Doing Big Things in Policy: It's All White Space

Wanna do big things? This week, a how-to guide for technically minded people who want to stop posting and start changing things — covering everything from why every globally important problem is "white space."

Joining Jordan are Kumar Garg, founder of Renaissance Philanthropy and a veteran of the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Remco Zwetsloot, co-founder of the Horizon Institute for Public Service, which builds pipelines into government for emerging-tech talent.

We discuss…

• Why $10 million globally on lead remediation tells you everything about how undertalented the world's most important problems are
• Ambition + humility as the Horizon Fellowship's selection criteria — and why most candidates need to hear the opposite of what they expect
• "We care meetings" vs. "we decide meetings," the Geithner heuristic for surviving senior government roles
• The tribal KPIs of the White House — what the Office of Public Engagement, speech writing, and comms actually want from a policy nerd
• The conscious-incompetence quadrant and why "your job is not to be the expert, your job is to mobilize expertise"
• The posting-to-policy pipeline, the rise of the individual writer, and the introspective work that public writing forces
• My Bulgarian tanks fantasy vs. the value-over-replacement case for picking your own hobby horse

Horizon recently launched Launchpad, a Substack on working in emerging tech policy with advice, explainers, and conversations like this one — if you enjoyed this conversation, you’ll probably like their other stuff as well.

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