Todd J. Moss

They are troves of expertise.

They are also, according to Todd Moss, who has spent a career inside these institutions, Wasting way too much time and effort writing policy papers that no one in government will ever read and missing opportunities to affect change in the real world.

These organizations that are built to influence how government works and improve policy decisions have too often lost the plot when it comes to what government officials actually do on a daily basis and how to be helpful to those people, Moss says.

He's on a sort of personal crusade to rethink the modern think tank.

This was a conversation about the real work of policy change.

It was also a conversation about leadership, how to build and lead an organization with clear priorities and tactics at a time when attention is a scarce commodity.

Here's Todd Moss.

Todd Moss, welcome to the podcast.

And the really cool thing about that was I invited a few people that I get to work with a lot now.

One was Todd Moss, who I had just observed from a distance at Breakthrough meetings.

I was quite intimidated by the energy for development space.

I felt deeply unqualified to work in the space, but I really admired Todd Moss's work, and the same tweet that has circled the world a million times is the, "My fridge uses more energy than the average..." I can't remember which country it was now, but I'll link to it in the show notes.

And so I used all my courage, invited Todd Moss [laughs] to speak at the Stanford Symposium, and we had, like, this three-day awesome symposium that was, at the time, like, the highlight of my personal professional life so far.

And as a result of that engagement, I got to be a founding member of the Energy for Growth Hub board, which Todd still runs, and that has just been a delightful engagement.

And so my plan has always been that, you know, get the kids through college.

I really want us to focus on things we can do that are catalytic toward modern industrial energy.

Uh, I think the sums that have been thrown around are such that, you know, we should be able to, uh, uh, sort of seed lots of think tanks, uh, that are country specific, um, and, you know, find ways of coordinating them.

Uh, together with a friend of mine, Todd Moss, we, we, uh, we're hoping to start an initiative that, you know, coordinates African think tanks, uh, uh, uh, for, for growth, uh, funded by, uh, a philanthropy, an American-based philanthropy.

Uh, news will be out soon on, on, on this hopefully.

Uh, and so, you know, we, we, we hope to have a world where, uh, African think tanks work on growth.