John White, Program Administrator at Washington DOT

[00:00:00] Speaker A: There's a path, and if you don't set barriers for yourself, right. And you kind of go about it like, you know, I want. This is where I'm going to start, and this is like, the things that I'm passionate about. It will take you down a path. Like, there will be a path that will unfold as you're going, and you just got to find that starting place, right? That foot in the door, that thing. That's like something you're passionate about, you're interested in, and just roll with it and it will evolve. But don't set barriers for yourself. Right. You know, people have a tendency to do that. Well, I can't do this. I can't do that. I'll never achieve that, you know, and it just limits yourself. Right. You know, is. Is this, at the end of the day, gonna, you know, prevent you from maybe achieving what you could? [00:00:42] Speaker B: That was a clip from today's guest, John White. You know, sometimes you meet people and they have a direct impact on your life. Cause you work with them or they mentor you or they coach you or you have some kind of, like, direct involvement. And other times, you people have impact on your life from afar. They're doing something, and you're kind of the audience to that thing, and that thing has, you know, a positive impact on your life. Today's guest is someone, uh, who. Who did that for me. We've met and kind of became an audience to his stuff through puck and hardcore. But then, since then, is also one of the first people that I knew who had gone on to be, like, a real deal professional that I could kind of, like, be. Be like, oh, like, you can be a professional and have a career and, like, have a LinkedIn and also still be, like, your authentic self or real self. Still kind of come from a place of, like, being a community centered punk person and go on and have a career. So it's really cool to have him on the show today, and I hope you get as much out of it as. As I know I'm going to. So with that, please rate reviews subscribe to the podcast. My name is Aram Arslanian, and this is one step beyond Jon. Welcome to the show. [00:02:04] Speaker A: Thanks, Arim. Great to be here. Really excited to chat. [00:02:08] Speaker B: I've been super stoked to have you on here. There's a lot of stuff that I want to get into today, but let's start with the easiest for the uninitiated, for those who don't know, who are you and what do you do? [00:02:17] Speaker A: Well, as you mentioned, my name's John White, but what I do is. My title is program administrator for the Puget Sound Gateway program. What does that mean? I work for the Washington State Department of Transportation, so I work in the government realm and infrastructure and transportation. And I spent the largest majority of my career managing what is referred to in, at least in Washington state and nationally as megaprojects. So they're what's called a program that's composed of a bunch of different projects that tend to be over a billion dollars. So the one that I manage right now called the Puget Sound Gateway programs, we're up to about 2.7 billion and growing as we work towards completing it. So I've worked three decades now, and as I think you were alluding to in transportation as an engineer, don't know if I ever, as my younger years, would have ever seen myself in this role, never envisioned working in transportation, actually, when I was going to school for engineering. But life takes you on unpredictable paths, and so I've been doing this for a long time. I love what I do working in the realm of government and the bureaucracy that comes with it. It's a unique world. There's politics and a lot of public exposure that comes with it. It can be good and can be bad, but, yeah, so I've been doing that for a long time, and I've been involved in some of the bigger, bigger projects and programs in the Puget Sound. Spent a number of years involved with the replacement of the Alaskan Way viaduct, if you're familiar with Seattle, the double decked for freeway that was along the waterfront. That now is a tunnel. At the time it was built, it was the largest tunnel of its kind. I think now it's not anymore because people are always breaking engineering records. And I was also spent a number of years managing the replacement of the 520 floating bridge, which was a very unique experience. One of a kind bridge, longest floating bridge in the world. You know, been involved with this program now for about six years. [00:04:17] Speaker B: Heck, yeah. All right, let's. Let's break it down. Like, let's go to some of the basics. So I think most people listening would know what the infrastructure is. But if you want to just kind of give us a. Just a general sense when people referring to infrastructure and then, like, maybe specific to transportation, what are we really talking about here? [00:04:33] Speaker A: Well, I mean, it's very much multidisciplinary, so it's easy to kind of just say transportation or infrastructure. In my case here, we're talking about roads, bridges, walls, drainage, all the things that come with building highways, tunnels, bridges. I went to school for civil engineering. That's pretty common in my field. Some people specialize in transportation engineering, but some people specialize in structural engineering. Some people specialize in geotechnical engineering, which is subsurface soils. Some people specialize in stormwater engineering. So those are all kinds of disciplines that play into what I do. I've spent most of my career managing projects or programs that are composed of projects. So I work in a world where I'm working with, you name it, all the disciplines. I mentioned working with architects at times, sometimes there's buildings or other facilities or architectural elements. [00:05:33] Speaker B: So I'm going to make a reference here because for the audience, we both come from punk and hardcore. So I'm going to make a reference here, and I want to relate it to something in your world. Sometimes when I'm working with clients or even just talking to people who don't know much about music or haven't been a part of creating music, I'm like, the easiest part of putting a good record out is writing a song that's like the easiest, easiest part of it. And it could be like an okay song or a great song. It's super easy. But putting out a great record is super complex because you can write a really cool song, you can have really cool lyrics, but then you have to go and record it. And you got to hope that the audio engineer knows what they're doing and the room sounds cool and their equipment sounds right, and that you get the right sounds for your record. And then you got to hope that the person who masters your or then the mixing of the record is right. And then you got to hope the mastering of the record is right. But that's not enough, because then you also have to think about the artwork and how the art looks for the record, and then where you get the record actually made, like, the actual physical components of the record. And then you got to hope your record label does a good job and the distribution is good. Putting out a good record, writing a song is the simplest thing, but getting a great record out of the world from start to finish is, like, infinitely complex, relies on a ton of different people from a ton of different disciplines. So relate that to building a road anywhere, like even a country road. [00:06:51] Speaker A: That's a great analogy. And the things I mentioned were the technical side of it. You've got all these engineers and people with technical backgrounds and skills and expertise. But what I didn't mention is these roads, bridges, infrastructure that you're building are in communities, they go through communities, they affect people. Whether it's closing roads and inconveniencing people on their commutes, which we all experience regularly, or you are doing something to change the context of the commute where somebody lives. That's the trick. And I think transportation engineering infrastructure in general is you have to engage the community, you have to engage the people that live there, the people that work there, the local governments, and you need to communicate with them. You need to receive input, you need to listen, you need to take that to heart and integrate that into what you do. And then you need to have a reasonable amount of transparency and clear and consistent communication as you go through delivering these projects, from planning, through design, through constructing it. And if you fail at any one of those things, or you're weak in any one of those things, you won't have a fully successful project. Somebody's going to look back on it, you'll never make everybody happy. That's the other thing in my world is you can never make everybody happy, period. It comes with the job. Whatever you're doing is somebody's not going to like, maybe it's just the construction impacts, they're not going to like maybe it's not going to be that you built something that they didn't think was the right thing to build or wasn't necessary, or it affects their community in ways that they think are negative. There's just no way around it. One of the things I learned kind of early on in my management career, I went to, I went through some training that was actually done by some consultants from, I want to say they're from the Netherlands, but they were taught informed consent and it always stuck with me in my head because its really kind of at the heart of what I do. You need to communicate with all of the right people. Like I mentioned, you need to engage them in good faith. Work through the compromises, work through decision making as best you can, the collaboration that comes with that. But at the end of the day, again, not everybodys going to be happy, but you need to make enough of the people happy and the right people happy at the end of the day to be able to have a successful project. And some projects end up being really transformative. And people realize that when you're done they're like, this is amazing. Even though at the beginning in the playing they couldn't see the path to get there and they didn't believe there would be positive, the benefits would be there. In hindsight, when you're done than they realize it. Right. And like the water. The alaskan way viaduct, good example, everybody. When we were planning it. You're going to take away my view from the bridge. Yeah. And I lived in west Seattle. I drove it all the time. [00:10:06] Speaker B: I loved that bridge. [00:10:07] Speaker A: Everybody loved driving that bridge because you could look at the Olympics and Puget Sound, and it was beautiful. It was like nothing like a drive. Like nothing like it. Right. But if you look at the Seattle waterfront and whats happening with it now, its absolutely transformative. Huge boulevard, shared use. Paths and walkways are pocket beaches. Theyre connecting the market down to the aquarium. So its all integrated, and you can walk everythings walkable and bikeable and scooterable and whatever. Right. And what was happening under the viaduct was the viaduct separated the business part of downtown and the market from the waterfront. And if you're thinking about public benefits and experiences, and of course I was thinking tourism and business, money is always an element. And things like this, connecting those things and taking away this barrier that was noisy and there was dust and broken down cars under it, drug use under it, all kinds of unsavory things. You take that away and you integrate everything so everything's walkable and easily accessible. You change the whole dynamic of downtown. But when we were planning it, people were just couldn't. People had a hard time with the vision. A lot of people won a bridge, the CAC. No way. Over our dead body, essentially. So it's compromises. We work through a lot of politics, a lot of difficult compromises, and it's all taking shape today. And people are like, wow, this is incredible. Or not everybody loves it, right? [00:11:59] Speaker B: Dude, it's so funny you say that. Monica and I and our youngest went down to see Monica's brother and his family, and we went down to the aquarium and all this stuff. I hadn't been down there in years and years in that area. And I remember thinking like, oh, this is way cooler. I didn't realize so much development. I was like, oh, I didn't realize how cool this area was when actually it's probably become cool and much more usable, much more livable in the past few years as a result. [00:12:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, these big projects like that, right? The Alaska may viaduct program was like a, I don't know, over $3 billion program. Just the contract to go and take it down and then build this tunnel was well over a billion dollars. These projects, these big projects that I've been involved with, they play out over many years. There's sometimes decades of planning that are required to get to design and construction. So there's a long burn. People can spend your whole career almost on a. On something like this. So, yeah, if you go there now, and the city of Seattle has been doing kind of building out their parts of it. Yeah, you've got a boulevard down there, and you've got gigantic amounts of public space. You've got the commercial side of it, where the buildings that were dilapidated and probably underutilized right next to the viaduct are now transforming into different uses, condos, restaurants, coffee, whatever things that activate public space versus. It was just a ghost town and noisy and dirty and kind of gross. [00:13:41] Speaker B: It was a ghost town. So I'm going to give a call back to one of our earlier episodes. We did this interview with a friend of ours named Pat, who does hand painted signs, and he's keeping that art live of hand painted signs. And he was talking a lot about how when there was a switch from hand painted signs and murals and all these things to things that were like, more like vinyl or digital or whatever, how it changed the livability of a space, because the space wasn't as visually stimulating before, and it did like, the environment wasn't necessarily like a work of art anymore. And how the importance of having things like hand painted signs adds to the livability of a space from a visual perspective. It creates a meaning and a context for a place that you're in. The stuff that you're talking about. If I think about that space, and I really liked what you said, usable public space, it's that there was space, but it wasn't space that the public would necessarily be using, accessing, experiencing. So it has a similar sense of creating a space that has a context and is. Is viable for people to experience the city in. [00:14:51] Speaker A: Yeah, it's place making, right. And it's, you know, and it's got, you know, at the heart of it's urban planning, but it's built around transportation and kind of a transformative change in the transportation system. So there's really notable projects. You look nationally, internationally, the ones that stand out are things that do things like that, that are, you know, are unique in different ways. You know, I was involved in the, you know, say the floating bridge replacement. That wasn't, you know, that didn't change a space. It changed people's experience, I suppose, like you, you go across the floating bridge, and one of the things I was involved with that was really cool on that was the architectural design. The previous bridge was pretty plain. And the new bridge has, you know, architectural features it has these features that are called sentinels, but these features that light up now can be lit up. And if you drive down there, you'll see for different events and different times of the year, they turn them on and the colors change and things. So there's things like that that change the experience. It's still a bridge from one point to another. It's not transformative. The program I'm involved with now has some transformative elements, but those are more environmental restoration. You know, we're doing some environmental restoration that comes with the program I'm involved with now is building new freeways, essentially building sections of new freeways that were missing links in the Seattle area or the Puget Sound area. So they're not in downtown Seattle. They're kind of south King county and north Pierce county, kind of near Tacoma. But we're completing these corridors that were never finished back in the sixties and seventies, and they were just left unfinished. The only ones just about in the whole state that are left like this. So its very unique because you dont see new road construction like that in the state of Washington. Maybe some states do it more than others, but its pretty rare, especially around here. [00:16:52] Speaker B: What do you mean they were left unfinished? [00:16:54] Speaker A: These are highways that were always meant to connect to I five. So when you think about transportation highways in my world, but even with light rail, rail transit, it's all about a network. It's a network, a transportation network. And you have all these different modes and ways to get around cars, buses, bikes, pets, the whole multimodal world of transportation. And these were two corridors that were supposed to have been connected to I five and never were I cities incorporated back around, back in those days. Some of this was before the cities around Seattle incorporated. When the cities incorporated and developed, it became harder. You couldn't build a freeway where you had planned. They had originally planned it because development had happened in both of the corridors that are part of this program that I oversee. We had to rethink, pick it up from where they left off in the seventies, where these corridors stopped abruptly and rethink the pathway to connect them to I five, which is what is at the heart of this program that I managed, Puget Sound Gateway. A lot of the messaging in the program is around freight mobility, because the ports are disconnected from the distribution centers and things and the airport. They're disconnected in ways that make things very inefficient for them. And completing these corridors helps with that. But we're also doing things like building miles and miles of shared use paths and things for bikes and peds and scooters and whatnot. So we're doing a lot of things that ultimately be transformative because you're giving people options they don't have today, and real options where you can, especially if you live and work within a certain area, you might be able to get around without getting in your car naturally. [00:19:03] Speaker B: What defines a megaproject? [00:19:04] Speaker A: Well, typically, the definition tends to be, at least the standard in the United States, maybe internationally, is a billion dollars and overdose with a b. That's a lot of dollars. And I think it's hard for people and even myself, it's kind of surreal sometimes to stop and think and go, wow, $2.7 billion. That's a lot. I mean, when you think about what that could do, different uses for that much money, some of the problems, social problems in the country and other things, it's really interesting to try to wrap your mind around it. But I think for myself, I think part of some of what we were talking about before this started was when you come up through, when you live your life up to a professional point in that kind of DIY kind of world and structured around music and things, you kind of think about things differently. You just think about things. So, for me, $2.7 billion is a lot. I mean, I respect it. I take it seriously, and I think it's an opportunity to explain to people how much things cost people. The public always wants everything kind of right, and they want it, and they want it at no cost. But things don't come at no cost. And the cost of building things is really expensive, and it leads to kind of think about, well, where's your money best invested? What can you do with that? What are the alternates? Sometimes, what can you do? It's maybe more cost efficient. In the case of the program that I oversee completing these freeways, there's no way to. We do things to, we call it practical solutions, practical design, value engineering. Those are terms we use, and we do things to kind of streamline it and reduce costs, make things more efficient in the design and construction. But at the end of the day, it's just really expensive to build big things like this. [00:21:15] Speaker B: So what does it take to lead at that level? Uh, you'd mentioned a lot about it sounds clear that there's, like a whole science behind it. And even saying, like, there's like, value engineering, this kind of engineering, that kind of engineering. And you went through a lot of the dis, the discipline, so there's a lot of science behind it, but there's also an art to it when you're talking about, like listening to the community, how you message and all that. So how does one lead and then create a leadership culture around something like that so that you're doing something that's meaningful for a community or a city or a state, but also is making as many people as happy and satisfied as possible? [00:21:51] Speaker A: Trey, that's a great question. And there's lots of different leadership styles. Right. And I've worked for people who were kind of more authoritarian, kind of more directorial. You go and do this and Warren is open to other ideas and things like that. I've certainly learned a lot coming up. I've worked for people that I wouldn't want to replicate their approach. I've also worked for people that I've considered great mentors and I've taken away lots of great things for, and sometimes the people that were hard to work for, you learn what not to do or how you don't want to present yourself. I think the way I go about it is I have to ultimately make big decisions and I need to communicate them upward to leadership at the state. I'm not too far removed from the secretary of transportation who leads transportation for the state, at least for the state department, transportation and the mega programs. There's a lot of money, a lot of politics. There's a lot at stake. I take that all really seriously. But I go about things, treating everybody fairly and with dignity and trying to hear everybody out to the best of my ability. I don't consider myself, I can sit down next to an intern or kind of the lowest person in the food chain of our organization and have to think. I can just have a casual conversation with them, talk about what they are doing on the project, as well as sit down, report to the secretary of transportation on what our key issues are and legislative issues or other political issues, things like that, challenges we have equally. And so I really don't. It's funny, people will kind of say things like, especially some of the people that are kind of lower in the organization who I don't get to see very regularly, don't know me. It's like you hear things like the big boss or whatever or that kind of person that you see their name, but you don't know who they are. And I hear things like that. I'm like, I just laugh. I'm just another person doing their job. But I'm really all about partnership, collaboration. I mean, these are all, I mean, I guess you could call them buzzwords, but when you take it to heart, right? It's listening. It's hearing people out. I think one of the things I've learned along the way is the best teams are diverse teams where you've got a lot of different voices for different perspectives and those combined to make something bigger and better than each of the individual parts. I think there was times in my career earlier on I was thinking about this on the drive up here. I was probably more inclined to talk at people more, and I don't know if it came across as lecturing or this or that, but I think I've learned and I try to really have self realization, be aware of how I present myself. I think I've come a long way in just trying to listen to everybody, hear all the elements out of present my ideas in a way that's softer, not saying it needs to be this way or I'm just going to make this abrupt decision. It's more of asking questions of people. You can get to decisions even if you're pretty confident of the path when there's other voices in the mix. Some of the ways you can get there is by asking questions or saying, well, if you think there's flaws in approach, getting at it versus casually dismissing something and saying, well, that's not going to work. Thanks. Thanks for the idea, but that's not going to work. You ask questions about it that uncover why it wouldn't work in your world. [00:25:52] Speaker B: Though, because there's huge amounts of money at stake. And of course, when anything's ever a government function, there's a lot of different boxes that need to be checked. So there's huge amounts of money. There's a lot of different process and things that need to be. To be checked. What you're doing is highly complex, and there's also a, like, deep need, like, public need for these things, even though maybe sometimes the public doesn't see it, understand it, or agree with it. So a lot of competing things going on there, plus normal human dynamics of people who want power, money, whatever, it is a lot of stuff to manage at any level of leadership. So if you kind of thinking back on your career, what are some of the things that were tougher things that you had to really learn and, like, coach yourself or get coached into being able to, like, deal with? [00:26:44] Speaker A: I think. I think early on in my career, I figured out, I kind of look at people that come through engineering. Yeah, you'll hear stereotypical engineer. You know, there tends to be people that think very technical minded, very regimented. That was never me. It was never me, even through school and things. That was just not me. I think early on I found my pathway towards management because I was able to communicate and step back and look at things in the bigger picture of how things fit together. And not everybody can do that, I suppose, or not everybody can do that as effectively. And so I think that's the path I went down, because I was able to engage people in the communities effectively and engage people that worked for the local governments or other transportation agencies, and kind of use the building blocks and put the building blocks together and kind of figure out different approaches and navigate that process. I think that's kind of the path I naturally took. And so I think I work with a lot of very technically oriented people, very smart, sharper, that do things I could never do. And I'm very much conscious of that, and I respect it, and I listen to them, and I listen to. I don't always agree, or sometimes I challenge them. Somebody will analyze something, whatever kind of suggests that it has to be this way. But again, if it doesn't feel like it's the right fit or doesn't fit within the context, when you use the right lines of questioning, you can figure out that there's other ways to get to the same conclusion, or a better version of an outcome that might fit the context of the community better, or the need for the project. I think thats where ive done well. There was back in the two thousands I inherited this project that had been stalled out for a couple of years. Its right down at the stadiums, the highway that goes from downtown Seattle and the stadium district over to I 90 and I five. And there was a last portion of this project that had never been completed, and nobody could agree. The stadiums and the port and the freight people in the city, nobody could agree. And the mariners were involved, the sports teams were involved, and labor was involved because of the ports right next to it. And so I kind of, when I was involved with the viaduct replacement, I got handed this as like a side project. It needed to be revived, it needed to be complete, and had just been sitting there dormant for quite a while. And there was funding that was just sitting there, not being utilized because nobody could agree. I think we came into it and just looked at what had been on the table before. And I guess one of the things id say here at this point, maybe, is I work with a lot of consultants. So especially in the bigger, complex stuff, it tends to be very consultant heavy mega programs, by their nature, you cant hire enough state employees with the right skills and qualifications to do this work using just government employees. So it tends to be a smaller group of state people and a lot of consultants that are very specialized people who are the best of the best often, and we just wipe the slate clean and we just said, okay, let's re envision this thing. What are the possibilities? What are the constraints when it comes to transportation and things like this and building? If you were to say, we need to widen this road right in front of your house, there's a lot of constraints. There's houses on both sides really close. Something's got to go. So in this case, you had stadiums and all these other facilities, businesses, and then you had the constraints of the highways themselves, the interstate that you're trying to connect to. But we were able to envision different ways to get to an outcome that ultimately satisfied the stakeholders and partners. I dont really like the word stakeholders that much. I like the word partners better because youre trying to establish trust and relationships with the people that have to buy into this project and support it. We invested huge amounts of time meeting with them on these big projects. You establish committees, essentially, of the stakeholders or partners. You work through these things collaboratively. Ultimately, we were able to get there. The project won some awards. In the end. We had to make some compromises. We had to add some things to the project that added a bunch of scope, added costs. So you're adding things to it that adds cost. Had to go back and get some help on funding to complete it, but at the end of the day, it works. Well, it met the vision. You know, the, you know, the stadium was happy, the sports teams were happy, freight got what they needed, the peds and, you know, the stadiums that needed pet access and transit access to the parking lot, access to the stadiums got what they needed, but it was a hard road to get there. Many, many hours of intense work. [00:32:29] Speaker B: Let's, let's pop back into your personal history about how you got here, because how does a kid from like Southern Connecticut get into punk and hardcore and find him way into like, leading mega projects in the Seattle area? [00:32:45] Speaker A: So I'll do a short version of this, I guess. You know, as we were chatting about, you know, I grew up in kind of the New York commuter suburbs, you know, and, you know, my dad was an engineer, a structural engineer. He was the quintessential stereotypical geeky engineer. Technical. I had technical knowledge way beyond anything I could ever retain in my brain. The pocket protector kind of calculator kind of model. But I grew up watching what he did. And that's, I think, probably stoked my. Ultimately my interest in how I landed engineering. But, you know, as you mentioned, you know, I was very involved. Like, I was always, like, intensely involved in music and passionate about music, you know, from very, very early years. Like, I. My first concert, I think, was when I finally got to the point where my parents would let me take the train in to the city, because it was New York was Manhattan was, like, a little less an hour train ride from where I lived. Yeah. Went into the city, see blue eyes or cult. [00:33:52] Speaker B: So, you know, what year was that? [00:33:55] Speaker A: Well, I think the decade starts with. I think it was actually. It might have been 1980 or 79, maybe, like, around then. I'm really. I'm old. It was. It was, you know, back then, I. And so I was really into music. And as I kind of was kind of finishing up high school, I saw some concerts, you know, and things that started to kind of transform the direction I took. You know, I. I saw the clash open up for the who. I went to go see the who, but then the clash opened up. You can actually, you know, there's. There's a record and a cd of the clash playing shea stadium, you know. So I went to see that. I was like, wow, like, you know, this is. You know, that was very transformative. I remember seeing the talking heads, you know, like, right at the kind of end of high school, like, stop making sense and things. I went to high school, I think I was mentioning to you with some kids that were into a hardcore. The only hardcore punk band in the entire town called the Vatican Commandos, known for. The only thing they're known for, probably outside of nerdy hardcore archivists, is the fact that Moby was in the band. But I went to school with them, and I was always fascinated by them. Chat them up in classes and things like that. And I went down to Florida to go to school. And in trying to find my place there, I immediately latched onto the college radio station. And in doing so, I met some people who are from the kind of punk and hardcore world that did these, like, late night radio shows. You know, like just chaotic punk hardcore shows. Noise, you know, you name it. And so I interned at the radio station, worked my. Earned a dj slot, and started doing these late night shows. And it was a radio station that would get all of the records. You get SST, touch and go, revelation. All the stuff would come in. This was in the eighties, and Tang records, all the things that are kind of like the eighties scene, discord we get them all. I just. You like a sponge, right? Absorbing it. One of the other dj's who was a roommate was, was played in a band that were called american waist, you know, like mid eighties Florida. He was like a year ahead of me but you know, mid eighties Florida hardcore. And I just, you know, really immersed myself in that world. I graduated with an undergraduate degree after spending one of the things I'll say about my, here's something that says something about myself in that intersection between personal life and the things you love more personally and professionally. I did this balancing act all through school, undergraduate and graduate school, where I was spending as much or more time with music and skating, probably trying to surf, but not doing a very great job. I spend more time doing that stuff than school and I do this minimum I need to do well enough in school that do something with it. I came out to Seattle and I got a job with an engineering company doing construction, inspection of foundations and things like that. And I showed up here and I'm like just spent four years just completely immersed in the Florida music scene and things. I came out here looking for where are my people here? And I started going to shows at this place called the community world theater in Tacoma. Back at the, this was teen dance ordinance days in Seattle. There werent a lot of all ages shows. I was always older than everybody else. Kind of was like the older kid, I suppose, because I was kind of a generation ahead of the underage kids. But I started going to Tacoma because that was where they had all these great shows like Fugazi and SNFU, Circle jerks sometimes all the shows I saw there, but they were having all these shows there and it was this really rough part of Tacoma called Hilltop at the time. It was like a full on gang war area actually, at the time. And so I go to shows there and I met this guy Greg Anderson, who had been, who was in this band False Liberty. And I think false Liberty, I met him and I met Vic who had been the drummer of False Liberty. I met them at the community World Theater going to shows. And I'm like, oh yeah, these guys. I'm walking around like wishing well records, t shirts and things and early revelation stuff. So eighties and gag, nasty shirts, whatever you represent yourself, what you're like is your tribe or whatever, your subgroup and you just latch onto people, right? So I'm walking around wearing band shirts like I usually do and I meet Greg and Vic. And so we kind of forged a friendship that led to kind of initiating a band called brotherhood, that my tenure in it was maybe like eight months or something. And me and Greg had a falling out. And that led to, you know, my friend, who I also had a little bit of falling out, this guy, Ron Guardipe, who's infamous in Seattle, like, just a legend, you know, really kind of taking that band to, like, where it was meant to go. But, you know, I think all that time while I was doing that, I was working in engineering, you know, so I was doing that. The band fell apart, or my role in the band fell apart. I was doing a zine at the time called open your eyes. I was trying to start a record label that ultimately failed to get off the ground. And I kind of had this moment, I think, with the band falling apart and things where I was like, I felt like I needed to continue my education. I think in the world of engineering, especially at that time, there was a certain perception that if you didn't have a master's degree, you need the credentials if you really want to take it to the next level. So I went back to school in Florida, and what's interesting is, again, like, I did this balancing act between going to graduate school and engineering. And I was in a band there. I was booking shows the entire time I was down there, I booked shows. I was like. And this is. We were talking about DIy culture, right? You can be in a band if somebody else can get there and scream or with whatever semi limited amount of talent, you know, you can find a way to do it. You can find, you know, these other people can just put on a show at a hall or some club. Why can't I do it? Same with zines. I was, you know, a fan. Loved zines. I'm going to do it myself. So I started doing shows and I did that. And you know what? I continued through my education at the same time doing this balancing act between world of music and things and education. And ultimately, I got my masters. I had to do a thesis. I swear, I barely. I think I barely got out of that school because I was. Our band did a tour of the east coast. It was totally ill fated, just a disaster. I'm supposed to be doing my thesis. And we did this tour up to Connecticut. Like, half the shows canceled. I think because we weren't, like. We had, like a seven inch or two out. It was called gasoline. We weren't. We were trying to be, like, probably something like turning point or something back then, but we weren't. It was just a weird hodgepodge of a band. But we played shows. We played some good shows. One of the things when you book shows is you can play with good bands. Playing bands, shows with shelter and 411 and all these bands I liked. But ultimately I wrapped up my thesis somehow or another by like just barely. Like there. There was this thing I think I had down to the day I had to finish my thesis. And if I went like one day longer and there's a committee that has to approve it. If I. If I went like a day or a week longer, I would have had to take a whole nother quarter of classes. And I pulled it off like right down to the wire. And then I'm sitting there going, okay, well, now what am I going to do? And I'd worked out here. All my connections were out here. My family had migrated out here from Connecticut because one half of my family was originally from Seattle. So I have family connections in Seattle. So I moved to Seattle. And ultimately moving back to Seattle is how I ended up at the department of transportation. And I think you can probably appreciate this. There's people, I suppose there's people out there that have some kind of vision for themselves upfront, have it all mapped out. But the reality for most people is you take this winding path that has things in it that you never expect or would have never been able to predict. And I came back out here and the company id worked for was actually laying off people because the economy had kind of bounced off the early nineties. And so I wasnt able to come back full time there. So I was kind of working there part time and applying to other jobs. And Dot was hiring. A lot of the consultants weren't hiring because the work had dried up a bit. And so I'm like, transportation? That sounds interesting. I'd never focused on transportation in school, but I'm like, I'll give it a shot. And so I got hired by Department of Transportation as a construction inspector. And that's kind of where it all started. But I think even into the nineties, when I come out here in Seattle, I was still kind of involved in some zines, doing a zine called rust with friends and things and kind of helping out to promote shows or book some shows. I was still kind of doing that balancing act between the thing I loved, music and the whole culture, that kind of independent underground scene especially. But as my career kind of grew and new opportunities presented themselves, I think at the end of the day, I just wasn't able to keep doing the balancing act as effectively. But I kind of walked away from the hands on stuff in the music scene and just became just another person going to shows and participating. [00:44:37] Speaker B: So there's so much stuff I want to comment on there first. Rest in peace, Ronnie. Yep, gone too soon and never, never be forgotten for all that stuff. [00:44:45] Speaker A: Legend in Seattle to this day. [00:44:48] Speaker B: Never be forgotten, man. And one of a kind. [00:44:52] Speaker A: Absolutely. They broke the model. There was a one off model that was Ron Gwartape, and that model was broken when he was created, and there was no the personality. Right. He's one of those people with a larger than life personality. And, you know, there's people that stand out like that. They're just like, you know, just overwhelming at times, but just, like, at their heart, like a great person. And, you know, Ron and I had our love hate affair over the years, you know, and we'd have falling outs, and then we'd, you know, reconnect and hug it all out, and we're besties again. And, you know, I think that's where we left it, you know, after he moved back to Spokane. Things. I always loved hanging out with Ron, but, yeah, so I think. And one of the things about me is I kind of compartmentalize my life a little bit, just to be honest. I still go to shows. My best friends and the people that I'm closest to, they're not people I work with, because it's just nothing. The people that I work with don't identify with those things that are my passions, for the most part. In general, I haven't certainly come across many in the engineering sphere. I like that. So it's mostly people from the music or art scene. Those are the people clubs, people involved in promoting shows and things. Those are still, some of my closest friends still have friends in their fifties doing bands. [00:46:33] Speaker B: Heck, yeah. [00:46:33] Speaker A: In the scene, right? [00:46:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So I want to hit a few things here. So you were. And I said this to you before we started, you were one of the first people that I could point to and be like, oh, that person has their shit together. And I'm not speaking globally, like, every single part of your life. But when I started kind of thinking about, like, well, geez, what do I actually want to do with my life? I knew I didn't want to be like, I'm not a good musician. I still stink a guitar. I started playing guitar when I was 15, and I stink still to this day. And people will kind of be like, no, you don't stink. I'm like, I definitely stink. I can't play anything outside of a Ramon song. [00:47:12] Speaker A: Well, that's like me. I'm not one of these brainiac engineers that has these technical skills are just mind boggling. I'm not, that's not me, right. [00:47:24] Speaker B: And. But what I have always been good at is bringing people together to make something happen. It's always been. And it's something I like doing. Like, I like creating and I like bringing people together. But anyways, I was kind of thinking, what am I going to do? I was super focused on music, super focused on bands, and I was, we had met just by chance at a show and I kind of became aware of what you did professionally. And I was always like, that guy still goes to shows, he does a scene, he's like part of these things. He has a master's degree. And it really, I don't like, basically it's like, you know, a path is easier to walk when someone else has walked it out of you. And of course, what I do is not what you do as not engineering, but when you see people who have been able to stay like kind of their authentic selves stay kind of like this, kind of like outsider you'd mentioned earlier, kind of being a bit of a black sheep in your personal life and your family world and staying who you are while also developing like a really meaningful career where you do something of like real substance that, that at least matters to you. You were the first people I could look to and be like, oh, no, that person actually has their shit together for whatever that means in this. And going to school for me was always like, I grew up in Calgary. I moved out to Vancouver under the guise of going to university, but I really just moved out here to go to hardcore shows and to play in bands and absolutely appreciate that. Well, your whole story about writing your thesis, I remember when I finished my last work for my master's degree, I sent it off and was looking at the clock like, oh, shit. Although I had mere minutes, it was like, you had a deadline that you had to submit it or you had to extend it to another quarter. And I was like, literally, I was like, I hope nothing goes wrong with the Internet, because if it does, fuck, I got it in. And then I literally went to go play a show that night. I was like, I gotta run to the show now. I think I was on stage within like 45 or like, you know, like an hour and a half or something. [00:49:27] Speaker A: I love that. [00:49:27] Speaker B: But school was never the focus. It was always, always music. And that's how I sold it to my parents. When I moved out here to go to university, I was like, oh, you know, I'm gonna UBC. It's this great university. And my parents are like, what do you even wanna do? Like, great university for what? I'm like, it's just a great university. So I came out, I did school, and I was going to be a teacher, and you and I met ish around that time. And then I started getting much more serious about, like, having a career. I got into the idea of being a therapist. I'd done some volunteer work at a addiction center for youth. I got into the idea and I knew that I had to take, like, a more serious path. Like, I had to get my ba, I had to get certifications, I had to get a master's degree. And it launched me on this whole thing, this whole path. But at the same time, I kept playing music, I kept touring. Like, I was involved in all of the stuff that people get involved in with all that stuff. And I always kind of kept your path in mind because it's like really trying to balance doing two things. I really did want to have a career, and I really, really was actually focused on at this point in my life. But I was like, oh, yeah, I want to go to Europe and tour for six weeks. I want to do that too. And I was able to through just some miracle. Like, it was just like, it's kind of how you keep your engine going on a tour van. It's like duct tape, go. And a bunch of prayers. I hope this thing doesn't break down. How I kept my education and my career going while also doing band stuff. And when I got through the big push of band stuff and I was like, okay, I'm not going to do this as my main focus anymore. And it just, like, it just hit me one day I'm like, okay, I'm ready to kind of focus on my professional career, a whole new way. Of all the energy I had dispersed on that, I understood what it was like to bring all your focus into your professional career, and then what happens from there? And it was like I lit like a fire. And it's never been the same since. I love playing music and I love, like, all sorts of music, but I love being involved in punk and hardcore. But I gotta tell you, like, my real focus now is my career. And I just love it. Like, absolutely. It's my career and family life really now insane. [00:51:32] Speaker A: And my main focus, you were in all these bands and you were doing different things than I was, obviously. But I can absolutely appreciate everything you said there. When it comes to music, and that kind of scene that we both spent lots of years and doing different things, and I'm a lifer to whatever degree. It'll always be part of me. I still go to shows. I'm always the oldest one there or whatever, still go see current bands when I can a lot more often than some of my peers. But, you know, I've got a family, kids, I've got a career that is high stakes, high risk, serious stuff, and that's not lost on me. Right. So I still do the balancing act, but it doesn't have to be one or the other. And one of the things that's always kind of fascinating me is the people that just kind of walk away and be like, oh, I'm too old for that. And it's like, but why? Maybe you just don't love it, or maybe you just didn't have the passion. Maybe just things have changed, but it doesn't seem to me that. It's never seemed to me that it has to be one thing or the other thing. Maybe the balance changes, but you still play change, still plays shows, you know, so, you know, the balance might change, but there's nothing, you know, it's still. It makes for a more complete life, right. And makes more for a more interesting life, at least for me, you know, totally. [00:53:06] Speaker B: One of the things that I really, so change play shows and, like, you know, I still, like, you know, I still write. I'm constantly writing lyrics. Like, always writing lyrics. I was talking about this earlier with my friend Matt, who's a writer. The idea of being connected to the muse, it's like being able to create something means that you're connected to something that's beyond yourself, that anyone who's creative in engineering or mathematics, anyone who's created something that's almost, like, beyond themselves when you're in that space, like problem solving, creating, whatever. But to do that, you have to have discipline and do it often. So I'm constantly writing lyrics, and probably 98% of the lyrics that I'm writing, and I write almost every day. I mean, stink. But that 2% is, like, what the gold is, right? And even I also keep kind of half baked ideas that eventually kind of, you think through and they become better. But I will say with that, like, music is really tightened up in my life. I still do it, still love it, but that the sense of, like, when I can take all of that energy that was dispersed into this other thing and just put it all on, building up this company and, like, kind of really family life company, like professional career. It's been such a huge shift. So this is where I want to start getting into, like, what did you learn in punk and hardcore that. And that you've brought into your professional career that's helped you do what you've done and be successful and be able to kind of like, be involved in things in the way that you, you feel good about. [00:54:34] Speaker A: I think, you know, like we were kind of talking about a little bit of the sense that you can do anything, right? I mean, you put your mind to it. There aren't the barriers. You don't have to be a great musician to be in a band. I had a couple runs singing for bands and maybe I pulled it off well. I pulled off well enough to do it a little bit, but I was never that good and I probably wasn't dedicated enough either. And part of my story was I was always this constant thing of I was working and I I was always the one that, a real job, this is the term that I was like the adult job, the real job person and no one else. My friend severe had that for many years. Jeff. [00:55:18] Speaker B: Oh, and from my perspective, that was John's got a shit together. So I'm looking at you as you had your shit together, but to you it was like, this is my real job. [00:55:25] Speaker A: Yeah, but you can get up on stage and even if it's screaming. Right, you can do it. And it takes like fear away in a way. It's a way to kind of. And after, that's for me, you know, I spent a lot of time, I think I was mentioning to this before the interview, I spent a lot of time doing presentations. Yesterday I had to do a briefing for the Senate head of transportation committee for Washington. Right. So one of the leaders for transportation, for the state and the legislature. Right. And then tomorrow I have to brief the House transportation chair and leave. And that's serious stuff. And I think a lot of my, and it's the kind of stuff that some people have a hard time doing. They get nerves and fear. And not to say that we're all different, right. And some people are just better tuned for doing those things than others. But I think the things coming up through that music scene that do it yourself, where you can put out a magazine, you can book a show, you can be in a band having done those things, it's like, okay, it takes the fear of a lot of the things that other people, I work with, other peers, maybe struggle with more. I just don't really, I mean, not to say that I'm not ever nervous when I have to go and testify in front of a legislative committee, transportation committee or something like that. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, but I approach things more conversationally, more of like, these are just people. These are people just like me. They're doing their job. There's politics involved, and it's high risk, and I'm aware of that. But I approach it just from a kind of a more casual, calm perspective. I think a lot of that comes from kind of the that this is the involvement in the music scene and things and just kind of the things that are instilled in you from that, at least for me. And I think it's the kind of stuff that you don't learn in school. You go to college. Things have evolved a lot. Like, if I were to go to school for the same degrees today, it probably be a more multidisciplinary approach. You'd have communications classes, you'd have probably more planning, kind of community and transportation or urban planning types of classes. But I didn't really have as much of that. So it's stuff I learned along the way. And a lot of it I think I attribute to kind of my involvement in the music scene and just that culture. It just gives me a very different perspective on life. It gives me a different perspective on engaging people. It's not hard to nail it down to something, you know, boil it down to some kind of science or something because it's not right. [00:58:19] Speaker B: I once had a boss say something to me when I was working as a therapist, and it made me take a step back, like, okay, I think I can say, I think you and I could both say, like, we like punk, we like hardcore. We think records are cool, we like the community, all that kind of stuff. So I've always loved and appreciated the culture, but something that a boss of mine said made me take a step back and really think about it on a systems level. So when I was working in community services, I was doing addiction therapy, addiction, mental health. And I was just chatting with my boss one day and he was like, what is this x on your watch? And I was like, oh, I didn't want to get into it. I'm like, I'm kind of trying to talk around and he's like, well, what is it? I was like, its this thing called straight edge. Im kind of embarrassed because im like a grown adult. Im talking about this to my boss, and hes totally fascinated. Hes asking me all these questions about it. Hes like, let me get this straight. Some kid in Washington, DC, when he was like a teenager was like, he just gave this thing a name. And from there, thousands or even tens of thousands of people have voluntarily abstained from drugs and alcohol in the period of time where they'd be the most vulnerable to falling into habits from like, you know, like 1514 or 15 or 16. And then most of them, uh, stop being straight edge, kind of in their early twenties or mid twenties or thirties. I was like, yeah. He's like, so basically, people on their own, just because of social influence, just decide to not drink for long periods of time and not do drugs. It's like, yeah. And he's saying it. I'm like, yeah, like, it's the most normal thing. He was like, do you realize there's been billions and billions of dollars invested in just say no campaigns, all this kind of stuff that is totally ineffective and just some guy somewhere makes it cool? And I was like, yeah, yeah. He's like, that's the power of culture. And he just said it to me. I was like, damn, that is the power of culture. That this, this one person, and not one person, like a group of people. And it so happened that they were not just a group of people, they were a group of people who were an extremely cool band. And that band had a bunch of cool friends who were also in cool bands. They create this great record label. So it's not as simple as just like, Joe local, like, saying something and a million people catching on. But it was this moment of time that created something that whether or not someone says straight edge or not, has nothing to do with it. It's just the idea of the power of subculture and culture. But subculture, in this example of how it can create something that literally millions or even billions of dollars of government funding wouldn't be able to do. You extrapolate that out to people challenging racism, people challenging sexism, people challenging homophobia, people getting challenging transphobia, people getting involved in political conversations, feeling like they should have a voice in their community, people writing fanzines, people starting radio shows, starting record labels, starting bands. This idea of just, like, if you want something to happen, just make it happen, that is part of punk and hardcore is so profound. And I think while sometimes it can be overstated, like, you know, you guys think punk and hardcore is the greatest thing. It's like, okay, I can see that. I can see that. Maybe we over talk it a little bit. But on the flip side, it actually is one of the most profound things of people just saying I want something to be, so I'm going to make it be. And I hear a lot of that in your story. [01:01:55] Speaker A: Well, it's this kind of melting pot. Kind of cultural melting pot, right. Of people that have common themes, but they're coming at it from all these different angles and different backgrounds and things. And I think being involved in kind of that diversity that comes with that music scene and things, and then you bring that into your professional career. It's very different than a lot of the people I work with who came through a much more regimented kind of education to their professional career and having a family. And I like to go hiking and I like to do this and that. But it's just you're exposed to things that a lot of people just don't get exposed to in the same way. And you bring that into your professional career in ways that show up and show up in all kinds of different ways. Right. And it really kind of differentiates you. I'm very guarded about. It's funny. People we do in the world post Covid, we do lots of virtual meetings and all staff meetings. We do icebreaker questions and all these things you do in today's environment to stay connected with people. When we work apart more than together, and people ask music questions, I'll drop little things here and there of things I'm really interested. People know I'm vegan because I'm always the odd one out at every conference or this or that. No one has to ask for the special meal or this or that, or we're going to a lunch, an office lunche. And I'm the one that can barely find something to order. So people latch onto that and start to kind of like, oh, yeah, you need something special. But in the music thing, I'll let out little bits and pieces here, and people are just fascinated. And then I'll have some of the younger people on the team kind of reaching out to me. Like one of the people on the communications team. We've got this communications team that's probably, you know, eight people deep on our program. It's a huge program, and it takes a huge lift. I think you could probably appreciate this, given your company and your profession, that we have a really deep communication and governance relation team. And one of the people reaches out to me after something I said in one of our team meetings, saying, do you like Metallica? And I'm like, I'm like, yeah, why do you ask? And they're like, well, at least some Metallica. Up to a certain year, I suppose and like, yeah, me and my brother have, we have tickets to go see them at Century link where they're playing here. Come up later in the month. I'm like, we might have an extra ticket or something if you want to go. I'm like, okay. It just kind of hit me out of left field. It's always kind of awkward for me. I have LinkedIn, professional social media and then any other social media I do is I'm off the grid. I really keep it separate because it's just professionally for me, it's hard to integrate those things and probably for me to fully speak my mind on personal opinions on things, probably not the best to mix that with business, especially in the government realm where there's politics associated with everything, whether you're like subtle in the background, there's still the politics and got to navigate that. So yeah, it's just that life duality of personal and professional life that I can't leave, but they integrate. And certainly the professional life, I mean the personal life things and kind of the way involvement in music and things like that has always kind of informed how I operate professionally and how I lead in terms of how I engage our team and just being approachable, being calm and mellow, nothing, never taking out the stress on your team members, even when people make mistakes. Right. You just, you live and you learn. Right. I think there's, and these are the life lessons and certainly have lots of personal life lessons I bring into the, you know, the professional realm where just kindness and compassion leads. Right. I mean that's the way to be in my eyes. Right. And you can be an effective leader and be kind and be compassionate and treat everyone fairly. Right. You know, it doesnt have to be any other way, Jeff. [01:06:56] Speaker B: So speaking to the professional, im going to ask you a question, but since you hit on the kindness and compassionate and you also mentioned veganism, so why veganism? Why now at this at your age at all, youve seen all youve done. Why veganism? [01:07:10] Speaker A: You know, thats an interesting thing for me because, you know, I've been vegetarian since, I don't know, probably around 86. 87, yeah. So going on four decades, it's kind of scary to say that it took me a long time to kind of, I danced around veganism for a while, back and forth, back and forth. And you know, I had friends like people like we were talking about Greg Beneck and others who were very outspoken and active in the, in that community, but it just took me a long time and part of it was personal life. Like, I had a first marriage that didn't work out and was a barrier in me making being able to live my life fully the way I wanted to live it, because it just wasn't part of the compromise. It just wasn't like it caused stress and strain, I suppose. But at the end of the day, when I moved past that life change, you know, there was nothing else stopping me. And it's kind of always been ingrained in me. I grew up in a family that was, like, midwestern cooking meat, meat to, like, everything was so meat centric, and I just never really liked it. I early on kind of, you know, some people, I think people can compartmentalize their pets and other things, you know, and I love animals. I like to go to the zoo. I like to pet animals. They can compartmentalize that from eating a steak. And I early on, for whatever reason, was in tune with, wait a second, that doesn't make sense, even though my parents are, like, when I stopped eating meat. So I went off to Florida to school. I got out of the house. I stopped eating meat. I transitioned away from eating meat, like, very quickly on my own. I'm like, I don't want that. I don't need that. It's just not my, my principles. Like, it just doesn't fit. And then I go back home, and they put, like, you know, fish or meat in front of me. I'm like, I don't eat that anymore. It was like, they, like, they feign this, like, what do you mean you don't? Like, I don't know how many years that went on. You know, like, I go back for a vacation. You know, I moved out. I go to a family dinner. What do you mean? Like, you know, well, this is what's for, served for dinner. Like, you can eat it or not kind of thing. Like, thanks. Yeah, thanks for being so accommodating. But I think I've just always been in tune with, you know, these living creatures deserve to be treated the same way as your pets. You know, they deserve to be able to have their life and not be, you know, have their life sacrificed for, you know, somebody's meal. And there's plenty of other, it always struck me as there's plenty of other options, even back in the early. And I think now, like, it's much easier to be vegan. Like, there's, like, all the products that, you know, replicate meats and things. So if you, you like that, if that experience, you know, you've got that available to you and, you know, just multitudes of options, right? Yeah. I remember in the early days of being vegetarian and, you know, dancing around veganism, there were very few options. In the eighties, early nineties and stuff. It was hard. You're eating bean burritos all the time. [01:10:33] Speaker B: Hey, man, you made it through. Yeah, yeah. [01:10:35] Speaker A: Pasta all the time or whatever, right? You know, it's one of those things that stuck. Like, we talked about straight edge. Like, I spent a bunch of years being straight edge, and I wasn't straight edge before. I was. And I think it was a very, you know, it was a needed life change to break bad habits and things, you know. Ron Gaudapi, we mentioned, I'm just going to backtrack to that, because when I met Ron and we had started brotherhood and we were playing shows, Ron was like a raging alcoholic drunk from Spokane, coming over to hang out in Seattle. I remember being with Greg Anderson, and Kiki has this family station wagon. We had to pick Ron up off the ground, drag him into the car, and go drop him off at, like, an apartment, like, just dump him, because, like, he was just, like, out cold. I don't know if Greg would remember that story or not, you know, but then, you know, that power of that kind of music culture and things, you know, totally transformed Ron now. And he went just like I did, you know, it served a purpose. It helped him kind of straighten out his life and, you know, get away from some bad habits. He went back to some of the. He transitioned out of it. But it changes you, right? It changes you. And these are transformative things in life. And I think just bringing this back to the work realm, these are all things that inform kind of how you view other people. And I think I'm much more in tune with kind of trying to understand where people come from. Right. Listening to people I work with people in communities that are pretty conservative politically. That's not me in that realm. I'm way off on probably what would be considered a progressive realm. But I work to understand where people are coming from. You have to, to be effective. And people that work for me come from those backgrounds, too, and they deserve to be treated the same way as everyone else. You kind of find that common ground with people. You try to spend time understanding people, and you focus on. I think it's important in my work, especially in the government, focus on what our mission is. Personal stuff comes into the play here and there, but at the end of the day, we all have this mission to go deliver projects, to be accountable for taxpayer dollars again, billions of dollars of federal and state funding and things like that are on the line. Right. And have to be accountable to that. [01:13:09] Speaker B: You know that when you talk about that, because you've mentioned quite a few times, like, coming from a place of diversity, but also being able to, like, have a lot of different kinds of, you know, partners and, like, hearing out lots of different people. One of the best things in my life, for sure, punk and hardcore. And there comes to, like, a level of critique that comes from punk and hardcore. Something that Walter, when we did our podcast, was like, oh, man, punks are salty. Like, punks are like, they got a problem with everything. And I kind of like that. Like, having a, like, a really critical eye has been ultra useful for me. And I'd say part of it just comes from, like, kind of being a curious person, but part of it definitely comes from punk and, like, picking things apart. [01:13:50] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. But where questioning everything. Questioning everything, right. [01:13:54] Speaker B: Question everything. Where it didn't serve me and where I had to really do a lot of work is coming to the table with my mind made up about right or wrong from my perspective and in the work that I do now and even the work that I did as a therapist, it's like, you know, if you think of. I think. I don't say if anyone, when I first thought of what does a therapist do? A therapist meets people in need and helps them kind of work through their challenges and their channel and then, and to address those things so they can go on and live a productive and meaningful life however they define that. But in my mind, that's always like, the story is never someone who's a terrible person or the story of someone who's done abhorrent things or the person who's done things that maybe I find distasteful or a degree off of what I think is right or wrong. And when I started becoming a therapist, I had a real hard reality check of, you're going to meet people that fit into this tiny box of this fairy tale story that you've constructed about what a therapist does. And you're going to meet a people that are a degree outside of that box, and you're also going to meet a degree, or you're going to meet people that are more than a degree out, like, really far out people that maybe that from your kind of critical mindset, you're going to have a lot of, like, you know, moral opinions about rights or wrongs and, and all sorts of kind of, like, critiques about. And I. This reality check that I had when I, when I was a young therapist was like, if you want to be good at this job and really be of service to people, you've got to leave that overt critical thinking at the door and come in completely neutral and be there with the person who's in front of you and really hear their story. And it was a really good, well, it was a really good process for me because, like, you know, when you're a therapist, you hear a lot of stuff that kind of, like, will rattle you. It was really good because it helped me be of good service and it's really served me in the corporate world. I was telling you a story before we started that I won't get into on camera of this really complex business problem I'm helping a company solve. And there's no bad guys in the story. And my punk critique mind wants to have a, I want to have a bad guy to rally against. And you're the authority figure and all you care about is money. But it's not actually that at all. And that space of really trying to come to the table and really help people and really listen and create the best solution for everyone comes with being able to put my natural or punk learned proclivity towards harsh judgment to the side. How have you done that yourself? Working with, because you mentioned, like, sometimes politics do kind of come in and I got to watch that because I'm a very liberal person. How do you manage that side of you carrying around this thing from punk of like, questioning everything and that like really strong critique we all carry? [01:16:41] Speaker A: It's kind of walking a tightrope, but it is trying to kind of understand where people are coming from, do the listening that is so critical. And if, like, say, you're being presented by, say, one of the electeds how to deal with, you're being presented an opinion that is counter to what we're trying to do and our objectives. It's listening and then being able to try to calmly kind of walk through what the considerations are and educate them, acknowledge where they're coming from, which is always important. Right. And even if it's something, and I've got a story here that I'll probably kind of go into because at least it makes me think of one part of my job that's the kind of thing you don't ever learn in school, and its around having to deal with people experiencing homelessness who are living in the public right of way. And so the story on our program is in one of these two corridors thats part of this multibillion dollar program when we were starting to kind of get to the point where we were getting ready to initiate construction on miles. So 6 miles of new freeway where we had bought the property over many years, and the property had just been sitting there vacant, waiting to get for all this planning and design and to get to construction. People, especially even before the pandemic, especially when the pandemic hit, huge explosion of people experiencing homelessness living outside in the public right away. I don't know if I know Vancouver's got its challenges. In Seattle, there's huge amounts of people living in the public highway right away. And we had hundreds of people, hundreds of people living in these encampments and was challenged by. And so we were at the front end of a much bigger issue that's played out over the last kind of five, six years in Washington state over people are homeless in the state right of way. But we were kind of at the tip of the spear. And the secretary of transportation was, who's just a great kind of more of a visionary and certainly somebody who practices kindness and compassion and kind of how they go about the business of managing the state transportation system, challenged us, saying, hey, you have an opportunity here, maybe to do things differently. And so what we did was we built a coalition, brought together kind of a, we call that a task force and still call the task force still going over three years later, where we brought together all the local governments, brought the state funding sources for homeless response and support services, brought together the social service providers, and then we were the first ones to do this within washed out. We brought on people to consult with us who had been social service homeless response managers for local governments that had worked with the people experiencing homelessness, worked in that environment, kind of like maybe some of what you're describing, people who, for multitudes of reasons, right, have found themselves homeless. And we went about moving, helping them move out of the right way because they had to leave the right of way for us to build a project. But what we did was we went about it in a way where we had enough lead time to where we could engage them, bring the services to them. We hired a team of people who had experience working with people who are homeless and experiencing homelessness and brought the services to them, help to figure out what they needed, people with small kids living in the right way, people who were veterans, multitudes of people with what's come, the stereotype of addiction issues, and help bring the right services to them and gave people options, gave them transitional housing options, and connected them with the services. And we had people dying in our right of way. We had people who in crisis, who we ultimately couldnt provide solutions for. But we also had many, many, many people that we helped get out off of, get from living outside, reconnected them with their families, connected them with jobs, connected them with services, and helped them on a path to get away from homelessness. Its something you don't go to school for, right? School for Engineering, but it's something where we were able to bring a humane, kind of kind and compassionate approach to something that was a huge challenge. And the model we used ultimately became a model that was adopted by the governor from a policy perspective for the state rights of way. Many of the consultants that, the consultants that we brought on started doing work around the state, helping out washdot, and it's become a model. So it's just an example, I think, of what you were saying, just having a unique problem and being given the liberty, and that's having great leadership. So the leadership for the agency, having the vision and the leadership to say, you don't have to go and post the signs that say you've got 72 hours to leave, we'll bring the social services out, and if you got three days, and if you can't find a solution, the police are coming out and you leave. That's kind of how things were, but it's not how they had to be. This stuff costs money, though. It takes resources, it takes energy. But we did it, and we cleared out that right away. Connected people, and we're still doing it to this day because the problem's not gone away. People come back. But it's something that I'm really proud of because I have compassion for these people. I see these people, whatever. It's so easy to stereotype. And I have people in my family, unfortunately, I end up having these family debates. I wanted to demonize people who are homeless on the street as criminals, throw them in jail, just arrest them, or they're all drug addicts and, well, it's like nothing's that simple. So part of what you theme in this is the real life of a lot of this is much more complex than it things seem on the surface. It's so easy to kind of want to categorize something simply, but when you dig into it and the root issues and the things going on, it's much more complex. Right. If you can do that and you can take the things that people want to simplify, but they aren't simple, and you can break them down and you can get to the root of what the problems are, then that provides you pathways to solutions rather than taking the simple solution, which often isn't the best solution, at least in my world. What the knee jerk simple approach isn't often the best. [01:24:17] Speaker B: All right, man, you ready to head towards the crucial three? [01:24:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:24:20] Speaker B: Okay. Before we get to it, as we're heading towards the close off, anything you want to shout out, anything you want to bring attention to. So we'll put all your information in the show bio, is there anything you want to shout out? Any questions you want to ask me, any ideas you want to put out there? [01:24:35] Speaker A: I just want to say thank you for this invitation, because I think, as I was mentioning to you before the beginning, it's not often that, well, I can do interviews about the projects we're building and things within them and challenges associated with them. It's nice to have this forum to be able to speak to the more personal side of it, of how do you approach leadership? What are the things that inform how you work with the people that are part of teams and the collaborative approach to delivering. So I really appreciate that. It's very rare that you get to have a conversation like this about the personal side of it, so I really appreciate that. And you've always kind of been out there, kind of peripheral, and I've watched what you're doing, too. I see what you're doing, and I've always kind of been, wow, you're really doing great things coming from that music scene. So it's just been fun to watch, and it's just been fun to be here, and what you're doing is great. I've watched a bunch of the episodes, and it's just really cool, cool stuff. [01:25:40] Speaker B: Thank you. I think I know you know this, but for the audience, uh, the crucial three are a set of three questions. They're going to scale up in difficulty. We'll go from easy to hard. Although last person I talked to was like, man, the first was way harder and the last was the easiest, but let's. Let's hit it. You mentioned earlier, and I won't get into the details of. Of kind of being a black sheep in your family. And, um, as we were talking through it, I could see that sense of, like, how that's been a thing in your life that you've had to manage. At the same time, you're kind of a black sheep in the corporate world or in the government world that you work in, but you're like a secret black sheep secret. [01:26:17] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:26:18] Speaker B: So what advice do you have for anyone who either in their personal life, professional life, feels that they're a bit of a black sheep, but they want to go on to do things of substance and meaning in the world. [01:26:31] Speaker A: I think people tend to create barriers for themselves. Sometimes people think that things are unachievable. Oh, I can't do that. And that's not really the reality. Often there may be things that you're not personally suited to do in a technical realm or this or that, but I think approaching your interests, trying to take things you're passionate about, take things that you're interested in, and kind of leverage that into starting place professionally with the understanding that wherever you start is not where you're going to end. And you know this for what you do. And I certainly know this because a lot of it comes with the learned experience, right? The lived experience. And when you're young, you're like, I don't know what I want to do. I've got a daughter who's going to college. I don't know what I want to do. I don't even know what I want to major in. But you got to start somewhere. Find something you're passionate about, find something that's interesting. I fell into engineering because of a family member. I stuck with it, and it's turned out to be something fascinating that I love, but I didn't take. I took a somewhat non traditional path, and then I've ended up utilizing skills that what I call are more the soft skills, the personal skills, rather than the engineering skills. That's what I rely on. That's what's made me successful. That's what allows me to do my job. I still have to understand the engineering and be able to process and make decisions. I did all kinds of things along the way. Instruction, inspection, I was mentioning. I've done all kinds of things along the way. There's a path, and if you don't set barriers for yourself and you kind of go about it like, you know, I want. This is where I'm going to start, and this is like, the things that I'm passionate about. It will take you down a path. Like, there will be a path that will unfold as you're going, and you just got to find that starting place, right? That foot in the door, that thing. That's like something you're passionate about. You're interested and just roll with it and it will evolve. But don't set barriers for yourself. Right. You know, people have a tendency to do that. Well, I can't do this. I can't do that I'll never achieve that. And it just limits yourself. Right. And we all have limits probably, in whatever we might achieve at the end of the day in a career. But setting artificial limits for yourself. Right. Is this, at the end of the day going to prevent you from maybe achieving what you could and maybe ending up where you really are best suited? You know, because I think I see people that kind of toilet away in things that they don't really enjoy, you know, and they. They have a hard time finding the path to what is that thing they enjoy and it's meaningful to them. And you have to be willing to, I think, walk away from something and keep searching until you find it. It's hard. I'm not saying it's hard because not saying it's easy is not right. [01:29:39] Speaker B: All right, second question. So much of your professional story and the things that you do at these really, like large scales, have a through line of empathy. So putting yourself in somebody else's shoes, really being able to understand someone else's feelings about how someone will feel someone else's experience as best as you can. You also come from a discipline, the engineering discipline, can have people that are, like, really very, very technical and can approach problems from simply, like, a technical space. So how do you teach and can you teach empathy when people come from a really data driven technical space? [01:30:22] Speaker A: I think you can to a degree. Right. You know, everybody's different, and everybody has the things that they're, you know, kind of ultimately are best suited at. Right. They're their strengths. Right. That they leverage to, you know, career wise. But I think you can, I mean, you can expose people to. And I think we do a lot of this in our team building and our teamwork with, you know, a program like ours. You know, you say a team, but this is like, you know, hundreds of people, right, in layers and layers. And there's people in construction, there's people in design, there's people that are playing, people in communications, people in government relations, just layers and layers and layers of teams within the umbrella of the overall team. And I think there's always in our meetings, in our engagements, there's opportunities to kind of bring that empathy to it, to get people to think about what we're doing, who we're affecting, how we're engaging them. We recently had to do some real work with this, a group called the East African Community services who are serving a marginalized population in the city of Seatac, where we're building a project. Us and soundtracks are almost right over their heads. And they bought a property and they serve very much an underserved, disadvantaged community of immigrants from East Africa. They didn't know what was, they didn't understand what was coming, and they bought this building and, you know, and we came along and we were disrupting their life and doing things. And we went and met them with that. We engaged them. Yeah, we had to bring translators with us because many of them didn't speak English at all or English was very much a second language that they weren't proficient in. Try to understand what were the things happening that we could help them with. And we cant help them with all the things, I think, that they had concerns about. But there were things we could do. And so we have team meetings where we discuss those things. So you bring that into the group meeting. So for our overall corridor team were exposing them to by leading and saying, hey, look, were going to go meet them. I went there on a weekend, we're going to go meet them and we're going to go figure out what we can do to help them survive this construction. And you didn't have to do that necessarily. And there's people on the team that are probably like, why are you doing that? And then we're going to go making banners, putting up banners on their buildings that say businesses open during construction, trying to get attention. I think I said we had to do that, but it's the right thing to do. So it's all about treating people fairly, understanding that you're inconveniencing people and businesses and what can you do, within reason to help them get through this stuff we're doing that's very inconvenient and explaining that in front of the team, in front of a multidisciplinary team. So you got the engineers and you got the planners and you got the construction people, and it's like, we're going to do this. We're going to invest in this. We're going to invest our time in it. We're going to invest our resources and our energy in it, and we're going to do some things to help them. And that's an example of what I would call leadership decision making. And it sets an example for the people on the team, like, oh, okay, leadership supports us. We can do this. And not everybody on the team would be inclined on their own to do it. I can guarantee you, like, oh, this is an inconvenience. There's nothing we can do to help them. So anyway, I think that's an example, right? You lead by it's so easy to say lead by example. It's more of maybe, and I almost don't like that phrase because it's such a catchphrase, but demonstrate leadership. Show that kindness and empathy through your decision making and the direction you set. [01:34:27] Speaker B: All right, last one. I don't know how you're going to get through this one. This is brutal. Three vegetarian songs. I'm going to identify which one do you think is the best song, but which one do you think has had the biggest impact? [01:34:44] Speaker A: Okay, so two. [01:34:45] Speaker B: Which one's the best song from your perspective, but which has had the biggest impact? [01:34:49] Speaker A: Oh, I love this one already. [01:34:50] Speaker B: So, all right. I'm no more by youth of today. Cats and dogs by gorilla biscuits. Feel their pain by instead go. [01:34:58] Speaker A: Well, I'm going to answer this through a personal lens, right? Cause this is. Right. This is all personal. The most impactful, I would say, is cats and dogs by far. I first saw gorilla biscuits in, like, I saw one of their very first shows. They played cbgs, and it just happened to be when I was at home on vacation from Florida at school, I won CB's and they were opening bandaid. It might. I think it was actually their very first show. It was their first or second show. I. Their. Their seven inch wasn't even out. You know, I didn't really know them. Um, and then, like, last year, I went to riotfest, saw them play, like, to a big. I've seen them play to big crowds. I've saw them at fun, fun in Austin to, like, play to a giant crowd. Um, and everybody's singing along, cats and dogs, like, you know, I mean, that is so impactful. The hooks, the, you know, the. I mean, you know, it just sticks with you. Right? And it sticks with everybody. Here's it. And, like. But personally, no more was my song. I mean, I got tattoo of it, so, you know, there you go. I mean, I have a gorilla biscuits tattoo, actually, so there you go. But. But no more was big for me. I mean, I was already down that path of vegetarianism. But when that hit and the video and the whole, you know, that. I mean, like, the whole youth group here and that. That was just like, that was, you know, that was so big for me. I mean, and, you know, that was no more. I mean, they were right on kind of on top of each other, actually. Cats and dogs and no more. But no more was for me personally, was. That was the song and nothing against instead, and I love instead, and I saw instead, and I'm still friends with Steve to this day, you know, and stuff. But I got. Maybe it's just where I came from and where I grew up and things, but cats and dogs no more. They're probably the ones for me. And cats and dogs, it's kind of hard. I don't even know how you could argue that that's not the most culturally impactful of those three songs. [01:37:03] Speaker B: Okay. All right. Can I give you my opinion? [01:37:06] Speaker A: Yep. [01:37:08] Speaker B: My friend Jeff. Shout out, Jeff. I love you. We were having this debate, and he was like, well, it's got to be no more. He's like, without no more, there's no cats and dogs. And I was like, listen, man, I get you that, like, this thing can't exist without this thing. But cats and dogs, from a cultural perspective, is the most approachable vegetarian song I think, historically, that's ever been written. The incredible song recording's amazing. Lyrics are amazing. Everything's amazing about it. And you could play that for almost anyone, and they could go, okay, I think that's a good point. Like, that make. That makes sense. It would at least make them be like, hmm, okay. Whereas no more. And feel their pain or more confrontational. And no more is very confrontational, where instead is a little bit less confrontational. It's kind of the middle ground between those two. Cats and dog, for me, is the, like, if I was to pick a song that I'd use as the spearhead to try and get people into vegetarianism or veganism, that would be the song. [01:38:02] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. The analogies and things. Yeah, I mean, it's in the lyrics. They're simple, but very effective and thought provoking. You listen to that lyrics, and you put those lyrics in front of anybody, and it's like, you get. You at least get somebody to stop and think and acknowledge that there's maybe a point there. [01:38:18] Speaker B: Well, that line and our love for them is real. And it's like, who doesn't can't think? It's like, yeah, I love my dog or I love my hamster. I love my, like, whatever it is, right? And it's like. It's like a real love. All right? So that, for me, is the most, I think, like, culturally impactful. And my favorite I is fill their pain instead. The older I get, the more I like. Instead, for me, is almost my favorite youth crew band. Whereas before, they were like, oh, yeah, I like instead. But the older I get and the more I've gotten to know those guys over the years, I'm like, instead. Instead is the. Is the band. However, it's a whole other episode, dude. All right, we got it done. We did it. Anything you want to say as we're closing off? [01:38:57] Speaker A: No, again, just thank you. I mean, what you're doing with this podcast, the diversity of the people on it, you know, and the different backgrounds and perspectives and at least a number of them, kind of the subcultures they come from and things, and how it integrates into kind of careers and professional paths and leadership paths. I mean, it's just great. I don't know anything quite like it. I think what you're doing is very unique and very. I love it, and so love you having me on. I mean, I drove up here just to see you and to kind of do this rather than do it virtual, because it's just so cool. [01:39:31] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks, man. I appreciate that. And thank you for all the stuff that you've done that has had direct impact, but also indirect impact, like, I was sharing with you before we started, everybody. So one of the things I said at the beginning here is just that idea of indirect impact. And, like, I don't want to go so far as just, like, be a good person. It's not that, but really that whatever you do in a day has got the ability to make a real difference to people. And that could be personal life, work life. It could be like walking down the street, you know? Uh uh. Monica and I live on a bike path. And, like, we see people, like, beefing with each other all day, every day, like cars and bikes and other people on bikes. I always kind of think it's just like, you got that moment in your day where you can do something, either choose to do it or do it naturally, that's just like, going to make a difference for people. And the idea that if we do things with intention and really, really try to bring our best to the table in every situation, the chance that we're going to have either direct or indirect positive impact on people is huge. Just like John here. We hadn't even met each other, and he'd already inspired me. So with that, everyone go out, take care of yourself, take care of others. This is one step beyond. We'll see you next time. One step. [01:40:47] Speaker A: One step. What does beyond.