01:31:19.360 I mean, I'm shocked at how, if you talk to those folks, how differently they view themselves.

01:31:24.180 Right.

01:31:24.940 That was one of the, the, the great joys of doing political, 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.

01:31:40.960 And it's like, are we talking California versus Texas versus Cuban Americans versus Argentinian?

01:31:46.580 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.

01:31:57.820 Hearts and minds is what wins.

01:31:59.240 You know, the biggest thing that, well, I won't get on a, I won't get on a soapbox.

01:32:04.040 So let's go back to some concrete realities, so to speak, given we're talking about infrastructure.

01:32:09.460 Right.

01:32:09.980 Rick, priorities, like that's always difficult.

01:32:13.660 What, what's really broken that should be fixed?

01:32:16.460 Like first and for the biggest bang for the environment and for, and for efficiency in your estimation.

01:32:22.340 Well, so, so Jordan, there's a couple of big projects that, that just must be done.

01:32:29.400 The gate, you visit in New York, the gateway tunnel, about a $13 billion project.

01:32:34.280 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.

01:32:42.320 There's about one train per minute that goes through there.

01:32:45.360 They are over a hundred years old, probably 110.

01:32:47.980 They are in dire need of being improved of just, there's a new alignment just being almost replaced.

01:32:57.500 East side access, Jordan, in, in New York is the long Island railroad coming into the city.

01:33:02.920 There's, there's a huge project that needs to, to, to streamline that.

01:33:08.800 There's a rail tunnel in Baltimore city where I'm from.

01:33:11.720 That's from the civil war.

01:33:12.880 That's too low for the trains to go through because it was designed during the civil war.

01:33:18.060 And then that needs to be raised.

01:33:19.820 So I would say a few of these, let's say mega projects need to be done.

01:33:23.840 The second thing, Jordan is deferred maintenance.

01:33:27.620 We just need to, to upgrade it.

01:33:29.820 It could be airports.

01:33:31.100 It could be dance.

01:33:31.880 It could be levies.

01:33:32.820 It could be seaports.

01:33:34.220 It could be electrical systems.

01:33:35.400 I mean, just to cross, we need to prioritize where deferred maintenance has gotten to be,

01:33:41.560 you know, a huge problem and, you know, and address that.

01:33:45.900 And the third one, Jordan, I'd say is, is we need to have some initiative.

01:33:49.100 Greg could help with this.

01:33:50.620 Some initiative to have a, not, not a developing technology, but an adoption of technology.

01:33:58.340 Just like a wave of technological adoption and infrastructure.

01:34:01.840 And, you know, there's all this stuff where people, you know, are, they're aware of this

01:34:06.360 new, this technology and the latest app and all that sort of stuff.

01:34:10.240 But all of this, a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about with smart stoplights,

01:34:15.020 smart streetlights, I could go on about liners for water pipes that will renovate water pipes

01:34:20.960 that attend the cost.

01:34:23.580 There needs to be some broad initiative.

01:34:25.880 Maybe we could do it with, when the president signs the bill to say, let's just have a

01:34:31.540 big initiative focused on this.

01:34:34.240 This is the ultimate bipartisan thing because it will reduce greenhouse gas.

01:34:38.900 It will reduce, you know, diesel emissions are horrible.

01:34:43.320 Gas emissions are bad.

01:34:45.320 It will improve the efficiency of our infrastructure.

01:34:48.760 And it's there on the table.

01:34:50.960 It's just somehow we can back, maybe backstop the risk of the asset owners, whether it's a

01:34:56.280 county or a city or a state or whoever it is, the city, backstop their risk somehow.

01:35:01.140 I don't know.

01:35:02.200 Let's just have some initiative to help these folks get the technology adopted. 1.00

01:35:09.020 And Jordan, I would say that's number one.

01:35:11.080 All right.

01:35:11.460 Great.

01:35:11.880 I think that's a good place to stop.

01:35:13.480 I hope that we can have a conversation like this again.

01:35:15.740 And also to talk more, maybe we can organize this in some manner, about how to ally the

01:35:23.800 proper direction of the infrastructure project with the messaging.

01:35:27.660 Yes.

01:35:28.080 And we've outlined some of that today, which I thought was extremely useful.

01:35:31.240 And so thank you very much.

01:35:32.700 Thank you.

01:35:33.080 Both of you for participating today.

01:35:34.620 And definitely let's talk again, maybe in a month and a month and a half or something

01:35:38.640 like that.

01:35:39.360 I'm happy to talk.

01:35:40.600 Great.

01:35:41.460 Great.

01:35:41.600 Yeah, this was a pleasure.

01:35:43.140 Thank you, Rick.

01:35:43.920 Good to meet you, Greg.

01:35:44.800 Good to meet you.

01:35:45.220 Thanks, Greg.

01:35:46.100 I'm happy to talk at any time.

01:35:47.580 Good to meet you.

01:35:52.880 Thank you.

01:36:00.560 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - December 07, 2021

207. Fix This： Infrastructure & Environment ｜ Gregg Hurwitz and Rick Geddes

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