On with Kara Swisher - Will Big Bets to Solve Climate Change Pay Off? With Rajiv Shah

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Are world hunger, pandemics and climate change “fixable” – or is mitigating their impacts the best we can hope for? Is there any point in making them moonshots? In his new book, Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens, Rockefeller Foundation President and former Administrator of USAID Rajiv Shah explains how going big impacts motivation – even if the result is a Big Fail. We speak with Shah about the outcome of the recent UN Climate Conference in Dubai (and the overwhelming presence of Big Oil), why he thinks global institutions like the World Bank and the IMF need to be revamped, and whether billionaire philanthropists are the answer to the world’s woes (spoiler: they aren’t). Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on social media. We’re on Instagram/Threads as @karaswisher and @nayeemaraza Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Naeem Araza. Today, our guest is Rajiv Shah. He's the president of Rockefeller Foundation and the former head of USAID, the Agency for International Development. We both met him earlier this year when he just published his book, Big Bets, How Large-Scale Change Really Happens. Yeah, I met him through Jim Bankoff, who runs Vox, but lots of people I know know him, and I'm surprised I met't met him before this.

He's been super involved in tech and has worked for the Gates Foundation. He worked, obviously, in the Obama administration in USAID. But he's someone who's really rising quickly in the philanthropy arena and has some really interesting ideas on how to change it. Yeah. International development is kind of our family business. My dad had a decades-long career at the World Bank. My sister works at the UN. I took a more private sector approach, working in a private consultancy on international development out of college. But Raj came up in a really different world, which is this tech-financed philanthropic world, which has taken off over the last few decades. A lot of these places are set up by people you know, people like Bill and Melinda Gates or Piero Mediar, who has the Mediar Network.

Talk about that tie-in between Silicon Valley and development and when you saw it happening and what was going on there. Well, they all create their own foundations. They think they can do it better. Obviously, Gates and the Gateses through the Gates Foundation, which initially was run by Patti Stonecipher, you know it was a big swing at that, a very serious swing. Previously, they did donations and stuff like that, but they all decided, because they were so rich, they knew what was better for the world. And so, as many rich people do, they created these foundations. Carnegie did it before, and obviously the Rockefeller Foundations did it way back in the day when they were the really rich people. So, it was a natural

progression that probably the two people that were critical were the Midyars and the Gateses, who took it quite seriously in terms of what they were doing. Yeah. And obviously, lots of other domestic trusts as well. I mean, the Zuckerberg Chan would be another one. I guess. But California does have, Silicon Valley in particular, has this kind of build-and-they-will-come, vanguard approach to things, so the Californian way being the right way. Some of the things that my work, I've seen the Gates Foundation do most effectively in Africa is noticing the work of others and kind of the Silicon Valley incubation model of getting behind good ideas. They were highly influenced

by Nicholas Kristof's reporting in the Times. They've seen innovations come up because people, you know, living in sub-Saharan Africa, rural Africa, come up with solutions for how to protect themselves or how to get light or how to get, you know, rural distribution. And a lot of what the foundations have done is scale up internationally so they can observe what's happening and kind of get in like VCs without the profit model to kind of back good solutions. And Raj has been at the forefront of that change, I think. Yes, he has. He certainly has. And he's been trying to change it, as do many big foundations, to innovate for the future.

Yeah. He's a good person to talk to now because of all the issues around climate change. for the future. Yeah. He's a good person to talk to now because of all the issues around climate change. And the Rockefeller Foundation has been very involved, especially working with tech companies on solutions going forward and investments. It's Wednesday, December 13th morning on the East Coast as we're taping this with Raj. We were meant to tape with him on Tuesday, but we pushed it back because the good people over at the UN Climate Change Conference, the COP28, ran into overtime yesterday. Yeah, they were having issues on wording, as they always do around especially the influence of the fossil fuel petrostates. And so they were arguing over wording of what they're going to say,

which doesn't really matter what they say. We're hurling towards really dangerous situation with our environment. And so the hope was that they would do more, but they, of course, did less. Yeah. Ironically, this conference was taking place in the United Arab Emirates. Obviously, I'm not sure if it's so ironic, but okay. There was a big conversation about how to reach the global warming targets and whether fossil fuels would be phased out. And also a question about the shape of that phase out, not disproportionately affecting developing countries or smaller countries who are like, hey, you guys got to develop with this lower economic cost fuel option, and now we need to pay the price, further set ourselves back. Obviously,

COVID has also had a huge impact on economic development in those countries. And ultimately, they ended up with some watery language. I want to read it. Quote, transition away from fossil fuels and energy systems in a just, orderly, and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade. Yeah. It says nothing. It says they're going to go as slow as ever, and they're not going to come to a global agreement on, it doesn't matter, nature will come to the global agreement when that's what it's already doing. So. Well, Rajiv Shah was there for part of COP, and I think that he will have he will have the fun job of helping us parse out those words. Absolutely. Let's take a quick break and we'll

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a COP document after 30 years of negotiation, but not the word phase out. So critics like Al Gore are calling it a half measure. I'd love your take on what's happening. Well, Cara, thank you for having me. And I appreciated the chance to be at the COP meeting in Dubai. This was an interesting COP because, of course, it was hosted by a petrostate that has benefited from windfall profits in the fossil fuel industry over the last 18 to 24 months. And at the end of the day, the language, I think, is meaningful progress. It notes that we need to transition away from fossil fuels. I wrote the book Big Bets to make the case that big bets start with knowing the data and understanding issues deeply. And you don't solve climate change.

You don't even protect against catastrophic consequences of climate change without embracing a transition away from fossil fuels. That's, of course, been known for decades. So the fact that this is the first time that language is being embraced is in fact a major step forward. Well, not embraced. I think embraced is a heavy word. Well, it's accepted. Let's say accepted. Yeah, okay. And you know, when you make, when these types of negotiations take place, there are enough loopholes to create space for everybody. That's how they got this through. First, they gaveled it through at the end without sort of a roll call vote. And so we'll see how

vested different countries, including big ones like India and small ones like small island states that potentially were underrepresented, will feel about it. But the loopholes are massive here. Well, why don't you walk through them? I think one loophole is there's no real timeline. It says by the end of this critical decade, but it means you could start the design of phasing out fossil fuels, which is a multi-decade kind of project seven years from now after effectively it's too late to save the planet and get anywhere near 1.5 degrees. The fact that they use the transition instead of phase-out language implies that there's space for the long-term use of fossil

fuels so long as it's quote-unquote abated. And then, you know, throughout this entire meeting, there's been mixed messages that are totally antithetical to the data and knowledge of reality that has embraced carbon capture and storage, which by, I mean, the only real scientific debate is whether carbon capture and storage can abate 0.1% or 0.44% of total energy emissions. It's completely not a solution. And yet, you know, you see all these fossil fuel companies embracing CCS in their own supply chains to extract and burn more fossil fuels. So there are loopholes all over this, but at the end of the day, it's progress because now countries will have to show up in two years with real plans and they'll be held

accountable in the court of public opinion. In the court of public opinion, which never holds many things accountable. Al Gore tweeted that the original draft, quote, read as if it was being dictated by OPEC. He went on to say it is of petro-states, by petro-states, and for petro-states. Climate activists, of course, have been up in arms about the involvement of them in the meeting. The president of the conference, Sultan Al-Jabbar, is also CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. There were 1,300 fossil fuel lobbyists there. The CEO of Exxon, Daryl Woods, came. That was a first. Talk about that, because you just said they're

talking about carbon capture. They're making that the topic of discussion. Is big oil taking over climate conversation, or is it important to have it at the table? And you don't need to comment on BP calling itself beyond petroleum, but go right ahead if you want. Look, big oil was at the table, obviously, was at the head of the table. Yes. And the UAE has committed to $150 billion of new fossil fuels exploration and development in the context of the run-up to this COP. So do I think that's optimal? Absolutely not. I mean, we should have a system to negotiate a global agreement that holds big oil accountable and

that encourages more people to divest. As the Rockefeller Foundation, an endowment, by the way, created by the wealth of Standard Oil 100 years ago, made the decision to divest, and we think others should do so. Yes, irony piles upon irony here, even so, Oil 100 years ago, made the decision to divest. And we think others should do so. Yes, irony piles upon irony here, even hundreds of years ago. Exactly. But it's been 100 years, for goodness sakes. We've learned a few things, and we know what the right thing to do is. So no, big oil should not, in general, be at the table. And there should be all the things that are not. Enforcement. There's no enforcement, as you just pointed out. Financing is my biggest concern because I think people believe, oh, technology will just emerge and save us. And the track record of scaling technology across the 81 economies that are where we will

win or lose the fight against climate change is terrible. And it has only been successful when there's real financing. And right now the opposite is happening and I can get into that. And access. If you're trying to put battery storage on a grid in Nigeria right now, forget about the price. You can't even access the technology because it's all going to Teslas and Rivians

being sold in California and New York. To rich people, yeah. Yeah, to wealthy communities. So we have a lot of work to do that is not part of the official reality of these COP meetings. And if we're really going to solve climate change, that's where we're going to solve them. Enforcement, financing, technology access, in addition to, you know, statements that imply where the quote-unquote world needs to go. Right. So let's talk about what's at stake. The UN is

doing a global stock take this year, and it doesn't look good, and as do most of the reports that come out. We're not on track, as you said, to stay under that 1.5 degrees Celsius level at this point. Obviously, major impacts all over the globe. The Arctic report just came out this week shows how it's affecting us here in the U.S. The summer was the warmest on record in many places above the Arctic Circle. Temperatures are rising four times faster. Greenland's ice sheet is melting, contributing to global sea rise, Canadian wildfires, which people noticed in New York, California wildfires, and also the wildfires in Hawaii. The list goes on. Talk about what you're most concerned with when it comes to the impacts of climate change. Obviously, warming is part of all of these issues. Or is it people pretending it's not warming?

I'd say two big things. One, you were getting at with that question. And that is what people, most people don't realize is we're crossing these irreversible climate tipping points faster than even the most concerned scientists expected. Losing ice the size of Texas in Antarctica has irreversible sea level and ocean acidification impacts that happened faster than scientists expected. So even if the world miraculously achieves 1.5 degrees, which is 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, even at that level, we're going to have more climate impacts

than people predicted 10 years ago when Copenhagen and Paris and those kind of numbers were made the global target. And then secondarily, we're off even achieving those global numbers, right? And by any reasonable estimate, we're right now barreling towards two and a half to three degrees centigrade, which is catastrophic. So what am I most worried about? I think the big policy decisions in wealthy countries, the US, Europe, and China, means that the world will avoid kind of total extinction, which is good. But what I most worry about is that there are two to three billion people who live in coastal regions, depend on food and agriculture systems that are less resilient than they are in wealthy economies,

and they will suffer massively. In 1990, 14% of the world's population suffered from hunger. That number was down to 6% in 2015. It's now up a few percentage points to 8%. It's projected to go back to 14% when the population mushrooms to 10 billion people. And that's a billion four people around the world that are going to bed hungry every night in 2040, 2050.

That's crazy. And that level of suffering will lead to migration, instability, violence, political realities that are far worse than what we experience today. The ocean acidification alone will wipe out fisheries that serve as the primary source of protein for 2 billion people today. There's no viable plan to replace that for that community of people and for the rest of us. And it's always the poor, the vulnerable, the people who live in countries that don't have the resources the wealthy countries do that suffer by far the most. So that's what I worry about, is human vulnerability skyrocketing. So let's talk about that, the impact on developing countries with this agreement. They

talk about transitioning away from, what it would mean for that. Developing nations together make only 8% of global carbon emissions, but they don't have the money to invest in renewables. This is excluding China and India, obviously. In a recent op-ed, you wrote, the fight against climate change will be won or lost in less wealthy countries that will produce the most emissions in the future. You know, they have a poverty of energy and a poverty of development. And when we're doing this energy transition, they're going to pay the most. Yeah, well, it's not just pay the most. I mean, they get trapped in poverty. So there are a billion people on Earth that consume less than 150 kilowatt hours of electricity

a year per capita. What that means is that's not enough power to have one light bulb and one small home appliance powered through the course of a year. There are three and a half billion people in 81 countries that consume less than a thousand kilowatt hours per capita per year, which means you live in economies where most of your businesses need backup diesel generators and they need power that's very costly, very dirty, and it deeply constrains your ability to grow and move your communities up the economic ladder.

your ability to grow and move your communities up the economic ladder. In that context, asking those countries to then make $3.8 trillion a year of investment required to transition their energy systems in an environment where they don't have the money and we're not able to provide it is not going to happen. And I said before this COP that the judgment of success for the COP shouldn't be the language in the agreement. It should be whether wealthy nations show up with financing solutions to pay for an energy transition in these 81 countries. Which they did not. They didn't. There are a few efforts, I'd love to describe one that we've helped create on the unofficial side of the COP, the public-private partnership space, that I think are very promising. But in an official context, absolutely nothing was done

to actually pay for anything. Now, we've seen all kinds of projects. There wasn't lack of projects in solar, wind, water in Africa. They haven't really made a dent, and most people feel that those aren't the way to go in any case now. I know Bill Gates talks about it. How are they going to be able to grow their economies with renewable energy if it hasn't worked and there's not the money? Yeah. So I don't think it's fair to say it hasn't worked. It hasn't been done. Absolutely. So the total wind and solar deployed in the world in 2021, 6% was deployed in these 81 countries. If you look at just Africa, 0.6%, despite having 50% of the world's landed solar radiation. So it's not fair to say it hasn't worked. It's fair to say it hasn't happened. It's not happening. Then you could say, well, why is it not happening?

And the reality is coming out of COVID, rich countries spent 30% of their GDP shoring up their economies, monetary policy, fiscal policy, you know, major cash infusions that created inflation that led to interest rate increases. Right now, 60 countries around the world are teetering on the edge of a debt crisis. So I was in Kenya, 62 cents on the dollar of their public budget is going to pay off debt that has skyrocketed borrowing costs. Ghana, it's 72 cents on the dollar. Zambia was even higher than that in country after country. So they're actually cutting health services. They're cutting food subsidies. Right. And then you're asking them to make the kinds of inflation reduction act style, large scale infusions of capital to transition their energy economies

which they do and they look at you say that's crazy how do how are we supposed to do this and why do we now have to do this when you the world's greatest contributors to global warming developed your economies on cheap coal and cheap fuel so So it's a super legitimate concern. And the reality is there have been moments in our history when we've looked around the world and said, let's reshape institutions to do the right thing at scale after World War II, for example. And we're in one of those moments. What technologies, and you and I have talked about this, that technologists think that technology will solve everything, poverty, and it never does. So what technologies do you see out there that make a difference in closing the energy divide and therefore the poverty divide?

Yeah. Actually, this is where I see a tremendous amount of opportunity because there is technology that can actually prevent carbon emissions while simultaneously lifting up, often for the first time, the world's poorest communities. And this is where Rockefeller's put a ton of our time, effort, and energy. What are the technologies I'm most excited about? Small-scale distributed renewables like solar mini-grids connected to battery systems, using smart meters to actually, for the first time, provide always-on electricity to villages in northern India or rural Nigeria. We're already rolling out thousands of these, reaching 1.3 million people. And we have plans in place and projects underway that will reach 77 million

people who live in energy poverty with these types of solutions from the Democratic Republic of Congo to the state of Bihar in India. That's transformational stuff. And 10 years ago, when we were first developing these systems, it would cost $1, $1.20 a kilowatt hour to provide power. Batteries were expensive. You needed people there to manage the energy and battery management systems. Metering was impossibly hard.

Now, with technology, you basically can run those things by artificial intelligence from afar, take personnel costs out of the system. Smart meters allow people to pay by their mobile phone just based on the power they use every day or every week. Battery costs have come down dramatically, and by the switch to certain types of battery chemistries, you can transform the possibilities. And, you know, our global energy alliance that we built as a public-private partnership to actually reach a billion people who live in energy poverty with these types of solutions is now working in just two years in 20 countries. But the holdup would be financing, correct, again? So the holdup is financing. And in this case, the Rockefeller Foundation,

the Bezos Earth Fund, and the IKEA Foundation, we each made a $500 million grant. So we came up with a billion and a half dollars of concessional or free money. And with that, we're able to get other investors into these projects. So for example, I write in my book about a visit to Eastern Congo, post conflict. Just a tragic, difficult place to work. Never had any real electricity, no grid power. We have a plan to reach 7 million people in the eastern part of Congo with solar electricity. The first project was $80 million. We made a $7 million grant and were able to find the rest of the capital from actual investors to make that

project valuable. So that's how you stretch grant money to make these things happen. To make it larger. So one of the other topics that- Can I just say one challenge though? Yeah. The problem is this shouldn't be a task that's left up to a handful of philanthropic institutions. If we were really thinking big about what it takes to solve the problem, you would have big negotiations like the COP say, okay, how do we provide 50 or 100 billion dollars of this kind of free capital to do this in country after country after country so that people can access all these technologies that the technologists are so excited about. Yeah, that sort of depends on the tech savior idea, like a Jeff Bezos or the IKEA people or whoever, and they want to be seen as local solutions in these countries. I'll say in our case, you know, the people who are taking these projects to scale, a group called Nuru in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Tata Power in India, where we're rolling out one gigawatt of solar in the state of Maharashtra, for example,

those are local companies. And those are local companies that once they have the technology construct, can innovate, can lower the cost, can operate and can expand. And capitalizing those joint ventures is what I'm talking about. We'll be back in a minute. Is it actually legitimizing and protecting the business you've been busy building? Make it official with LegalZoom. LegalZoom has everything you need to launch, run, and protect your business all in one place. Setting up your business properly and remaining compliant are the things you want to get right from the get-go. And LegalZoom saves you from wasting hours making sense of the legal stuff.

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Is there a role for AI in this? Because one of the things that obviously we know is the power issues around AI are rather massive. It's creating a bigger problem. You know, AI servers could use as much electricity as Sweden now. So talk a little bit about the both sides of it. And are you worried that the surge in AI is going to widen the divide between rich and poor countries even more? Well, AI could go either way. It will, without question, consume massive amounts of additional energy. So all the people who said, hey, this is peak energy consumption, and now we're just going to get more and more efficient and will therefore consume less energy in the future. I think that's proven to be wrong, because AI alone will change that calculus very dramatically. because AI alone will change that calculus very dramatically. So the question then becomes, you know, how do you meet those needs? And if you can only meet those needs in wealthy countries, then yes, then AI will be, you know, as Kai-Fu Lee and others have noted, a source of massive rents that go to very, very small number of companies and countries on the other hand if you can help

the 81 countries i'm referring to develop modern renewable or clean energy systems that provide high levels of energy then more people can benefit in a totally digital economy that's why when i sit with prime minister modi or with heads of state in africa they just want to know they're like look i don't want coal i don't want heavy fuel oil i certainly don't want backup diesel generation which is super inefficient 60 cents a kilowatt hour but help me with how i get cheap baseload power how i get batteries so that i can use my wind and solar resources effectively and give me a plan where I can increase the electricity available to my companies and my population by a factor of 10 or

20 over the next 20 years. And right now, the task of helping those countries do that is falling to the Global Energy Alliance, this public-private coalition, which is fine, but it's only fine if public sector entities get on board at much bigger scale. Is the Biden administration doing enough? Or Biden is focused on AI and mostly about regulation and competition with China and not development? Yeah, I would argue no wealthy economy right now is sufficiently focused on the intersection of climate and development. And there was a time 20 years ago when we did big things. We said, hey, we should wipe out the debt that highly indebted countries have, and they

should use that money to get 60 million girls into school. And by the way, that worked. Or we said, there's an AIDS crisis, and we should prevent a whole hollowing out of the populations of 50 countries around the world. And we went out and solved that problem over decades. Those are the kinds of big bets that I write about that we need in the world. And right now, it's absolutely not happening in climate. I think John Kerry's been the hero of the COP to the extent that anything good happened there. You know, I give a lot of credit to the U.S., but really to Secretary Kerry.

But what should it be doing? What should it be doing more? Because most of the action around, say, AI, which is the next important economic development, I think we all can agree, is happening with big companies in wealthy countries for the benefit of wealthy countries? Well, I think two things. One is it should be reshaping the multilateral institutions that it created after World War II. The World Bank, the IMF, the other institutions that have been the leading entities supporting a development vision for the rest of the world. These things were created after World War II with a basic idea, which is if lower income countries can grow and can abide by Western norms and standards around economic management, we will avoid World War III, be safer and more secure and more prosperous. And where that's worked, that has absolutely bared itself out. The problem is in 80 years, we've made almost no changes to these institutions. So we put together an effort called, it's a little technical,

called the Capital Adequacy Framework of the G20. Sorry about the name. But deep analysis shows that you could basically generate hundreds of billions of dollars annually if you modernize these institutions to operate like modern institutions do. Or if, from a global perspective, if the Republicans retake the House, you could just get rid of them. Yeah, unfortunately, they're very hard to get rid of. Or fortunately or unfortunately, they're hard to get rid of. They talk about it. They talk about removing the U.S. from these things. Yeah, to these framework conventions and these other pieces. But the truth is, honestly,

when we've made big progress on big global collective action problems, there have been as much Republican participation and leadership as Democratic. And sometimes that's surprising, but it was George W. Bush that started and ultimately created the framework to beat AIDS around the world. It was when I was in government, we created the framework to beat AIDS around the world. It was when I was in government, we created a framework to reimagine America's leadership on food and hunger. We moved 100 million people off the brink of hunger sustainably by investing in agriculture. The legislation to do that was totally bipartisan and reauthorized twice, including under President Trump. And because there was a very, very

strong Republican faith-based conservative support. So big talk, big talk, the idea of like, let's just let capitalism take care of it. That's what they seem to say. Well, that's what some say. I mean, I've always found progress with bipartisanship happens in private behind closed doors. So, if you listen to what they say on TV, you're going to be really discouraged. But I actually wrote the book, Big Bets to Be Optimistic. And I have a whole chapter in the book that I titled, Make It Personal, because in my experience, it was praying together behind closed doors. It was getting to learn about people's families and where they're from and what their values were that opened their eyes as to how we could partner to transform the fight against hunger. Well, that's sort of a lovely vision, although it doesn't feel like that from a public perspective.

But let's talk about the book Big Bets. Your main takeaway is try to solve the problem, not improve the situation, which is what you're referring to there. Let's not fix these institutions, completely change them. In various stages of your career, you've tackled problems such as childhood vaccinations, the fallout from the earthquake in Haiti, world hunger. Of course, all these problems are still out there. So why do you think working to solve the unsolvable is better than trying to fix it or mitigate it, I guess? Yeah, my pitch is that our mindset changes and our capacity to imagine what it takes to solve a problem changes when we set the goal with high ambition. And instead of that, when we sort of say, let's just do what we can, let's just do the incremental thing, of that, when we sort of say, let's just do what we can, let's just do the incremental thing,

we tend to, you know, we tend to let the pessimism of the day overwhelm our imagination. And so to me, a big bet starts with setting a bold goal, immunizing every child, for example, for basic childhood vaccination. It involves betting on innovations, finding those innovations that are scalable, in this case, childhood vaccination. It involves building super unlikely partnerships across the public sector and private sector, vaccine companies and UNICEF or Republicans and Democrats. And it mostly requires having a discipline around measuring results. And I'd say the examples in the book include immunizing 980 million kids and saving 16 million child lives over 20 years. They include recognizing we could have had 1.6 million cases of Ebola in 2014, including

a few hundred thousand in the United States, and ending that crisis in three small West African countries with only 30,000 cases, two in the United States, no transmission in our borders. 30,000 cases, two in the United States, no transmission in our borders. I take away from all of those examples, including some failures, both lessons learned and an absolute conviction that if we don't actually try to solve these problems, if we don't set the goal impossibly high, we have no chance of success. And if we do, we can actually sometimes succeed. Right. Well, you did also talk about fails in the book. You talked about when you were at the USAID working on a new dam built in Central Africa, the Inga 3. You wrote about something called

the aspiration trap. Can you talk about that? Yeah. The aspiration trap is what I think we just saw at the COP, which is, you know, hey, we know we can't get language on phasing out fossil fuels. So what can we do? And let's embrace all these loopholes to make it possible. Or it's saying we don't have the will right now to finance energy transition in 81 countries around the world. So let's do these super incremental things and hope that that helps. And in lieu of that, if we just set the goal of let's move a billion people out of energy poverty through renewables, recognize that what is required to do it and

put together the partnerships to get that done, that's the counterpoint. And to me, those counterpoints offer real optimism. Now, you mentioned the Inga Dam. I really felt strongly had to include that story because it was a massive failure. After the Sunnylands conference between President Obama and President Xi, America and China decided we would try to do something big and bold together to show the world that these two rising powers can cooperate for good. I ran with that construct and tried to turn the example of that into this large hydropower dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo that would have provided four cents per kilowatt hour power to 250 million people and had

the climate impact of taking one third of the U.S. auto fleet off the road. And so I thought, hey, that's super compelling. I worked for years with all kinds of high level partners, including the Chinese government at the highest levels, only to fail miserably when Senator Leahy passed a piece of legislation that precluded us from engaging in that project. And it was embarrassing and it hurt, you know, but I learned from that, that you have to know who you're betting on when you take on these big projects. And I had underestimated the U.S. environmental community and its impact on Senator Leahy, who's a friend and someone I admire. I had underestimated President Kabila, who ran the DRC, and how he would react.

And I had hoped that he might react in a way that would allow us to abide by our standards and transparency and anti-corruption, but that wasn't the case. And so, you know, I learned from that and say, okay, let's just go to the next big bet, but let's be more conscientious of who we're betting on. Right. But that's always, of course, that's always subject to change. I mean, corruption in the Congo, you're kidding, right? I mean, I'm not an expert. Right. So now we're launching an effort to reach 7 million people with solar in Eastern Congo. And we're doing that in a way that we believe is

protected against corruption we've worked with the government to change the regulatory framework to allow these local developers to be successful we've created a community of local developers that are building out solar we've worked with small businesses that will be the customers of this that are going to buy power improve improve their businesses, create jobs, and bring hope to a place that has been ravaged by unspeakable harms to children, boys and girls. And that gives me hope. But one of the things that seems to happen is ideas get shifted out of whims of a few. And one of the things you and I know have talked about is the rich and the richest, which are largely tech people now, except for Saudi Aramco and maybe

that luxury guy in France. It's tech people. You just look at the numbers, you look at the valuations, remains the top most influential people, and now they're moving into philanthropy. Let's talk about their responsibility and their ideas, because they're quite forceful, whether it's the Gates Foundation or the Bezos Fund or Mark Zuckerberg. Talk a little bit about how you deal with the new rich. It's as if, you know, John D. Rockefeller were walking around and telling you what to do, which I'm sure you would not welcome. Yeah, maybe not so much, right? And

the reality is, I make a big distinction between the super wealthy who have taken the time and put in the hours to both learn deeply about issues from the people who they seek to serve and frankly, from experts and those that have built kind of organizations and institutions populated with those experts versus those who just sort of say, look, I made a lot of money doing one thing. And as a result, I'm really, really smart at everything I can potentially do. And so I'm just going to do this or that without the benefit of that kind of learning process and engagement. And the truth is, I see both. And I put Bill Gates in the first category, and I write about in the book, a learning journey that I had with him and Melinda.

And Melinda was a huge part of it, sitting in homes in rural Nigeria or in Dhaka and Bangladesh and saying, tell me about your life. What really happens here when people try to help and spending their time doing that made a big difference. And then I see philanthropists often in Silicon Valley, but I say that respectful of the ambition, but a little skeptical about the approach where people say, well, I don't need to do that because engineering will just solve the. And I'm going to restructure education in America by engineering a new solution without talking to kids. So I see both. You know, they're also very good at foreign policy, by the way. I don't know if you know that. They know everything about it. They also know about vaccinations, and they know everything.

They're just the best people. But there are lots of different things. Like, you're working with the Bezos Earth Fund, which is dispersing $10 billion over the next 10 years. And yet you have Jeff's ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott, who just is giving away money. Just giving it away. Just, like, on her own. And then, of course, you have your former boss, Bill Gates, is giving away almost all his money into the foundation. And a lot of these issues, of course,

are issues as was back 100 years ago, caused by the big business magnets. Do they have a greater responsibility to solve the problems? And should they do more? And should maybe they stay out of it more, I guess? I would say they have a responsibility to be clear-eyed and honest about what it takes to actually solve these problems. So, for example, if you look at inequity in the United States, in my view, American tax policy and regulatory policy are the prime contributors, especially since the mid-80s to now, to a shift in the level of equity and opportunity that exists in this country. And I give credit to a Warren Buffett who can go out there and say, hey, the rich should be taxed more. Inheritance taxes should be real and collected.

And I pay less taxes as an Uber centibillionaire than my assistant who has a regular day job. And that's just wrong. But the fact that I can only name Warren in saying that is what the problem is. It's like everyone should be saying that because it's so obvious. I'm not obviously a centibillionaire, so I don't know the lifestyle difference between having $100 billion or $70 billion, but I imagine it's not that much. There is none. Exactly. Exactly. So people should be more clear-eyed about that. I think I told you my line, they're so poor, all they have is money. But, you know, charitable gifts reduce the tax burden. When you gift your own charity, you control the money. They love control. So they all get the credit, and U.S. taxpayers

pick up the tab in that regard. Yeah. So it's not quite as generous as it's made out to be. It's not. But at the same time, the philanthropy, when done well, can have extraordinarily positive human benefits. That's usually not the problem. The problem is the political engagement that locks in a system that refuses to take in real tax and regulatory reforms and creates inequity in our economy. Or the problem is the business practices themselves that generate, you know, problems that we then have to deal with. And those businesses being so self-protective, like take social media, that entire industry

lives within Section 230 of the Federal Communication Code that gives them blanket immunity for virtually anything that happens on their platform so we could protect MySpace's ability to be a successful company and InfoSeek in 1996. You know, that's crazy. And those companies, obviously, for self-preservation, invest a lot in protecting those kinds of regulatory safeguards. So I think picking on the philanthropic initiatives when done really, really well, there's some that are done very poorly, and that should be very open to critique. But, you know, what Bill and Melinda have done to

vaccinate children around the world, and not even themselves, I mean, to enable UNICEF and WHO and thousands of local organizations around the planet to put their expertise to use with more resources has been an extraordinary gift to the world. So how do you then approach those ones that are not doing that? They're very rigorous. There's no question. You can have criticism about the Gates Foundation, but it's very rigorous and serious, and I consider them very serious. But there are those who say that billionaire philanthropy has a negative impact on society, and obviously Robert Reich has been pretty vocal about it. There are others who worry that global philanthropy like this is a new form of colonialism. I hate to bring up that word.

How do you take all this money, because they got a lot of it, and they're richer than anyone in the history of the planet, including Cleopatra, I guess. Apparently, she was the richest person on the planet at one point. And get them to do what you want without all the hooks that stick with it. Because they're living. These people are living. Rockefeller's dead. You don't have to deal with him. So what's the best way to channel that money without having to deal with them and their opinions, I guess? You know, I would just point to things that I think offer a path forward. One is collaborate with expert institutions that have a longer track record,

and you can judge them based on what they've done. So the fact that Bezos and Ikea, for example, said, look, we sort of trust you, the Rockefeller Foundation, on this one issue of bringing renewable energy to a billion people that live in energy poverty, and we're going to provide $500 million of our money to you to help build an alliance to do that. That is largely local. That is informed by 110 years of being in these countries, in these markets that will involve building up the human capital base in the DRC, in Nigeria, in Zambia, in India, in Indonesia, and is empowering of others. So that's one path. Another path is, I think, what Mackenzie did. I don't know her, but I look at with awe that she has the ability to say,

you know, I don't have to be smarter than everybody on the things they do. If there's an organization that has been effective at pursuing a social justice goal or providing education to minority kids, let's just get them the resources we have quickly. That I really admire. And, you know, we don't at Rockefeller have the business model or the scale of philanthropy to do that. But that is an alternative approach. And then I'd say the third is for the things that are going to occupy the intellect and the energies of the people that are giving themselves, you know, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Bill Gates's, the Steve Ballmer's, the others. That's where I think the pathway that Rockefeller took 100 years ago and the path that Bill

took 25 years ago is worth studying because what they said was, I'm going to pick one or two issues and I'm going to really learn with humility over time. And that might not be the way they built their businesses, by the way. I don't know. Definitely not Bill Gates, but go ahead. Okay. But I got to work with Bill when we were in that phase. And Melinda and Bill and Patty Stone, everybody was like, okay, we don't know this stuff yet.

So even though we might sound confident amongst ourselves in private, we have a lot of learning to do. And I write in the book about ask a simple question, start from a blank sheet of paper, make some early bets in order to learn. And that discipline of learning rigorously is something that I have seen very, very few philanthropists actually do because it's hard work. And I guess when you're super rich, it might be more fun to go out on the boat than sit in a slum in Dhaka. But my advice would be, if you're going to do it and you're going to make it a big part of who you are and what your contribution in the world is, do the learning deeply and sit in that slum and listen first.

But the larger question, I'd like to answer this finally, is large-scale giving problematic? Relying on the kindness of billionaires really is not a plan, is it? No, it's not a plan. I mean, it's been a plan. It's been a plan. It's not a plan. For us, in our example, it is only worthwhile if it stimulates broader political and social change that makes the world more equitable. And others can judge whether making the world more equitable is what people are trying to do with their philanthropy. I'd argue all day long that at the end of the day, Bill and Melinda, when they established their system, were trying to do that. I'd argue that John D. Rockefeller, when he created our institution, with at the time almost 2% of American GDP,

did it with an idea of using science to lift up those who were living in extreme poverty at home and around the world. But those examples, I think, are very few and very far between. And most philanthropy, there's $800 billion of philanthropy on an annual basis. The vast, vast majority of that is not informed by that deep, absolute, studied, and humble commitment to creating a more equitable world for everybody. And that's perhaps why people look at philanthropy and say, gosh, that's not the solution. And it's not. The solution has to be policy, governance, regulation. We know what it is. You could wipe out child poverty by 50% in America by implementing one small policy. We just tested the child tax credit and making that a part of how we insist on making sure

more American kids don't grow up poor in a wealthy country. So we know what it takes to actually succeed. And when philanthropy understands that and respects that, it's much more honest and much more impactful. All right. We'll end on that. Raj, thank you so much. Thank you, Cara. It's great to be on your show. The rich billionaires are not going to save us. No, they never were. And they shouldn't be in the position to do so.

Yes, and I don't think he was making that argument at all. He's actually a super institutionalist, Raj Shah. Yes, I think he's probably frustrated by the entrance of individual players because it's not organized in any way. It's just whatever is up to the whims of people. Although his book is a big testament to the power of the individual. And he seemed to be paying a lot of kudos to Bill Gates and very diplomatic in his responses about politics and whatnot. But he's kind of making the argument that what we really need is a moment of reinvesting in these institutions, the World Bank, the IMF.

These institutions that have made a lot of headway and not been changed at all over the course of time. Yep, absolutely. You know, it's an important time to think about how we're going to fund these things, especially energy poverty, because nobody can develop without energy and we face also an existential crisis. So it's a critically important thing to focus on.

But carbon capture and carbon credits trading, it's going to save us. It's going to save us. It's part of a multi-faceted solution. I don't think it's the worst thing to do, but it gets people in the frame of mind. But there's got to be better solutions, better energy, cheaper energy loans, just like he was talking about the way they repaired Europe after World War II. It's a similar thing.

You were coming at it from the politics perspective also. What did you think about his answers in terms of the headway that Republicans have made in international development? He's got to work with everybody. This is a man who's got to work with everyone. He wants to get his goals done. It's not someone who has the indulgence of being partisan. It's also truthful, right? I think he's saying that, look at what Bush did for AIDS.

He can't be. He can't be partisan. It's not going to work if you're partisan. And so much has been made political around climate change and everything else. So it doesn't help him to be political. Yeah, but development isn't partisan either. Yeah, but it sure can be. I mean, maybe it's like war. It's like easier for hawks to be peaceful and easier for doves, like Democrats, to take war on. Maybe something similar in development. But

he was a big fan of John Kerry. Yeah, he was. Just for a moment. I think, again, he has to be, he's a very diplomatic man. Well, you do not have to be diplomatic, Kara. I don't. Do you want a diplomatic read us out, though? Yes. Today's show was produced by Neha Maraza, Christian Castro-Rossell, Kateri Yochum, Megan Cunane, and Megan Burney.

Special thanks to Kate Gallagher. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you're making a big bet. If not, you're caught in the aspiration trap. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow.

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