Thanks you at home for joining this, as I'm really, really happy to have you here tonight.

You want to see a beautiful thing.

Look at this.

Whether or not you're like an infrastructure geek, isn't this a nice-looking bridge?

I think this is just gorgeous.

I grew up in the East Bay in Northern California when I was a little kid.

Every time we'd drive over the Bay Bridge from the East Bay to San Francisco,

I would drive myself nuts trying to figure out how on earth they could ever build a big,

long bridge like that. I think that I, I think I have a memory of convincing myself as a little

kid that they must have built the Bay Bridge, the suspension part of it. They must have built it

straight up in the air as if it was a big

flat tower, and then when it was tall enough, they flopped it down onto the other side of the

bay. That's how I believed these things must be built, which is not at all how you build a bridge.

This, in fact, is how you build a bridge. This is a time-lapse video that shows

how this one in particular was built out from each side of the span, both sides building toward

the middle. And then when they get to the middle, look, it just knits together. And presto,

it's a bridge. Just beautiful stuff, really impressive.

This bridge costs nearly $5 billion to build. They built it to stand for more than a century.

And this bridge has taken years, but it is ready to go. After years of construction and all the

design and effort that went into this, this beautiful bridge is good to go.

It is ready for cars and trucks. It's even got a lane for bikes or people walking. Let's go. It is ready.

But of course, there's a reason I'm not showing you pictures of cars and trucks and bikes

...