Colorado Governor Jared Polis has five months left in office, and Dan didn't want a retrospective. Polis leads with the win he's proudest of: Colorado went from 27th in the country for preschool enrollment to 3rd, and #1 in the nation for education — funded by a ballot measure that passed with more than two-thirds of the vote, in Republican counties and Democratic ones alike.
From there it's a builder's conversation. Why Americans pay two to four times what France or Japan pays for the identical drug, and why closing half that gap would take 8% off every employer's premiums. Why housing is a supply problem, and what gets taken away from a generation when the $300,000 starter home no longer exists.
Then Dan puts the hard question on the table: Colorado has every right to be the world's best innovation ecosystem, so why are the people leaving California looking somewhere else? Polis's answer is that investors can love a founder in Colorado and still not want to put money into Colorado. Two different problems, and Colorado has been better at the first.
Plus, the three-month sabbatical where he says no to everything, why he thinks the AI bubble will burst without taking AI down with it, and the Sundance he'll finally get to enjoy without his phone going off.
Learn more about Governor Polis and his administration's work: https://www.colorado.gov/governor
Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book
Listen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretch
Check out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallen
To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com