Governor Jared Polis on Quantum, Aerospace, and What Colorado Is Leaving on the Table

[00:00:00] Well, Governor Polis, I'm so excited to have you on here. Dan, it's great to be here in your studio. Yes, absolutely. So, this is it. You're winding down your long tenure as governor, and you've spent time in Washington, but you've also been a tech entrepreneur. You also do investing. You've really got a richness of experience, and I want to spend all this time talking about the future, not necessarily the past,

[00:00:23] and the future, your future, your future vision for what Colorado is, can be, the potential Colorado, how it gets there. I want you to paint a picture about your view of kind of Colorado, and then I want to talk about you. I want to talk about you and your path forward, and not so much about if you go back into politics. I'll let you talk about that if and when you want to talk about that, but let's talk about what your journey forward is in life outside of politics.

[00:00:53] Sure, and it doesn't feel like winding down yet because I'm here until the second week of January, so about five more months. And it's like being CEO of any large enterprise. We have 32,000 employees in the state of Colorado. So, I mean, there's 15 things every day, including planning for the future and kind of what, in terms of legacy achievements, I want to make sure there's continued momentum on and what we're worried about, what we want to continue.

[00:01:20] But, you know, it's like an instantaneous handoff that second week in January. But until then, it's, you know, it's 100 miles an hour every day. Well, let's talk about those legacy things that you want to make sure have continued momentum. Well, I think, you know, really it tracks back to kind of why I ran for governor in the first place, because I had served in Congress, as you mentioned, representing, you know, Boulder, Fort Collins area for 10 years. And it wasn't like I was planning at some point on running for governor.

[00:01:50] That wasn't, you know, that was something that, you know, I thought, you know, maybe, but it wasn't something I was like, oh, I got to run for governor. But it was like, you know, really frustrated with a lot of things in Colorado. And one of those reasons I ran is Colorado only had half-day kindergarten for parents. I wanted to have full-day kindergarten and universal preschool. All the long-term studies show that those early childhood years are incredibly important. And we just got some great recognition on that, didn't we? We did.

[00:02:17] Number one in education, U.S. News and World Report, absolutely. And our progress in early childhood was probably the biggest factor in what propelled us from number one. We were number 18, number three last year, number one this year, 18 when I took office. And it's a big deal for a number of reasons. So first of all, for the child, and that's what obviously drives us, you know, language skills, especially if parents don't speak English, if parents might not have a high school degree themselves, incredibly important. But also for the economy today, we're going to talk about competitiveness, I'm sure. But like, you know, for families to be able to have kids and be able to work,

[00:02:47] they need to be able to afford, you know, child care. And so we've made child care affordable across the continuum. But universal preschool and kindergarten help a lot in kind of parents having the option to reenter the workforce sooner if they choose is a big deal there. So that's one of the big ones. Health care, health care, health care, which I've been very frustrated with our progress on. So, I mean, first of all, early childhood, you know, we accomplished what I set out to accomplish, preschool and kindergarten. That was what I said I was going to do. Talk maybe a minute or two longer about preschool and kindergarten. And what did we put in place?

[00:03:16] Yeah, so they're different. And I want to talk about them both separately since we have this wonderful long-form interview. Not long enough because the governor's only giving me 50 minutes. There you go. It's usually an hour and a half. So we'll talk a little quicker. I'll make up for Fred talking fast. So, yeah, and some people are playing this in their car and two-speed also. So kindergarten was half day. Parents could pay for full day. You know, some low-income kids got it for free. But that's by school districts. So that's in a school. It's a grade, right?

[00:03:44] And so we just simply funded it for full grade, full time. And it's just like first grade, second grade, third grade. Preschool didn't really exist as publicly funded. There was some funding for, again, very low-income people. But when we did preschool, we said we're going to embrace not just schools, but choice and community providers. So parents actually choose the preschool that they want. There's a lottery if there's too many people that want it. It's about 60% school districts, 40% private and child care-based preschools.

[00:04:13] Many parents want those because they might have like a one-year-old and a three-year-old and a four-year-old, and they want them in the same place so their four-year-old is there. And they do a fine job too. So the key thing we leaned into was kind of parent choice for preschool, not just school districts, but how do we open it up to anybody else who's providing quality. We have quality indicators preschool. So this is the third year, and it took Colorado from, no surprise, 28th in preschool enrollment in the country where we were, to third in preschool enrollment in the country. And I would also add, it's not a red state, blue state thing.

[00:04:42] Oklahoma's had universal preschool for more than a decade. They're a Republican state. And when we voted on it, we had to bring this to the ballot, which you do in Colorado, you know, when you have a new funding initiative. And it passed with over 66% of the vote. So it passed in Republican counties, Democratic counties, rural, urban, suburban, everybody, 67, you know, it's hard to get 66% of Colorado's who can anything. Yeah, kids ought to be able to go to preschool. Yeah, well, thank you for doing that. And congratulations for seeing that all the way through. That's incredible. Yeah, I'm definitely a fan of that.

[00:05:11] So, I mean, the second reason I ran was healthcare. Healthcare, and let me talk a little more about education before we get to healthcare, because I want to talk about some of the other things we've done. Choice is a powerful element in education. And, you know, even it benefits what we call neighborhood schools as well, because neighborhood schools perform better if the people who are there actually want to be there. But in school districts across Colorado, you have choices of learning styles for kids, right? Some kids are going to learn better with an arts-focused curriculum, some with STEM-focused curriculum. We look at some of the things St. Frain is doing around their Innovation Center.

[00:05:41] I think you've been over there and seen that. And many kids from, you know, Boulder and Thornton enroll there, because it's, you know, even if it's a little further, it's something that they can't get closer to home. So having all these options is a way to engage students better. We got our graduation rate up from, I think it was 85% to 90% over the last four years. And a big part of that is a great way of high school students. Yeah, high school graduation rate. That was another metric that went up that propelled us to number one.

[00:06:06] And the sauce, the secret sauce there was really having more, you know, from the kids' perspective, it was probably the word they would probably use as fun, but just more like relevant experiences for what they want to do, which is not the same for every kid that are meaningful at that high school level. That's right. So now you want to talk about health care. Yeah, health care is a big miss in our country. So let's just kind of look at the macro and you can analyze.

[00:06:31] But basically, we spend about twice the percentage of our GDP on health care as every other Western industrialized country. And now that might be nice if we were all living longer and we were the healthiest country and we were all super healthy. We're actually the middle of the pack from health. We're not the worst. We're not the best. We're like middle of the pack on health. But we spend twice as much. Bad deal. And it's across the entire continuum of health care. It's fundamentally a market that doesn't work.

[00:06:58] And you can say it's a part of incumbents and monopolies. You can say it's a part of government regulations. There's some truth to all these things. I'll just talk with a few of the problems we face, a few of the initiatives we did. So one is we instituted very strong hospital pricing transparency. Before we implemented this, you didn't even know what other people were being charged or what in hospitals have this notorious practice of charging different amounts, whether you're self-pay, don't pay insurers. We now have full transparency.

[00:07:27] We're only in the second year of this. So I think that alone will lead to a downward pressure on prices. Pharma is messed up in our country. We do a lot of the research here, and that's great. But it's not fair that Americans pay two, sometimes three or four times as much for the exact same prescription drug that's available. And I'm not talking about Tanzania. Available in like France or Germany or Japan, right? Like comparable wealth nations.

[00:07:55] We should have a competitive market where Americans are paying a similar amount. And I'm willing to say, look, if America is the base, which we are of a large part of the pharmaceutical industry, a lot of the R&Ds here, and maybe we are a little bit better off in Europe. Sure, we can pay maybe 20 percent more, but like not three times as much. That's not right. Yep. And what causes that to happen? America and United States doesn't negotiate for prescription drug rates like every other country does. And I say every other country is possible. You'll find some country that doesn't.

[00:08:23] But effectively, all the European countries, the wealthy Asian countries have a negotiation for a prescription drug rate. We don't have that. Don't allow that. We're trying to get around it. Like here in Colorado, I signed a law and we're pursuing importing prescription drugs from Canada, which, again, they would have to be in excess supply in the Canadian health care system if they want to sell them to us. But it might help. And here's the ironic thing. First of all, it would be about half the cost. And these are the exact same drugs. They're literally made in the same exact plant, same exact time.

[00:08:53] And yes, maybe the label that they were sent there with is French and English, and our label is only English. But they're basically the same thing. And if we can find a way to do it, we got approval from the FDA. It's harder in terms of now finding where they might have access. Obviously, they're not going to send us anything they need. There's pressure from the big pharma companies that they don't want to sell them anything that they might export to Colorado. But we're trying to find our way around this. But this fundamentally needs to be done as a country. I mean, states, we're pushing the edges with our flexibility. We're being sued over it, obviously, which is great.

[00:09:21] You know, when you're doing something big, you get sued. But like fundamentally, we need to approach that as a nation. Pharma is about 16 percent of total health care costs. Half, which would be easy if we paid the same rate prescription notice for the country. That's a net 8 percent reduction in total health care costs for the country. That's big. And no change other than you did that. Yeah. Let me tell you one more thing. Like what did 8 percent, just that alone on pharma, like 8 percent of net reduction in health care costs. What that means is premiums for companies that were doing health care. All those reflected in that would go down like 8 percent just with a national pharma reform.

[00:09:51] Is there something that Trump administration has been doing in that area? A little bit. They've been pushing pricing transparency. Well, they've been doing new things. First of all, on the pricing transparency front, they are pushing basically what Colorado has done, a slightly weaker version, but a strong version of it. So they're pushing hospital pricing transparency and tying Medicaid payments to that, probably 80 percent of what Colorado is pushing, which is great for states that don't have it at all. We have more than that. So we're good. On pharma, it's a little hard to say what they're doing. They're kind of playing around the edges. They're doing flashy stuff.

[00:10:19] But they haven't really addressed the core of it. And there's one more piece of the core of it. We talked about, you know, we need to negotiate for better rates. The other part is the very high cost of FDA approval, over a billion dollars inception to market for the demonstrations of safety and efficacy that are required. Even the European model, we usually think of Europe as like more bureaucratic.

[00:10:43] It's roughly I mean, you could ask pharma execs, but it's roughly half the cost from inception to market. So that's another 500 million, which particularly for specialized drugs that might only have a thousand or two thousand people that use them. And the future of pharma is definitely more towards that personalized medicine. Think about amortizing that billion across only a thousand people. Right. So it's just and that that has to be done. Even if you negotiate for better rates, they still need to recoup what they put in. So and get a return.

[00:11:11] So, I mean, you know, you got to find a way for safety. Of course, we want we want safe and no question about it. FSC efficacy can be demonstrated more in real time as long as there's not contraindications or side effects. But you've got to find a way where it doesn't cost a billion dollars. And it also means pharma startups basically generally sell to big companies that can afford the billion or they have to somehow raise that themselves with a strong proof of concept. But it's very hard to bring something to market. Medical devices are an example of how to do better.

[00:11:41] Medical devices also have to be FDA approved. And I have to look up. So don't quote me on this. But the average cost is significantly lower. I'm thinking close to a factor of 10. So I mean, it should be under 100 million, maybe 50 million, something like that to bring a medical device to market. So we should look at the way at pharmaceutical products more like we look at medical devices from an approval perspective. Great. Start about Colorado. Talk about the future of Colorado. What excites you about our future? What makes Colorado different and unique?

[00:12:08] What can we be doing to take the advantages of Colorado and make it be felt more across all of Coloradoans? We're an amazing state. I mean, a great quality of life, great location. You know, we say 300 days of sunshine. And, you know, when it's 90 degrees here, it's nothing like a miserable 90 in like New York or New Orleans or Texas. Above 100 was a little rough. Yeah, you know, that gets that pushes it. It's then, you know, but it's still one of the big differences is it cools off at night and it's beautiful. You know, summer nights are gorgeous.

[00:12:39] So we have all these attributes. Obviously, one of them is, you know, Denver Airport, one of the busiest in North America, access anywhere. I mean, you can do day trips, East Coast, West Coast, spend the night super easy. You know, it's the mountains, the outdoors are a big part of our quality of life. And wellness in general. Wellness in general. And we're actually at the lowest obesity rate of any state. And that's a metric on our wellness. I think we're third longest on average lifespan.

[00:13:06] So we're, you know, we value that. And that's a whole Colorado value, not just like a Boulder value. In fact, I think what our longest lived county, if I'm not mistaken, a summit county where a lot of folks go. And now, again, it's going to be self-selected. More active seniors probably move there because they want to be in the outdoors. But still, very healthy lifestyles, healthy diet and nutrition, lowest obesity rate. We want to push the envelope on that to make it even better. And, of course, the people, right? So we have over 6 million people now.

[00:13:34] We just passed 6 million people for the first time in our history about two months ago, three months ago. Well, it's a lagging indicator. It was probably, you know, a year ago. But the data came out three, four months ago. And that also brings its own challenges, which we're probably going to get into. One is how do we make sure we protect the beautiful outdoor areas and experiences that we want from the dual threats of climate change and demographics and increased utilization? Second is housing costs, right?

[00:13:59] When housing costs are a function of supply and demand, that's, you know, economics 101 like anything, the fact that demand is great is wonderful. You don't want to have low housing costs because nobody wants to live there because there's no jobs. You want high demand. Came from the Midwest. I know about that. Yeah, right. Exactly. You can get homes for $150,000 there, right?

[00:14:15] I mean, but what we've had is artificial constraints on supply, primarily around units not being able to be built, complex zoning requirements, years of approval, folks that are originally, you know, trying to build, you know, 40, let's say, condos. And they get hammered and they reduce it down to 12. And, you know, how do we allow homes to be built, including starter homes, homes that people can get into for, you know, two, three hundred thousand?

[00:14:43] Those are in very scarce supply in Colorado. We don't want to lock people who are low middle income into being runners their whole life. We want to get the opportunity of a down payment, a mortgage and build equity and wealth. And that's important. Building the equity and wealth part is a big part of it. I mean, a lot of people achieved wealth, you know, throughout the American dream through their ownership of a property. Yeah, it was not only the primary means of wealth building in the 20th century. It remains the primary means of wealth building for middle class working families in the 21st century.

[00:15:12] And when you have the average home price in Boulder, one million dollars, Denver, six hundred thousand dollars. That is out of reach for many people that are earning, you know, 50, 60, 70 thousand middle class working class that, you know, a generation or two ago, that would be homeownership. So you've really got to get that price point in the two to three hundred thousand range for a starter home. And, you know, maybe they live their whole lives or maybe they live there 15 years and they do buy one of those six or seven hundred thousand dollars because they built the equity in their first home.

[00:15:42] Yeah, let's let's stay on this topic a little bit, because if we were having this conversation, we were on the West Coast or the Northeast. The problem we'd have is where are you going to build the houses? I mean, there's land is constrained. You know, it's a long commute from where you can build to where people tend to work. But when we drive from Denver to Boulder or from Denver to the airport or from Denver to up I-25, there's places to build everywhere, including right in Denver itself.

[00:16:10] We don't have a land constraint issue. And a lot of times where people want to go to is, yeah, people should be able to afford Vail as well. So I go, yeah, let's put a Ford Vail itself to the side a little bit. And let's talk about all these places that are ripe for building. I'm sure there's a lot of people in the real estate industry who want to put risk capital work and they want to build. You know, if we made if we put our minds to it as a as a community that cuts across both the political side and the business side and said,

[00:16:37] we're just going to increase the growth rate of the number of of housing units. We're not going to grow at one percent, which I think is growth rate right now. We're going to grow at three percent or three and a half or four percent. And that's our goal. Then how are we going to get there? And you touched on a lot of the things we'd have to just roll up our sleeves and get to. You know, how do you get through the the approval process more quickly? How do you reduce unnecessary costs associated with building? How do you allow for more density?

[00:17:01] How do you you know, how do you get you'll take as much friction out of the process as possible? And how do you declare victory in the form of there's more housing being built because then supply and demand works in the favor of those who want more affordable houses? So I think that's something we can rally around. It's not a political issue. Certainly, there's some local factors that you have to overcome, but we have the advantage of space and resource to get that to happen. Yeah.

[00:17:29] And I'll talk about some of the things we did and some of the things that need to be done in the future. But by the way, and by the veils and aspens absolutely have their own challenges. And we don't need to get into that. But basically, it's where the workforce lives. Right. So it's a fundamentally different challenge. But if you're going to be offering, it's not that every Coloradan should be able to can afford a place in Vail or Aspen. But if you're going to have a Vail and Aspen that are great experience, where are the people that run the stores, work in the restaurants, work in the shops, where are they going to be able to live? And so that's a separate challenge.

[00:17:53] But for the front range and our population centers, and I would add into the front range, Mesa County, Grand Junction, our big city in the western Colorado, it's about how you unleash more housing. And so we, for instance, allowed accessory dwelling units, that's what you call mother-in-law flat on the same property, buy right in many cities. We've got rid of government-imposed parking requirements. If you believe the government used to impose parking requirements, like cities would say if you build somebody square feet, you have to have two parking spots or three parking spots. We should just let the market decide. Each parking spot has about $30,000 to the cost of the unit.

[00:18:21] So if somebody wants a condo that's 2,000 square feet with one parking spot, that's fine. If they want it with two or three, that's also fine. You shouldn't be forced to build parking spots that are empty and at cost. We want to make it easier to subdivide lots, right? So if you build the accessory dwelling unit, that can be your starter $200,000, $300,000 home. Talking about the need for those, especially in our cities. We've also upzoned, if you will, areas that are near transit.

[00:18:45] And what that basically means is most of our cities that are within half a mile of sort of major bus or rail stops are upzoned in the sense that it's easier to build now condos or more units in those areas. But there's a lot more work to do. And life is locally governed, too, that you have to overcome. And that's been the challenge for the last few years. The state has – we've argued and the state hadn't really looked at land use and zoning since the 70s. We said, you know what? This is a dual concern of local communities and the state.

[00:19:14] The state's interest is affordability and livability, right? How do you actually make it so people can afford to live close to work and in our state? Obviously, the community also – you know, a certain rights, as I like to put it, like, you know, the community, even at HOA level, that's even more – you know, they can say the houses have to be one of these three colors. That's not really a state concern. But the fact that we don't have affordable housing, $200,000, $300,000, $400,000, that's a state concern. And so we need to drive statewide policy to do that. Exactly. I agree.

[00:19:43] Okay, so talk more about Colorado. Let's pick some other areas. What do you see as opportunities? Yeah, I'm excited about our world-class education system. So, yes, you know, K-12, number one in USU's World Report, but our university ecosystem is amazing, too. We just had three universities in Colorado that were ranked on the top 400 globally, which is huge, right?

[00:20:02] And obviously, CU Boulder, over a billion dollars in research, CSU, those are our two tier one institutions, but also gems like School of Mines and really across the state doing great work on not just preparing students for success, which we do. And we attract a lot of students from out of state, and many of them choose to deploy their talents here once they learn. But also on research and tech transfer, really a great place to be from all the way from early childhood through our world-class university system.

[00:20:32] So that's a competitive advantage. That's a distinction. And also, the innovation that comes out of the university spurns our economy. I'll give you an example of a joint venture. So CSU is currently, it should be completed in January, February, building one of the largest laser-built labs in the country. It's called the Atlas Building. It's a huge building. It's a partnership with Marvel Fusion, a Bavarian company out of Munich that is one of the top companies looking at the next-gen fusion technologies.

[00:21:00] But there's multiple companies here in Colorado that are doing some really innovative stuff with fusion. They are. I would say energy. We talk about sort of clusters. Aerospace is a cluster. Energy is a cluster for Colorado. So aerospace, we're one of the top two or three. And in sectors, it's kind of like if you're in a consumer marketing business, you want your brand to be number one or number two or three. I mean, you don't want to be number seven or number eight. You want to be, obviously, number one. But you want to be in the top three. Like, you want to be one of those. So we are for aerospace. And we are for energy.

[00:21:29] And energy means everything, right? I mean, anything related to energy. I mean, yes, it's oil and gas. It's solar. It's wind. It's fusion. It's next-gen. We've been focused on bringing geothermal, and we're very excited about that. So it's all forms of energy. We are a top state for that. Research, deployment, and aerospace. We are, again, one of the top sectors. Military, commercial, scientific, all those, Colorado Springs, and Denver-Boulder area. Yeah, well, let's talk about others that were also right up there in one, too. Obviously, quantum, which gets a lot of publicity.

[00:21:59] But one that is, I think, overlooked and related to energy, maybe even related to quantum and space as well, is metals. So critical metals, rare earth. Colorado's a hotbed for that, and that is top of mind. In fact, we just recorded a podcast here yesterday with one of the leaders in that sector talking about it. I can't wait until that drops. But it's a huge opportunity going forward for Colorado Springs. Yeah, in terms of production, we're number one in molybdenum out of Leadville.

[00:22:26] So that's the one that we are, I think, the largest producer in the Western Hemisphere. In terms of potential for others, it's definitely there. We produce uranium. There's opportunities for others across the West. Quantum is a great example. We have the most quantum employment per capita. I would argue we're number one. We're certainly top three. And we have deliberately focused our efforts as a state to further position that. As you know, Quantum Hub, but also memorandums of understanding, Finland, United Kingdom.

[00:22:56] How do we become the American center of this? And we focused our state work, working with the coalition of quantum companies and universities, in really establishing and focusing Colorado as the number one in a sector that I'm bullish on and you're bullish on. We wouldn't have done this if we weren't. We're bullish on this sector and what it means for the world. And we want Colorado to be the center of that. Yeah, most of quantum today is hardware, just like computers were initially a hardware. And certainly Colorado, you know, it's hard to say it's not number one right now. It's early.

[00:23:25] So you can go from number one to number five if you're not careful. But we have multiple public companies in quantum already. And there aren't that many public companies in the world that are quantum. And we have several more that are on a path to potentially be public companies too. But where we need to make sure we get ahead of the game in Colorado is on the software side of quantum because we're so good at hardware. And the good news is early on, software sticks close to hardware. But we need to also develop kind of independent software around quantum. And we need to get more of the big tech companies who are focused on quantum.

[00:23:55] You know, Google's starting to do more stuff in this area. NVIDIA, we've got to get in this area with their quantum. So we've got to really exploit our advantage there. Let's talk about some other ones. I do want to mention, by the way, the regional and local presence of many of the big tech companies is a big part of our success too. So Intel does a lot of their solid state research here. Google, big presence. IBM. So the fact that these companies are investing in Colorado and are partners, they're not based here. We want them based here. That's great if they decide to do that. But in the meantime, having that as part of our ecosystem is a big net plus also. Yeah.

[00:24:24] Having them have big hubs here would be. And then the next ones may get invented here. But you've got to start by having that presence here. And there are a lot of the tech companies that are thriving in today's environment where you look at what the person's background was. And more and more you see they're at Google. They came to Boulder because of Google. Now they're doing video amp. They're doing owl AI. They're doing all kinds of really interesting things. Yeah.

[00:24:52] When you're looking at a founder that's raising money and they've spent 10 years at Google and Boulder, that's a plus. They're a great employer. They're doing great things. I mean, that's like a good thing in a founder's background. And many folks, you know, I was a founder from like a super young age. But many folks do a stint, you know, in kind of that private sector for a larger company for a while and then become a founder. And that's also a totally valid background. Yep.

[00:25:13] So let's talk about my old industry, because I think that's one that we underappreciate the important role that Colorado plays in what we call digital infrastructure or increasingly people use the word AI infrastructure. But there are more of the top data center companies. And by far, the two largest by far fiber bandwidth companies are here in Boulder. The company I founded with Zale and the company that I was part of co-founding that was called Level 3 now is called Lumen. Quest is part of that as well.

[00:25:41] But I don't think we appreciate how much of our of a leadership role we play. We don't have the big data centers being built in Colorado, but many of the big data center operators who are building those data centers are right in our backyard, including some upstarts. You know, one has the same last name as me. They spell theirs wrong. They spell theirs like Robinson Crusoe. But Crusoe is, you know, if they go, well, they weren't quite formed here. I don't think so. They won't be able to take over Zale in terms of the largest IPO that was born in Colorado.

[00:26:11] In recent years, unless they were born here. But they certainly if they go public would be worth more than, you know, Zale is worth when I sold it. So there is a lot of digital AI infrastructure and they're spawning off a lot of additional companies, too. And that kind of intersects some of what we're doing in energy. There's a company called Peak Energy. That's former Tesla guys building large scale batteries. We just featured the CEO there on the podcast. There's Boom Supersonic. Really cool. Have you had them on?

[00:26:41] Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, Denver to London in three hours. We all can't wait for that, right? Yeah. But you know what they're doing now is not that. They're doing data center. Yeah. They're doing the generators for the data center. They're still very focused on their future for aviation as well. Yeah. It's good that they're getting some cash now. So let's talk about one or two more positives. Let's talk about kind of, you know, the challenges that we're facing. Let's talk about our sports ecosystem here. Yeah. I mean, well, sports and entertainment.

[00:27:07] I mean, look, Colorado is a sports town, both from a participatory perspective and a fan perspective. So I was pretty, you know, of course, you know, world-class Broncos football, great ownership group there. You know, we have the Kroenke group and, you know, basketball and soccer. And then, of course, the Rockies could do a little bit better. But we got some sort of new ownerships coming in with some. They do, which is also very good, which is the Broncos ownership group for those that are not paying attention, the Walton Penner group.

[00:27:34] But certainly they have a great fan base, despite their low performance. I mean, you go out to Rockies game, they sell a lot of tickets because people have. But also the ones we've added. And so what we've added has been a lot of it. There's been amazing growth. And I'm bullish on it also in women's sports, which is great. So we now have a Summit women's soccer team, which is incredibly exciting. We're continuing to kind of grow that. We have a professional ultimate team in the Ultimate League. So X Games headquartered right here. We do. And we do a lot of events.

[00:28:01] So I think that as a center, a regional center of sports, right? I mean, you know, fans of our teams are from Wyoming. They're sometimes from northern New Mexico. They're from, you know, western Nebraska. We are the kind of regional center for sports and sports entertainment. And that's a good thing. I think it also fits in. We talked about healthy lifestyle, you know, hiking, biking, lowest obesity rate, one of the third largest, longest lifespan. It's all part of that is the whole kind of sports and active piece of being part of Colorado.

[00:28:29] Bill Resorts headquartered here, Altera headquartered here, although I'm hearing rumors they might be looking elsewhere. I hope not. I think we'll keep them. But, you know, we have Altera. And as you mentioned, two large, you know, these both, both of them, the inception of them was really, you know, Colorado. But these are both companies with global reach that are based here now. Yep. And then festivals. We got Sundance coming into town, Outside Days. And Tulagi. Tulagi, which is the one we're behind. But we're also, you know, behind all of them.

[00:28:58] We work really closely with Sundance. Sundance is a huge win for our state. So it is, you know, internationally recognized and known. I mean, you think of names, you think of Cannes, you think of Sundance. Colorado has quietly become the home, and Boulder in particular, but I would say our whole state, quietly become home to like more and more creatives over the last decade or two. And so there's like folks that have done major Hollywood productions just sort of quietly living here. And they go to L.A. maybe, you know, once a month or every other month. But they're able to have their lives here. They like it. They like the quality of life.

[00:29:29] And that has kind of reached a critical mass where it was very much part, along with kind of the experience and the venues and all of that, to attracting Sundance, which really puts Boulder on the international stage as a place for creative deals to get done and to celebrate creativity. Okay. So let's talk about the other side of the coin.

[00:29:48] I mean, Colorado, for all the reasons you and I just talked about, has more opportunity to be the number one ecosystem, I would say, in the world for innovation. And innovation includes creativity, as you mentioned. It includes innovation in the public sector. Innovation is a very inclusive word. Whatever you're doing can be covered by that umbrella of the word innovation.

[00:30:18] And it would be great for any geography to be tops in innovation. But most, you know, they could say that, but that's really not realistic. For Colorado, we have every right to be the number one ecosystem in the world for innovation. Yet in the immediate term, we've got some challenges. We've got challenges in those who are reconsidering, say, the West Coast, reconsidering the Northeast, departing from those.

[00:30:45] They're not looking toward Colorado like you would think they naturally would. They're looking at Colorado and they're scratching and saying, boy, that sounds like they're doing the kind of things I'm trying to get away from. If I'm leaving California, maybe we should go somewhere else, which is kind of a huge lost opportunity if it remains that case for all of Colorado. How do you see what's happening there? And do you see that, you know, we're kind of maybe causing a little bit of self-inflicted pain? And how do we get out of that if so?

[00:31:14] Yeah, I mean, when you think of tech, obviously you think of Northern California. It's a great success story. You know, more recently, last 10, 15 years, Austin has also been a great success for tech. I mean, I think like Colorado has been kind of quietly building over the last couple of decades. We don't we don't necessarily have the scale yet of those areas. There's just also more people in those areas. But I think making Colorado. Colorado has a scale. Austin for certain. We do. Yeah, we do.

[00:31:41] In fact, Austin is our biggest source of immigrants to Colorado. When you look at we're getting more people from Austin proportionally than we are from Northern California right now, for whatever reason. I think making Colorado, you know, great. But you mentioned this already, but let me just repeat it. Southern California, there's a lot of people even there who are part of the creative world, including creative tech. Yes. And we are getting correct, maybe more than our fair share of those folks.

[00:32:08] But we have a huge opportunity to make it make a highway directly from there into Denver, Boulder and the broader Colorado, because this is a very ripe for creativity environment. And, you know, we're already getting some of that, but we could get a whole bunch more. So that's another big opportunity. Yeah, I think our quality of life speaks for itself. And the fact that the schools are good, the education is good, the economy is good. I would focus on how we make Colorado the best place to start and grow a business.

[00:32:38] We first of all, we have a good entrepreneurial ecosystem. That's something I couldn't say, you know, two decades ago when I was a founder in the late 90s. We didn't have a significant entrepreneurial ecosystem. I mean, now we have more structure around capital, early stage, professionally managed venture capital. We have, you know, it used to be there was like one firm and there's two firms. I literally couldn't name the number of firms managed in Colorado with managing partners in Colorado today. I mean, it's probably. Well, you could if you went on a Crucible Ventures website because. How many?

[00:33:07] We have a big directory there and we list them all and there's probably 60. Right. And so like literally it was like two or one, you know, so like and that's a big deal as well. It's a big deal. Because it's not that it guarantees their investments will be here, but you look at convenience and ease of access and it turns out, you know, for many of them. High correlation. Yeah, high correlation. So and by the way, also, I don't know if you tried to shoot, but it also is just managing partners from funds that might very well be based in Boston or Silicon Valley who live here full time.

[00:33:35] So that's almost the same thing because they're like to have developed or something or looking for an excuse to live here more and want to develop portfolio companies here. But, you know, how do we how do we make our state an even better place to do business to grow is kind of the key criteria there. Access the talent. I mean, the number one things that build companies is talent and the people that build them. And so how do we, of course, have our own homegrown talent, which we talked about education. But two, we want to be a desirable place to live if people are going to be moving here from other places in the country.

[00:34:05] I think we are. And we want to double down on that. And a desired place to invest because when people are deploying capital, whether they're deploying it from elsewhere, you know, it could be a Silicon Valley investor, but they're deciding where am I going to deploy capital? Where am I going to support companies? You know, they want to know where the talent is. They want to know where the infrastructure around the talent. You know, it's a hotbed for space. It's a hotbed for quantum, all the other sectors we're talking about. But they also want to know it's a safe place to deploy capital, that the capital is going to be put to good use in the state.

[00:34:34] They may like a founder in Colorado, but if they don't feel comfortable with investing their money in Colorado, they're going to go to the founder and say, hey, why don't we invest our money in, you know, a more friendly geography? And way too much of that is happening right now. Yeah. It's in our portfolio companies, which is frustrating to see our portfolio company headquartered here in Colorado, talking to them and saying, well, we're going to have that next plant we're going to build, and that's the manufacturing facility, the next testing facility. We really need to go to the next quantum expansion.

[00:35:01] We need to do that somewhere else because, you know, either they're enticing us to come over there or we're getting worried about what Colorado is going to do if we invest in Colorado. And I think that's where we got to spend more of our time and attention is how do we change that around to make them want to be in Colorado and want to invest their money here, want to remain here, want to come here? Yeah. I mean, you know, in terms of like if you're talking about kind of creating, you know, beyond the kind of founding stage when, okay, we're going to create our production facility, our plant.

[00:35:31] There is obviously going to be local zoning involved, and there are many counties in our state that are aggressively pursuing that. You know, Boulder County is not usually one of those. Usually companies start, grow here, but then when they're thinking about scaling and production and manufacturing, you know, it's possible to do in Boulder County. There are some that do in Boulder County, but, I mean, they're often talking to other counties. It could be El Paso County. It could be Adams County. Yeah, we hope they stay here in Colorado. The state side, we have made a lot of progress on expediting.

[00:35:59] I mean, the state doesn't have the primary permitting piece. What we do have is usually like an air quality approval piece, a water piece. We have focused on reducing the turnaround times for those, and we've done that significantly and gotten them down. You know, I would have to look it up, I think, from something like nine months to something like two months on the pieces that we touch. But there's a lot more to it than that. The project can't proceed. The project can proceed. Regardless of what you think of them. So this is like a nicotine chew thing.

[00:36:29] Zin, have you heard of that? So it's like a replacement of cigarettes and legal products. So we're for any legal product. We always push the envelope in Colorado. You know, psilocybin, marijuana, whatever it is. Zin is, you know, obviously healthier than smoking. And it's Philip Morris, PMI, big plant in Aurora. We just went to their ribbon cutting. I think they're employing 500 people right now or hiring up to that over the next couple of months.

[00:36:54] Project conception and choice of a venue to opening in 18 months. And one of the reasons they picked Colorado is because they had local partners that were able to go through approval and not hang it up. They said they couldn't have done this in many other states. They did it here because they wanted to get this open as soon as possible. And this is a huge city of our facility. Frankly, I'm amazed they built it in 18 months. And it just opened a couple weeks ago. Great. I know we're running short on time.

[00:37:22] Let's turn this to your future, your personal future, your ambitions. You have a family. You live here in Boulder, although you spend a lot of time in Denver right now. You're going to be having some time on your hands, at least for a little bit of time, in about six months. What are you looking forward to in your next phase of life? So I've never taken a sabbatical in my life. You should talk to the Foundry Group guys. They're experts at taking sabbatical. They're good at it. Originally, I've been thinking of taking a six-month sabbatical.

[00:37:51] I don't think I could survive a six-month sabbatical. I'm going to take a three-month sabbatical, which means I'll say no to everything and not respond during three months. And think about that. It's hard to think about that when you're peddled to the metal and running things. There's things I like. I obviously like startup world. I enjoy entrepreneurship. I don't mind. I mean, I don't necessarily love larger companies and scale companies.

[00:38:17] I mean, I actually am more familiar with that, having run an enterprise with 32,000 employees than I was before I went in, when the biggest company I had been involved with had 250 employees. And that seemed enormous to me. That was pro-flowers before we sold it. So I love entrepreneurial. Obviously, I care deeply about education, giving back. But no, I plan to say no to things and just take three months and think about that. But it's hard to do while you're a participant in the game, which I certainly am, until the second week of January.

[00:38:45] Yeah, three months will go by like that. I would say maybe start exploring after three months, but take your time even more so than that. I don't want to be like without a plan or strategy just like saying yes to different things. And all of a sudden, like I have three quarters of my time is doing boards and other stuff I said yes to. I don't want to like wind up with that without kind of proactive planning about what I want to do. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. So let's talk about AI a little bit, too.

[00:39:13] So AI is obviously one of the most impactful things that's ever happened to humankind. And impactful can mean good. Impactful can mean not so good. And with AI, it's going to be a lot of both. It's going to be a lot of legitimate opportunities to produce more of what humans need over time, produce more medicine, produce more shelter. That's going to be felt across the world.

[00:39:40] So a lot of big sources of good there, more creativity of different varieties. And then there's the other aspect of AI that looms, which is what's AI going to do? It's certainly going to disrupt a lot of career journeys that people are on. And some of them are going to be able to use that to their advantage, but many are going to struggle with what AI does to them. It's going to make educating kids very difficult to think through. How do you take advantage of AI in the education process,

[00:40:08] but how do you not let AI be a challenge that gets the better of both educators and those being educated? There's the darker scenarios about AI taking over what's important to humans. How do you think about AI, both from the vantage point of thinking about your current role, as well as looking into the future in general? Well, it needs to augment humanity, not replace humanity. That's kind of at the... That's our opinion.

[00:40:38] I don't know if that's AI's opinion. Well, AI might have a different point. Does it have an opinion? First of all, there's real threats. I mean, you touched on those, to financial systems, to national security. Like any technology, this is a really important issue. I mean, we need to make sure that we have white hat AI defense of our critical infrastructure,

[00:41:00] financial and physical, that outpaces those who would seek to do harm, whether they're state actors, whether they're individuals. Because it's easier to use AI to disrupt than it is to use AI to make sure you don't get disrupted. It can be. So, I mean, I do worry about that. And, I mean, that would be getting critical energy infrastructure, military technology, all of those things that would be the kind of largest threat.

[00:41:30] But in terms of its macro effect, outside of kind of that nefarious effect it could have if we don't defend ourselves, obviously, it's changing a lot of things. And people are worried. There's a lot of angst out there, right? Like what, you know, this vocation that I've trained for and worked in for a couple decades, will it even be relevant? My kid is in college. Will, with their study, it even be relevant? Will they be able to get a job? You know, we need to look at it as a tool, first and foremost. I use it as a tool. You use it as a tool. I think more and more people are using it as a tool.

[00:41:58] But in terms of where it goes in five or ten years, we have to find a way where, again, it augments us. And, you know, as you said, it sort of has a life of its own out there. And there's certainly dangerous to humanity as well. Yes. I can't, you know, I wish I was a lot younger because I want to be around to see it play out over 20 or 30 years. And hopefully I'll have the opportunity to see it from a certain vantage point. But it's so exciting right now. Well, I'll say the second thing, though.

[00:42:27] I mean, there's also it's also a very heady space that is a bubble from a financial perspective. So there is what you might say dumb capital is going in. And when dumb capital is going in, you know, there's going to be. Well, AI is here and it's going to be revolutionary. Just like, you know, it was like, you know, the Internet 1.0 bubble in 1999 and it burst. It didn't mean the Internet was gone. The Internet can just take off. There's going to be a bubble bursting here on AI. It doesn't mean AI is not going to have vast ramifications and changes in five years or 10 years. You don't know exactly when that is. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't know the timing.

[00:42:57] That's the problem. It could triple in size before the bubble burst. But yeah, no, there it's you can see it coming. All the same signs we see with everything else. But again, that's not at all detracting from the revolutionary impact is going to happen. Many things. Yeah, no, it's definitely going to be. This is definitely a bubble dynamic. No doubt about it. But like you said, you don't know where yet. And when you're in a bubble, you just know that there's probably a bubble looming and it could double or triple or, you know, or. And it's going to overcome whatever happens.

[00:43:26] I mean, when you look at a plot of stock prices from 1995 to today, yeah, you see that bubble. But the bubble looks a lot more like a blip in 99 and a blip in 2008. Yeah, because they were they were sectoral. And hopefully this one will be, too, and not a global recession. I mean, the AI bubble, you know, won't affect presumably, you know, companies like Pepsi or other companies, you know, the companies that are publicly traded. The great reception. That was a broad one. That was a broad based one.

[00:43:54] Housing driven, though, it was housing driven, but bank driven. You look at it on a chart now and it just looks like a little blip. Right. And the same with Internet, you know, 1.0 in 99, 2000. That was a tech driven one. Yeah. And the big trade recession was housing driven, bank driven, financial institution driven. Of course, it had ramifications across others, but they were the hardest hit. Yeah. Okay. So advice for the next governor. Do you give advice to the next governor?

[00:44:22] Or is that something that you're like, ah, that's not sure. Whatever, you know, whatever advice is desired. I don't think I can prefer advice, you know, that isn't isn't desired. But whatever whatever help they need. Obviously, we're going to be focusing on transition, meaning the aspect of running all the state agencies, including their plans for the next year or two, which we hope the next governor will will will stick with. And there's a lot of planning that goes into a successful transition. So that's really the bulk of our work towards the end of this year.

[00:44:52] Great. Well, we're at the 50 minute mark. So I'm going to give you an option to go a little bit longer. I'm going to give you an option to wind this out. Well, it does fly through, but we can go. You can do one. You know, go ahead and do one more. One or two more questions here. Sure. All right. So let's see what what excites you most about Sundance. So, I mean, are you going to be here when I will? In fact, I'm going to enjoy it. Really. It'll be great. It'll be right after I finish this job.

[00:45:18] So I'll be able to really enjoy it, which I would not be able to do if I was, you know, in the job, which will be, I guess, the first part of my sabbatical. How is the timing of it's administration ending versus what? I think it's two weeks after. Wow. We're going to have a big party for you in Boulder. We will. I'll get to actually watch movies and relax, and my cell phone won't be going off with fires or whatever the heck's going on. I'd say, first of all, as a Boulderite, the benefit for Boulder, which is very exciting. These are a very slow time in late January.

[00:45:45] It's just wonderful for local businesses and the community that we have it. And then, two, just sort of putting Colorado on the map from a creative perspective is very exciting. And to think of all the creative people and funders and financiers in the media sector that'll be here is an exciting thing to contemplate. Yeah. And a lot of infrastructure is being built out as well. I mean, there's... Like the winterization of Chautauqua, which is, yeah, long-awaited. Huge. I hear that's going really well. People are talking about that. It is.

[00:46:13] And that's something that, like, will be an asset to the community well beyond Sundance. I mean, just the fact that that place has been, you know, it's closed, nothing for, you know, five months here, whatever it is. To have a year-round venue there that's workable and bolder of that size and character, it has a lot of character. I've been to, you know, events there in summers, of course, is very exciting for the town. Yeah. And then there's, you know, multiple other venues that are getting major overhauls in terms of totally, you know, movie systems that are state-of-the-art. And those are going to be operational.

[00:46:40] And part of the concept behind Tulagi, which I hope you're going to come to part of Tulagi, we sent you an invite. I know you're both busy and being around bigger crowds isn't necessarily kind of where you're in your most... I'll certainly try to. I'll come to something, I'm sure. I won't be able to fully enjoy it because I'll still be governor. But I'll try to. I'll absolutely do that. You know, we talked about AI. Another sector is entertainment. I mean, what's it going to do to entertainment in the media and movies, right? I mean, how long or how far are we from... Are we at a place where actors will be obsolete at some point, right?

[00:47:10] I mean, these are things that... Questions that actors are asking, that producers are asking, like, where does this evolve in 10 or 15 years? Yeah, I'm actually hosting a summit right after Tulagi. It's for 50 people. And the theme of the summit is around creativity. It's people who create. Create content and create experiences. So content creation is film, gaming, music, and experiences. You know, everything from sports to destinations to recreation. So we have content experience creators.

[00:47:39] Then we have deep tech people, AI tech people who are creating platforms for content creation. So a lot of them are Silicon Valley types. You know, several of them have deep Google history. Some are still currently at Google, but have deep, deep, deep technology who are applying it toward creating experiences and creating content. And then investors who focus on that. And, you know, not surprising to you because you already said it, two-thirds of people have at least a strong foot in the door already of Colorado.

[00:48:07] Mainly split time between Colorado and Southern California or Colorado and Northern California. Or they recently moved here. And then the other third are coming in. And most of them are coming in from California. So part of that is building on kind of our theme of, you know, creativity ecosystem. But we're doing it in a way where it's like forward-looking, like with AI looming. You know, what is the human journey going to look like? And, you know, people's use of time is going to evolve during that.

[00:48:37] You know, how are they going to be spending their time 10 years from now? How do you skate toward the puck? You know, what do you create because of that? And how do you create? How do you create without being, overcoming whatever fears you have around AI, if you're a content creator especially? How do you embrace that? So they're liking the fact that they're going to be, you know, side-by-side in conversations with those who are as deep a tech as there is in the creative technology. And that's very special for Colorado too.

[00:49:03] And, you know, one of the things about our state is when people experience it, many of them want to live here when they get to see and be part of our state and they're visiting from other places. That's my secret goal, but don't tell them that. There you go. We won't mention that. It'll sell itself. So thank you, Dan, for having me on. I appreciate it, really. I appreciate the long form. And it's very rare these days where we're able to communicate beyond, you know, a soundbite or two and be able to talk for, you know, 52 minutes or however long this one's up.

[00:49:28] Yeah, and I just want to thank you for the leadership you've provided, both as an entrepreneur but also as a leader in our political ecosystem. You know, I know it's not easy. It's too hard for me to do. That's one thing I would avoid like anything. But you've been able to navigate through it. You've been able to work through some trickier issues. And you've always had the best interests of Colorado in mind and want to recognize you for that. Thank you, Dan. It's been a great honor to be able to serve the people of the state I love. So thank you. All right. Great.

[00:49:58] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Bear Roars. Check out Stretch, the new song from Dan Caruso with music by Jason Mendelsohn, available now on all streaming services. If you enjoyed the episode, please like and subscribe on your listening platform. This podcast was produced by Loud Bear Productions and edited by Hannah Schmetzer with support from Kendall Weinberg, Alex Kim and Gibson Siegert.