October 28, 2025 • 42 mins
The American Society for Civil Engineers gave the U.S. a C on its 2025 Infrastructure Report Card. From public transportation woes to bridge collapses and that pesky plane delays, why can't this country make the jump to straight-A infrastructure land? And will we ever be able to rely on the subway to not get stuck when we have to pee really bad?? Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has some thoughts about how to break the cycle.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Here we go again again.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, I'm Kalpen and this is here we go again,
Here ween go. So I live in New York City,
which means two things. A. I take the subway everywhere,
and B, Like every New Yorker, I love to complain
(00:33):
about taking the subway everywhere. The big challenge with this,
as you all know, it's not very efficient, and if
you've got a pe and you're stuck in between stops,
or your express train suddenly decides to go local, you're
like cursing everybody involved. I was watching this video this
week that the New York Times put out following one
(00:55):
of the people in charge of signal changes at the MTA,
and I was floor because these signals are manual. They're
like these huge steel rods that are moved in between
these holes. Then that changes tracks and signals. The reason
this made me so angry and amused is that when
(01:17):
this wonderful woman whose job it is to change signals
has to take a break, or when she herself has
to go to the bathroom, every express train runs on
the local track for all of us who also have
to take a piss.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
It's insane.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
It's so wild, and it's one of the things that
made me want to delve into the topic of America's infrastructure.
So it turns out there is a scorecard for America's infrastructure.
It's handed out by an organization called the American Society
for Civil Engineers, and we got in twenty twenty five
(01:53):
the grade of C. Yeah, one of the biggest superpowers
in the Global warl world with a US household net
worth of one hundred and sixty nine trillion dollars, got
to see in infrastructure. Clearly America doesn't have a tiger mom.
So why can't America make the jump to a straight
a infrastructure land? What kind of cycle are we trapped in?
(02:15):
This is here we Go again, a show where we
take today's trends and headlines and then ask why does
history keep repeating itself? I'm Kalpenno.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Hey, how you doing good? How are you good?
Speaker 2 (02:31):
I see it, Nice to see you, Thanks for doing
Let's introduce my guest. So most people know him as
Mayor Pete or Secretary Pete. But here's what you really
got to know. He was the youngest mayor of a
US city when he took over South Bend, Indiana at
twenty nine He ran for president in twenty twenty and
won the Iowa caucuses. Then, as the first openly gay
(02:52):
cabinet secretary in American history, he spent four years trying
to fix America's crumbling roads, rails, and airports as the
Transportation Sayingtary under Joe Biden. Ridiculous resume, Okay, Harvard Rhodes
scholar at Oxford, worked at Mackenzie, served as a Navy
lieutenant deployed to Afghanistan while he was still mayor, and
he casually speaks like eight languages. So love him or
(03:14):
hate him. Pete's not just a policy nerd. He's a
dad to twins with his husband, Chastin, and he can
actually talk about real things like a real human, even
really boring things like potholes and plato or fun things
like pop songs, all on the same breath.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Welcome, Pete, Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Of course, get to see you man. Okay, So I'm
just the first segment is about the past. You were
a history major in college, and I don't want to
open by sounding overly condescending to anybody or reductive, but
you're so good at explaining complex concepts to the layperson.
People who don't necessarily have a background in it. So
I feel like it makes sense to start with a
very basic question, what is infrastructure? Right? I just did
(03:54):
a little bit of a definition in our intro, But
how have you been explaining it to people?
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, and you know, it's not always the easiest question.
There were some hot political debates over exactly this. To me,
infrastructure is what sits as a foundation beneath everything else
that we do in our economy and our society. So obviously,
the example I worked with the most was transportation infrastructure,
but as a mayor, I worked a lot with sewer
(04:20):
and water infrastructure. There's a lot that depends on things
like power infrastructure. There are a lot of theories of
what's called social infrastructure too, the way we count on
things like schools and libraries and neighborhoods to make it
possible for us to do all the things that we
count on every day. But to me, I just come
back to the etymology. The word right in from means beneath.
(04:42):
Infrastructure is what's beneath the structures that we kind of
think about in the sea every day and makes everything
else possible.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
This might be an obvious question because we all know
why sewers are important, but why is infrastructure essential? And
then what do people usually get wrong when they talk
about it.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Well, the way I think about it is that whatever
is important to you in life is made possible by infrastructure.
And the best working infrastructure is what you don't even notice,
because that makes it possible for free to focus on
what matters. So to me, there's actually a connection between
things like waste water and the meaning of life. And
(05:20):
the connection is whatever brings your life meaning, whether it's
faith and family or enterprise, a business you're trying to build,
or scholarship and the life in the mind, whatever it
is that matters to you, you're going to have a
better chance of living a life that revolves around that
if you're not thinking about things like whether you can
(05:41):
get a glass of clean, safe drinking water out of
it's happened in the morning that's not going to poison
your family, or whether there's a road that gets you
to where you need to go to work or to
drop off your kids at school without holes in it
that are going to mess up your car. So paradoxically,
good infrastructure is just there. It just takes care of
problem basically those of us who have worked on infrastructure.
(06:03):
I think the best way to understand our mission is
that we worry about stuff like that so that you
don't have to when you're going about everyday life.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
That's a good point. I live in New York City,
and you know the I'm a big mass transit fan,
but the MTA is like the bane of our existence
a lot of times. Obviously it's an aging system. It
needs a big revamp. But that's a great point, you know,
Like I want to take all these things for granted.
If I have a meeting and I'm hopping on the subway,
like I want to know that in eighteen minutes, I
(06:29):
can actually get there, not wait for the next train
in thirty two, right, so you only notice it when
something goes wrong. I'm just thinking of past presidents, right,
especially Eisenhower and Lincoln and their major infrastructure projects they
invested in their respective administrations. Do you know historically, like
was their view to build these things so that people
didn't have to think about it. And with Lincoln I
(06:50):
think it was what canals and railroads, and with Eisenhower
it was the interstate system. Can you talk a little
bit about how these presidents championed those projects.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Yeah, I think they lived on the other side of
these problems. So you had to think about, you know,
all day, you had to think about problems of how
you could move goods or how you could safely move
around a community or a region. You know, if all
you had it was kind of muck filled pathways instead
of highways, for example, then you had to worry about
it all the time. So I think now, having had
(07:20):
those pieces of infrastructure built out, especially things like railroads
and highways, we don't have to think about We just assume.
We just know that you could get across the country
in a matter of days if you're driving, or hours
if you're flying. But of course, part of what's so
exciting and compelling about imagining yourself in the position of
people who were working on these problems in the years
of Abraham Lincoln or even in the Eisenhower years, was
(07:43):
they had to have the imagination to say, hey, you
know what I know now, if I want to get
from New York to Florida, that could take like two weeks.
I'm thinking about, you know, the fifties, and it would
not be obvious how to get there and you'd have
to stop for directions all the time. But it doesn't
have to be that way. Someday we could live in
a country where where you just knew that you could
get from one major city to another. And they saw
(08:05):
the power of that, the potential of all that, and
they weren't afraid of how hard it was to do it. So,
you know, when you go back to the canal building
that went on in the early nineteenth century, and it's
funny to think about now, there was a canal building craze.
People got so into a canal building that some states
went bankrupt or nearly went bankrupt with speculative investments in
(08:27):
what was kind of like the dot com boom and
bust of its day. Because you know, once they figured
out you could put canals in, obviously that solved some
massive problems of how you're going to move a ton
of goods through some densely forested region. But then they
didn't know when to stop and wound up kind of
overdoing it on the canal front and really went crazy
on the canals. Then you got to the railroad stage
(08:48):
and getting a railroad network that worked. So all that's
to say, you know, the complexities of these things. They
show up when you're trying to build and create, but
then if you get it right, you don't have to
think about it that much. The other thing I think
about a lot when I think about, you know, whether
it's the interstate system under Eisenhower or the finishing of
the trans Continental Railroad under Lincoln, is that those are
(09:10):
really a big part of what made America into one
country in the sense that we know it is today.
So of course, you go back two hundred and fifty years,
you know, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, that's what
we think of is making America into a country. But
you know, early on sometimes people talk about the United
States as plural and not singular, and it was a
(09:32):
radically different experience depending what part of the country you
were in, for all kinds of reasons, social, political, but
a lot of it was infrastructure. It was transportation, and
the moment there was a railroad that actually linked the
East coast to the West coast and everything in between,
it was a major leap forward in this really functioning
as one country and working as one economy. And that
(09:54):
became true to a whole other level about one hundred
years later, when the Interstate Highway became a reality.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I feel like when we look back at what happened, right,
the New Deal gets invoked a lot as a major
moment for infrastructure investment for anyone who might not know,
because I think most of the time now we hear
about the New Deal if somebody's talking about the idea
of the Green New Deal. But what was the New Deal?
About Roosevelt's New Deal and why was it so impactful?
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, you have to remember how terrible the economic conditions
were that Roosevelt inherited levels of unemployment that we would
just not even be able to recognize because we've never
seen them in our lifetimes. And there was a massive
crisis of how to make sure that there was good
work for people to do and that people were contributing
(10:42):
towards things that the country actually needed. So as part
of the New Deal, President Roosevelt set up things like
the WPA the Works Progress Administration to do what was
then called sometimes it's still called public works, everything from
major roads, bridges, subways, to things like a footpath along
the river that in South Bend, Indiana that I used
(11:02):
to still count on growing up. We still call it
the old WPA wall, the rubble walls. You can imagine
a needle of work by the time I became mayor there,
you know, sixty or seventy years later. But what started
with the question of how do we create more work
for people wound up being one of the great economic
success stories in American history because it didn't just put
(11:23):
people to work, you know, digging a trench and filling
it back in again. It wasn't just make work, although
they definitely did things that would not have been done otherwise.
It was work that created value that lasted, building schools,
building housing, things that the country really did need. But
the markets had broken down and it wasn't happening without
a big boost from the public sector, and the administration
(11:46):
was willing to say, Yeah, we're going to use tax
dollars to fund big projects that people are going to
get paid to do, and by doing that, we're going
to get the economy back up and running. That was
a huge part of what pulled this country out of
it its greatest economic depression, followed, of course, by the
way the country mobilized for World War II, which is
another example of an administration using taxpayer funding to do
(12:09):
a massive shared national project which wound uplifting the economy
at the same time.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Were there things that made the new deal different from
past infrastructure projects aside from scale.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Certainly the ambition of it, but also the approach the
strategy where they said, Okay, we're actually going to set
up these public institutions at a federal level. And you know,
if you're coming at this back in the nineteen thirties
or nineteen forties, it was pretty revolutionary to do some
of these things at a federal level. You just didn't
usually look beyond the state for some of the kinds
(12:41):
of things that that FDR decided to do, and that
was contested. It was controversial. It had a lot to
do with power, right, I mean, some of this was
a zero sum game between governors and the president who
controlled what in terms of money, in terms of decision making. So,
you know, we think of it as kind of the
most natural thing in the world now that we have
of a federal national aviation system, for example, or that
(13:04):
we have a federal interstate highway system. But there was
a period when it was controversial to have as much
of a federal role in these things as we now
take for granted.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
The New Deal included I always think about the public
art projects were artists like Diego Rivera Lee Krasner. Originally
I was just going to ask you, like, at what
point did we stop giving a shit about artists? But
I feel like there's a more eloquent question there too,
which is a like, at what point did we stop
giving a shit about artists? But at what point did
it become so politically loaded? Like I remember, you know,
(13:35):
I was the arts liaison among a few other jobs
when I was in the Obama administration, and there was
a point after which the administration felt like they were
so beat up by the Fox news is of the world,
suggesting that the fact that there was a White House
Arts liaison meant that we were propagandizing through artists, which
obviously wasn't the case. That they kind of abandoned a
(13:56):
lot of boulder vision on the arts. How were they
able to do that where they could wrap their arms
around artists and say, these are American values, the arts
make everything better and by the way, they'll help the
economy in this way. How come we can't do that anymore?
Speaker 1 (14:10):
I think the key ingredient was American pride. There was
a sense that this is something that a great civilization does,
but in our democratic way. So it wasn't like you know,
other periods, medieval or other historic phases, where basically the
emperor or the king would patronize the arts and as
all as you are on the king's good side, you
(14:31):
could get some funding maybe to do your thing and
composing music or paint paintings. And that was what it
meant to have the arts. Obviously that's not the American way,
but there was a sense that this was of public interest,
that part of what it meant for America to be
a great country, part of what it meant for American
civilization to take its place as a leading or the
leading civilization, was that we invest in this. The thinking
(14:53):
that prevailed at the time was, you know, a great
country uses art as a mirror to see itself in
in different ways. We're obviously struggling with that right now,
and that's disappointing because our country should more than ever
be one that can embrace and support art that shows
how complicated of a country we are.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
I couldn't agree more like it just reflects the strength
and the security of a country and its leadership. We
have these moments that you articulated so well of infrastructure
investment throughout our history. And I'm grateful that I can
do things like drive across the country, listening to my
own podcast on loop for nine days straight and eating
tacos along the way. But what's happening in the moments
(15:34):
between these infrastructure projects and there are like decades and
decades in between. I mean you in the Biden administration,
some of the work that you all had to invest
in was because things were neglected by both parties, frankly
over a long period of time. What happens when these
things aren't a priority, both politically and practically.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Well, the simplest thing that happens is it gets more expensive.
The longer you take to take care of something more
it's going to cost you when you finally do the
same as a leaky roof on a house and the
expense of securing it before the leak becomes a problem
versus waiting until your roof is rotted through and having
to replace it completely. We kind of lived diversion of
(16:13):
that as a country when it came to our transportation infrastructure.
You turn back the clock thirty forty years, you start
to see under investment disinvestment and things ranging from subway
systems to roads and bridges to airports, and that started
to catch up to us. And what that meant was
a big part of what we did in the last
(16:34):
administration really was just making up for lost time, doing
things that should have been done a long time ago,
but not letting them deteriorate any further. And to be honest,
that crowded out some of the other things I wished
that could have been a bigger proportion of it. But
we did get to fund a lot of newer things
that nobody was dreaming of forty years ago, whether it
was laying the groundwork for a new level of infrastructure
(16:56):
for charging vehicles or things like high speed rail that
people have often gone around the world seen in other
countries come back and said, you know, why can't we
have nice things? And we were able to get the
funding out to do things that we hope by the
end of this decade will be a reality, like the
high speed rail running from Las Vegas to southern California.
(17:17):
You know that's on track to be done before the
end of this decade. And I think once people talk
about the high speed rail experience they had not after
they get back from Tokyo or Shanghai, which most Americans
won't visit, but coming back from Vegas, I think that
really changes America's appetite and frankly just awareness that, yeah,
(17:37):
we can do that in the US if we're willing
to roll up our sleeves and make it happen.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
The lessons learned part I'm also curious about. So I
had no idea about some of the history of the
interstate highway system actually until I saw you talking about
one thing in particular. And I know when for our
conservative friends, you know, when we talk about sort of
the role that racism played in the interstateway system, a
lot of my conservative friends or even anybody on social
(18:03):
media is like, oh, highways are racist now, too, right,
because nobody's stopping to listen to, Well, what's actually the
public policy truth that went into building that, and what
are the lessons to be learned from that with new
infrastructure projects. You've spoken so eloquently about this, in what
ways did race impact the interstate highway system? And is
the solution just to like delete government websites like they're
(18:25):
doing now, or like how do you move forward?
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Yeah? I mean, as we said earlier talking about the arts,
I think we're much better off facing these realities and
dealing with them than pretending that they didn't happen. And
you know, in the same way that race affected so
many things in our country, everything in our country really
in one way or another, especially when you look at
federal policies in the twentieth century. Of course, that had
(18:49):
a massive effect on infrastructure, and in turn, infrastructure choices
had a massive effect on racial and economic justice and
inequality in this country. The very fact that we have
an expression in American English the wrong side of the tracks,
tells you a lot about how pieces of infrastructure became
dividing lines. And that's not just a random thing. It's
(19:11):
not just a coincidence. That had to do with choices
that were very normal at the time that they were
made about whose neighborhood would have a highway go through it,
or even periods and places where it was seen as
an advantage for a highway or a railroad to become
a kind of a physical barrier between a white neighborhood
(19:32):
and a black neighborhood. And when that happened, there were
results that people still live with today. Look, these aren't
just things. Even if we're talking about a decision made
in the forties, fifties, or sixties, that's not just a
historic curiosity. That could very much be the answer to
a question somebody has about why my neighborhood is the
way it is compared to a different neighborhood. The reason
(19:54):
I talked about all of this wasn't to make people
feel bad. The reason I talked about this was because
with the historic infrastructure funding that we secured in the
Biden administration, we had a chance to do something about it.
And my view was that if you break something out
to fix it. And even if I wasn't around, and
none of the people I worked with at the Department
of Transportation were around for many of those decisions made
(20:17):
in the fifties and sixties, or the twenties, you name it,
we might not have been responsible for that, but we
were definitely responsible for what we do next. And there
were so many places around the country we saw, from Buffalo,
New York, to Detroit to Florida, every part of the
country in some way, shape or form, where we could
mend and reconnect a place with how we handled the
(20:39):
next generation of infrastructure investment. But it meant being intentional
about it. It meant taking account of how we got here,
facing it, being honest about it, and not being afraid
to tell the truth so that we can do something better.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah, I'm always a little weirded out when I hear
people say that talking about tough things in the past
makes them feel bad, because I feel like it should
be the opposite. If we're going back to security versus insecurity.
If you're a secure person, learning from the past is like, hey,
let's celebrate the fact that we're not like that anymore
and build on the progress, as opposed to looking back
and going You're told to feel bad, and it's like, well,
(21:12):
you should only feel bad if nothing has changed and
if you don't want to change it. But seeing is
how we've come so far, isn't that a beautiful thing
to look at? And that's actually that wasn't going to
be the segue, but it is a nice segue to
ask you a last question before we pivot to act too,
which is about the now we'll talk about your past.
You were mayor of South Bend, Indiana. You initiated, like
you mentioned, infrastructure projects like installing bike lanes, and something
(21:35):
called the smart Sewers program, which I know you mentioned.
What did you learn doing this about infrastructure and then
about governing more broadly?
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Yeah, thanks for not everybody gives me a chance to
talk about smart sewer.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yeah, it's a shitty question, but I'll ask it anyway.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
I see what you did there. Now, I'm really proud
of that work, and I was building on work that
my predecessor did. It was very much part of the
style of our community. So what happened with the smart
sewers was, to cut a very long story short, our
city needed to redesign its sewer system to prevent an
enormous amount of water pollution from damaging our river, and
if we didn't, we were going to face major legal
(22:14):
action from the EPA and the federal government. And under
the gun of a settlement with the EPA, this is
something that happened to a lot of cities. By the
way we had to redesign our sewers, we found out
that there was a way to do it with a
less rebuilding by putting Wi Fi enabled sensors throughout the
sewer system, basically redirecting the flow of our wastewater the
(22:35):
same way that you would try to redirect traffic flow
in a city if one part of it got congested,
and by doing that there was a chance to save
hundreds of millions of dollars in not having to rebuild
and move your pipes, just by using the pipes you
had better. So it's a story about efficiency, about creativity,
And the best part about it, other than the problem
that it solved, was that the technology became the core
(22:58):
of a small business that was headquartered in our city
as we were trying to grow new small businesses that
then sold this technology to other cities that had a
similar problem around the country and around the world. So
I think it's a great example of how in your
own backyard you can find creative solutions to big civic
problems and then use that to build a a kind
of a culture and build a kind of an ethic
(23:20):
of problem solving that then became the source of great
civic pride, at least, you know, for those of us
who like to geek out on technology innovations in cities
and things that can show how small community government can
be really creative and resourceful. And I took some of
those ideas with me even when I was serving at
the presidential cabinet level looking for ideas that we could
deploy or scale or help small communities do on issues
(23:44):
they confronted, from traffic safety to economic development.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
So I want to focus now on the now instead
of just the past and on the now. Note, how
do you think we give infrastructure a rebrand? I think
it gets a reputation as being tremendously unsexy, But as
you articulated, really well, it's so relevant and necessary. So
how have you been talking about it in a way
that gets people interested.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Well, one thing I would point to is that, in
addition to the virtue of having better infrastructure, in other words,
the benefit that comes from getting to use a great
airport or a nice smooth road or a good bridge
that never gets closed because it's compromised, or good internet
or any of the things we really want to need,
even before you get there, you get these amazing economic
(24:39):
opportunities from the chance to build it. I always thought
when I became Transportation Secretary that my best days in
terms of having fun on the job, would have to
do with kind of things that I loved as a
transportation geek. And sometimes they were like I got to
kick the tires of a seven forty seven, just as
like a boyhood fantasy, like getting to do that that
was your boyhood fantasy, Well it was one of them.
(25:01):
I was really into aviation. That's cool, right, and like
being around you know, the seeing the back end of
you know, how an airport operation works, or what goes
into making sure that the trains run on time and
in Japan as well as closer to home. All of
that was cool. But to my surprise, many of the
(25:23):
best moments I had as secretary were about engaging the
people who are going to be doing the work that
we were building, including high school students. We had a
long time in this country where we just failed to
show enough respect for the trades, for the work that
we count on electrical workers and cement masons and brick
(25:44):
layers and carpenters and iron workers and others to actually do.
You know, there was even the sense that, you know,
it was kind of like a second best life. You know,
if you weren't going to if you couldn't go to college,
you know, this is kind of your backup option. One
thing I'm really proud of is how we've started to
change that culturally, like whether or not you're excited about,
you know, the finer points of how a bridge gets built,
(26:06):
or how your road's going to work, whether or not
you think airports are neat or just something you suffer
through in order to get to where you're going. So
many people will find are finding their lives transformed by
the jobs they get to do. And of course I
also think the finished product is exciting. You know, here
in Michigan, as chance would have it, one of the
seventy thousand projects that I signed off on when I
(26:28):
was secretary is one that is right here in our community.
I drive by almost every day. Our three year old son,
who like a lot of three year old boys, is
super into heavy equipment, loves watching the blow by blow
of this major road rehabilitation project. So I was commenting
on it. If they're not out there, it's like, why
an't the workers working, And I'm like, because it's like
(26:48):
because it's Sunday morning, buddy, Like, he's like super into
it and it's cool to watch that. But of course
the best thing of all is that, like, well, our
community will benefit from that for decades when it's done.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
That's cool. That's that's a good jump into I was curious,
you know, what are the things you feel like the
Biden administration made good on in terms of the infrastructure
improvement promises? You know what got done. But then for
those that might have missed things, right, I'm not talking
about like the news cycle being in never ending nightmare factory,
but like, actually, what were the things that you wish
(27:20):
had gotten done that didn't get done in a way?
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Well, know what, anytime you leave a job like that,
there's a lot of unfinished business. So you know, we
approved and funded about seventy thousand projects. About twenty thousand
of them got done on my watch, and I'm pretty
sure that that means that I hold the record for
the most projects done by anyone in the history of
that office. But my successor could match that record or
(27:46):
even beat it, just by delivering all the other projects
that we started. But it didn't get complete because they
were multi phase, multi year projects, or because there were
complications on the ground. So I think a lot about
some of those other ones, some of which by their
nature are going to take a decade. Even think about
the Hudson River Tunnel project in New York. This is
one of the biggest public works projects in modern American history.
(28:08):
I was proud to be there while we started a
lot of the phases of it, knowing that somebody else
would have the job, maybe a couple people would come
and go from the job. By the time that they
were cutting the ribbon on the finished product. A lot
of other programs were just new. Giving an example, in
terms of electric vehicle chargers, we set a goal to
have half a million of them out by the end
of the decade twenty thirty. We also put a lot
(28:31):
of conditions, like making sure that those chargers were made
in America, not made in China. We knew that was
going to add a couple of years to the timeline,
and that meant that most of the chargers would be
built after we left office. We thought it was worth it,
but it means that now I'm watching to see if
those projects actually get completed in the out years twenty
six twenty twenty seven as they were planned to do
(28:51):
or not. So you know, there's always more to be done,
and frankly, there's a lot to be done to make
sure projects in general go quicker in this country. There's
I think a healthy debate happening right now, especially on
my side of the isle among Democrats, but really in
the whole community of people who care about this stuff
about how we can be a little less paperwork intensive
(29:12):
cut through some of the red tape. I tried to
do it. I think there's more to be done so
that dollars turn into projects sooner and we can all
benefit from the projects being done.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Is it possible do you think these days to do
something as monumental in terms of infrastructure as what Eisenhower
did with the interstates or Lincoln with the railroads, Like politically,
can we is it possible to come together to get
the votes to build the support for something like that.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Well, I think the Infrastructure build demonstrated that. I remember
arriving in Washington in twenty twenty one. They were still
security fencing around the Capitol as a consequence of January sixth,
and the general attitude was that you couldn't get two
sides to work together on anything. And yet by the
end of that same year, I was there on the
South Lawn as the White House as the President was
(30:00):
signing this massive bipartisan infrastructure package that had had its
obituary written time and time again before it actually got achieved.
So what that showed me is that yes, we can
get these things done. It's hard, and it's getting harder,
especially in the climate that we're in right now, but
you can find some things that are so clearly worth
doing that even in our political system and in our
(30:23):
political climate, with the right leadership, you can pull together
the political will to make it happen.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I'm gonna waste everyone's time, including yours, with a personal
pet peeve question since this is called here we go again.
So you know, a lot of times like a flight
will actually be on time, it'll even be early. You
land early, everything's wonderful, and then the captain comes on
and says, hey, folks, so good news, we're thirty minutes early.
The bad news is because we're early, the ground staff
(30:50):
didn't know we were coming and they don't have a
gait for us, so sit tight. And then everyone sits
there for like an hour and a half, which really
makes you late. But literally, the technology of getting a
plane from one city to another means the ground staff
had to know we were coming early. That's the whole
fucking way it works. So I guess I want to
know a why are airplane captain such shitty liars, and
(31:14):
b what's actually going on when this happens? Right? Obviously
they have to make some excuse for something, but like,
what what's actually happening at the airport when they knew
you were coming early? But there are gates open, but
they can't accommodate you.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Yeah, So, first of all, I feel your pain. This
happens is having me last week, And you know, I
think a lot of it is you almost wish they
hadn't pointed out that arrived early because they're excited to
tell you that, But telling you that only for you
to be waiting at the gate kind of feels like
it's rubbing salt in the wound. But I think it
also shows you something about how complex these systems are,
(31:47):
right that it turns out, even after partaking in the
miracle of human flight that can propel hundreds of people
safely through the air with flammable liquids and nearly the
speed of sound and deliver them to a from place,
if you don't have the right guy at the right gate,
you're still going to be late. Right, and so it's
so many things have to go right for something simple
(32:10):
like a flight being on time and the flying part
is only part of it. You have to have the
right staffing, you have to have a gate availability. It's
like a Rubik's cube if anything is out of what's
on the schedule, and something will always be different from
what was on the schedule. Right now, America is seeing
this with air traffic control towers and the staffing rates
(32:33):
up there, and I was proud that we finally got
the number of air traffic control workers to be growing
again after shrinking for decades. But there's a long way
to go, and obviously you can't just let anybody do that.
You have to go through all the certifications to make
sure that you're capable of doing that job safely. And
if not enough people are available that day, you just
have to slow down the traffic because you're definitely it's
(32:53):
not okay to accept a safety consequence, so you just
have to slow down the traffic. I think this shows
us that we have to pay attention to everything that
could be the limiting factor, everything that could stand between
a system and its working well, and oftentimes it comes
down to a human factor. You can have the coolest
technology in the world, but if you haven't taken care
(33:15):
of the people, the workers who need to be working
on it, making sure there's enough of them, and that
they're supported and that they're trained, and that they have
the equipment that they need. Then you're still going to
get stuck.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
I'll end this section with the hypothetical, and then we
can talk about the future. Let's say you're stuck in
an elevator with your successor, Sean Duffy. You left your
phones in the bathroom. No one can record anyone, it's
just the two of you. You can say anything that
you want to say to him. There will be no
evidence of it other than his word, and obviously nobody's
going to believe him. So what do you say.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Look, I called him as soon as you got the job,
and I would you know, you know what I told him?
That isn't that different from what I would say now,
which is I really as an American, as a member
of the traveling public, as well as just being somebody
who obviously cares a lot about transportation because of my
own career. I want them to succeed. I want that
department to succeed. They've obviously hit some rough patches. There are,
(34:08):
as you would expect, very different decisions happening over there
than I would make. But the bottom line is we
should all be rooting for the US transportation system, especially
the Federal Aviation Administration, to be working.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Well, pivoting to the future. Then if infrastructure in America
could magically be depoliticized and anything was possible, what's the
future that you'd want to see?
Speaker 1 (34:36):
I think it's first and foremost safer, also cleaner, more sustainable,
a lot of other things, but most importantly safer. You know,
we rightly pay a ton of attention as a country
whenever there's any issue with aviation safety, but we weirdly
pay almost no attention as a country to roadway safety.
We lose enough people every single day on our roadways,
(34:59):
more than a hund undred people a day, enough to
fill an airplane. And you know, I'm proud that we
were able to see that rate inch down on my watch.
Even knocking that down by three or four percent meant
over the years thousands of lives could be saved. But
it should be dramatically lower than it is. Forty thousand
people a year. It's totally unacceptable. It's on a par
with gun violence. It's worse in the US than it
(35:21):
is in a lot of other developed countries, and we
should do better. Part of that's technology, part of that's policy,
part of that's regulation, But a lot of things need
to happen, and I'm actually very hopeful that technology can
help on that, even though I've had some very visible problems.
I actually think automated vehicles hold a huge part of
the solution to safety because frankly, human drivers have a
(35:45):
very troubled track record, especially when it comes to personal vehicles.
Professional drivers it's a little different, but we have not
been great. Or to put it in another way, there's
a lot of other products that if you know, as
Americans we killed forty thousand people a year, we probably
wouldn't be permitted to use them in the same way.
So I'd like to see a safer future. I'd like
(36:06):
for high speed rail to be something that we just
count on and take for granted the way you can
in most other highly developed countries. I'd like for there
to be different options to get around so you don't
have to have a car to get around a community,
even a suburban community, to have better transit options and
things like that. It's doable, It's not out of our reach.
It's definitely technically and technologically possible, we just haven't managed
(36:30):
to come together and make it happen.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Let's say you run for president in the future, maybe
in twenty twenty eight, and it's my producers have written
here take a long pause to let Pete declare his
candidacy on our podcast. I won't take the long pause,
but let's say, like, just in the future, right, whatever
your political journey happens to be, if that's in the
executive branch, what would your first one hundred days look
like in terms of infrastructure? Because I think we're seeing
(36:53):
you're very gracious, I think with your comments about Sean Duffy,
and of course we all want America to succeed, but
they've handled things almost the exact opposite of the stuff
that you handled it as Transportation Secretary, Soul. What would
that one hundred days look like?
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Well, yeah, I mean they've taken a very, very partisan
in political approach, and I think this is something that
even more than usual, requires us to be less partisan
and less political, especially because I think that the challenge
for any leader in the next few years, whether you're president,
governor mayor, or whether you're running a company or pretty
much anything else is going to be about contending with
(37:32):
what technology is doing to change everything in our everyday lives.
I think even with all the attention that's being spent
on artificial intelligence right now, we're still underreacting and it's
still being underreported, and we're still underprepared. And I think
infrastructure is just one lens to look through what's going
to change. We're going to need to be way better
(37:52):
at creating electric power infrastructure and making it as clean
as we possibly can because of the power demands of
artificial intelli elegence. We also need to be ready to
apply some of the solutions that AI could accelerate to
make things from vehicle safety to aviation technology better. There's
a huge opportunity here, but there's a huge challenge too,
(38:13):
and I think we're only starting to get our arms
around it. I think most people still don't realize how
much it's going to change. And what I'm trying to
do is make the conversation about AI less of a
tech conversation that you have to be, you know, the
kind of person who really cared about the Internet in
the early nineties, or you know, really is into coding
(38:36):
or something to care about and make it clearly all
of us. Never mind the tech. You could you could
get interested in the tech or not, but just as
a citizen and as a worker, like all of us
need to get ready for this.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
We're almost out of your time. Is there is there
anything else you want us to know or think about
when it comes to infrastructure, anything that we missed that
you wish people would know about.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah, I just want to double down on this point
about how much is about to change our relationship to
our jobs. And by the way, this is particularly true
for people who are in white collar jobs, which is
very different from some of the other big tectonic kind
of industrial changes we've had. But you know, no matter
where you fit in the economy, this is probably the
biggest change to come since the seventeenth century. We're in
(39:19):
the middle of it, and I feel that the policy
world and the political world is really underreacting to this.
We've got to view this as an opportunity to make
sure that we meet the potential of this, which is
a safer everyday life, cleaner air, fewer work hours, and
more money in your pocket, which could happen. But whether
it actually does happen, that's not a technology question. That's
(39:41):
a policy question, that's a society question. That's us coming
together and saying, hey, with this new technology coming on,
we've got to make sure that American people get enough
of a piece of the action, both getting to use
it and potentially getting dealt in on some of the
wealth that it creates too, so we don't just wind
up with a gilded age on steroids in terms of
a tiny handful of people becoming even wealthier. So that's
(40:03):
a big thing that's on my mind. And you know,
when you're doing something like planning a subway line, or
thinking about the future of commuting, or trying to get
high speed railed to be a thing, or accelerating the
arrival of the electric aircraft engine, or any number of
other things, you know that conversation can't be separated from
a conversation that's still very immature in our country about
(40:23):
technology and artificial intelligence. And by the way, it might
get political quick, but it doesn't have to. Man.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
You know, it's funny you and our friend Don Buyer,
who for folks that don't know, is a member of Congress,
are the only two elected officials or folks in government
who I've heard actively talking about AI and openly talking about, hey,
we should address these challenges proactively. And he's probably done
with the program now, but Don was doing a master's
in AI, if I'm not mistaken to like get a
(40:52):
grasp on that.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Right, and he was doing it before it was cool. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
I was like, dude, you're I don't want to call
him old, but like, especially given his years and his
contemporaries in Congress, he's the only one doing something like that.
So I'm not trying to shut on others. I'm just
saying it's nice to actually have a non fear based hey,
let's try to figure this out sort of conversation and
to make that tie to infrastructures is I think really
really compelling. Thank you, Pete.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
All right, glad we get to do that.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Yeah, man, thank you. Here we go again. As production
of iHeart Podcasts and Snaffoo Media in association with New
Metric Media. Our executive producers are me kalpen Ed Helms,
Mike Falbo, Alissa Martino, Andy Kim, Pat Kelly, Chris Kelly,
and Dylan Fagan. Caitlin Fontana is our producer and writer.
(41:40):
Dave Shumka is our producer and editor. Additional writing from
Megan tan Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino. Tory Smith
is our associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly, logo
by Matt Gosson, Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline Johnson
and Megan Halson. Special thanks to Glenn Basner, Isaac Dunham,
Adam Horre, Ryne Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts,
(42:03):
but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etoor. Thanks
for listening. See you next week.
Here we go again again.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, I'm Kalpen and this is here we go again,
Here ween go. So I live in New York City,
which means two things. A. I take the subway everywhere,
and B, Like every New Yorker, I love to complain
(00:33):
about taking the subway everywhere. The big challenge with this,
as you all know, it's not very efficient, and if
you've got a pe and you're stuck in between stops,
or your express train suddenly decides to go local, you're
like cursing everybody involved. I was watching this video this
week that the New York Times put out following one
(00:55):
of the people in charge of signal changes at the MTA,
and I was floor because these signals are manual. They're
like these huge steel rods that are moved in between
these holes. Then that changes tracks and signals. The reason
this made me so angry and amused is that when
(01:17):
this wonderful woman whose job it is to change signals
has to take a break, or when she herself has
to go to the bathroom, every express train runs on
the local track for all of us who also have
to take a piss.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
It's insane.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
It's so wild, and it's one of the things that
made me want to delve into the topic of America's infrastructure.
So it turns out there is a scorecard for America's infrastructure.
It's handed out by an organization called the American Society
for Civil Engineers, and we got in twenty twenty five
(01:53):
the grade of C. Yeah, one of the biggest superpowers
in the Global warl world with a US household net
worth of one hundred and sixty nine trillion dollars, got
to see in infrastructure. Clearly America doesn't have a tiger mom.
So why can't America make the jump to a straight
a infrastructure land? What kind of cycle are we trapped in?
(02:15):
This is here we Go again, a show where we
take today's trends and headlines and then ask why does
history keep repeating itself? I'm Kalpenno.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Hey, how you doing good? How are you good?
Speaker 2 (02:31):
I see it, Nice to see you, Thanks for doing
Let's introduce my guest. So most people know him as
Mayor Pete or Secretary Pete. But here's what you really
got to know. He was the youngest mayor of a
US city when he took over South Bend, Indiana at
twenty nine He ran for president in twenty twenty and
won the Iowa caucuses. Then, as the first openly gay
(02:52):
cabinet secretary in American history, he spent four years trying
to fix America's crumbling roads, rails, and airports as the
Transportation Sayingtary under Joe Biden. Ridiculous resume, Okay, Harvard Rhodes
scholar at Oxford, worked at Mackenzie, served as a Navy
lieutenant deployed to Afghanistan while he was still mayor, and
he casually speaks like eight languages. So love him or
(03:14):
hate him. Pete's not just a policy nerd. He's a
dad to twins with his husband, Chastin, and he can
actually talk about real things like a real human, even
really boring things like potholes and plato or fun things
like pop songs, all on the same breath.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Welcome, Pete, Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Of course, get to see you man. Okay, So I'm
just the first segment is about the past. You were
a history major in college, and I don't want to
open by sounding overly condescending to anybody or reductive, but
you're so good at explaining complex concepts to the layperson.
People who don't necessarily have a background in it. So
I feel like it makes sense to start with a
very basic question, what is infrastructure? Right? I just did
(03:54):
a little bit of a definition in our intro, But
how have you been explaining it to people?
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Yeah, and you know, it's not always the easiest question.
There were some hot political debates over exactly this. To me,
infrastructure is what sits as a foundation beneath everything else
that we do in our economy and our society. So obviously,
the example I worked with the most was transportation infrastructure,
but as a mayor, I worked a lot with sewer
(04:20):
and water infrastructure. There's a lot that depends on things
like power infrastructure. There are a lot of theories of
what's called social infrastructure too, the way we count on
things like schools and libraries and neighborhoods to make it
possible for us to do all the things that we
count on every day. But to me, I just come
back to the etymology. The word right in from means beneath.
(04:42):
Infrastructure is what's beneath the structures that we kind of
think about in the sea every day and makes everything
else possible.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
This might be an obvious question because we all know
why sewers are important, but why is infrastructure essential? And
then what do people usually get wrong when they talk
about it.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Well, the way I think about it is that whatever
is important to you in life is made possible by infrastructure.
And the best working infrastructure is what you don't even notice,
because that makes it possible for free to focus on
what matters. So to me, there's actually a connection between
things like waste water and the meaning of life. And
(05:20):
the connection is whatever brings your life meaning, whether it's
faith and family or enterprise, a business you're trying to build,
or scholarship and the life in the mind, whatever it
is that matters to you, you're going to have a
better chance of living a life that revolves around that
if you're not thinking about things like whether you can
(05:41):
get a glass of clean, safe drinking water out of
it's happened in the morning that's not going to poison
your family, or whether there's a road that gets you
to where you need to go to work or to
drop off your kids at school without holes in it
that are going to mess up your car. So paradoxically,
good infrastructure is just there. It just takes care of
problem basically those of us who have worked on infrastructure.
(06:03):
I think the best way to understand our mission is
that we worry about stuff like that so that you
don't have to when you're going about everyday life.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
That's a good point. I live in New York City,
and you know the I'm a big mass transit fan,
but the MTA is like the bane of our existence
a lot of times. Obviously it's an aging system. It
needs a big revamp. But that's a great point, you know,
Like I want to take all these things for granted.
If I have a meeting and I'm hopping on the subway,
like I want to know that in eighteen minutes, I
(06:29):
can actually get there, not wait for the next train
in thirty two, right, so you only notice it when
something goes wrong. I'm just thinking of past presidents, right,
especially Eisenhower and Lincoln and their major infrastructure projects they
invested in their respective administrations. Do you know historically, like
was their view to build these things so that people
didn't have to think about it. And with Lincoln I
(06:50):
think it was what canals and railroads, and with Eisenhower
it was the interstate system. Can you talk a little
bit about how these presidents championed those projects.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Yeah, I think they lived on the other side of
these problems. So you had to think about, you know,
all day, you had to think about problems of how
you could move goods or how you could safely move
around a community or a region. You know, if all
you had it was kind of muck filled pathways instead
of highways, for example, then you had to worry about
it all the time. So I think now, having had
(07:20):
those pieces of infrastructure built out, especially things like railroads
and highways, we don't have to think about We just assume.
We just know that you could get across the country
in a matter of days if you're driving, or hours
if you're flying. But of course, part of what's so
exciting and compelling about imagining yourself in the position of
people who were working on these problems in the years
of Abraham Lincoln or even in the Eisenhower years, was
(07:43):
they had to have the imagination to say, hey, you
know what I know now, if I want to get
from New York to Florida, that could take like two weeks.
I'm thinking about, you know, the fifties, and it would
not be obvious how to get there and you'd have
to stop for directions all the time. But it doesn't
have to be that way. Someday we could live in
a country where where you just knew that you could
get from one major city to another. And they saw
(08:05):
the power of that, the potential of all that, and
they weren't afraid of how hard it was to do it. So,
you know, when you go back to the canal building
that went on in the early nineteenth century, and it's
funny to think about now, there was a canal building craze.
People got so into a canal building that some states
went bankrupt or nearly went bankrupt with speculative investments in
(08:27):
what was kind of like the dot com boom and
bust of its day. Because you know, once they figured
out you could put canals in, obviously that solved some
massive problems of how you're going to move a ton
of goods through some densely forested region. But then they
didn't know when to stop and wound up kind of
overdoing it on the canal front and really went crazy
on the canals. Then you got to the railroad stage
(08:48):
and getting a railroad network that worked. So all that's
to say, you know, the complexities of these things. They
show up when you're trying to build and create, but
then if you get it right, you don't have to
think about it that much. The other thing I think
about a lot when I think about, you know, whether
it's the interstate system under Eisenhower or the finishing of
the trans Continental Railroad under Lincoln, is that those are
(09:10):
really a big part of what made America into one
country in the sense that we know it is today.
So of course, you go back two hundred and fifty years,
you know, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, that's what
we think of is making America into a country. But
you know, early on sometimes people talk about the United
States as plural and not singular, and it was a
(09:32):
radically different experience depending what part of the country you
were in, for all kinds of reasons, social, political, but
a lot of it was infrastructure. It was transportation, and
the moment there was a railroad that actually linked the
East coast to the West coast and everything in between,
it was a major leap forward in this really functioning
as one country and working as one economy. And that
(09:54):
became true to a whole other level about one hundred
years later, when the Interstate Highway became a reality.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
I feel like when we look back at what happened, right,
the New Deal gets invoked a lot as a major
moment for infrastructure investment for anyone who might not know,
because I think most of the time now we hear
about the New Deal if somebody's talking about the idea
of the Green New Deal. But what was the New Deal?
About Roosevelt's New Deal and why was it so impactful?
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, you have to remember how terrible the economic conditions
were that Roosevelt inherited levels of unemployment that we would
just not even be able to recognize because we've never
seen them in our lifetimes. And there was a massive
crisis of how to make sure that there was good
work for people to do and that people were contributing
(10:42):
towards things that the country actually needed. So as part
of the New Deal, President Roosevelt set up things like
the WPA the Works Progress Administration to do what was
then called sometimes it's still called public works, everything from
major roads, bridges, subways, to things like a footpath along
the river that in South Bend, Indiana that I used
(11:02):
to still count on growing up. We still call it
the old WPA wall, the rubble walls. You can imagine
a needle of work by the time I became mayor there,
you know, sixty or seventy years later. But what started
with the question of how do we create more work
for people wound up being one of the great economic
success stories in American history because it didn't just put
(11:23):
people to work, you know, digging a trench and filling
it back in again. It wasn't just make work, although
they definitely did things that would not have been done otherwise.
It was work that created value that lasted, building schools,
building housing, things that the country really did need. But
the markets had broken down and it wasn't happening without
a big boost from the public sector, and the administration
(11:46):
was willing to say, Yeah, we're going to use tax
dollars to fund big projects that people are going to
get paid to do, and by doing that, we're going
to get the economy back up and running. That was
a huge part of what pulled this country out of
it its greatest economic depression, followed, of course, by the
way the country mobilized for World War II, which is
another example of an administration using taxpayer funding to do
(12:09):
a massive shared national project which wound uplifting the economy
at the same time.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Were there things that made the new deal different from
past infrastructure projects aside from scale.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Certainly the ambition of it, but also the approach the
strategy where they said, Okay, we're actually going to set
up these public institutions at a federal level. And you know,
if you're coming at this back in the nineteen thirties
or nineteen forties, it was pretty revolutionary to do some
of these things at a federal level. You just didn't
usually look beyond the state for some of the kinds
(12:41):
of things that that FDR decided to do, and that
was contested. It was controversial. It had a lot to
do with power, right, I mean, some of this was
a zero sum game between governors and the president who
controlled what in terms of money, in terms of decision making. So,
you know, we think of it as kind of the
most natural thing in the world now that we have
of a federal national aviation system, for example, or that
(13:04):
we have a federal interstate highway system. But there was
a period when it was controversial to have as much
of a federal role in these things as we now
take for granted.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
The New Deal included I always think about the public
art projects were artists like Diego Rivera Lee Krasner. Originally
I was just going to ask you, like, at what
point did we stop giving a shit about artists? But
I feel like there's a more eloquent question there too,
which is a like, at what point did we stop
giving a shit about artists? But at what point did
it become so politically loaded? Like I remember, you know,
(13:35):
I was the arts liaison among a few other jobs
when I was in the Obama administration, and there was
a point after which the administration felt like they were
so beat up by the Fox news is of the world,
suggesting that the fact that there was a White House
Arts liaison meant that we were propagandizing through artists, which
obviously wasn't the case. That they kind of abandoned a
(13:56):
lot of boulder vision on the arts. How were they
able to do that where they could wrap their arms
around artists and say, these are American values, the arts
make everything better and by the way, they'll help the
economy in this way. How come we can't do that anymore?
Speaker 1 (14:10):
I think the key ingredient was American pride. There was
a sense that this is something that a great civilization does,
but in our democratic way. So it wasn't like you know,
other periods, medieval or other historic phases, where basically the
emperor or the king would patronize the arts and as
all as you are on the king's good side, you
(14:31):
could get some funding maybe to do your thing and
composing music or paint paintings. And that was what it
meant to have the arts. Obviously that's not the American way,
but there was a sense that this was of public interest,
that part of what it meant for America to be
a great country, part of what it meant for American
civilization to take its place as a leading or the
leading civilization, was that we invest in this. The thinking
(14:53):
that prevailed at the time was, you know, a great
country uses art as a mirror to see itself in
in different ways. We're obviously struggling with that right now,
and that's disappointing because our country should more than ever
be one that can embrace and support art that shows
how complicated of a country we are.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
I couldn't agree more like it just reflects the strength
and the security of a country and its leadership. We
have these moments that you articulated so well of infrastructure
investment throughout our history. And I'm grateful that I can
do things like drive across the country, listening to my
own podcast on loop for nine days straight and eating
tacos along the way. But what's happening in the moments
(15:34):
between these infrastructure projects and there are like decades and
decades in between. I mean you in the Biden administration,
some of the work that you all had to invest
in was because things were neglected by both parties, frankly
over a long period of time. What happens when these
things aren't a priority, both politically and practically.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Well, the simplest thing that happens is it gets more expensive.
The longer you take to take care of something more
it's going to cost you when you finally do the
same as a leaky roof on a house and the
expense of securing it before the leak becomes a problem
versus waiting until your roof is rotted through and having
to replace it completely. We kind of lived diversion of
(16:13):
that as a country when it came to our transportation infrastructure.
You turn back the clock thirty forty years, you start
to see under investment disinvestment and things ranging from subway
systems to roads and bridges to airports, and that started
to catch up to us. And what that meant was
a big part of what we did in the last
(16:34):
administration really was just making up for lost time, doing
things that should have been done a long time ago,
but not letting them deteriorate any further. And to be honest,
that crowded out some of the other things I wished
that could have been a bigger proportion of it. But
we did get to fund a lot of newer things
that nobody was dreaming of forty years ago, whether it
was laying the groundwork for a new level of infrastructure
(16:56):
for charging vehicles or things like high speed rail that
people have often gone around the world seen in other
countries come back and said, you know, why can't we
have nice things? And we were able to get the
funding out to do things that we hope by the
end of this decade will be a reality, like the
high speed rail running from Las Vegas to southern California.
(17:17):
You know that's on track to be done before the
end of this decade. And I think once people talk
about the high speed rail experience they had not after
they get back from Tokyo or Shanghai, which most Americans
won't visit, but coming back from Vegas, I think that
really changes America's appetite and frankly just awareness that, yeah,
(17:37):
we can do that in the US if we're willing
to roll up our sleeves and make it happen.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
The lessons learned part I'm also curious about. So I
had no idea about some of the history of the
interstate highway system actually until I saw you talking about
one thing in particular. And I know when for our
conservative friends, you know, when we talk about sort of
the role that racism played in the interstateway system, a
lot of my conservative friends or even anybody on social
(18:03):
media is like, oh, highways are racist now, too, right,
because nobody's stopping to listen to, Well, what's actually the
public policy truth that went into building that, and what
are the lessons to be learned from that with new
infrastructure projects. You've spoken so eloquently about this, in what
ways did race impact the interstate highway system? And is
the solution just to like delete government websites like they're
(18:25):
doing now, or like how do you move forward?
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Yeah? I mean, as we said earlier talking about the arts,
I think we're much better off facing these realities and
dealing with them than pretending that they didn't happen. And
you know, in the same way that race affected so
many things in our country, everything in our country really
in one way or another, especially when you look at
federal policies in the twentieth century. Of course, that had
(18:49):
a massive effect on infrastructure, and in turn, infrastructure choices
had a massive effect on racial and economic justice and
inequality in this country. The very fact that we have
an expression in American English the wrong side of the tracks,
tells you a lot about how pieces of infrastructure became
dividing lines. And that's not just a random thing. It's
(19:11):
not just a coincidence. That had to do with choices
that were very normal at the time that they were
made about whose neighborhood would have a highway go through it,
or even periods and places where it was seen as
an advantage for a highway or a railroad to become
a kind of a physical barrier between a white neighborhood
(19:32):
and a black neighborhood. And when that happened, there were
results that people still live with today. Look, these aren't
just things. Even if we're talking about a decision made
in the forties, fifties, or sixties, that's not just a
historic curiosity. That could very much be the answer to
a question somebody has about why my neighborhood is the
way it is compared to a different neighborhood. The reason
(19:54):
I talked about all of this wasn't to make people
feel bad. The reason I talked about this was because
with the historic infrastructure funding that we secured in the
Biden administration, we had a chance to do something about it.
And my view was that if you break something out
to fix it. And even if I wasn't around, and
none of the people I worked with at the Department
of Transportation were around for many of those decisions made
(20:17):
in the fifties and sixties, or the twenties, you name it,
we might not have been responsible for that, but we
were definitely responsible for what we do next. And there
were so many places around the country we saw, from Buffalo,
New York, to Detroit to Florida, every part of the
country in some way, shape or form, where we could
mend and reconnect a place with how we handled the
(20:39):
next generation of infrastructure investment. But it meant being intentional
about it. It meant taking account of how we got here,
facing it, being honest about it, and not being afraid
to tell the truth so that we can do something better.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah, I'm always a little weirded out when I hear
people say that talking about tough things in the past
makes them feel bad, because I feel like it should
be the opposite. If we're going back to security versus insecurity.
If you're a secure person, learning from the past is like, hey,
let's celebrate the fact that we're not like that anymore
and build on the progress, as opposed to looking back
and going You're told to feel bad, and it's like, well,
(21:12):
you should only feel bad if nothing has changed and
if you don't want to change it. But seeing is
how we've come so far, isn't that a beautiful thing
to look at? And that's actually that wasn't going to
be the segue, but it is a nice segue to
ask you a last question before we pivot to act too,
which is about the now we'll talk about your past.
You were mayor of South Bend, Indiana. You initiated, like
you mentioned, infrastructure projects like installing bike lanes, and something
(21:35):
called the smart Sewers program, which I know you mentioned.
What did you learn doing this about infrastructure and then
about governing more broadly?
Speaker 1 (21:44):
Yeah, thanks for not everybody gives me a chance to
talk about smart sewer.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yeah, it's a shitty question, but I'll ask it anyway.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
I see what you did there. Now, I'm really proud
of that work, and I was building on work that
my predecessor did. It was very much part of the
style of our community. So what happened with the smart
sewers was, to cut a very long story short, our
city needed to redesign its sewer system to prevent an
enormous amount of water pollution from damaging our river, and
if we didn't, we were going to face major legal
(22:14):
action from the EPA and the federal government. And under
the gun of a settlement with the EPA, this is
something that happened to a lot of cities. By the
way we had to redesign our sewers, we found out
that there was a way to do it with a
less rebuilding by putting Wi Fi enabled sensors throughout the
sewer system, basically redirecting the flow of our wastewater the
(22:35):
same way that you would try to redirect traffic flow
in a city if one part of it got congested,
and by doing that there was a chance to save
hundreds of millions of dollars in not having to rebuild
and move your pipes, just by using the pipes you
had better. So it's a story about efficiency, about creativity,
And the best part about it, other than the problem
that it solved, was that the technology became the core
(22:58):
of a small business that was headquartered in our city
as we were trying to grow new small businesses that
then sold this technology to other cities that had a
similar problem around the country and around the world. So
I think it's a great example of how in your
own backyard you can find creative solutions to big civic
problems and then use that to build a a kind
of a culture and build a kind of an ethic
(23:20):
of problem solving that then became the source of great
civic pride, at least, you know, for those of us
who like to geek out on technology innovations in cities
and things that can show how small community government can
be really creative and resourceful. And I took some of
those ideas with me even when I was serving at
the presidential cabinet level looking for ideas that we could
deploy or scale or help small communities do on issues
(23:44):
they confronted, from traffic safety to economic development.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
So I want to focus now on the now instead
of just the past and on the now. Note, how
do you think we give infrastructure a rebrand? I think
it gets a reputation as being tremendously unsexy, But as
you articulated, really well, it's so relevant and necessary. So
how have you been talking about it in a way
that gets people interested.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Well, one thing I would point to is that, in
addition to the virtue of having better infrastructure, in other words,
the benefit that comes from getting to use a great
airport or a nice smooth road or a good bridge
that never gets closed because it's compromised, or good internet
or any of the things we really want to need,
even before you get there, you get these amazing economic
(24:39):
opportunities from the chance to build it. I always thought
when I became Transportation Secretary that my best days in
terms of having fun on the job, would have to
do with kind of things that I loved as a
transportation geek. And sometimes they were like I got to
kick the tires of a seven forty seven, just as
like a boyhood fantasy, like getting to do that that
was your boyhood fantasy, Well it was one of them.
(25:01):
I was really into aviation. That's cool, right, and like
being around you know, the seeing the back end of
you know, how an airport operation works, or what goes
into making sure that the trains run on time and
in Japan as well as closer to home. All of
that was cool. But to my surprise, many of the
(25:23):
best moments I had as secretary were about engaging the
people who are going to be doing the work that
we were building, including high school students. We had a
long time in this country where we just failed to
show enough respect for the trades, for the work that
we count on electrical workers and cement masons and brick
(25:44):
layers and carpenters and iron workers and others to actually do.
You know, there was even the sense that, you know,
it was kind of like a second best life. You know,
if you weren't going to if you couldn't go to college,
you know, this is kind of your backup option. One
thing I'm really proud of is how we've started to
change that culturally, like whether or not you're excited about,
you know, the finer points of how a bridge gets built,
(26:06):
or how your road's going to work, whether or not
you think airports are neat or just something you suffer
through in order to get to where you're going. So
many people will find are finding their lives transformed by
the jobs they get to do. And of course I
also think the finished product is exciting. You know, here
in Michigan, as chance would have it, one of the
seventy thousand projects that I signed off on when I
(26:28):
was secretary is one that is right here in our community.
I drive by almost every day. Our three year old son,
who like a lot of three year old boys, is
super into heavy equipment, loves watching the blow by blow
of this major road rehabilitation project. So I was commenting
on it. If they're not out there, it's like, why
an't the workers working, And I'm like, because it's like
(26:48):
because it's Sunday morning, buddy, Like, he's like super into
it and it's cool to watch that. But of course
the best thing of all is that, like, well, our
community will benefit from that for decades when it's done.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
That's cool. That's that's a good jump into I was curious,
you know, what are the things you feel like the
Biden administration made good on in terms of the infrastructure
improvement promises? You know what got done. But then for
those that might have missed things, right, I'm not talking
about like the news cycle being in never ending nightmare factory,
but like, actually, what were the things that you wish
(27:20):
had gotten done that didn't get done in a way?
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Well, know what, anytime you leave a job like that,
there's a lot of unfinished business. So you know, we
approved and funded about seventy thousand projects. About twenty thousand
of them got done on my watch, and I'm pretty
sure that that means that I hold the record for
the most projects done by anyone in the history of
that office. But my successor could match that record or
(27:46):
even beat it, just by delivering all the other projects
that we started. But it didn't get complete because they
were multi phase, multi year projects, or because there were
complications on the ground. So I think a lot about
some of those other ones, some of which by their
nature are going to take a decade. Even think about
the Hudson River Tunnel project in New York. This is
one of the biggest public works projects in modern American history.
(28:08):
I was proud to be there while we started a
lot of the phases of it, knowing that somebody else
would have the job, maybe a couple people would come
and go from the job. By the time that they
were cutting the ribbon on the finished product. A lot
of other programs were just new. Giving an example, in
terms of electric vehicle chargers, we set a goal to
have half a million of them out by the end
of the decade twenty thirty. We also put a lot
(28:31):
of conditions, like making sure that those chargers were made
in America, not made in China. We knew that was
going to add a couple of years to the timeline,
and that meant that most of the chargers would be
built after we left office. We thought it was worth it,
but it means that now I'm watching to see if
those projects actually get completed in the out years twenty
six twenty twenty seven as they were planned to do
(28:51):
or not. So you know, there's always more to be done,
and frankly, there's a lot to be done to make
sure projects in general go quicker in this country. There's
I think a healthy debate happening right now, especially on
my side of the isle among Democrats, but really in
the whole community of people who care about this stuff
about how we can be a little less paperwork intensive
(29:12):
cut through some of the red tape. I tried to
do it. I think there's more to be done so
that dollars turn into projects sooner and we can all
benefit from the projects being done.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Is it possible do you think these days to do
something as monumental in terms of infrastructure as what Eisenhower
did with the interstates or Lincoln with the railroads, Like politically,
can we is it possible to come together to get
the votes to build the support for something like that.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Well, I think the Infrastructure build demonstrated that. I remember
arriving in Washington in twenty twenty one. They were still
security fencing around the Capitol as a consequence of January sixth,
and the general attitude was that you couldn't get two
sides to work together on anything. And yet by the
end of that same year, I was there on the
South Lawn as the White House as the President was
(30:00):
signing this massive bipartisan infrastructure package that had had its
obituary written time and time again before it actually got achieved.
So what that showed me is that yes, we can
get these things done. It's hard, and it's getting harder,
especially in the climate that we're in right now, but
you can find some things that are so clearly worth
doing that even in our political system and in our
(30:23):
political climate, with the right leadership, you can pull together
the political will to make it happen.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I'm gonna waste everyone's time, including yours, with a personal
pet peeve question since this is called here we go again.
So you know, a lot of times like a flight
will actually be on time, it'll even be early. You
land early, everything's wonderful, and then the captain comes on
and says, hey, folks, so good news, we're thirty minutes early.
The bad news is because we're early, the ground staff
(30:50):
didn't know we were coming and they don't have a
gait for us, so sit tight. And then everyone sits
there for like an hour and a half, which really
makes you late. But literally, the technology of getting a
plane from one city to another means the ground staff
had to know we were coming early. That's the whole
fucking way it works. So I guess I want to
know a why are airplane captain such shitty liars, and
(31:14):
b what's actually going on when this happens? Right? Obviously
they have to make some excuse for something, but like,
what what's actually happening at the airport when they knew
you were coming early? But there are gates open, but
they can't accommodate you.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Yeah, So, first of all, I feel your pain. This
happens is having me last week, And you know, I
think a lot of it is you almost wish they
hadn't pointed out that arrived early because they're excited to
tell you that, But telling you that only for you
to be waiting at the gate kind of feels like
it's rubbing salt in the wound. But I think it
also shows you something about how complex these systems are,
(31:47):
right that it turns out, even after partaking in the
miracle of human flight that can propel hundreds of people
safely through the air with flammable liquids and nearly the
speed of sound and deliver them to a from place,
if you don't have the right guy at the right gate,
you're still going to be late. Right, and so it's
so many things have to go right for something simple
(32:10):
like a flight being on time and the flying part
is only part of it. You have to have the
right staffing, you have to have a gate availability. It's
like a Rubik's cube if anything is out of what's
on the schedule, and something will always be different from
what was on the schedule. Right now, America is seeing
this with air traffic control towers and the staffing rates
(32:33):
up there, and I was proud that we finally got
the number of air traffic control workers to be growing
again after shrinking for decades. But there's a long way
to go, and obviously you can't just let anybody do that.
You have to go through all the certifications to make
sure that you're capable of doing that job safely. And
if not enough people are available that day, you just
have to slow down the traffic because you're definitely it's
(32:53):
not okay to accept a safety consequence, so you just
have to slow down the traffic. I think this shows
us that we have to pay attention to everything that
could be the limiting factor, everything that could stand between
a system and its working well, and oftentimes it comes
down to a human factor. You can have the coolest
technology in the world, but if you haven't taken care
(33:15):
of the people, the workers who need to be working
on it, making sure there's enough of them, and that
they're supported and that they're trained, and that they have
the equipment that they need. Then you're still going to
get stuck.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
I'll end this section with the hypothetical, and then we
can talk about the future. Let's say you're stuck in
an elevator with your successor, Sean Duffy. You left your
phones in the bathroom. No one can record anyone, it's
just the two of you. You can say anything that
you want to say to him. There will be no
evidence of it other than his word, and obviously nobody's
going to believe him. So what do you say.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Look, I called him as soon as you got the job,
and I would you know, you know what I told him?
That isn't that different from what I would say now,
which is I really as an American, as a member
of the traveling public, as well as just being somebody
who obviously cares a lot about transportation because of my
own career. I want them to succeed. I want that
department to succeed. They've obviously hit some rough patches. There are,
(34:08):
as you would expect, very different decisions happening over there
than I would make. But the bottom line is we
should all be rooting for the US transportation system, especially
the Federal Aviation Administration, to be working.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Well, pivoting to the future. Then if infrastructure in America
could magically be depoliticized and anything was possible, what's the
future that you'd want to see?
Speaker 1 (34:36):
I think it's first and foremost safer, also cleaner, more sustainable,
a lot of other things, but most importantly safer. You know,
we rightly pay a ton of attention as a country
whenever there's any issue with aviation safety, but we weirdly
pay almost no attention as a country to roadway safety.
We lose enough people every single day on our roadways,
(34:59):
more than a hund undred people a day, enough to
fill an airplane. And you know, I'm proud that we
were able to see that rate inch down on my watch.
Even knocking that down by three or four percent meant
over the years thousands of lives could be saved. But
it should be dramatically lower than it is. Forty thousand
people a year. It's totally unacceptable. It's on a par
with gun violence. It's worse in the US than it
(35:21):
is in a lot of other developed countries, and we
should do better. Part of that's technology, part of that's policy,
part of that's regulation, But a lot of things need
to happen, and I'm actually very hopeful that technology can
help on that, even though I've had some very visible problems.
I actually think automated vehicles hold a huge part of
the solution to safety because frankly, human drivers have a
(35:45):
very troubled track record, especially when it comes to personal vehicles.
Professional drivers it's a little different, but we have not
been great. Or to put it in another way, there's
a lot of other products that if you know, as
Americans we killed forty thousand people a year, we probably
wouldn't be permitted to use them in the same way.
So I'd like to see a safer future. I'd like
(36:06):
for high speed rail to be something that we just
count on and take for granted the way you can
in most other highly developed countries. I'd like for there
to be different options to get around so you don't
have to have a car to get around a community,
even a suburban community, to have better transit options and
things like that. It's doable, It's not out of our reach.
It's definitely technically and technologically possible, we just haven't managed
(36:30):
to come together and make it happen.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Let's say you run for president in the future, maybe
in twenty twenty eight, and it's my producers have written
here take a long pause to let Pete declare his
candidacy on our podcast. I won't take the long pause,
but let's say, like, just in the future, right, whatever
your political journey happens to be, if that's in the
executive branch, what would your first one hundred days look
like in terms of infrastructure? Because I think we're seeing
(36:53):
you're very gracious, I think with your comments about Sean Duffy,
and of course we all want America to succeed, but
they've handled things almost the exact opposite of the stuff
that you handled it as Transportation Secretary, Soul. What would
that one hundred days look like?
Speaker 1 (37:08):
Well, yeah, I mean they've taken a very, very partisan
in political approach, and I think this is something that
even more than usual, requires us to be less partisan
and less political, especially because I think that the challenge
for any leader in the next few years, whether you're president,
governor mayor, or whether you're running a company or pretty
much anything else is going to be about contending with
(37:32):
what technology is doing to change everything in our everyday lives.
I think even with all the attention that's being spent
on artificial intelligence right now, we're still underreacting and it's
still being underreported, and we're still underprepared. And I think
infrastructure is just one lens to look through what's going
to change. We're going to need to be way better
(37:52):
at creating electric power infrastructure and making it as clean
as we possibly can because of the power demands of
artificial intelli elegence. We also need to be ready to
apply some of the solutions that AI could accelerate to
make things from vehicle safety to aviation technology better. There's
a huge opportunity here, but there's a huge challenge too,
(38:13):
and I think we're only starting to get our arms
around it. I think most people still don't realize how
much it's going to change. And what I'm trying to
do is make the conversation about AI less of a
tech conversation that you have to be, you know, the
kind of person who really cared about the Internet in
the early nineties, or you know, really is into coding
(38:36):
or something to care about and make it clearly all
of us. Never mind the tech. You could you could
get interested in the tech or not, but just as
a citizen and as a worker, like all of us
need to get ready for this.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
We're almost out of your time. Is there is there
anything else you want us to know or think about
when it comes to infrastructure, anything that we missed that
you wish people would know about.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yeah, I just want to double down on this point
about how much is about to change our relationship to
our jobs. And by the way, this is particularly true
for people who are in white collar jobs, which is
very different from some of the other big tectonic kind
of industrial changes we've had. But you know, no matter
where you fit in the economy, this is probably the
biggest change to come since the seventeenth century. We're in
(39:19):
the middle of it, and I feel that the policy
world and the political world is really underreacting to this.
We've got to view this as an opportunity to make
sure that we meet the potential of this, which is
a safer everyday life, cleaner air, fewer work hours, and
more money in your pocket, which could happen. But whether
it actually does happen, that's not a technology question. That's
(39:41):
a policy question, that's a society question. That's us coming
together and saying, hey, with this new technology coming on,
we've got to make sure that American people get enough
of a piece of the action, both getting to use
it and potentially getting dealt in on some of the
wealth that it creates too, so we don't just wind
up with a gilded age on steroids in terms of
a tiny handful of people becoming even wealthier. So that's
(40:03):
a big thing that's on my mind. And you know,
when you're doing something like planning a subway line, or
thinking about the future of commuting, or trying to get
high speed railed to be a thing, or accelerating the
arrival of the electric aircraft engine, or any number of
other things, you know that conversation can't be separated from
a conversation that's still very immature in our country about
(40:23):
technology and artificial intelligence. And by the way, it might
get political quick, but it doesn't have to. Man.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
You know, it's funny you and our friend Don Buyer,
who for folks that don't know, is a member of Congress,
are the only two elected officials or folks in government
who I've heard actively talking about AI and openly talking about, hey,
we should address these challenges proactively. And he's probably done
with the program now, but Don was doing a master's
in AI, if I'm not mistaken to like get a
(40:52):
grasp on that.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Right, and he was doing it before it was cool. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (40:55):
I was like, dude, you're I don't want to call
him old, but like, especially given his years and his
contemporaries in Congress, he's the only one doing something like that.
So I'm not trying to shut on others. I'm just
saying it's nice to actually have a non fear based hey,
let's try to figure this out sort of conversation and
to make that tie to infrastructures is I think really
really compelling. Thank you, Pete.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
All right, glad we get to do that.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Yeah, man, thank you. Here we go again. As production
of iHeart Podcasts and Snaffoo Media in association with New
Metric Media. Our executive producers are me kalpen Ed Helms,
Mike Falbo, Alissa Martino, Andy Kim, Pat Kelly, Chris Kelly,
and Dylan Fagan. Caitlin Fontana is our producer and writer.
(41:40):
Dave Shumka is our producer and editor. Additional writing from
Megan tan Our consulting producer is Romin Borsolino. Tory Smith
is our associate producer. Theme music by Chris Kelly, logo
by Matt Gosson, Legal review from Daniel Welsh, Caroline Johnson
and Megan Halson. Special thanks to Glenn Basner, Isaac Dunham,
Adam Horre, Ryne Lane Klein, and everyone at iHeart Podcasts,
(42:03):
but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etoor. Thanks
for listening. See you next week.
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