 William D. Eggers is co-author with Donald F. Kettle of the new book Bridge Builders, How Government Can Transcend Boundaries To Solve Big Problems. Now Executive Director of Deloitte Center for Government Insights, 30 years ago, Eggers ran the Privatization Center for Reason Foundation, the non-profit that publishes Reason Magazine. He's worked with dozens of governments at all levels, both in the United States and internationally, and he's written a shelf's worth of books on the proper scope and functioning of government. I talked with him about Bridge Builders and what he's learned over the past three decades about making government more effective and less intrusive when confronting major challenges such as pandemics and why it's long past time to move beyond what he and his co-author call the vending machine model of government. Will Eggers, thanks for talking to reason. It's great to see you again, Nick. We've known each other 30 years now. That is, it's kind of sobering, right? Your new book is Bridge Builders, How Government Can Transcend Boundaries To Solve Big Problems. You co-authored it with Donald F. Kettle. What's the elevator pitch of Bridge Builders? Basically, our political and policy debates are mostly based on an outdated mental model, what we term the vending machine mental model of government, which is you have a big problem, you pass a law, you fund an organization, you put money into the vending machine, and you expect it to produce results. That's what we read about in the newspapers. We see it on TV and that doesn't reflect either how government operates or how you can actually solve any big problems today. Take a problem like homelessness. Is it an economic problem? Is it a mental health problem? Is it a housing problem, a crime problem? Whose responsibilities is it? Is it local government, state government, federal government, nonprofits, foundations, does the private sector care? The answer to all those questions is yes. What we need is a new model to look at public management and government that reflects the reality of a big blurring of the lines really between the public and private sector and the key to effective government today is really the ability to effectively manage these public-private networks. Before we get into some specifics about stuff, let's reflect a little bit on your history, both at Reason Foundation. When I interviewed for a job and I joined it in October of 93, you were already working there. You're like Bartleby the scripter. You were there when the guy shows up in the office. But you were running or you eventually ran a Center for Privatization and talk a bit about when in the early 90s, when your career started, what were the challenges and what has become? The vending machine model is outmoded. That's not how governments operate. How did that happen? I started off right out of college working at Reason, what was then called the local government center. It was really doing the nitty gritty of local government management and how do you deliver garbage collection or wastewater treatment in areas. At the time, people wanted to go to think tanks and do sexy policy things. I originally thought, oh my gosh, what is this? Then I saw just how important that work is. It's also a lot of work that most think tanks don't do. They don't do implementation. They just want to debate policy ideas. That's what made Reason and the local government center and then the privatization center and Center for Government Reform so unique. At that time, there was a lot of debate really about who should be providing these different services. Should it be the public sector, the private sector, sort of the mixed thing. There's a large debate. That debate is largely over today. My friend, Steve Savas, wrote literally 35 years ago about how government should steer, not grow. Increasingly, that is no longer something that is debated, whether it doesn't matter on the Republican side, the Democrat side, what ideology you have. Increasingly, government is playing the role of steering rather than actually rolling itself. And funding as well, right? Like a lot of the money. One of the things that was fascinating in the book I didn't realize, you talk about how in during the Manhattan Project, like a ton of that stuff was outsourced to private industry. Because one of your previous books, if we can put a man on the moon, dot, dot, dot, it's kind of, there's a long tradition going back really centuries in Ben Franklin's autobiography. He talks about fulfilling a contract that he got, a governmental contract that he got for delivering stuff to the border or the frontier in the French and Indian War and stuff. But the Manhattan Project, talk a little bit about how like they farmed out different parts of that. It was the Manhattan Project where then General Leslie Groves was the person who was in charge of this. And he had to find a way to build the atomic bomb, but do it with a lot of secrecy. And there was literally tens of thousands of academic researchers and people from private industry and some government who are all working on different elements of it. And Groves was one of just a few people who knew how all the different parts were working. And that actually, we saw the very similar model in the Apollo mission of when we first put a man on the move, that was James Webb who listened to Kennedy's call and he was instrumental in organizing this vast network. And when you look at the Apollo mission, it was over 22,000 different firms that were involved in that. Academic research centers everywhere, NASA employees. And so we have this history of doing big things. And when we do it, it's usually through these very blended models. And I think in many respects, the U.S. has really led the way probably over centuries and developed these sort of very sophisticated network models. But it's hard to find something that we've done that you can say a really big accomplishment that wasn't done in this sort of a model. When you were starting out at Reason and whatnot, one of the big books that was in the air and concepts was Reinventing Government, which Al Gore and I'm struggling to remember his name, Bill Clinton, you know, it's funny how quickly people kind of fade from consciousness, but they, you know, they were talking a lot. That was part of their pitch as like new Democrats that they were going to reinvent government. Can you talk a little bit about that book and how that is, you know, that has had like a serious influence along with, you know, people like Bob Pool and Steve Savas, you know, talking about privatization? Well, absolutely. Actually, David Osborn, one of the co-authors of Reinventing Government actually gave us a nice blurb for this book. But that book really did usher in a whole wave of government reform and a focus on good government, effective government in a nonpartisan way during the 90s. And that for those of us who've been looking at public management, and for me, it's three and a half decades, that was really the heyday of a lot of that. We saw a lot of very business-minded mayors who focused on pragmatic things, of making these cities run like Steve Goldsmith from Indianapolis, who I wrote a book with. You had Ed Rendell from Philadelphia. So, Paul Smith, a Republican, Rendell, a Democrat. And then a lot of governors like William Weld, who's been featured and you've had on your show before, John Angler and others. So, it was a really big focus. And one of the reasons why it got so much attention, of course, was because Bill Clinton was seen during his campaign actually walking around with it. And then of course, famously, Al Gore went on the David Letterman show and he looked at these ashtrays that cost so much. And then they had big forklifts that they showed all these government regulations. So, they did a really nice job messaging and kind of making government reform sexy. What was the impetus? Was it a sense? Because this is coming after the Reagan years, and Reagan was a revolutionary or whatever, but he was very popular. H. W. Bush was kind of popular until he lost reelection. But why were Democrats championing a new way of delivering government services? Was it, and I guess was it because they had failed in the older model, or were we out of money? Like what were the pressures saying we got to do something different? Well, I think, you know, some of it was, of course, a lot of the new Democrat mantra. And there was think tanks like the Progressive Policy Institute led by Will Marshall and my friend Rob Atkinson, who were putting out studies along these lines. And really, people were looking at a lot of the sclerosis that was occurring at the time in a lot of our big cities and government institutions. And really, how do you fix that? And so, it was not only, though, the Democrats, you had a lot of these real reform-minded Republicans who made this a big part of their governing philosophy at the state level, from Tom Ridge to William Weld, Tommy Thompson out of Wisconsin, and others. Is it easier, I guess it is easier to do it at the state or local level, or that that's where the delivery of services really kind of takes place? It is where the delivery of services takes place, although under the reinventing government initiative, I mean, they did reduce the size of the government workforce more than we've ever seen any administration do it. And they basically down to the same size as when John F. Kennedy was president. Which is kind of fascinating because the government is, I mean, Bill Clinton's last budget, I think, was $2 trillion in nominal dollars. You know, we're now spending over $6 trillion on a regular basis, it seems. But the amount of workers paid by the federal government is smaller. Right. And that really shows a big point of our book is that most of what government does today through the federal government is not direct government paying employees and so on. It's through what are called indirect tools of government. It's through tax credits and contracts and grants and loan guarantees and areas like that. And we actually estimate in the book that about 94% of the federal budget is through these sort of more indirect tools of government as opposed to direct government action. Yeah. And I'm looking at, I mean, this was one of the things that really made my head explode. In table five dash one, you talk about the federal government's financial footprint and out of total outlays and you come to a number, you know, this is from 2021. So it was $6.8 trillion, which is a record which I suspect will be broken sometime within the next five years. But, you know, a chunk of that is a large chunk of that is through things like tax expenditures, which are tax cuts or tax loopholes, subsidies and things like that, loans and whatnot. And so the total footprint of the financial footprint of the federal government is more like 11.7 trillion. And you say only about 458 billion of that is to, you know, the government putting a check in somebody's pocket. Exactly. So we end up, you know, having all of these debates about a tiny little percentage of the actual government budget right now. And in fact, when you look at how, especially in the United States, when we're trying to realize different policy goals or have behavioral changes or do various things, increasingly policymakers are using these indirect tools because they don't say they're growing the size of government before and they're trying to oftentimes catalyze markets and catalyze the private sector to do various things to achieve broader goals that they might have, whether it's climate action or workforce development. Let's go through a couple of specific examples of where government, you know, over the past couple of decades has successfully, you know, solved big problems or addressed them. What is the, what's your top of mind example for that? Well, you know, I mentioned, of course, the Apollo mission and written a lot about NASA over the years because I do think it's an exemplar agency. And even when you look at the commercial space industry, which I'm incredibly bullish on space and what's going to happen there, the commercial space industry would not exist anywhere near it exists today without NASA and NASA playing a role as a catalyzer of this industry. And in fact, in Walter Isaacson's new book about Elon Musk, I don't know if you've read that yet. It's a great read. Yeah. I've known Walter a long time. And he's got a quote from Elon Musk where SpaceX almost went bankrupt at one point. They're in real trouble. And then they got an anchor contract from NASA that allowed them to then start investing. And even Musk, who's no huge fan of government, as you know, at one point he had as his password to his computer, I love NASA. So NASA's done a really good job of being what we call a catalyst by design. Let's dig into that a little bit. Musk, we did a video about him a couple of years ago about, you know, he is more than a master of markets. He's a master of getting government subsidies and incentives for sure to walk through that because NASA, you know, after the Apollo, you know, mission kind of and whatnot, they generally the knock on NASA is that it's a really bureaucratic kind of stuck in its way risk averse culture. So how but but you're right and you document this in the book that NASA is the reason why there is a big private space, you know, kind of industry that's going how does this work? And how does it show the new kind of blended government model rather than that to the vending machine model? Well, if you think about NASA and without the commercial space industry without the sort of all the incentives that they created for that to flourish, NASA might need to be two three times as large to do what, you know, what they're doing right now in terms of space travel right now. So what they did was they had a big change a couple of decades ago, starting with Charlie Golden, who we talk about in the book where they said, we're going to focus on catalyzing innovation. We're going to focus on creating incentives and systems to to actually get the private sector, essentially, to build what we need to meet the mission of NASA, but also at the same time to expand the opportunities for space travel. And so they've done hundreds of prizes and challenges, open competitions for from an innovation standpoint, they use tools like competitive grants and of course, their procurement contracts, they have over 20 different technologists, people who are just focusing on what are the technologies in these different markets and how how are they progressing? How important are they for for NASA? So they're doing market sensing at the same time and they're creating a lot of channels to academia and private industry. And I think increasingly that's really the future of government agencies. And was that mostly under Obama that these shifts took place? The shifts have been going on for a while, but yes, a big acceleration under under President Obama. And what's interesting, if you look at big acceleration, this notional public-private partnerships, the Obama administration was a big driver of these and everything from space. And we saw it in the defense world. We saw it in even areas like foreign aid and and elsewhere, but it's not just, you know, that administration in that in the George W. Bush administration, our former colleague, Lynn Scarlett, was the assistant secretary of Interior and one of her major accomplishments was to really drive public-private partnerships in the national parks, to really improve that and bring the communities more into the administration part. Are there, you know, are there any surprising challengers to this kind of thing? And I know like when you talk about something like the national parks and then you say, you know what, we're going to contract out, you know, the vending machines or the, you know, the franchises and a bunch of the amenities and maybe even the upkeep and stuff, you know, like obviously anybody who is a public sector employee is going to be like, no, this is, you know, a sacred trust and you can't have like, you know, private contractors, they pay less and they, you know, they don't care, etc. But who, you know, who else are the surprising people who are like, no, no, no, we really have to keep the government, you know, directly funding everything. Well, I think what we really try to focus on in the book and my co-author, Don Kettle, is kind of the Dean of Public Management in the U.S. has written 25 books on public management. So it's very much a non-ideological, non-partisan look at this. And increasingly, the debates are not about whether something is contracted out or not. It's about what's the right mix between the public and private sector. And what we try to focus on in the book is that the private sector is now putting in essentially trillions of dollars into creating different elements of private public value. And so how can government leverage that? So it's a lot less about necessarily who should be delivering that service, but how do you bring the different sectors together to produce the most public value? That's, that's how Houston has been able to reduce homelessness by 63% at the same time when it was going up in other cities all over the country. So explain how they did that. What, what does the, you know, the kind of local government of Houston do and or, you know, to the extent that it matters, the state government and the federal government? Like how, how does Houston figure out how to fix homelessness? I live in New York City. They're not doing such a great job of it. And certainly, there's a lot of West Coast cities that are just really abysmal. Yeah. I mean, Houston has now put over 26,000 individuals in permanent housing over the last decade, three-fourths of whom stay in permanent housing, 63% reduction, which we haven't seen almost anywhere else to that extent. And there's a couple of key elements to it. Certainly, number one is they've taken the funding from federal, state, local level, foundations, and individuals and companies. And they've been able to bucket a lot of the funding together, which is excellent. Well, because the siloed funding processes are one of the biggest obstacles to doing all this. When you look at most of our problems, they go beyond the boundaries, the legislative boundaries that have been set for them. And so what they need to do at Houston, they took funding from HUD or HHS or the state level, and they were able to then put pool all of that money. And then there's a nonprofit called the Houston Coalition for the Homeless, over 100 different provider organizations. And Mike Nichols was the orchestra conductor, kind of, because that's how we look at this, of bringing all those organizations together. And another key element is just the data system that they created. So previously, before they got started down this road, the mayor, Annalise Parker, then would say that you could be having different organizations. And again, these are mostly nonprofit organizations, some for delivering services to a homeless individual and not knowing what other services they've gotten, not knowing where they were in the journey, they couldn't talk to each other, they couldn't share information. And they built a system so that they could share all that in real time, that they could measure outcomes, and they could see, well, this individual, this is the services that they need, the services they've received, and they could be monitoring that at all times. So they went from being kind of just a number to really the kind of the life history of each individual glued together by this data. Is that primarily, you know, in the name of the book is Bridge Builders. And you talk a lot, you mentioned that the phrase an orchestra conductor, you know, where somebody who is overseeing everything, right? So it's like Leslie Groves or whatever. Is this, you know, is it primarily individuals who, you know, you have to have the right individual in place or is it a systems approach so that you are, you know, and how do you balance that? It's definitely both. We found, you know, we profiled dozens of these amazing Bridge Builders across all the different sectors. And it's really hard work, you have to look out for Bridge Builder burnout. And one of the keys to being good at this is understanding deeply how each of the sectors work. And sometimes those are called tri-sector athletes, people who have worked across the sectors. So that's government, private industry and non-profit. Yes. And you could say academia could be another one and so on that's involved. So those individuals who could navigate across the sectors is really important. We think we need not thousands more, hundreds of thousands, but really millions more Bridge Builders. And when I speak at universities and grad schools, which I do all the time, this is the sort of thing young people really want to do. It gets them really excited and interested. Well, that's because they get to be the orchestra conductor, right? They're not third oboe or something. Or they might want to be not all of them want to be the conductor. What goes into that then? I mean, is it, you know, is it like, is it getting people to shift between these sectors like during the course of their career? I think absolutely having that sort of thing where people might spend some time in government, some time in private industry, you might work at a foundation, a non-profit, and being able to move across those sectors, even have tours of duty where you might go into the private sector or public sector. Because if they don't understand each other, if you're in government and you don't understand the value that the private sector can bring to a big initiative, you're going to have a hard time then creating as much value as you could. But those that we found that were very successful really had that deep understanding of the different sectors. That's why NASA has tried to do so much to create those various channels. And we do have some tours of duty now in the federal level, U.S. digital service, or 18F, or White House Innovation Fellows. I think we need a lot more of that. When you say the tours of duty, it's people have like kind of term limited place. Yeah, they might go in for three years to five years and then move back out again. You know, one of the undertakings that you talked about in the book, which is really interesting, is operation warp speed or the kind of federal response to COVID. And this is, I think, without being overtly ideological about it, it's like at the highest level possible, it's kind of a cluster fuck. You had the FDA and the CDC and a bunch of other agencies shutting down the early people who were trying to figure out what was going on to do early testing. They kind of threw a monopoly blanket over different parts of the response. But operation warp speed, which was Trump's kind of saying, okay, we're going to spend, we're going to give a lot of money with relatively few strings attached to people who produce vaccines. Talk about that. And how is operation warp speed like a great example of what you're talking about? And then where does it fall short? Yeah, I think you can look at operation warp speed. And another example we talk about in the book is the Human Genome Project. We are still benefiting from decades, decades later, and I've had my genome mapped. Have you? I have 23 of May. So, you know, close enough. And I mean, it's interesting because Francis Collins, who was, you know, the hero of that story is one of the villains really of, you know, I think reason is written about this and trying to shut down various kind of responses to the state during COVID. But be that as it may. Yeah, let's talk about warp speed. So when we look at operation warp speed, I think what is a very successful public private effort, public sector as both a funder, convener for this, but what they did was a number of important things. They set very, very clear goals and, you know, get shots in people's arms as quickly as possible and prevent as many deaths as we can. They did a lot of deregulation, administer the regulatory relief, which was really, really key in this place. They did the funding and they actually then let the private sector, they gave them the freedom and flexibility to come up with different solutions. And it wasn't a heavy touch. It was more of a light touch working with them. So this is where they kind of created certain frameworks and then said, like as long as you're within this, you know, do what you're going to do. I mean, it's kind of fascinating because, and you know, the book recounts this when COVID hit and people are like, okay, we need a vaccine. The best minds were all saying, well, you know, it could be like three to five years. Nobody was expecting, you know, to go from, you know, January, February, March of 2020 to having shots in the arm, you know, by Thanksgiving. I mean, Trump said it. Nobody believed him, but it did happen. So how does that, you know, at the same time, there's issues, right? Like where in order to expedite the, you know, getting shots in the arms, the government says, okay, we're definitely, we're committing to buying a lot of this stuff, whether kind of whether we need it or not. They clearly we needed it. They also immunize companies against certain kinds of legal things. So like, how do you balance all of that in this kind of framework? How do you do the cost benefit analysis of figuring out, okay, well, you know, yeah, we're going to make sure that they can't be sued or that they maintain intellectual property rights, even if some of the money that they use to develop it comes from taxpayers and things like that. Well, in this case, it was, we saw an existential sort of a threat. And so what they were able to do is that a lot, I mean, all during COVID in ways good and bad, a lot of the traditional procedures and regulations and everything that government had, a lot of those were waived. And all of a sudden we saw telehealth, which had been impossible to do for all sorts of regulatory reasons for decades, then come online. And now we're never going back. We saw cloud computing, we saw people working remotely. So it's oftentimes during the situations of crisis and disaster that you're able to do a lot of looking at every rule and regulation and whether it makes sense or not, and you're going to waive it. And recently, I live on the West Coast, East Coast, SDU, Nick, and you remember I-95 and essentially the bridge collapsed. And outside of Philadelphia, they estimated it was going to take five months for it to be fixed. And that would have just created massive congestion problems, all sorts of other issues. And Governor Josh Shapiro said, you know, every single regulation that gets in the way of getting this done quickly, we're going to waive at this point. And what did they do through a public-private partnership, mostly a lot of private sector innovation, including bringing in NASCAR engineers to help with it. They were able to get that bridge fixed in 12 days, 12 days. And one of the things that we talk a lot about the book is what are the lessons we can learn from these disaster response when government is able to move very, very quickly and you need to then rethink a lot of the current regulations so government can be a lot more agile. So what happens, though, because, you know, with things like telehealth, I mean, this might be a little bit different, but, you know, various states waived people having to get certified in their state in order to practice medicine, et cetera, things like that. A lot of workplace restrictions and regulations, a lot of things were waived during COVID and then they start to come back, right? And the FDA, you know, the FDA is not an agile organization, right? And they want to go back to the status quo before COVID and things like that. How do you work to, you know, lock in the liberating aspects of a deregulated kind of crisis environment? And during COVID I wrote a lot of studies on what are the lessons learned, how do we overturn orthodoxies and so on. Can we learn? And the speed at which government moved then was kind of unprecedented in many respects. And so it was like that. You're never going to have that over a long period of time because we do have checks and balances and democratic processes and so on to go forth. But what we don't want to do is go back to that old way. You want to learn a lot of the lessons and hopefully have a new normal. And that's really the key point, a new normal looking at based on lessons from those different crises. Do you think we've done that with, you know, related to things like vaccines or the delivery of medicine post COVID? Like have we learned lessons that are going to reset how we do things? We certainly are, my center produces 50 to 60 studies a year on government management and technology. And we look a lot at public private and just around research and development from the standpoint of medicine, pharmaceuticals and so on. There's a lot of rethinking going on on that and how to do that better, how to use more open innovation models within those processes. How do we speed things up? And there's actually a lot of ways you can use technology now. Are there, like who are the constituents for that? Because it's, you know, it's, I'm thinking of the political dynamics. And it's like during COVID, obviously no congressmen or, you know, no elected official wanted to be the person who was like, yeah, put this in your arm and then like a lot of people die. But, you know, there, you know, do they have an incentive to, you know, once the crisis has gone to be like, yeah, you know, what we should be doing is we should, the government should be doing less in terms of regulating or overseeing everything. I think it's less about doing less than new regulatory models and using technology where I'm doing a lot of work right now and gen AI and regulation and looking at that. And you can dramatically speed up all sorts of these processes simply by using technology. I mean, Mark Andreessen years ago in his manifesto, that software eats, it's everything, eats the world. And he also, he wrote one at the beginning of COVID time to build, which didn't, which didn't extend to a, you know, a middle income housing development that was adjacent to one of his properties where he tried to get a quash, but yeah. So it's about having regulatory processes, which are more agile, which are outcome based, which are looking at one of the areas that we're seeing governments all over the world do is regulatory sandboxes. We've seen that in the fintech area. Yeah, explain that. That's essentially where you bring in the UK has been a leader in this area. You bring them into a sandbox, essentially, and you enable them to do various things that previously weren't allowed under close supervision. And what governments are doing is they're learning from how those technologies are progressing. And instead of going in early with precautionary regulation, they're actually stepping back and they're learning in a more controlled environment. And they've even found the startups that are part of these sandboxes end up getting more investment money. They do better over a long period of time. So it's a very different sort of model, you know, based on more of the innovation principle of regulation. And I think that's, that's really positive things. I was on a World Economic Forum futures council where we had dozens of regulators from all over the world who are looking at these sort of more flexible models for regulating emerging technologies because they're moving too quickly for those old regulatory models to work very well. What do we do about the, you know, one of the things where there seems to be a new normal, I kind of referenced it earlier, you know, we went from, I think it was in 2019, the federal budget was like, I think 4.8 trillion dollars. And then it went up over 6 trillion very quickly because of COVID because of a lot of federal spending. And then it went up to 6.8 trillion in 2021. And, you know, now it's down a little bit from that. But, you know, this is the kind of Robert Higgs crisis and Leviathan model that during a crisis government expands, spending expands, and then it might come down a little bit, but it doesn't come back to where it was. How, you know, how do we steer clear of that kind of problem? Well, my focus for the last couple of decades has really been on making government work better. Right. And as opposed to the overall size, and I think those are, there's, those are a lot of policy decisions. There are a lot of based on first principles. We don't seem to be having that debate in America or many other countries around the world right now. And I think, you know, depending on where interest rates go and the debt situation that may bring a lot of it back again. But as you've seen with the model that we have here, if you're really going to talk about the size of government and so on, it needs to be based on where the government spending actually is today, as opposed to where most of the debates are on, which is a very, very tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. What do you, you know, how do you, I don't know if you consider yourself like, you know, a libertarian or, you know, a small government conservative or, or, you know, a small government liberal or a progressive or whatever. But what, you know, if government gets better, I guess this is my question is like, if government gets better, will people demand more of it? Because I know a lot of libertarians that when you say, and I've heard this, you know, and people like Bob Poole and people at Reason Foundation who help implement better government policies, you know, I know a lot of libertarians who will say, you know, why would you want to do that? I want government to suck as hard as possible, because then people will get rid of it. Is this, is that borne out by data or, you know, how would explain to, you know, libertarian like to anarcho-capitalist why it's actually worth their time to have a government that, you know, runs its schools well? Well, this is a great discussion. And we, we had this discussion over a decade ago. And I actually even did a piece why libertarians should stop hating government kind of because actually the data is pretty clear that those governments where when you have worse government more bureaucratic government and so on government can't get things done. It ends up being bigger, growing bigger over time. Which is very counterintuitive. It's because people keep putting more and more money into things and they're not working and then you have all these processes in bureaucratic and sclerotic process, a lot of rent seeking involved, a lot of bureaucracy and so on. So in fact, and just think about things in our everyday lives that it does make a big difference. So I ask a lot of people what's the biggest innovation and government in the last decade or so that has made a difference in your lives. And for business travelers, it's things like TSA pre and global entry and even clear, which is more of a private sector. I, I just traveled to Europe. I was in London. I was in Paris and then back here. I breezed through the airport in ways that was similar to pre 9 11. And those were based on having these systems that broke trade offs innovations about breaking trade offs. So TSA pre global entry, they broke that trade off between having more security and convenience. And they said, we can actually have both. So there are a lot of different ways that by reducing friction by making government better, more efficient, it can actually improve our lives. It can actually lead to a much better business climate. I mean, to think about the countries where government doesn't work at all very rarely is that business climate very good either because there's so much friction and in the system that or in some of those countries where then you have a lot of both corruption in the system. So, you know, I've always believed that better government can lead to more freedom for individuals, a better economic climate for businesses. And I think the data shows that out pretty clearly. Yeah, it's a couple of years ago or more than a few. I wrote a story about how, you know, it's widely observed by economists and sociologists and whatnot around the globe that as societies go from high trust to low trust, you know, corruption increases and people know the government is corrupt, but they ask it to do more and more for them. And, you know, in the United States in the reverse way, like during the 90s, and you know, certainly Bill Clinton, you know, he didn't mean to elect a Republican majority in the House and the Senate, you know, but the way things ended up shaking out, government got better at what it was doing. It stopped doing certain things. They balanced the budget. Yeah. And, you know, and we actually, you know, government, the size, scope and spending of government relatively speaking declined. And then under Bush, when government started doing a lot of different things and it was not going well, whether it was in the economy or in wars and things like that, government grew. So, it's an interesting, I mean, I take some flak for this and I, you know, I understand why, but the idea is that like libertarians won the argument that, you know, the government can't do anything well. And that doesn't lead to people saying, okay, I don't want government. It leads to them saying, well, I want more. I want more government. And then they're facing all these frustrations. So in the UK, if you had a death of a loved one, previously, you had to notify already over 40 different agencies type in that same information again and again, and again, you weren't in that condition to do. So you're grieving for a loved one. They switched it to a process using digital government called tell us once. Now you just have to tell the government once with that is and they get information out to all these, all the other agencies. And increasingly, I think, you know, the leading governments in the world around innovation and things like Estonia or Singapore trying to figure out they're talking about frictionless government. They're talking about personalized government basing things on life events when you lose a job, or you're going on to college, or the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, how we organize services around that, again, to reduce all of that friction that currently exists in the system. And now with AI and digital government, we really have the ability to turbo charge that more than we've ever seen before. Who who are the politicians in America who you think are doing the best job of really kind of pushing into a new model where it's not okay, you know, when, you know, I'm not going to give you a job and you know, and then your kids and your families that are like that, but people who are like, you know, what we're going to try and do is just create a general framework where government helps, but it's not on the you know, it it a lot of different people, a lot of different innovation is happening. Well, I think when we look at from a bridge building standpoint, government politicians who have made that kind of a key part of their governing philosophy, one of the individuals we talk a lot about is John Hickenlooper, when he was mayor of Denver, and then governor of Colorado, extremely popular then across the different parties. And he made public private partnerships at the center of his governing philosophy, and he was always looking at how do we create mutual advantage between the sectors, always reaching out to them. And that actually brought in a lot of bipartisan support to support from companies. He was able to raise over $295 million towards these public initiatives. And that was at the very core of everything he did. And then as mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, again, you know, coming from the business community and coming from a foundation community, he deeply understood the sectors. And so again, that became a key part. So you can disagree with those sorts of other stuff you might have done, but those were two individuals who understood how to create mutual advantage between the sectors. Bloomberg is really interesting because, you know, I live in New York, so I talked to a lot of people who are, you know, both, you know, at every stratum of society. And one of the things particularly in the wake of Bill de Blasio and now Eric Adams, people who may not have liked many elements of Bloomberg. They're like, you know what, like, you know, trash was collected better. The roads were kept better for the most part. And it was a good business climate which made everything better off. Where, you know, but in Bloomberg, like, we're not going to see the likes of him very often, right? And I'm not, you know, totally saying he was great by any stretch. But that, you know, that type of person who has, you know, government experience, non-profit experience and business experience, like, you know, that just, he's kind of a unicorn in that, right? Well, Governor, I find really interesting is someone you've had in your podcast before is Governor Jared Paulus from Colorado. Yeah. Who I think is a little bit insane. He's like a centimillionaire from an online greeting card company. He really understands technology really well. I think that he's his beliefs are a little bit iconoclastic in certain ways, which I find really interesting in doing a really good job governing the state. And on the other side of the country in a way, he's no longer governor, but Larry Hogan as governor of Maryland is very pragmatic, business-oriented. And he, along with another moderate Republican, then Charlie Baker from Massachusetts, were two of the most popular governors in the country. What was, what, you know, what did Hogan do? And he's always being floated as like a third, you know, a no labels type candidate, et cetera, also had to work with a super democratic legislature and stuff. But like, what were, you know, what's the takeaway from, from a Larry Hogan that should be replicated in other places? The takeaway is problem solving. Focus on solving problems. He was very pragmatic. The state was run well. They had a lot of innovation and there was like workforce development, which is a huge issue in the country. Among most governors, the notion of upscaling the workforce to meet 21st century needs, whether it's an AI or, or solar or wind is really one of their most important topics, areas of issue-oriented. And what Hogan did as governor was they had something called Earn Maryland, which in contrast to most workforce development programs, it was industry led, which meant that they said, you know, industry knows a lot better than we do as government officials with their needs are. And so we're going to let them apply for grants together and we're going to give out competitive grants to industry and is usually different nonprofits who are running these different things. And they're going to, they're going to create the curriculum and they're going to change it. We're going to let them be very agile, depending on the very changing workforce needs. And that was just what, and it was very successful program we talk about in the book as a real model. And that's where a lot of other states are now going and work first development. But he had a lot of initiatives like that, which are very, very, I would say, pragmatic business minded focus on what works. What do you think of people like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, you know, Texas and Florida, and they very much kind of pushback. If you look at, you know, Texas, I talked to Jeff Bush recently, who's somebody you're very familiar with. But you know, Florida, California, Texas, New York are the four most populous states in the country. And it's an interesting thing where California and New York are very much kind of blue models of states. They have high taxes, high regulation, and they promise a high level of government services, whether they deliver that or not is a different question. Then, you know, Florida and Texas are red models, right, where they say we're going to cut government, we don't have an income tax, we don't regulate business as much. You know, are Abbott and DeSantis doing something right? Because that's like Florida had more people move to it than any other state last year. You know, how do you evaluate somebody like a DeSantis and Greg Abbott? Well, I don't want to comment on those individual politicians. The one thing I would say though, in the kind of climate we're in, which is so partisan and so ideological, that oftentimes we're failing to see some of the positives in a lot of different states. So let's say California right now, you know, California is pretty well positioned for the next step or the AI revolution with literally well over half of all of the leading AI companies out of California as well as climate tech and other areas. So I think a lot of the states have different things going for them. And what we should be looking at as a country, what are the different regions that are that are selling in different technology areas? And what are the best ways of supporting them, creating those economic climates for getting ready for this is really we're in the fourth industrial revolution, essentially, which is an AI and digital revolution, and we're going to have to compete against the rest of the world in that respect. So what's good in Florida though? I mean, leave DeSantis out. Why, you know, why are so many people moving there? Why are jobs growing there? It's just not my area necessarily. Okay. Let me ask as, you know, your first book, I believe was Revolution at the Roots, right? That you wrote with John O'Leary. And if I'm remembering correctly, that had a blurb from Newt Gingrich on it. And this was in the mid 90s. It was interesting. And I think with even by the end of the 90s, people recognize that Newt Gingrich was, you know, there's something wrong with him. But there was that interplay of like him and Bill Clinton who, you know, like weird twins, right? I mean, they're both sons of the south, they're both intellectual, you know, raised by kind of odd single mothers and distant fathers and all. I mean, it's just it's fascinating that they were around at the same time. But can you reflect a little bit on your like the political or ideological or intellectual journey that you've been on over the past 30 years? Because that I mean, you know, what did Revolution at the Roots get right? What did it get wrong? And, you know, where are you now in relation to where you started? Well, I think the most important thing about my intellectual journey is I've really tried to focus increasingly on what the data shows, what is the evidence show and to avoid what we talked about in one of our books, John and I, which is called the Tolstoy Syndrome, which essentially confirmation bias. And to really be focused on what's working, what's not working, how do we change these systems? Because, you know, at this at the city level, Nick, you can't govern by ideology. It just doesn't work. That's not how you get potholes filled or anything else. It's all about really nitty gritty of the system. So I really focused more and more of my time and attention on understanding these systems, understanding policy implementation, because I believe that when you look at a billion dollars going into think tanks in America in many respects, like the percentage of that that actually talks about how do you make these things work is very, very low. And even look at something like originally California electricity deregulation. It was passed unanimously. Yeah, which was the first sign that it was not a good idea. Yeah, because they essentially wrote it to pass the legislature not to work in the real world. And of course, Enron was able to game that system. So what they didn't spend enough time is war gaming all the ways that this could go wrong and really looking at market design. So my work has really been focused in that in that respect, looking at these systems and how do you structure the systems and markets and incentives the best way to create the most public value. Are you optimistic? I mean, we're in a very, you know, fraught polarized period, you know, and certainly discourse is not good. People seem to be more tribally identifying with one side or the other when it comes to Democrats and Republicans. Are you optimistic about, you know, the next five or 10 years of that changing? Or it's like it doesn't really matter. Well, it's one of the one of the reasons why I've always loved your work and that's where because you have pointed out time and time again, all the different ways things are getting better. And we have so much pessimism now, and almost nihilism in certain respects. And yet when you look at the next five to six years or so, the US is incredibly well positioned for the future, if we can take advantage of it. About three-fourths of the leading AI companies in the world out of the 50 top are from the US. We have the overwhelming number of companies that are engaged in climate technology and investments in that area. And space is another area. We do have the best kind of innovation ecosystem set up between universities, private sector, research labs, federal government funding and so forth in the world in many respects. And we're ranked number three behind Sweden and Switzerland, I believe in terms of innovation climate in the US. So there's there's a lot of really positive things there. And you don't read about that at all. And and the sentiment from voters is so negative in many respects. And it doesn't it doesn't actually connect with what the data shows. So is that a is that a problem that, you know, people are living, you know, they think they're living in a world that, you know, the dystopia that's mostly in their head? Well, obviously, some some people are suffering and relations been going up and everything. But even among the experts and among the people who are on TV, the reality right now. And when you look at the data, it doesn't jive at all with the negativism and the pessimism that we see. And it's not only in the US, we see some of this in a lot of other parts of the world. But I was just in India, six months ago, and absolutely amazing, so much more positive energy. But I was in something called the tech city in Hyderabad where there's hundreds of thousands of tech workers working it for US companies, international companies becoming middle class upper middle class. And 10 years ago, it didn't even exist. It was forest land. And so there's a lot of more hope there. And I just think we need to regain some of that hope in order to to move forward. Because, you know, as the work of Stephen Pinker has showed and others, a lot of things are getting a lot better. Final question. Put this in generational context. You know, it seems like younger people, younger millennials and Gen Z are pretty pessimistic. I mean, they have been they've been raised, marinating in a story about climate disaster and climate apocalypse about, you know, about not being able to afford a car or a house, not being able to get a full time job, all of these things, all of which I, you know, without going into detail, we can say, OK, these are all overblown. But, you know, is our younger generations likely to be optimistic? And, you know, if they are, or, you know, are they more likely to go into the private sector and to government? Or are they, you know, somebody like Peter Thiel at the end of zero to one, talked about how, you know, too many of us now, particularly young people, are waiting for the future to be invented rather than, you know, kind of doing it ourselves. You know, how do the dynamics that you're talking about play out among younger people? Well, I'm not an expert on generations. I have seen a lot of that data, which which I think is very concerning. But one area that I do find really interesting, I'm a big science fiction fan. And if you look at the science fiction from decades ago, Robert Heinlein and others, it was a lot of it showed this sort of utopian vision of the future that then inspired people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and many others. And the science fiction over the last few decades has almost all been dystopian. And so it's hard for people to see this really positive future, because you don't see a lot of it in our popular culture today. And so where do they get to see in terms of what the possibilities are? Because I think if you look out to 2040 and others when we have AI embedded into every element of our society in various ways, I think there's a lot to be optimistic about and bullish about. But if people never see that, if they never see the vision, that's I think that's really there's not a lot of positive stories about AI. Could you and I said that was the last thing I want to ask you real quick, you know, can you just very quickly sketch how AI is going to make everyday life better? Because no, it's fascinating. And it follows a very kind of understandable cycle, like a new technology reaches a certain level. And then everybody's like, this is the end of the world. And it's like, not really. But, you know, make can you make a quick case for how AI is going to make life better for us? Well, people talk about AI being the new electricity and all the different thing about all the different ways electricity changed our lives. Even in Manhattan, where you live, the development of the skyscrapers, it used to be if you're really wealthy, you'd live on the bottom floors because you didn't want to walk high. So electricity went into every element of our lives in manufacturing and the homes and everything and it transformed it. But it took us a couple of decades to figure out all the changes and processes to realize that. Now, what's actually going to happen a little bit faster, I think, with AI, but just think about things such as foreign languages. Well, there's already something out today where I can be speaking to you. You can be speaking in Japanese and I can be speaking in Italian of an older, but I don't know if it counts as utopian or dystopian, but Douglas Adams, the hitchhiker's guide, the whole kind of idea of a babble fish, which is one of them is called, right? Yeah. So there's that. And I guess there's things like helping to maintain schedules and things like that. Think about writing. Yeah. You know, a lot of people aren't that great at writing. It's their third language, second language, and all of a sudden they could put them through an AI tool and that is able to do that. You have the world's knowledge at your fingertips and you're able to pull all of that. We're going to have productivity increases go up. We're probably going to have more leisure time. We're not going to be tied to our phones anymore because it's going to be with gestural sort of interfaces in the real world. Anytime we go to see any sort of a monument or anything else, we'll be able to understand the history of it. Just looking at it from augmented reality. We won't need to chain children to desks, sitting in desks all day long because they'll be out in the real world learning about it. And with a digital overlay over it, there's a million ways it's going to be really exciting. And we're seeing the kind of exponential breakthroughs right now in AI. The technology is increasing at the kind of rate that we saw with Moore's law in the digital technologies. And so we don't know exactly how it's all going to turn out, but I tell you, I'm pretty excited about it. Yeah. Is there anything that can really kind of screw that up? Well, obviously, you've got to have the right regulatory regimes and we're looking at a lot of that. Preferably little to none, either from my side. But for the rest, there's some harm that can be prevented. Obviously, I think a lot of the fears on some of the very existential fears people have on AI right now are way overblown. We're not anywhere near artificial general intelligence right now. Certainly, from a warfare perspective and so on and drones and autonomous drones, I think there's some real dangers there. But certainly, there's a lot of different dangers, but we always have faced those with different technologies and we've been able to overcome them. And I think we understand what those are better now than we did with social media technologies of two decades ago. Yeah. All right. We're going to leave it there. The book is Bridge Builders, How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems. The co-author is William D. Eggers. Will, thank you for talking to reason. Thanks, Nick. Great to be back with you.