Come with me on an exploration of self-discovery. On this podcast, we decipher what really matters as we unravel the chaos of day-to-day work to learn how to build an essential life.

Today I have, on the What's a Central Podcast, Beyond Lomburg, loosely speaking, he's a genius.

He's a political scientist. He heads the Copenhagen consensus, which has done something really rare, and certainly grabbed my attention the moment I became aware of it.

He has gone through a process of prioritizing the world's greatest problems, global warming, poverty, disease, based on how effective our solutions might be.

So there's a lot more that Beyond has done professionally in his educational pursuits, his academic work, but this is the focus of today's conversation.

It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the What's a Central Podcast.

Great. It's great to be here.

Can you give us some context for setting up the Copenhagen consensus and the process you followed to prioritization?

Because this is to me a non-trivial achievement. Let me say by way of a little further context.

I have spent a decent amount of time at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in various venues.

I have talked to people who organized the United Nations development goals, whether the millennial goals or the replacement to those.

As an essentialist, I've advocated pretty strongly for prioritized lists, and despite all of that, I have, let's say, failed in my efforts.

Because when they came out with the replacement millennial development goals, I recall 17 of them, not prioritized, as in any sense.

And so it's just a list, and I'm not arguing that they aren't important items, but there's just so many of them.

What do you do? And so we're acting as if there aren't trade-offs, and this has ramifications, you took a different approach. Go.

Well, thank you, Greg, and I've got to say we share something very important in common.

We clearly both failed to get most people, and certainly you can listen to prioritization.

Fundamentally, prioritization is an obvious thing. It's something you do every day.

Something you do as a person, you know, you don't have enough time, you don't have enough resources.

You have to choose to do some things over other things. It's not that you wouldn't like to do everything.

It's simply that you can't, and we do this as organizations, we certainly do this if we run companies, and politicians do this for the countries as well.

So we always prioritize, and the trick, of course, is even if we don't talk about prioritization, we end up prioritizing because we can't do everything.

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