Welcome back everybody. I'm Greg McEwan and I'm the author of Essentialism and also Effortless,

two New York Times bestsellers, but really in those books and beyond I am here with you,

on this journey to learn and to share the things that I'm learning along the way.

Go back with me a few years ago. Do you remember that there was an unbelievable outbreak of Ebola?

in West Africa. Every day the news explained how more cases had been discovered than the day before.

Perhaps you remember as I did how close we got to a full worldwide

pandemic of a completely different level than the COVID pandemic that we all experienced and

went through. We got so close to something that would have been more like the black plague

that destroyed half of Europe. A curse so strong it's a miracle that humanity even survived it.

And maybe you don't remember it because after all it's closer to 10 years ago now and because

it didn't turn into that. In Effortless there's a whole chapter that I give to the

powerful idea of prevention. When you prevent something serious from happening that is often

10x leverage because you intercept a problem that would be massively discombobulating.

Well we explore this in part two of my conversation with Dr. Shah. Dr. Shah is the president

of the Rockefeller Foundation right now. He previously to that was responsible for USAID including

being on the very front lines of the response to that Ebola crisis. Now you may never have heard

of Dr. Shah before. You may not have followed the story especially closely but you can be

absolutely sure that the work that he and others around him did prevented an unbelievably

dire situation from happening around the world. As is often the case we don't always remember the

people that prevent problems. That's part of the problem that's the disincentive.

But in this episode we get to celebrate somebody who did and whatever our political persuasions

happen to be. We can be grateful that people like Dr. Shah have stepped up to contribute in their

...