Dr. Rajiv J. Shah - President at The Rockefeller Foundation | Why You Need To Make Big Bets

Today, my guest is Dr. Raj Shah Director at the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation, the 16th Administrator of USAID under President Barack Obama, now the President of the Rockefeller Foundation with a $20 billion fund leading the 110-year foundation globally. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. For everyone listening, I just have to ask you a question. Do you want to know what separates the contenders from the pretenders, the A-list from the C-list, world champions from the world, not champions? It's pretty simple. The fourth quarter in sports, more importantly for a lot of the people listening here in business, finishing strong is key. Now, HubSpots, New Sales Hub is the software that you need for your sales and your sales team to win Q4. 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You know what, I'm from suburban Detroit in Michigan, my parents are immigrants from India, and I grew up in a pretty typical Indian-American community in that time, and at that time, sort of our options if you were a hardworking kid where you could be an engineer or a doctor, and I actually wanted to do both, it didn't realize there was any other opportunity or option out there. And frankly, when I was a senior in high school, Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and of all places, he came to Detroit and he walked on the River Rouge auto plant and met with auto workers, my dad had worked at Ford for more than 30 years, and he ultimately gave an amazing speech, a Tiger Stadium, and I was a huge Tigers fan, but it was very Motown, Stevie Wonder was the opening act and Mandela spoke, and I was just watching on TV, but I was transformed, and I just thought what an amazing human being, what an amazing leader he brought tears to everyone's eyes with recounting his struggle and frankly thanking the people of Detroit for their support. And I kind of knew in that moment that I wanted to do something with my life that was more oriented around social change and social justice and impact for those who are left behind, but I had no idea what to do. So I went off to college and one thing led to another and I ultimately had the chance to have this type of career, but that was the moment when I realized that being a doctor or being an engineer in and of itself was probably not going to be my path long term. You know, I admire that because I think a lot of people have those altruistic goals. I think that the changing the world for the better is a thing that everybody wants to accomplish early on in their career, but you ended up in a spot where you could actually do it, and I think a lot of people find themselves aimless and find themselves lost. Maybe we don't have to go into everything you've done in your career because you've done a lot and we'll talk about your story and throughout this podcast and different pieces of it. But let's talk about some of those key things, some of those purposeful things that you did throughout your career that allowed you to eventually end up to where you're at now where you can actually invoke meaningful change at scale. Well, you know, so I went on from college and went on to medical school and as a training doctor to be, I was a highly distracted one. So I kept getting involved and I got involved in local political campaign for then Mayor Ed Rendell in Philadelphia. I kept taking the train down from Philly to D.C. to volunteer and engage in policy-making operations. And finally, I got a chance to join Al Gore's presidential campaign. And that was really a unique experience for me because I here I was like a college graduate and medical school almost graduate. And I went down there just as a volunteer and that experience changed my life because it introduced me to people who were like me, wanted to be involved in social impact and political activity. And even though we lost that campaign, some of us thought we wanted and I could sit here and make the argument that more people voted for Al Gore and Florida for sure. But when we lost that campaign, I was sort of searching around for what to do. And I landed at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation right when Bill and Melinda were starting their major philanthropic initiatives. And really, I wrote the book Big Bets because of what I learned in those early days at the gates at the gates as hands, which was they wanted to do things that were going to make the make the world a better place. But they wanted to do it at massive scale. It wasn't enough to just say let's help some kids be healthier. It was how do we immunize every child on the planet to save child lives by the millions. And I feel like I learned a mindset and an approach in that setting that I was then able to apply and government and the Obama administration and now at the Rockefeller Foundation. You know, that's like that's like taking big Harry audacious goal to another level. Right. Really, it really is. And I think that I was listening to a couple different podcasts just to sort of prep for this. And I thought of I listened to Armchair X pod with with DAX and you were great on it. And one of the points that he brought up and I thought was so interesting was how effective Bill and Melinda Gates are at philanthropy because of their success in the business world. Maybe walk me through some lessons that you learned working with them in terms of just nonprofit efficacy. Because I think we've seen the opposite of the spectrum where we've seen nonprofits that are not effective. And they don't really change the world and really move the needle the way that we expect them to. And I think that sort of, you know, we start to lose faith when we give money and give money and give money and what and nothing really changes. So just walk me through that experience with with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Well, I think the first big lesson is if you're going to seek to create transformational change in the world, aim high. You know, the book is called big bets because these are big aspirational goals. And it's very easy when we try to quote unquote do good to think that doing good is good enough and therefore we get trapped in what I call the aspiration trap in the book, which is just all the cynicism is overwhelming and the problems are so big. So you say, okay, I'm going to do something small and modest and move on. Bill, Bill and Melinda took a very different point of view. I mean, they read a newspaper article about 400,000 kids dying every year of a disease called rotavirus and said, okay, all these kids are dying in poor countries from rotavirus. Almost nobody dies in the United States, yet all the vaccines are available. I'm going to be available in richer places, not in poor ones. Why why is it like that? What can we do to change the system so that vaccines are manufactured at a scale and a price point that make them accessible everywhere and what kind of investments are required to do that? So, you know, 20 plus years later, 980 million kids vaccinated, 16 million lives saved. And it all started with Bill asking some pretty simple questions. In fact, the first chapter is called Ask a Simple Question because I know. We don't bring us together. But I see there's like a playbook bit. You sort of like reverse engineer here. And you know, but he would bring us all together and say, what is it cost to vaccinate a child? Yeah. And it be shocking. It took us like two years to answer that with discipline and with enough modeling to actually understand what was happening out there. And that was the basis for achieving those goals. Do you feel like, you know, you've worked in both private and public sector? Do you feel as though one should own more responsibility for changing the world? And I say that because it seems like what you can do in private sector with smart and vicious talent people can move the needle much quicker. And traditionally, I believe that we look to governments to solve a lot of these issues. And we feel that governments move slow. And they're not as efficient as some of these private sector individuals that technically, you know, they don't have to operate within the confines of bureaucracy, right? And you've seen this first hand. So whose responsibility is it? Who's doing a better job? What should we learn about working between the public and private sector? Because you have this unique experience of doing sort of both jobs. Well, I think the basic approach to making and executing big bets can be done in either. So finding fresh, innovative solutions to kind of seemingly sticky problems, building the kind of unlikely partnerships and alliances required to sustain them. And frankly, measuring results with discipline, you can do that in the public sector. And I have seen whether it was the Haiti earthquake response or fighting Ebola in West Africa or many other efforts. I've seen that you can bring that mindset to the public sector. The thing that private sector has that is so special is the capacity to innovate to take risks to go first to be bold. And for a lot of reasons, that's much, much harder to replicate in the public sector. The thing the public sector has that the private sector doesn't is scale scale and a mission to reach everybody with with whatever the policy purposes. So really big bets are best when you can marry the innovative capacity to take risks in the private sector with the scale, the resourcing and the sense of mission that you can develop in the public sector and then see it through with a rigor and discipline around measuring results that should exist in both. And that's when you get the real magic to happen. You mentioned this aspiration trap and I think that this is a, let's start there because this is sort of where this whole problem stems from. When you are, say an entrepreneur, a lot of entrepreneurs listen to this show and they're looking to build the next big thing and they want to do good in the world, but they're worrying about finding product market fit and making rent next month and they're going to listen to this and they go, yeah, I'm sure Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation are able to change the world and they're able to make these big bets like, yeah, billions are at play here. It's not my reality. So I'm aspirational. I want to make the world a better place. I'm an entrepreneur. What are the lessons you're going to teach me? How do I avoid this aspiration, this aspiration trap? Well, I think it starts by being able to zoom in and zoom out. So great entrepreneurs can zoom out, see the forest for the trees, understand how their vision is going to affect change at massive scale, whether that's transforming an industry or building a new one or innovating technology that changes the way people live. But then to make it practical, real and to build the flywheel of progress, you have to zoom in tremendously in super detail oriented about as you point out, making payroll, delivering product, generating the next bit of revenue. And it's shocking. The same skill set is required in taking on big public sector or social sector efforts. You have to be able to kind of, I had teams at USAID that were leading and I was helping to lead the effort to overcome the earthquake crisis in Haiti right when it happened in 2010. And it was a massive tragedy. 250,000 people died very little visibility on the ground. You had to be able to kind of go all the way down to the ground and understand, okay, our women, is there enough lighting in a community to keep girls safe at night? Is there enough film micro? But then you had to zoom all the way out and it's okay, we got 56 countries seeking to be part of this response. The whole thing might cost four billion dollars. How are we going to allocate resources? How are we going to move fast? How are we going to set a results framework that allows us to measure and respond to that whole cohort of actors that are going to be part of what was the largest civil military cooperative humanitarian response in history? So you just have to be able to do both. And I think that's a skill set for entrepreneurs. I think it's a skill set for people in charge of projects in government. I think it's a skill set for people in the social sector that really want to make change happen at scale. When you were thinking of compiling all your learnings and your knowledge into big bets, do you feel like it was knowledge that was based on retroactive responses or were you hoping to put this book out into the world in hopes of saying this is more of a proactive framework that I want you to take on? Well, I think a little bit of both when I did the book in part because when honestly, when I was a young kid kind of starting out in my career, I kind of knew I didn't want to be a practicing doctor. We had lost a presidential election. I found myself unemployed and I just had no idea what to do with myself. And I didn't believe in a million years you could have a career where you help Bill Gates deploy billions of dollars and save tens of millions of lives and then have a career where you work with President Obama and large global humanitarian and development priorities and then you run a really historically unique foundation that kind of created the movement of philanthropy before any of it existed. So I wanted readers to have confidence that in fact, there's a path here if you want to take it and there are set of tools and skills you can hone to be someone who has a successful career making change happen at scale if you kind of learn and apply these lessons. And I wrote it largely because I didn't have that when I was starting out and I thought it would be helpful to others. I also want to ask a tough question that's going to set the framework for how we can be effective as people that want to give back, that want to take big bets for people to take big bets or to even bet in institutions that can take on these challenges. There's a very important thing that I'd like you to speak on because I think I was looking back like three years ago you made a very good point how people don't trust institutions as much as they should. They don't trust governments and trust is a big thing because a lot of the issues that are big bets that are taken on by the Rockefeller Foundation, world governments, the Gates Foundation, these are things that should be nonpartisan. They are humanity improving initiatives. But for some reason there's a trust factor. There's discord there. So I don't think trust in institutions has gotten better since COVID. I'm pretty sure it's just gotten way worse. So how do we solve for this? Because right now I think trust is at an all-time low across the aisle with any group that you speak to. Yeah, trust is at an all-time low in almost any kind of institution. And so what I was hoping is that this big bet mindset gives people the capacity to trust others and to build trust and to be an optimist when it would be very, very easy to be cynical. It's very easy to say, well, government shuts down. It's not effective. It's not going to work. It takes more effort and you got to have a different kind of mindset to be able to say, hey, if we really want to tackle hunger at scale globally, we need food companies working together with humanitarian partners working together with governments at scale. And here's a playbook for how to bring that partnership together. One of the elements of building trust is reaching across the aisle and making your relationships really personal. And I write in the book about efforts we pursued after 2008 when there was a horrific food crisis around the world related to the financial collapse and the financial crisis. 100 million people had pushed back into deep, deep hunger, kids eating mud cakes in very poor communities just to feel satiety. And we built a bipartisan coalition in the United States to pass something called the Global Food Security Act and move 100 million people out of hunger and poverty. And that happened because I had the good fortune of getting to know some really conservative Republican senators who on television didn't quite seem like they were going to be our partners and friends. But in private, when you got to know their families and you got to know their values and you got to know their faith and you got to know what they really cared about, they became real champions for fighting hunger, whether it was in Ethiopia or India or Indiana. And they held hands with progressive partners and made it happen at scale during a really tough political environment. And so I really think it's about building those personal relationships. And you can only have trust if you know people and you know their values. And to know their values, you have to talk about your own, you have to share what your vulnerabilities are and you have to be very real with people that sometimes you just met. I love that though. I think that's so important because I think that everyone being locked away and assuming that somebody's entire personality is their Twitter feed is it's a very dangerous game to play, right? And I think that I mean some of these, some of these ideas should not be partisan, should not be polarizing. And I think this is actually, you know, there's a few points. I think that trust is monumental. I think the way you build trust across the aisles is very important. Another point, it was literally your first point in this book, the ask a simple question, but there's a there's a there's a quote, a Bill Gates quote, and the barrier to change isn't too little caring. It's too much complexity. I think complexity causes confusion and confusion creates this trust. So talk to me about simplicity, simplifying these issues, educating on these issues that we can actually move the needle and stop worrying about the banter back and forth. Yeah, that's a great point. I think it's very easy for people to be put off by complexity. And it's super, how many times have you asked a question, well, why are so many people homeless? The answer is, well, it's very complex. Why do we allow 40% of American kids to grow up in child poverty? Well, that's that's super complex. You know, why? Why are there still droughts and famines that are actually killing people in large numbers when food is relatively abundant and pretty cheap. It's very complex. Complexity is a way to kind of keep people out and Bill actually told this great story once he was like, you know, Davos is something the world economic forum, all these leaders, private sector, public sector, go to the Swiss Alps and have this big conference. And he said, you know, you can go to Davos and sit and listen to a meeting about saving tens of millions of children's lives. And it can feel a little dry like everyone's using big words and it's all very technical and complex and very low energy. And then then you can go across the street where a software company is like launching a new game or a new piece of software and their lights and cameras and smoke and dancing and music. And it's very lively. And you're just like, why why do we try to tackle the toughest problems in the world with the language and a work style that is off-putting to so many people like we have to make this simple to bring people in. And I saw that over and over and we did the Haiti earthquake, you know, more than more American families contributed in some form to relief around the Haiti earthquake than watch the Super Bowl that year, which shows you how good American families are, how much they want to be on the side of right morally. And they did it because we created a text thread and you could text a small contribution very quickly, they did it because lots of our partners had other ways to be a part of the solution. Instead of saying, well, it's very complex, just just sit this one out. You got to reach out and give people and trust that people want to be on the side of right if you make it possible and you make it easy for them to do so. And I think the last question about trust in them will keep going, but I think this is also a very important question to address. When people think about big bets, it's just sentiment that I've heard echo repeatedly. It's like, well, we, especially in the US and I'm not even American, but let's pretend I am for a second. So say I'm an American and I'm always being told we have to help outside the country, outside the country, but to your point, there's homelessness, there's there's crime rates in certain cities that aren't great. I don't feel like the US is properly getting the TLC that it deserves. So for that individual that feels that way, how do you convince me to support big bets outside my country when at home, I feel like government isn't even taking care of me? Yeah, so both are quite necessary, but what we do in the context of global humanitarian and development efforts really amount to less than 1% of the federal budget. It's not a huge cost item, but it is often some of the most cost effective spending we've had. And on a bipartisan basis, when I write in the book about the effort to fight Ebola in 2014, the CDC was estimating in 2014 that there could be 1.6 million cases of Ebola that they would be all over the world, including throughout the United States. And President Obama on our team made I think a bold decision to say, you know what, instead of that outcome, we're going to send American troops, American humanitarian partners and global collaborators into three West African countries to fight the disease there. And when we made that decision, by the way, we didn't know what the solution was going to be. We didn't actually know how this particular variant could be beaten in the context of reducing contagion. We had to figure that out by experimenting on the ground in those countries in a very, very tough environment where people were literally bleeding to death in the streets. It was a hemorrhagic fever that was horrific, and I write about my own visits there during that time. But it's doable. And it was very cost effective at the end of the day and preventing a million plus cases from getting out of that region into Europe and the United States was well worth the cost of deployment. It's some of the most cost effective things we can do. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot. Now, as you all know, the success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. There are incredible podcasts in this network. One of my favorites that you have to check out. If you don't know this podcast, you're kind of sleeping on it. The Gold Digger podcast hosted by Jenna Kutcher. This podcast has been around for a minute. Jenna is an OG in the podcast game. The Gold Digger podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business hacks, inspirational stories, interviews, and so much more. Please go check out the Gold Digger podcast hosted by Jenna Kutcher wherever you get your podcasts. I think that's very important. It's a very important message too. And I'm glad you sort of break it down because I think that that's lost on people. How effective some of these like, these big bets can really be it. It seems like it could be just so much bigger than, you know, the individual and it seems like it could be so expensive and time-consuming and resource-training, but really sometimes it's not and it's very important to sort of communicate that. One of the points that you mentioned and I didn't know if this was, it was pulled out of the book and when we were prepping, I was looking at some of the different points we could speak about and even you sent over some great points as well. But this was one I thought was interesting. The requirement to jump first, is that on an individual level, is that on a country level? Explain to me what jumping first means. Yeah, that's an on an individual level. You know, you mentioned you have a lot of entrepreneurs on this on the show and the listen. One thing I admire about entrepreneurship is it requires taking some risk, you know, having a vision going out there first and saying, hey folks, this could work and at a time when we had done a lot of the analysis around what it would take to vaccinate every child on the planet and change the structure of the global vaccine industry, one of the answers was we needed kind of fast early capital in order to build out the global supply base and do some long-term contracting and so to create that capital, we invented something called an immunization bond and to use a simple form for it. And we had all these partners, the UK, France, heads of state, chancellors of the ex-checker, which is effectively like a finance minister, Gordon Brown. But everyone, no one was willing to kind of go first. So I was as a young professional at the Gates Foundation, I sort of said once at one evening in a conference at a bar on the back of a cocktail napkin, we kind of drew out a financial structure and I said, well, the foundation could guarantee the securitization of this new bond and that guarantee kind of gave everybody confidence that, okay, this is going to work because an institution with billions of dollars is going to guarantee the debt issuance. And fast forward two years later, when we actually issued the debt, the guarantee wasn't even needed because the debt could stand on its own and was a credible financial instrument. But had we not jumped first to make that commitment, we never would have got to know whether the commitment was going to be drawn down on or not. And I of course made that commitment without anybody's permission to do so and gotten a little trouble for it. But it ultimately worked out. And the point I'm trying to make is if you want to be a leader in social change and creating change at scale, you have to use some of those entrepreneurial techniques of taking risks and jumping first to get others to go with you. I'll give you another one. If you're going to fail, well, you will fail. So you have to learn how to fail fast. I want to understand this in an entrepreneurial context. I also want to understand this in a you context because your career probably had so many points where very valid and positive syndrome manifested coming from a medical background, moving into these philanthropic organizations working with some of the most established, esteemed individuals in the world. When you jump into something is your mindset, I have to learn, I have to try, I have to fail. I'm assuming there is a portion of that, but it's also scary as hell for somebody to actually do versus you just teach over to that. Yeah, no, the mindset's definitely not I have to fail. It's kind of the opposite. In fact, the imposter syndrome makes you afraid of failing, right? So I remember once when I my very first national security council meeting was the day I was appointed the kind of global coordinator for the Haiti earthquake response. And we went that evening into the White House and sitting in the situation room across from Bob Gates and Mike Mull in the Secretary of Defense and the incredibly thoughtful and capable chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And you know, 20 other people and and I had I had written out all the things we needed from the military in order to deploy these urban search and rescue rescue teams to go save lives in Port of Prince. And and I written it all on note cards and on the way over the White House, I'd smudge the edge of the note cards. So as I was reading my points, one of the things I said, well, we need these we need these C13s to get these urban search and rescue teams and their dogs into Port of Prince right away. And of course, I what I meant to say was C130s, which is the military cargo plane. As I said, C13, I didn't realize it until and then when it came out and I was like, should I correct myself? What do I do? I just rolled with it. Nobody said anything, thankfully. And we went on to have an amazing civil partnership. But you know, you make mistakes all the time. And so you give yourself you let yourself, I mean, you give yourself like the the psychological safety, you know, that there will be some failure. And then that's, but I think that's very important to that so far. There's one other thing I should say about that. Oops, let me there's one other thing I should say about that, which is I have a chapter in the book that's about failure. And it was a much bigger failure than just getting the terminology wrong about a cargo plane. It was as part of a big effort to bring power and electricity to Africa. We had pursued an effort to build out a large-scale hydropower dam, which would have provided electricity to 250 million people who didn't have it and effectively live constrained because of it. And it would have been the equivalent in terms of savings on fossil fuels of taking a third of the US auto fleet off the road. So it was a big deal. But I frankly pursued it aggressively without fundamentally understanding that the president of the DRC at the time, and even the chairman of the appropriate committee in the US Senate at the time, we're basically not going to be easily convinced to do this project with all the transparency and the ways we had to get it done. And so so, you know, as I was charging ahead doing this and issuing press releases and raising money and doing all the things with a large global team, the Senate passed a resolution that basically stopped us in our track. And the president of the host country did some things that did the same. And I woke up one day and read about it on the front page of the financial times. And so so, you know, what I learned from that is you do have to know who you're betting on when you make big bets. And I think that's true for folks in the private sector, public sector, really any project. And it sometimes you learn in the hard way that that's what you have to do on the front end. And sometimes sometimes you don't. How do you make those? So obviously, the decisions to invest in a certain initiative or whatnot, you probably get endless proposals like across your desk. So walk me even through that decision making process on deciding where to put the money and where to put time and the resources because yeah, that's right. All these great causes. I'm sure not too many causes are bad causes now, but there's their scale. There's there's, you know, feasibility. Then there's also the people that are sort of positioning this you and are going to be the people that are going to execute on it, right? Yeah, our basic criteria are things like impact, scale, leverage, you know, the single biggest investment the Rockefeller Foundation has made in 110 years of its existence. We made recently to create something called the global energy alliance for people and planet. And the goal literally is to reach a billion people across the planet who live without access to electricity with renewable electrification. And the reason we could go big in that setting is we have access to some really unique new technology that allows for solar grids and batteries to come together with AI and remote management and reduce the cost structure of providing electrification to rural communities that have never had access to electricity. The other reason we can do it is we know that it can largely be commercially viable. So if we put in this case, we raised about a billion and a half dollars from ourselves and other partners. If we put a billion and a half dollars in and take the risk out for more commercial investors, we can leverage that up to 10, 20, 30 billion dollars. And then you can really start to achieve impact at scale. So, you know, we actually just closed on a project in the eastern Congo, an area ravaged by war that I write about in the book because I met these kids there that just broke my heart. And they just had no opportunity. And we're breaking ground right now on building out solar infrastructure that's going to provide electricity to communities, help people start businesses and create jobs for the first time in decades. And it's going to transform their lives and their family's lives. That can happen because I think for every dollar we're putting into that project, we're getting $11 from private investors to come in behind us, even though we take the risk. And that's the kind of leverage we seek to deliver on when we take on these big scaled efforts. So, impact, results, leverage, those are the kinds of criteria we're focused on. And how do you, you know, just back to that people piece and that team piece, how do you build that right team to execute? And because, you know, you can't control, you can't control every single government in the world. You can't, you know, even in that one, one example in the DRC, like, it was just, it was frustrating and it probably, it probably was a foresight there, but you can't control everything. So, you can only control who you hire, who you directly work with. What's, what's the secret to finding these people that are going to execute on these, like, literally humanity impacting missions? It's not just revenue. It's people's lives, right? Yeah. You know, this is something probably I've evolved the most on during the course of my career. I mean, I used to look for people who are just super smart, super highly competent and say, I wanted to be surrounded by people who are the most smart, the most competent. But over time, I've realized that actually you need to find people that have that, but also have a sense of purpose and a sense of values that are pretty deeply grounded that come from somewhere where they can articulate their values, why they care about this mission, why they want to go the extra mile for doing things that actually lift up those who are vulnerable. And because you make sacrifices, frankly, when you, when you do this, and, and then I've always looked for people we call athletes, but I write one of the chapters of book is called Pivot, because I, I'm excited to be surrounded by a team at the Rockefeller Foundation that's willing to say, okay, we did, we did this, but now there's COVID, it's destroying our nation, we need to pivot and tackle that with real intention. So finding people who are agile, flexible, can pivot, that's the other element that we look for. Very smart. There's so much innovation, there's so much innovation in, in, in countries around the world, and we're constantly building new products and services and technologies that can make life better. Why do we have such an issue leveraging innovation to help other countries that are not as fortunate as ours? Yeah, well, first, I think we have to recognize that a lot of innovation is not really fundamentally improving quality of life, right? Yeah. In its most profound ways. I mean, we used to look back 20 years ago and say, you know, the, the world at that time spent six times more on developing the next erectile dysfunction product versus literally versus finding a vaccine to end AIDS, malaria, and TB combined. And you're like, okay, what's wrong, Karen? It's not that there's anything against Viagra, but we already had Viagra. Because market incentives are what they are, today's version of that would be a lot of our social media platforms are probably making us less healthy and less whole and less democratic as a society than, you know, than they could be. So, so there, there's that. And then frankly, there's the reality of the global macro economy. And right now is we're having this conversation. They're about 50 countries teetering on the edge of a debt crisis. And most private commercial investment flows are going from lower income countries to wealthier economies that are the beneficiaries right now of trillions of dollars of green economy subsidy investment. So, where would you rather build a battery plant? Yeah. In the United States or in a part of Africa where the currency just got devalued 40%. So, where I just happened to be there a few weeks ago, and that was the situation. So, so we, you know, there have been times in our history where leaders have come together after World War II, for example, and understood that it was both macro and micro effects. And they built institutions like the World Bank and the IMF and the United Nations to reshape how the global economy developed and how we'd prevent conflict at scale. And I've argued that we need that kind of a moment again when we have leaders who are willing come together and say, you know what, the challenges we face, climate change, massive hunger and dislocation, 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050, they require a way of thinking about our global commons in a way that's fresher and more novel and more innovative. And I think we need to go through that now at a leadership level. You know, this is just very interesting because World War II really galvanized to your point. Quite a few nations and countries. You would think that you would think that an event like coronavirus, like COVID would also galvanize. It did, it seems like the exact opposite of galvanizing anybody. So, how do we, like, what happened here? Why can we not as a world get together and get on board with some of these initiatives? Why does it still feel like so, it feels like there's such an argument against basically what you just mentioned happened post World War II? Yeah. Well, you're right that COVID was so widespread that many of us hoped that it would change the consciousness, you know, that you'd understand that okay, we are all interconnected and that a disease that might emerge from China or part of Africa or a part of Latin America can wipe out millions of lives in the United States and vice versa. So, let's cooperate to tackle those problems in a more forward looking way. Honestly, I blame a lot of the lack of getting there to our politics and people like the book big bets is about global solutions that have we've demonstrated can work at scale and and I and right now our politics are pretty fragmented, which is why I want young people in particular to read the book and some of them at least if not just vote for the right candidates go into politics themselves and be part of reshaping the future because we we have had times in our past as you noted when we can when we have come together around a higher purpose and a higher calling and I've just seen it in communities across this country and across the world. I think people want to be part of solutions that are designed to produce gains for everybody in a way that's bigger than themselves. We are not fundamentally designed to be purely self interested in our entire lives. We just kind of beat it out of people over time in our own country. So, I want to I hope more people read the book and say okay, I can be part of the solution. And in your opinion with innovation, is there a red flag moment where innovation that is driven by the market is creating further gaps and further divides because there's sort of two views on this. I mean, globalization in terms of what happened post pandemic with everyone working from home and now you have a global marketplace of talent and you can hire people from different countries and you can afford them different opportunities. That's great, but then also with innovation. I mean, we look at some of the I don't think I don't know if people I have no idea. I don't want to sound like I know for sure, but I feel like, for example, the evolution of AI and some of the applications for business, I feel like it's being used more in the US than in other parts of the world. And that could just be totally me being naive. I have no idea, but maybe you go to these different countries. Do you see innovation in the US being a positive for other countries or a negative? Well, I think it's definitely a positive in the story of innovation has been one of invention creation somewhere in the world and then over time diffusion and it doesn't create a bigger imbalance. It creates a more positive. Well, no, so depending on depending on how it's embraced, it can actually create divides. If you look at the agricultural productivity improvements from the 1500s and the 1600s actually lowered the standard of living of many of the peasant producers because of the economic infrastructure and political infrastructure of medieval Europe, basically. But that's why it's so important that we come together in these collaborations that are public and private. When we reshape the global vaccine industry and focused on saving child lives, that was a collaboration that came together and we said, okay, let's actually make sure we're manufacturing 10, 50 times the scale of product at price points that are lower at volumes that are high so everyone can access them. Like that consciousness on the front end was the only thing that ultimately created that outcome on the back end. And I think by the way, we need to do exactly that now with the renewable energy revolution. We should be looking at how battery manufacturing can be global and be at high enough volumes that allow prices to be low and access to be ubiquitous. If you think about solar energy or just renewables in general, less than 1% of all renewable energy deployment on a global basis since its invention about 20 years ago has been in Africa, less than 1%. And about 60% of the world's energy poor people who don't have enough electricity to power their home and want appliance on an annual basis are in Africa. So to solve the markets alone are not going to solve those mismatches, which is why, you know, which is why I write about these big collaborations, big bets that bring together the public sector policy makers and private innovators to create change at scale. And I'll say one thing about that is I have found that the private companies that are part of these efforts actually love being a part of these efforts because most companies are populated by people who want to change the world at scale. They want to be a part of something that's big and important and meaningful. And I've seen it when we got Cargill to donate rice in the middle of a famine in the Port of Mogadishu. I've seen it when we got drug and vaccine companies to change their manufacturing and access IP policies. And I'm seeing it right now in our renewable energy partnerships where people, especially people who work in these companies, they want to be part of something special. And when you look at all the different initiatives that you are taking on and that you're trying to solve for, what is the biggest bet that is concerning, that is existential, that could really, really impact for the better or worse if we don't focus on it? Well, I think right now it is making sure we get the energy transformation or the energy transition to reach every part of the globe as quickly as possible. Just to put it in perspective, all of the talk of Paris commitments and climate targets and all that, it all leaves out one big piece of math and that is the emissions that come from developing economies over the next 20 or 30 years. So we could be successful at changing emissions use in richer countries. If we could be more than successful at hitting our targets and we would still make our planet literally unlivable if we don't ensure that India and Brazil and South Africa and Nigeria and the DRC switch from diesel generation and heavy fuel oils and coal to renewable electricity. And right now, precious little is being done on that despite 10, 15 years of commitments and press releases and talk to do so, which is why our foundation is all in on making that renewable energy frontier a vehicle that lifts up everybody, not just those that live in wealthy economies. What do we have to do to fix that? Because this is now you're talking about, you're talking about imposing, not imposing, well, yeah, kind of imposing policy on a government that probably doesn't, you know, you know, without lack of a better word, doesn't give a shit the way that they should give a shit. Well, you know, it's interesting. If you if you go, because I spent so much time working with governments around the world on exactly this issue. And if you sit with Prime Minister Modi or you sit with President Ruto and Kenya, Modi's in India, you know, they actually understand that hey, solar power on 320 million Indian rooftops can create a second income stream for Indians farmers and can end poverty in our country while also reducing the need for coal and heavy fuel oil in the future. The challenge is attracting investment. The challenge is overcoming a reality that most of the subsidies are in the richer world. So right now, everyone's investing in the United States and Europe. And frankly, the challenge is making sure we have supply chains for these various products and commodities that are not entirely dependent on China and that are in fact much more distributed. So, you know, we need a globalization that actually allows for manufacturing of critical minerals and batteries and solar panels and equipment that's everywhere, not just in a few places. And we need some real transfers of public sector resources from wealthy economies to less wealthy economies so that everyone can access the energy future, not just a few. Do you see that being a reality? Do you have a playbook on RutoG? We have a playbook. There's a chapter in the book on exactly that task. And I would tell you, we are, it's slow work, but we are starting to succeed. I mean, when we launched the global energy alliance, we put $500 million in ourselves, raised a billion dollars from the Ikea Foundation, the Bezos Earth Fund. Thank you to both. And then we got another 10 billion from all of these multilateral development banks. That's about 11 billion. Today, we're in discussion with the next set of commercial banking partners to say, hey, you want to be part of this solution. And we're even designing, we're designing credits so that companies that need to buy carbon credits can do so by enabling these types of renewable energy projects like the one I described in the DRC. So it's possible to envision a future where a billion people move out of poverty because they have access to solar and wind and renewable energy. And it's possible to envision a future where 75% of the world's emissions do not come from what we today call developing economies. But it depends on us making the decisions now and building the kinds of public private partnerships today. Have you figured out, have you figured out say, I'm very curious about the number that you would have to raise because you have that number. I know that you have that number. So what is that number that you have to raise and to to radically shift global warming and all and the, you know, the use of all these different types of fuel sources in these developing nations. What's that number? And then also what's the time frame that we could actually accomplish that and if you had that number? Okay, so there have been, you're right, we've done the math. There have been about six different analyses that all have the same answer. And that number is about $2 trillion a year for about 10 to 15 years. And that seems like such a massive amount of investment that it's impossible to imagine getting there. And then you realize, hey, wait a minute, that is 2% of the global economy. When America helped rebuild Western Europe after World War II, we committed about 2% of our economic GDP to the task of creating the Marshall line. So we've done it. We've done this before. And we did it before. And by the way, if we didn't do it, Western Europe wouldn't have been our stalwart partner in an Atlantic chartered partnership for decades that has maintained peace and prosperity. It's the same moment we can do it again. We just have to inspire people. It's possible. And by the way, if you think 2% of the global economy is a lot, which you should, you know, if you look at just the excess windfall profits earned by petro states in the last two years, because of two and a half years, because of very high oil prices, that's been about two and a half percent of the global economy. So if we had the capacity to, you know, tax, there has been a great proposal to tax that and transfer. But, you know, it's, it's out there. We just have to be more ambitious in what we seek to accomplish. And we have to be clear that this time, this is not just a humanitarian enterprise. Our planet's survival depends on our ability to get this right. I love that. Okay. Um, let's, let's uh, get some last closing thoughts from, from big bets. If you wanted to, you know, if you wanted to bring up one last lesson or one last thought or story that would be really, really impactful for the audience, what would that last lesson be? Well, we've talked a lot about big bets that are these big global initiatives. And one thing that I have found so inspiring is that it really anyone anywhere in any community can make a big bet and see it through. And when I first got started in this work, I spent a summer kind of interning basically with a doctor in Southern India, who was just going door to door looking for people with leprosy and finding, once he had eradicated leprosy from this, this sort of community and a rainforest, he realized what kids really needed was nutrition support. So he took these malnourished kids and helped help resuscitate them. And it was just amazing to watch. And what it taught me is that big bets are about big global things. And they're also about just in your local community, making a difference in any way you can. And, and I, I think that's an important part of the book. And I love the fact that I get to tell some of these stories because these folks bring so much inspiration. If people want to get the book, if I want to connect with you, see where you're, you know, see what you're working on, where, where should they go? The social, the website, I'm sure it's all over Amazon and wherever you get your books as well, but other places. Yeah, come, come to Rockfeller RockFound.org our website and join our big bet community. We're looking for people who want to be part of the solution. And, and we want to help you live out your aspirations to be a big better. So, so come join us. What does that mean? What's the big bet community? So if people actually want to get involved, what are they doing with you? Well, right now, we're just asking people to sign up and, and over time, we're going to have programs and outreach so that people can get trained and how to do this and people who are seeking jobs or internship experiences or connections to nonprofit organizations and others, we facilitate what we can so people feel like they're connected to getting a chance to express their values in this way. I love it. All right. Okay. Just to close this out, you've had an incredible career. I'm actually going to ask you two questions. The first question would be, if you could tell your 20-year-old self one thing after everything that you've done, what would that thing be? If I could tell my 20-year-old self, what would that one thing be? You know, honestly, it would be take a little time out to journal and to take pictures and to reflect on each day because it's going to be okay and these moments are the moments you'll look back on and cherish. I love that. And then again, incredible career, multiple seasons to your career, at this point in your life, both for the Rockefeller organization, for what you're working on, but also personally, what does success mean to you? You know, right now, success is really about helping others and sometimes that's, I have three wonderful kids and maybe I missed a little too much of their early childhood, so it's helping them be the best they can be and my parents a little older, it's helping them and my teammates here that I work with is just helping folks be their best self is super rewarding and I didn't fully appreciate that when I was younger, I think, in my career, so I get to spend more time thinking about that now.