Dr. Rajiv Shah
speaker
124 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Rajiv Shah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And so President Obama made a big bet, which together with his team, of which I was one, was that we would, for the first time in our history, deploy American troops into a disease fighting situation in a hot zone. And I helped lead that deployment in West Africa. And to make a long story short, we had instead of 1.6 million cases, we had 30,000 cases.
And instead of hundreds of thousands of deaths, we had 11,000 deaths. There were two cases in the United States and no transmission on U.S. soil. Sometimes some of the biggest wins you have are things that don't happen. But had a disease with that level of mortality started spreading across this country, you can only imagine what would have happened.
And so, again, very proud to be part of a national security team that understood that diplomacy, development, and defense can all come together to make us stronger by helping others in a faraway way. We didn't lose a single service member. Nobody got sick. We handled it very professionally.
And I write about in the book, one of the core elements to doing that successfully was having a structured learning and innovation approach. Because a lot of times when you're in a crisis moment, again, your listeners in the Silicon Valley area would get this instinctively. You have to constantly innovate and learn. And you can do that even in a big bureaucracy.
Thank you for doing that.
I left government, I'd been there six years, six and a half, and it was the right time for our family. When I left, I actually started a small private equity firm with partners and started teaching at Georgetown. And I was doing those two things along with a bunch of others and realized that I missed the chance to be doing the work I was doing.
And one thing led to another, and I had the opportunity to become the president of Rockefeller Foundation. This is an extraordinary institution. It really is. It was founded by John D. Rockefeller back in the day, 1913, and it was founded on a single extraordinary idea, which is that advances in science and innovation should be applied to lift humanity broadly. That was the simple idea.
At the time, They were most inspired by advances in medical sciences. You know, medicine was transitioning from being something where you sold stuff off the back of a pickup truck that might or might not have any real scientific basis to a more disciplined science-based enterprise.
And we funded public health schools and medical schools and the Flexner Report and institutions that ultimately went on to become the CDC, eradicating hookworm. at home and engaging in invention of the yellow fever vaccine abroad. So a tremendous sort of history in the application of science for humanity. And it's just an honor to be here.
Sure. Well, turbulence is normal, right? And so we live in a moment in our society where technological transformation has happened so fast and continues to accelerate that it has just reshaped so many communities and their sense of opportunity. Some have skyrocketed through the roof. Others have been left farther and farther behind. And that
framework has changed our politics and our geopolitics and our sense of confidence. When my grandfather made that investment of his retirement savings in a one-way ticket to the United States, there was like a 90 plus percent chance if you were born in the US back then, you would do better than your parents.
I mean, literally the only people who didn't were named Rockefeller because obviously your parents were already doing so well off. Today, it's less than 50%. Actually, over the last 30 years, it's probably less than 50%. So the reality is a lot has changed and it just creates a lot of turbulence, a lot of change.
Most of the last elections since 2000 have been change elections, one form or another. And that is a signal that there's a lot of uncertainty and lack of confidence in too many communities across this country. So I tell my teams, we have to stay focused on our mission.
We're trying to end energy poverty around the world by giving every single family a chance to live in a community where the cost of energy is low, where energy is abundant, where businesses can grow and where they can participate in digital economy.
There's still 800 million to a billion people who live literally without any electricity, no light bulbs, no power tools, and no real upward mobility through the job market if there's no energy deployed. And so we do a lot of that type of work all over the planet.
And we have a plan and an infrastructure and a set of partners where we're really operating at scale to reach people with what we think of as the core driver of human dignity and opportunity. In the United States, we observe that
chronic disease is out of control, and that if we treat food as medicine in a more structured, science-based way, we can largely reduce the prevalence of prediabetes and diabetes in the US population, something that costs us more than $300 billion a year.
And there are more amputations performed every year in the United States as a result of diabetes than in all of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan put together over the last two decades. We have some scientific and innovation-oriented ideas that we're investing in and getting behind and building partnerships in order to deliver results for people at home and around the world.
When I started at the foundation, we had to make some real changes to the structure of our organization in order to get back to making the types of big bets that John D Rockefeller had envisioned when he created the institution. And strangely, philanthropies can be tough to change. For some reason,
institutions that I think should have really the highest risk profile of institutions across society can tend to be quite risk averse and afraid of making mistakes. But we made those changes and it was difficult to do, but with a strong board and a really determined leadership team, we were able to do it. One of the big things we were able to do as a result of that was work on COVID and
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