Let's talk about systems versus goals. You know that I wrote a book called "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" in which I talked about having a system, something you work on every day that gives you a good result but you don't necessarily know exactly how it's going to end. So a system is something to improve your odds of a good outcome but you don't know exactly where it goes, versus a goal which says we will have single-payer health care. Just use that as an example. So a goal would be single-payer health care. So it assumes the exact answer or something like an exact answer, as opposed to a system which would be a way to work toward a better healthcare situation but you don't know exactly how that works out. That's what a system would look like.

Let me suggest some new ideas here. I'm going to throw some ideas into the mix. I've talked to you already about how Kanye did something much bigger than the press realized or reported. Now what Kanye did was suggest ideation centers in urban areas. And that would be a center where you would work with the local folks to come up with ideas for solving things. If you come up with an idea, ideally you want to be able to test it in maybe one city or one community within the city, but something small that you can test. So the ideation centers would create ideas. You'd package them so that you've got something an investor, let's say a billionaire who just wants to help or even the government that just wants to help, and they've got some money to do a small test. The small test works, you implement it.

Now what makes this a system is you don't know what the thing looks like. You don't know what ideas they're going to come up with. It's a system. We don't have a system. Kanye is operating at a higher level than anybody who's criticizing him. That's my take. Because this doesn't exist and it's exactly what needs to exist. Not a solution, a system for creating solutions and testing them. As many solutions as you can come up with to test.

But I would extend this idea and say maybe we should do even more of it. I'm going to take healthcare as my example and I'm going to introduce this idea that I just made up, so you won't find this anywhere. This is just a mental experiment. Term I made up: the president's portfolio.

Now what I mean by the president's portfolio is not that the president is going to be investing in any stocks or anything like that. So it's not that. It would be a portfolio of startups or companies that are working for the betterment of the United States as a whole. So most startups are just trying to make money, right? So if you're a game startup you just have to make money. It doesn't really make much difference to the United States except in some general way it might help the economy. But there are other startups that would dramatically lower healthcare costs. There are startups that would get you dramatically better results in healthcare. There are startups that are working on the systems, the databases, the processes that would greatly reduce the amount of complexity, for example.

So the president's portfolio would be, and this is an idea not a real thing, and the idea would be that the president working with a team of people who would help him vet what's in the portfolio and what isn't, would be a list of companies. And this in this one example for healthcare, the healthcare companies that are startups that would really make a difference in the cost of healthcare if they worked. And the idea of the president's portfolio is not that the president invests, so there's no investment. He's just spotlighting. So it would be a spotlight that says look, if you've qualified because your startup is a serious one, and let's say there's some criteria such as you have to at least get some money from a high-end venture company. So if Sequoia or some big venture company has already put money into you and it could be demonstrated that you're for the benefit of the larger society not just making money, then you could be in the president's portfolio.

What would be the advantage? The advantage would be the spotlight so that the billionaires who want to help would know exactly where to look. They say, "Oh, I'll go to the web page with the list of startups that are part of the president's portfolio and I'd like to do something good for the country and why not maybe make some money at the same time." So the billionaire goes here, looks down the list and says, "Wow, there's a company that if this works out they're going to maybe be able to make an MRI that costs you ten dollars instead of hundreds of dollars. So I'm going to invest in that." Might not work, but if it does the whole country, maybe even the whole world, is better off.

Now I use healthcare as my example because it was a clear example where spotlighting the companies that can bring down costs would be very important. But this could be any category. It could be climate change. What are all the companies working on things that would make a real difference to climate change? Wouldn't you like to know? Wouldn't you like to know that there are a dozen companies that are looking to capture CO2, scrub it out of the air, make maybe a better nuclear plant? Wouldn't you like to know what is the small portfolio of companies that are going to fix our biggest problems so that our billionaires can be weaponized to make a difference?

Right now if you've got a billion dollars and you want to help the world, what the hell are you going to do? So this is the genius of the Gates Foundation. When Bill Gates decided, and here I don't want to read his mind but it seems obvious from the facts, it seems that Bill Gates said to himself some version of this: I have all these billions of dollars. I want to help the world. How do I do it? It's actually hard because you don't know where to put that money that the government can't do it better, that it can really make a difference. What do you do?

So Gates created the Gates Foundation whose primary job, as I understand it, is to figure out where to put his money. Because the figuring out where to do it is the hard part. That's sort of the sign of the golden age. So the golden age, as I define it, is the time we're in where the biggest problems are the way we think about stuff. We don't have a resource shortage. We have an ideas shortage.

Kanye understanding that we're in the golden age where we don't have a resource shortage, we have an idea shortage, we have a system shortage, we haven't organized into the right systems, has suggested a hugely important idea that the press has completely overlooked. Ideation centers. A place to create ideas and package them so you can put them in front of a billionaire or put them in front of the government and say here's this idea. The community is on board. We've packaged it. We've looked at the economics. Can we get a billionaire to do a small test?

Likewise on healthcare, I'm greatly annoyed when I watch the debate about single-payer. The debate about single-payer goes like this: yes or no. That's the whole debate, right? Yes, single-payer or no. But is there a smarter middle ground where you can find a way to do a small test? We should never be saying no to big ideas. Let me say that again. We should never say no to big ideas. Instead we should say can you test it? Can you test it small?

Now that doesn't mean looking at Europe and seeing what they did, although that's useful, right? Could you, and I don't know if this is true, could you pick a state, could you pick a county? Suppose you could pick a county and say all right, we're just going to test single-payer in this county for the next three years or whatever. You're all going to be on the single-payer. The government will artificially lower your drug costs. In other words will subsidize them to give you the impact of what it would be if we had negotiating power on a countrywide basis, which we don't have yet because this is just a test. So if the experts said well if you could negotiate the prices down 30% you'd really have something, so you just artificially do a test where you force the prices to be 30% lower. See what happens.

Now that particular test might be a stupid idea. It takes people who are working in the area to come up with what a good test looks like. But if we're saying yes or no to any kind of a healthcare change, it feels like the wrong process. The right process to me sounds like: can you test it small? If you can test it small, you don't have to say yes or no, right? We should get out of yes or no. If there's one change that Kanye can bring to the world it's to get us out of yes or no. We're not a yes/no world. We should be a systems world where we're continually trying new ideas, packaging them in a way we can test them small, see how it does, and then make a separate decision whether you want to go big.

So yes or no is just an unproductive way to address these big things. All right, competition in healthcare is a failure, blah blah. Well I would imagine that there are lots of things you could test in healthcare and other ideas. And by the way, the ideas that I'm suggesting here, these are all the normal ideas in the business community. So everything I'm describing here is the exact way that capitalism works. So capitalism works great because they think of ideas, they test them small before they decide to go big. Now the government does that in some cases, but I would think that should be the standard form. And you should never, if you're a Republican and you're saying no to any other healthcare idea from the left, that's just the wrong approach. The right approach is can you test it small? If you can't test it small then you can say no. If you can, then you should be saying put together a package and let's see if we can test it somewhere small.

All right, R and D suffers with universal. We don't know that, do we? We don't know that. We do know that there might be some kind of a trade-off, but we don't know what the trade-off looks like. So when you say stuff like such as innovation will suffer, I think that needs to be tested. It is fair to say that if you took the profits of the healthcare businesses, if their profits reduced, it probably would come out of R and D. But that doesn't mean there wouldn't be something else jumping up to replace it. You know, some other entity.