Tacit Knowledge

In this episode, host Kumar talks to Adam Goff, Director of Origination at Renaissance Philanthropy. Adam is a self-described dilettante with a polymath’s nose for big-if-true opportunities, who keeps digging until he finds areas that are high leverage and under-explored.

Adam talks about cardiovascular disease as the single largest cause of death, cheap and proven fixes like adding potassium to salt and breeding more nutritious crops, and why the world is fundamentally slow at moving on opportunities. He dives into how an interloper operates in the gaps left by experts’ constraints, and how he has used AI agents to industrialize the search for big and easy ideas.

Adam reflects on the lessons that shape his approach: work for incredible people early on, build on strengths, find what compounds over time, and ask good questions that turn expert lectures into joint problem solving.

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What does a Director of Origination at Renaissance Philanthropy actually do?

Adam Goff helps design and develop new thesis-driven philanthropic funds — scanning a huge range of topics to find problems that are both big in scale and genuinely tractable, then building the case for a fund around them.

What is Adam's pitch for an overlooked cardiovascular disease intervention?

Cardiovascular disease causes over a quarter of all deaths globally, yet some of the cheapest ways to reduce it — like reformulating salt to include more potassium relative to sodium — get far less attention than infectious disease research or novel drug development, despite proven philanthropic playbooks (fortification, crop breeding) that already exist to deliver them.

Is there real evidence that a salt substitute reduces deaths?

Yes. The Salt Substitute and Stroke Study (SSaSS), a large randomized controlled trial in rural China, found that replacing regular salt with a reduced-sodium, potassium-added substitute reduced stroke risk by about 14%, major cardiovascular events by about 13%, and death by about 12%, with no increase in serious adverse events.

Why would a solution this well-evidenced still be neglected?

Adam points to a structural "silo problem": the people positioned to act — doctors, RCT researchers, mechanism scientists — don't see commercializing or scaling food fortification as their job. He argues the world is fundamentally slow to act even on fixes we know work, meaning tens of millions of preventable deaths can occur in the gap between proof and adoption.

What is the "big and easy" framework Adam uses to find opportunities?

A filtering approach that scans across many problems for ones that are both high-impact ("big") and genuinely tractable ("easy") rather than politically or technically intractable — distinguishing real opportunities, like fixing salt composition, from ones that only look simple, like a carbon tax.

How does Adam use AI in this process?

AI lets him systematize searches that used to depend on personal intuition and scattered reading — for example, running parallel research agents across millions of nutrition papers to flag which interventions are proven, how many people would benefit, and what the next step would be — freeing up his limited hours for direct conversations with experts.

What is the "interloper" role Adam describes playing?

Acting as a connective, non-expert integrator across philanthropy, nonprofits, universities, and companies — gaps that exist because, unlike in markets, there's no built-in financial incentive pushing someone to coordinate across those silos and speed up adoption of what already works.

What historical example does Adam cite for compressing timelines on hard problems?

Dan Wattendorf's 2011 pitch to DARPA asking whether a vaccine could be built in under a year — work that became DARPA's ADEPT program and fed into the rapid development pathway later used for mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.

On mentorship, reading, and asking better questions

Special Guest: Adam Goff.

Links:

• Adam Goff

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Twitter: (at)ishan_sharma3

What is geologic hydrogen, and how is it different from manufactured hydrogen?

Geologic hydrogen (Geo H₂) forms naturally underground, for example when water reacts with iron-rich rock, so it can be found and produced rather than manufactured with expensive, energy-intensive processes. Ishan argues it is zero-emission and potentially a fraction of the cost of today's hydrogen. He cites the estimate that about 2% of the hydrogen thought to be in the ground could meet civilizational needs for centuries.

What is the Chimaera Fund?

The Chimaera Fund is Renaissance Philanthropy's field-building fund, directed by Ishan Sharma, aimed at making geologic hydrogen a credible part of the energy mix in the 2030s. Ishan says the field has already drawn roughly $1 billion in private investment, so the fund isn't trying to compete with startups. It aims to grow the overall pie with open-source testbeds, data sharing, and policy work modeled on what worked in shale and geothermal.

Why does Ishan see geologic hydrogen as essential to decarbonization?

He argues that cheap solar has largely solved the "green electron" half of the emissions problem. The remainder, in food systems and heavy industry like steel and chemicals, needs a cheap green molecule, and he doesn't see manufactured green hydrogen arriving before roughly 2045–2050. Industrial plants are making capital decisions in the next 5–7 years that could lock in emissions for about 40 years. In his view, geologic hydrogen is the only option that could affect that decision window.

What can shale and geothermal teach us about scaling a new energy industry?

Ishan points to a pattern: both industries spent decades in slow, localized progress before inflection points driven by government-backed testbeds and companies sharing subsurface data. Geothermal went from a first well in the 1920s to a Department of Energy testbed in Utah and, now, Fervo Energy's public listing. His conclusion is that opening up solutions and data early is the fastest path to scale, measured in years rather than decades.

How did Chimaera get private companies to share subsurface data?

It started small: one company, a grant of roughly $250K, and an ask for the metadata version of its data rather than the proprietary data itself. Researchers could then propose studies based on what the company actually had. Once that first company signed on and Chimaera announced it at a major geologic hydrogen conference, several dozen other companies asked to do something similar. Early wins then became proof of credibility, including work with the U.S. Air Force and real operating companies.

What is Chimaera working on next?

Ishan previewed a $10M grand-prize challenge with the Japan Cabinet Office to drill the first hydrogen well, and a test bed in East Africa. The East Africa work is framed around reducing smallholder farmers' dependence on imported ammonia, not just emissions. Both were described as upcoming, not yet announced, at the time of recording.

What is the Law of Requisite Variety, and how does Chimaera apply it?

Ishan describes it as the idea that the entity with the most flexibility in a system has the greatest control over its outcome. Chimaera applies it by staying deliberately nimble instead of building headcount. One example he gives is walking away from a donation of about 1,200 acres for test beds to pivot to a faster-moving opportunity.

On careers, credibility, and field-building

Special Guest: Ishan Sharma.

Links:

• Ishan Sharma

In this episode, host Kumar talks to David Carel, Director of the Inspired Air Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy. David has spent a decade working on the most pressing problems in health and education, and his latest project aims to boost student health and learning outcomes by improving air quality in classrooms.

David discusses the transformative potential of improving the air we breathe indoors, where we spend about 90% of our time, and the surprising things we’re learning about airborne illness. He also shares how he stays motivated in his work to sustainably improve conditions in the classroom, even when the going gets tough.

David talks about the mentors throughout his career who have taught him to be the adult in the room when no one else is tackling an issue, and the power of using emotional intelligence to push through the self-doubt that affects all founders.

Hosted by Kumar Garg

https://x.com/davidcarel

What is the Inspired Air Fund (formerly the Clean Air for Schools Fund)?

A new fund at Renaissance Philanthropy, led by David Carel, focused on improving indoor air quality in schools — both to reduce airborne disease transmission and to improve learning outcomes. It sits at the intersection of health, education, and biosecurity policy.

Why does indoor air quality matter more than most people assume?

People spend roughly 90% of their time indoors, so indoor air quality — not just outdoor pollution — determines most of a person's actual exposure. Wildfire smoke advisories that tell people to "go inside" miss this: outdoor air gets drawn inside buildings too, and indoor spaces also generate their own pollution, from manufactured furniture, engineered wood, and even human aerosols from people who are sick.

What's the evidence that clean air improves learning, not just health?

Air filtration has been shown to cut school absenteeism by 10–20%, and lower carbon dioxide and VOC levels have been linked to measurably better cognitive performance. JPMorgan Chase's new $3 billion Park Avenue headquarters doubled its ventilation rate above code specifically because Harvard research found doing so yields a return worth thousands of dollars per employee per year in productivity.

Why has indoor air quality remained a blind spot despite living through a pandemic?

David argues it falls into a structural gap: philanthropy and policy are organized into verticals like health, education, and environment, and indoor air quality doesn't fully belong to any one of them, so it rarely becomes anyone's top priority even when it would meet the bar for impact in each vertical individually.

Why did public health take so long to accept that diseases could spread through the air?

For most of the 20th century, airborne transmission was accepted only for tuberculosis and measles; other respiratory illnesses were assumed to spread via large droplets or surfaces. The WHO initially stated early in the Covid-19 pandemic that the virus was not airborne. Science journalist Carl Zimmer's book Air-Borne traces this history and argues it left the world underprepared for Covid.

What historical precedent does David point to for solving this at scale?

The late-19th-century clean water movement, which built modern water infrastructure and dramatically cut typhoid rates within a generation. David frames indoor air as a comparable infrastructure opportunity: a relatively low-cost, low-administrative-burden intervention that could address multiple problems — disease transmission, pandemic preparedness, and cognitive development — at once.

What is the Fund currently building?

A cities competition focused on clean air in schools, designed to learn from the successes and failures of past municipal competitions and challenges. David's ask is for input from people with experience designing these kinds of competitions, and from people with insight into how to coordinate across the health departments, environmental agencies, school systems, and mayor's offices a program like this would need to touch.

On agency, uncertainty, and following the thread

Special Guest: David Carel.

Links:

• David Carel

In this episode, host Kumar speaks with Cara Eckholm, the founder of Pilot City and a Fellow at Renaissance Philanthropy. An urbanist at heart, Cara has thought deeply about how to build relationships between local governments and their constituent researchers and technologists.

Describing herself as a "tri-sector athlete" who has moved between government, academia, and the private sector, Cara talks about growing Pitch Fest, which pairs city government agencies with academics and civic technologists willing to help solve specific, openly shared problems, from 100 attendees and a few agencies in its first year to 40 participating agencies and 104 pitches, with 100 of those pitches drawing at least one interested expert.

Cara talks about collaborations, cold-emailing, and the power of connection.

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LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cara-eckholm-506b2236/

A matchmaking program, started by Cara Eckholm in New York, where city agencies pitch specific problems they need help with and local researchers or technologists apply to work with them — flipping the usual model where academics pitch ideas in search of a government partner.

City agencies present problem statements in short, informal pitches (originally modeled on how Stanford classes help students find startup co-founders). Interested researchers and technologists then apply to work with a specific agency, and the agency chooses who they want to work with from the applicant pool.

Eckholm observed that both sides were siloed: academics and civic technologists had ideas for improving cities but no government partner, while city agencies had unmet needs but no channel to reach outside talent. Starting with the agency's stated problem — the "buyer" — rather than a researcher's proposal solved the matching problem directly.

A metro population of at least a million, a government champion willing to publicly share unsolved problems (which runs against how most agencies communicate), and either a research university or an active civic tech community — most U.S. cities already have the latter.

Economist Al Roth was approached by an NYC Department of Education official who had read his work on medical residency matching and asked him to help redesign the city's high school placement process. The redesign was later adopted in Boston, and Roth went on to win a Nobel Prize for that work and related market-design research, including kidney-exchange matching.

In its most recent year, 40 agencies submitted 104 pitches, and 100 of those pitches drew at least one interested researcher — some drew as many as 20. The program is now expanding beyond New York to Boston, Hennepin County (Minneapolis), Los Angeles (water district), and Philadelphia (regional transit).

Tenure and promotion structures reward publication in a narrow set of journals, not applied public-sector collaboration — to the point that one professor Eckholm spoke with left his work as a city and White House housing policy adviser off his tenure application, worried it would make him look like an activist rather than a scholar.

Special Guest: Cara Eckholm.

Links:

• Cara Eckholm

In this episode, host Kumar speaks with Joshua Elliott, Chief Scientist at Renaissance Philanthropy and a former prolific DARPA program officer. Joshua brings deep personal passion to climate work and is a constant source of ideas who also sharpens others’ program designs.

Joshua discusses the Advance Research for Climate Emergencies (ARC) Initiative at Renaissance Philanthropy, through which the team identifies experts and ideas, incubates them from small seed grants into fully staffed build-grant programs, and launches them.

Joshua traces his ambitious, technically rigorous approach to his years at DARPA, which gave him permission to chase ideas others called impossible. Widely sought out for mentorship, he talks about the Climate Emergency Forum and issues an appeal to scientists and nonprofit leaders.

*Tacit Knowledge *

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuawrightelliott/

Substack (The ARC): https://arcinit.substack.com/

An in-development ARC initiative (still under a stealth name) aimed at launching small satellites and balloon-based sensors to resolve one of climate science's biggest open questions: how much of the Earth's declining reflectivity is due to falling aerosol pollution versus a warming-driven feedback loop that's itself reducing cloud cover.

NASA's CERES satellite data suggests the planet has lost enough reflectivity since 2000 to contribute roughly 2.7 W/m² of climate forcing — a number comparable to the instantaneous forcing from all greenhouse gases emitted since the Industrial Revolution. That comparison is still being finalized in peer review, but it points to a second, under-discussed pillar of climate change alongside emissions.

Burning fossil fuels releases sulfur dioxide and other aerosols that seed brighter, more reflective clouds. That pollution layer is estimated to be offsetting about half a degree of global warming — meaning, as Joshua puts it, we're already living in a "near two-degree world" that's been masked by the dirtiest possible form of accidental geoengineering. As pollution controls reduce aerosol emissions, that masking effect declines too.

About 30% of lost reflectivity comes from vanishing ice and snow cover (largely Arctic sea ice, mountain glaciers). The remaining majority comes from changes in cloud cover — and current observational and modeling capabilities can't yet disentangle how much of that is falling aerosol pollution versus a self-reinforcing, warming-induced feedback loop.

A recent study comparing the ~40 global climate models in the CMIP archive found that the models which most accurately reproduce observed changes in reflectivity and Earth's energy imbalance also tend to show 1.5–2x higher climate sensitivity than the model average. If those more accurate models are right, a projected 2.5–3°C future could actually be closer to 4.5–5°C.

A set of pressure-testing questions developed by former DARPA director George Heilmeier to evaluate research proposals. Joshua distills it into four core questions he uses as a first-pass filter for any ambitious idea: what are you trying to do, who's doing it now and what's wrong with that, what's your big insight, and who cares.

ARC (Advanced Research for Climate Emergencies) is Renaissance Philanthropy's "nonprofit venture studio" model for finding experts and ideas and building them into fundable climate programs, incubating efforts like the Arctic Stabilization Initiative. BiTS (Big if True Science Accelerator) is a related program Joshua co-designed to teach scientists and engineers how to turn ambitious ideas into coordinated, fundable research programs — modeled on the DARPA program-manager playbook.

On program design and ambition

Special Guest: Joshua Elliott.

Links:

• Joshua Elliott

In this episode, host Kumar talks to Charlotte DeWald, Director of the Arctic Stabilization Initiative (ASI) at Renaissance Philanthropy. Charlotte is a deep researcher who has spent her career studying runaway climate risks and figuring out what needs to be done to stop them.

Charlotte discusses what drove her to assemble ASI's team and create a roadmap around that end goal from the start, and the advice and mindset that led her to make a deliberate departure from how she'd seen other organizations in the field start out.

Charlotte talks about the role her delivery focus has played in her own career shift, growing impatient with research that wasn't translating into action fast enough, and what pushed her to build something explicitly designed to produce usable, actionable outputs.

Charlotte’s fascinating story sheds light on how to find problems worth working on.

*Tacit Knowledge *

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/charlottebeall

Housed at Renaissance Philanthropy and directed by Charlotte DeWald, ASI is stage-gated research designed to give governments and multilateral organizations the safety, efficacy, and feasibility data they'd need to evaluate Arctic-targeted climate interventions — not to deploy interventions itself.

Climate action has three points of attack rather than two. Decarbonization and adaptation get the most attention, but neither addresses near-term "tipping point" risk already locked in by processes like sea ice loss and permafrost thaw. ASI focuses on the third arm: regional climate stabilization in the Arctic.

Once certain climate thresholds are crossed, DeWald explains, the resulting state change is irreversible on human timescales — and the Arctic is where several of the most imminent thresholds converge, making it a first test case for humanity's tipping-point response.

There are three broad categories: increasing atmospheric reflectivity, structurally reinforcing ice sheets and sea ice, and increasing atmospheric emissivity — helping trapped heat escape. DeWald's research focuses on the third and least-understood category.

Mixed-phase clouds cover roughly 60% of the Arctic and trend net-warming, not cooling. Because they sit low to the surface and much of the Arctic year has little sunlight to reflect, these clouds act more like a "hat" trapping heat than a shield blocking it.

The proposed intervention is to nudge clouds into ice formation to help them dissipate. The mechanism relies on ice-nucleating particles — rare naturally occurring particles that trigger ice formation at temperatures far above freezing — a topic DeWald spent roughly a decade researching via shipboard instrumentation and national-lab modeling collaborations.

The approach is neglected, not infeasible. Cloud seeding and cloud shaping are established techniques; what's missing is the applied research connecting them specifically to Arctic stabilization. DeWald built the initiative largely by cold-calling experts across disciplines to pressure-test whether a five-year research agenda was viable.

Open asks from the episode: DeWald is looking to connect with people in conservation (for perspective on intervention risk/tradeoffs), scientists developing Arctic sampling platforms or sensors, and anyone who can "think programmatically" about field-building. She's reachable via Substack and LinkedIn.

Special Guest: Charlotte DeWald.

Links:

• Charlotte DeWald