For the John Templeton Foundation, I interviewed Matt Warner, the president of Atlas Network, about global freedom and human flourishing.
How did you first get interested in entrepreneurship and development?
I took a break from college and spent two years with immigrant communities in Brooklyn and Queens, where I taught English and helped with housing and employment challenges. I learned quite a bit from that experience, and it made a big impression on me. When I finished college, I started interning with a think tank that focused on economics and the impact that could have on individuals, which introduced me to other think tanks here in D.C. Almost everyone who works at think tanks finds the term think tank inadequate. What these organizations really do is pursue important and useful ideas that make the world a better place. If you consider that to be what a think tank does, then you can imagine a more expansive landscape of activity. Today we’re seeing think tanks engage more broadly in things like storytelling and filmmaking in addition to the traditional forms of books and academic papers.