Here we go again again.

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 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 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 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.

It's insane.

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 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?

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.

Hey, how you doing good?

How are you good?

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 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 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.

Welcome, Pete, Hey, thanks for having me.

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 a little bit of a definition in our intro, But how have you been explaining it to people?

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 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.

Infrastructure is what's beneath the structures that we kind of think about in the sea every day and makes everything else possible.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 became true to a whole other level about one hundred years later, when the Interstate Highway became a reality.

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?

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 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 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 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 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 a massive shared national project which wound uplifting the economy at the same time.

Were there things that made the new deal different from past infrastructure projects aside from scale.

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 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 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.

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, 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 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?

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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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, we can do that in the US if we're willing to roll up our sleeves and make it happen.

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 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 doing now, or like how do you move forward?

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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 called the smart Sewers program, which I know you mentioned.

What did you learn doing this about infrastructure and then about governing more broadly?

Yeah, thanks for not everybody gives me a chance to talk about smart sewer.

Yeah, it's a shitty question, but I'll ask it anyway.

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 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 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 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 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 they confronted, from traffic safety to economic development.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 had gotten done that didn't get done in a way?

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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 political climate, with the right leadership, you can pull together the political will to make it happen.

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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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, 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.

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?

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, 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 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 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 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 to come together and make it happen.

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 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?

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 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 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, 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 technology and artificial intelligence.

And by the way, it might get political quick, but it doesn't have to.

Man.

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 grasp on that.

Right, and he was doing it before it was cool.

Yeah, exactly.

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.

All right, glad we get to do that.

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.

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, but especially Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman and Nikki Etoor.

Thanks for listening.

See you next week.