Ten Across Conversations

Ten Across
  • 5.0 (8)
  • News Commentary
  • Biweekly

Ten Across Conversations examines pressing issues impacting communities along the U.S. Interstate 10 corridor. From Jacksonville, Florida to Los Angeles, California, this region provides a compelling and comprehensive window into the major challenges and opportunities of the 21st century in their most extreme. Join founder and executive director, Wellington “Duke” Reiter, as he chats with subject experts bringing unique insights and new ways of thinking to reveal our collective capacity to create a more resilient future. For more information about the Ten Across Initiative visit www.10across.com.

  1. 18h ago

    $7 Billion Bet Against the Next Big Storm: Rob Rogers on Protecting the Houston Ship Channel

    Every one of those [petrochemical] materials floats on water. So if the flood waters reach your home but they’re only an inch deep, you’re still contaminated for a long time. —Rob Rogers, founding partner, Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers Episode Description Eighteen years after Hurricane Ike showed the catastrophic storm-surge risk to the Houston area’s industrial and petroleum complex, architect Rob Rogers is making the case for a storm barrier inside Galveston Bay. Built largely from material dredged from the Houston Ship Channel, it would double as a public park. Why it matters: When Ike hit, Texas refineries holding about a fifth of U.S. capacity shut down, and gas ran short as far away as Atlanta. The federal plan to protect the channel is still in design. The question: How do we maintain the public will to pay for protection when the last disaster is fading from view? Why here: On the I-10 corridor’s Gulf Coast, the Coastal Texas Project—the “Ike Dike”—is what Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham calls “the largest coastal resiliency undertaking in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers history.” Rogers Partners developed the Galveston Bay Park Plan with Rice University’s SSPEED Center and engineers at Walter P Moore. Rice put its cost at about $7 billion in 2025. In this episode, Rob Rogers, founding partner of Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers, joins Duke Reiter to discuss what an architect brings to flood protection design, why the Army Corps’ process never produced a plan like his, and what the Ship Channel, like the interstate highway system, tells us about building for generations. This is Part One of a two-part series on who pays to protect the Texas coast. In Part Two, Bolivar Peninsula resident and advocate Brenda Flanagan and Michel Bechtel of the Gulf Coast Protection District talk about the peninsula’s engineered sand dunes and who maintains them. Relevant Articles and Resources “Massive Galveston Bay Barrier System Gets One Step Closer to Construction” (Public Health Watch, February 2026)“Texas Leads Bold Push to Build ‘The Gate’” (Texas General Land Office, December 2025)“Rice’s SSPEED Center unveils Galveston Bay Park Plan: A comprehensive solution to hurricane storm surge threats” (Rice News, May 2025)“Houston Ship Channel Ranked #1 U.S. Waterway” (Port Houston, May 2025)“Galveston Bay Park (Houston-Galveston Area Protection System)” (Rogers Partners)“Post-Ike gas shortage may take weeks to end” (Christian Science Monitor, September 2008)“Hurricane Ike idles 21% of US refining capacity” (Oil & Gas Journal, September 2008)Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts Negotiating Survival: The Complex Decision-Making Required to Save Louisiana’s CoastKatrina’s 20th: Jeff Hébert on Community Recovery and ResilienceAddressing Historical Inequities in Our National Infrastructure, Then and NowCredits Host: Duke Reiter Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler Guest Bio Rob Rogers, FAIA, is the Founding Partner of Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers and has served as professor and architecture critic at prestigious design schools and universities around the country. Believing that even a single building is a piece of urban design, his work explores the limits of architecture and the overlap of disciplines: the spaces where architecture, landscapes, and the public realm converge. Designing in cities nationally and abroad, Rob is committed to design excellence, creating work built on research, analysis, discovery, and shared experience.  Links to Apple Music, Spotify and Google Play: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ten-across-conversations/id1582715331?uo=4 https://open.spotify.com/show/2NPKV4nAArPPknNEIGx0Zx

  2. Oct 15

    Election Integrity on the I-10: Three County Officials on Earning Voters’ Trust

    "We like to remind people that the voting process doesn't belong to us. We facilitate it. But the voting process belongs to the citizens of the jurisdiction." — Dean Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, Los Angeles County “…To those folks who are sowing this distrust, making sure that we challenge them with, ‘Hey, why don’t you come work for us? You will get the training that every staff member gets, you will be in the environment, you can see it firsthand.’” — Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, Recorder, Pima County, Arizona "Every state has the ability to set their own laws. The fact that Arizona and California take longer does not concern me at all." — Mark Earley, Supervisor of Elections, Leon County, Florida Heading into the 2026 midterms, election integrity means more than the mechanics of ensuring an accurate count. The officials responsible for elections in influential counties like Los Angeles, California; Pima, Arizona; and Leon, Florida, also have to earn voters’ confidence in the result.   Why it matters: Trust in elections is a foundation of American self-government, and in recent cycles some voters have lost it. That doubt now shapes how elections are run, from how fast votes are counted to how an election office communicates with its voters. The question: How does an election office rebuild the trust of voters who have lost it? And should every state have to go about it the same way? Why here: Interstate 10 runs through three highly influential states that conduct the same election three different ways: California mails every voter a ballot, Arizona lets voters sign up once to get one for every election, and Florida requires a new request every two years and posts its results on election night. Side by side, perspectives from these three counties show how differently each state can build trust in its count. In this episode, Dean Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk for Los Angeles County; Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, Pima County Recorder; and Mark Earley, Supervisor of Elections for Leon County, Florida, join Duke Reiter and co-host Bill Gates, executive director of ASU’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory and a former member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. ASU formed the Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory in 2024 to help restore public confidence in elections, and we were fortunate to have its director, Bill Gates, co-host this conversation. Gates’s lab hosted the national Election Science, Reform, and Administration conference at ASU in June, which brings election officials and researchers together to improve the quality of American elections. Together they talk through the importance of election integrity including the current mid-term elections, why a count can take hours in one state and days in another, how prediction markets shaped expectations in Los Angeles this summer, why Pima County redesigned its ballot envelope this year, and whether voters will ever cast a ballot from their phones. Relevant Articles and Resources New Laws, New Maps Can Complicate Election Administration Across the I-10 Corridor  (Ten Across Insights, June 2026)2026 Election Science, Reform, and Administration Conference (hosted by ASU's Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory, June 2026)Election Science, Reform and Administration Intro VideoREPORT: "Local Election Officials Survey 2026" (Brennan Center for Justice, April 2026)"Federal election changes loom ahead of midterms" (National Association of Counties, September 2026)"New ASU lab aims to restore public election confidence, encourage careers in field" (ASU News, August 2024)Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County ClerkPima County RecorderLeon County Supervisor of ElectionsRelevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts James Fallows on How the News Media Influences U.S. Democracy and ElectionsNew America's Anne-Marie Slaughter on the Importance of Local and Regional GovernanceWhat America's Small Towns Tell Us About DemocracyCharting an Optimistic Future with Marc Morial and Paul Johnson Credits Host: Duke Reiter Co-host: Bill Gates Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler Guest Bios: Bill Gates is Executive Director of ASU's Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory (MODL) and a Professor of Practice in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. ASU formed MODL in 2024 to help professionalize elections administration, and in 2025 the lab launched its AI + Elections Clinic to help election officials use AI responsibly. He served on the Phoenix City Council from 2009 to 2016, including as Vice Mayor, and was elected to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in 2016 and re-elected in 2020. During the 2022 general election, he took part in 16 press conferences as the county counted razor-thin statewide races over 13 days. A frequent on-air contributor to CNN, he received the American Bar Association's Unsung Hero of Democracy Award in 2024, was named The Arizona Republic's 2021 Arizonan of the Year, and holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Dean C. Logan is Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk for Los Angeles County, which his office describes as the largest and most complex county election jurisdiction in the country, with more than 500 political districts. Beyond elections, the department records property documents, maintains vital records, and issues marriage licenses. Before coming to Los Angeles, he directed records, elections, and licensing services for King County, Washington, and served as Washington's state elections director. He is a past president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, serves on the board of the National Election Center, advises the MIT Election Data Science Lab, and teaches in the MPA program at California State University, Northridge. Gabriella Cázares-Kelly was elected Pima County Recorder in November 2020 and leads the office responsible for voter registration, early voting, and document recording in Pima County, Arizona. A former public school educator and community organizer and a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation, she ran for office after encountering the systemic barriers that kept people from registering to vote. She is the first Native American to hold an elected Pima County office. She is a graduate of Pima Community College and the University of Arizona and holds a master's degree in educational leadership from Northern Arizona University. Mark Earley has served the voters of Leon County, Florida, for more than 30 years and was first elected Supervisor of Elections in 2016, succeeding his mentor, Ion Sancho. A former president of Florida Supervisors of Elections, Inc., he serves on the executive committees of the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission's Local Leadership Council, and on the Bipartisan Policy Center's Task Force on Elections. He played a lead role in developing a post-election audit system, holds a mechanical engineering degree from the FAMU/FSU College of Engineering, and was inducted into the Election Center's National Hall of Fame in 2023.

  3. Oct 8

    What It Takes to Cool a City: Bill Updike on Smart Surfaces

    "…we can still get stuff done in this country when people's lives are on the line." —Bill Updike, Director of U.S. Policy & Programs, Smart Surfaces Coalition Cities are getting hotter, but some of the biggest opportunities to change that may be hiding in plain sight—in the roofs, roads and parking lots that surround us every day. Why it matters: Extreme heat is the leading weather-related cause of death in the U.S., according to a September 2025 GAO report. Dark roofs and pavement make it worse, soaking up the sun’s heat all day and releasing it at night.The question: The fixes are old and simple–cool roofs, lighter pavement, more shade. So why aren’t more cities using them?Why here: The I-10 corridor runs through some of the hottest cities in the country, and four of the Smart Surfaces Coalition's ten partner cities are on it: Phoenix, San Antonio, New Orleans and Jacksonville. Green building expert, Bill Updike, takes us inside an effort to rethink those surfaces. His organization, the Smart Surfaces Coalition, brings together more than forty organizations to help cities move from recognizing the problem to acting on it, with the maps, cost-benefit tools, and model policies to get there. But if the solutions are relatively straightforward, why aren’t more cities adopting them? Updike describes the less visible barriers standing in the way, the cities finding creative ways around them, and the political trend he now sees as the biggest risk to the whole effort. In this episode, Bill Updike, Director of U.S. Policy & Programs at the Smart Surfaces Coalition and formerly chief of green building and climate policy for Washington, DC, discusses what it takes to get a city to build differently.  Smart Surfaces Coalition and their tools can be found at: https://smartsurfacescoalition.org/ Relevant Articles and Resources REPORT: "Extreme Heat: Limited FEMA Assistance Highlights Need for Reevaluation of Agency's Role" (Government Accountability Office, September 2025)"Phoenix has a new 5-year, $60M shade plan. Is it enough to cool down the city?" (KJZZ, September 2026)"US cities using smart surfaces, strategies to cool residents" (The Nation's Health, October 2025)Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts Building Heat Resilience with Kathy Baughman McLeod & David Hondula10X Convergence: The Region's Experts Convene to Address the Insurability CrisisJeff Goodell on the Science and Accountability of Extreme HeatCredits Host: Duke Reiter Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler Guest Bio Bill Updike is Director of U.S. Policy & Programs at the Smart Surfaces Coalition. He was previously a principal at the engineering firm Integral Group, where he developed climate action plans for cities and zero-carbon plans for colleges and universities. Before that, he was Chief of the Green Building and Climate Branch at Washington, DC's Department of Energy and Environment. There he chaired the group behind the first city adoption of all major chapters of the International Green Construction Code, led the effort to create the first city-based Green Bank in the U.S., and helped introduce the first mandatory minimum energy performance standard for existing buildings. He began his career as an environmental journalist for two national magazines. In 2015 he received one of the U.S. Green Building Council's inaugural BOLD Awards.

  4. Sep 24

    Every City Is Now El Paso: Jazmine Ulloa on a Border Built Brick by Brick

    "The foundation of the immigration system and the battles... all of that had been built brick by brick in El Paso, through both Republican and Democratic administrations." —Jazmine Ulloa Episode Description: To much of the country, Interstate 10 reaches El Paso on its way to somewhere else, the city seen as little more than a name on a sign between San Antonio and Phoenix, or as a backdrop for whatever border story dominates the news. Yet its position at a key gap in the mountains, El Paso del Norte, has anchored a pivotal crossroads for as long as people have traversed the continent. The city shares a binational life and generations of family ties with Ciudad Juárez, the older settlement on the southern bank of the Rio Grande. The two have been bound together since long before the U.S.-Mexico War placed an international boundary between them, a boundary whose precise course remained contested for decades. In El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, New York Times national reporter Jazmine Ulloa returns to her hometown to tell its story through the lives of five families across a century. In that time, El Paso has been a testbed and proving ground for U.S. border and immigration policy, and the lives of its residents chart the complicated motives, successes and failures, from the establishment of the Border Patrol in the 1920s to today's Department of Homeland Security. It is a history worth understanding now, as the biggest shifts in national immigration policy play out most pointedly along the I-10 corridor. The book was inspired by a tragedy. On August 3, 2019, a gunman drove to El Paso from the Dallas area and killed 23 people at a Walmart, and later admitted choosing a border city to dissuade Hispanic immigration. Ulloa, then covering national politics for The Boston Globe, was on a plane home within a day. From the memorial that had sprung up in the Walmart parking lot, she could hear the traffic on the nearby Interstate 10. The sound that had once called her to leave became a reason to return, to understand the place she came from. In this episode, she joins Duke Reiter to discuss what she found, why she considers the comparison between El Paso and Ellis Island imperfect yet useful, and why the Ten Across region is such a revealing lens on immigration. This is where migration, enforcement and the question of who belongs are felt first and most intensely. What takes shape here tends to reach the rest of the country. As Ulloa argues, every city is now El Paso. Relevant Articles and ResourcesEl Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and MemoryREPORT: "Border Control: Revised Strategy Is Showing Some Positive Results""Jazmine Ulloa on 'El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory'"Relevant Ten Across Conversations PodcastsKyle Paoletta on American Oasis and the Southwest's Claim on the American StoryTwo Texas Cities Reexamining Data Center Deals, with Robert Moore of El Paso MattersAlternative Visions of the Southern U.S. Border Yesterday, Tomorrow and TodayCredits Host: Duke Reiter Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler Guest Bio: Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter for The New York Times. She previously reported for the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe, where she was part of a team that won the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. A native of El Paso, she started out as a journalist in Texas, where she worked for newspapers in Brownsville, San Antonio and Austin. She has made appearances on MSNBC, CNN and CBS, as well as in Al Jazeera's documentary television program Fault Lines. Tags: Governance, Equity, Commerce, Border, El Paso, Mexico, Texas, Arizona, California Links to Apple Music, Spotify and Google Play: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ten-across-conversations/id1582715331?uo=4 https://open.spotify.com/show/2NPKV4nAArPPknNEIGx0Zx

  5. Sep 10

    Jeff Goodell on the Science and Accountability of Extreme Heat

    "This is really a story about... the people who are causing the pollution, harming the people who basically did nothing and are suffering the damages. And do those people who cause the harm owe the people who suffer the damages anything?" —Jeff Goodell, contributing writer at Rolling Stone and author of The Heat Will Kill You First  July 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States, and Europe came through its hottest June-to-July period on record. At least 35,000 excess deaths have been counted across the continent's summer heatwaves — a figure produced by statistical modeling rather than by death certificates, and one that is still incomplete. Here in the Ten Across region, where extreme heat is not new, Maricopa County confirmed 645 heat deaths in 2023 and counts them one by one. A September 2025 report from the Government Accountability Office describes extreme heat as the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States. Nonetheless, extreme heat has never met the criteria for a federal disaster declaration. Federal assistance is largely built around damage to physical infrastructure, while extreme heat mainly damages people. Mayors from this corridor, who have been managing heat longer than anyone, have been pressing to change that. Meanwhile there is still no federal heat standard protecting outdoor workers, and Texas and Florida — among the hottest states in the country — have passed laws barring their own cities from requiring employers to provide water breaks and shade. The heat is also moving. In June 2021 a heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest, a region built for nothing like it. Among the hundreds who died was Sebastian Perez, a 38-year-old farmworker from Guatemala, two months into a job at an Oregon nursery. Within two weeks, scientists at World Weather Attribution announced the event would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change. In the five years since, the field has advanced to counting the deaths a heat wave would not otherwise have caused, and to tracing heat damage to the emissions of individual companies. That science now underpins lawsuits against fossil fuel producers, new laws in Vermont and New York, and a fight over the climate chapter in the reference manual federal judges consult. In this episode, climate journalist Jeff Goodell returns to the podcast to discuss the summer behind us, the divide he has described between "the cooled and the cooked," and his current project on the rise of attribution science. Relevant Articles and Resources  "Framework for a Heat-Ready Nation" (Federation of American Scientists & Ten Across, July 2025) "The New American Inequality: The Cooled vs. the Cooked" (The New York Times, August 2025) Copernicus Climate Change Service monthly climate bulletins (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, 2026) Maricopa County Heat Surveillance (Maricopa County Department of Public Health) Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts Finding Optimism Amid the Climate Crisis with Jeff Goodell Covering Climate Change as It Unfolds with Jeff Goodell Building Heat Resilience with Kathy Baughman McLeod & David Hondula Credits  Host: Duke Reiter Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler Guest Bio Jeff Goodell Jeff Goodell's latest book is the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. He is the author of six previous books, including The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, which was a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017. He has covered climate change for more than two decades at Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. As a commentator on climate and energy issues, he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News and The Oprah Winfrey Show. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.

  6. Aug 27

    Why the Southwest Is Already the American Future with Kyle Paoletta

    "There's maybe a more practical way to look at it, which is just understanding water as a communal resource, as something that is necessary to share rather than this thing that we divide up and profit on." — Kyle Paoletta Kyle Paoletta opens his recent book, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest with a claim similar to the one on which Ten Across is based: the Southwest "already looks like what the rest of America is becoming." Every year the country at large grows hotter, drier, more urban, more diverse. The desert cities got there first. His view of what lies ahead for the Southwest--and by extension, for the rest of the nation-- first required a deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of the place. That is the case for treating this region as a preview rather than an exception, and it is why the Interstate 10 corridor is worth watching closely. What arrives here arrives everywhere, eventually. Kyle is a journalist who grew up outside Albuquerque and left for the East Coast, where he found that almost no one knew the place he came from. Years later, his book takes the five largest desert cities, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tucson, and El Paso, and weaves them into a single story of people who learned to live where water is becoming more scarce. In this conversation with Duke Reiter, he explains how a magazine called Arizona Highways and a relentless chamber of commerce sold the Arizona desert to the rest of the country, a playbook similarly run in Texas and Florida. He points to Las Vegas, which added hundreds of thousands of people without increasing its water use, and to El Paso, where the country’s first direct-to-distribution water recycling plant opens in 2028. He discusses Tucson's heritage of architecture designed for heat—knowledge the rest of the country is beginning to need—and argues that the short renegotiation cycles for Colorado River water may be a feature rather than a failure. Ultimately, Kyle’s reflections on where the story of the Southwest is headed next may not be what you expect. American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest is available from Pantheon. https://www.kylepaoletta.com/ Relevant Articles and Resources Native American Tribes Came Together to Secure Their Rights to Colorado River Water. Four States Are Stalling the Deal (ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix, June 2026)TSMC Announces Additional $100 Billion Investment in Arizona (Arizona Commerce Authority, July 2026)Judge blocks Arizona water rule that halted new housing developments across the Valley (Arizona Mirror, April 2026)El Paso Water breaks ground on the nation's first direct-to-distribution water reuse facility (February 2025)Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts Understanding Groundwater Risks in the Southwest with Jay FamigliettiLatest Deadpool Projections Inject New Urgency into Colorado River NegotiationsDebunking the Water Myths of Western Cities with Grady Gammage Jr.Checking in on Tense Colorado River Negotiations with Anne Castle and John FleckCredits Host: Duke Reiter Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler Guest Bio Kyle Paoletta is a journalist, essayist, and cultural critic whose reporting and criticism have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and the Columbia Journalism Review, where he is a contributing writer. He earned a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Columbia University and worked for several years as a fact-checker at GQ, Harper's Magazine, and New York Magazine before becoming a full-time writer in 2020. He grew up in New Mexico and now lives in Maine, where he is at work on a new book about the nation's relationship to the natural world, Out to Pasture: How Reviving the Wilderness Can Save America From Itself. American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest, is his first book.

  7. Aug 13

    Preparing for the Next Disaster: AI, Local Capacity, and a Shrinking Federal Role with Jeremy Greenberg

    "A large portion of an emergency manager's time is not doing active response. The administrative burden of writing grants, developing plans, reviewing plans, all of those tasks are what takes up a significant portion of time... So where we would say, hey, these smaller jurisdictions don't have time to go do this [adopt AI tools], the return on investment is almost higher in some of these places." — Jeremy Greenberg Emergency managers at the local level are being asked to do more with less, and artificial intelligence is arriving faster than the guidance for using it. That tension is especially pressing along the Interstate 10 corridor, one of the most disaster-prone regions in the country, where hurricanes, wildfire, flooding and extreme heat arrive as a matter of routine. The Markle Foundation and Aspen Digital, a program of the Aspen Institute, have formed the AI for Disasters and Emergencies Initiative, or AIDE, a multi-sector, nonpartisan collaboration working with the RAND Corporation. Its first year of findings, published this month, points to real potential for human-centered AI to help small agencies stretch thin resources, and to the leadership, training and procurement conditions that make adoption work. An adoption playbook, capacity-building pilots and a summit in Austin this September are all ahead. Jeremy Greenberg, who leads the effort for Aspen Digital, spent twenty-three years in federal emergency management and more than twenty as a volunteer firefighter. He argues the return on AI may be highest in the smallest offices, where one or two people carry grant writing, planning and response on the same desk. He is also candid about the field's harder problem: nobody, he says, has ever held a press conference to celebrate a disaster that didn't happen.In this episode, Greenberg discusses what those findings mean in practice, what the federal shift toward state and local responsibility means for the agencies absorbing it, and where a two-person office should start. Follow the AIDE Initiative's playbook, research and September summit at https://www.aideinitiative.org/  Relevant Articles and Resources AIDE Summit 2026 (Austin, Texas, September 2026)REPORT: "AI for Disasters + Emergencies: A Way Forward" (The Markle Foundation, August 2026)REPORT: "Final Report of the President's Council to Assess the Federal Emergency Management Agency" (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, May 2026)"FEMA review signals shift to state-led disaster management" (StateScoop, May 2026)"Markle Foundation initiative aims to bring practical AI tools to emergency management" (StateScoop, June 2026)The AIDE Initiative — jurisdictions can submit input directly through the siteRelevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts AI Series: 10X Cities Are Using Digital Twins to Solve Complex ProblemsWhy the Ten Across Geography Needs FEMA with Dr. Samantha MontanoAI Series: Balancing Data Infrastructure Resource Demands10X Convergence: The Region's Experts Convene to Address the Insurability Crisis Credits Host: Duke Reiter Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler About our Guest: Jeremy Greenberg is Senior Advisor to Aspen Digital, where he leads the AI for Disasters and Emergencies Initiative, and President of Provincial Strategies LLC, an emergency and risk management consulting firm. He also serves as an Adjunct Instructor in the University of Chicago's Threat and Risk Management Program. He brings more than 23 years of federal service, including five years in the Senior Executive Service, with extensive experience leading national emergency preparedness, response, and risk management efforts. Most recently, Jeremy led FEMA's Response Operations Division, overseeing national capabilities for identifying, alerting, and stabilizing threats and hazards, including the National Watch Center, FEMA Operations Center, National Response Coordination Center, and National Urban Search and Rescue program. He previously served as Chief of the National Response Coordination Center and FEMA Team Leader for the Domestic Emergency Support Team, responding to hundreds of presidentially declared disasters spanning hurricanes, wildfires, cyber incidents, and terrorist attacks. Earlier in his career, Jeremy served in senior policy, performance, external affairs, and emergency management roles at FEMA and the U.S. Department of Transportation. His experience also includes the Department of Homeland Security, Booz Allen Hamilton, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Department of Justice. He holds degrees from American University and the National Defense University's College of International Security Affairs and is a graduate of the National Emergency Management Executive Academy and Harvard's National Preparedness Leadership Initiative. Jeremy has dedicated over 20 years to serving his community as a volunteer firefighter, emergency medical technician, and instructor.

  8. Jul 24

    From City Hall to Climate Bank: Financing Resilience with Chris Castro

    "If you use low-cost capital, you don't need tax credits to make the economics work. That's what excites me the most about how to scale this thing up. [...] How do I help every other community bank get in the game of building their green lending muscle and thinking about resilience? And if we can do that, then we don't need all of the tax credits and all the incentives that everybody has thought we needed in this industry."  — Chris Castro, founding director and chief sustainability officer, Climate First Bank Federal support for climate and clean energy programs is being dismantled, and the question of who will finance resilience has turned urgent for communities throughout the Ten Across geography. The money that flowed from Washington is thinning; the need is not. Few people have approached that question from as many sides as Chris Castro. He built Orlando's sustainability and resilience office under Mayor Buddy Dyer, then moved to Washington as a presidential appointee, helping stand up the Department of Energy arm created to move historic infrastructure and climate funding to states, cities, and school districts — until the change in administration halted the work. Now Castro is pursuing the same goal from inside the private sector. As founding director and chief sustainability officer of Climate First Bank, he is testing whether a community bank can finance resilience at a scale federal programs no longer will. In this episode, Ten Across founder Duke Reiter and Chris Castro trace that arc from city hall to federal government to mission-driven banking, and land on a question 10X is now taking up with its own networks: what resilience officers need to know about finance.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
8 Ratings

About

Ten Across Conversations examines pressing issues impacting communities along the U.S. Interstate 10 corridor. From Jacksonville, Florida to Los Angeles, California, this region provides a compelling and comprehensive window into the major challenges and opportunities of the 21st century in their most extreme. Join founder and executive director, Wellington “Duke” Reiter, as he chats with subject experts bringing unique insights and new ways of thinking to reveal our collective capacity to create a more resilient future. For more information about the Ten Across Initiative visit www.10across.com.

Information

  • Creator
    Ten Across
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    138
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright Ten Across
  • Show Website
    Ten Across Conversations

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