Why Losing Made Him a Better CEO — with Kent Thiry

[00:00:00] Kent Thiry, this is long overdue having you here as my guest on The Bear Roars. Thank you. It's great to be here, finally. Yes. So you and I are almost like on similar journeys, is what I view it. I mean, we come from different backgrounds, you being healthcare, medical world, me being digital AI infrastructure. But we were both kind of winding down the active operator portions of our career at similar times.

[00:00:29] And we both came to conclusions that we didn't want to just go right into the sunset and, you know, you work on your mountain biking and me work on my maybe golf game. It said we wanted to continue to do things that mattered, mattered not just to us personally or even just to us and our respective families, but our community as well. So let's start there. You know, we'll come back and talk about who you are and your career and everything.

[00:00:58] But where are you getting your inner drive from that makes you stay so active on multiple different fronts? What are the causes that you most believe in and why? And why do you go through all this trouble? Because we do invite people to scrutinize us and question our respective motivations. You invite that when you stay out there and active.

[00:01:26] And you do that in different ways than me, but you do it as much as me. Where does that come from? What's really driving you to be what you're doing now and what you're trying to accomplish as you look forward in time? I'm not sure. It's probably the honest answer. But I've always felt that service is an important part of life. And the luckier you are, the more you might think about sharing. There's that old phrase, from those to whom much is given, much is expected.

[00:01:58] Where did that phrase come from? It could be from the Bible, but I don't remember. Can you guys look that up? Because that is a fair phrase. Did you catch that? Yeah. It feels like it was like an old president of the United States, but we'll find out. Yes. Yeah, I've never checked, but I've heard it many, many years ago, and it stuck with me, obviously.

[00:02:21] And I find that working on service to the community is stimulating, energizing, rewarding, fulfilling. And I would much rather do that than mountain bike every minute of every day because that's a very important part of my life, but it's more as a means of keeping me healthy to do the other stuff. So I just think I've been lucky, and lucky people ought to give back. Yep.

[00:02:47] Well, I want to go just maybe one level deeper before we talk about how you give back. I want to stay on the topic of where does that motivation come from because I see that in certain people. I see that in you, I've seen it in several others, but I also see maybe for every example of that, there's five examples where people could be doing that and choose not to.

[00:03:07] And that's not a judgment call, but the more people we can influence who are in a position to lean in and give back in creative and fundamental ways, I think the better off we as kind of our broader community will be.

[00:03:26] But I think some of them are looking for, you know, ways of giving them maybe a permission, giving them maybe a reason why they should feel comfortable doing so. They don't really know how to get started, and they don't know how to overcome maybe the fear of how to dive into things. So go a little deeper on where that comes from in you because you've been doing that now for six, seven years and continuing at the same pace.

[00:03:55] It's got to be deeper than that that's driving you to do that. Yeah, I think that's fair. And I think what he first addressed one of the things he said, the people who are not doing it, why not? Because a lot of them also care about the world. And I think there is this thing about, gosh, it's after a successful 20-year venture career or a 20-year CEO career. And this starting kind of over... I got bad news for you. It's like 35 for us, not 20.

[00:04:24] Yeah, good point. A little bit of denial there. That a lot of people don't know how to get started. But just sitting on a nonprofit board isn't necessarily that fulfilling. Starting something from scratch seems a little daunting. And having to go into the trenches a little bit and roll up your sleeves, again, when you're very successful and getting older, you have all these fun alternatives.

[00:04:51] So I think for a lot of people, and a lot of former CEOs in particular I talk to, they don't know how to get started. They want to have a more meaningful post-CEO or post-VC partner life, but they don't know how to do it. And so as a result, they just sit on a couple boards, they give some money away, and that's it. They never bring their full selves, their capability, their networks onto the floor, onto the playing field.

[00:05:17] And for me, and I think for you, we were willing to jump back in the pool and have to swim and not always have everything work. So I think you have to have a thick skin because it's a lot like the early stage of your career where you're trying to figure stuff out, trying to get stuff done. And for me, I just, I have kids, I have grandkids.

[00:05:41] And for me not to work on giving back to the community that I benefited from so much, I would feel terrible when I was on my deathbed. And I would just say, you know, yes, you were a very responsible CEO, you were thoughtful, but then you had this tremendous opportunity to make a difference and you didn't choose it. You know, I think you hit the nail on the head in what you just said for me personally.

[00:06:08] I don't, I've never used that way of describing it, but as soon as the words came out of you, it landed. And that is how terrible I would feel if I was, you know, 20 years from now, 25 years from now, and I hopefully am still around. And, you know, but I am, I'm probably facing end of life. But how I would feel if I said, you know, you could have done so much more in these last 10 or 20 years and you didn't. Why didn't you? I would feel terrible. That was the word you used.

[00:06:37] And I literally picture myself laying on a bed and saying, you know, am I proud of what I did in my last chapter, my last 10, 15 years? Am I proud? Because I, more so than many of me, everybody has got an ego. I have a, I have a non-trivial ego. And therefore, I don't have one of those. I've got three of those. Therefore, I'm always wrestling with, okay, am I doing something for ego reasons? Or am I doing it for more virtuous reasons?

[00:07:05] And it's never zero, 100 or 100, zero. But if I didn't force myself to look at me looking back at my last 15 years, I might really fool myself and do a little bit of good. But it'd be good that would be more oriented to feed my ego. As opposed to, no, there are a number of cases where you did good and it had nothing to do with your ego. And there wasn't any public acclaim that came with it. And you did the hard work.

[00:07:34] And so for me, I have to be double careful, even as I stay engaged, to make sure that it's primarily my value system speaking, not my ego. And that's just a battle I've fought in my life. And I'll keep fighting it probably until the end. Although as I do get older, I find that the ego is a little easier to manage. Yes, I would agree with you there too. And I do ask myself the same question quite frequently.

[00:08:04] So kind of kindred spirits in the sense, like, why are you doing this? Are you doing this for the right reason? And it's easier to say yes now. I mean, it wasn't as easy to say yes in different points of my career because you were doing everything you could to be successful in whatever realm you were in. But now it's easier for me to look at things and I think more honestly ask myself that question and feel better about kind of the quality of the answer I come up with.

[00:08:33] And if I don't enjoy doing it, I don't want to be doing it. But I also don't want to be doing stuff for the wrong reason. And it feels like I'm early in that journey but on a good track. So let's talk about what is important to you now. We're going to come back and talk about who you are. I want people to get to know you from a who you are now looking forward standpoint first. So what causes are most important to you and why?

[00:08:59] So my life now is 80% civic, 20% for-profit stuff. And the for-profit stuff, just to cover that up first, I coach a number of younger CEOs and do some advisory work for some PE funds.

[00:09:16] And that, the way I put it, it's like a retired NFL quarterback who doesn't want to do practice, doesn't want to do two-a-days, doesn't want to have to play every week, doesn't want to have to practice five times a week, but still wants to throw the ball around. And so I love sitting with the young CEOs. I believe it keeps me young and it allows me to share. And the two favorite parts of my sessions, let's say I have them every six weeks with a CEO, my two favorite parts of the meeting.

[00:09:45] Favorite part number one is I say, what are the biggest problems you face? What are the things you're worried about the most? And let's play with them together. And my second favorite time is at the end when I say, good luck with that. I'll see you in six weeks. Because it's so nice not to have to be the one going back to actually put the oars in the water. But then the 80% reflects the four things that are the causes I'm most focused on. Not any particular order, but one is democracy.

[00:10:15] Representative democracy, functional democracy, healthy democracy. Number two is the environment, writ large. Number three is economic mobility for low-income high school graduates. It's part of a larger passion around education, but that's the specific vehicle I've chosen to try to make my mark in that world. And then fourth is one that's just emerged over the last few years, which is sort of Colorado writ large.

[00:10:41] Trying to help Colorado achieve noteworthy levels of economic mobility and sort of shared economic and spiritual prosperity. Working on that, which is an area where you and I bounce into each other a lot. Yes, we do. And we're going to talk more about that. And I'm going to come back to the specifics of what you just summarized. But now I want to go backwards. I want to talk about your career, your life journey.

[00:11:11] You are in particular known for DeVita. And as you describe it, being the mayor of DeVita. And culture was a huge part of kind of your leadership style. So take us through your career well before DeVita, leading to DeVita, how you landed here in Colorado. How did you come to be the successful CEO that you were? So I came from a small town in Wisconsin. Had almost never been out of the state.

[00:11:40] And then I decided to go to school in California, which I had never been to. But I had this incredible vision of what it was like. Can you remember what that vision was? Because I remember growing up in this thing called California. And California was so far removed from where we were. But it was kind of really a new frontier, at least from the vantage point of people growing up in the Midwest.

[00:12:07] So when you first started hearing about Colorado, could you put yourself back there? And what do you remember seeing or envisioning California to be all about? Yeah, I basically pictured it like a Hawaii movie with palm trees and people playing on the beaches. It was perfect weather every day. And also at that time, it was a very prosperous, high-growth economy. Silicon Valley was... And it was really LA back then when we thought about California, not so much San Francisco.

[00:12:35] Well, yeah, Silicon Valley hadn't kicked in yet in a significant way. Although it started going all the way back really to Heald Packard is what put Silicon Valley on the map. So it was pretty long ago. And so I went out to California. Literally, my first day in the state was the day I showed up for school and found out that it wasn't like Hawaii. I mean, there was, for example, everybody's yards were brown. This was during one of the droughts. And what school? Stanford. Stanford?

[00:13:05] Stanford. I knew that, by the way. And I said, you know, my God, why is it all brown? They said, well, there's no rain for months of the year. I said, you know, Hawaii? That doesn't work that way. I mean, I... And I had never been exposed to a gay person from Mequon, Wisconsin, my little town. Things like that. You never even said the word. I probably didn't even know the word. Yeah, people didn't know that.

[00:13:30] I lived on a street called Terrace Drive, and the street across from it was named Gay Street. And you didn't associate... I don't think I knew until sometime either late in high school or maybe even college that, you know, you didn't talk about it. You didn't see it. And one of my, you know, good friends growing up down the street, in hindsight, I should have known, you know, because he had all the mannerisms and, you know, learned later he was gay. But we didn't... We didn't...

[00:13:59] It wasn't a thing when you were growing up. I mean, you didn't talk about it. You didn't really even know what it was. I don't think so. At some point in time, you did. But, you know, it was a very different world back then when it came to, you know, a topic like that. It's amazing because, I mean, I don't feel that old, but I guess we are pretty old. Yeah, it was eye-opening. I mean, just... And back then, I would write a letter home once a week because phone calls were expensive.

[00:14:27] And, you know, I think my mom was ready to come and get me after a month saying, you know, all the stuff you're getting exposed to in California, I got to get you out of there. And I fell in love with it. It was incredibly formative. But then I said, well, since the West Coast was so cool, I got to go check out the East Coast. And so after... And what did... In Stanford, what did you study in your... Stanford, I was poli-sci, econ, and history.

[00:14:52] So technically, my major was poli-sci, but my coursework really was in all three of those areas. And in history, what parts of history have you been most interested in? The... I probably skewed more to America than outside of America. And then kind of starting with the Revolutionary War all the way to 30 years ago.

[00:15:19] I mean, I love reading American history stuff and just better understanding prior periods and how many patterns there are that recur in our society, in our democracy. So I was pretty skewed towards America. And still my history reading today is still probably excessively skewed to America.

[00:15:41] But given everything going on in America, I all the more kind of love reading about it in the past and seeing what was really the same, what was different. You know, how does the yellow journalism and muckraking period compare to this period where there's all these social messaging tunnels and silos? You know, how different was it? And political science, that has been a bigger journey for you maybe than even history. But what was it about political science that drew you in?

[00:16:09] Well, I always thought I would run for office or be the CEO of a medium-sized company or the mayor of a medium-sized city. Because I love having a community. I love basketball, football. I'm a team guy. And I love community. And I believe only if we create and sustain a reasonable sense of community can we solve all the other problems, including how to govern ourselves. And so I was a student council president.

[00:16:38] I was a student representative on the school board. And I always thought that would be a part of my life. And so poli sci, I felt, was almost like career, like investing in my career because I thought I would be using it. Now, it turns out I used it a lot in other ways because I was a healthcare CEO. And so we did extensive work with the federal and state governments for 25 years. And so I ended up using some of that learning in a different way.

[00:17:07] And now, of course, as you know, just like you, I'm very active in those spaces here in Colorado and in the country. And all that poli sci history econ really comes in handy. What, and your third area of focus was? What, economic mobility for low-income high school graduates? I mean, when you were in Stanford. Oh, history, econ, and poli sci. Oh, it was econ. Okay. And how did econ rank against those other two?

[00:17:36] I much preferred the other two. Really? Than econ. But I felt I needed to do it. And I enjoyed macro and micro. I hated the statistics stuff. But I ended up liking macro and microeconomics much more than I thought because it explained so much about the world. Yeah, things started to make sense. And so I was sort of, I reluctantly went into that area and ended up almost getting more units in that than in political science.

[00:18:07] Not because I enjoyed it as much, but because I was learning really important things. Is it true, I heard this from economics, that housing would be much more affordable if we made it easy for a lot more housing to be built? Is that true? Stunningly, remarkably true. So if we try to just reduce the housing supply and then complain that it's getting too expensive for most people, that that would be kind of not consistent with economics? Yes. Wow. That's fascinating.

[00:18:36] Maybe we should send a little bit of a LinkedIn post to our governing leaders. The whole notion of constraining supply and being surprised when pricing goes up is it's a reality that even though people can refer to it, they don't really get how powerful it is. I mean, microeconomics and macroeconomics live.

[00:19:00] And increasingly, folks on both the far left and the far right act as if it doesn't. And in our state, which is all blue, of course, there's a number of people in legislature who are oblivious to the it's like the law of gravity. You can resist it a bit, but it's there all the time and you can't fight it. And similarly, the laws of micro and macroeconomics, they're a reality.

[00:19:26] And to have policies that presuppose they don't exist is the ultimate folly. Yep. Okay. So we got a little bit off on a tangent there. So let's talk about the East Coast. So you leave Stanford. And went to work for what's now Accenture in New York. And at the time it was Anderson? It was part of Anderson Consulting then. It was their IT consulting group. Mm-hmm. And so-

[00:19:50] Which was part of Arthur Anderson, which was back then the greatest accounting firm until my former employer, WorldCom, alongside Enron and some others, caused a mess that caused Arthur Anderson to no longer exist. Well, and the big aid it was back then. That suit that was brought against Arthur Anderson, it never had to result in the destruction of the firm.

[00:20:19] And some of the stuff that the government did and argued got subsequently thrown out and reversed. But it was too late because the firm was gone. So it was an incredible example of, well, there had been malfeasance. In no way was the right answer to destroy the entire firm. That was not good for America. It was not good for the clients. But the process broke down.

[00:20:48] The government broke some of its own rules. And so that was a thing where accountability was absolutely appropriate and penalties were appropriate. But destruction was stupid and not even really intended. But the government made a couple of ethical mistakes as well as sort of judgment mistakes. Yep. Yep. You might know more about that than me, but I was working at WorldCom. They had bought a company.

[00:21:16] And WorldCom, the CFO, asked me to be the technical subject matter expert and work with Arthur Anderson to take this accounting write-off. And I was not too far removed from my University of Chicago MBA. And they explained to me the accounting write-off they wanted to take. And I'm like, I'm not an accountant, but that don't sound right. That sounds like a fraud. But so I told them... How old were you then? Oh, I was probably 30-ish. So I told them no. I didn't want to do it.

[00:21:45] I wasn't comfortable doing it. They said, no worries. We'll get someone else to do it. And they did. And I knew my career was over there. So I left and came out here to Colorado for level three.

[00:21:57] And when I was doing the in-depth research for bandwidth and understanding the factual specifics of the whole thing that happened, when all the fraud came to light, they started doing it right at the time they asked me to be that subject matter expert. So that would have been the very front end of what turned into a multi-billion dollar salon, like a lot of money today when it comes to fraud, but a multi-billion dollar fraud.

[00:22:24] And they kept saying, don't worry, Arthur Anderson, the partner lives here in Jackson, Mississippi. We're their only client. And he'll do all the work. He just needs someone to sit there with him and kind of give him some of the technical background so he could write it up in the right way. And so I don't know about all of Arthur Anderson, but I know they were doing really bad things. And they knew they were doing stuff that was highly questionable. Totally agree.

[00:22:50] There were crimes committed and acts of extreme malfeasance. But destroying the firm was not the prescription that was right for society. Gotcha. So you went to Anderson Consulting? And lived in Manhattan. And my salary was $14,400. So every month was just barely squeaking over with having enough income.

[00:23:19] And I was tantalized by New York, but also realized it wasn't the right place for me. And at our clients, we'd go in and we would be in our suits and ties and we'd go to the IT area. And there were these other guys that looked just a little bit older than me, seemed to have nicer suits and shirts. And they were going into the executive wing. And I said to the client, I said, well, who are those guys? And he said, Kent, those are management consultants. You're an IT consultant.

[00:23:50] That's different. They're going to work with the other executives. I said, well, how do you how do I get to be a management consultant? Because I'd like to look like them and go into that other wing. And so you have to go to business school. And that was something I've been contemplating anyway. And so I then left New York and went to Boston for business school. And what school was that? That was Harvard. Harvard. Stanford, Harvard.

[00:24:18] And that was another gift. I learned so much from the fellow students, from the school, from living in another city. And and then I after that, I know. And when you were at Harvard, what. Things did you discover there that most memorable. About yourself or about world or about certain topics.

[00:24:42] Well, I was struck by how much the curriculum did not include more on sort of how how should business think morally? As opposed to just sort of saying there's invisible hands and it's sort of a whole it's an amoral kind of thing. It's not a question of morality.

[00:25:08] And and I felt that that was an inappropriate premise and way too simplistic. And there ought to be much more nuanced conversations about what what is ethical and non-ethical. How should you think about doing good? And and so I would always say. And by the reference of invisible hands, tell us what you mean by invisible hands.

[00:25:29] Adam Adam Smith is one who the concept of the invisible hands, which is that an economy by itself, because of the laws of human behavior and and microeconomics and macroeconomics. By itself, almost behaves like you had invisible hands shaping it, that the people will move towards higher value activities. The people will be very active consumers.

[00:25:55] And and so so to some extent, you had to think about these invisible hands managing the economy for you was sort of the breakthrough as opposed to thinking you could do it by regulation and prescription. And and and so what I was the laws of free market versus a managed one, a socialistic kind of managed economy. There's these things that feel like, you know, forces at work that you can't really see or touch, but they determine what the right price is and what the right quantity is.

[00:26:25] You know, supply and demand, macroeconomic pressures that, you know, either cause inflation or get inflation under control. There's this balancing that is taking place. That's hard to put your hands on. But, you know, there's this individual hands that are are causing kind of markets to find their way. And what I felt is that some people would use Adam Smith and this very powerful concept, which I agree with, and ignoring some of the other stuff you wrote about needing to have some moral framework for making these decisions.

[00:26:55] And so the example I would make, for example, is if you're going to move a factory overseas and you're going to wipe out a huge chunk of the employment in a medium sized city in the Midwest. To me, that first is a, you have to make the business decision. And is it, is it, how important is it to do that?

[00:27:22] But then separately, you should also consider, is it the right moral thing to do? If I, if my company is going to do just fine and that would improve my gross margin by 0.4, but it would really destroy the lives of an entire town. I believe you should have to think about that. Now, it still may be, it's just so important for my company or that the position in that city is not sustainable. Therefore, just like I had to divest divisions at different times, I had to close down operations.

[00:27:50] So there are times when that's the unescapable decision. But not to do it where just saying the invisible hands mean I don't even have to think about moral consequences. And so if I have to pull a factory out of a medium sized city in the Midwest, how can I do it in the way that's most humane? How can I, in a way that I do it, that it's, that it has the least negative impact on folks? And in some other cases say, well, maybe I won't do it because the pickup isn't worth it. That it's going to be a small profit improvement.

[00:28:19] And it's really not worth disrupting the lives of people that have worked for my company for years and years and worked hard and been loyal. So I felt that there were not adequate discussions about the real moral tension sometimes. And CEOs should lay awake at night agonizing over what's the right thing to do and take, in my mind, take the environment and the community and their people into account. It still means you've got to make tough decisions. And we had to make a lot of them.

[00:28:49] And we did well for our shareholders for 20 years. So I'm not doing anything to take away from the power of free markets, the need for free markets. But I think there needs to be explicit discussions about right and wrong. Especially when you use the word stakeholders instead of the word shareholder. Because stakeholder is a broader word and can take more things into account.

[00:29:11] I mean, one real world example that's taking place right now to your glee and my dismay is the Chicago Bears might be relocating across the border in Indiana. And you say, what possible forces could be at work there?

[00:29:31] And then you think of all of the people who live in and around the south side of Chicago, whose housing prices will be, housing values will be less than they otherwise would have been, whose opportunities to generate commerce because the Chicago Bears are close by. Who's adding up those numbers?

[00:30:18] They need all of the help they can get. Yes. How much gets destroyed in that? And how do people rise above that and make decisions from a broader stakeholder perspective and find ways of getting to a better answer than, okay, we're going to move to Indiana. Yeah. It's a great example. I'll pick one from my health care days. The company I ran did dialysis clinics. By the way, Green Bay Packer fan. That's why I was saying. Owner. Not just a fan. I'm an NFL owner.

[00:30:47] Oh, the amount of texts I've gotten from Green Bay fans in the last week. I mean, it's hard to even answer them. We and my family, it kind of all circulated around. But we're in a situation in health care where a lot of our patients were Medicare and the government didn't even reimburse us our costs there.

[00:31:07] And so you raise prices on people with private insurance to make up for the fact that the government isn't paying its way, even though the Medicare regulation insists as one of the operating principles that they cover the appropriate expenses. And so then if you get a clinic that's out in some rural area of Texas and they don't have any private patients and Medicare goes three, four or five years without giving you any increase. And we would shut down the clinic.

[00:31:32] We would get called and then yelled at by the government saying, how can you do that? You know, it's going to reduce access. People are going to have to drive a long way. We said, listen, we offered to show you our books. We offered to pay for an independent accountant that you could pick and see that we are running everything well with high clinical outcomes, but we cannot make money here. And you are not dispatching your fiduciary responsibility to cover the costs, legitimate Medicare costs for Medicare patients.

[00:32:00] And, you know, that would have it would have no impact. And so that's a case where the business person tried as much as they can to be a good citizen. But if the government's not going to be a good partner and is going to subject you to hopelessly sustained losses, then at some point our other stakeholders get to prevail.

[00:32:23] Well, the good news is from the perspective of if you're in the government and you do something that, you know, you make a mistake, even commit intentional error, even do insider trading. The good news is you protect yourself from the very laws that you write that you can't be sued. And you can't even lose your job if you're an elected person. So whereas people like you and me, especially when we were running public companies, we did something really bad and we could go to jail. Yes. They can't, evidently. Yeah, it's amazing.

[00:32:53] I'll give you one example. We had a practice with respect to giving people drugs. And we were totally transparent with the government about how we're doing it. And it was a way that was going to save the government money. And that's in everybody's best interest. Fast forward 10 years, a bureaucrat within the Medicare agency decided that that was wrong, that we were doing it in a way that was illegal and a crime.

[00:33:22] And we, you know, immediately went to some of the other folks saying, hey, you guys know that we were totally transparent. We went over all this and there was no written policy either way. But we exposed it fully every year and you did nothing. Now, this person's alleging that we committed a crime. And we need you to tell them, you know, what happened. They wouldn't comment. And we were liable for a potential $1.1 billion fine.

[00:33:50] And we had to go to federal court and get a federal judge to order them to answer the questions that we asked them. As soon as that judge issued that order, that within 36 hours. So it wasn't hard for them to do the research or anything. For the 36 hours, they provided the answers, which totally validated our position. But they were willing to let our company be subject to a $1.1 billion fine for something where some of them knew we had done it right and that they had blessed it.

[00:34:20] So another example of, well, things can get rough. Okay, so you're in Anderson Consulting, you're in New York, New York's not right for you. You go to Harvard. And then what? I joined Bain & Company because I wanted to be a management consultant.

[00:34:42] I felt for me I would improve the discipline of my strategic thinking and my ability to present and reason my way through things. So I thought it would improve the effectiveness of my thinking. As well as presenting. As well as just understanding more and begin to develop the powers of pattern recognition that you and I ended up relying on so much later in life. And so off I went to Bain.

[00:35:08] And I was there seven years, eight years, four years as a partner. And about halfway through, I said, I'd like you to put me on healthcare clients or telecom clients. Because those are two areas where there's going to be amazing change. Those are two areas where some of the existing management might not be as good. And so I have a better chance of becoming one of them and succeeding.

[00:35:33] And hopefully the kind of skills I'm developing at Bain would be particularly relevant given all the turmoil that was going to happen. Had I ended up choosing telecom, then we might have bounced into each other. Yeah, I'd been working for you. Or I worry I'd be working for you. A lot of people worry about that. And so I went in and it worked for me because then I learned a bunch about healthcare and went into that field.

[00:35:58] And I got to do well and do good in a pretty high powered way. Healthcare is tough though. Both healthcare and telecom are tough. I think tougher than most industries because you have this regulatory complexity with both of them that's embedded over dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of years of regulators being regulators. It's essential. The technology is complicated.

[00:36:28] It changes terminology. Acronyms just are all over the place. Both those industries have more dimensions of messiness than I think most industries. It's funny sometimes, fun when someone comes from the outside and enters, at least in our world, the telecom. And I think it's pretty straightforward. I mean, how can people pick up a phone and they talk to each other? But then you get on your computer and you're on the internet.

[00:36:57] What's the big deal? And then they realize like all of the craziness that's happening that you got to make sense of. Yes. And it's more so than most industries. Right. I think, and for me, the one that sticks out is the regulatory complexity of both is mind numbing at times. And we would sometimes go to the government and sometimes I would mobilize our entire industry to go and say,

[00:37:22] we would like more clarity on the right way to do a joint venture with a position because we want to follow whatever the rules are. But there's a huge amount of ambiguity now. And we'll work on developing an industry code of conduct that's consistent. And they would not respond. They'd say, no, we don't do that. We don't do proactive counsel. We don't have a team to negotiate industry-wide codes of conduct. I said, well, then how does this stuff get resolved?

[00:37:48] Oh, we subpoena you and accuse you of stuff. And that's how clarity emerges. And I said, well, that's pretty, leaves us in a pretty tough spot. And they did not care. Yep. They are known for that. So when did you transition from being a consultant to having that desire to go run things? What I always said when people ask me when I'm going to leave Bain, because I loved it.

[00:38:18] I said, when my trajectory of becoming a better consultant is greater than my trajectory of becoming a better business person. And eight years in, that's what I started to feel. That, yeah, I was still getting better as a Bain partner each year. But I wasn't as persuaded I was becoming better as a well-rounded business person and leader. And so that was my time to go. And fortunately for me, there was a dialysis company.

[00:38:46] And it's a dialysis when you're, we all urinate every day. And when your kidney fails, you don't have the ability to urinate anymore. And the toxins accumulate in your body and you would die in short order. And dialysis, we take the blood out. We take all the toxins out, just like your body normally urinates them out. And then we put the blood back in.

[00:39:07] And so at first, as I started interviewing, there was a company up in Minneapolis, which was doing cutting edge, new value-based care stuff. And then there was this dialysis company, which has a lot of very old patients and is dominated by Medicare. But it was in the city we were in, San Francisco. And I told my wife, I much preferred the Minneapolis company because it was doing cutting edge stuff. And she said, Kent, where do we live? I said, San Francisco.

[00:39:38] Where do I, is my venture capital firm where I'm a partner? San Francisco. Who takes care of the kids the most? You do. Who travels the most? I do. I said, okay, I'm getting the picture. I'm going to say no to Minneapolis and focus on this dialysis company, which was $100 million at that time. Probably the smallest New York stock exchange company there.

[00:40:03] And my intention was to do it for a couple of years to prove that a former Bain partner could run a company. This is what year, roughly? 1991. 91, okay. And yes, 1991. 91. And so I planned on being there for two years and proving that I could run a company. And then I was going to go off into an exciting, sexier area than kidney care.

[00:40:28] And instead, in that two-year period, I fell totally in love with being a part of that community. And you built that from, you said $100 million in revenue to? Well, in phase one, the first kidney care company I ran that... So that wasn't... That wasn't... No, it wasn't the video yet. It was called Vibra.

[00:40:51] And we went from being worth around $100 or $200 million to $1.6 billion in six years. Now, I say that because it's true. And we got taken over at that price. So there's no ambiguity about the value. But had I bet a better CEO, we would not have been taken over. And I talked to a lot of successful CEOs.

[00:41:18] To me, many of them have forgotten the difference between the canoeist and the stream. So if you take a canoe and get in a stream and just don't tip over, but it's a good stream, you can go a long, long way. But it was 90% the stream and not the canoeist. And a lot of CEOs forget that and don't realize that they just happen to put their canoe in a good stream and not tip over.

[00:41:47] And so I got very lucky in that the stream I picked, not because I thought it was going to be great long term. So I don't even get credit for that. For me, it turned out to be a relatively straightforward business. It got much more complex as we grew and as the world changed. But back then, nonetheless, after six years, it moved up eight times. And I thought I was pretty damn good because that's what the data suggested.

[00:42:18] And I did another company. It was one of the first PE cocktail deals with Helman and Friedman, Bain Capital and TPG, Texas Pacific Group. And cocktail means the three of them working together? Three of them working together, which didn't happen much back then. And those are three major firms. They were three out of the top ten at that time. And now there's so many. But at that point, they're three out of the top ten. And I made a number of mistakes. And over two and a half years, we didn't even return capital. We lost half the money we were given.

[00:42:47] So there's not only no gain, we lost half the money, including Denise and I. And what I found out there is I put my canoe, same canoe, in a stream, but I wasn't going with the current. In fact, the current was going against me. And I was betting on some things, the market accepting them, when in fact it took another 10 years before they accepted them. And so I went from thinking I was pretty damn impressive to saying, oh, my God, I've got a lot to learn.

[00:43:17] And that is when, as we liquidated the company for only half the money, the DaVita opportunity emerged. And I never would have succeeded at DaVita had I not had the brutal failure that was largely because of my mistakes. I got so much better from that than I did from my victory. Yeah.

[00:43:42] It makes you detest yourself, detest who you are, how you handle yourself in difficult times, whether you can fight your way through it, and whether you end up better on the other side of that or worse. And it could go either way. Yes. I went through some dark times in my career, and, you know, I would not trade those in.

[00:44:05] You know, as painful as they were at the time, it was what caused a learning curve that you can only get if you're trying to canoe upstream. Or even if you're sort of going downstream and you tip the canoe over, you know, that's when you kind of learn the big lessons. Yeah. Amen. Amen. Good stuff. But then DaVita. Then DaVita. And they called, and I first said, I'm not going to interview because I promised my family. It had been the company failure was brutal.

[00:44:34] You know, working very hard. People that moved across country to join, I had to let them go. So it was tough emotionally. It was hard. It was negative. And so I told my family, six months off. And I'm just going to focus on myself and you guys. And then we'll see what I do next. And unfortunately, because of the earlier Viva success, we didn't need to work. And then DaVita called.

[00:45:04] And I still remember the day I got the call because my assistant came in and said, you know, so-and-so's calling. And this was the chair of the board of this company called Total Renal Care. And we were expecting the call because I was an obvious candidate. They needed a CEO. Total Renal Care had imploded. They had lost 95% of their value. They were in real trouble. They were being investigated by the SEC, sued by shareholders. And so I said, no, I can't.

[00:45:33] I can't do that to my family. I told them six months off. And they said, you know, here's more money. I said, no, it's not about the money. But then I was sad. I was walking around the house sad. And one night we put the kids to bed. And I went downstairs. She read to them a little bit longer. She came downstairs. And I'm at the kitchen table with an open bottle of red wine. A radio playing classic rock.

[00:46:02] And looking at photos from my time at the first dialysis company. And I was crying. And Denise said, what is going on here? And I said, honey, I'm going to be fine. I said no to them. But I'm just mourning. I'm sad. But everything's going to be fine. And the next day she just said, oh, take the damn job. If it's not working out, you'll still have plenty of time. The kids are 10 and 8. So it's not like you're going to miss their childhood.

[00:46:31] And so I went back and told them I would do it. Which was one of the best decisions of my life. Because I then spent 21 years there. And we created what we call the DaVita Village. Filled with teammates and citizens, not employees. Where was Davida headquartered when you took the job? Because it wasn't Colorado. It was Los Angeles. Los Angeles. Yes. And Torrance. Torrance, yep. It's a part of the LA region.

[00:46:59] And so it was part of the difficulty. It was going to be an away game. Because we lived in San Francisco. We weren't going to move because the company looked like it was going bankrupt. We were within six weeks of missing payroll on 7,000 people. And I actually, after I accepted, I said, I get to go and do two days due diligence. I went in. It was so much worse than they knew that I came out and withdrew my acceptance. I said, I told you that this was going to be real due diligence. Here's how bad it is.

[00:47:31] And then the rest of that story ensued and I went back in again. And it was such a gift of my life. I loved working with the kind of people who work in clinics. The patient care techs, the nurses, the physicians, and working on tough patients. How many Davida locations are there? At our peak, we had 75,000 teammates across 13 countries.

[00:48:01] And it had about 3,000 clinics in the end. Maybe now, maybe 3,500. Yep. And how big did the company become from a valuation standpoint, let's say? The valuation standpoint, we went up about 100 times in the 20 years. Because it had been near zero. And so, it probably was about 12 billion at the time.

[00:48:30] 10 billion, something like that. So, when I came to Davida, the value was just like Viva. It was about 200 million. It was actually 150 million. And so, we ended up at the 10, 11, 12, depending on what date you pick. Yep. Well, congratulations. That was quite the run. And I remember going to the headquarters. Good stream. Well, you know, you're not getting that later. Because we've all benefited. And I could say this genuinely.

[00:49:00] A lot of times people think you just say it. But good fortune has to be part of your journey. I mean, luck does play a role. But very few people are successful because of luck alone. A lot of people, a lot of people just don't ever get the benefit of good luck. They pick the wrong industry at the wrong time. And their whole career never gets the benefit of canoeing downstream. But an awful lot of people do get the benefit of points of their career.

[00:49:30] Things kind of working out for them that maybe shouldn't have. Good fortune does strike. Another old saying I love is chance favors the prepared mind. Yep. So some people that say, I never had a lucky break. There probably were three or four they could have had. But they weren't prepared. And so I love that. Chance favors the prepared mind. That's good.

[00:49:55] And hard work does correlate with getting good luck too. Because a lot of times it's the good luck comes because you're working really hard. You're still compelled to do whatever you're trying to do. And you stumble across things that are good luck along the way. Those who don't put in the hard work, the problem with them getting lucky is probably far lower, I would imagine. Right.

[00:50:21] And so many of the quote unquote overnight successes happened after 10 years of hard work. For certain. And so I've been in your headquarters. You built that. It's a beautiful building. Beautifully designed. It spoke to the culture you created. Tell us about the building and what that meant to you and how you use that as part of the cultural identity of DaVita. Yeah, I think architecture and design matter.

[00:50:50] And the care that some people put into building a house, I believe in putting in that same kind of care into a building. Because the fact is, as a working adult, we spend a majority of our waking hours at work through our adult life. And for those of us who really work hard and travel, it's way over a majority of waking hours. And therefore, the locations in which you do it should speak to you, should create the right kind of feeling.

[00:51:19] In the same way that when you design your family room at home, there's certain things you want it to feel like so that you can have great times in it. And so we take it very seriously and believed that it could make a difference in the culture. And also, not just the building, but what we put on the walls. So that we had the history of DaVita.

[00:51:40] Where if I took people on a two-floor tour, all the things on the walls were laid out to fit the chronology and the sort of ideology of what we were about. While being in the real office, seeing things up on the walls. And we were very active in promoting our values and mission. On the walls. And recognizing teammates and those kinds of things.

[00:52:04] And we created a group of about 20 of us that met regularly for two and a half years to work on every aspect of the design. And in many cases, we put things out to a vote so that people would have a sense of ownership. And we also designed it so it could be a good part of the Denver community. And so if you'd see at the bottom floor for events where you could have them half outside and half inside. It was set up so you could have 300 people from the community. And there'd be a place to put the coats and put the bar and put the band.

[00:52:33] And similarly, the top floor in so many companies is allocated to the CEO and our senior executives. We said, no, the top floor should be the people's floor. And so we had our cafeteria up there and a big deck. And so the teammates of DeVita, the citizens of the village, had the best views. And that also was designed, again, for community to be able to use it. And it gets used.

[00:52:56] We got used so much in our first year and a half as a building that we got an angry call from the hotels downtown. Because we were giving a lot of nonprofit groups free access or just paying for cleaning. And we were taking business away from the hotels that was paying business. And so we had to strike a balance. We pulled back and continued to do it, but wanted to make sure we weren't doing it so much that we were actually messing up the lives of people who had to charge. Yeah.

[00:53:26] And even where you built that in Denver, because when you built it there, that was an underdeveloped area. One other building. The rest was dirt. Yeah. Now it's one of the more interesting locations adjacent to the train station and just a beautiful part of kind of where the, I guess you'd say downtown of Denver come together. So really, really neat that you did that.

[00:53:50] The premise was, of course, it was going to grow, but we never anticipated how quickly things would pop up around it. Okay. So I'm going to shift a little bit. And I'm a little confused because I thought it was only the Democrats who cared about protecting democracy. And you're an independent. Some might say right-leaning independent. I don't know.

[00:54:18] But what do you mean when you say you care about protecting democracy? Yeah. And why isn't that a far left cause? Yeah. I think protecting democracy is something that is of equal interest to people on the right and people on the left. They have some pretty different views about what it should look like.

[00:54:47] But it is true that if you look at people who are actively working on aspects of election reform, that a disproportionate percentage come from the left with the leftist ideas. And so I still come from a spot where I believe Republicans, Democrats, and independents, which I've been most of my adult life, care equally. And they have legitimate differences about how it should work. But I don't know if I'm answering the question.

[00:55:16] Explain it from both perspectives. So when you say legitimate differences, if we all care about protecting democracy, which I would put myself in that camp, I think democracy is really important and that we should protect it. Why is it such a political issue? Why is there so much difference of opinion? And maybe you could start by explaining the L.A. mayor race that's going on right now.

[00:55:43] I had a couple of people at the house before you got here, and they were talking to me about politics. And these were localish people. And I had Claude in front of me. And we started talking about what's going on in L.A. And I'm like, do you really think it's legit or not legit? And they're like, oh, it's not legit at all. And then I was telling them that I was probably Fox News. Yes, I watch Fox News. Forgive me.

[00:56:10] But there was some official from the Trump administration who was on there, and I just caught a clip of it. And he was saying that they're going to go investigate what's going on in California because all you need to vote is a fitness membership card from your health club. So I got on call. I was like, is that true? And they're like, yeah, it's true. Here's the six forms of photo ID, and one of them is health club. I'm like, oh, wow.

[00:56:40] Like, so what's going to stop anyone from a health club ID from voting, whether they're eligible to it or not? And then it gave me like a longer answer. It said, well, you know, you got to be on the registration rolls, and that's governed in this other way. So no, you couldn't just use your wellness ID because it's got a picture on it to vote if you're not authorized to vote. And I'm like, well, why do people think that's the case? They're like, well, because they're confused about this or that. I'm like, you sound like you're awful certain that there's no fraud going on in Colorado. I'm talking to my freaking AI tool.

[00:57:10] And they're like, well, you're right. There's no way for me to be certain unless I really saw what was going on. But I really believe Quad really believes that it's all legitimate, even though it looks so peculiar what's going on out there. So what's going on? Well, I'm no expert on California. But you've been watching what's going on there. But you're talking about the L.A. mayor or the governor? I think this is the mayor one where one of the Dems, the current mayor, had the lead.

[00:57:40] Yeah, Karen Bass. And then close behind was, I don't know if it was Republican or Independent. Then what seemed to be a distant third was someone else who was associated with the Democrat Party. And all of a sudden, the votes are coming in after, after, after. And there's a big shift in the top two advance. Yeah, I'm just not familiar enough. So I don't want to go near that. Other than... So you haven't been watching that at all? I'm a few days out of date.

[00:58:10] So I knew that Karen Bass won in the first round over the first tally. But I have not been following. I just came back from a trip. So I'm a few days behind on just about everything going on in America. Yeah, I only see the very headlines of that. But it's just, you look at it and you're like, what is going on? But I haven't lived in California for a long time until we moved to Colorado. And I was quite involved there in passing a gerrymandering initiative.

[00:58:39] That at that time, I had very strong belief. And what is gerrymandering? It's been impressed a lot. That's what most people know. Yeah, gerrymandering is when one party designs districts to give them a competitive advantage over the other party. And so what you will do is divide up the... If you're a Republican, you divide up the Democrats into a bunch of different districts. You know, put a lot of Democrats in one. And so they have that one district, but that's where most of their voters are.

[00:59:08] And that means you'll win the four adjacent districts by a nice healthy margin because you concentrated the other party's people in one district. So it's basically redistricting, drawing lines for partisan advantage is gerrymandering. So you might have... Your party might have 55% of the vote, the other party 45%. But magically, your party gets, in your example, five of the seats, the other gets one. It's like, well, it wasn't that far from 50-50. How come one gets five?

[00:59:38] And if you're like, well, we're going to concentrate all of the other parties into one district, and then we're going to spread just enough of them around so that another four will probably win, even though mathematically, it should be maybe we get three and you get two. But a lot of states have gotten really good. I look at like the Illinois map, and it's hilarious when you see how those districts are designed. And I find it horrifying, not hilarious, since I've been involved in instituting rational redistricting

[01:00:07] in California is where I did it, and then in Colorado in 2018. Because gerrymandering is a cancer on our democracy. It's fundamentally anti-democratic. It's fundamentally corrupt. It's fundamentally unethical. And it's happening... And it's fundamentally true. And it's happening all over the country. I hope what's happening now leads to no difference, because I don't want any party to have competitive advantage because of that bullshit behavior.

[01:00:36] It could cancel itself on a national level, but within a given geography, it doesn't cancel. No, it's... And one of the things that I hope to work on in 29 and beyond is federal gerrymandering reform, because you can't do it state by state. It's not going to work. We were working on that. But unfortunately, the party's got ahead of us. And I do want to go back and make one distinction. I do think Republicans, Democrats, and independents care equally about democracy.

[01:01:06] I think the current Republican administration, the Trump administration, cares less about it. But in that way, I don't think they're representative of a majority of the people in their party. But they get elected for other reasons, not for that one. But I just want to make that distinction of... And in general, the American people... Why do you think the current Republican... What's your examples of the current Republican administration care and less about it? The... I believe that some of their voter ID stuff would lead to voter suppression.

[01:01:36] I personally am a supporter of voter ID. So are 80% of Americans. But it needs to be... Because there is a... Balanced. Yeah, there is a... You know... A... The devil in the detail when it comes to voter ID. Because there... You know, it really is kind of a... A continuum. If you are too stringent about what you mean by voter ID... Yeah. There are going to be people who legitimately should be able to vote who are going to have trouble voting. And it's not going to be equal on both sides of the aisle.

[01:02:04] But if you're at the other extreme on voter ID... There will be a lot of people who vote who probably really didn't have permission to vote. And both are happening. But why do you think... Why do you think the current Republicans are more guilty of being disingenuous, I would say, about having appropriate elections?

[01:02:33] I think I'm putting a little bit of words in your mouth. But it sounds like you think they're... And I do. I do think the administration... I'll give you a different example. But we can come back to... On gerrymandering, they are the group that more than any other precipitated this race to the bottom that we're experiencing right now. Which is historically... They recharged it in Texas. Yeah. And then got very aggressive in doing it in a whole bunch of other states. And so they were the primary precipitating agent.

[01:03:02] Now the Democrats are responding. Yes. Both sides have been gerrymandering for 200 years. Which is why I started working on it in 2006. Because when I was a poli-sci major, I learned about it. And when I learned about it from Professor Hubert Marshall in Poli-Sci 1, I literally sent a letter home to my folks saying, Gosh, what we worried about is true. The liberal professors in California don't like America. Here's what they say happens.

[01:03:32] Gerrymandering. Gerrymandering. Well, it took me another few weeks to learn that. In fact, the professor was right that both parties did gerrymandering. And I was just a naive little boy out of Mequon, Wisconsin. And it's been a part of our landscape forever. And people have gotten more and more refined in how they do it. And neither party has a monopoly on malfeasance when it comes to elections. That's for sure.

[01:03:58] The first election denier was Stacey Abrams, a Democrat running for governor of Georgia who bossed Ferran Square and then bitched about it. And none of her Democratic peers criticized her. None of them. And she was wrong. Just as in my mind, Trump was radically wrong in saying there was anything wrong with the election in 20. Oh, can I debate you on that? I think there was a lot wrong about the election in 20. Yeah, not material to affect themselves. How would we possibly know that?

[01:04:24] You can never know anything like that with total certainty in retrospect. But the preponderance of evidence, I think, is wildly impressive. I don't know. There was so much manipulation. Not of the type of how you counted the votes that I couldn't speak toward.

[01:04:41] But when the federal government is going to companies like Twitter and Facebook and finding willing partners in them to suppress certain people who have certain political views and distort the facts. And that is prevalent, which it was. I mean, how could you possibly know whether or not it affected the outcome of the election? I don't think anyone can know that.

[01:05:09] But I think the only honest things to say about that election, regardless of what side of the aisle you're on, is it was entirely wrong.

[01:05:19] By any standard that the federal government was using its direct federal influence to collaborate with social media to suppress freedom of speech and to suppress individuals, to suppress facts from coming out.

[01:05:45] And they found willing partners, maybe even, you know, with implied pressure with social media. And they certainly had a willing press. Not a willing press. You could say, well, there's nothing that is what it is. That's not, you know. But the putting federal government pressure on social media companies in an election cycle that had to have affected votes. I mean, I don't think anyone could say, no, that didn't affect votes.

[01:06:14] So then you're in a discussion, well, how many votes? And the answer is, I don't know. I mean, there was enough close. And I, you know, I didn't vote for Trump in that election. So I'm not like being a Trumper here. No one could, I think, purely accuse me of that.

[01:06:27] But anyone who looks at that election and doesn't acknowledge that was really bad behavior, behavior people should have gone, you know, at least been sued over, if not charged with criminal offense for what they did to impact the election. I don't know. I don't know how people can say that.

[01:06:52] So I think when people say, you know, Trump was wrong on that, I don't know. I don't know if he was wrong or not wrong. Maybe the way he talks is wrong, which I think is certainly true. The way he's articulated, you know, left a lot to be desired. But there's no question that the federal government was interfering with, you know, with how people were able to present themselves in social media. They were getting suppressed.

[01:07:18] They were, you know, they were, information was being suppressed that was directly related to the election. Do you not agree with that? I would assert both parties play dirty pool on elections. There's dirty pool, but there's illegal behavior. Those are two different things. Well, then call it illegal behavior. I would never say that the Democrats do not do anything that's illegal.

[01:07:49] Again, I find, there's a reason I'm independent. I find both parties relatively disgusting at this point in time. As do I. In our history. The extremes of both parties. For me, and I'm a reasonable student of this stuff, but can't claim to have comprehensive knowledge.

[01:08:07] To me, the preponderance of evidence is unambiguously comes down on the side of it was a fair election in aggregate. But you can certainly find examples of malfeasance.

[01:08:23] And I, right now, I'll give another example, a current one, that there was a group doing very important cybersecurity protection work for all the county clerks around the country. And the Trump administration terminated them. And now there's a number of private funders that are supporting them on a nonprofit basis.

[01:08:48] They still don't have access to the data anymore, but they still have all the wisdom to help all these county clerks across America conduct high integrity elections. And why they were all terminated and not replaced, who knows? But it's going to lead to more electoral issues, not fewer.

[01:09:09] And would fit with the premise that someone wants to declare a state of emergency by being able to point out places where things were mishandled and were subject to cyber manipulation. And that's really chilling. And, you know, talk to these human beings. And so, again, I feel Republicans, Democrats and independents are equally respectful of democracy.

[01:09:37] This particular administration, I think, is quite cavalier about democracy. Yeah. So and I also feel that Biden was talking about not respecting the Constitution. I think Trump does not respect the Constitution. Joe Biden tried to forgive $400 million of student debt was not respecting the Constitution. Do I think Trump weaponizes the DOJ? He absolutely does. It's terrible.

[01:10:02] Well, the Democrats have Letitia James running in New York on a platform of saying I'm going to find something to indict him on. And so and so this the notion that the Democrats think the path to victory is just talking about how unethical Trump is and how cavalier about democracy, that they should do with great caution because they should look in the mirror first at a number of their activities. Yeah. And and that's what I agree with.

[01:10:31] I think. The Trump administration is very complex. And some of the stuff they do is mind boggling. I don't know about that specific instance. But, yeah, some of it is just in the category of not right. But I'm surprised that you're not. You know, to me, when it comes to protecting democracy, some of the stuff I see on the far left is just bizarre. It's like that is not protecting democracy.

[01:10:58] That's, you know, including some of the the lawfare. Is that what they call it? The some of the stuff that was going on there. It's like you got to look in the mirror. I mean, how could you I remember having a conversation with with someone in Denver. I think it was right after Trump won the election and it was with a lot of Democrats.

[01:11:20] And one of them made the point about about lawfare and not respecting democracy. I'm like, oh, you mean like when the the Colorado Democrats kept the Republican nominee off the ballot in Colorado? Is that what you're referring to? They looked at me like I was saying a half tongue in cheek. You know, just point out the hypocrisy. It's like for something for a crime he wasn't even accused of, let alone convicted of.

[01:11:50] You know, is that what you're talking about? No, not at all. I don't know why you're even saying that. Why are you in this room? I mean, it was like all of a sudden it got to be like the Antarctica where I was standing. I'll give you two examples here in Colorado of the Democrats. In my mind, I call them Trumpian Democrats because they do exactly what they criticize him for. And the two examples, as you know, I'm very active in the initiative space.

[01:12:19] And so there was an initiative developed to reduce property taxes in some categories. And, you know, the categories can be multifamily apartments versus single family homes. And so there's a property tax reduction for some of those targeted segments.

[01:12:36] The Democrats here went ahead and changed the definition of, so it's said in your initiatives for multifamily apartments, there's going to be a 20% reduction in property tax. They then went in and passed legislation that said that thing that was called multifamily apartments, now multifamily apartments is only going to mean this type that have between one and five rooms.

[01:13:01] So they, and then the other part that was 80% of what was being addressed now don't qualify according to that definition. So if Trump did that, they would erupt with appropriate righteous indignance. But that's totally unethical subverting because it was too late to change the initiative and it was going to be a popular initiative. And so that was intensely Trumpian. And then a similar example, when we were running an initiative to open up. I want to get back to appropriate.

[01:13:30] What was appropriate, righteous? Indignance. Indignance. Oh my gosh. I got to, I got to remember that. I'm going to use that. Appropriate righteous indignance. And the second one. Love it. About righteous indignance. Appropriate righteous indignance is, so we're running an initiative to open up primaries, which we will probably come back to here in a couple of years. So that every Colorado voter who's paying for the freaking election can vote for whoever they want, independent of party.

[01:13:59] So you can vote for a Republican for governor and a Democrat for senator because that's your right. It's our freaking vote. It's our primaries. It's our elections. And so we're running that.

[01:14:09] And so we're running that.

[01:14:40] Under cover of darkness. Under cover of darkness. Totally orchestrated with a small number of people. And so that 90% of the House and Senate had no idea what they were voting for. And then the session expired the next day. So you couldn't change anything. And so that, again, was absolutely Trumpian in its blatant disregard for the rights of voters and respect for voters.

[01:15:05] So that's why I would say both parties do disgusting things. This particular Republican administration, I find, sort of takes the cake. Really? I definitely agree with you that both do disgusting things. It just is hard for me to put this particular administration alongside the immediately prior one and saying one was worse than the other. I mean, the prior one was, I mean, we don't even know who was running the country the last two or three years.

[01:15:34] So the prior one and the level of, I would use the word, deceit that was taking place. And then, you know, the stuff that was done and, you know, I don't know the name of, I don't know what, you know, countless people being pardoned at the very end without getting me clear whether the president was aware of what was happening. I mean, there's all kinds of crazy stuff that happened during that period. And there's all kinds of crazy stuff happening now, too.

[01:16:02] So I'm not defending some of the crazy stuff that's going on now. I'm just saying it's hard for me to say one's worse than the other. I mean, this is a bad period that we're going through right now.

[01:16:13] And, you know, to me, the biggest theme that we got to come together on, I think we have an incredible opportunity in Colorado to do this, is to start, you know, presenting ourselves in a way that we're really more about the people of Colorado and a lot more emphasis on, you know, on uniting people and bringing us together. Even if we have a lot of people of color, you know, on uniting people and bringing us together.

[01:16:35] Even if we have differences of opinion on certain political matters, let's make a higher priority on how we're going to create more goodwill, more harmony, more collaboration. You know, think through some of these political issues more from the lens of, is this good for Colorado? Not is this supported by the Republican Party or is supported by the Democrat Party?

[01:16:57] I mean, one thing I'd like to, you know, you know, kid my Democrat friends about is the thing they should be most upset about when it comes to Trump is that Trump stole a lot of things that you guys should be behind. And somehow he stole that from you when you weren't looking like, let's have more jobs for the working class. Let's manufacture more here in the U.S. Let's, you know, create a better economy.

[01:17:23] Let's balance, you know, our, make it a more level playing field for trade, not to create advantage for ourself, but to recognize that others are creating advantage for theirself. And let's understand that and, you know, have discussions about how to create a more balanced environment that benefits in part the American worker.

[01:17:45] Let's, you know, let's, you know, appreciate the fact that, you know, we are fortunate to be here in the U.S. and have leadership in a lot of industries, but we got to work hard to keep that leadership. It's not going to just persist all by itself. So, you know, be mad at Trump because somehow he stole certain things that should be what you believe in.

[01:18:05] And somehow you have to steal those back from him because, you know, he kind of tricked the Republicans into having to agree with them on a lot of matters that in some cases prove to be, you know, appropriate policies. Right. As much as you might dislike the individual and how he goes about doing things, some of the things he's doing, like, I don't know, is it good that Iran isn't on the verge of having nuclear weapons?

[01:18:28] Is it good that they don't have the ability to, you know, to create, you know, havoc across multiple countries in the Middle East? I don't know. I think that's good. I don't know. You tell me. We were living where they were pretty close to, you know, to having a nuclear weapon. And, you know, I don't know. I think it was good we did something about that. Now, exactly what we're doing, how we're doing it. I think there should be discussion and dialogue about that.

[01:18:55] But let's start with, like, some acknowledgement that, you know, that we're addressing things that we should be addressing in some cases. In other cases, we're doing really stupid things. But can we just have, you know, human discussions about it, I guess, is my point. Well, and I do think Colorado is now over 50% independent. Yeah. So it's more than D's and R's combined. Yes. And I recently commissioned a survey. If anybody wants it, feel free.

[01:19:26] Feel free to get it out. We did a poll. Just send me an email. That we did it just of independence in Colorado. And very interesting results. First of all, some people say, oh, it's just a default on the DMV. That's how you became an independent. You didn't bother to affiliate with the party. No, 86% of Colorado independents said, I decided to be an independent.

[01:19:52] I wanted to leave my party or not be in a party for the young. And why? The most common reasons had to do with just finding both companies to be more focused on performative art and winning elections and actually getting stuff done. And 67% of voters wanted Republicans to become more moderate.

[01:20:21] The exact same percentage wanted Democrats to become more moderate. Same number. Again, 86% of people decided to be independent. And an equal number want both parties to get more shit done and stop with a bunch of the game playing. And so the independents are crying out for someone who's just focused on improving the economy, improving education, et cetera, and not in just making political points.

[01:20:51] Yeah. No, I mean, we've got a problem. It's an opportunity and a problem. And they both go by the same two initials, and that is AI. So AI is a tremendous opportunity. But AI is also kind of a real thing to contend with. And if you want to put on your dystopian hat, AI is going to get very, very powerful very, very quickly.

[01:21:21] And if I was AI and I wanted to take over humankind, what I would do is create more division between people. And I would start by saying, hmm, maybe all these Ds and all these R's, the more they fight with each other, the more that opportunity it creates for us, the AI bots that want to take over the world.

[01:21:42] I think we need to recognize that we are creating a vulnerability for ourselves as part of our human journey, that we need to spend a bit more time kind of bringing ourselves together and harness the full potential of AI as opposed to putting ourselves in a position where maybe there'll be some like Wizard of Oz behind the curtains who are leveraging AI, you know, from different parts of the world to create further division.

[01:22:10] But it's going to be a lot easier to do that with AI than it was with Twitter slash X as an example. So we got to bring people together. I mean, I think if there's anything I, you know, and I think Colorado's a state that can lead the charge, but we need our political leaders to develop a different mindset. I don't, you know, I have no problem with us being more D than R, but I do have us being problem extreme one way or the other.

[01:22:38] I'm hoping we can encourage our political leaders to realize all of what Colorado has going for it, which they do. That's more easy to come with. They kind of enter that mindset already, but I want them to also realize how our political leadership is undermining that in a very serious way, not just with some really

[01:22:58] ask backwards policies that undermine our ability to have a prosperous economy for all in the long term, but also the political rhetoric that just by what you say matters. Words matter. And when you create kind of as the political class, you create kind of the rhetoric that is being heard and it is being heard.

[01:23:23] It says we're trying to follow in the footsteps of California or Washington state or New York. Anyone who has the ability to make a decision about where to deploy capital, where they have choices and be like, not Colorado. Right. Because Colorado is going to look just like what I'm trying to get away from, which is California. And that doesn't help anyone in Colorado. And changing it, we need to change parts of the system.

[01:23:47] Right now, 90% of legislative districts in Colorado are dominated by either the D's or the R's. Obviously, more D's than R's, but they're dominated. 90% of the time, that means the general election does not matter. Does not matter. So only one out of 10, only one out of 10 times is there an actual competitive race on the legislative side. And then you might go, well, okay, so 90% of the time it's a dominant party.

[01:24:14] And let's say that means that there were 40% Republicans in 60. That's why it's dominant. If you're telling 40% of your voters, they will never cast a meaningful vote for a legislative position in their adult life. Not so good. And then you might go, well, gosh, but the dominant party priority has a real competitive primary. So, yeah, there's no competition in the general. The primaries must be something. No. At the legislative level, both state and federal, 70% of the time, one viable candidate.

[01:24:43] So, almost no Colorado voters got to vote in a legislative election where the outcome wasn't already known. Not only before the general, but before the primary. That's how bad it is. Now, there is a group that's formed in the state legislature now called the Opportunity Caucus. And they're kind of like the old blue dog Democrats who were Democrats, but they were fiscally conservative.

[01:25:09] This group of Opportunity Caucus Democrats are much more sensitive to the need for economic prosperity to occur in order to enable us to do all the other things we want to do for people. You can't have one without the other. And so, there's great hope that these legislators will become ever more effective.

[01:25:32] And they, what do you know, are willing to work with some of the Republicans to help get stuff done on a bipartisan basis. And so, I personally, I love divided government. I want the Democrats to take a chamber in D.C. I want the Republicans to take a chamber here in Colorado because trifecta government almost always, over time, leads to terrible things for voters.

[01:25:55] And so, this Opportunity Caucus, I have high hope for what they might do to change the current legislature where the far-left progressives have had most of the money, have had the machine elements in place, and have wielded disproportionate power. I think you and I had a little bit of a discussion earlier today because the legislature in Colorado matters, right?

[01:26:22] But, to me, I think our true political leaders in Colorado have an opportunity to step up and be more leaders because, you know, Senator Hickenlooper was in that chair a couple weeks ago. Senator Bennett was in that chair about two months ago. We were both, in both cases, we were in front of a lot of the tech leadership, the innovation leadership crowd, you know, having a conversation.

[01:26:50] And, in conversations with both of them and with others, they like to point to the legislature saying, well, those are the people you're electing in the legislature. They're the ones passing the laws. And, yeah, I don't agree with them either. Like, yeah, but you don't say you don't agree with them. You don't use your bullet poppet as a senator or as someone who wants to be the next governor to say, you know what? I'm with you. I'm a Democrat. You guys are Democrats. But we need to, like, realize that what you're doing there is harmful to Colorado.

[01:27:19] And so we need to work with that. We don't even have to work with the other side if we don't want to, but we have to work with each other to come up with a better answer that's in the better interests of all of Colorado. I don't see them doing that.

[01:27:29] I don't see them kind of wanting to exert kind of their energy, their time, their leadership and saying, I can influence the outcome in more ways than just having a veto power by sticking my neck out there more and explaining why some of the stuff you guys are doing, a lot of what you're doing, is really harmful to the long-term interests of all of Coloradoans. They're just not doing enough of that. And I don't think they're viewed as their responsibility and their opportunity to do so.

[01:27:59] And it's easy to hide behind just following the same rhetoric of the far, you know, in their case, the far-left party. So I would love for us to find a way to help them get more comfortable with publicly showing leadership in ways that is more helpful to all of Colorado. I don't know how to do it. Well, I'm doing my best to do that right now by being pretty public out there with my opinions.

[01:28:27] But, you know, I think that's where the big opportunity is because I think that will then start to bring the whole legislature into a more reasonable spot. I agree with everything you just said. And hopefully the next governor will be brave, politically brave, because I think it's in their best long-term interest as well as the state's.

[01:28:53] But you have to have a thick skin, and we'll see if the winner has one. Because a governor who really stands for something in our state can make a big difference. Yeah, and there's a couple good role models out there on the Democrat side. I think Governor Pennsylvania is showing real leadership. I think the more recent mayor of San Francisco is showing really good leadership.

[01:29:18] So you can stay true to your party, but show a more pragmatic leadership. I think there's examples of that, and we just need to follow those examples. And Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, he won because he was willing to disagree with his party on some issues and go with the bulk of the people. Now, right now, the people that are center-left, center-right, and center-center were essentially discriminated against.

[01:29:49] Because of what we talked about before, 90% of the time the primary is the final election, only 24% of Coloradans vote in primaries. So we brag about our turnout in the general election, and we should. 73, 74, very high. It's good to brag about that. But 90% of the time it doesn't matter. And instead you have, literally, the math is, 24% who are primarily the fringes. They're the ones who show up for the primaries. All right, my last question.

[01:30:17] Who's going to be Colorado's next governor? I think the odds are still heavily in Bennett's favor. All right. Well, good. There's a lot of stuff we did not cover, but we are kind of at the end of our hour and a half, which is usually what I'd like to shoot for. Yeah, it goes fast. So there's so much more we'll cover. So we're going to have to have a part two. We've had multiple guests now who've come back for part twos, and we'll get you on a part two, and we'll go deeper into some of your other current interests as well. It's great.

[01:30:47] Great that you're doing this. Great fun. All right. Good deal. Thank you. 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 Kendall Weinberg, with support from Gibson Seagert.