Greg McKeown:
Hello everyone. I’m Greg McKeown, and I’m here with you on this journey to learn.
Have you ever wanted to make a higher contribution, a big impact in the world, but felt perhaps a little hopeless about it all? Perhaps you remember that just a few weeks ago, I compared two great fortunes in America and how one of those fortunes was depleted within two or three generations. In episode 221, A Tale of Two Billionaires, I shared the two rather shocking stories of the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers and how one, the Vanderbilts, fortune was depleted almost to nothing within just a couple of generations, whereas the Rockefellers built a foundation that lasts to this day. Well, that begs the question, what is the Rockefeller Foundation doing, and why does that matter for you and for me anyway?
In today’s episode, which is part one of a two-part interview, we’re welcoming Dr. Rajiv Shah, who is the president of the Rockefeller Foundation. This is a global institution that has a mission to promote the well-being of humanity around the world, but even before that, a rather young-looking Dr. Shah was also the US Aid administrator where he was responsible for leading and reshaping the $20 billion agency that has operations in 70 countries around the world to develop even stronger results.
Dr. Shah is also the author of a new book, Big Bets: How Large-Scale Change Really Happens. By the end of this episode, you will better understand the journey that Rajiv went on in order to be able to make this higher contribution. What were some of the trade-offs that he made along the way? Where did he have to rethink his path? Some of the steps in his journey have been political appointments, and in this podcast, I am, and this is politically independent, but whatever your political persuasion, each of us can still learn from people who are committed to trying to make a difference in the world, as Dr. Shah clearly is. Let’s get to it.
As we’re coming here to the end of the year, it’s a really good time to be able to pull out Effortless, to pull out Essentialism, to realign yourself with these principles to be able to help you find your highest point of contribution both personally and professionally.
Dr. Shaw, welcome to the podcast.
Rajiv Shah:
Thank you. It’s great to be with you.
Greg McKeown:
Can we just go back way back to the beginning? Can you just tell me about your grandparents?
Rajiv Shah:
Sure. Well, my parents are immigrants from India, so their parents lived in different parts of India. My mother’s side of the family was actually quite successful. They were in the cotton milling business, my father’s parents. My father’s dad was an accountant, my grandfather, and one of the stories I write about in the book Big Bets is his big bet was he was such a passionate believer in America, even though he’d never once left India, that he his retirement account to buy a one-way plane ticket from my dad to come to the US as an immigrant with no resources, but with an educational scholarship, and that’s how my family came here in the late 1960s.
Greg McKeown:
I thought that was such an extraordinary part of your story that someone could believe in that way from such a distance. Did you know your grandparents well?
Rajiv Shah:
I did because they came to visit and when I was young they would come to visit and stay with us for extended periods of time, so I got to know them through those visits, and then my grandmother, when my grandfather passed away on my dad’s side, actually lived with us for many years until she passed, so I did get to know them well and I got to appreciate how extraordinarily different being in America in a middle class or upper middle class family was than the world they had for themselves back home.
Greg McKeown:
When did you know the story that you just described to us? Was that something you grew up knowing? My grandfather believed so much in this experiment called America that he launched this whole family opportunity.
Rajiv Shah:
That was something I grew up knowing because what happened was then my parents brought their brothers and their sisters over all again on educational scholarships, but in our very small and close-knit immigrant community, that was a pretty common story. In fact, it was so common that it never occurred to me anybody felt any differently about America until I was older. I just assumed everybody just thought, if this is the one place in the world, if you come here, you work hard, you play by the rules, your kids get a better shot at life than you did, and that was it. That’s all I was ever taught until I was old enough to open my eyes and learn that people have had very different experiences
Greg McKeown:
To some of that broader complexity in the world. Your parents settled in Ann Arbor?
Rajiv Shah:
They did.
Greg McKeown:
Were you born in Ann Arbor?
Rajiv Shah:
I thankfully was. Go blue
Greg McKeown:
And tell me a little of those first few years of your first memory in Ann Arbor was what?
Rajiv Shah:
Well, actually, well, my first memory, who knows what’s memory and what stories that were told. But my mother ran the Montessori school, the early childhood education program for the University of Michigan, and that was a very big deal because she was an Indian woman who was just a few years into being in this country and created that, and that was a pretty important part of our childhood. She always had a Montessori school as I was growing up, and then my dad worked at Ford Motor Company, and so we were all in the Detroit area. You grow up around the auto industry, you just think that’s the whole world. For many years, I just expected I would be an engineer in an auto company or even more, I thought I’d have one of my own. That’s what we dreamed about in that setting.
Greg McKeown:
But that’s still really telling that you were in an environment where a dream that seemed plausible. Tell me more. That’s exactly how it was. Tell me more.
Rajiv Shah:
Yeah, because, so I grew up, so back then the public schools around Detroit actually offered, not even offered, they were required that you took pre-engineering, drafting, and automotive design. These were classes you took as a middle school kid with T squares and protractors and the like, and so I do make reference to it in the book, but it was without question sort of the path that, and it’s what made so many things interesting, like science was interesting because you could take your Pinewood Derby race car and test it in a wind tunnel and try to win a race. It’s like it was very applied science back in that timeframe because that industry was such a big part of our lives and a big part of the American story.
Greg McKeown:
Was it then more the effect of the culture of the school or more this Montessori type parenting that you would most attribute that sense of possibility to?
Rajiv Shah:
Well, probably all of the above and to some extent just being in a family where we were incredibly aware of the sacrifices our parents and grandparents made to come to this country. Actually, my first true, honest memory, I close my eyes and see the picture was when I was a little bit older, but my grandfather came to the United States on a visit to meet with my parents and to stay with us, and my dad, who was kind of a pretty frugal person – still is love you dearly dad. Sorry about that. But he had his dad, he had his dad pay for his own plane ticket to come visit because back then if you paid in rupees, the Indian currency, it was a little cheaper than if you paid in dollars. And then it was always his intention to pay my dad back, my grandfather back.
So when my grandfather arrived, he got off the plane and you could go all the way up to the gate back then, and so he gets off the plane and he and my grandmother, and he’s just like ashen in tears, and he was so worried that, oh my gosh, my son went to America and didn’t have enough money to buy my plane ticket. He must be in trouble. I need to go help him.
Then when he arrived, and the two of them spoke, they just gave each other a hug, and they both started crying because they realized, no, my dad was just saving some money on the ticket, but actually he was fine and everything was going to be okay. So we always deeply understood the sacrifice of an immigrant family to be in a different place, and that coupled with given great opportunities in school and in other settings, I think made us all pretty focused. My sister’s a surgeon on the Upper East Side in New York, and so she’s the same sort of story.
Greg McKeown:
What kind of a student were you?
Rajiv Shah:
I was pretty good. I thought I was a better student than I was, in retrospect.
Greg McKeown:
Why? What does that mean?
Rajiv Shah:
Oh, it just means we were digging through old report cards and I was realizing my recollection of those scores were a little bit higher than what they actually were.
Greg McKeown:
Interesting. So you recalled yourself as what? How did you remember it?
Rajiv Shah:
Oh, straight A kid.
Greg McKeown:
But when you read the reports, you found…
Rajiv Shah:
Somewhere between A’s and B’s.
Greg McKeown:
Interesting, because it means that, it means that, I know I don’t want to make a huge thing of it, but it means that you had a perception of yourself as excellent. That’s who I am. Even if some of the data, I mean it’s A’s and B’s, it’s not like something shocking, but somehow you have garnered in a sense of I am competent. I can learn. I am intelligent. I’ve always performed at a very high level that’s like self-identity describing there.
Rajiv Shah:
Yeah. There’s one I write about in the book, one particular activity when I was young called policy Debate. It’s something that’s available throughout the country and you’re given a topic and you have two person teams and you travel around and it’s sort of structured debate and argumentation, and I fell in love with that activity. That was where I thrived, won championships, did really well and developed the sense of confidence from that engagement. So that was a pretty big part of my childhood. And then what was interesting was one moment in the history of Detroit and myself is when I was a junior or so in high school, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and in Detroit we didn’t get the biggest visitors. It was a wonderful place, but it wasn’t New York or LA or something.
Well, when Mandela was released, he came to the United States and he came to Detroit and he did an event on the assembly line at the River Rouge Auto Plant, and he spoke to auto workers. He went to Tiger Stadium, which is where our baseball team played and did a huge event. Stevie Wonder opened for him. It was very Motown, and he closed his amazing speech, which I was watching on television and just transfixed by his multi-day visit. He closed his speech by saying to the people of Detroit, I want to tell you from the people of South Africa that we admire you, we respect you, but above all we love you.
And I just thought how amazing that someone who’s been imprisoned for decades comes to Detroit, pretty gritty city and talks in front of 50,000 people about love and social justice and right and wrong. And I realized in that moment that I wanted to do something with my life of service knowing full well I was never going to be a saint like Nelson Mandela, but I was also not really sure how to go about being involved in giving back and in social justice work. And so I spent the next many years trying to find my way.
Greg McKeown:
It seems to me that without the kind of suffering of a Mandela, you can’t become a Mandela. It is just not available. In a sense, thank goodness, it’s not available to most people, so a certain kind of greatness has to be thrust upon you with a certain amount of suffering. It seems to me.
Now a question I have about that moment, you’re describing it as defining, is that in hindsight it was defining or was it a very present moment in that moment, literally in that moment, something awakened in you?
Rajiv Shah:
I think in hindsight, I think in hindsight, because when I’m saying, okay, I knew I still went to med school, I knew I was going to go to professional work either as an engineer or a doctor. That was sort of what we did.
Greg McKeown:
That is the Indian way.
Rajiv Shah:
Exactly. If you can, that’s what you do. But I think that sort of lit up in me a spark to do something different, but I didn’t know what that different was and I didn’t know how to take that and do something with it. It just created a sense of aspiration and hope, and it maybe in the future led to more decision-making that I, at least for me in the moment, was relatively courageous. No one else would look back and consider that, but no, not right away.
Greg McKeown:
So I want to go back for a moment to these policy debates that you did because that was over a period of time, and I can easily see that as you are starting to do well in them, as you are in the best moments speaking in a way that is spell-binding for the audience, you experience something really rare for a teenager to have a whole audience paying attention to, in fact, doing it in a way that you are winning these. There is something about that early experience that I imagine was defining in the moment. Am I reading that wrong?
Rajiv Shah:
On the debate side, I think so many kids who end up building enough confidence to do something that they’re really proud of in their lives have something in their childhood that gave them a lot of confidence. And for me, that was it. And I write about my high school coach because he was the individual who instilled a work ethic in me to do it. I write about my teammates because it was a team activity, and it’s the whole picture, it’s the hard work. It’s doing all the research, it’s learning a ton of stuff about something you might never have otherwise known about, and then it’s performing even like any sport, it’s not just the performing, it’s all the work that goes into it. And so that was my defining childhood experience that gave me confidence.
Greg McKeown:
But you still left that planning to be a doctor.
Rajiv Shah:
Yeah.
Greg McKeown:
So take us on that next part of your journey. So you’re finishing high school, you go to university where?
Rajiv Shah:
So I went to the University of Michigan, not far.
Greg McKeown:
Had you traveled through your life at this point? I mean, had you gone out of the country?
Rajiv Shah:
Yeah, we had gone primarily to India actually on some trips when I was young and then across the US to different places, but not a lot of travel, but enough, and I was fortunate for it. But Michigan, I just grew up loving it, wanted to go, didn’t really know, didn’t consider a whole lot of options, and was thrilled to be there. And I loved it. And at Michigan, I sort of started to learn more in a disciplined way about policy, politics, economics, inequality – became more active in efforts to address hunger and inequality in particular. And that led to a course of study primarily in economics, and then a year at the London School of Economics.
And so when I came back from all of that, at that point, I was pretty intent that I wanted to do something in policy and public service, but it’s hard to shake the doctor thing when you’re an Indian American kid back in that frame. So I just thought I would do it all. So I went to med school at Penn, I went to the business school there too, to get a PhD in health economics. I ended up with a master’s. And it wasn’t until I took my final set of board exams that my then girlfriend, now wife and I got in my car and drove 14 hours and joined Al Gore’s presidential campaign as a volunteer in Nashville, Tennessee. And that was really the main moment that I acted upon my sort of stated desire to do that.
Greg McKeown:
That’s the moment that you took action down a certain path, but at some point prior to that, you had to decide you wanted, I mean, you called it public service, which it is, but it’s a political ambition. Of course, there’s a multitude of motivations we all have for anything that we’re doing, but part of it is political ambition. When did that happen? Is it at LSE or it must have been before then because you only studied LSE because you say, oh, I actually really want to understand this side of the world. What was the ambition at that point?
Rajiv Shah:
I didn’t actually know all the answers to those questions. What I knew was that I wanted to understand, especially why some countries and communities were like America with a lot of development and a ton of wealth and seemingly very minor levels of real people suffering with want and poverty and why others were like India, where 50, 60% of the population lives and what we would’ve called poverty back in that time where we don’t have enough to eat, where my grandmother would tell the story of skipping meals all the time so that her kids could eat, even though her husband was an accountant at a bank. How does that happen? And then trips back to India. And my course of study really just intensified the desire to want to both know why and the sort of huge ambition to want to do something really dramatic to solve that problem, right?
You’re a kid; you dream about solving big problems. And so yeah, LSE was a place where I could study those topics from some of the best professors in development and development economics. That was definitely true. And get exposure to leaders around the world, political leaders around the world that would come there to talk and meet with students. And so, by the time I got back, I knew I wanted to do something, but I was on a path. So I went to med school, and in med school, I loved the science part of it, and the cadaver lab, in particular, was my favorite part.
Greg McKeown:
That part sounds awful to me.
Rajiv Shah:
Oh, it was so interesting.
Greg McKeown:
I understand this, and the doctors I’ve spoken to really seem to be drawn to that. My brother-in-law is a doctor – the same.
Rajiv Shah:
But frankly, it was one professor who sort of said, “Raj, look, your dream is to give this a shot. You should try it.”
And I applied twice to the Gore campaign and got rejected. And then, actually, Gore’s campaign was floundering; it was struggling. And he actually picked it up and moved it from Washington DC to Nashville, Tennessee. And in the process, he lost maybe half of his staff, and that’s when someone said, “Hey, you should try a third time.”
So I tried again to apply, and they finally said, “Okay, we won’t pay you, but if you come, we’ll give you housing.”
So at the end of that 14-hour drive that day, we ended up in Al Gore’s best pool house. That’s where I lived for the next six months as I learned about what an American presidential campaign was like.
Greg McKeown:
And what was it like?
Rajiv Shah:
Well, first, it was miserable. I was much older than all the other volunteers who were local high school kids.
Greg McKeown:
Wow. So how many were high school kids that you were with versus you?
Rajiv Shah:
Oh, probably seven or eight kind of high school kids, myself as the sort of youngish person as a volunteer, and then sort of older individuals who bring food to the campaign office for everybody else because there is a difference between volunteers and staff. So there were plenty of people my age who were staff in real jobs, but the volunteers were kind of off to the side. And then, over time, I got a job and was on the policy and research team, and then met all these amazing people, some of whom, most of whom have gone on to be both great friends and extraordinary people. They’ve done amazing things in public and government. Jason Furman, who ran our Council of Economic Advisors, and Philippe Reus, who went on to be a strategic communications leader in democratic politics. And Jeff Nussbaum, a renowned author who’s a great speech writer to multiple presidents. And the list goes on and on of people who’ve contributed in so many different ways. But at the time, we were all just kids working on the research and policy team and the Gore campaign.
Greg McKeown:
So what would a day in the life have looked like for you?
Rajiv Shah:
Back on the campaign? Oh, it was pretty monotonous living. I mean, we would go to the office in the morning, sit at our desk, do what we were told a lot of research on issues like healthcare and foreign policy, a lot of responding to doing the research so that others could respond to reporter inquiries about things. We did debate briefs to prepare the vice president, Vice President Gore, for his debates at that time against Bill Bradley, who was his in the primary and then later in the general campaign. And then as we kind of matured into those roles, then we would brief reporters, and we would start being more forward-facing and crafting policy and making arguments in support of those policies. But it was definitely a climb up that ladder.
Greg McKeown:
I’m wondering how it’s different then versus now that would’ve been pre-social media. I mean, it was certainly the age of 24-hour cable news. It’s like the CNN in its heyday, that kind of phase. How do you see it different then versus now? Just any reflections on that?
Rajiv Shah:
I think now it’s also instantaneous, and frankly, now there’s so much misinformation out there in different channels that our primary job, which was ascertaining what was true and what was not, almost seems like it must be very different today when so much of what goes around and is learned is simply not true. And so people might not even care that a candidate says it’s not true. And so anyway, I assume it’s quite different and much faster-paced.
But the basic tenets of, frankly, that’s the work, the thing you really get out of a campaign experience like that is the feeling of what it’s like to be on a presidential campaign, to be forced to articulate what that side believes is right for the country and why. And frankly, the friendships you make along the way, whether you recognize it at the time or not. And one of the reasons I loved writing the book was I realized myself as I went through different chapters in my future when I served in the Obama administration and now run the Rockefeller Foundation; there are so many times when I lean on the comradery and the intellect and the friendship and partnership of the five to ten folks that were in that, we called it the cage in that cage in Nashville together.
Greg McKeown:
So those high school students have gone with you.
Rajiv Shah:
And the staff that were in the cage.
Greg McKeown:
Okay. So while you are there, are you having, you have to have been thinking, would I want to do this one day? You have to be, I can’t see anybody doing that without at least thinking about that. And maybe that’s sort of why someone’s doing it at some level, even if they don’t want to say so. What are your thoughts about this at that time?
Rajiv Shah:
Yeah, I was learning it all in real-time and loving it. And then the thought in my mind was, when we win, I’m going to get a job in the White House. And there was a show back then called The West Wing, which made it all very glamorous, and everything you said was pithy and fun and intelligent. But that was the vision of success. And then, of course, we didn’t quite win that race, and so I ended up unemployed.
Greg McKeown:
What is that moment like? So you are through all of the recounts in Florida, the back and forth, the will it happen, won’t it happen all the way to Vice President Gore actually saying, okay, I’m calling it and the Supreme Court stepping into, like all of that. You are there through all of that.
Rajiv Shah:
I was, and frankly, I was at the Naval Observatory, which is the Vice President’s residence, the night he took his limousine to the White House to deliver his concession speech in December of that year, many weeks after the election. And that concession speech actually was one of the most special moments in American political history.
Greg McKeown:
I think that’s true.
Rajiv Shah:
And really, there was so much in there that’s so rich, including his love of country and his commitment to honor the ideals of the country over himself. But also this phrase that he quoted from his father that I actually refer to a lot, which is that “defeat, as well as victory, can shake the soul and let its glory out.”
I thought that was a beautifully phrased. That has gone on to help me, at least through moments that have felt like defeat.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. Well, the inherent ups and downs, every success story, there’s no exception to that. There’s nobody, it just appears that way to people sometimes. Oh, the rise and rise of whoever or whatever business or whatever band, it’s like, yeah, that’s just the part you see. You just don’t see all the misery, all the uncertainties, all the failure moments before it. And I completely agree with you.
Do you have any in-it front-row observations of that moment before he gets in the limousine and goes to the White House that you remember?
Rajiv Shah:
I just remember the sense of purpose. It was like once he had made that judgment in his mind, I mean, there was actually a tent in the yard, and there was a concert going on, and it was part of a thank you to some of the folks who had been on the campaign, which was why we were all there. And so he left. We all watched him deliver this thing, a short speech that changed our country, came back, and then we had a party for the next three hours. And it included Stevie Wonder performed, and I remember John Bon Jovi was in the crudités line. Just a fun, surreal, fun. It’s a surreal evening.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, because it’s a celebration in the midst of this defeat, all this emotion, part of history, living history, no question. And what a rare, unusual moment to be a part of.
You don’t have a job in the White House. I mean, that has got to have been a pretty rough moment. You’ve got a lot of good things behind you already. It’s not like you have no options. But the difference between the West Wing vision, four to eight years of a whole amazing experience that just was right there. I mean, of course, we have often thought about it from Al Gore’s point of view, but I mean all of the staff, you are there. What did you do next? How did you deal with your own disappointment with that and turn it into a success?
Rajiv Shah:
Well, I went back to Philadelphia, where I was still finishing up some coursework at Penn and in grad school, and started looking for a job and tried a bunch of things, some of which didn’t work, some of which were fun to do, but not really a career. I worked on in the New York mayoral campaign next.
Greg McKeown:
So still in politics.
Rajiv Shah:
Yeah, still trying to find a path in that space.
Greg McKeown:
Trying to find the star to hang with. Al Gore was supposed to do it for me. It didn’t get me there. So you’re trying other things. And then?
Rajiv Shah:
Well, and then one day, a friend from the campaign called and said, Bill and Melinda Gates have started this foundation, and they’re looking for someone with this kind of a background who’s interested in economics but also knows about health and medicine and do you want to go meet with them? And so I said, sure, absolutely. And the next thing you know, I was working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in its earliest days.
Greg McKeown:
Who was it that reached out to you? You don’t have to say the name. What was the role?
Rajiv Shah:
Well, he was the former chief of Staff of the campaign itself, and then he was tasked by Bill and Melinda’s name is David Lane, and he’s a great friend, and he was tasked by them to help build out a small team in Washington that could help think through policy and finance types of issues related to our work.
Greg McKeown:
It is, let’s say, an extraordinarily good fit for you.
Rajiv Shah:
I mean, certainly, in retrospect, but I loved it from the get-go.
Greg McKeown:
But you didn’t recognize it necessarily as this sort of godsend moment when it started?
Rajiv Shah:
No, because it was a philanthropy, and I didn’t know what that meant. I really didn’t. And I didn’t also think you could. I was a young person coming out of a good school and looking for a career. I didn’t think that was a career path. I literally thought that’s what happens when people make a lot of money and then give it away later in life.
Greg McKeown:
I mean, that is kind of true, but the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for those not really familiar with it. I mean, it’s so vastly funded. It’s not really like other philanthropies. And, of course, that’s true with the Rockefeller Foundation too. It’s an unusual type of opportunity. So you really didn’t understand or maybe appreciate the full scope of what this would mean or how it would introduce you to people. Maybe it was so young in its development that wasn’t obvious at that time, but you enjoyed it from the first moment. How long did you end up staying there?
Rajiv Shah:
I was there for eight years. And I’ll tell you I enjoyed it, and I write in the book about some of the experiences, but part of it was the book is called Big Bets because it’s about setting bold ambitions for helping to change the world at scale. And I really learned that mindset from the team, including Bill and Melinda, but from the team that had been assembled there that was trying to ask all of us how could we possibly immunize every child on the planet in an effort to save as many lives as possible?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah. So that was interesting the way you said that. You said from the people on the team, also from Bill and Melinda. Why the distinction?
Rajiv Shah:
Oh, just the team, I mean, by the time I joined, the team was already pretty exceptional. A woman named Sylvia Matthews, who’s now known as Sylvia Burwell, who was the Health and Human Services secretary for President Obama, was a leader at the foundation already. David Lane, I mentioned, had joined Patty Stonesipher, a seasoned executive from Microsoft, was the CEO. Bill’s Father, Bill Sr., really set the tone about how we have these resources, but boy, are we going to be good listeners and really humble as we listen because we know nothing compared to a teacher who’s taught second grade for 20 years if we’re going to try to help improve American education. And we don’t know as much as those experts out there that have worked on health in Africa and Asia if we’re going to try to make a difference there. So he set the cultural tone.
And then Bill and Melinda were very involved. And I write about Bill’s. The first lesson from Bill I call, ask a simple question. He would gather us in the conference room and just hammer away at how much does it cost to immunize a single child? Because if you didn’t have the answer to that, you couldn’t understand what it would cost to vaccinate all 104 million kids that were born every year at that time and do that over and over again. And you couldn’t begin to solve a problem if you didn’t understand its scale and the needs.
Greg McKeown:
Well, that’s a wrap for part one of this interview with Dr. Shah. I think it’s a fascinating story to just look at the journey that he went on to be able to see which trade-offs he made. And I put this to you as you are coming to the end of this episode, what is something that stood out to you? What is something that you can do differently because of this conversation? And who is somebody that you can share this with so that the conversation continues now that the podcast has come to an end? Thank you. Really, thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
