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

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

This episode was recorded on November 9th, 2021.Jordan Peterson, Gregg Hurwitz, and Rick Geddes meet to discuss the debate surrounding the multi-billion dollar infrastructure bill currently going through the US congress.Rick Geddes is a professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University and a well-recognized expert in American infrastructure policy and development. He has done extensive research on infrastructure, including but not limited to the funding, financing, operation, and maintenance of major projects with a focus on new technologies.Gregg Hurwitz was today’s co-host. Gregg is a former student of Jordan’s at Harvard. He is now a bestselling scriptwriter, producer, and novelist. In the years leading up to the presidential election, Gregg has been working with an independent team of Hollywood writers, producers, and directors to design a moderate, far-reaching political message for the democratic party.Find more Rick Geddes online here:https://aei.org/profile/r-richard-geddesFind More Gregg Hurwitz on Twitter:https://twitter.com/GreggHurwitzCheck out Gregg’s bestselling books:https://amazon.com/Gregg-Hurwitz/e/B001IXPXTG[00:00] Intro[00:30] Jordan introduces this week’s guests to discuss the newly-proposed infrastructure legislation (winter '21)—a crucial bill for the American people[03:28] Geddes gives an overview of infrastructure and his background therein[07:46] The monumental accomplishment of the US interstate highway system. Could it be built again today?[11:10] “You've heard the adage that time is money. [That's] certainly the case with infrastructure. When a project gets delayed by the NEPA process for say 5 years, the amount of extra money spent... is enormous, it can sometimes double" Rick Geddes[14:42] Gregg Hurwitz highlights the unsophisticated way the media and most politicians are currently handling the infrastructure bill[16:02] “It seems like we can get very little sane discussion in the media on the role that regulation plays in building a renewing infrastructure" GH[16:40] Extra delay and cost in federally funded projects is a regressive tax that hurts the poor and middle class[22:02] Pressure on the infrastructure bill from climate change. Looking at the evolution of new technologies to improve the efficiency of current infrastructure[25:49] “If infrastructure development means replacing inefficient use of resources with efficient use of resources, that should be a net gain on the economic side, so it helps poor people, and it should also have environmental benefits" Dr. Peterson[26:07] What are our current top infrastructure priorities? What needs to be addressed and fixed ASAP?[35:31] We need to capitalize more on the utility of combined public and private ventures in infrastructure projects[52:32] The importance of defining and communicating what a successful infrastructure project looks like[55:36] Given our systemic problems, how can we give politicians and private firms a positive incentive for meaningful participation?[01:03:14] You can only focus on so many projects before outsourcing becomes a necessity[01:12:19] You'd be extremely naive to believe that the people sustaining our infrastructure systems are only in it for personal gain[01:16:48] The extraordinary reliability of the societal infrastructure system[01:18:47] “The idea that it's just power that drives people to the top of organizations isn't true because, if it were, we would have many more psychopaths and they would be way more successful" JP[01:23:15] What about infrastructure projects that should be started immediately?[01:25:44] “This is the ultimate bipartisan thing because it will reduce greenhouse gases, diesel emissions, improve the efficiency of our infrastructure, and it's right there on the table" RG[01:26:21] Outro#InfrastructureBill #Bipartisan #PublicVentures #ClimateChange #Infrastructure

Welcome to the JBP podcast season four episode 64. In this episode, dad had Greg Hurwitz and Rick Getty's on to talk about the multi-billion dollar infrastructure bill that's currently on the table for the U.S. Congress. Rick Getty's is a professor at Cornell and a well-recognized expert in American infrastructure policy and development. He's the author of The Road to Renewal, Private Investment in US Transportation Structure. Greg Herwitz served as Dad's co-host today. Greg's a former student of Dad's at Harvard and now a best-selling scriptwriter, producer, and novelist. You might have heard of Orphan X or the book of Henry. More recently, Greg's been involved in creating moderate political messages for the Democrat Party. That's right.

He's tried to bridge the gap between the Democrats and the Republicans. I hope you enjoy this episode. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep, GQ and Wired's number one mattress of 2020. I have a bit of a hard time sleeping, trying to calm my brain down, and the fact I have a mattress, this good makes a huge difference. It's like sleeping on a cloud. I cannot tell you how much I love these guys. I had one of these mattresses in Toronto and recently moved to Nashville and got another one. Ben spent time traveling in the UK and I don't know what's up with beds over there, but they're awful. Being back on this mattress has removed all the pain in my neck that accumulated in the UK.

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free pillows for our listeners at helix sleep.com slash Jordan. Take their two minute sleep quiz and they'll match you to a customized mattress for the best sleep of your life. That's helixleap.com slash Jordan for $200 off and two free pillows. Hi, everybody. I'm very pleased today to have with me two people, Dr. Rick Gettis. The timing is really perfect because the Biden infrastructure bill just passed. And Dr. Gettis is an expert on infrastructure development. And so it's exactly a propitious time to have this conversation about the details associated with infrastructure, what it is, and how it might be renewed,

and what obstacles there are, and so forth. And he's a well-recognized expert in this particular area. He holds a joint appointment in both the Cornell Brook School of Public Policy and in the Economics Department at Cornell. He's a member of the Graduate Fields of Systems Engineering, Regional Science, and Economics. He's founding director of the Cornell program in infrastructure policy. He's also a non-resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. I suppose that puts him somewhat to the right of center. And that's relevant for reasons we'll find out later. Rick's research centers on the funding, financing,

and permitting of major infrastructure projects. His publications have appeared in a variety of academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics, and the Journal of Law Economics and Organization, among others. He's author of the 2011 American Enterprise Institute book entitled The Road to Renewal, Private Investment in US

Transportation Infrastructure, Healds, Emma, and Ph.D. Economics from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in Economics and Finance from Towson State University. And I also have with me, as a co-host today, Greg Herwitz. Greg was a student of mine at Harvard years ago, and we've remained in close touch ever since. He's the New York Times number one international best-selling officer of 23 thrillers,

including the Orphan X series. His novels have won numerous literary awards and have been published in 33 languages. Greg was a guest on this podcast. It was season four, episode two, and an episode entitled Build a Better Democrat. And he said, I would say center left. And so we have two viewpoints.

I don't exactly know where I said. And many people have many opinions about that. So, but Greg is also interested in policy development and his influential in his views are influential on the center left. Let's put it that way. And we spent a lot of time discussing practical issues, including what might political parties concentrate on reasonably intelligently to pull the discussion back to the moderate

and productive center. And we figured that infrastructure was definitely at least in principle, one of those things that might be regarded as non-objectionable and useful by people on both sides of the political spectrum, assuming that they're not so extreme that you can't just talk to them at all. So, I invited Greg today for the same reason that I invited Dr. Gett is, I hope to learn something about infrastructure development from someone who spent his whole life studying it and Greg's here for exactly the same reason and so thank you very much Dr. Getty's for agreeing to talk to us today and I'm looking forward to it. So how did you get interested in it like why infrastructure for you and maybe you can lay out what it is as far

as your concern why it's so crucial and, but also what got you interested in it. Yeah, so thank you, Jordan. I'm very honored to be invited to join the show and excited people are talking about infrastructure, particularly with a policy bent. I have to go way back in time, Jordan, I wrote a paper on the US Postal Service back in college at a Towson State,

now Towson University in Baltimore and got interested in economics and college and attended graduate school for my master's. Now, master made you popular with the girls, hey, that's the trick. Yeah, just just really popular with them. But I wrote my dissertation back at Chicago on the regulation of electricity companies,

an investor owned electricity companies. So I was always interested the regulation of electricity companies, the investor owned electricity companies. So it's 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 circle back on the postal service, in fact. And I talked at Fordham in the Bronx before coming to Cornell and I talked about Fordham in the Bronx before coming

to Cornell, and my work at Fordham focused on postal policy around the world and postal regulation. And then, Gordon, in the 0405 academic year, if we can go back that far, I was invited to join the Council of Economic Advisors in the White House as a senior economist, what's called a senior economist. And that year was precipitous for infrastructure policy because Congress was passing a highway reauthorization bill. And that's actually important for what just happened in Congress now.

And what happens is every five or six years Congress reauthorizes spending out of the federal highway trust fund. Congress reauthorizes spending out of the Federal Highway Trust Fund. So every time you buy a gallon of gasoline in the United States, 18.4 cents goes to the federal government. If you buy diesel fuel, it's 24.4 cents. And Congress just kind of stores that up in the Highway Trust Fund until it reauthorizes spending out to the states every five or six years. So that year, 0405 was the safety lieu, that was the name of the bill,

the safety lieu highway bill. And the executive branch was asked to weigh in at a whole set of issues related to highways, roads, bridges, tunnels, and it included things like environmental permitting, tolling of the interstate highway system or of other roads, public private partnerships or private investment and infrastructure, which is the topic I wrote the book on that you have, because the executive branch is being hit with all sorts of policy

issues. As a result of that, Jordan, President George W. Bush invited me to be a member of a commission that was created in the safety Lou Haive bill. We called ourselves Section 1909 Commission because that was the section. It was literally called the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission. Because the federal highway program toward 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 US interstate highway system. But by the 90s, it was largely complete. But the point was, you know, they're still collecting the gas and diesel fuel taxes. And what's the point of the program if you're, you know, basically have a complete system? So the purpose of this commission was to kind of study that question.

And I got exposed to even more of these issues, Jordan, by serving on that commission. And we put out a report to Congress called Transportation for Tomorrow. I'm kind of laughing because it was put out in 2008 just as the global financial system was melting down. We never got the attention that we hope, but we did have some impact. But Jordan, I came to realize the importance of these issues and how in some sense understudy they were. And in particular, by economics departments, right? Back in my day in college, almost every economics department had a transportation economist. And that slowly went by the wayside. And the transportation policy issues really were

not being studied. Now how come it went by the wayside? I mean in Canada, it was infrastructure that delivered this country. It was a railroad that tied us together. So infrastructure actually is at the basis of our country. And when I go down to the States and I see that that interstate highway system that was built between the 50s and the 90s, that bloody thing is a miracle. And it's an economic miracle. So I don't think it could be built today. Maybe I'm cynical about that. But- It could not. Okay. Why do you say that? Why could not it not be built today given how crucial that

piece of infrastructure is? Because so one of the issues that we study on one of the things that that I became interested in, we actually just put out a working paper a couple days ago through my CPIT program here, Cornell is called NEPA and that's the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which is a broad act where you have to file an environmental impact statement in EIS in order to design and construct a new facility, expand an old facility, you almost anything. And part of the reason why I say that, Jordan, is because the NEPA process has become much, much larger to the point where it can slow down projects routinely for a decade.

Right? I think the average might be five. We have in our research paper. So let me push you on that and maybe Greg can jump in here too. So now the Biden administration has decided to make infrastructure, renovation, and renewal. Yes. One of its primary focuses. And we were, Greg and I were both talking to a Republican congressman a while back and asked him what impediments he might see to its implementation. And he raised the same issue that you just described, which is that the red tape surrounding

infrastructure renewal is now so dense that it's not obvious what can actually be done. And so this actually puts the people say on the center left in somewhat of a conundrum, because on the one hand, they want to build infrastructure, not least to serve the interests of the poor and the working class. Absolutely. Because the rich can't take infrastructure for themselves, let's say.

But if the regulatory structure is such that these projects are actually not practically implementable, well, is that a reasonable criticism that you're living? Now, is it reasonable to place you politically on the moderate right, let's say? And how does that influence your thinking about such things? I mean, Jordan, I come from a classical liberal libertarian, Scottish enlightenment, neoclassical economics. I have my doctor from Chicago, right? And sort of one of the golden years,

I would say of Chicago economics. I guess you could place me, you know, wherever, you want to give it, given that information. But yeah, I take a basic market oriented approach. I mean, I wrote a book on increased private participation in the delivery of public services, which is a huge issue globally. Right? 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 that has experience around the world can help to deliver public what are fundamentally

public goods and services. So I think it's fair to put me slightly, you know, affiliated with American Enterprise, slightly to the right of the center on this. But I do want to go, you know, go back to this, Dwayne, because I think it's a really interesting point that people should be aware of. So you've heard the adage that time is money, right? Time is money. That is really true in infrastructure. If you delay a project by five or seven years because of the NEPA process, then you just increase the cost enormously. I mean, it could double the cost or something of that nature. And so what's happening now, it's actually very interesting. I think you'll find this very interesting.

During the Trump administration, there were folks in the White House who suggested a new model for NEPA, and it's called the one federal decision, right? One federal decision. And that is the idea that you would have a lead federal agency. So you wouldn't have the environmental protection agency and you'd have Native American burial grounds and you might have some other, all these different agencies that have to weigh in for project approval, one agency would take the lead in shepherding the proposal, right, through the federal process. And that agency could actually,

if the other agencies were dragging their feet, would have the power, basically, to make a decision for them. The situation now toward is one agency will head it off, hand the proposal off to another, and that'll hand it off to another and off to another. And as you can see, it slows down the process enormously. And I believe that in the bill that was signed or voted on by the House late on Friday night,

the one federal decision language is in the bill, right? But on the other hand, there's folks within the Biden administration who are trying to walk back some of the Trump era reforms with regard to expediting the environmental impact statement process. Right? So I think we all want to protect the environment. We all want to protect endangered species. We want to protect the water, the air, Native American, Bairdell grounds, you know, and so on. But there has to be some limit on how much time can be spent, you know, on these things before you either say yes or no. Basically. So there's a bit of There has to be some limit on how much time can be spent.

On these things before you either say yes or no. Basically, so there's a bit of, things are being pulled in two different directions. With the bill basically saying, we're gonna do one federal decision and that's gonna be a big reform of the NEPA process that policy people like me love. And then there's another poll within the administration

to kind of repeal some of the Trump era reforms on this. So one of the big things we would like to see is some, it hasn't really been reform since 1970, which is a long time ago. And there's, as you know, Jordan, an ecosystem of lawyers and consultants, et cetera, in Washington that have built up around the Neapro process, and they, you know, that whole thing slows it down. So, that would be one

sort of major reform that we think would expedite infrastructure delivery in the United States, you know, speed it up, and essentially do it at lower cost. And so, you know, we're hopeful that that's when the president signs the bill, that that'll be, you know, part of it and we'll see some changes. But in answer to your original question, Jordan, things I think are so cumbersome at this stage that you could never build the interstate highway system

in the United States today, the way you did in the 50s and 60s. Yes, so the Chinese announced 150 nuclear plants today, I think today or yesterday. Well, yeah, that's their plan. And so great, you had a question. Well, I was thinking, you know, one of the things Jordan and I talk about sometimes is the aim that we strive for

in our mutual work is to try and get people arguing and talking about the right things at least, right, versus how so much conversation goes. And I was really struck by even something that is as seemingly uncontroversial as infrastructure, there's very little discussion in the media, in conversations around this topic with any sophistication. Like even something like infrastructure to me has been pushed into such sort of gridlock that any discussion of regulation from the left is viewed as corporations trying to roll back stuff so they can dump toxins into oceans and make more profit.

Rather than that being able to be framed and described as you're doing it, everybody has an intuitive sense of that. Anyone who's ever done a remodel or had a home project, everyone knows the cost and the expense of anything that takes longer and how unerous that is and how many different layers. And part of what, from the messaging perspective, is how do we, yet again, it's another example

about how the working class, small businesses in the poor are being held hostage by a messaging apparatus from both sides that has sort of distilled the argument into sort of tribal warfare on either side. It seems like we can get very little same discussion in mainstream media about the role, for instance, that regulation plays in how to strike the balance. And you're so clear about it. Of course, we need to protect the environment. Of course, we care about species in extinction and disruptions to the habitat, but we also can't take six years to build an overpass in New York City. It's just not going to be functional. Not and retain an economy that simultaneously serves the needs of the people who are released

well off, because they're the ones who will pay the price for those delays fundamentally. Absolutely. Another way of saying that Jordan is all these delays and cost, it's like a regressive tax, right? In other words, it's a tax, we economists would think about it as an implicit tax that disproportionately hurts the poor. Okay, why does it almost all the time? Why disproportionately hurts the poor. Why disproportionately hurts the poor?

Well, I mean, these facilities, let's go back and talk about the actual facilities, the actual infrastructure that we're talking about. As I stress, it provides basic public goods and services, so mobility, getting to school, getting to your work, getting to your community activities. The history of infrastructure, and this just goes 200 years back in the U.S. Postal Service, is the history of trying to provide all communities with access, or being sure that no communities are left out. That goes back to the horse post, right? When you were delivering letters and cards

and newspapers by horse, and the goal in the United States was that all communities should have access to a post office, right? And the history of infrastructure in the United States, universal land-wine telephones. There was a farms to markets Movement where we tried to pay rural roads because farmers couldn't get their their harvest to the market You know in time on dirt roads that were full of mud. So there was this this farms to markets There was electrification during the Roosevelt year rural electrification

So there's always this this and we see it now with broadband, right? markets, there was electrification during the Roosevelt year, rural electrification. So there's always this, this, and we see it now with broadband, right? Yeah, I was going to say our broadband in that access. Consistently in our polling, we go out often into the 37 congressional districts decided by five points. We really want to see what people think to cut through it. And consistently, rural broadband tests through the roof as a necessity, right? It is the new, those are the new information highways, right? It's the new, it is the new infrastructure system, and we see a huge demand and need for that. Well, and think of all the education

law opportunities that provides as well, and increasingly so. And so, okay, so let me ask you another kind of technical question. So, please go ahead. The whole is universal access, and that includes the poorest communities, right? Rural communities, poor urban communities. It's always been across sectors, this goal of everybody having access, and that's fundamentally what the infrastructure is about. Okay, so do you think, so here's a proposition, twofold proposition, the most important thing that might be done to rectify absolute poverty

and maybe to mitigate relative poverty would be the provision of energy as cheaply as possible. And the second most important would be the universal provision of efficient infrastructure. Is that a reasonable, are those propositions reasonable from the perspective of an economist? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, crucial, but I would say that the energy

infrastructure, the energy is part of the infrastructure, the generating distribution and transmission capacity. You need to get power, right, to people that that's a crucial. We kind of, you know, the extension of that is we don't like to live in a society where some communities are systematically don't have these things, right? We kind of think everybody should have heat, everybody should have electric, everybody should have mobility, right, in your community. So I would say absolutely. And that's why having these things, 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. But in infrastructure, it is used generally, I think it's this old notion of universal service, universal access, where all, it's equitable for all communities to have this. And of course course I'm a consider myself to be an old-time regulatory economist and I'm always harping on how these

issues have been studied for a century or longer in the you know to provide these basic services as the technology evolves and now of course with Zoom call, we know how important broadband internet access is, and kids need to have it for school, and people need to have it for work. And so we don't want either open pockets to be left without it, you know, or rural. So Jordan, I don't know if I'm answering your question, but there's a certain level of power that we need. Well, the other thing that I've thought a lot about is pre-do distribution problems. And so, you know, the fact that money, for example,

does tend to end up in the hands of fewer and fewer people. You have to fight very hard to not have that happen. But that doesn't seem to me to be the case with infrastructure, because, well, it can't happen that way. You can't hoard the highways. You can't hoard the electrical grid, and even if you did it, it wouldn't do you any good. And so, if you are actually devoted to serving those who are oppressed and excluded at the bottom of the socioeconomic and power hierarchies, then I can't think of a way

to facilitate equitable distribution of valuable resources, especially energy, because energy is work. I can't think of a better way of doing that than to concentrate on infrastructure development. And so then that brings us to the next problem that's going to be a big one for this infrastructure bill is like, as pressure ramps up in relationship to climate change and the environmental concerns that go along with that, there's going to be more and more pressure on infrastructure development in terms of regulating and suppressing it for that matter. And so that's a real tension on the left, I think, because the left tends to be more concerned, let's say, with broad-scale environmental issues, but theoretically, also, they're concerned with the poor.

And there's a big tension there. And so do you have some sense of how those mutual goals might be brought into alignment with one another instead of acting in an antagonistic manner? So, George, I think you've hit on one of the most important and underappreciated issues in infrastructure policy. And I kind of regret that I didn't spend more time in my book that you have on this. But I've been studying this for 15 years now, and I would say there's been a slow revolution going on in the technology of infrastructure delivery, right? And some of those things make, you know, the front page of the New York Times, and that's driverless cars, right, and the hyperloop and things like that. But there's a whole host of other

technologies that have been developed in the universities, in the labs, in the startups that stand to transform the way infrastructure delivery infrastructure is operated and delivered in the United States. Let me give you a couple examples. One is smart stoplights. Smart stoplights. I had a kind of a little briefing of this by the folks at Carnegie Mellon recently and it's a stop light right with different colors but it has a camera and a sensor attached to it so that the lights are not just on a rope timer, they actually change in response to the traffic that's actually at the intersection. So many drivers have had the experience of going to a roll road and there's a red light because they're good

people, they stop and wait there and there's no traffic in the other direction. And they just know that if the light knew that I was sitting there, it would turn green. What turns out the technology has existed for a decade to sense the cars actually at the intersection and change the lights optimally in response to the actually at the intersection and change the lights optimally in response to the traffic at the intersection.

Jordan, they have it now to the point where they can sense pedestrians and include pedestrians in the changing of a light. They have it to, they can tell a dog, they can tell a person in a wheelchair and they can just change the optimize, the changing of the colors to maximize the flow through the intersection. Now, stop and think for a minute, how much gasoline you would save if you with that, right? But the problem, Jordan, is not the technology.

The problem is the adoption, right? Is getting the people who own the stoplights. You might be a small town like where I am in Ithaca, where it could be, you know, a county, it could be a city, but it's highly atomized in the United States. But getting them to overcome their risk version. And I understand that totally, they're risk-averse to new technologies, they're afraid of it. They don't what we call headline risk, you're the mayor,

and you're afraid you're gonna wake up tomorrow and find that there's been a giant crash because these stoplights malfunctioned, right? But we've got to somehow overcome that risk-aversion to get them to adopt these new technologies. Okay, 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. So it's a great 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. So for poor people, plus it should have environmental benefits. So we shouldn't be thinking about it. Exactly.

Okay, okay, okay. So how about priorities? Like you give the highway systems in this book, for example, in the US, I think it's a D and the bridge is a C minus. That's a very in the bridges of C minus. That's the American society civil engineers. Right. So 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, like what's really broken?

What really, where's the, and where's the biggest bang for the buck? So, so yeah, let me, uh, wow, that let me, wow, that is a great question. You know, the American Society of Civil Engineers has done a great job of pointing to the inadequate, the deferred maintenance, right, in the United States. So the bottom line is, I think, the U.S. has done a good job of designing and constructing and building out new networks to ensure that all communities are connected, right? The interstate highway system, the state routes, the local streets, you know, in infrastructure,

the same thing across, you know, across sectors, but we've done a very, so we're good at building shiny new things, but we're very poor at taking care of what we have already. And I think there's political incentives, right? If you want to be reelected, you want the ribbon cutting ceremony with the big scissors, right? But it doesn't get you reelected if you say we put five millimeters of asphalt on that bridge over there, even though the civil engineers are telling you you need to resurface that bridge. So there's a problem with the political incentives

that have led to these trillions of dollars of deferred maintenance. And I think in the bill, so of course, one of the dead, that's part of the debt that deferred maintenance. That's also part of this part of the debt. That's also part of messaging failure, you know, is you're describing the stoplights. And that's like the send city stuff, right? We can plug in cart like the stoplights also have so many other aspects is charging stations and different security. They can alert to gun shots like there's so much in it that's efficient. And to me, I just hear that as a, you know, obviously being somebody who's more involved with the messaging side of it, but that seems to me to get somewhere like Ithaca to adopt that,

it has to be framed as an environmental imperative. Like you want to cut gasoline costs, here's how we do it. Here's how the city is cleaner. Here's where the money will skew to other people. There's a way that that has to be packaged and sold that's outside of the norm. Right. And I think the thing that we see increasingly is that we, you know, the way that the information moves

now and polarizes in the soul, we expect politicians to also have to figure out how to be TikTok stars, that they know exactly how to sell everything in some magical fashion. And the lack of a proper messaging apparatus around some of this stuff is really costly. And people tend to forget that that's just as essentials figuring out the problems. If you can't sell them and communicate to people in real concrete terms, the ways it will affect their lives and their communities, it doesn't get adopted. Yeah, so that's also an infrastructure problem in some sense, right? And non-trivial one at that.

So how do you make these things sexy? I mean, I made a joke about that at the beginning, that these tend to be regarded as dry discussions, but they're not. They're the real details of actual policy, the real details of actual politics. And what we're laying out here at the moment is a vision that something like,

well, how does enhanced efficiency, like why is that a problem for anyone? Well, and also efficient. Go ahead. No, we're real quick. Also, this is where ideologies, and by that, I don't just mean far left and far right. I also mean classically conservative and classically liberal. This is where they come to die in a good way in the solution of a problem. Like, if we can have this conversation about specifically how this makes people's lives better, maybe that's a solution that 70% conservative, 30% liberal when it comes to some application.

Maybe. And so what's so important about boiling them down to this and figuring out how to talk about it is a lot of the useless ideological overlay to specific problems that concretely help the working class and the poor and actually make headway for community environment. And that's also clean fields and strings, right? We're not just talking global warming, we're talking about literal, the communities that people live in, that they fish in that small businesses are run in.

That's where all the rubber meets the road. And then- Well, Craig, it might be a rule of thumb that if the discussion is occurring at a level where all that's happening is ideological argument, then the problem actually hasn't been specified clearly enough to move towards solution. It might be a good film. Well, then you also see, in your way, right, is it bureaucrats, is it businesses that are legitimately looking to override regulation for ill motivation. If we can, once it gets boiled down, it also, you get a very clear lay of what the strategic field looks like

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So Jordan, I wanna address just a few ago, you said who could be against greater efficiency, right? Yes. And I think this in some sense, the greats point should be the ultimate bipartisan issue, right? I'm not sure, with all due respect, I'm not sure engineers are the greatest on the messaging. Piece of this, I love them to death, but there is this issue. So let me give you two other examples I want to get off my chest. And you know, they're saying

there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, but the closest thing to a free lunch in economics is technological adoption, right? So one great example I think is completely underappreciated. I, you know, we're all concerned about climate change and it's methane emissions at wastewater treatment plants, right? So a lot of wastewater treatment plants, particularly in the eastern United States, are old. Our here in Ithaca was over a hundred years old

and there are open settling ponds for solid waste. Well, guess what happens? The methane from that process just goes into the atmosphere, which is a very bad greenhouse gas. So what you can do and what the city of I think I did, where we are, the mayor is a Cornell graduate, was partnered with a private company. In this case, it's Johnson controls to install a digester. And I've had the tour that digester looks like a giant tennis ball. It's a big white sphere with a plunger. They capture the methane from the natural process of breaking down

the solids. They use the methane to turn turbines that Johnson-Constrolled installed three of them at 120,000 RPMs. They're very, very efficient. They make electricity. They capture the methane, so it doesn't go into the atmosphere. It doesn't cause climate change. They, instead, use that to create electricity, so they offset other generating sources. Now our wastewater treatment plant sells power to the grid. Instead of using power from the grid to run the plant, they sell power to the grid. It's a win, win, win, right? To the point where they're gonna,

I believe they're gonna install another digester and they're actually taking waste from other surrounding communities to process here, right? They charge something called a tipping fee, right? The city doesn't do that for free, they do that for a charge. And so this should be done at scale in the United States, where this is where you have to have a private sector company, because it's technologically

challenging to install this and install the generating capacity's micro generators to get them to work properly. But now we have taken a know, taken a hundred-year plant with private sector, oh, the other thing I should say is how do you pay for this, right? If you're the mayor, the first everybody's cash strap, so guess what? Johnson Controls was able to pay for the installation of the digester by getting a share of the lower and electric bill. So think about that. They knew that our wastewater treatment electric bill was going to go down. They said, just give us a share of

the electric bill. We will bond against that savings and we'll pay for the installation of the technology. Well, you've just got the mayor's ear, right? So I don't understand why we can't replicate that across the United States. There should be no open waste water treatment settling ponds that are a hundred years old, emitting methane that could be used to power the plan and power the city. So this, I don't know if it's a messaging or a, I don't know what it is. Well, who's really good at messaging or corporations, right? They're really good at it. You can, I'm gonna turn on the TV,

look at what ExxonMobil does, right? And so it's really interesting because in a certain way, as you lay it out, if there's a for-profit aspect to this, from private industry that benefits cities at no cost to get something in place that also earns cities money, it seems to me like that's a perfect union for private and public interface. And so somebody, it seems to me like the most

immediate driver for that would be for the private corporation to figure out how to package and sell that to other cities. That's a bigger driver to me, I think, than trying to convince layers of bureaucracy and governments why this makes sense and to adopt it through city boards or councils or however that works. Well, I would presume that's also partly why in your book, this road to renewal that you also stress the utility of public private joint ventures and so we can go into that. Okay, so here's a couple of things we sketched out is,

well, let's go for efficiency because that's gonna service on the environmental front, but it's also going to be economically efficient. And then we could also point out, like there's a big argument always going on ideologically in some sense between melathusian biologists and enthusiastic economists. And the melathusian biologists insist

whether limits to growth, everything has a maximum carrying capacity. We can't exceed that. And there are melathusian catastrophes. But the economists come and say, yeah, whether limits to growth, everything has a maximal carrying capacity. We can't exceed that. And there are no enthusiasm catastrophes. But the economists come and say, yeah, we'll wait a minute. One of the ways that we can solve that is by doing more with less. And we're really good at that.

And we're getting faster and faster at being better and better at it. And I think the economists, to my way of thinking, the economists are the optimists. And I think they have the upper hand in the argument. But this is a perfect marriage of those two things in some sense, because it means that the optimal infrastructure plans please both sides. It's like, yeah, this is going to be better for the environment, plus it will make poor people wealthier. So how is that not exactly what we should be aiming for? And then, well, the messaging issue, well, that's a pretty easy message to sell, especially if it's true. And so, and so, and let's go into the public private issue a bit.

And I give, can I give, I want to give you guys a third example before we go to the public private. Just a tech, because this Jordan gets directly to the point you just made, right? I emphasize stoplights before. Now I'm going to emphasize streetlights. On parking lots, you have the roads where you have the, you know, to illuminate the thing at night. The thing now that's the methane capture equivalent for streetlights, we talked about stoplights, is LED conversions. So if you fly over a parking lot and you're playing at night, you see this yellowish color from the bulbs.

This old pressurized sodium incandescent technology is very old. LEDs in street lights are so much more efficient that you can, again, you can install the bulbs, you can install the new towers, and you can do it at virtually no cost to the city by the savings on the electric bill, but there's so much more efficient

that you get more lumens, right? You get more brightness. And this was done in the city of Detroit, I believe that Paris did this, but think about the effects of that, right? You have more brightness, that reduces crime, that reduces pedestrian accidents, that reduces car accidents, that reduces car accidents

at night. This helps communities at almost no cost to the jurisdiction that is installing them. And you can do other things like you can hang 5G, what they call pizza boxes, which are 5G transmitters on those towers, and you start to deliver higher speed internet at the same time you're improving the lighting. So there's all these innovations that are completely underappreciated in this debate, and I have to say I'm somewhat frustrated that there's not more focus on these opportunities.

So in fact, I think the street lights is what I was thinking about for the charging of cars and other things rather than the stoplights, which was your earlier example. But a quick question for you, while we're on specifics, which is this, you said that it's Johnson Industries. That does.

It was in the Netherlands. It was in the Netherlands, I mean. So what is- What is- I mean, so clearly they have an outreach business development off it. What do you think the impediments are to them going and pitching this and just having explosive growth? If in fact, all of these things line out,

you've assessed them. I'm just curious like why they can't move from that from city to town to city to town. I think they can. I mean, that's a really interesting question, Greg. The case to the ethical, I'm pretty sure is what we call an unsolicited proposal, right? So it's not like the city of Nithaqq's came and say, hey, we want somebody to do methane capture on a wastewater treatment plant. I'm pretty sure Johnson

controls studied the situation and approached the city and said, you guys should do this, right? One thing again is, you know, it's the United States and it's this frankly, Balkanized system of delivery and many sectors. And they're a bit jealous of, they want local control, right? And they're a bit afraid. I think they're so small. A lot of these wastewater treatment systems are small. They're afraid of a big company, right? So it has to be done properly.

I don't really have a good answer to your question, Greg. But I think smart public policy, and this gets the Jordan's point about public private cooperation. How can we do that better, right? Smart public would encourage this, encourage this. Okay, well, some of it is a matter of decreasing distrust. You know what I mean?

For a public private partnership to work, the private sector has to trust the public sector and the public sector Has to trust the private sector and then for that to be marketable to the population at large people have to believe that The institutions are fundamentally sound and that would mean the governmental institutions Which the left tends to take for granted as being sound not always It depends on who's who's in power But also the private institutions, which the right tend to take for granted as sound.

But there isn't any reason that we couldn't reconfigure our beliefs, at least to some degree, and think, well, look, we could all, we could unite in the pursuit of the efficiency and environmental cleanliness. Right. It's like, where the hell's the problem with that? And one of the things that's quite disturbing to me when I look at the United States is, when I travel from Canada to the United States, I'm always happy to be in the States.

I go to New York City and I look at, I was in Manhattan this week and I think, this bloody place is it's such a miracle. Like there's seven million people that are crammed onto this island. And it's clean. Like it's actually clean. How do you do this?

This is impossible. It's such a bloody miracle. And then I see the country like rivting itself apart and tearing itself apart with its ideological struggles and not noticing that it's really pretty damn good. And your institutions work remarkably well and like what's so the paranoia about folks? And those are discussions that Greg and I have had

on other issues. So this issue of trust, Greg, seems to me to be central to this in part, is like, and also the provision of something like an optimistic vision, which would be, well, we don't have to, it's not limits to growth. It's not, it's not the Rome club in 1968 saying, we're going to be overpopulated by the year 2000, and we've got to shut all this down. It's like, no, we can solve the environmental problem and we can solve the economic problem and if we do them properly, we're going to solve both better and faster. Yes. And I think that's actually realistic.

Yes. It's happening in certain cases. I mean, I'm giving you examples of where all these technologies are being, it's not, there's no silver bullet. It's, it's, this is the real world, but it's, it's a win-win win. It needs to have, let me say something Jordan and Greg, I just love your reactions. I've been studying the infrastructure delivery around the world, and I'm pretty sure that in developed countries, and many developing countries, the United States is dead last in public-private cooperation. If you go to France, they have an office of partnerships, the French word for that, in Paris, that automatically assumes that was the way you move freight back then,

was through a public-private partnership. It was through a concession. If you go to Canada, where you are, Canada is one of the world's leaders in public-private partnership. You guys have these what are called PPP units. For Ontario has one, Quebec has one, I could just go on, and then there's a national one, and it's all to facilitate public private cooperation.

I spent a year on sabbatical in Australia, as a Fulbright scholar, to study their infrastructure delivery, every state in Australia, New South Wales, Queensland, they all have an office of a PPP unit, or an office of Queensland, you know, gone, they all have an office of a PPP unit or an office of partnerships, and then they have a federal one that's called Infrastructure Australia to facilitate public private cooperation. And the United States, the two sides are just completely suspicious of each other, but we're supposed to be capitalists. Do you think that's because the general, in generally speaking, that liberals have distrust

of private business and conservatives have distrust of government? I mean, do you think those are the drivers of why? Yeah, so Greg, that's a really good question. I think there's probably a book, but here's my quick answer. So the United States, you have to go then to the financing of infrastructure. This, it sounds opaque, but this is one of the most, I think, important issues. And I'll get the details. The United States, I've talked to people around the world,

is the only country I'm aware of that has this tax treatment of publicly-issued debt. All right, so that's That's tax exempt municipal bonds. What that means is if you're the bond holder, you buy the bonds, you do not pay federal tax on the income. Now think of what that does. If you're the issuers, say you're the city of Ipica and you're the mayor and you issue bonds to pay for a new bridge,

and you have to issue $100 million of bonds. You get a lower interest rate because they're tax-exempt municipal bonds, right? So this pushes infrastructure delivery in the United States away from public-private partnerships, right? And this is now a multi-trillion dollar market. It pushes it away from public-private partnerships

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now and get your Gen 4 TheraGun today. That's TheraBody.com slash JBP. Again, TheraBody.com slash JBP. Do you think there's any possibility that that could be modified or is that an impossible task? So Jordan, that's that is a multi-trillion dollar financial market on Wall Street now The the political forces that are gonna protect you know are gonna protect that tax exemption are very strong But it's in the bill Jordan what they have the the people in Washington have recognized this problem.

We call it an unlevel cost of capital playing field where the tax treatment artificially lowers, hold on a second, sorry, the tax treatment artificially lowers the cost of capital, meaning the cost of money, right? If it's a tax example, municipal bond that's not issued by a private company, right? So in the bill, they have something called private activity bonds or pads. And what that does is it extends that taxis option to publicly issue debt through a PPP. Now I could go into the details. What did you call that?

What was it, was private? Private activity bond. Hab. Private activity bonds. Please do not confuse it with a bag, which is a billed America bond. It's different. The real action is in the tabs, the private activity bonds. The United States Treasury is jealous of the

the public fisc, right? And so they don't like to give tax exemptions. So the old law was $15 billion cat, right? The total amount of issuance of Pabs with $15 billion during the new bill would double it to $30. So people like us say that's great, it's not enough. But the 15, they hit the $15 billion cat, the Pabs were so popular, at least the bill doubles it, right? And we would like to see it, it's only for transportation, I think.

We would like to see pebs, the cap on pebs increased, and also be used for other things like water, or power, whatever those things are. But economists do not like to see economic decisions distorted by tax law. I'm getting to Craig's point. I think the United States is kind of behind this because it's so easy to just use tax-examinacible bonds. If you're a public owner or a infrastructure

and to say the heck with the PPP, right, you guys are going to have taxable debt. That's going to cost me more. I'm just going to go with taxis and minidet. And so it's it's this odd thing that has caused you know supposedly free enterprise America to be kind of adverse to private cooperation and infrastructure delivery. Is that why you think that it's almost like the larger forces, the foundational forces are skewed from this tax perspective. And so for something to break through, it's got to be wildly innovative and immediately profit driven, like the example with Johnson and the methane. It has to be something that's so innovative and so tip of the arrow that it can offer a solution

that doesn't rely on the bigger sort of capital raise with the tax ramifications. And so 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 worth a while. No, I think that's right, Greg. And I'm not, I'm gonna be clear, I'm not faulting the public owners. You know, the mayor's, I think it's mostly the mayor's. It could be kind of executive or governors, but really it seems like the mayor's, the people who are dealing with most of this.

And I've heard stories, Greg, where they'll be, they'll have to do a new project, right? They have to finance it. They will have two groups coming from the same bank. From the same bank, the one group is pushing tax exempt municipal bonds, and the other group is pushing public private partnerships. And the mayor just says, look, my interest payments,

my service on the debt's gonna be a lot lower with the taxis and municipal bond root. So I'm going to do that. You know, and it's almost like a fiscal. Okay. So why is that? Okay. Why is that bad, though? Let's go into that because if he's saving money doing that and the and the project is going to go ahead anyways, then why not take that route? What's the cost of not rectifying this? So during the cost is a crowds out private participation. Because the private folks cannot compete. A lot of these things are levered. You know, it's 80% debt, 20% equity.

And they can't, they just cannot compete with this artificially low cost of capital from muties. Okay, and so what's the problem? What's the problem with leaving? Okay, so what's the problem with just, okay, so what's the problem with just leaving it in the hands of the government? Okay. Now, we talked about messaging, and so what's the problem there exactly? So, Jordan, you don't get the innovation, you don't get the risk-bearing benefits of

including the private partners. They're one thing they're good at risk management. You do not get the new technologies. The other thing I should have harped on more in that book is what's called the life cycle asset maintenance. And that means if you do a PPP, you wrap the design and construction in with the operation over maybe 25 or 30 years. So that means the contract requires the public owner to keep the infrastructure up. And this is one of the things that I heard.

The United States last time I checked is a relatively wealthy country. Why is our infrastructure degraded? It's because we haven't done the operation and maintenance over the life of the facility, the way the civil engineers told you to. So it's called a DBOM. So the incentives are wrong.

I mean, that means the fundamentals are the incentives are wrong, right? So it's. Yeah. Yeah. You're all screwed up. I mean, and I have said in every venue I can to do to wrap those things together a bundle that determines to bundle design and construction. That could be renovation, but bundle it in with O&M with operation and maintenance. And the poor bless their hearts, the poor authority of New York and New Jersey, you mentioned New York, have the authority to do this on their own. The new Goethals Bridge, I've had a tour,

it's a hundred year bridge, it's built to last 100 years. Beautiful bridge is a debomb, it's a design build operate, maintain contract, over 25 or 30 years. I forget the exact, and there's other facilities, I think maybe it's the new LaGuardia Terminal, is a D bomb contract.

So, Jordan, what answer your question? That I think the taxi to the community that was very good for the United States in this developmental stage, but now it's become a problem, right? An albatross, in some sense, because it crowds out these private partnerships that the rest of the world is the leader. The rest of the world has been using its states. In terms of messaging, one of the things you did in your book is you pointed to a lot of projects that were really radically successful.

And so I'm kind of imagining a messaging campaign where there's some focus, like an ad, a focus on a project that really worked, and some discussion of why this worked, and what work means. It's more efficient, it's cheaper, it's better for the environment, everybody wins, that's pretty good. And then to scaffold that upward, upward to include larger and larger projects that have exactly the same sort of aim, it would be something like that.

But so would it be possible, because this book's somewhat old, can you think of a number of projects you talked about the methane capture system? Are there projects that could be profitably assessed that have been radically successful, that work on all fronts, that could

be used as detailed templates for messaging going forward with infrastructure development. Would that be a good approach? Because it kind of ties the high to the low, right? Absolutely, John. So, yes, I mean, so one of the things I have researched, you might appreciate a nature. I'm very proud of that because of the general interest readership of nature and science, right? With two great people, Peter Krampton,

who actually his father was Dean of the Law School here grew up in Africa, an Axel Okenfelds, an Axel's at the University of Cologne, and the nature paper lays down how road pricing, right? Pricing the use of the road, which a pilot project is in the bill that was Pricing the use of the road, which a pilot project is in the bill that was just signed by the House of Representatives could help to alleviate

and in fact eliminate traffic congestion. But people don't talk to me. Oh my God, what would we do without traffic congestion? We'd live, it'd be a utopia. Yeah, well people spend like an hour a day. People spend like a half time job in traffic congestion. This is not a trivial problem. It's unbelievably economic drain and it's terribly polluting.

But Jordan, look at what do they do? What's the first thing that you hear when people say this road is congestion? They say build another lane. Build another highway, right? And there's economic research that shows, it's what called induced demand. It is the fact that you have added a lane, adds to the demand on the highway.

The developer says, oh, there's a new interstate highway here. I'm gonna put a housing development in. Well, what does that do to the interstate highway? It adds to congestion. And so they're always looking for these capacity expansions or they're looking for new and wild technologies, right? I love the Hyperloop, you know, they're saying let's do a Hyperloop. But the economics 101, the first semester of microeconomics provides the answer where the problem is that the price of the road space is zero, right?

It's a free good. So it's just like if you have a pile of free bananas and a pile of price bananas at the grocery store, people are going to take the free bananas and they're going to be gone. Right. And so it's an artificial free too because it's not free because people are paying for it with their time. Well, it's the Soviet system. It's queuing. Yeah, yeah. Queue. So with a lot of these with a lot of these problems systemically, I'm just trying to think through how this works, you know, with people making decisions. I'm not as familiar with with, you know, mayor offices, though I'm, though I'm somewhat, but I mean, so there's a couple of things which is going to be more tax efficient for your two years, four years, for whatever your term is, it's going to make sense in the short term, but not in the long term. And so to overcome that, people may or has to be armed with a whole different story that they're able to tell and market and draw voters with.

Because under current circumstances, and, you know, the other thing that I think about that I don't think any one of us is gonna have an answer to immediately, but I just thought I would raise it that we're seeing everywhere. I'm sure you see it in all of your ventures is, people are so busy scrambling to keep up with, I'm gonna call it corruption, and by that I don't mean to overt corruption.

I mean, all the nonsense and clogging that goes into the act of being, let's say, a politician, right? You can't just chasing, right? The congestion that there is no time to consider and to weigh things out in a way that involves bigger picture-innovative thinking. So the easiest thing is to just pull the lever on what you've been doing all along, right? And I'm seeing that a lot in what you're saying, to adopt new technology, to sell it. So many of us to really understand that. They have to go into it like the methane capture.

They have to go into private business. Right. You have to figure out what regulations need to be cleared. It's to figure out how to package that and sell that. And no one's going to get caught. And when congressmen are spending 25 hours a week, fundraising because they have to, how the hell are they going to take the time to dig into something at this level of detail? And that's more like congestion than corruption, really. It's easy to be cynical about that, but it's not

helpful. But also nobody gets fired if you pull a lever on something everyone's been doing for 50 or 75 years, where you get fired as if you have, and you advocate for that partnership and it turns into a disaster. And so there's a lot of ways that people are risk averse based on the system. And I think, you know, for me, I hate to sound like, you know, a hammer where everything's a nail, but, you know, the only contribution really that I can offer that significant is on the storytelling front, which is messaging, which for me, messaging is distinct from propaganda. If you can get the messaging right, sometimes you can get the policy right. But Craig, let me, let me, you know, excuse me a little bit.

And this gets to Jordan's point. These are great, you know, great people. It's been wonderful for me to interact with the people actually own and operate and have responsibility for infrastructure, right? Why? Why? Why has it been wonderful? Because they really care about the public services, right? They're really trying to provide clean water. They're really trying to make the roads work.

And a mayor has got 15 different things every day that's a problem, whether it's interacting with the police or the potholes or an ethical it's dealing with Cornell. And I really do think that they try their best. It's a hard job. I mean, to be the person who is in charge of this. By the way, the US interstate highway system zero of it is owned by the federal government. It's

entirely owned by state states. And that means if you're a governor, you have the responsibility for operating it, maintaining it, policing it, taking care of the dead animals, resurfacing it, taking care of the signage and the line thing. I mean, it's a it's a big job. And I think a lot particularly. And it's not glamorous. It's not it's not cameras. But great, nobody wants to go first, nobody wants to go first, you don't want to be the mayor of Charleston, and you install the smart stoplights and then everything screws up, right? So this is why I think pilot projects,

you know, whatever the technology is, pilots. So geeks like me, another academics can study the pilots right about them, produce, you know, reports and saying, this is what did well, this is what did poorly, this is what you, the mayor of Syracuse, you know, or wherever you are should do. But there's really this risk aversion. While in these pilot projects, the mayor of Syracuse, wherever you are, should do.

But there's really this risk aversion. While in these pilot projects, then partly what the engineers and the economists should be thinking about too is not only do these work and what are the outcomes economically, but is there a way of constructing an incentive system around the successful project so that the people who took the risk are rewarded for having taken the risk and so that that becomes part of their political capital. Because without that being

solved, solving the other problems is going to be sufficient. Because they're just punished for mistakes. They're not rewarded for movement forward. It's so true. Not to keep harping on methane capture, but it's such a compelling and concrete thing. I mean, part of how I would think if for Johnson, if they're gonna target that is to do a breakdown and say, here's how much money the city made. Here's how much time they saved. Here's how much revenue is generated. Here's their cost basis.

I mean, all these things can be broken down and handed off in a way that's a neat package of life. But we can make an investment. Here's how much money that you'll make in an ongoing way. And here's a small slice of it. That's a reasonable reward for a company who's taking the expense up front. Yeah. So Greg, let me let me say one thing about that. Let me get back to the screen here. This is an interesting left of center, right of center thing. You know, in some cases, right?

For infrastructure to improve infrastructure delivery, we cannot avoid the P word. And the P word is privatization, right? And so I have, because of who I am, I'm not in a company or anything. Some of these infrastructure companies are happy to talk to me about what they think the best policies. For the methane capture example, you could do a long term lease, so you could lease out the operation

of the wastewater treatment for 50 years, a long time. And the companies say, we could do things if we own that plant, right? In terms of, you know, just all these sort of cutting edge technologies that we will not do even with a 50 year lease, right? 50 years is pretty long. And that's not selling the wastewater treatment plant.

You're just taking a part of it, right? The other thing I learned the other day is, 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. I recently learned from one of my board members, Bob Helman, who invests in this. There's like seven or eight private, private bridges. So these are bridges. They're toll bridges, they're part of the network, they're operated

commercially. They're operated like a private business. But there's some aspect of infrastructure communications where if you can just say it's privatization, that ends in conversation. And I think that's a mistake because economics, actually, Albert Williamson, who won a Nobel Prize in economics, pointed to this. A lot of these are commercial activities where you can, you know, you can have the private sector in there operating it commercially, and you get better at service quality, you get proper

asset maintenance, you get incorporation of new technologies. So, I want to avoid the demagoguery. If you're a politician, and one of the things you want to ask yourself is like, how many things do you actually want to be responsible? That's right. It's like, why not farm some of this out to competent people? It's the only way, and that's as part of this efficiency issue, you know, as the scale of my operations have grown, the only way I've been able to manage that is to make sure that I have competent people around me and then give them their fiefdom.

And I do not micromanage. It's like, you can either do this or you can't. If you can't, I'm gonna find someone else right away because this has to be done. But if you can do it, good, do it. And then I can go do something else that I can do or that I want to do. And that distribution is 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 message? Some good news for you, Jordan, which is Trudeau has offered to privatize all of Jordan Peterson corporations. So we're going to have some, he's just eager to take it all over. So that could take a lot of work off your plate number one. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Well, the other thing here that I was thinking about, Rick, when you were talking about this privatization, that's another big scary word, like deregulation. And in certain cases, everybody- I'm talking about selling the roads. Right, right, right. And so, 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. But it removes all the benefit for the huge, the immense gray area in between, right? Of all the ways the privatization can be, there can be partial, there can be split partners. There's a hundred different ways to skewed deals. And I was thinking about what you're saying just in, in simplest terms about how this functions. And it's like, it's like when we buy solar, right? I've now put solar panels on two houses, right? I don't want to own it for 25 years. I'd rather the company own, like, we sit down

and we look at all these things. You can own it outright and you're responsible for maintenance. I don't want to be responsible for maintenance of solar panels. Like, I'd rather sit in my office in tight, right? And so it's like, what, you know, there's concrete ways that people can kind of understand this that are in structures that are all around us all the time. And so, you know, what's a particular interest to me

about the situation in Ithaca is that it's a balance between the two, right? There's aspects that seem that are privatized and there's aspects that aren't. And, you know, creative fuel structure. That's the book. It's back to, this gets back to something that we touched on earlier, which is, what's the proper antidote to ideological struggle and tips for test strategy?

Well, yeah, it looks like it's something like nuance. It's like, if you specify the problem, look, let me tell you something. I don't like the difference. For professors that were negotiating with the university for their grant application, like their initial startup grant before they go to grant. I said, look, if you want to maximize the amount of money the university is going to give you,

detail out all of the equipment you need with the costs, like down to $1,500, make a detailed list and get everything you want, and you will get every cent. And the reason for that is, well, how are they gonna say no? It's like, you don't need this piece of $500 equipment. No. Of course, that's not gonna happen.

Now, if you ask for $500,000, they're gonna say, how about $250? But if you do a detailed summary of everything you need for your research, down to the micro details, it's like, you just get it. And it's the same thing details, it's like you just get it. And it's the same thing here is like it could easily be that if we find ourselves in general in a conversation that's tilting an end ideological direction, what that means is we've got the level of analysis specified, you know, or we're dealing with bad faith players, but we might just

have the level of analysis improperly specified. Because who's going to argue with the methane plant? You know, who's going to argue with that? Also lack of after action reports, meaning that, you know, you have New Orleans blowout and everybody knows about it, but if it doesn't, nobody's going to hear about it. And I think that there's a failure in messaging to prescribe the roads not taken in failures that are reverted in potential expenses and costs for it. So like how useful would it be for somebody to say, I put this much money in a reinforcing a bridge, this hurricane cane, it didn't get knocked down.

Here's how many people would be delayed for how long. Here's the expense that we would have. Here's what would happen to insurance premiums. And we need to figure out how to convey back to people because I think that, you know, that's a thorny problem because prevention is a lot less sexy than cure, right? It's really a big problem because most things work all the time. And so pointing to something and say, Hey, look at how that's working. It's like, well, yeah, almost everything works.

Thank God for that. But it's very difficult for people to get people excited about predictability, even though that's what everybody wants. It's the same rules that you're talking about with nuance, though, because how you get people excited is specifics, right? So there's a hurricane that came through. It was, you know, I don't know how hurricanes are rated. Here's what would have happened to the bridge. Here's what that means in concrete terms. Like there's a way to spell a narrative

that everybody can feel good about it. I mean, one of the things that we're looking at increasingly and in messaging and politics is what's called like the good boy, good girl effect. The people are so exhausted from being told that they do anything right. They feel like they're killing themselves, they're working, they're trying to step with groceries, they're trying to follow rules when people aren't, they're trying to play by the rules, you know, be law-biting,

and no one's coming along telling them that they're doing a good job. I think that this, 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. Yeah, great. I'm breaking my back to do this. And that's the message. Some motivation. Likewise with infrastructure, right? It's do we want another catastrophe. The bridges are crumbling, there's all this stuff. And I think that a shot of an after-action report about some innovation that got made and to detail its success gives people some role

in agency in their interaction. It brings government back to them. It brings the notions of infrastructure and their city functioning around them back to them, as opposed to everything. Well, it's not like you, you Americans don't like success stories. Because you do. You know what I mean?

Well, one of the things that's really interesting from a Canadian perspective to go down to the US is how cinematic the culture is. Like everything's like a big movie. New York City is like that. It's like, it's just cinematic everywhere. And your culture is immensely powerful in generating motivational narratives.

It's second to none in that, and everyone ever, all right, well, that's why America is so dominant, culturally. And so much of the messaging is positive. It's, I mean, look at the Marvel movies just as an example. That's a multi-billion dollar franchise. And that's all aiming upward, like it's all positive. You're so good at that, it's just ridiculous. And so it doesn't seem to me to be impossible to do something like celebration of,

well, this methane treatment plant, yeah, example. And 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? Yeah, let me say something. About Greg's point. It's a really good point about messaging.

And again, this is, I think the disconnect between the engineering and the communications people because the engineers will report the improvements in terms of metrics. They'll say, well, what we get, so many hundreds of cars per hour across this lane with this new facility. You know, and that doesn't, it doesn't sell. You know, but that can be a story. The story is a story is a single mother who can now get to work and back to the kids an hour earlier. That's the story.

And then you talk about that in terms of how many hours a week and how many hours a year and what that time spent with kids. What's your family that you couldn't do? Yes, precisely that. Yes. Yes. Well, the thing, there's a reason for that too, you know, because engineers are temperamentally different from those who would communicate.

So engineers are fundamentally interested in things. That's part and the communicative types are fundamentally interested in people. And so the engineers are going to say, they are interested in things. It's like, well, here's a bunch of things stories. Well, that doesn't work. It's not a story. And so it's not surprising that it won't add methane man to the Marvel universe. But like the methane, and there's other thing gas is beside methane. But the point is, this is like the ultimate, it should be the ultimate bipartisan opportunity to come together and say, look, we need,

we have the technology. We have the technology. We have the technology. We have the $6 million man. It's not a question of developing something in a lab. It's patented, it's proven, it's there. It's ready to be deployed. Can't we just come together and say this is a win-win-win? And then advertise somehow figure out how

to message so the Joanne-Jane Sixpack can say this is an improvement in our life, right? 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, the right looks at government and thinks, oh, it's full of corrupt people only up for themselves. And then the left looks at businesses and say,

well, it's all full of corrupt people only out for themselves. And it's like it's simply not true. That is, like, there's corruption in every endeavor, but it's a small percentage of the endeavor in a functioning country. And the idea that everybody is only self-interested, that's, well, first of all, that's a confession, not a theory.

And second, it's simply not true. Like, the more people I've met, the more I've been struck by the fact that there's so many good people working on both sides of an argument, and they're working for high and noble purposes. High and noble purposes exist. No. So no cynicism, man. That's why it gets to crop out.

That's why it gets better than naivety. In addition, complimentary to an academic career, which you're familiar with, it's been a joy to get involved in real infrastructure because these are people who actually care about whether the subways in New York work or the bus systems, you know, work or the water's clean or if wastewater treatment plants are, you know, are operational.

I mean, they really do care, right? And so for me, I get psych visits, I get to see the stuff in construction. It's great. You can tell that they care. You can tell that they care because they're paying attention to details that matter. They in construction. It's great. You can tell that they care. You can tell that they care because they're paying attention to details that matter. They're real.

It's real. It's really matters if the sewage system works. And you think, well, that's not that interesting. It's kind of beneath me. It's like, of course, the sewage system is beneath you. Like, obviously, but it's a mark of caring to make those things work. And everyone knows what it's like to bring a plumber into your house who's a good plumber. Yeah. It's like, you're so happy he's there.

It's like great. And he's got his business and it's going fine. And he comes in and he doesn't rip you off on the bill. And he actually fixes it. And it's not going to screw up again. It's like, and it's a good interchange. It's, you know, you're happy to have someone like that in your house.

Absolutely. And that's, yeah, this isn't any plumbing problems. The first time we bought a house that I feel like our trust and plumber was like part of the family. Like figure out his favorite is favorite thing to drink it. Like cocktail hour at the end of the day. I mean, he was in there.

It's unbelievable how reliant we are on skilled skilled trades people and working people who do their job well. It's just it's unbelievable. If it take take that Greg and and multiply it by 10, right? So one of our affiliates is Patrick Foye, who was ahead of the New York of the court authority of New York in New Jersey. But then he was made ahead of the MTA,

and guess what happened? COVID hit, right? The Fairbox revenues of the MTA in New York were down by like 90%. And here's a guy who's been appointed by the governor to do that. And this is your moment to step up to the plate. You gotta still pay your workers,

you gotta keep the system running. But your Fairbox revenue just dropped by 90% because of the quarantine. So think of that, right? I couldn't sleep, I wouldn't be able to sleep. But Patrick was able to take it through and pull it out somehow, pull it out the other end, right? And manage all this crap that was going on

on the New York City subway system, you know, partly because the virus, I mean, that's amazing. I was stunned when I went to New York City, to Manhattan. You know, it looked like it did five years ago, except it was cleaner. I thought, and then I noticed that while everybody was just back on the streets, this is just reopened. I thought, how? Just think about this. That city was shut down for 18 months, and it still works.

It's like, what the hell? That's a miracle. That's an absolute miracle. And if everyone was corrupt and power-seeking and malevolent and only out for themselves, that is not how that city would look. No. No, and it is amazing given the level of activity, and the density, and the restaurants, and the waste, and the, you know, it's amazing. It's amazing it does work. But, you know, as I said to you on the outside,

I come from this, you know, neoclassical free enterprise kind of perspective, but the longer I've been dealing with infrastructure, the more respect and admiration I have for the public people who have, you know, are largely dedicating their careers to making this stuff work. They really do have a public interest, you know, desire embedded in them, which is nice, right? It's nice to see that. And they take their job, they can all make more money in the private sector, probably.

Yeah, definitely. And it shows these things. And be easier. You know, and the rewards would be bigger and there might be more security. I mean, look, Greg and I went to Washington four years ago and one of the things we did was host a couple of launches and we had relatively junior Democrat Congress people

and Republican Congress people and Republican Congress people just come to lunch because they don't get a chance to meet each other partly because they're raising money 25 hours a week. And plus they're up for a election in two years. Like these are busy people. And so the first thing we did was just had everybody introduce themselves and talk for five minutes. It was like, why are you doing this?

That was the question. And you could not tell the Democrats from the Republicans. Every story was the same. It was like, well, you know, I'm kind of a serious person and I would really like to serve my country. And I felt that although I had other opportunities that this was worth a sacrifice and I was hoping I could come to Washington and really make a difference. And like you listen to eight people say that and these aren't trivial people and they're

not grandstanding because there's no audience. It's like they're just saying what it is. And you can be cynical about that if you want, but you're a fool if you are, because that means you're cynical about the most noble ambitions of people who are making a genuine sacrifice. These are hard jobs. And so, and it's so nice to hear from you that you've been in the trenches working on these practical projects. And the consequence for you is that you've become like more optimistic and pleased with the characters of the people you're dealing with.

Yes, great. Let me be clear, Jordan, we should be clear. There are cases where infrastructure delivery is rife with corruption, and there's an older black in Brazil. You may be familiar with that scandal in South America. Biggest construction company was bribing public officials to be the winning bidder and prime ministers went to prison. So it's not some pure, it's the real world of humanity,

right? It's not a pure thing, but I think that's the exception rather than the rule. Well, psychopaths are 3% of the population, not 97%. Yeah, and they never get above 5% before they're called essentially. One to 5% and the basic, 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 So so yeah, these are exceptions especially in highly functioning societies and the US I mean there isn't a society that's ever been more highly functioning than the US all things considered wow So I'm glad to hear that Well, I don't think it's I don't I don't think that's an unreasonable proposition I mean the it's it's an it's the economic driver in some sense of innovation throughout the free world. I mean, there's other countries that are doing well, but, you know, the America is really a kind of epicenter, and everyone knows it. And so it's, and it's huge. I mean, 300 million people. That's a lot of middle-class people, man.

Well, there is no Silicon Valley of Germany, right? I mean, to some extent. Right. Right. Well, in Silicon Valley, and in the Indian countries, can do beautifully for sure. I mean, the thing that people tend to forget about America is, it's like all of Europe in one place. I mean, like the disparate cultures, climates, you know, perspectives, values, communities that are held together, it's pretty extraordinary. I mean, that's another thing that diversity of government and the distribution of powers, it's a complex place.

And so the fact that it functions as well as it does all the time, I mean, and a good index of that, you don't think your systems are functioning well, they? Well, have you plugged something into your outlet in your house lately? And how often does that not work? And that's a complicated system. Almost always works. I do want to tell you, maybe Jordan, I'll appreciate this, a European friend.

I think she was from Austria, came to New York, right? You know, to visit and it was her first time. And you know, she had her reaction was America. She said, Americans aren't anything. And I couldn't understand what she was saying. She said Americans aren't, and this was after her visit. She said Americans aren't anything. What she meant is, you know, they're not in New York, right? They're not just Latin, they're not Asian, they're not, it's like this big mishmash, right? It's like a UN meeting. So, so, you know, if you look at New York City,

of course, it's different across the country, but in a lot of places, there's no unique, you know, it's a bunch of cultures thrown in together. We lit my wife and I lived at 55th and I have anyone else kitchen for five years. I think there were 15 different ethnic restaurants within a short walk of our unit, right? And so it's this big mess.

What upsets me probably more than anything with the way that the cultural conversation has gotten so tribalized is that it removes the conversations about diversity from being joyful. And there's so many ways that it's such a driver of joy when when you have friends and community and family and food and culture and music from across all of these different categories. And I'm finding people are increasingly constrained about how

they even know how to talk about that is the one thing. And then the other thing is of course not to detour us often to cultural territories. I know Jordan gets really uncomfortable discussing those things publicly. But people also start to view it that there's one set of spokespeople from every community. Like I know people who only know what Latinos, how limited is your world if the only people who you know are one particular cross-section of a community. Yeah.

And so they're so diverse, Greg. The co-heum. They're from Belize, they're from Honduras, they're from Mexico. I mean, and they're all quite their Panama, you know, Costa Rica. I mean, I'm shocked if you talk to those folks how differently they view themselves, right?

Yeah, for Belize. That was one of 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, people talk about, you know, just to use for an example, the Hispanic vote. And it's like, are we talking California versus Texas versus Cuban Americans versus Argentine?

And like, there's such a range. we're talking California versus Texas versus Cuban Americans versus Argentine. 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 and ways that are joyful because that's always what wins. Hearts and minds is what wins, you know, the biggest thing that, well, I won't get on a, I won't get on a soap block. So let's go back to some concrete realities, so to speak, given we're talking about infrastructure.

Right. A rich priorities, like that's always difficult. What's really broken that should be fixed like first, and for the biggest bang for the environment and for efficiency in your estimation? Well, so, Jordan, there's a couple of big projects that just must be done. The gate, you visit in New York, the Gateway Tunnel,

about a $13 billion project. They're the rail tunnels that run under the Hudson River and they're owned by Amtrak. But New Jersey Transit uses them during the peak commute. There's about one train per minute that goes through there. They are over a hundred years old, probably 110. They are in dire need of being improved. There's a new alignment, just being almost replaced. Eastside access, Jordan, in New York, is the Long Island Railroad coming into the city. There's a huge project that needs to streamline that.

There's a rail tunnel in Baltimore city where I'm from, that's from the Civil War. That's too low for the trains to go through because it was designed during the Civil War, and that needs to be raised. So I would say a few of these, let's say, mega projects need to be done. The second thing, Jordan Jordan is deferred maintenance. We just need to upgrade, it could be airports, it could be dance, it could be levees, it could be seaports, it could be electrical systems. I mean, just to crop, we need to prioritize where deferred maintenance has gotten to be, you know, a huge problem and, you know, and address that.. The third one, Jordan, I'd say is we need to have some initiative.

Greg could help with this. Some initiative to have a not developing technology, but an adoption of technology. Just like a wave of technological adoption and infrastructure. There's all this stuff where people are aware of this new, this technology in the latest app and all that sort of stuff. But all of this, a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about with smart stoplights, smart streetlights, I could go on about liners for water pipes that will renovate water pipes to the tent of the cost. There needs to be some broad

initiative. Maybe we could do it with when the president signs the bill to say, let's just have a big initiative focused on this. This is the ultimate bipartisan thing because it will reduce greenhouse gas. It will reduce, you know, diesel emissions are horrible. Gas emissions are bad. It will improve the efficiency of our infrastructure, and it's there on the table. It's just somehow we can back maybe backstop the risk of the asset

owners, whether it's a county or a city or a state or whoever it is, the city backstop their risk somehow, I don't know, but just have some initiative to help these folks get the technology adopted. And George, now I would say that's number one. All right, great. I think that's a good place to stop. I hope that we can have a conversation like this again. And also to talk more, maybe we can organize this in some manner about how to ally the proper direction of the infrastructure project with the messaging. And we've outlined some of that today, which I thought was really useful. And so thank you very much, both for participating today. And

definitely let's talk again, maybe in a month and a month and a half or something like that. Great. Great. This was a pleasure. Thank you, Rick. Good to meet you, Greg. Good to meet you, Greg. Thanks, Greg. I'm happy to talk at any time. you