Infrastructure Technology Podcast: Looking ahead to technological trends in 2026

On the Season 2 finale of the Infrastructure Technology Podcast, Gavin, Brandon and Jessica are joined by Noah, who opens the show with an update on the state of the transit industry's zero-emission bus transition in the face of tariffs. Noah breaks down the four major propulsion categories (standard fuel, alternative fuel, hybrid and zero emission), surprising the team with the current size of the nation's zero-emissions fleet. He also covers infrastructure gaps (like charging and hydrogen refueling) and how tariffs may shrink upcoming procurement orders. 

Next, returning guests Jay Wratten and Chris Harman from WSP review their early 2025 technology predictions. They evaluate what came true and explore how AI, digital twins, USDOT requirements and digital delivery are accelerating heading into 2026.

After the interview, the team transitions into the listener email segment, sparking more discussion on zero-emission buses and Waymos. The episode closes with Gavin and Jessica once again testing Brandon’s geography knowledge as the show heads into its holiday break.

Episode length: 1:21:38

 

About the author

Jay Wratten is the executive digital lead at WSP USA, as well as the global smart places lead for WSP. He joined WSP in December 2006 and has held a number of leadership roles during his nearly two decades with the company. Most recently, he served as a senior vice president and leader of the company’s Property and Buildings Market Innovation and Advisory Services practice.

Wratten started his career with WSP in the San Francisco lighting design team and has contributed to a number of landmark sports projects such as Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in architectural engineering from the University of Kansas and project management professional certification.

Based in Atlanta, Chris Harman leads the implementation of the firm’s digital delivery offering by elevating existing services and developing innovative new approaches, including connected data environments and digital twins. Harman participates in the full life cycle of project delivery through all phases of planning, design, construction and asset management. He works with experts in modelling, simulation, data management, systems interface and AI to provide enterprise-level strategy for clients, assisting them to realize the true benefits of their data and information.

His background includes consulting and design of major civil infrastructure projects in the U.S., UK and Middle East, with significant expertise in corporate design technology and aviation projects. Harman supports a range of design disciplines in the AEC market.

Here is a transcript from the episode:

GJ: And welcome to today's episode of the Infrastructure Technology Podcast, the ITP, brought to you by Roads and Bridges, Mass Transit and our parent company, EndeavorB2B. I'm Gavin Jenkins of Roads and Bridges, and with me, as always, we have Brandon Lewis.

BL: Good morning everybody. It is a Tuesday, it is podcast day, and it is our season finale.

GJ: And we have Jessica Parks from Roads and Bridges.

JP: Hello everybody. Happy Tuesday.

GJ: And then we have our newest member. We have Noah Kolenda. 

NK: Hey all, thank you for having me back. 

GJ: Alright, Noah is our data guru, and we will be getting to him in just a minute, but first up, let me just tell you that as Brandon said, this is our Season 2 finale. We're going to be going on hiatus through the holidays, but we will be back in January. We have two interviews in the can already that we're saving for January and then we have a lineup scheduled that is going to be out of this world for Season 3 that will get kicked off in 2026, and what else, Brandon?

BL: Boy, Gavin, that was a great tease for our audience. Let's just say that we have…

GJ: Oh, no, it was a tease.

BL: We have a lot of things planned for Season 3. I think you guys are going to really enjoy it. We have a lot of different interviews coming from a lot of different perspectives in the world of both the Mass Transit and the Roads and Bridges industries, and it has to do with a certain age group for a lot of these interviews.

GJ: And you know what, I'll just go ahead and say it now. Later this afternoon, I'm interviewing two just outstanding students from UC Berkeley, and they will be coming up in January. We're going to interview them this afternoon, and I'm really looking forward to talking to them, and they're the future of engineering in this country, and it's going to be great, but let's hold that off. Hold that thought for another day. But today we have a return guest, I think these are the first people who've returned to the show, and we actually started off 2025 with these two, and we're ending 2025 with these two. And that is Chris Harmon and Jay Wratten from WSP. If you recall, earlier this year, they came on and gave us predictions for how they saw the world of tech unfolding in the industry space in the construction industry. They gave us predictions and now we asked them to come back to tell us how the year went and what they see going forward, and Jessica has that interview. We'll get to those two guys in just a minute, but first, we're going to turn to Noah now with a little data download. Noah, take it away.

NK: Absolutely. So I just recently released a story with Mass Transit covering a new tariff being placed on buses being imported to the U.S. and so today, I thought we could discuss kind of the current makeup of buses by type in the U.S. and what's on order, what was built this year and kind of get an idea of the makeup because a big component of the discussion I had surrounding this tariff was that it would impact the future adoption of zero-emission buses because the higher initial cost, coupled with the tariff, could really push various transit agencies in adopting these new zero-emission buses off another cycle. Because once you factor in a 10% tariff, if you're buying, say 100 buses, that 10% cuts 10 buses off your order, so I figured we could start by discussing the current makeup of the buses on the road, and I've broken it down into four categories for you. So we have your standard fuel, which is made up of gas and diesel buses, alternative fuel, which is made up of biodiesel, CNG, propelled buses and propane buses, hybrid buses, which are hybrid of either gas or diesel, and then zero-emission buses, which are made up of battery-electric or hydrogen powered buses, so of those four categories, are you guys able to rank what you think is the most prevalent to least prevalent? Or could you maybe tell me by what percent these make up our current bus outfit in the country?

GJ: Oh, that's fascinating.

BL: I like it. That's fascinating. I'll just say from the Mass Transit side, that's really fascinating because some states like California have been really into the zero-emission transition. Some of them have reached 100% of zero-emission transmission and then there are other states where most of them have not done it, so I don't have really a great read. I'll tell you guys that on the Roads and Bridges side, I would guess it would be very close between all four would be my guess.

GJ: Oh, I would disagree. First off, I think that it is insane that when we pull up to a gas pump that we don't have options of different types of fuel. It's a capitalistic market and in the marketplace I should have more options. and I shouldn't just be able to choose gasoline.

BL: Well, it depends. I mean if you go to Sunoco, which is a local gas station here, you have the NASCAR fuel, they have the option like the premium.

GJ: Okay, well it's just different types of gasoline is what you're choosing from, and then if you're rich, maybe you have an EV that you can plug in somewhere, but we don't have the choices. Buses seem to have more choices for U.S. consumers, which is great. I would love to see more hydrogen fuel on the road personally, but I think that even though the buses have more options, I think that the number one is gas, diesel, just by far, I think it's still number one by a lot and then after that I think that the zero- emission is probably number two just because of places like California. And then number three, what were the other two options again?

NK: Hybrid and alternative fuels. So like biodiesel, compressed natural gas or propane based.

GJ: Yeah, well propane based. That is so funny to me. Just a grill, you grill, I think the propane alternative is last place. 

BL: Yeah, I would agree with that. And then I would definitely agree the biodiesels three.

NKl Okay. So Jessica, do you have any crazy differing guesses here or should I just get to the reveal?

JPI think I'm pretty much the same. Gas diesel number one, zero emission two, just because those are probably in climate forward cities. I think that they're probably buying those in swarms and then hybrid just because that's easy. And then alternative fuels. I doubt that that's being heavily used, so I think I'm the same with Gavin.

NK: Sounds good. So you were all right on your first guess that standard fuel is still the bread and butter of the bus industry. That currently sits at 54% of buses on U.S. roads being your standard gas or diesel based buses. However, I am going to blow your minds a little bit and provide you with quite the upset here. So the alternative fueled vehicles, so that comes to biodiesel compressed natural gas or propane makes number two in the list at 24% of buses on the road.

GJ: It’s because of the compressed natural gas.

NK: Shockingly, it's actually because, well, yeah, no, you were right. Excuse me, I had my rows flipped here. So compressed natural gas was definitely the number one driving factor of that category with biodiesel in number two. But to your joke, yeah, there were very few propane buses on the road. I got 52 of the 41,114 buses recorded here were propane based buses, so it made up a very small percentage, and then down the list, hybrid buses made up 18% and surprisingly, this really kind of blew my mind, zero-emission buses only account for 4% of buses on the road right now.

BL: That blows my mind. I took California way too much into account.

NK: Yeah.

GJ: Wow.

NK: I thought the same thing.

GJ: I figured that each major city probably had two or three zero-emission buses in their fleets. Wow, that's interesting. Very surprising.

BL: For how much that we cover agencies and state DOTs and all the converting buses to either zero-emission or at least the hybrid at Mass Transit, I thought for sure it'd be higher.

NK: And Gavin to one of the points you made before the reveal, hydrogen is a very small portion here of the equation. Only 127 buses on the road right now are utilizing that compared to 1,530 battery-electric buses because unless agencies are able to create their own hydrogen storage and fueling facility, it is very much pricing agencies out of the market to just run on hydrogen that they have to obtain elsewhere.

BL: Well, it does make sense. I would say in this way, if you really think about it, I know we have covered this. I've done stories, I know, Noah, you've done stories on this and the zero-emission transmission of how long it takes to actually start from the procurement to the design to actually getting the buses. They sign these contracts, and it takes two, three, maybe more years than that to actually get the bus on the road, so I think in that way I think it makes sense that the data's telling you that, yes, these agencies, they are going after fewer emission buses. A lot of these agencies, they want to transition by either 2030 or 2040, but a lot of them are in the contract stage right now, and they're not necessarily on the road

NK: Exactly. And to that point too, you got to have charging stations in the ground before you buy the electric buses or hydrogen fueling stations in the ground before you pick up hydrogen buses. Otherwise, they're just going to be huge paperweights.

GJ: Interesting.

NK: So you can't really put the cart before the horse there per se.

GJ: But I want to put the cart before the horse, Noah, this is really interesting, and it reminds me probably about a decade ago, I was working at a gas station while I was in grad school, and I actually did a lot of research on alternative fuels for classwork that I was doing because working at the gas station was part of my thesis. But anyway, it's interesting how none of this has really changed in a decade. It's just electric has moved the needle, the other stuff has not, and there are people out there who drive around with hydrogen cars, but a lot of it is homemade.

NK: Either that or just in California

GJ: Or California. Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of it has to do with just the infrastructure isn't there, and it's not only with what you're saying with how to refuel the buses or charge the buses, the same thing exists for regular everyday people and commuters in their cars or their trucks. The infrastructure isn't there yet to charge alternative fueling and so everyone's still using gasoline.

NK: Definitely. And after discussing this, do you guys have any predictions for the buses that are on order and how the makeup has shifted at all, if at all?

GJ: Oh wow. Why don't you go first, Jessica?

JP: I'm hoping that there'd be more zero-emission buses on order that we'll see if it's available, and the prices are appropriate. I think we could definitely see a lot more of those in the next year. However, you totally threw me off with me thinking that that was going to be the second highest bus, so what do I know on that? I was going to add though, I do think that the team needs to go try one of the propane fueled buses for our podcast for sure.

GJ: Yeah.

NK: Absolutely. Live episode on the road.

GJ: Brandon, what's your prediction?

BL: So as Gavin would say, I may have a little inside baseball here because we cover so much of this on Mass Transit, but I do think that we are going to see more agencies be converting their buses to the hydrogen fuel cell and the battery-electric buses, but I think these tariffs may make these contract orders potentially less, so instead of somebody, as Noah alluded to, asking for 100 buses or 50 buses, it may be 20, or it may be 10, or it may be however, just because of the cost of these buses and then the manufacturers, one of the big things is there's a few U.S. manufacturers now. Nova Bus, who's in Canada, and then GILLIG in the U.S., but there have been some, mainly Proterra, that went bankrupt in August of 2024, so there's not as many manufacturers, which I think is also slowing down a little bit of the production for sure.

NK: And I'd just like to note too before we get into results and have Gavin guess, that this data did come out just before the proclamation for the tariff was made public, so this data does not have any potential immediate contract shifts accounted for it. So these were the orders prior to the tariff proclamation, just so we make sure we have that clear. So Gavin, do you have any guesses as to the future of the bus market?

GJ: Yeah, the bus, I would predict that the oil industry will burn the country down rather than let anything else be number one in any market, including the bus industry, and I think that the second the big wigs in the oil industry can make money off of these alternative fuels, then we'll see a switch, but until that day comes, the system will be rigged and shaped, so that oil can be number one. That's the way I see it. It's just my humble opinion. That's not the opinion of anyone here at Endeavor B2B or anyone else on this call. That is just my opinion. Gavin Jenkins.

NK: So your humble opinion happens to be the correct one?

GJ: Yeah.

NK: Standard fuel buses are still number one on order, with 57% of current orders being for standard fuel buses. However, all of your predictions were correct. The zero-emission buses are number two on order right now, making up 18% of current orders. Hybrid buses make up number three at 13% of current orders and alternative fuel buses make up number four, being 12% of current orders, and I'm honestly a little bit surprised by these. I'm glad to see that there's such a jump in the zero-emission buses but knowing the makeup of the U.S., I'm surprised that hybrid isn't really more up here on the board. Honestly these zero-emission buses are great, but they have to be used in rather specific applications to be the most efficient, and if you're covering significant ground, like a lot of these U.S. transit agencies are, I'm surprised that hybrid isn't being seen as kind of more of the end all be all option to cover the most ground, the most efficiently.

GJ: I say bring back trolleys. Bring back trolley cars. We're in the 1930s.

BL: They are still huge in San Francisco. Philadelphia has some as well. Yes, San Francisco is big on trolleys.

GJ: Bring back the trolleys. Alright Noah, thank you so much for that excellent data download and talking about some buses. Jessica, tell us a little bit about our guests that we're about to hear you interview.

JP: So I spoke with Jay Wratten and Chris Harman from WSP. Jay is the executive digital lead for the U.S. operations of WSP, as well as the global smart places lead for the company. In his U.S. digital lead role, he's charged with establishing a clear digital strategy, creating a robust digital leadership structure and driving excellence and applying digital tools to project delivery and strengthening revenue in margin via digital offerings. Chris, he serves as a director of digital delivery and innovation for the U.S. at WSP, and he's based in Atlanta. He leads the implementation of advanced digital delivery processes and tools within the firm's infrastructure and transportation practices. He has a strong background in civil engineering and digital engineering practices across both U.S. and international markets. They gave me their predictions, what they see for the year ahead and also we recapped what they had previously spoken with us about. I think there's a lot of hot takes and spicy content ahead for you guys so take a listen to the interview.

GJ: And Jessica, this is your first interview for the podcast?

JP: It is so bear with me a little bit, but it's really interesting.

GJ: You did great. I have a feeling that Brandon's going to say that you did an amazing job on the other end of this, but right now, let's get into Jessica's interview. Take it away.

JP: Hi everyone and welcome back to the podcast. I'm Jessica Parks, staff writer here at Roads and Bridges. Today, we're thrilled to have Chris Harman and Jay Wratten joining us once again for a special episode. We'll be recapping the highlights of 2025 and diving into their predictions for the year ahead. So how are you both doing today?

CH: Doing awesome, Jessica.

JP: Thank you. We're so happy you're here. So let's just get started. So I'll start out with, for any listeners who didn't catch our previous interview, could you introduce yourselves and what you do for WSP?

JW: Chris, you want to go first?

CH: Yeah, sure. My name's Chris Harman. I look after digital delivery for the transportation infrastructure business for WSP in the U.S., so T and I clients are wide ranging all across the U.S. and half of my time I go into projects where WSP is delivering for somebody and then I go, ‘come on guys. We're using new tools. We're going to do it in new ways’. We're going to build all the models. It's the future so internal advocacy change and focus on that. And then the other half of the time I'm talking to the clients and saying, ‘You want to do what? Oh, cool. Yeah, let's try to do that’. And then actually trying to implement solutions for them, so it's a cool split. 

JP: That's awesome.

JW: And then for my part, hello everybody. Jay Wratten. I am the digital lead for WSP USA. So I get to work with Chris and his colleagues helping our different business lines or end markets figure out what is the biggest and most expensive problems that our clients have and how do we bring the best of WSP and bring to solving those problems, and I'm lucky enough to also have a global role in working across the WSP global business around what we call smart places, and that means that I get to see what's working in Australia, what's working in Hong Kong, what's working in South America and bring the best of that back to our U.S. business.

JP: Thank you both for taking the time to introduce yourselves. And my next question is, what stood out to you? What technology stood out to you in 2025? Did anything surprise you?

JW: Chris, how do you want to handle this? You want to go first?

CH: Yeah, I'll start with the obvious big one, right?! So I kind of feel like chicken little, right?! For so long, I have been running around and telling people that it's going to happen. You're going to have to change, you're going to have to do the digital. There's no getting away with it, and it hasn't really been just there. It's like one-off clients are asking for it, or I'm affecting change, but this year, and I talked about it when we first spoke, the focus on modernizing our delivery process and design and construction and collecting more information and more data and just doing things digitally. It's showing up everywhere. It's showing up. I'm seeing it all across the country, especially in state DOT’s, we're all asking for pilot projects, but they're not asking for it. They're demanding it. PennDOT has got a requirement of a certain number per district. Texas just put out a request for proposals for just a general services engineering contract that we would normally go after, except it said these are only digital delivery projects. So suddenly I found myself just, I don't know why, completely shocked at how many digital projects are out there and the real focus, the kind of momentum behind it, and I mean, it's exciting. It feels a little bit surreal though too because I've been kind of in a position like this for not a decade, but basically a decade saying it's coming and now I feel like, ‘Oh, it's actually happening’, so that's been a really big change just to see how many states, how many clients are actually asking for this now.

JP: Definitely. I can imagine I can't. Do you have anything to add, Jay?

JW: I mean, I think we started 2025 and thank you for having us again on the podcast. It's so fun to get to do a podcast again and sort of reflect on what did you think was going to happen? What did happen? We started our last podcast with a discussion around AI. You can't have a discussion around digital these days without AI. Did what happened in 2025 happen the way we expected it? Yes and no. I think, yes, we saw a lot of conversation about AI happening over the course of the year. I think I was surprised by some of the solution providers and the speed with which they've rolled AI solutions into their core product. We saw some pretty strong announcements from Autodesk, from Bentley, from Esri, from Microsoft, from Google, the companies that are invested in this technology speaking for WSP and for I think our peer groups. We also saw AI rolled out to staff, so most organizations have either formally or informally. This idea of shadow AI started to see more adoption of generative models. LLMs the ChatGPT’s and the co-pilots start to become more and more a part of our workflows, so I think that was exciting in terms of what happened that I didn't expect. I think we expected Agen AI to really take off this year, and there was some early predictions. The year of the agent. I would say my observation for the AEC industry is primarily this has been back office work, and we haven't seen the sort of broad agentic, ‘Hey, we've got this amazing tool that does a thing that solves an engineering problem for us’. I don't think the industry is necessarily there yet, but we're certainly seeing it in proposal responses, deep research, the kinds of things that we're using internally. AI definitely came in, and I would say the last piece that sort of just landed in the last month, early in the year, the Trump Administration required all federal agencies to have an AI strategy. Well, that deadline was September 30th and many of the organizations that we work for have now published their AI strategies, and for the readers that haven't looked at them, I would encourage you to. This is the best signal that we've gotten from Department of Transportation, Department of Health Services, the Veterans Affairs Department of Energy, National Nuclear Lab, MSF, have all published an AI strategy, and that is really meaningful for us because it gives us a signal about where our clients think the future looks, what our clients think the future looks like and as a result, how we can best position to support those needs.

JP: That's really interesting. I'm definitely going to be looking into those as well, see what stories we can find from that. My next question is, so I think you answered actually this one. How did it measure up to your, how did AI measure up to your expectations? I mean, if you want to jump in on anything with AI, Chris, you're more than welcome to. My next question was on AI, and I know that Jay did say something, but if you wanted to add more.

CH: Well, I would say that I've been watching presentations on deterministic AI, this kind of idea that a generative AI has the ability to generate lots of different answers, including different answers to the same question, which is problematic if you're in engineering, and I think Jay pointed out that we're seeing back office solutions like the cats have the bag, AI is not going back. I can't imagine work without it. However, I'm not asking it to do complex engineering tasks because I can't really have a different answer, and I think we've all gone through this process of working with AI where we're like, ‘Hey, can you do this thing for me?’ And it's like, ‘Yeah, I can’. And then you give it, and you're like, ‘Well, this is fantastic’. And you're like, ‘But you left out half of the answers’. And you're like, ‘You're so right. You're such a genius to point out that I left out half the answers. Let me do that again for you’. So then it does it, and it gets the half that it left out but then it leaves out one that it did originally, and you're like, ‘But did you leave out one of the…’ and it's just like this back and forth where it's trying to get to that level of certainty and things have gotten much better, but it makes it hard to distrust it. It makes us want to be more in the loop on what it's doing and maybe not let it loose on discrete tasks that need the same answer every single time and so I think agents are hopefully going to go a long way to solve that. They seem like much more well tooled solutions for specific tasks and agentic is a way to do that. I do think that I've been very bullish on LLMs and their power, and it's just finding the right window to use it. It tends to be more manual labor intensive data entry, text extraction, sentiment analysis, the more kind of general stuff, and also a lot of learning. I use it just to learn every day almost, so it's going to be interesting to see that when we need the same answer every time. Are we going to specifically tool agents that are task-based? Are we creating our own solutions in that space or are we going to be just writing Python scripts that we know give us the same answer and then letting AI bounce between them?

JP: Definitely. That's interesting. All right. My next question is if, oh yeah, go ahead. 

JW: Maybe before we jump off the topic, we probably have a lot of thoughts on AI, so we won't spend the whole time on that, but a few things that stood out for me this year that I think are going to set the stage for what's probably going to happen next year, what I hope is going to happen, one data point model context, protocol, MCP, that came onto the stage as an idea. I can't actually remember who brought it forward. It was one of the big AI companies. You can fact check me on that later or maybe Chris can look it up quickly. And the concept is how do we connect AI systems to other systems? And we saw MCP come out for Autodesk, I don't know, but I would be surprised that Bentley and Esri won't also have an MCP equivalent. Why is this important? Because there's a light at the end of the tunnel for how would we connect the ChatGPT’s of the world that we're used to interfacing with our engineering systems, the workflows that our teams use day in day out, and that's a bridge that needs to be built before we can start to see meaningful AI interaction when you're starting to see some initial LLM type queries of, ‘Hey, what is this in the model starting to happen?’ I think that MCP sets the stage for much more AI driven automation going forward. And then the second piece that I really enjoyed was I got a chance to go to Autodesk's conference in September, and they really leaned in on their neural CAD foundation model, and what this is, is if you imagine all of the geometric information that AutoCAD and their competitors have been collecting to date, we've had large language models. The focus there is on language. Well, where are our large geometry models, the things that know about how stuff looks in the real world, how does a beam relate to a column? How does a roadway relate to the side of the roadway to the curb? As we see those models built, that's where I think engineering really starts to look radically different in an exciting and probably also a scary way. And just like we saw if you had been a rider two years ago or three years ago when ChatGPT hit the scene, I think we'll see the same thing happen with engineering work, particularly in the AEC field.

JP: That's a really good point that I've never thought of it that way before. I am interested to see what that looks like, that big change, that big disruption. It's been really fun to be a part of this crazy technological shift in so many ways and see how it hits different fields. My next question is: Have digital twins proven themselves and become less divisive?

JW: I think they've not become less divisive. That's probably still the subject of a couple pints of beer. Well, and isn't a digital twin. So my short answer would be no, they haven't become less divisive. I would say. I personally have seen maturing of a few markets where digital twins or whatever use case they're specifically trying to solve, operational efficiency, user experience, whatever the use case would be, there are every day more and more that we can point to. I'll let Chris answer from his perspective, but I'm looking for the day when those digital twin use cases are not some lighthouse project where one forward-looking client with a lot of capital invested in something that we all hold up on the stage and go look at this amazing digital twin, and we're at a point where our normal day-to-day workflows lead us to digital twins of lots of stuff as a commonplace, and I would say from my money, we're not there yet. There's still lighthouse. We're on the shelf space, but we're seeing the install pool widen. I don’t know where you're at, Chris.

CH: Yeah, digital twins are still very divisive because I always do this, call it what it is, if you call it a digital twin, but you're not clear on what it's achieving. Then everyone's like, ‘I think we already had this, or I still don't know what I'm paying for’, and it just makes people feel ick. What are we talking about? Whereas if you just say, if you never say digital twin, but you say predictive analytics, or you say asset and operational dashboarding, people are like, ‘Oh, that sounds great. Can I have that? Can I see the model?’ And you're like, ‘Yes you can’, and you never said the word digital twin, but it's all those things. This year I have seen a lot more understanding around that space. It's one of my predictions for 26 around asset information versus project information. There is an understanding I think among owners of like, ‘Oh, we're actually moving into having a virtual version of whatever physical thing that I am owning or building. That's great, but now I understand why that's valuable’. And all the parametric work, all the 3D modeling, all the data-centric approaches, data through construction is really enabling those outcomes. It's giving us the ability to have sensors in the field that attach to real virtual elements that relate to the physical, so it's easier. I think it's becoming more mainstream because we have so much more based data without having to go back and recreate everything from PDFs to hack it for somebody. We just have it all and so now it's finding those outcomes and actually achieving them. Whether you call it a digital twin or not, that's where the rubber meets the road, and I'm seeing more and more clients and owners really happy with some sort of system or solution post-construction for an asset that they own that they're really excited about. Even if it's as much as finding legacy information, that's still a really valuable way to interact with a twin. Wait, I said it was a virtual model.

JW: I'll throw maybe something slightly spicy in here as a data point, or not data point, but an observation. I don't think our clients are going to pay the AEC industry for a digital twin not on top of our base contracts. I think where we're headed is delivery of a twin or whatever we want to call it. I'm 100% with Chris on this needs to be part of how we deliver projects. They're expecting the value, which would be realized from an asset management platform, from an operational management platform to be baked into the way the AEC industry works, as opposed to expecting to pay us an addition for a separate contract to build a twin. Now, that has happened. There are data points in the market of here's an RFP for digital twin 100%, but I don't think that that market will exist in the long-term. I think at some point the AEC industry just delivers them as a course of work.

CH: I was going to disagree with you right off the bat. I was like spicy. I don't like it, but I do agree that we can only create a virtual version of the physical to a point where we've created all of the physical, right? I think the only thing I would say to this is that the confusion I see so much is the difference between project models, project twins and asset twins, and I work with owners that operate like say a large airport, and they have a concourse as part of a terminal that was built in the 1970s, and they have multiple projects ongoing and that were fit the last 20 years. None of those projects are physical. If I take all those projects, and I put them all into one file, I have 12 projects that all overlap with each other. I still don't have what's out there. Somebody's got to go in and use scissors to cut each one so that they snap together the way it was built in real time to get the actual version, and that's the difference between the asset version and the project version and a lot of owners will say, ‘Ah, well this is easy. Just give me the projects (I'm using air quotes here) and then I'll be able to do all of the things I want’. But that is not an asset version. That's still a project version. It has to integrate and relate to what's actually out there for a new build at final handover. Sure, it's one project file, but the first renovation that's done in that facility, you're going to get a handover. That's a project handover, and somebody's going to have to take that project handover, and I need to think of a new term for this. That's what I've been using. Frankenstein it together into the actual, and they're going to expect to be handed something that just connects in, right Jay? And there's only so many times you can use the scissors and then Frankenstein the thing together before you have what's actually out there, and if you give them the existing virtual version that you have, and then they use that to do the renovation, they should be giving you back the final, right? So I agree with you, but I think we're in this middle step of understanding that projects are not assets. Projects do not give us the twin, and there's a whole phase of work that's got to get done to build this out, and there's awareness and understanding piece that the whole industry needs about that. A set of as-builts is not air quotes digital twin or a virtual version of what's out there necessarily. It may need to be combined together with 100 years of legacy information. If you're an old piece of public infrastructure.

JW: That, and Jessica, we're just going to start talking to each other and not let you ask the questions, but I do think fine is fine. You probably hit on maybe another interesting observation that I don't know that I would say this is a knock on effect of ai, but the whole world, and as a result, the AEC world became much more aware of data as a very powerful piece of their enterprise and organizational value. So when I say, and I'm not going back on my spicy comment, I think the new digital twin market is probably near term viable, but midterm nonviable, but I would 100% agree with Chris that existing asset digitization, this idea that yeah, great, the new, if I pick on airports, the new terminal is amazing. All the digital components you guys built for me, my ability to see what's going on, but I have six other terminals and 100 outbuildings and so on down the line, so we are seeing as client maturity and using these models and seeing the value grow, more of an emphasis on going back and digitizing the existing so that they are not, I don't like your word Frankenstein, Chris. We should work with marketing on a better one there. That's not great zippered, I don't know, zippered maybe together to form a holistic model of that client's assets, and I think airports probably lead the way on this at the moment because they have that mix of existing assets, new assets and they are also long-term owners of those assets, so the value realization is kind of baked in for them.

CH: I think Frankenstein was the asset information modeler and Frankenstein's monster is the asset information model or something. There's some joke in here that I could try to get to if I worked at it. It's not good. It's really not good.

JP: Thank you both for your thoughts on that. My next question is what are your thoughts about AR and VR in the industry? The use of AR and VR?

CH: Okay, I'll start because I'm the one that was tried to be spicy last time and said this is not the year for it that we are not going to see the hardware innovation needed to actually make this kickoff. I think Jay, when we talked last time, you had said that you tried on meta glasses, and I have seen a lot more meta ray bands out in the wild. Yeah, and I want to say this, we just moved offices. We moved up three floors to a new space and in the space is a technology room that includes Meta Quest 3 and a whole space to connect that in with our models and participate in VR design reviews with other offices, so I think the proof is going to be if anybody uses it, right? But it is part of our space. It's not going away, but it's not happening this year. I don't think it's going to happen in 26 either. I mean, I haven't seen anything that makes me think I’ve figured out how to make me want to wear it on my face, but I do think it's going to happen. It will. Maybe the data that we've been collecting and that we've been so sure is important will be the driver. Because if you can surface that information to people out in the real world, that'll be what makes people want to put that on their face. I don't know. Jay, thoughts?

JW: I'm with you. I think the raybans to me, were a hopeful, ‘Oh shoot, if people start to wear them in their personal lives, it'll push into the professional world’. And I think that's probably where, if I go back to AI, where we saw consumer product outpace professional product, you had ChatGPT at home, why don't I have this at work? Because that analog in VR and AR hasn't existed. Nobody's using it at home and then coming to work and be like, ‘Man, if only I had a VR this’. I sat on a plane the other day next to a guy that leaned back and looked into his VR and watched a movie the whole flight, and I thought, ‘Okay, is there a pivot coming?’ Maybe, but Jessica, to answer your question, no, I haven't seen it this year. I've seen a few of the A bands that are equivalent in the field. I don’t know. I think we're still not there. I think the value proposition is still unclear. It's too niche.

CH: Pass through mode is good, and I can see real value in having someone in the field in operations wearing a headset with pass through that's showing them what to do, showing them how to operate, showing them how to go through a process or procedure. Having that, the experience of augmenting reality is, I mean that's the promised land, and I do think that's the future. I don't know.

JW: I don't think it solves a big enough pain point. Somebody in our org said to me the other day this is a priority, but it's not even in our top five and so maybe, Jessica, the way I would look at it, and I'm talking about AR, VR. This was another example. Maybe another way that I would look at it is, does AR or VR solve a problem that is in the top five priorities for our clients? And I don't know that it does. I think it solves a problem, but there are so many other cost schedule, quality problems that we would tackle first.

JP: Definitely. That's a good way to look at it. That's very interesting. My next question, this is the last question I have that I wrote down. What are the trends that you're seeing in 2026 for technology?

JW: Chris, do you want to go first?

JW: Yeah, I can start. I tell you something I've been seeing a lot and so maybe it's 25, but I don't think so. It's the little chat window on the bottom of, you're used to seeing it on a website, right? Like, oh, do you need help? Can I help you? And it's an AI agent or it's a chat bot essentially that's going to be endemic. It's in every tool, it's in every place. You open up any product from any vendor that you're used to a desktop application, and it's going to be there, and it's a chat-based interface to actually make changes. And so for us, this is interesting because it's like someone's invented the mouse in a sense. Not really, but imagine having conversation or conversationally doing your job. I need to draw a 20-story building that fits within this site, blah, blah, blah. It has 30-foot setbacks from the property line, and it will know where the property lines offset it. It'll build the whole thing you're explaining in chat what you want it to do, and it's doing it and it's a new interface. It's kind of a change and almost every product we've been seeing advanced views of, they've got the little thing, and I think it's going to be frustrating at first because it's not going to do anything that you want. It's probably even going to be bad at helping but eventually we are going to be interfacing with this, and I would say in 26, we're going to see it everywhere, and we're going to start developing those muscles, which is different than having to think through the steps and then carry them out yourself. Instead, you're prompt engineering to get the best output from the device just by having a conversation with it, and that is a shift in the future, so that's one of the big changes that I would expect to see in 26 is more conversational inputs.

JW: Alright, why don't we volley back and forth here, Chris, because I know we both have a number of thoughts about where we're heading, so I'll put one forward. I think 2025, in our organization, in organizations like ours, saw a lot of proof of concept with some of these new AI capabilities in engineering workflows. There was an interesting MIT study that came out maybe two months ago about, I think the headline was something like 90% of enterprise AI investment doesn't meet reach production. So what do I think is going to happen in 2026? We as an industry are going to have to grapple with the proof of concepts we spun up in 25 and decide if we are invested in them to make them production ready and deploy them out across our teams or if they are going to remain niche proof of concepts and the one thing that I agree with that article on is the gap between my ability to use vibe coding and spin up a proof of concept and do it once and have a tool that I could roll out to the 20,000 U.S. employees. That bridge is long, so 2026 is going to see a win now. I think of proof of concepts that were built in 25, and you'll see a couple of those within organizations like WSPs start to become production ready, so I think that's maybe my number one observation and then I think with that, I hope that we see our industry start to reshape the way we deliver projects to leverage those AI tools. I was thinking about where are we at right now? If you imagine that most projects that WSP bids on, our cohort of competitors bid on, they're probably three years long, plus or minus, so the jobs we're delivering today, finishing today, we bid in 2022. So next year we're going to be midstream on projects. We bid in 23, 24, and towards the end of the year we're going to start to get the jobs that we bid on now really into heavy production, so where does AI automation, digital delivery meaningfully impact the way we resource and bid projects that I think is going to start to come to reality in 2026? And my big prediction will be a shift to much more time spent in QA and less time in production. The more we automate generation of stuff, the less time we're going to spend on making the drawing, but the more time we need to spend on making sure the engineering is right. Chris mentioned deterministic AI. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of WSP and our peers to ensure that what we're putting out is safe. What we're putting out is efficient, is buildable, complies with code because we carry the professional responsibility there, and while we might speed up production, we cannot speed up QA, QC. And I think you'll actually see an organizational shift in firms like ours where more of our mind power will be spent on QA and less on production. Chris, I'll kick it back to you on another.

CH: No, I kind of want to ask you about that. It's really interesting, so you're saying what we're going to put in a proposal and on our org chart that's going to be like, well, I mean, yeah, there's AI engineering, but the resume you want to see is the AI, QA lead, the agent lead, the human in the loop lead, right? This is their resume and that's why it's important to you. It's like a totally different resume would normally include. It's a new person; they're going to know we have AI that's doing work, and they're going to want to know that we're using it responsibly, and we've got somebody that's going to manage that so is that what you're saying, Jay?

JW: First of all, I think you're going to see AI on org charts, so if we think about virtual employees, the Gentech employees, I would be very surprised that our clients don't see org charts that show an AI agent as part of the team, number one, and as a result, who oversees that person? A virtual person who's responsible, accountable for their work? And that will be a new role that did not previously exist.

CH: Yeah, that's amazing. That's really cool. I don't have anything that good. Well, yeah, I mean, I talked about conversational interfaces. I think the other thing that I'm bullish on, I started today like this, so maybe I can try to bring it home with it, is that the transportation kind of infrastructure sector are going to finally shake off this industry persona of being behind, of being old fashioned, of delivering kind of the old ways. Because all of the value and benefits of digital twins and data being data-centric and having solid modeling practices that kind of go from planning through design and construction into operations, those work really well for owners or operate large assets and have to continue to maintain them over 30 years, hundreds of years, and those are the big DOTs, so forever they've been kind of derided as like, oh, there's still 2D, and they're still hand-drawn plans, and they're out there in the field with just somebody integrating equipment getting within a foot but that seems to have changed this idea about property and buildings and kind of the vertical sector being so advanced digitally. Their focus has always been on efficient construction, efficient delivery of an asset, not on maintaining the long life of it unless they're an owner operator. A lot of times it's built and tried to hand over, so we're trying to use digital to have your capital costs as economical as possible, and they've done that, whereas in T and I, we're trying to use those same digital tools and skills to make the operations as economic as possible, which means that there's a lot of leg room for us to leapfrog or pass the other sectors in industry, so that's my focus. So they're asking for it now and next year they're going to start getting recognized as being really advanced in the space.

JW: Chris, I feel like you snuck a spicy one in there. 

CH: I didn't mean to. I really didn't. 

JW: Giving us some alert there.

CH: I didn’t.

JW: What I heard you say is that the horizontal market is going to get in front of the vertical market in terms of digital maturity. 

CH: Yes, I mean.

JW: Challenge accepted.

CH: And there may be a little background of me for years being told that I'm just, ‘Oh, you're a civil engineer, you guys don't do digital’, that kind of thing. I'm going to finally get rid of that. They're going to be like, ‘Oh, you're a civil engineer. You must be really digital’. Actually, I'm going to remove that from my 2026 prediction. I'm not sure that one's going to happen, but one day that's the dream.

JW: I do agree with your sentiment that the value proposition for all of these technologies is in owner operators over the long haul and so while it might sting because I personally come from a vertical background to hear you say that, I think the way I would frame it is markets where the long-term ownership is also building, that's where you see a ton of alignment of digital value proposition and those markets will accelerate beyond the part of, say, the vertical market that builds to sell.

CH: That's fair. That's a much less spicy way to put it. Thanks, Jay.

JW: So Jessica, I will throw one last one in. An area that I spent a lot of my 2025 thinking about is remote sensing and satellite imagery. It was not on our topic list, but if you're so kind as to invite us back in another six months, I'd love to give an update on where that heads, I think, and I have seen some initial internal proof of concepts and some external vendors that are doing this. The availability of temporal and spatial data from satellite imagery above has considerably increased in the last couple years. Airbus put up another constellation over the summer, so the availability of within the last couple days, sub beaner satellite imagery that we can extract information out of means that engineering firms like WSP can do so much work from our desks that we couldn't do before. Has this been installed in the field? I don't know. Let me look at yesterday's satellite image and see, can I get a real time update if something looks different than it should think? Coastal erosion impacts the safety barriers. Our ability to know what's happening in the physical world from our desks I think is meaningfully changing, and I don't know that AEC has necessarily caught up with that in terms of how we see the world in our value proposition and the thing that I totally love about this is that number one, this saves our clients money. Getting humans in the field is time consuming, inexpensive and it also makes things safer for our employees. If I don't need to send someone out to the road to look for something or send someone out to the coast to look for something, I'm keeping them safe at home and that means they go home to their family at night and all these great things that we want to achieve with technology, so I would put on our topic for next time, what are we seeing in satellite imagery and remote sensing as it affects digital delivery and digital offerings within infrastructure?

JP: Definitely. That's really interesting. I never thought of that. The work you can get done at your desk, I never thought into how that would fit into engineering, and I think that's super interesting. We'll definitely be looking back at that the next time we have you guys on. Is there anything else that you guys would like to shed light on or discuss?

JW: I'm going to end with one more thought.

JP: Okay.

JW: I touched on it before, but I think there is a macro shift, particularly in transportation around time and materials versus lump sum. I'm going to go ahead and put it out there. The meta impact of technology, of digital delivery of AI is that it speeds up our time to delivery, right? If I take less time to create an engineering create document and engineering solution, then ideally my client gets a smaller bill, right? Many of our contracts are time and materials that works for incremental improvement shifts, which we've seen over the last five, 10, 15, 20 years, but it doesn't work for disruptive technology shifts. If the time it takes goes from 100 to one, and as a result the fee goes from 100 to one. If I'm client side, I think, ‘Heck yes, this is amazing. All my consulting fees just went to 1%’. But in there, which is not quite right, our cost as an engineer to deliver those technologies still remain the same. In fact, they're largely increasing. I talked before about our professional liability, our professional responsibility to ensure that those engineering drawings and those solutions are viable and also insured is also tied to the value that we as consultants are paid. And then third, in order to achieve those efficiencies, that takes an upfront investment from not only the technology providers, but also the AEC industry and creating those workflows and building a solution, so I would put out there's a shift in business model coming and a shift in contract mechanism. I hope that we get to a point in the near term where we can possibly start to charge for technology solutions as a line item within our cost structures. Typically, we pass that as an overhead cost, and I don't think that the industry has come up with the right answer for what happens if the time to deliver goes to the floor, but realistically our fee can't go to the floor, or you just don't have the industry that you need to support the client need, so I don't have an answer, but I think, and I would encourage anyone listening to this podcast, either on the owner side or on the consulting side or on the vendor side, to start to have the conversation around what is a procurement mechanism and a compensation model look like where everyone wins so that all of us can keep doing what we went to school to do, what we're mission driven around and that there isn't a huge shift in value within the industry that disrupts a major part of it.

JP: I think that's super interesting too. Thank you so much. Is there anything else you'd like to add, Chris?

CH: I think the last thing I would say is the last podcast I said we are going to shift from being knowledge workers to knowledge managers. We need to think more about how we store our info, and I was thinking about something practical. If you're not familiar with GIT and GI workflows, if you don't have a GitHub account, I think all of us should start thinking that way. I think we should start thinking about our work as being reusable blocks. We should start thinking about how we collaborate on those blocks and how we work with each other, and it's different. It's very different. Engineers are not, especially in the AEC space, are not used to thinking this way, to using these tools, and it's necessary now. It's going to be necessary for all of us so shake off the anxiety and make yourself a GI account at one of the GI vendors like GitHub. It's the big one and give it a try and see what's in there and see what you can do because you'd be amazed at how many of our own internal processes can be vastly improved by adopting that kind of, those workflows, so that's what I'm going to leave everybody with. Save it for your New Year's Resolution, though. Don't start now. Just give us yourself for next year.

JP: Well, thank you both so much. That's all from me today. I really appreciate you guys both coming on, and it was such a pleasure listening to your insights and recapping the year, and I'm really excited for hopefully to do another one of these in the next, maybe halfway through the year or at the end of next year. We'll figure it out. 

JW: We’d love too. Absolutely.

JP: Thank you both.

GJ: And we are back. Jessica, I have to say excellent job with that interview.

JP: Thank you.

GJ: Alright, Brandon, tell us what your thoughts are.

BL: She absolutely knocked it out of the park with that first interview. So Jessica, this is your first great interview on the ITP, a tradition around here. But Chris and Jay, I mean you talked about it, Gavin, at the top, they came on at the start of 2025, and they gave their predictions on what we were going to see for this year, and I think the biggest takeaway for me is that as they said, AI is here, and it's not going away. We all sit around, we watch television, we all know from last week, I have no idea about my movie choices in life, but we all sit around and we watch television, and we see commercials for ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot and it's here, and it's not going away, and I did find it fascinating, and I did not know about this until I heard this part, that the current administration actually asked to put out an AI strategy by September 30th of this year that has been starting to be implemented and rolled out. So very interested to see how that carries into 2026, and I also thought they're sort of talking about the fact that state DOTs, like the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, the Texas Department of Transportation, that they are now demanding, they're not requesting, they are demanding. I believe Chris specifically said digital projects and in the digital twin space. I thought that was really fascinating.

GJ: Yeah, absolutely, and I think what really shows through is that Chris and Jay have great chemistry, and they really work well together, and it's just WSP is such a great company and really thankful for WSP to provide those two. Scheduling them is not easy. They are busy guys, and I'm just so grateful that they came on and shared their thoughts with us, and again, Jessica, wonderful job. 

JP: Thank you.

GJ: Some say there's an AI bubble, but that might be a discussion for another time, but yeah, it's definitely, it's here to stay, and it's changing. It's changing our life, our lives in many, many ways. Yeah. Alright, well excellent job, Jessica. Now let's go to some viewer emails.

BL: Some listener emails.

GJ: Listener emails.

BL: It's very hard to view a podcast that is a straight audio only, but in our minds, we can imagine these people that have sent us some wonderful emails. As always, if you have an email for me, Gavin, Jessica, Noah, all of us, anybody on the ITP team, you can email us at [email protected]. 

GJ: And thank you for everyone who's been emailing it. I mean, we've gotten some really great emails. Thank you for those who've emailed us. We read them all, and we try to respond to them all. Just keep sending them.

BL: So our first one here comes from Sydney, and she's located up north in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

GJ: Oh, Canadian.

BL: And this ties into what Noah was talking about earlier in our data segment about zero-emission buses because Sydney wants to know if we have ever ridden a zero-emission bus, and if we haven't, do we think it would change our bus riding experience?

GJ: I'm pretty sure I, I think that I did whenever, I mean I'm not certain, but I think earlier this year I was in Germany, and I was in Munich for the Alma Expo and a lot of those buses made the sound as if, you know how you can hear when something's electric?

BL: Yeah.

GJ:I felt like a couple of those buses that I got on were zero-emission, but I'm not sure.

BL: Did you think it was like a quieter bus experience?

GJ: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm sure it said, so what it was on the side of the bus, it was just in German, but it had that if it wasn't zero-emission, it may have been a hybrid. You know how even with hybrid cars, you can hear that were, I'm not going to imitate the sound, but you can hear that sound like a RAV4 hybrid makes a certain sound and the buses made that sound, so I think, let me Google that. I'll Google Munich buses and see what happens.

JP: I think Germany would be a place that you see some electric buses and zero-emission buses. 

GJ: Yeah.

BL: Well, Gavin is using that wonderful tool called Google and not ai, not ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot.. Jessica, have you ever ridden one?

JP: I don't think so. I have not ridden a bus since maybe in the last six years, so I mean maybe if they were around before then, the extent of my riding a bus was in New York City. Maybe during the pandemic or just after the pandemic.

BL: They've been around, but I think around the pandemic the year after when the infrastructure investment in Jobs Act got signed by President Biden back In November 2021. Again, the push was before that, but that's when the funding and everything really got started off the ground. So I have not and being in the transportation industry and doing a bunch of stories on them, I really want to because I am a bus driver. I'm not a bus driver, I'm a bus rider. Yeah. I can't imagine me being a bus driver, and again, I love the Greater Cleveland Regional Transportation Authority, GCRTA. They are transitioning to hybrid and zero-emission buses because our buses are old, and they're loud, and so I would love to experience it and see the quietness of the bus for myself, and I'm hoping to do that obviously one day, but I have not done so yet.

GJ: Yeah, so I 100% percent was on a zero-emission bus looking it up right now, zero-emission bus trials in Munich have occurred since at least summer 2020 when the Munich Transport Corporation, MVG began using a Lion City 12 E electric bus for testing. Yeah. So yeah, I definitely was on some green buses in Munich earlier this year.

BL: Our next question comes from Chad, and he doesn't say which part of this state he is from, but he just says he's from the great state of Pennsylvania, and this goes back to our discussion a few weeks ago on Waymo's, and he wants to know that if Waymo's were ever going to have the capability to take somebody across the country, would you take a Waymo on that trip, just a road trip to wherever you want to go across the country? Would you travel in a Waymo?

JP: I'll answer that one. I mean, the question is like, are you going to be stuck in the car the whole time because it has this mission of getting you from A to B? Does it have that individuality where, I don't know where you could be like, ‘Stop and let me out for a rest break’ or is it really just like A to B, and that's it, and there's no working off of that because then I'd say no, If I'm just trapped in a car for how long it takes. 

GJ: Well, of course they're not going to be trapped. I mean the whole point of a Waymo is that you can communicate well, you can change your route.

JP: Yeah, but can you have it stop and wait for you?

GJ: I imagine. So I mean, if we get to a point where Waymo's are that normal, that they're going across the country. I imagine at that point you're talking to the Waymo and saying, ‘Waymo, stop at the next rest, stop exit 12’. And then you just go into that rest, stop and stretch your legs, use the restroom, that sort of thing. I would do it but not if it was a car, maybe. Well, the whole point would be able to relax your legs. Yeah, I would. I definitely would imagine just sitting there watching a movie.

BL: Yeah. Across the country. It's almost like flying, except for the fact that you're in a vehicle in a way. I will say that we talked about Waymo a few weeks ago, and I had never actually seen the inside of one until I was watching a YouTube video a couple of weeks ago, and a YouTuber I was watching was in Los Angeles, and he took a Waymo and just to see the way that it was literally driving without a human being in it and to see that up close firsthand was like, how did we get here and what life am I living in that this is possible, but also like, wow, I want to experience this, and this may be the greatest invention that's ever been invented. I think I would. There's something about the computer that, and I say it all the time, If you come anywhere in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, these people have no idea how to drive their cars, so in my opinion, I think technology may help with that.

GJ: Are you saying Ohio drivers are bad?

BL: They're terrible.

GJ: Because that's what here in the great state of Pennsylvania where I'm from.

BL: As well as Chad.

GJ: As well as Chad, though if Chad was a true Pennsylvanian, he would've said the great commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but yeah, that's a thing here. When we say that Ohio drivers are bad, my dad raised me to think that anytime we went into Ohio, he would say, these drivers are really bad. However, my dad is wrong. Ohio drivers are not the worst. I would say that Virginia drivers.

BL: I've heard that too.

GJ: Oh, and the thing that's frustrating about Virginia drivers is that they don't, in Virginia, you can cruise in the left lane on a highway.

BL: I've heard that. Yep.

GJ: And it's not for passing. And in Pennsylvania, the left lane is for passing only, so you drive into Virginia and all of a sudden these people are just cruising in the left lane.

JP: I would lose my mind. As a Massachusetts driver, we are passing, passing, passing, and I don't care if you're going this fast. If you're going the speed limit, I still want to pass you so get out of the passing lane.

GJ: It is. So I used to live in Virginia. I used to live in Martinsville, Virginia. I was a sports writer for the Martinsville Bulletin and covered NASCAR at the Martinsville Speedway and whenever I would drive up I-81 to go home to Pittsburgh on holidays and whatnot, it would be so frustrating.

JP: You go from covering NASCAR to people going 40 in the cruise, in the passing lane. 

GJ: Yeah. All these NASCAR fans that don't know how to use the left lane, it's insane.

BL: But that's all I got for emails.

GJ: Okay, well thank you so much for emailing us and thank you to our listeners who've supported us through this second season and get ready for Season 3 because Season 3 is where we are going to really, really blow up. I just know it. I know it. We're in full stride now, and we got some youngins, some youngins. The youths are coming onto the podcast. We're going to bring on some next gen and really examine in the next season, examine what's attracting young people to this industry and the technology that they are fascinated by, how they're being trained by that technology, and we're really going to dig in and really examine the next generation, and I think that our audience is going to love it.

BL: And by January, I will update both of you as to what shows that Gavin has recommended me to watch. I will be diving into, over our break here, as well as if I improved on any geography skills. See, the youngins can teach me some things.

GJ: Okay. Alright. Hey, what is the capital of Pennsylvania, the great state?

BL: Oh, good question. 

GJ: What is it?

BL: I'm going to guess It's either, I'll say Pittsburgh, I feel like it's not. 

GJ: No, it's not. 

JP: Can I guess?

GJ: Go ahead.

JP: Is it Harrisburg?

GJ: It's Harrisburg.

BL: Harrisburg. Oh.

JP: Okay, cool.

BL: I was going to say Hershey and then I was like, no, that's not it.

GJ: Well, Hershey's, right next to Harrisburg. You could drive from Harrisburg and be in Hershey in 20 minutes.

JP: Was it ever Philadelphia or was it always Harrisburg?

GJ: It started off as Philadelphia. I mean Philadelphia, yeah, and then it moved to Harrisburg.

BL: That was going to be my first guess but then I knew that that wasn't it.

GJ: Yeah. My God, Pittsburgh should be the state capitol.

JP: What's the capital of Massachusetts?

BL: Yeah. The only city I know is Boston. I don't know a lot of cities in Massachusetts, so no, I don't.

JP: It's Boston. 

GJ: Oh, it's Boston? 

JP: Yeah.

GJ: Why did I think it? I thought it was maybe Springfield.

JP: No, it's Boston. It's one of the, it's like surprising how you always think the capital is going to be the most populous metropolitan city, but it's not half the time. New York is, most of it's Albany.

BL: The weird one to me is California being Sacramento. That one I don't get.

GJ: What it is, is whenever they made them, a lot of times it's the city that's most central in the state. Harrisburg is smack dab in the middle of the state.

BL: That makes sense. Which is why Columbus is Ohio. It's pretty much smack dab in between Cleveland and Cincinnati.

GJ: Yeah, same with Sacramento. It's not necessarily, you have to think in terms of the 1800s, where people were traveling by carriage, and it was just like what was the easiest place for the people in the state to get to?

BL: It's crazy to think about these states were formed in the 1800s and here we are in 2025 going into 2026 and the people that made up these states back in the 1800s never would've thought that 300 years later, these people are talking about artificial intelligence and driverless cars.

JP: They couldn’t even comprehend it.

GJ: They couldn't comprehend a microwave, let alone cell phones and AI and Waymo's. If you could go into have a time machine and just go back and just pluck some random person off a dirt street and 1829 and bring them here, they would of had a stroke.

BL: Back in the day, you guys had to use a compass and read a map for directions. Now we just go, ‘hey Google, give me to this place’.

JP: I mean, I think it's even archaic. I used MapQuest, and I'd print it out the piece of paper.

GJ: You still do that?

JP: No, I used to. 

GJ: Oh, I still do that. I live completely analog lifestyle. 

BL: I know people that do that, that still do use MapQuest because they refuse to believe Google Maps. They think it's going to drive them off a bridge. 

GJ: They don't trust the clankers.

BL: No, they don't.

JP: Oh my goodness. I mean, MapQuest, I remember you'd miss a turn. You'd have to go all the way back to the one that you knew you finished last.

GJ: You actually did. 

JP: Oh my gosh. Don't miss that.

GJ: I used to print out stuff, too. Back in the day. Back in the day. Alright.

JP: Back in the day.

GJ: Well, that is it. Thank you so much. We also want to thank our parent company, Endeavor B2B, and we want to thank Brandon for being so awesome all season long. And Jessica for joining midseason, jumping on and being excellent. And again, one more time. Thank you to you, the listener. And the next time you hear us it will be 2026. And until then, goodbye.