Lessons - The Man Obama Called When a Million Lives Were on the Line | Dr. Rajiv Shah - Rockefeller Foundation President & Fmr USAID Administrator

In this lessons episode, explore how to turn big ambitions into practical action without falling into the aspiration trap. Discover why balancing long-term vision with day-to-day execution drives meaningful progress, understand how trust and personal relationships enable large-scale collaboration, and uncover why simplifying complex problems inspires more people to take action. 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, I'm sure Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation are able to change the world and they're able to make these big bets. Billions are at play here. It's not my reality. 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 trap? I think it starts by being able to zoom in and zoom out. 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 and be super detail oriented about as you point out, making payroll delivering product, generating the next bit of revenue. 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, 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. 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, are 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 say, okay, we've got 56 countries seeking to be part of this response. The whole thing might cost 4 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? You just have to be able to do both. 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. I did the book in part because when honestly, when I was a young kid 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. 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 on large global humanitarian and development priorities and then you run a kind of 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 is monumental. I think the way you build trust across styles is very important. Another point, it was literally your first point in 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 is to little caring. It's too much complexity. I think complexity causes confusion and confusion creates distrust. 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, 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 there are 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 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, 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, the last question about trust and the more keep going. But I think this is also a very important question to address. When people think about big bets, it's just sentiment I've heard echoed repeatedly. It's like, well, we, especially in the US, and I'm not even American, but let's pretend that 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, 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, 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, we have, 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 and our teammate, 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 did, 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, was well worth the cost of deployment. And some of the most cost effective things we can do. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.