Over much of the past three decades, i have been an investor. The highest calling of mankind, i have often thought, it was private equity. [laughter] and then i started interviewing. While i watch your interview, because i know how to do some interviews. [laughter] i have learned in doing my interviews how leaders make it to the top. I asked him how much he wanted. He said 250. I said fine. It didnt negotiate with him and i did no due diligence. David i have something i would like to sell. [laughter] and how they stay there. You dont feel inadequate now because being on the second wealthiest man in the world, is that right . [laughter] dr. Raj shah is dedicating his life to solving the problems of health and hunger. After getting a medical school degree, he began his career at the Gates Foundation. From there, he joined the Obama Administration as the head of the usaid and now hes the head of the Rockefeller Foundation. Had a chance recently to sit down with raj shah talk about his passion for solving the global problems. So tell us, what is the Rockefeller Foundation . I know about the rockefeller name. But what is the foundation and what does it really do . Dr. Shah the foundation was created more than 100 years ago by john d rockefeller. The idea was very simple. To use science and innovation to lift up as many people around the world as possible. Over that period of time, this foundation has helped create the field of modern medicine, invest in International Public health, launch a green revolution through Agricultural Sciences that helped almost a billion people move off the brink of hunger and starvation. And today, our big focus is around climate and energy. David so if i said to you i have a great idea for the Rockefeller Foundation, whats your polite way of saying no . Dr. Shah it depends on the idea, i guess. [laughs] in general we love hearing about new ideas. We do tend to be a little bit more directed and focused than perhaps other institutions. You know, almost 50 of our giving is focused right now on ending Energy Poverty around the world, which we can talk about. We tend to sort of set of strategies and then go find partners that can add value to implementing those strategies as opposed to just taking in recommendations broadly. David recently you wrote an article about the importance of Climate Change and what youre trying to do about it. What is your idea of how we can tackle that problem . Dr. Shah we actually are very concerned that the larger global effort to fight Climate Change is missing a major focus on developing and emerging economies. The reality is if all of the wealthy countries, the United States, europe, china, live up to the policies they have already committed to, then 75 of all future emissions will come from 81 countries that today, are classified as housing more than 3 billion people that live in Energy Poverty. And right now we are on path to provide those people with electricity and energy through coal, heavy fuel oil, natural gas and other sources of power will continue to drive emissions. We are trying to change that pathway for those billions of people, to focus much more on renewables. David i have often thought that one of the problems with Climate Change getting people to do it, is that the benefits are not going to be found in your lifetime. Most likely, your great, great, great grandchildren will see the benefits of what we do now. It is hard to get people to change their conduct further great, great, great grandchildren. How are you going to get people to really care about reducing the use of carbon . Dr. Shah i will tell you, we are seeing the impacts in communities we work in around the world right now. The reality is we have already seen downward pressure on every cultural output in africa and parts of india, latin america that are increasing the number of people who are hungry and the number of communities that are threatened. We are already seeing tremendous changes to coastal communities, whether its in bangladesh or in south america, that are reducing peoples livelihoods and access to fisheries and sources of protein. And we are already seeing women working in salt flats i was with them just last winter working in extreme heat in india and some even perishing through trying to make one dollar a day, or two dollars a day doing backbreaking work in 110, 112 degree weather. This is a crisis that is affecting people, especially Vulnerable People and poorer communities right now and that is why we are so focused on fighting Climate Change. David you are putting a large number of your resources and personnel into this effort . Dr. Shah absolutely. We are all in on addressing Climate Change. And we as a institution founded originally on the resources that came from standard oil, we have divested of fossil fuels in our endowment. We are making a commitment to run our operations in a netzero manner by 2040. We are very committed to making sure our partnerships help change the trajectory of Climate Change, especially in developing countries. David recently, you have also written a book called big bets. We will go through the book and some of the big bets you have made. But what gave you the idea of writing a book you are so young in your career about your career already . Dr. Shah i mostly wanted to just make the point that when you work in social impact or in issues like Global Development, which i had a chance to work on at the Gates Foundation and under president obama at usaid, and now here at the Rockefeller Foundation, you dont have to settle for incrementally doing good. So much of human charity is sort of doing a little, doing about what you can and feeling good about it. And i wanted to introduce the idea that you can actually try to solve some of the worlds biggest, most challenging problems. And in fact, if you look at our philanthropic history, not mine personally, but that of the Rockefeller Foundation as an institution or what the Gates Foundation has done as an institution, i think their biggest wins have been thinking of solving problems globally and living conditions. David what about making small incremental bets are easier to get done, what is and that is your to do them the big bets which could fail . Dr. Shah well, ironically, big bets require making lots of smaller experiments along the way we are trying to bring power and electricity through renewables to a billion people who live literally in the dark, with less electricity per person than it takes to power one light bulb or one small appliance in your home to the course of a year. We dont sell that in a large effort. Well solve that by collecting and getting thousands of small actions with people around the world. But here is the difference. When you aspire to do Something Big and bold, you can then talk to leaders who want to be a part of solutions at the scale. I can sit down with larry fink at blackrock and design financing instruments that can bring billions of dollars. I can talk to the heads of those putting together the cop climate negotiations at uae and structure initiatives that can mobilize the kinds of resources we need. I can partner with colleagues at tata power and say, lets build 10,000 rural mini grids and move 25 Million People out of power, out of Energy Poverty. Those types of solutions, in my view, happen when you dream big. David lets talk about your background. So your parents came from where . Dr. Shah my parents are from india. David where did they settle . Dr. Shah they started in pasadena, california. My dad was an engineer who was working on the apollo programs for a Company Called bendix that was designing components on apollo missions. But they quickly moved to detroit, michigan, and my dad had a 30 year career at ford motor company. David and your mother . Dr. Shah my moms in Early ChildhoodEducation Specialist and she started a Montessori School and ran that throughout my childhood, right . David you were a superstar student, is that right . Dr. Shah i was a pretty good student and i grew up in an Indian American community that was pretty focused on being a good student. David you went to university of michigan . Dr. Shah i did. Go blue. David why did you want to study . Dr. Shah i started in engineering because i grew up in a family where you are either going to be a doctor or an engineer and i thought may be an outer designer was my sort of early plan. I quickly switched to literature, science and arts and started studying economics and policy. David so you graduated michigan, and decided to go to medical school at university of pennsylvania . Dr. Shah i did. David medical school was not enough. You wanted to get another degree as well. Dr. Shah i think i felt i was supposed to be a doctor because i just sort of grew up with that and i got very interested in politics and policy. So i wanted to learn about health, economics, and i joined an Md Phd Program at penn medical and the wharton school. David to set up shop to become a doctor . Dr. Shah i didnt. David did that disappoint your parents . Dr. Shah at the time. And maybe not disappointed and made them awfully nervous. But after i took my last set of board exams, my then girlfriend and i, now wife and i, got in my car and drove 14 hours to nashville, tennessee from philadelphia, in order to volunteer on al gores president ial campaign. David it was during your timeout . Dr. Shah it was. David when he did not become president , what did you do . Dr. Shah i found myself unemployed for a little while and i started dabbling in Political Consulting and doing some other things. David did that make your parents nervous . Dr. Shah it did, frankly them and everybody else. I thought, i should go back to medicine and just be a doctor and do a residency. But then i got a phone call from a friend who i met on the campaign who said, you know, bill and Melinda Gates were setting up this foundation. And they had Big Aspirations for what they wanted to do. And they were looking for someone who knew health, economics and medicine. And had some perspective on Global Health issues. So i interviewed for a job. David and you got it . Dr. Shah i did. David what was the challenging there, you wrote about it in your book, but why dont you describe the challenge you had to do there over like two or threeyear period of time you were there. Dr. Shah this project was really their big initial effort. Bill and melinda had read an article about a disease called rotavirus that was killing 400,000 kids around the world every year. And in that same article, they pointed out that a company, merck, was rolling out a vaccine in the United States to address rotavirus where kids actually didnt die of the disease. And so they had a very simple question of, why couldnt we get the vaccines to every child on the planet and particular, those that need them to survive . David so your project was to get this vaccine to everybody in the world, essentially every child who needed it . Dr. Shah the childhood vaccine that existed, to every child who needed it. We started a global birth cohort of about 105 million kids at the time. We assessed the data and concluded that probably about half of those kids were getting some form of robust vaccination that could save their lives from Infectious Diseases and half were not. David to eventually meet with bill gates when working on this problem . Dr. Shah yes, and i write about this in the book. I learned from bill the power of asking a simple question it wasnt just one meeting but he would pull us all together quite regularly and say, do you know what it takes to vaccinate every child on the planet . It required really deconstructing the challenges and it was interesting because what i learned in that setting was, sometimes complexity can make it hard to engage. And bill just insisted on finding a simple answer to a simple set of questions and that helped us craft a strategy. David you pointed out in the book that you couldnt vaccinate all the children in the world by yourselves, the Gates Foundation had good resources, but not Unlimited Power to do everything, so you had to appoint countries. You said at one point in the book you went to meet with president chirac of france and you didnt have shoes that were appropriate. What happened . Dr. Shah what we learned as we were doing the work, is that the vaccine industry was even producing enough vaccines for kids in lowincome countries effectively, so we needed to restructure the way the world does vaccines. We put a proposal together for a social impact bond to solve the problem. We were effectively seeking frances support to make that bond buyable. So bill and i met with president chirac at the elysees palace. I was coming from seattle and i just had old shoes, i had actually left the new shoes i bought for the meeting back in seattle. So i was wearing shoes that had a little hole in the bottom of them. I was just selfconscious about that. We sat in the meeting and the meeting went great. President chirac said we are not only going to make this happen, but i will direct my finance minister, nicholas sarkozy, to create this project with you guys. That ended up transforming global immunization and vaccinating nearly a billion children over 20 years. But when i called rick to ask him about what bill thought of the meeting, which i thought was a homerun, he was sort of ribbing me a little bit, and said, bill thought the meeting was fine from a content perspective but he was really concerned about your footwear. [laughter] at the time, i was a young kid working at the foundation. I was terrified that that was actually true. I learned they were just making fun of me. David well, you survived that. But after you accomplished that global immunization program, you said you wanted to do something different. So you decided to leave. Dr. Shah i was at gaates for a while. After president obama got elected, i got a phone call to join the Obama Administration. It had always been my dream since i left medical school to work for gore that i would get a chance to serve in the administration, so i moved to washington, d. C. David so you wanted initially to work for the secretary of agriculture, who i guess is secretary of agriculture dr. Shah [laughs] it is, yes, tom vilsack. David he has had a couple of tours of duty in the position. You later got asked to be the head of usaid. What is usaid . Dr. Shah the United States agency for International Development is americas prime development and humanitarian agency. It was founded by john f. Kennedy. It has a very clear and direct mission. The idea is bringing dignity, security, hope and opportunity to the poorest parts of the world. Makes us all safer and more prosperous. David so you got the job when you were 50 years old . Dr. Shah when i was 36 years old. David 36 years old, you are running usaid. How many employees does it have . Dr. Shah 11,000. David did you feel qualified to run something that big . Dr. Shah at the time i did until that work started. [laughs] i was confident i had ideas and experiences that could help the agency be successful. But it was not until the Haiti Earthquake happened effectively on my first week on the job that i realized i needed a lot of help. David so the massive earthquake in haiti occurred, usaid was going to take the lead for the u. S. In trying to redevelop and fix the problems in haiti. You go to the oval office and you hear something you are not supposed to hear, which is the Vice President of the United States, joe biden, now, the president , saying, is this guy really able to lead the effort, is that right . Dr. Shah president obama called me actually the day before right after the earthquake happened, and said first time i took a call from the president and said, raj, i am putting you in charge of the whole of government effort, civilian and military, to respond to this tragic crisis, which ultimately led to more than 250,000 people perishing just two hours from our shores. So the next morning in the oval Office Briefing i got there a few minutes early because i was terrified of being late. David your shoes were ok . [laughter] dr. Shah my shoes were fine. President biden and president obama were in the window, by then facing out at obama facing the door so he saw me coming in. Vice President Biden was in the middle of saying to president obama, are you sure about this guy raj shah . He is only 36, he just got here to washington. And the person who leads fema, craig fugate, has much more experience in these efforts, may be we should ask craig to help obama saw me and walked in right away and said, raj, come in, sit down. Next thing i knew, everybody poured into the living room and we quickly got it to work. David what ultimately happened in haiti . What did the u. S. Government do through usaid that helped ameliorate the problem, not solve it, ameliorate . Dr. Shah in reality we mounted the fastest and largest humanitarian response in history at that point. We did it, and we were able to do it, not because usaid did everything, but because we were able to, as i write about in the book, open the turnstiles and invite and colleagues federal Emergency Management from the agency as well as the department of defense and use all those assets and capabilities. David people must say to you all the time, you have done a lot of things, you should run for office. Ever think about running for something . Dr. Shah i do. Since i was a little kid, i have always been enamored of the concept of Public Service, and frankly my time in government taught me that if we have the right kinds of leaders in place, we can get a lot done. Dr. Shah usaid took the care and the responsibility of working with the centers for Disease Control to mount a response in west africa and contain and contain ultimately limit the disease before it spread around the world. David after the ebola problem is more or less solved i wouldnt say, eliminated ebola completely, but you addressed the problem, you then pursued the highest calling of mankind, which is private equity. [laughter] you set up your own firm to invest in, i would say, electrification projects around the world, is that right . Dr. Shah that is correct. David it had two big backers, dick blum was one of them and david bondman was the other . Dr. Shah yes, we started the process of building a small firm and partnered closely with a larger firm, tpg, and started identifying projects and raising funds. I got about a year and a half, into that, and the Rockefeller Foundation opportunity came up and i felt that was more aligned with what i wanted to do. David so you became the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, how many years ago was that . Dr. Shah six. David the Rockefeller Foundation is very famous, over 100 years. But it is not nearly as big as the Gates Foundation. How do you deal with the challenge that people think you have unlimited amounts of money, but you really dont . Dr. Shah our resources really should be societys risk capital to solve tough problems. We think of it that way. We are not trying to pay for solutions at scale. We are trying to build partnerships that either allow companies to build up global electrification and reach people who are very poor and make that profitable and viable in a commercial basis, or get government to do that are transformational, like you did during the covid crisis here in the United States. David so do you worry about the problem, the dysfunction of the government sometimes . Clearly, we see that the u. S. Government and congress cant get its act together in passing bills and so forth. Is that something you address . Dr. Shah we work on that every day. Because whether we are working to expand diagnostic testing during the covid crisis here in the United States, or working to reinvest in Global Development efforts abroad, u. S. Government leadership is almost always critical to success. And the truth is, you know, if you work behindthescenes quietly, as you know, you can get republicans and democrats to collaborate and partner and you can find those partners who want to do the right things. They are not always the loudest voices, they are not usually screaming on cable news, but they are, in fact, the ones that make things happen. David lets go through some of the leaders for whom you have worked. Al gore. You got to know him a bit. What kind of leader was he, or is he . Dr. Shah i worked less closely with al gore. I was a very Junior Member of his campaign. I have gotten to know him more in recent years as we have focused on Climate Change. I just think he is extraordinarily smart, very, very disciplined and extremely persistent in his beliefs. David what about barack obama, how do you find him as a leader . Dr. Shah president obama i learned a lot from just by watching the way he worked. In my view, he had this unique ability to be extremely determined, passionate, and also preternaturally calm in any given moment. Let you sort of knew that underneath that calm was an absolute determination to win in the long run, whether winning was a major Foreign Policy issue or some domestic transformation of our economy. David what about joe biden . Dr. Shah at the time, Vice President biden was so personable, especially during my tough moments i gave a speech called the National Prayer breakfast speech and i was quite nervous about it for a number of reasons. And he was the kind of leader that would comment put his arm around you and say, youve got this, in more colorful ways. David what about Hillary Clinton . You worked with her when she was secretary of state, what was that like . Dr. Shah i learned from secretary clinton just the power of toughness. There are times especially in government where you take hits, where people critique what you are doing if youre trying to be a change agent and trying to make change happen. And i learned early on from her that this is a woman who has taken a lot of hits and just keeps going. If you care about what youre doing and you believe youre trying to help other people and you see a path to making a difference, you have to have a strong shell. David so as you look back on your career, what are you most pleased that you have achieved so far . Dr. Shah the big bets that worked. The effort to vaccinate one billion children and save 16 million child lives over two decades through the establishment of a global vaccine alliance. The effort to prevent ebola from spreading out of west africa and into the rest of the world, when the cdc was estimating 1. 6 million cases and we ended ebola through bold action with less than 30,000 cases and less than 11,000 deaths and not one case of transmission in the United States. And the big bet we are taking on right now, to reach one billion people who live in Energy Poverty with renewable electrification. We already have projects with lineofsight to serving 77 million of them. Those are the things i am most proud of. David so, people must say to you all the time, you should run for office. You ever think about running for something . Dr. Shah i do. Since i was a kid, i have been enamored by the concept of Public Service and, frankly, my time in government taught me that if we have the right kinds of leaders in place, we can get a lot done. You know whats brilliant . Boring. Think about it. Boring is the unsung catalyst for bold. 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