Harper Reed, Technologist and Entrepreneur
Harper Reed knows more than most that technology designed to do great things can be easily weaponized to do bad things. His view of the role technology should (and should not) play is heavily influenced by decades of work bringing technology to the forefront in industries such as ecommerce, politics, and startups. When the covid-19 pandemic hit, Harper was involved in efforts to help guide technological supports for the critical work being done in communities across the country, and has emerged with a deep sense of awe for the public health community and some ideas on how to make the system work better for all of us.
Harper Reed is a technologist that predicts the future for a living. He spends his life traveling around the world showing people the possibilities of tech and sharing his experiences to propel the greater good, all while raising the level of fun in the room.
Harper knows his incredible luck has led him to achieve many wonderful things. At PayPal, his roles as Head of Commerce and as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence allowed him to guide teams into the thrilling future of e-commerce. The technology he developed as co-founder at startup Modest Inc. had initially garnered the attention of PayPal, which led them to acquire Modest only a few years after launch.
Harper also believes the talent of a great bunch of humans can transform an organization like nothing else and he uses that belief to strengthen, deploy, and inspire every team he works with. Previously, Harper was CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign, where he was the first to bring the mentality and connective capabilities of tech to the political stage. He was also the CTO of Threadless.com, where he pioneered crowdsourcing and grew the company from a 12 person startup to a multi-million dollar enterprise. Harper is an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, sits on the advisory boards for IIT Computer Science and the Royal United Service Institute, and is on the Cornell College Board of Trustees.
You can find Harper hacking on personal projects and enjoying life in Chicago with his partner, Hiromi and their beautiful and bizarre poodle, Lulu.
Show Notes
Harper Reed shares his background, merging technology with large groups of people. [3:56]
How did technologists and health care professionals collaborate during COVID? [6:03]
Why did the US lag behind other countries in effort to deploy technology solutions during the pandemic? [10:45]
What is the most surprising thing about the US health infrastructure? [13.35]
Why is the idea that technology will solve the problem typically false? [16:50]
What are the three different, possible paths for the future of health care? [21:16]
How can we make sure that health care data and AI will be used for good? [25:03]
Will the lessons learned from organizations during the pandemic propel us forward in a positive way? [31:05]
The US will have to change how we are investing in health care or will continue to fade into irrelevance on the world stage. [33:36]
Transcript
Juliette Price 0:03
I'm Juliette Price, guest host for this week's edition of Health2049.
Harper Reed 0:09
Technology itself comes with a lot of baggage, this idea that technology will be the savior or will solve the problem, I think is typically false and what ends up happening is technology becomes the shiny thing. And so it's very easy for a governor or for a leader that is not necessarily well-versed in public health, or what have you, to latch on to a technology solution for many reasons, many cynical reasons, we can pick their donors, etc, or just because it's cool.
So I like to think of technology more as lubrication for an engine, like the oil that makes it go faster and the thing that augments it instead of the replacement, and I think oftentimes tech people think more about replacing everything than just making it go a little bit faster. And so that's my big lesson takeaway from the Obama campaign is that technology, if you use it as a replacement function, it's going to ruin it. But if you use it as just a thing that just makes it go a little bit faster, don't try and go like 10x, just like one or two, 1.5, just a little bit faster, then it really helps.
Juliette Price 2:14
Today's guest is Harper Reed, a technologist that predicts the future for a living. He spends most of his life building big things, hacking things and talking about doing both of those things. As Chief Technology Officer of the Obama 2012 campaign, Harper was the first to bring the tech mentality to a political level. He believes the talent of a great bunch of humans can transform an organization like nothing else. And he uses that belief to strengthen, deploy and inspire every team he works with.
He also believes his incredible luck has led him to achieve wonderful things like pioneering crowdsourcing at Threadless.com, founding Modest, Inc. and guiding the software team at PayPal. His resume includes fellowships at the MIT Media Lab, USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab, but equally importantly documented, Harper stop taking himself seriously in May of 1990. I'm Juliette Price, a special guest host for today, and you're listening to Health2049. It is my pleasure to welcome Harper Reed to our program. Harper welcome and thank you for being here.
Harper Reed 3:16
Thank you for having me. Every time I hear my bio, I'm like, I should make that less serious. It's a little, you know, you write those things, and you don't really expect anyone to ever use them. And when you hear them, you're like, oh, boy, it's a lot. So hopefully I can fulfill that.
Juliette Price 3:33
No, of course. So the last time you and I were together, it was back in 2013, when big data had just hit the headlines, and everyone was looking at your work on the Obama reelection campaign and CTO as sort of a turning point and how we were all going to use data and technology moving forward. But you've done so much more than that. Could you tell our audience a little bit about your interesting background?
Harper Reed 3:56
So, my name is Harper Reed, I am an internet person, so I've been online for my whole life. I find technology to be a really important part of our culture and obviously the work I do. And so I'm oftentimes trying to find places where myself as an engineer, can fit in and make interesting things happen for communities of people. And so, Threadless was a big example that of crowdsourcing, and then the Obama campaign, big community movements, big grassroots organization tech, enabling that.
As I moved on to Modest, it was a lot about tech enablement of e-commerce trying to make sure that we were able to sell things quickly online, which is not as cool as crowdsourcing or Obama campaign, but it was a fun thing to do. And what I've found is my entire career, it has been a combination of technology, large groups of people, and kind of merging those two things together to try and make something that is interesting or better or what have you.
But then there's also this thread that has happened a few times, but in a real notable way. And as you mentioned, 2013, big data was really like the kind of term of the day everyone was talking about it, etc. And then basically, the technology that we used and pioneered at the Obama campaign was then used in misinformation, disinformation, attacks in Ukraine by Russia, in the political campaigns of 2016, and so on, and so forth. And so I also have this kind of interesting thing where I'm like, oh, boy, we really released that to the world. And then it was used by people that I don't think we all agreed with. And so it's very complicated. And so I have a very different perspective on those things, I think now than I did in 2013.
Juliette Price 5:40
Great. And one of the more interesting things is, as I was catching up on what you've been doing of late when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, you and others really mobilized and jumped into action in a few different ways. Could you tell us a little bit about what you did to help in the response to the global pandemic? And what you learned from that experience?
Harper Reed 6:03
Yeah, actually, it's pretty straightforward in that, like everyone, COVID kind of happened. And I was out of a job, I really wasn't doing anything. I had left my job in 2018, and was kind of wandering the earth looking for what was next. And I had an office here in Chicago that I had rented, it was almost more of an artist's studio sort of vibe, just people would come over and we'd hang out and just like build robots, or whatever. And when COVID happened, obviously, people stopped hanging out at the office. So we all went home. And I think everyone was trying to figure out what is this new world look like and how can I help? And since I didn't have a job, I just started trying to talk about what was happening.
So the first thing that I did is really started organizing small groups. And a lot of those groups were technologists, public health people, epidemiologists, doctors and whatnot and various WhatsApp groups. A lot of it was mostly around trying to share information. And so there was a handful of people that I worked with that were pretty interesting, and were at the frontlines in many ways. And it was honestly these small little communities, there was a data science community, there was a doctor community, there was a general community, and a lot of it was about just sharing information in a way that was just less guarded. Not necessarily off the record, but it was in a way where people felt safe to be able to talk and actually be critical and confused and show some weakness and some strength and whatnot, and really support one another.
And that really kicked off a bunch of other small communities where, the first thing I started to do is try and convince tech people that they can't solve epidemiology without epidemiologists in the room. Not that tech people can't help but what we saw was a bunch of Silicon Valley types who are jumping in and saying, oh, I can solve this, this is easy. And then not talking to any public health people, not talking to any epidemiologist, and trying to solve these problems that are actually relatively complicated. And then just trying to organize people in ways that I can help. Because of my background, and what I've done, I have a pretty broad network. And there's a lot of people who were trying to help and just needed to be plugged in somewhere. And there was a lot of people who were looking to be plugged in, or looking for someone to help them out. So it was just organizing, and a lot of it was, I don't want to say grassroots, because it was sort of like, technically grassroots, but a lot of it was just hanging out online, and Zooms and whatnot.
And I think my very specific background of building something, and then realizing that that might have been a bad thing for the world has helped my perspective on things like surveillance, whether we're talking about actual epidemiology surveillance, or we're talking about regular surveillance capitalism. I think we need to be very deliberate about how we're rolling those things out because for the most part, it doesn't hurt people like me, who are relatively successful, or what have you, it only hurts the people who are already vulnerable. And so I just think it's important to have that perspective when you're building technology.
And so what started as a lot of organizing moved into doing some advocacy work around privacy in regards to exposure notification, or at the time was called digital contact tracing even though it wasn't really contact tracing at all. It was just exposure notification. And that kind of helped influence a lot of folks who were thinking about it, and we called the exposure notification, Data Bill of Rights, which was a group of people who were trying to advocate that the data shouldn't be shared. It should be protected, it should live on devices, it shouldn't be automatically uploaded, etc.
And this was right around the time that Singapore started their digital contact tracing program, and then moved that into exposure notification. And we saw a bunch of great work in South Korea and a lot of countries who were a little quicker than the US at moving around these things and started deploying some solutions. And so we tried to help influence them and learn from them and try to bring that learning to the US. And, sadly, as we all know, the US was very, very slow in adopting anything like this.
Juliette Price 10:13
Yeah, that's so curious that you mentioned the other countries, this is something that was very curious to watch where cultural norms and other countries met the needs of the pandemic and then met digital culture and all that. Why do you think the United States really lagged in that game, and that we really half-heartedly tried and ultimately did not deploy anything remotely as original as some of these other countries?
Harper Reed 10:46
I'm not sure I have a good answer on that. I have a lot of cynical answers around like, capitalism, or our love of freedom. You can't compare the governments of Singapore to the government of the United States. Singapore does regular surveillance normally, it's not the same kind of government at all as the United States, obviously smaller population, etc. Same with South Korea, to some extent. And so I think it's really complicated to compare those.
But I think there's the other thing of, we have this interesting mixture of politics, power, people in power, capitalism, and all these things mixed together that it gets really complicated. And so, for instance, Google released their expose notification platform with Apple, and I had a bunch of Googler friends that were saying this is a terrible idea for Google to be involved with because of how it kind of messed with their potential business models. And in my head, I'm like, Oh, this seems really complex. I understand the fear, the backlash, etc. I understand that, but also, aren't we just trying to survive here? This is also earlier within COVID, where there was no vaccine, no one was leaving the house, going to the grocery store seemed like a liability. There wasn't a clear answer. And yet, you did see that a lot of people were trying to either be extractive trying to make money, etc, or they were trying to be protective, and tried to create their silo of which they weren't going to take a risk. And it's hard, running a startup is hard. Running a business is hard. I don't want to minimize that.
But I do think that in the US, we have this unique mix of ineffective government, especially on the public health side. And as I talk to more and more public health people, they're like, Oh, finally, someone's paying attention after 20 years, to public health, and it's like this very frustrating thing of when you learn about how the public health infrastructure in the US, about how everyone is so stratified, no one talks to each other county by county, etc. and you learn about that. And then you see something like, the UK where they're launching apps that weren't necessarily effective, but they were actually trying, and so you see this difference between the very distributed public health infrastructure in the United States, which is obviously deprioritized by the government versus something where it's much more centralized. And so watching that in practice was very frustrating, but I don't know why it is other than our addiction to capitalism, and then profits over people.
Juliette Price 13:19
What was, speaking as you just did, as someone who came into the health space, not necessarily from it, what was the most surprising thing that you learned along your journey here about the US health infrastructure?
Harper Reed 13:36
I think the most surprising thing for me was how every single public health person I talked to, was the best person I've ever talked to. They were all so amazing, dedicating themselves to the surveillance of outbreaks in these small communities for the last 10 years, and it might have been STDs or might have been HIV AIDS, it could have been anything, but they're dedicating their lives to this using the minimum amount of technology because there was no money. And just the magic that they were, being in some rural community in Nebraska or being in Detroit or wherever they were, they were just these amazing people dealing with such huge hurdles.
The disconnect between talking to them and then talking to either the people at the state level with the budgets, and then the tech people with these insane budgets, and how none the three would ever meet. So it's the thing of like, these poor public health people who had dedicated themselves to either a city or county and they just were struggling and the low hanging fruit was so low. And so then finally, you started to see organizations like USDR, US Digital Response, come in and start helping out. I remember being on some calls with the Michigan disease surveillance people and they were just like, Please anything, we have this technology that some contract was won 15 years ago, and we're still working with it. And it's not the right technology, but we're in the middle of pandemic, and we're not gonna get something new.
And so it's like all these problems of like, they're just struggling. But it was the best people to interact with. They were so smart. They really were the ones that were the right people there. But the issue was that no one was paying attention, and no one cared. And it was really sad to see these folks who have prepared almost their entire life to solve these problems. And then to see them be kind of deprioritized for the shiny thing, and not listened to because of politics, or because of polarization or what have you.
And there's a lot that I think we all know, we could have avoided, for one reason or the other. But I think if I had a magic wand to change things, there's a lot of things I would change. But I think the main thing I would change is how we have structured public health in United States. And if I remember correctly, I think it's county by county, in many ways, and I think what that has created is the counties are so different. I live in Chicago, so Cook County, and the fact that they're funded and separated by county means that there just isn't a lot of collaboration between counties, which means that when you're in a COVID style position where you need that collaboration for both surveillance, communications, and response, our kind of distributed, decentralized system really falls down.
Juliette Price 16:25
Mm hmm. What do you think in the future, what are some ways we can bring more tech into the public health arena? And obviously, some of the structural items that you've named, will not resolve themselves in an hour or a few hours, but what opportunities did you see that you might think about deploying in the near future?
Harper Reed 16:50
I don't even know if there's tech solutions. I think most of the problems that I saw were mostly around people, or things that were not real, meaning there are a lot of issues that we have from a macro standpoint in the US, rural versus city, all of those kinds of things manifest in this public health space. And I think it's dangerous to say that the solution will be technology. I think it has to be led by people. And I feel like, in some ways, if you're trying to fill a ... I keep thinking just really terrible analogies, but are metaphors just like the worst. I'm really bad at that, you know, some really elaborate metaphor, and it doesn't actually make any sense. And it doesn't make my point.
But what I have learned is anytime you're dealing with problems that are more centered around people, technology doesn't always solve the problem. In many cases, what it does is it may patch up a problem, but it creates another problem. I'll just give an example from the Obama campaign that just blew my mind, this was a hard lesson for me. I came in as a hotshot tech person being like, technology will save the world. And then I was talking to a grassroots organizer, and they were like, technology will only hurt us. And I was like, Nah, tell me, What do you mean? And they're like, well, because if I make a mobile app, then I have to train people how to use the mobile app. And I have to train everyone how to do this. And whereas like paper, everyone knows how to use paper, it scales infinitely, we're not going to run out, we just got to Home Depot and get more paper. And it really made me realize that technology itself comes with a lot of baggage.
And so this idea that technology will be the savior or will solve the problem, I think is typically false. And what ends up happening is technology becomes the shiny thing. And so it's very easy for a governor or for a leader that is not necessarily well-versed in public health, or what have you to latch on to a technology solution, for many reasons, many cynical reasons we can pick like their donors, etc. Or just because it's cool. You know, like Apple's exposure notification program is really cool. It works really well. It's neat, it's very different. It has all these privacy implications that are positive, it's pretty interesting, but then is it effective, does it actually solve problems?
And that's, I think, where it might be easier just to go through partners and health style, contact tracing, which is very people based, a lot of phone calls, a lot of knocking on doors, a lot of just talking to people, me with my voice talking to someone else with their voice, no texts, and I think what you do is you think about it as like, we look at something like that, and there's cracks in it, and we fill the cracks with tech. We don't replace the whole thing with tech. So an example would be if you think of like very traditional contact tracing, it's very one-on-one, knocking on doors, getting some report going and investing in that report with real people. You could start it by sending a text or a phone call, that you can do with tech, but you have to follow up in that very, people way because there's all sorts of aspects of contact tracing that I didn't realize when I first started this kind of work that I think are really important, like the fact that some people may not want to report their locations.
So they don't want to track their location 100% of the time, some people want to be private about it, like they don't want to mention that they went to visit their drug dealer or visit their mistress, that can out them in ways that they would be shamed for, and therefore they won't participate at all. And so like pure automation of these things might actually be more detrimental than just kind of patching up some of the things that make it less easy.
I like to think of technology more as lubrication for an engine, like the oil that makes it go faster. And the thing that augments it, instead of the replacement, and oftentimes tech people think more about replacing everything, than just making it go a little bit faster. And so that's my big lesson, takeaway from the Obama campaign is that technology, if you use it as a replacement function, it's going to ruin it. But if you use it as a thing that makes it go a little bit faster. Don't try and go like 10x, just like one or two, 1.5, just a little bit faster, then it really helps.
Juliette Price 20:58
Yeah. Great. So looking into the future, and given your your expertise that at looking into the future and seeing what's coming, what do you think health and health care, which are two very different things, but what do you think it'll look like in the year 2049?
Harper Reed 21:16
I don't know, I have like three predictions for the future. And I think they're paths more than predictions, I think there's three paths. One is like Star Trek, where we lean into abundance. The other one is like Black Mirror, which seems like the path we're on right now. And the third one seems like Mad Max, where we're all just looking for water. What I mean by that is we're at the cusp of so many different paths forward, the easiest one that I think we can think through is like just the continuance of surveillance capitalism, and then that infecting various things like health care.
When I think about health care, I think about, I'll just tell a story from my experience. Before COVID, I was working with a handful of scientists that I had met through Media Lab, who were building these really amazing prosthetic legs. And they were not expensive, they were super effective, they had all this technology, and all this machine learning built into them that would allow the people who were wearing the prosthetic legs to have less fatigue when walking, to have more stability because they could feel the ground using stimulus into the nerves in their muscles on their legs. Like all this really cool tech. And they were trying to figure out how to take it to market and so I was helping them out, we were thinking about starting a company, and all this stuff. And became clear is, the bill of materials might be like $5k, but once it went through the entire insurance system it was $100k. And so there was this thing that is happening today, which is everything gets way more expensive, even though the technology has made things cheaper.
I remember pitching a healthcare VC around this time and I was saying, I think we can get it cheaper. And they said, which I thought was the most depressing thing, we've never had an entrepreneur come and pitch us and say that they can make something cheaper. They've always said that they can increase and that healthcare costs have increased year over year, based on technology, even though technology has made everything cheaper. The fact that you can go buy a TV that's super thin and gigantic for 400 bucks on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and then you can't seem to see the same decrease in costs in health care. In fact, it just keeps going up even though the costs of the bill material and whatnot go down.
And so I think that we are addicted to these big organizations making money and in the Black Mirror kind of path, I do think that we will just continue to see more surveillance and more capitalism, and more exploitation of people who can't afford to pay. And I don't have a lot of hope, to be honest about making the world better with that stuff. And unless we take a stand and try and figure out how to solve these problems, I don't think the US is going to be a better place.
Juliette Price 23:53
One of the things that in recent years has definitely come under immense amount of scrutiny is the application of AI. And its various forms in health care. And one of the things that is concerning and I think this echoes your last concern is that the data that a lot of these algorithms are using, these datasets that have existed and that are being used to build these new models, they represent a fairly small subset of the population.
And as you were just mentioning, as we continue to leave folks behind both in terms of access and in terms of treatment, you're essentially skewing the model further and further in ways that don't actually help the large number of people who are currently left out today. And I want to harken back to something that you were saying around you have been someone who has built a lot and then lived through seeing it let's just call it weaponized. Having that having that perspective, what's your best advice for folks who are embarking on some of this work moving forward?
Harper Reed 25:03
I don't know it's really complicated. And I say that because as an entrepreneur when you're building something, you cannot see the negative side, you only see the positive side. I think it's kind of like, when you have that friend that's dating someone, and you know that they're bad for that person, but you're not going to be successful at telling them, Hey, that's a bad person. They're so in love with the idea of it, they're so in love with the experience of it, everything about it, that's an entrepreneur. By nature, we have to be so in love with what we're doing that any negative thing that you hear, you're just like, oh no, but it's so good, you have all this kind of nonsense that happens.
And so I think it's impossible for entrepreneurs to have a clear perspective about the downsides of their work, and whether they're working in health care or social media, or what have you, I think an example is Facebook. I don't think they meant to create algorithms that lead people towards extremism, but both Facebook's internal reporting and external reporting by privacy activists and analysts have said that that is what happens. And so even Facebook now today is like, yeah, no, and it's like, well, your report says it does, like they're so hopeful about it, they can't see the dark side.
And so I think it's responsibility of entrepreneurs to hire people who are able to see that dark side or engage people, consulting firms, whatever, who are able to see that dark side of the work they're doing, and to acknowledge this may go wrong, I think back to the 2012, when we did a lot of our Facebook stuff that really was like a mini Cambridge Analytica. And I think back to that time, and we did a lot of work to make sure it wasn't creepy that it wasn't like, kind of gnarly in some ways. But we didn't think of the unintended consequences. Like what happens when that cat is out of that bag, like we didn't think about that. We didn't think about what happens if someone else were to use this, we just were like, We're gonna use it, because we're gonna, we're gonna use this to win.
And I think that's kind of ... I'm not sure. I don't have a good answer, I guess. But I do think that we need to think about ethics a lot, we need to think about how we are investing these things. I think AI is hyper complicated in that it's hard to make models that are equitable, that don't somehow screw up or have bias or what have you. And the medical profession has not been one that has handled bias within it very well.
I don't think AI is going to make things better. I think it's going to be very complicated. And I don't know, I'm not sure what my answer would be. If I was doing that work, I think what I would do is I would try and create an ethics advisory board. And I would surround that with combination of human rights people, people like ACLU, those type of folks who are thinking about the most vulnerable, because the problem is that typically, we don't end up screwing over the normal people that can afford health care, we end up screwing over the people who are most vulnerable. And typically the people we're interacting with are not the people who are most vulnerable.
And so as a startup or a startup CEO, if you're going down this path, I think it's worthwhile to set up some sort of advisory board in the same way we'd have a tech advisory board, or business advisory board, to have an ethics advisory board that helps guide us, helps us answer those really complicated questions with people who are thinking about them all the time. And this kind of goes back to my experience during the COVID times.
In the beginning, there are all these entrepreneurs who were dedicating their entire teams to solving some COVID problems, could be supply chain issues, it could be trying to find pipettes or whatever it might be, it could be anything and because they didn't talk to any epidemiologists, or any public health people, in the beginning it was just treading water, they're just wasting time. If they would have stepped out of their own egos a little bit and just talked to some public health people, they would have said, Hey, we don't need that we need this instead. Or they would have said, that's great and all, but I can get that through the state. Can you focus on this? And it took us and include myself in this, it took us, let's say, six months to figure that out. And so that's a wasted six months of almost everyone.
Obviously, there's some people that didn't waste time. I mean, if you read Michael Lewis's book about those folks, I think there's lots of examples of people who really got that stuff done and it was fun to read about that. But there were a whole lot of people all over the United States who just wasted time because they thought they were smarter than the people who are experts.
Juliette Price 29:49
So much of your work and all the different organizations that you've been a part of, and you mentioned this earlier has been around building great teams and building people who can work together and really both produce but also know when to quit, also know when it's the wrong question that you're on answering. I'm curious about, between the public health agencies who responded, as you were mentioning the number of folks from the outside who stepped up and wanted to help and wanted to be alongside.
I think one of the things I try and focus on in all of this is that there's been a lot of darkness, there's been a lot of negative things that have happened. But I think we've also learned a tremendous amount, working together to try and solve through this pandemic. And my hope is always that we can pull those learnings through into the future. And I'm curious, given your work, building teams that have to learn together, fail together, and then keep going, are you more optimistic that folks will take the lessons learned the good, the bad, the ugly, and sort of propel that forward? Or do you think this has been, maybe not so much a learning environment?
Harper Reed 31:05
That's a really complicated question. I mean, it's a really good question. I say it's complicated, because I think there's an answer for every path. We saw what happens when public and private work together to solve some of these problems, as defined in the Michael Lewis book. But I think the interesting thing about that book is the the end of it wasn't very positive. The end of it was basically like, the government is not here to help us, the CDC is not a good organization in regards to reaction, it's a good organization regards to research, on all these things, the expectations that we had about what would happen during a pandemic, even if we had the plan weren't actually the reality of what happens when we have a pandemic.
What I think was very complicated is, I don't think that's the only story that we have. I think we also have the story of all of the work that was done by grassroots organizations in New York early on in the pandemic to get PPE, etc, for the the health care and frontline workers in early March, or whenever that was in 2020, or, all of the work that was done in various places to help support vulnerable communities, whether it was Native American reservations, or what have you, to try to get them equipment and ways where they could be healthier, and then whatnot during a pandemic, and all the people that continue to go to work even though it was against, it seemed irrational, like all of those things, obviously, are about people and teams and people that work together and stood up in the face of adversity.
But then you have on the other side, a continued defunding of public health, the continued deprioritization of good comms around public health, etc. And so it seems like we have more of the same even though we have evidence that that is actually ineffective. And so I'm not sure. Whenever I think about this stuff, I don't have a lot of optimism. And I feel like one of the issues that we saw was the organizations that were able to move really fast were organizations funded by billionaires. And so has our public health infrastructure been replaced by benevolent rich people and how do we deal with that?
Juliette Price 33:17
Sure, as an end user of our health care infrastructures, as we all are, like it or not, is there anything that strikes you, maybe once or, in a big way, or repeatedly, as this just isn't the way we should be doing things?
Harper Reed 33:36
Yeah, I have some opportunities to participate in more personalized, or concierge style medicine, which I think is exciting that it's getting cheaper and cheaper, whereas a long time ago, it was very expensive and now it is somewhat accessible to some normal people. And I think there's a lot of things that we can look at around tech enablement, data enablement, data sharing that will make things quicker, make things better for everyone. I think there's some complicated monopolies within that space, epic or whatever, where it's like, that's just it.
So they don't have necessarily an interest in making things better, or more effective. And so it does take some insurgent startups and whatnot to solve that problem. But I think we have and this is where it goes into the Star Trek world, I think there's an opportunity. And I think there's an opportunity for entrepreneurs and there's an opportunity for medical professionals, health professionals, public health people to really take advantage of technology in a way and as long as I think it's driven by experts, like the people who are native to the space, not technologists, necessarily, but in partner with technologists, I think there's opportunities to really make the world especially on healthcare better. But it's it's a choice, we have to choose to do that.
And I think what we're seeing right now, is we're seeing a lot of entrenched companies who are choosing to not necessarily make the world better, they're choosing to make the world the same. And over and over again, we see these choices. And then at some point, people are going to be frustrated and want to do things differently. And I think part of that is cost-based, the health care in United States, just how expensive it is, is pretty insane. And especially my favorite thing to do around that is just to talk to someone who is new to the United States that has lived in almost every country in the world. And have them go to the eye doctor and try and figure out eye insurance and they're just like, it doesn't make any sense. For an organization or country that really values, wages and workers, you would think that we'd want them to be healthy. And we certainly don't and so it's very confusing to me.
So I'm not sure, my internal quandary always is, I'm definitely a capitalist, I invest in companies, I take venture capital money, I'm very entrenched in that yet, almost all the problems that I see in the world are rooted deeply in that system. And so when I think about how to solve these problems, it's really about how do you disrupt the status quo? How do you disrupt power? How do you how do you allow for more people to have part of the pie, which is sometimes at odds with my own wealth creation? So I'm always, like, I'm so confused. But at the same time, I think it's an important thing to think through. And I think we have to do it. We really truly have to engage and really have to try and solve these problems. Otherwise, the systems won't change and the world will continue to become a worse place.
One of my hobbies is I work with some organizations around like national security and foreign policy and whatnot. And I do think if we can solve this problem, the United States will be more relevant on the world stage. If we don't solve this problem, we will continue to fade into irrelevance and countries that are solving this problem will attract more workers, will attract more mindshare, will attract more thought leaders as we did in the early part of the century and will get ahead. If we want to continue the dominance of the United States then we're going to have to change how we are investing in people, process, health care, etc. And so I do think this is a big national security issue. When you talk to national security folks, they tend to agree, yet we're not electing the right people. We're not investing the right things. And thus, I think the United States is very close to becoming, not irrelevant, but definitely not number one.
Juliette Price 37:49
Well, Harper, thoughtful as always, the complexity absolutely is there. But I appreciate your willingness to wrestle with it and not give an easy answer, as they call them because there are no easy answers.
Harper Reed 38:05
I wish I had them, where do you get them? Is there an easy answer store?
Juliette Price 38:09
Yeah, I haven't found it yet. So if you find it, you gotta let me know. But this is great. I so appreciate it. Harper, and we'll leave it at that.
Harper Reed 38:18
Thank you very much.
Juliette Price 38:20
That was Harper Reed, technologist, entrepreneur and internet person with his thoughts on the future of health and health care. Thanks so much for listening to Health2049. If you like what you heard, please subscribe on Apple Music or Spotify, and share this podcast with a friend. Thanks so much, and we'll see you next time.
