Pod Insights Ologies Climate Fervorology (ECO-ADVOCACY WITHOUT IT BEING A BUMMER) with AJR’s Adam Met About this episode Cleaner energy! Reasoning with climate deniers! Using fandom to pass policy! And not burning out. Adam Met, of the colossal indie pop band AJR is also a career climate activist, an International Human Rights Law PhD, adjunct professor at Columbia University, and the author of the upcoming book “Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World.” He joins to chat about breaking through the overwhelm of climate causes, what action actually matters, if petitions even work, what happens to our brains at a rock concert, how human rights and climate policy intersect, if you should drive a gas or an electric car, how to solve problems that are vexing you by not working on them, carbon footprint guilt, the similarities between writing an album and writing a book, and how to do something about climate change without bumming everyone out. It’s possible.
Transcript 14,967 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Alie Ward? How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel. That's Mazda's philosophy when designing every vehicle.
0:42 Alie Ward? Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It makes you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. To learn more, visit mazdausa.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This podcast is brought to you by Aura. Your body has a lot going on. Sleep, stress, recovery. You would be surprised how connected it all is. Aura Ring tracks more than 50 metrics from your finger, and the Aura app brings that information together to help you see patterns across your sleep, and stress, activity, and more.
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1:38 Alie Ward? Oh, hey, it's the guy at the library, covertly eating granola out of his hand. I'm Ellie Ward. This is Ologies. This is a podcast. This is April, which means it's the month that we all like to use the globe emoji and the green heart one and get free canvas tote bags from startups. And in the back of our minds, we like to twitch at the existential nagging of climate change. It's Earth Month. Listen, listen. I get it. This episode is carefully timed to address what to do about the world and what to do that actually works. What works? We asked about it. We got some answers. And? It's not depressing. So this guest is the founder of the nonprofit Planet Reimagined,
2:20 Alie Ward? which is dedicated to climate solutions that have deep impacts. He got his bachelor's at Columbia, a master's at NYU, and a PhD in international human rights law from the University of Birmingham, and is now an adjunct professor at Columbia, teaching about climate policy and sustainability. He's also the author of the upcoming book Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World. Now for cool points, I met this guest backstage at a sold-out rock concert. He did not know the band. He was the band. He was playing a rock concert. Yeah, he's a scholar, he's a climate activist, a Time 100 Climate List honoree, casually also a very famous rock
3:05 Alie Ward? star in a band called AJR. So my brother-in-law, Chris Berry, plays drums for them. Hello, Chris, and thank you for the intro. And it turns out that this guest listens to Ologies, so we hit it off, obviously, right away. And then we went to the mall to go look for some new sunglasses. So he is the A in the band AJR. And if you have been online, or on TikTok, or not in any cave, you've heard their music hundreds of times.
3:56 Speaker 01 Can we skip to the good part?
3:58 Alie Ward? Yes. But before we do, thank you to all the patrons at patreon.com/ologies for supporting the show for as little as $1 a month and for submitting your questions. Thanks to everyone in Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. Thank you to everyone who's ever left a review. I read them all, and it really keeps the show up in the charts, such as this one recently from Alfie Romero, who wrote that, "It seems every time I get drunk and go to a bar, I walk around and tell people about your podcast. I'm a park ranger, and every one of our rangers religiously listens to you. Thanks for being so curious." Alfie, tell the other Rangers I love them and I will buy you a beer should we ever meet. Also, if anyone has any problems with swearing, I don't know what to tell you
4:41 Alie Ward? other than we have a show called Smologies, which is a spinoff show, which has G-rated, classroom-safe, and shorter episodes for you for free. Look for Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S, wherever you get podcasts. You're welcome. Okay, on to this topic at hand. We're calling this one "Climate Ferrology," which, yeah, it's a bending of words, but there's no term for this topic yet. And it comes from the Latin for the word "to boil over" or "fizz," because the topic of effervescence in activism is at the core of what this guest talks about. It's at the core of this episode. So, sit under a tree, stare at the clouds, make friends with a frog, listen together for ways to break through the overwhelm of taking climate
5:25 Alie Ward? action. What action actually matters? Do petitions even work? What happens to our brains at a rock concert? How do human rights and climate policy intersect? Should you drive a gas or an electric car? Why working together matters for artists and everyone? How to solve problems that are vexing you by not working on the problem? Carbon footprint guilt? The similarities between writing an album and writing a book? And how to do something about climate change without bumming everyone out? And more, with nonprofit founder, adjunct professor, human rights law scholar, author, rock star, and climate fervorologist, Dr. Adam Met.
6:21 Alie Ward? We're gonna put this up on Tuesday, so we're gonna be, we're rolling, rolling, rolling.
6:26 Speaker 02 Amazing.
6:27 Alie Ward? It's gonna be up so soon.
6:28 Speaker 02 I am Adam Met, he/him, and I'm the executive director of Planet Reimagined. But you know, I also have many other jobs.
6:36 Alie Ward? You have a lot of jobs.
6:37 Speaker 02 I do.
6:38 Alie Ward? I first met you backstage at a show for AJR, your band, that you are in, which probably everyone in the world knows of. But you also just happen to run a nonprofit and have a PhD and do a ton of work in climate advocacy. And I'm like, how do you even get one of those things, let alone do a lot of those and more? How do you divide your day?
7:01 Speaker 02 Honestly, thinking back, I have no idea how this happened. I divide my day in such a weird way. I do music when we're on tour. I do music starting at eight thirty, nine P M. And even when we're on tour, I use my full days to do climate work. So when we're in different cities, I'll be meeting with members of the city council or mayors or governors and I work on climate policy. And honestly, even when I was doing my P H D, I would be going back and forth between the U K where I did it and here on tour. And my brothers would attest to this, but even when I was doing my masters and my P H D, the back of the tour bus was just filled with my books and it was kind of annoying for everybody.
7:43 Speaker 03 Nerd.
7:44 Speaker 02 And then even until like twenty minutes before we would walk on stage, I would be writing and doing work. So I forced myself to do it because I know this sounds crazy, but I don't think of them as two separate things. My kind of go to thing in the world is solving big creative problems. And for the music industry, we didn't have a record label for a really long time. We developed this approach to independent music and Ryan and Jack, who write the music and I, who do a lot of the business side of it, we came together and said, okay, how can we do this in a creative way? And our manager, Steve Greenberg, came in and said, let's do something different. Let's not go through a major label.
8:29 Speaker 02 Let's do it ourselves. And coming up with all of those strategies honestly uses the same part of my brain as when I'm developing climate policy. It's all that same kind of creativity.
8:40 Alie Ward? Well, you're an overachiever in both of them because I've been to your live shows and you don't need to have thirty foot puppets and you don't need to have like all these different changes and a ton of musicians, but you really work creatively to put on above and beyond what a lot of live shows are. You could take it easy on that front and you don't. It's cool because it's a great show to go to.
9:04 Speaker 02 Even when we started out touring, we would be in a tiny sweaty club and we would have all of these lights and light up drumsticks and try and give people something that they had never seen before to the point where they would go and tell ten other people. And same thing, honestly, when I was in school and when I'm working on policy in D C and growing the nonprofit, it's all if I'm actually gonna do something, then I'm gonna do it to the best of my ability.
9:31 Alie Ward? So Adam and his brothers, Jack and Ryan, that's the J and the R of A J R. They spent part of their childhoods in Queens, New York, and then they moved to Manhattan. And last year, they sold out Madison Square Garden. Twice. Can you imagine selling out the world's most famous arena, which it is called, which is also your hometown in New York? Surreal. Nothing would feel real after that. But let's back up. What, you moved to Manhattan when you were around 10? Tell me a little bit about where you grew up. Did you have a very outdoorsy kind of childhood? What connects you so much to ecology and the environment?
10:08 Speaker 02 So my connection to the environment really is through a human rights lens. I know this sounds super strange, but when I was in high school, I heard a lecture by this woman named Mary Robinson, who was the former president of Ireland, and then she was the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. And she made this argument at this field trip that I went to on high school about the relationship between human rights and climate. And something just clicked in my brain. I was never a super outdoorsy kid. I hated camping. I really don't like bugs. Like, I had a cockroach in my apartment, and I had to call somebody else to, like, get rid of it for me. I just, I could not deal with it.
10:49 Speaker 02 And for me, climate and the environment is about solving really, really big, complex problems. And I like that systemic way of thinking so much that it felt like that's the thing I'm drawn to. I need to solve something that's so difficult. People have been spending so much time on it that that's what I want to dedicate my time to.
11:10 Alie Ward? And with your PhD, what was your dissertation about? And how did you decide what to do that dissertation on?
11:16 Speaker 02 That's a really good question.
11:17 Alie Ward? Is it bound behind you?
11:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:20 Alie Ward? He looked over his shoulder to these high shelves of books.
11:23 Speaker 02 It's right here. It's right here.
11:25 Alie Ward? I love a scholarly bookshelf.
11:28 Speaker 02 So my dissertation, sometimes I forget the name of it because it's way too long. It's called Stakeholder Approaches to Human Rights and Development in the Commercial Context. And this is it.
11:39 Alie Ward? That's a beggar.
11:42 Speaker 02 Basically, what I did was I looked at really big renewable energy projects and non-renewable energy projects around the world and developed a model for businesses to be able to incorporate human rights. And right now, as we're making the green transition around the world, I want to make sure that we are incorporating human rights, in particular, local and indigenous rights, into the building of these projects. So I developed a methodology for that and went through a bunch of case studies to prove that these projects are more effective and the communities benefit if you build them in from the ground up.
12:19 Alie Ward? Where does that tend to pop up more? I mean, I imagine it's aquatic, I imagine it's terrestrial, I imagine it's the temperature of the planet, sustainable fishing, everything. But when it comes to human rights in the intersection of climate, what are some of the pressing problems that we may not be even aware of?
12:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, land use is a really big problem. A lot of the places where people want to build solar, wind, even geothermal or hydroelectric power, a lot of that land is owned either by local communities or indigenous communities. And especially in Africa and Southeast Asia, there are so many examples of these communities being removed from their land, when it would be so much more profitable if they could build schools, hospitals, infrastructure on that land. That would create so many jobs, they would build an economy there that would be based around this new renewable energy that they're building. And if they integrate people
13:16 Speaker 02 into how that development happens, the development is much more likely to last a really long time.
13:23 Alie Ward? Would that be in tandem? Would that be, say, putting up a solar array or turbines as well as schools and businesses and more infrastructure?
13:33 Speaker 02 It would be both. So the first step would be, okay, we want to build a solar array in order to provide electricity locally, but we want it to be utility scale, which basically means that it's large enough to be able to capture electricity and send it through transmission lines to other places. But- You need enough people to maintain that, to be able to build the solar ray, to be able to maintain it, to be able to build the transmission. And that's why you need people locally. Then you want to build the schools, the hospitals, the other infrastructure around it. So creating that economy that's based on energy, it ends up having this kind of blowing out effect, yes, of the electricity itself, but also you get to create all of these jobs and you get to build that economy around it.
14:18 Alie Ward? Why are these lands already owned by communities or indigenous folks? Is it because they're lands that have been spared from development because of that? Or do they tend to be in places with harsher winds or different minerals? Why does it happen that those lands are already protected, given that, especially in the United States, we're not great at protecting public lands as it is? Or indigenous lands?
14:44 Speaker 02 We are pretty terrible at both. Honestly, the answer is both of the things that you mentioned. The first is that a lot of these lands traditionally are not the most hospitable. So we tend to put people there that we don't have the most respect for, which is extremely problematic. As we move to Native Americans kind of further and further west, they ended up in these big, open swathes of desert where there isn't a huge amount of potential for infrastructure. But now we've developed ways to build infrastructure even in the harshest climates, so we can take advantage of that land now. Oh, great. You're back. And also, there are a lot of indigenous communities, and especially First Nations
15:28 Speaker 02 in Canada, that have treaties with the government that go back from the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s that give them ownership over this land. And the funny thing is, the government gave them ownership over this land, but they don't even feel that they have ownership over this land, because a lot of these cultures believe that they live in tandem with the earth. Ownership is not really a concept that makes sense to them culturally. And why would it be that the incoming governments are the ones who are granting them the rights? But that's a whole other philosophical and cultural question.
16:01 Alie Ward? Right.
16:02 Speaker 02 But the ultimate answer to your question is both. It's really difficult land to build on, and it was difficult land to build on, and it's land that has been set aside by governments for these people.
16:15 Alie Ward? And Adam notes that when tribal governments have the power to choose what energy company develops on their land, they can dictate these important cultural provisions, like the protection of a certain meaningful species spiritually to them. And this is, of course, at the intersection of climate and human rights, but just zooming out even more than that to the entire planet and all the people and land and species and grass and data and bills and laws and vetoes. I feel like climate advocacy can be so overwhelming to everyone who spends more than one second thinking about it. And we've talked about this in the Oceanology episode with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. This notion of your carbon footprint being put out by fossil fuel companies to put a lot of responsibility on the individual.
17:00 Alie Ward? When it comes to climate advocacy, I think a lot of people are kind of deer in the headlights about, should I be recycling my plastic? Should I only take public transportation? Should I make sure to not wear certain fabrics? Where do I give money? What are the most tackleable problems that we're facing right now?
17:20 Speaker 02 This is such a big question. And every time I'm on tour, I have fans coming up to me saying, I really want to help. What can I do? And so many people think that their individual carbon footprint is the place to start. And by the way, I love Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She is an amazing climate communicator. She is so talented. And I'm sure she said something similar to what I'm about to say. But your personal carbon footprint really is not going to matter. Individual action in the climate space is nothing compared to what I call individual leadership.
17:58 Alie Ward? So one person can make a difference, not so much in a vacuum and not alone.
18:03 Speaker 02 And I'll tell you a really short story. We were on tour and we get to Indianapolis. We're playing a show in Indianapolis. A young woman came up to us in Indianapolis. This was a handful of years ago and said, I don't need a picture. I just want to tell you a story. And she told us about how she started a petition in her high school to end all single-use plastic in her high school. She got enough signatures on this petition that they ended all single-use plastic in the cafeteria. And then she was working on a district-level petition. That's not individual action. That's not her changing her own behavior. That's individual leadership. That's someone who took it upon themselves to galvanize a bunch of other people.
18:47 Speaker 02 And what she changed was something at the system level or the policy level. So not everybody can be this young woman, but there are a couple of things that you can do that have so much more impact than changing your own individual carbon footprint. The number one thing is voting. People think elections in the US happen every four years. That's wrong. They do happen every four years, but they also happen every two years. And if you're in a place like New York, we have an election this fall in an off-cycle. There are primaries that are happening throughout the year. There are special elections. And in addition to politicians being on the ballot, so many people that I talk to are tired of talking about politicians.
19:29 Speaker 02 More and more, there are actual provisions on the ballot that you can vote for policies that are impactful at your local level. So voting, number one thing you could possibly do. Number two is signing petitions. I know people think, oh, I just signed a petition, whatever. These actually work, especially when they're geared towards corporates or they're geared towards community boards and locally elected officials. These are happening all the time. Really? All the time.
19:58 Alie Ward? I didn't know. I was like, does anyone even look at these? You know, like the change.orgs? Are those the ones people look at? Are they the more official government petitions? Which ones work?
20:09 Speaker 02 They're the ones that nonprofit organizations that have started in these communities and are being delivered directly to the people who can vote on an issue.
20:18 Alie Ward? OK, so how can you get more people to sign them, though? Do they work? First, consider whatever platform you have. And in this case, Adam's platform is literal. It's a huge stage above a crowd. He's on a platform.
20:34 Speaker 02 I don't know if you saw this when you were at our concert, but we had the option for people to phone bank on site, calling their representative about a specific issue that was being voted on locally. So people literally could go to a table at our concert. And this is part of a program we developed at Planet Reimagined, where we did all of the research. We figured out what fans were willing to do, the actions they were willing to take, and what things they were willing to do when their friends were also doing it with them. And we found out that phone banking and letter writing, huge. So we left thousands and thousands of messages with local politicians throughout the country, focused on specific issues in each city. So in Phoenix, I'll give you an example.
21:18 Speaker 02 In Phoenix, it was 109 degrees the day that we were there.
21:21 Alie Ward? Oh, my god.
21:22 Speaker 02 There was a whole phone banking and petition signing system in order to get FEMA to designate extreme heat as an emergency, which, first of all, is insane that FEMA does not designate extreme heat as an emergency, so they won't give any money for it. But we got over 1,000 signatures and phone calls made in order to push FEMA to designate extreme heat as an emergency on a day that was 109 degrees. Every action was customized for each city. And over the course of the tour, 35,000 people took concrete civic or political action to make a difference.
21:57 Alie Ward? So in a group situation, 35,000 people were taking action despite how they were registered to vote nationally. Because local people can agree that when something like if their coworker's mom dies from heat exposure and people can't afford air conditioning bills with rising temperatures year over year, it's a real shit situation. And when it's local, it's personal. And when it's personal, it matters.
22:23 Speaker 02 Here's the best part. In seven different states, we had people advocating for climate policies.
22:30 Alie Ward? Oh, wow.
22:31 Speaker 02 In every single one of those states, the climate policies went in the right direction, even if the politician that people were voting for went the other way. So it was actually really exciting to see that we were able to move the needle, even in our small way, to get people moving on climate.
22:51 Alie Ward? And I know that that program you call Amplify.
22:54 Speaker 02 Yes.
22:55 Alie Ward? Which is very clever, considering that you're also musicians with amplifiers onstage.
23:01 Speaker 02 You know.
23:01 Alie Ward? You know I love a pun. Did you do any surveys? Were you able to to sort of project or predict whether or not those people then were more likely to phone bank in the future and more likely to sign a petition because they'd done it and they know like, oh, that's easy and it feels good?
23:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, that on-ramp to activism is something we spent a lot of time measuring. The thing that we found out that I thought was probably the most interesting is that if you can get people to a second site, then they're more likely to stay advocates for life. So the first step was at our concert. So if we can get them on board at our concert, great. The follow-up email, 84% of people who were sent the follow-up email opened it, which is, for anybody who does email marketing, is an insanely high percentage that never happens.
23:50 Alie Ward? I looked this up and the average is 17 to 20% open rate on marketing emails. So 84% is legend.
23:57 Speaker 02 So it was really incredible for us to see, but the real win is getting them to a second location. And so we had 40% of those people actually show up to a second location, meaning a community board meeting, volunteering for a nonprofit, volunteering to do voter registration, things like that, or even volunteering at another one of our concerts later in the tour to help other people take these actions. Now,
24:25 Speaker 02 One of the things I want to mention, which I get really excited about, is this idea called collective effervescence. And I talk about this a lot because this term is so cool. And I have this book behind me. But so there's a sociologist named Emile Durkheim. And again, I get super nerdy on this stuff. So bear with me for like one second.
24:48 Alie Ward? That's the whole point of the show.
24:49 Speaker 02 I know, I know. But I love your audience. I love that they actually care about this kind of stuff. So we'll get nerdy for one second. Sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote a book, wrote a lot of books, but wrote a book called Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
25:03 Alie Ward? So French sociologist Emile Durkheim is the grandpappy of sociology. And this 1912 text looks at religion as a social phenomenon and how the evolution of religion led to communal living, which then leads to a more emotionally secure group attachment.
25:23 Speaker 02 He studied this idea of collective effervescence, which is basically that energy that happens when people are in groups trying to do something. He studied it in the case of religion. Everyone's there for the same purpose. There is that collective mindset. And as the years progressed, people started to measure this. Is this a real thing? And there were studies later and later figuring out that when people are in these group settings, like having religious experiences, their brainwaves start to sync up. And you have people kind of merging into this collective identity.
26:01 Alie Ward? And according to the 2022 Frontiers in Psychology paper, Emotional Processes: Collective Behavior and Social Movements: A Meta-Analytic Review of Collective Effervescence Outcomes During Collective Gatherings and Demonstrations. Participation in a Collective Gathering enhances
26:16 Alie Ward? The participant's sense of social belonging. That makes sense. And it says the reciprocal stimulation of their emotions. You stimulate mine, I stimulate yours. It leads this group to feel in unison. And Durkheim's theory cites a few key ways this happens. So it says collective effervescence. It intensifies and converges these emotions. So everything feels bigger and it's contagious. And it enhances social belonging and it creates a group consciousness. So all of these common beliefs come to the foreground of thought. And according to this paper, a gathering like a concert fosters, quote, exceptionally energizing effects. It empowers the audience and reinforces vital energy.
27:01 Alie Ward? And there's this tweet that went viral that always sticks with me. And it says, I believed in God as a kid because I always felt so moved during worship songs at my mega church. And then I went to a One Direction concert and felt the same thing. And I realized I just like live music.
27:19 Speaker 02 So I said, okay, they've done this in religious spaces. A Taylor Swift concert kind of feels like a religious space to me. Everyone is singing and dancing and they make friends with people that they never would have made friends with before. Concerts are like the epitome of a religious space. Also, sports games, right? All the fans are there. They might not know each other, but they all care about their team. They're all in. And we said, okay, as academics, can we figure out how to measure if collective effervescence is a real thing? So we tried to figure out, can we measure collective effervescence? And we can. So we did this big study with Ticketmaster and a handful of other partners, including Reverb,
28:05 Speaker 02 Climate Outreach, polling partners, people who focus on music tours. And we sent this poll out to 350,000 people who attended concerts in the last year and a half. Taylor Swift fans, Beyonce fans, Dave Matthews fans, Post Malone fans, The Weeknd, every, all genres. And we measured how likely they are to actually take action on an issue when they're doing it in the concert space with their friends, when they're willing to take action, if they're willing to do it in the car on the way there, after the show, on site, while they're sitting on the toilet in the venue, is that when they're most likely to take action? Someone's in here. We measured everything. We measured the language that the artist should be using to talk about these issues.
28:48 Speaker 02 We measured how much time people are willing to take on this. And we essentially turned Durkheim's theory of collective effervescence into something scientific. And we found that it's actually true. When your friends are willing to nicely bully you into doing something, and you have that feeling of all being kind of all caught up in that energy, your brainwaves are starting to sync up, you're much more likely to take action. So now, we've started applying this idea at a bunch of other tours, a bunch of other artists, and this summer, we're starting to do it in sports. Because this last year, about 15% of people at our shows took action.
29:32 Speaker 02 There are 250 million people attending concerts in the United States each year. That's a huge way of reaching people that is going underutilized. So we can use collective effervescence to really move the needle on so many different issues. So now I will get off my soapbox about collective effervescence. I was just so excited that I had to share it with you.
29:57 Alie Ward? Don't worry about the math. I did this for us. 15% of 250 million is 37 and a half million people taking some action who otherwise might not. And that's just in the US. You know, it makes sense why certain politicians are constantly doing rallies, if you know what I mean?
30:16 Speaker 02 Totally.
30:17 Alie Ward? We see now Bernie and AOC doing a lot of rallies and starting to galvanize that way. But that collective effervescence, let's say that You are doing it domestically, right? Say it's not globally quite yet. Does each artist sort of have any say in or sway the cause? If it's, you know, particular to certain communities? Or in what vein of advocacy do you think people will start to gravitate toward?
30:43 Speaker 02 So every artist is going to be different and every artist has a different thing they care about. We started in climate, but in the study we did, we looked at education. We looked at immigration. We looked at abortion. We looked at healthcare.
30:56 Alie Ward? And just as we're discussing healthcare, on cue, an ambulance was going by Adam's Brooklyn apartment. So don't freak out. Just consider it like the bird song of the city, the crickets of Brooklyn.
31:08 Speaker 02 We looked at really all of these different social issues. And one of the things that I liked the most that came out of this is that 76% of fans across the board said that they want artists to be talking more about the issues that they care about, which essentially gives artists a cover, right? To start participating in these issues. 10, 15 years ago was the whole kind of shut up and sing fiasco where people want artists to just be artists. That doesn't really exist anymore with the rise of the individual relationships on social media. Social media previously was a promotion tool. Now, everything based on the algorithms is let's include just people's faces.
31:52 Speaker 02 Let's make sure that people are talking directly to the camera. Fans want to know who the artists are as a person, what they care about. And they can read through it pretty easily if the artist is not being genuine. So the artist needs to actually care about the issue.
32:08 Alie Ward? And for more on how fandoms coalesce and the psychology behind that sense of belonging, which is fascinating, we have a two-part episode with Meredith Levine about, yes, fan anthropology. The study of fans has its own ology.
32:22 Speaker 02 But we did all of the work to say, you are allowed to care about this in public. You can ask your fans to participate. And not only that, your fans will like you better. That's one of the things that we found out is that fans want their artists, their artists to do this because they'll see them as real. People and that's what makes an artist kind of really endearing to their fans. It's not just about the music or the merch or the live show. It's can I relate to you as a person?
32:52 Alie Ward? What types of kind of campaigns do you think will be coming up either with music or with sports? Like what types of issues are kind of on the bulletin board to tackle?
33:03 Speaker 02 So we are doing a lot around climate, but to be honest, I'm never using the word climate when I'm doing these issues nowadays.
33:11 Alie Ward? Oh, okay.
33:13 Speaker 02 Pretty sneaky. In the last like year or so, I've been making this argument a lot. How we need to be talking about the economy. We need to be talking about jobs. We need to be talking about healthcare, about immigration, about all of these issues. Secretly, they're all climate issues. We are going to have more immigrants crossing borders in the next 10 years due to extreme heat than we ever have in the history of the world. Immigration is a climate issue.
33:42 Alie Ward? Yeah.
33:42 Speaker 02 In the United States, we're starting to see more mosquito borne diseases further and further north because of temperature increases. And they're diseases that were not set up to treat. They're diseases that have traditionally been treated in places like the Caribbean and Central America, but now we're having to treat them further and further up the East Coast and the West Coast because the mosquitoes now have a longer season and they have the ability to thrive in these warmer environments. That's a health issue, right? Even though it's secretly a climate issue.
34:13 Alie Ward? Not sure if you heard about this, but the CDC recently had a bunch of layoffs, including in departments that detect emerging diseases and ones that are spreading to new areas, measles people, dengue people, Marburg people, some new strains of rabies and mosquito and midge borne illness called orapuche that can also be sexually transmitted. And it's headed straight for Florida of all places. So the CDC was working on it until recently, when a bunch of people got fired. And this all feels like a satire, but for more on the spread of mosquitoes in our warming world, you can see the Culsodology episode with the wonderful mosquito expert, Dr. Fallon Ware Gilmore.
34:58 Speaker 02 So I am talking about all of these health-related policies, even things like infrastructure, building seawalls, building superstorm and fire-resistant infrastructure. Look at LA. So when we go to a place like LA, we're talking about fire suppression policy and fire resistance policy. In the Northeast, we're talking about building storm-resistant infrastructure. Same thing in places like Florida and Louisiana. We're using terms that are not big and existential, but are small and local and make sense to people. So all of these policies that we're looking at are customized based on what the artist cares about, but also with a framing that will make people actually get engaged. Climate change is not here.
35:42 Speaker 02 Climate change is here and it's too far away. We need to reframe it as something that's here.
35:47 Alie Ward? I feel like when you talk about climate and you talk about global warming and climate change and these really big issues, yeah, it's like when you've got too many things plugged into one outlet and you just blow a fuse and you can't process it. Did you find in your research or in developing these programs that kind of the more local and the more personal it felt, the more action people took?
36:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, there were a couple of things that we found out that helped us choose which actions to have onsite. And one of them was, how much impact is my involvement actually going to have? So in Texas, for example, there was an election that was won by 82 votes. It was a local election. 82 votes literally makes the difference. Your vote really makes the difference, especially at a local level. You have so much power at the local level. So how much impact you can have, what the history of the nonprofit organization, how much success they've had. You only want to attach yourself to something if you know they're really freaking good at what they do. And then are your friends and family doing it with you?
36:54 Speaker 02 That's the other kind of big driver. Are there actions that can be taken that you can do in a group together? And being in a group will help move it faster. So those are the three requirements that we found. And so therefore, we pick policies that hit at least two of those three.
37:11 Alie Ward? And again, those factors are how much impact will this actually have? How effective is the organization associated with it? And are your friends and family and peers also on board? What about internationally? Because in terms of a pilot program, obviously, super successful. But when do people who are huge stars in Thailand? Like, we saw Lisa, who played Muk on White Lotus, is like a Taylor Swift over there. There are huge audiences in so many different countries. When does it start to expand in that direction?
37:45 Speaker 02 It starts to expand in that direction in July.
37:48 Alie Ward? Oh, well, there you go.
37:51 Speaker 02 We've developed an entire program for the UK, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. And actually, Australia has already gone first. They've replicated our study. We gave them all of the questions and the information for free. The Australia Institute is already running that study right now in order to make sure that the data that they're getting is the same as what we got in order to start implementing it in Australia. We said it worked so well in the United States. We're actually going to be implementing it in the UK with a really big artist that I don't think I can mention her name yet because we haven't signed anything yet. But if you're going to name like five female artists in the world, it's one of them.
38:33 Speaker 02 Like, her 13 shows in the UK, we're implementing it there, including her six nights in an arena in London. So if you want to go try and figure out who that is, and based on the clues that I gave you, you can figure it out.
38:46 Alie Ward? 13, interesting. 13, I'll think about that. Good to know. That's got to feel very gratifying to have had this idea and also to have that Petri dish of your own tour. So while you're out there and you're playing all these shows, you're connecting with all these fans, you're also... Like secretly collecting a lot of data, which is nuts.
39:10 Speaker 02 Exactly.
39:10 Speaker 04 Like a guinea pig. That's exactly what you are.
39:12 Alie Ward? When it came to writing your book, which comes out in just a couple of weeks, Amplify, how did you decide what to put in that book? What did you draw from your experience? And who is it aimed at to galvanize?
39:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a great question. Honestly, the way I developed the answers to these questions is listening to what fans wanted. So the first three chapters are, what is the world you want to be living in? How do you think about that? What is the transportation system that you want? What is the healthcare system that you want? What is the education system that you want? How do you figure out what that world looks like? And it can be something super small. And then, once you've figured that out, chapter two is about the role that you can play. This, in a lot of cases, is the most important question. Everyone is so busy. Everyone is doing their own thing. I give a lot of talks at colleges. And one of my favorite things to do is when I go in,
40:09 Speaker 02 people say, oh, you know, climate's really important, but you know, I study pre-med. That's not related to climate. Or I study architecture. That's not related to climate. Or I study visual art. That's not related to climate. So I do this thing where I literally go around the room and ask every single person what they're studying. And they all think their thing is not related to climate. But then I prove to them that every single thing, all of the skill sets they have, can be applied to climate. Really, climate is everything, and everything can be applied to climate. So I go through all of these different roles about how you can take the things that you care about. And you probably heard this from Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, but her like model of what you love, what you're really good at,
40:53 Speaker 02 and what the climate world needs, that overlap. We then kind of go into that overlap and say, here are all the possible different ways that you can contribute.
41:03 Alie Ward? And again, that was oceanology guest Dr. Johnson, whose latest book is the New York Times bestseller, What If We Get It Right: Visions of Climate Futures. And on our webpage for this episode will be a link to that Venn diagram, PDF free to play around with yourself. And Adam also incorporates ways to see yourself in the climate change landscape, so to speak.
41:24 Speaker 02 And so we hope people see themselves in it. But then the crux of the book, the kind of remainder of it is, the music industry is freaking great at building fanbases. They are so good at it, right? From Taylor to BTS and Blackpink, like you mentioned, they are so good at building these communities of people that will go out and do anything for the artist, but they also organize themselves and do a lot of things themselves. Let's look point by point at how those fanbases are built and see if we can use those strategies to apply them to build better social movements. So we have chapters on effective storytelling. There's a big difference between good storytelling and effective storytelling.
42:08 Speaker 02 Good storytelling is the story that you'll share with your friend or your family around the dinner table. But effective storytelling is the one that actually makes you do something about it. We have a whole chapter on gamification. And I talked to the guy who invented Pokemon Go about how he got people out of their house to be outside during a pandemic. It was incredible. We have a chapter about how to create a bigger tent for your movement. I literally sit down with Glenn Beck.
42:38 Alie Ward? Just a little context. Glenn Beck, side note, is the 61-year-old longtime Fox News and radio pundit and is known for his support of traditional American values. He's a staunch disbeliever in climate change, having gone on record as saying, there is more proof for the resurrection of Jesus than man-made climate change. And he does seem to oppose elites, but he makes an estimated $30 to $40 million a year. But Adam agreed to meet with him.
43:09 Speaker 02 And this story is crazy. So
43:12 Alie Ward? What happened?
43:13 Speaker 02 Glenn Beck came to a show and I didn't know he was at the show. This was a show in Dallas a bunch of years ago. And he tweets after the show saying, I love AJR. I love their music. I love their songs. Meanwhile, our songs are very far left. We have songs about gay marriage and having a female president and immigration. And the last part of his tweet was, I love AJR also because they allowed me to get closer to my son. I was like, okay, that's interesting.
43:41 Alie Ward? Oh.
43:42 Speaker 02 So I contacted him and I said, I'm working on this book. Can I come and interview you? And he said, yeah. So I went down to his studio in Texas. I sat with him for four hours and we talked about everything from religion to childhood to all these different social issues to climate. My goal was to find one thing that we agreed upon, like literally one thing. That was my goal.
44:08 Speaker 04 I just want to tell you good luck. We're all counting on you.
44:11 Speaker 02 Three and a half hours passed and we hadn't found anything. And so I said, okay, now I'm really going to try and find something. We found one area of agreement and it's a really impactful area. And that is that we should be plugging leaks in methane pipelines.
44:28 Alie Ward? All right. There's that.
44:30 Speaker 02 Yeah. Methane is a greenhouse gas that's more than 80 times more powerful than CO2 in terms of warming, but it stays in the atmosphere only 10 years. The CO2 stays in the atmosphere far longer than that. But so much of methane is getting released in these leaks and pipelines. So there's an economic loss there, too. If we cut out these leaks, it'll drastically reduce the impacts of climate change. So I was able to sell him that on the economic argument because it will save these companies a bunch of money. And also, why are we just getting rid of a product that we could be selling?
45:11 Speaker 02 So we ended up agreeing that we should be plugging leaks in methane pipelines, something I could get behind, something he could get behind. It was great. There's a whole interview in the book about this. It's, it's actually really, really funny. So all of that is to say, there are so many different tactics that the music industry is great at, that we can apply to building better social movements. And the audience for this is people who want to get involved, people who don't know what they should be doing. And then people who do work in movements, figure out how to make their movements better and more effective and bigger and stronger.
45:47 Alie Ward? Mm hmm. Oh, I have some questions from listeners. Can I ask?
45:50 Speaker 02 Let's go.
45:52 Alie Ward? Do you mind? Okay, let's go. Let's see. But first, of course, we're going to donate to a worthy cause. This week, we're supporting Adam's 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Planet Reimagined, which researches methods to incubate and scale creative solutions to our most pressing climate problems with an unwavering focus on impact. And Planet Reimagined brings researchers and advocates from around the world to collaborate on all aspects of the climate crisis, including energy, waste, water, farming, finance, production, transportation, environmental justice, and so much more. You can find out more about them at planetreimagined.com, which is linked in the show notes. So thank you to sponsors of the show for making that possible. This episode of Ologies with Ali Ward is brought to you by Alloy Health.
46:36 Alie Ward? As you may know, we've talked a lot about estrogen and hormones on this podcast. We have a three-part menopause episode. And there's something that nobody tells you. And this is that your skin changes that start in your 40s, they aren't just aging. They are hormonal, specifically estrogen loss. So estrogen naturally helps maintain collagen. It helps support elasticity, keeps your skin hydrated. And as it declines, your skin gets thinner and drier. So if your skin is feeling thin or dry or dull after 40, Alloy has prescription M4 skincare. It's designed for perimenopause and beyond with convenient virtual consultations and redelivery. So try M4 skincare from Alloy and see results in as little as eight weeks. Head to myalloy.com and use the code OLOGIES to get 25% off your first order. So.
47:21 Alie Ward? Your menopause specialized doctor will help you build a skincare plan for your needs. Plus you get $0 unlimited messaging with your doctor. So head to myallloy.com and use code OLOGIES to get 20% off your first order. This code is valid on products only. These are compounded products, not subject to FDA approval. Ologies with Ally Ward is sponsored by Sylvania. It's time to upgrade your nighttime drive with Sylvania LED Ultra Fog and Powersport Lights. These powerful lights deliver cool white clarity and crisp visibility that's built to last. And thanks to their compact design, Sylvania LED Ultra Fog and Powersport Lights are engineered for a DIY install, no mechanic required.
48:03 Alie Ward? They're also backed by a limited lifetime warranty and 125 years of lighting expertise, bringing you LED Ultra Night Vision to help you see better at night. Switch today and see better tonight with Sylvania LED Ultra Fog and Powersport Lights. Ugh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app.
48:48 Alie Ward? If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details.
48:54 Alie Ward? Listen, sometimes you get out of your routine. That happened to me recently when I went out of town and I realized I forgot my Ritual Essential for Women 18+. It's a multi that I've been taking for years. And guess who landed in another country without them? Me, didn't feel right. They contain nine key nutrients, two delayed release capsules designed for optimal absorption. But Ritual, why do I love them so much? They have a team of scientists, they poured over thousands of studies to figure out what are common gaps that people need in their diet, but they don't actually consume. It's also designed to be gentle on the stomach. You can take it with or without food, which I love. Plus, I like That it looks like a tiny lava lamp. I tell you that every time, but it has these beads and oil and it tastes like mint, easy down the hatch. I usually take them in the morning.
49:39 Alie Ward? And the reason why I've stuck with Ritual for so many years is because my schedule is all over the place. Sometimes I'm eating breakfast, sometimes I'm running through an airport with one shoe. So instead of striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health. Save 25% on your first month at ritual.com/ologies. That's ritual.com/ologies for 25% off your first month. Every time I record a Quince ad, I'm like, look at me wearing head to toe Quince. I feel like this is enough of an ad. I can just stop here. But if you're like, huh, what is that? Quince sells clothes and shoes and bags, even stuff for your house that are classic, well-made and priced at 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they cut out the middleman. They work directly with ethical factories.
50:23 Alie Ward? So you have luxury quality pieces without a luxury price tag. Perhaps this holiday season, do you know what it feels like to get a cashmere sweater as a gift? I don't because I'm the one getting them for people and so can you and they're affordable too. They also have 14 karat gold earrings, high-quality down outerwear, cozy gloves made of cashmere, leather bags. They have great bedding, cookware luggage. So whether you're giving that to you or to someone else, you can give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or you can go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too.
51:05 Alie Ward? And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, just let them know it was Ologies. It's the best way to support the show.
51:13 Alie Ward? Now, before we get to questions, just some context. So in March 2025, just a few weeks ago, the Trump administration proposed rolling back dozens of longstanding EPA regulations. This was a move that Global Health Watch reports would reduce wetland protections, loosen regulations on climate pollution from vehicles and power plants, from wastewater, from coal plants and from air pollution from the energy and manufacturing sectors, including restrictions on mercury, which is a known neurotoxin. And also on the administration's to-do list are closing environmental offices, firing hundreds of EPA workers and cutting ties with some key science advisors.
51:56 Alie Ward? And experts warned that these moves will lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Scientists across many disciplines say that this sucks shit. Let's start with our, our little government because we're both Americans. Valby Listening says, how have laws shifted to suppress climate advocacy such as nonviolent protest? And Addie Capello says, are you actually able to get anything accomplished right now federally speaking? Or is it like talking to brick walls? So yeah, a few people wanted to know with our government, the, the change in the last couple of months, how hopeful can we be that those kinds of petitions and those phone calls are moving any needles?
52:40 Speaker 02 It's a really good question because a lot of people are extremely frustrated. I'm extremely frustrated. I will share some good news. About three weeks ago, I introduced a bill in the Senate that has both Republican and Democrat support in order to put renewable energy on top of current oil and gas land to help transition these businesses to have an additional revenue source. We have Republicans on board and Democrats on board. We have people in the administration on board. It really is a solution that is going to move things forward really, really quickly. There are people in the federal government that are really looking for wins here. They want to get reelected.
53:25 Speaker 02 So if you can find things that impact their district directly, that's how I did this. I got people, a Senator from Utah on board. He's a Republican. He really cares about and all of the above energy approach. His name is John Curtis. Incredible. I showed him the map of Utah and said, look, this is the number of new jobs we can create in Utah. This is what the economic boom in Utah will look like. I did the same thing in Colorado, a Democratic state, and said, look, this is how much energy we can save. This is how much carbon we'll end up saving. This is how much methane will end up saving. I used completely different arguments for each of them, but there are really concrete ways to get things done.
54:05 Alie Ward? This next point was a real light bulb moment for me, so listen.
54:09 Speaker 02 However, at the federal level, in general, it's hard to find these kinds of bipartisan solutions. If we can move things forward at the city and state level, that will have far more impacts than absolutely anything that the federal government can do. If we focus at the state and local level, we can take policies that we know are working and apply them in other cities and states. That has the potential to be 10 times more impactful than that one federal law. So, working at the local level, because of the way our country is set up, that there's a lot of oversight at the city level, the community level, the state level, that's where the wins are going to be, especially for the next four years.
54:53 Speaker 02 So when you say, "Do petitions work? Does this advocacy work?" It'll work so much better for the next four years at the state and local level. And you, listener, has so much more access to your council member, or your assembly person, or your state senator, and those are the people that are moving the actions forward right now.
55:15 Alie Ward? Okay, that's great to know. I think a lot of people think it's, "Why bother with the small fish?" But if you get a case study going in your city and it saves people money, and it's better for people and the environment, then the next city over, the next county, might go from there, and then you have some proof then, right? A little siren action, don't worry about it.
55:34 Speaker 02 Exactly. And we found case studies, and all across the country, there's an amazing policy in San Antonio about construction and reusing materials. We figured out that that policy can easily be applied in a dozen other cities around the country, and it's just not. So, we're taking those policies that work really well at the local level and hand-delivering them to all of these other cities, saying, "Look, you can apply this instantly." And so we're creating this groundswell of local climate action, which I think then can be replicated around the world so much faster than waiting for countrywide governments to make these decisions.
56:11 Alie Ward? Well, it's so frustrating, because there are so many answers that so many scientists have that are just not getting implemented because of money. And a few people, clever hedgehog Davis Bourne and Earl, wanted to know, in clever hedgehog's words, "Since it appears we will be operating in the capitalist economic space for the foreseeable future, how can we leverage the power of the semi-free market to affect positive climate change?" And Davis says, "I've come to believe that we basically can't meaningfully achieve any of these goals under capitalism." So, is the answer to just always appeal to the dollar if that's all that... Your opposition might care about?
56:49 Speaker 02 It's one of the answers, right? Appealing to the dollar is absolutely an answer. Appealing to jobs. We saw that the main reasons why Trump ended up winning in 2024 was the economy, was jobs, and was immigration. And a lot of other things, including LGBTQIA rights, et cetera. But those were the top three. You know, economy, jobs, immigration. If you can appeal to those three, then you'll be able to move things forward. But the other thing that's really important is momentum, right? But I work with a lot of corporates who are doubling down on their renewable energy commitments, who are moving forward with their sustainability commitments. They're just calling them something else.
57:34 Speaker 02 It's really easy to hide the work that you're doing. I mean, it's the same thing with DEI. People are scrubbing DEI from their websites, but it doesn't mean they're getting rid of the initiatives themselves, right? They're just changing the way that they do it because of people who are frustratingly trying to attack these concepts. There are companies in California and in Washington State that have really doubled down their renewable energy commitments because of the momentum. They started it over the last four years. It will cost them more money to undo what they've done than to continue the path. Solar is the cheapest form of energy in the world.
58:16 Speaker 02 The AI companies, data chip manufacturers, they all know that in order to power all of these new facilities that we need, the cheapest thing for them is going to be building new solar. So why not do something that's better for the bottom line?
58:32 Alie Ward? Will that rise in AI? Centers need for electricity. Will that offset a lot of gains that we might need for other electricity for industry or for personal?
58:44 Speaker 02 It's a spectacular question. And it's one that I think about a lot.
58:48 Alie Ward? Okay.
58:48 Speaker 02 So. Since AI joined the common person's lexicon, let's call it two and a half years ago, two years ago or so. And I don't mean to be derogatory when I say common person. I mean, somebody like myself, who is not in the AI industry. I consider myself a common person in the AI space. The amount of energy it's taken to complete a single query of the type from two and a half years ago has been cut tremendously because AI is helping us to solve a lot of these energy problems. They're helping us decide where we should be citing. They're helping us to decide how we can cut down
59:33 Speaker 02 the amount of power it takes for each time you type in a question to ChatGPT. So I think that while, yes, the calculation now is based on current power usage, the thing we're not taking into account is how many people around the world are using AI to help achieve the climate goals. It's similar to crypto. So Ethereum was really, really expensive to mine in terms of electricity in the beginning. And now it uses one one hundredth of the amount of electricity that it needed, you know, 10 years ago. AI is going to be the same thing. Yes, we are going to need more power, but it's not going to be a statistically significant amount
1:00:17 Speaker 02 compared to what it's going to be 10 years from now. AI is going to help us to solve this problem that you just talked about.
1:00:25 Alie Ward? If it doesn't kill us all first.
1:00:27 Speaker 02 I mean, yeah, that's, but that's a different episode of the podcast. It's in the works.
1:00:33 Alie Ward? OK, what about fossil fuels? Joe Louis and Jasser Size wanted to know, in Joe's words, why does nobody discuss how insanely we have subsidized fossil fuels in the last 30 years? Crazy expensive, the things our military has done to keep oil flowing from places with centuries old conflicts. RJ George wanted to know, electric cars versus gasoline cars, is it worse to get a car off the road that we don't use, that runs on fossil fuels, to get a new car when the lithium is dredged from the oceans outside of Papua New Guinea and from South American countries, from indigenous lands? So when you are making big purchases or, you know, big decisions in your life, how do
1:01:16 Alie Ward? you reconcile those things that you have to use every day that are, one option's bad and the other's bad?
1:01:21 Speaker 02 Yeah. This is a really important question. I'm going to tackle the first half first about fossil fuel subsidies.
1:01:28 Alie Ward? There's a really long, loud siren here, so I'm going to recap. But Adam says that fossil fuels, one of the biggest drivers of international relations and international politics, and the way that the US is so involved with Middle East politics because of oil and gas, makes it a challenge for the US government to disentangle those politics from climate. And Adam says he agrees 100% that the US should not be subsidizing oil and gas. Rather, he says-
1:01:56 Speaker 02 That the price of oil, the price of a barrel of oil should come from market forces. And if it did, then we would be much farther moving towards other forms of energy. Absolutely. But the fossil fuel interests are so entrenched in Washington DC. I saw this video online of like these little numbers hanging over each member of Congress that makes it clear how much money they've taken from each fossil fuel company. It's insane. They all help fund their campaigns. So that's a big problem. The number one thing to do would be to get corporate money out of politics. But again- Concept for another episode, we could go on that for forever.
1:02:40 Speaker 02 I agree, we should not allow fossil fuel funding to fund political campaigns because it then continues to further us subsidizing fossil fuels. Cars, other big purchases that are, you know, cleaner, you can see me, I'm putting that in quotes, cleaner. In many ways, it is better for the environment to have an electric car than it is to have an oil and gas car. Yes, there are all the problems that you talked about, the mining of lithium, the human rights conditions in those mines, extremely problematic. These are all things that we need to address.
1:03:20 Speaker 02 However, I would say that if you're going to buy a car, an electric car, the number one thing you need to do is look around your neighborhood and do the research to make sure you have the infrastructure to be able to make use of it. In a place like California, where a majority of their electricity is coming from renewable energy, when you're using your car and plugging it in, that means your car is being powered by solar or wind or geothermal. If you're using kind of a local power source, or if you're in a place that's not grid-connected, you might be using oil and gas in order to make that electricity in order to power your car.
1:04:02 Alie Ward? So in the US, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act did a few things, but notable here is it's the biggest investment in climate change solutions in our history, and it involved loan policies like the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program. We're looking at over $780 billion toward energy and reductions in greenhouse gases. Adam worked on this bill, and though it passed, it doesn't mean that those changes are on a fast track to actually happening.
1:04:31 Speaker 02 And it gets really complicated, but let me put it one more kind of simple way.
1:04:39 Speaker 02 The more adoption of renewable things such as electric vehicles, the more incentive there is for private companies to jump into the game of building infrastructure. There was a lot of money in the Inflation Reduction Act to build chargers. Very few of them have been built. The private sector can move much faster than governments. Governments are really good at incentivizing the private sector, really bad at doing things themselves. If we are showing with our dollar, with our investments, the things that we want, which is moving towards more clean energy, more renewable energy, more sustainable
1:05:22 Speaker 02 infrastructure, electric cars, if we are showing that with our dollar, then it's going to get the corporate sector to jump in even faster because they'll see an opportunity to make money off of things like charging infrastructure. Again, it comes down to the dollar. It's sad, but it's true.
1:05:40 Alie Ward? It sounds like you're so good at really figuring out what matters to what person and approaching it that way, which is brilliant. And I think a lot of people just think if I say what I think more loudly, then someone will listen. But you really have to come through a back door and appeal to what that person is going to be receptive to. And, you know, in that way, Jackie J and Amity Bliss both wanted to know, how do you move past preaching to the choir? How do you deal with the echo chamber? You know, I struggle with that with this podcast, too. The people who need to hear some of these facts are the ones that are going to be turned off as soon as they realize that you're trying to teach them or enlighten them or whatever. But yeah, echo chamber, how do you get past that?
1:06:21 Speaker 02 So two answers to this question. One, the first part of what you were talking about is really understanding audiences. And what I mean by that is not just the audience of this podcast, right? If you have somebody on as a guest, understanding who their audience is, understanding who your audience is, let's say I want to figure out a way to do a collaboration with a right-wing influencer in order to try and get my message in front of them. I am not going to use my language that I would in front of my audience. I'm going to try and understand who their audience is and figure out what language resonates with them and try and sneak in the things that I care about, sneak in the actions that I want them to take.
1:07:04 Speaker 02 So there's general audiences and then there are audiences within audiences. Meaning when somebody like Taylor Swift goes on tour, her audience in Texas might be a little different from her audience in Florida, a little different from her audience in Pennsylvania. That's why when we do activism at our shows, the actions are different in the different places because the audiences are different. So that echo chamber, yes, if I post something on my social media, I know I'm going to get those same, you know, people watching, a lot of them already know what I talk about, a lot of them already know what I care about. One chapter in the book is called "Feat."
1:07:46 Alie Ward? Okay.
1:07:47 Speaker 02 F.E.A.T., not F.E.E.T. And by "feet," I mean, you've seen on the Billboard charts or on Spotify or wherever, so many songs now are an artist featuring another artist.
1:08:01 Alie Ward? Yes.
1:08:02 Speaker 02 That's the way.
1:08:03 Alie Ward? Oh, my god.
1:08:04 Speaker 02 To cross-pollinate audiences. And I'll tell you a really interesting fact. That's one thing that we need to borrow from the music industry is movements featuring other movements. There was a study done out of the University of Chicago that said for every degree increase in climate. There will be 7% more gun deaths.
1:08:27 Alie Ward? Oh.
1:08:28 Speaker 02 The relationship between gun violence and climate is very clear.
1:08:33 Alie Ward? Oh, God.
1:08:34 Speaker 02 So by the climate movement featuring the gun movement and vice versa, you start to make impact around both of those.
1:08:42 Alie Ward? For more on these statistics, you can see the 2022 study, Analysis of Daily Ambient Temperature and Firearms Violence in 100 US Cities. Or there's a 2025 paper titled, "Temperature, Violent Crime, Climate Change and Vulnerability Factors in 44 United States Cities." Or the 2020 paper, "The Association Between Weather and the Number of Daily Shootings in Chicago." There's a lot of data on this.
1:09:06 Speaker 02 The public health movement is the same thing. That could be a gun in public health. That could be a climate in public health. This idea of featuring and understanding who these different audiences are and that cross-sector collaboration is what the movement world needs to do. Right now, we're in competition for money and resources and people. A Taylor Swift fan? It doesn't mean that they're not a BTS fan. It doesn't mean that they're not an AJR fan. People can go to multiple concerts. People can care about multiple issues. This idea of featuring is key in order to make our social movement stronger.
1:09:39 Alie Ward? Back in the day, they used to call those collabs on YouTube. But featuring is, there are so many artists that I've decided I like because they were featured on someone else's song and then I became a bigger fan of them. That's like genius. But a lot of people, by the way, wanted to say that they love AJR and they love you and that you're their favorites. California's Classroom, Paulina, said that, big fan of AJR. Justin B. wanted to know, really looking forward to Amplify, your book, and wanted to know who you geeked out the most over getting to interview.
1:10:09 Speaker 02 Hmm. That's a good question. Justin B., is that Justin Bieber? Justin Bieber's a fan?
1:10:15 Alie Ward? I think it is, yeah. Yeah, he's a huge fan.
1:10:18 Speaker 02 My God.
1:10:19 Alie Ward? Keeps texting me and I'm like, babe, I'm on Signal. Go, what?
1:10:26 Speaker 02 Who was I the most, okay. I think the most excited person I was to meet, uh, that I was excited to meet and interview was Bill Nye, the Science Guy.
1:10:35 Alie Ward? Oh.
1:10:36 Speaker 02 He is just a delight. He told me all of these stories about how to reach your audience effectively using comedy. He was actually a Steve Martin impersonator when he was younger and he learned how to do comedy and then he applied that to teach kids about science. And I was like, yes, that makes so much sense. But he is the nicest, the smartest, the best climate communicator.
1:11:01 Alie Ward? Oh, what a dream. If I may plug an episode that we have of him, um, we had Bill Nye on for a pedagogology episode about science communication. I'll link in the show notes. He also has a podcast called Science Rules and I was very honored to be his first guest on it. So a big fan over here and I very much understand how he crashes out.
1:11:21 Speaker 04 What I'm saying is the planet's on fucking fire.
1:11:25 Alie Ward? A bunch of people wanted to know. Jessica Gonzalez, Jamie Hanna, Jackie G, Mia, Kathleen, first time question asker, Renee Wagner. Jackie G asked, how do you not get burned out and exhausted by doing this work? Jamie Hanna asked, how do you handle your climate grief? And Jessica says, I'm so distressed over this topic on nearly a daily basis. Do you have any advice around dealing with climate anxiety while also still trying to make good change? Like, how do you not lie face down on a carpet and cry every day? And just over this.
1:11:55 Speaker 02 All of these people are asking such good questions. For me, it's all about reframing things. I have this really big whiteboard that I use to kind of draw out my ideas. Everything that we've done in the music space and everything that I've done in the climate space has been because I've explored ideas in a lot of other places. We've watched movies, Broadway shows, listening to other music. In the climate space, I could be sitting at my piano and playing and then get inspired to do something with climate. And one of the things that I advocate for people to do is not spend all of their time focusing on the thing itself, to do other things that inspire you and then take that
1:12:38 Speaker 02 inspiration and use it in order to get shit done. Am I allowed to say that on the podcast? I think you said fuck.
1:12:44 Alie Ward? Yeah, yeah, we swear constantly, yeah.
1:12:46 Speaker 02 Perfect. As long as you said fuck first, I can say shit now.
1:12:49 Alie Ward? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
1:12:51 Speaker 02 So it really, for me, is about the mindset. I stay positive because when I get angry at music stuff, I will then go and work on climate stuff. When I get angry at climate stuff, I will then go and play piano. When I get frustrated with the piano, I will then go read a book. I don't force myself into doing things that make me really uncomfortable. I find the solutions in one area and then apply it somewhere else. That would be my best advice for burnout. If you say, "I need to solve this climate problem right now and spend days on it," that's gonna cause burnout. If you don't have the solution, go and freaking draw. I don't care.
1:13:34 Speaker 02 I'm a terrible artist, but I'll sometimes just draw in order to get my feelings out. This sounds super cliche, but any form of art is a really good form of therapy. Also, I'm not discounting therapy itself. I go to therapy. Therapy is extremely valuable, but also creative pursuits are so amazing. I don't know what your creative pursuits are, but I'm sure you have something that's a creative pursuit.
1:14:01 Alie Ward? Oh, for sure. I do embroidery at the end of the day.
1:14:05 Speaker 02 Love it.
1:14:06 Alie Ward? I'm not, I'm not good at it. I do cross stitch. It takes me a year to finish doing one tomato, but I don't care. It just is a thing for me to turn my brain off of some things. And we have an episode coming up called Salugenology, which is a two-parter coming up about just that, just about how important going out and joining a drum circle and going on walks and, you know, why you need that to prevent burnout. And Brian Scott also sent in an audio question, wanted to know, they're a postdoc at Arizona State in soil microbiology, and they say that-
1:14:40 Speaker 05 I mean, I go to talks, and it's the same, same scientists are making the same arguments that they have for the past decade, and they're talking to a room full of people who all agree, and it's a bunch of rah rah rah, and outside the world burns. We haven't moved the needle. I would really like your guest to address, what can we do differently?
1:15:05 Speaker 05 To start to make inroads, not with all of us who are happy to get on board, but with the people we need to convince that this is an issue that needs to be addressed. I mean, it's just crazy that human beings are like this. We're the only species on the planet who doesn't get it.
1:15:22 Alie Ward? I think that you've addressed that really well of talking to people in a different way, but do you have anything to speak to that, like either, you know, move your sail this direction or something's are changing?
1:15:36 Speaker 02 Yeah. One of the things that's most kind of valuable, I feel, because I came from the academic space, as we talked about, I did a PhD. When I finished it, I put it up on the website of the school. I think three people read it in total. Three people read this thing that I spent so long on, and I'm just like, I can't believe three people read it.
1:16:00 Alie Ward? Oh, God.
1:16:01 Speaker 02 The first thing we need to be doing is to translate that work into something that first is going to be interesting to another audience and is useful to another audience. Academia is great. There are a lot of problems with academia. Academia is great, but one of the things it's really bad at is building in an advocacy strategy from the ground up. And this is literally why we built Planet Reimagined. As we're moving forward, I can see a future where a lot of these journals that publish academic work is going to say, where is my so what paragraph at the end of this work? How can it actually be useful to people?
1:16:43 Speaker 02 And by that, I mean, who are your audiences? What are the levers that we need to push in order to get this stuff implemented and stuff done? And that might mean academics collaborating with advocates.
1:16:58 Alie Ward? So academics, a dissertation section saying, hey, people, you can use this this way.
1:17:05 Speaker 02 And honestly, that's what we do at Planet Reimagine. We put academics and advocates together to create something from the research stage to the publication stage, to the implementation stage, to bringing it out into the world. And so there's going to be a much cleaner pipeline between the two moving forward. And if you're an academic and if you can start on that process now, then you're going to be way ahead of the game. And what I mean by that is you're a soil scientist, right? So if you are doing an academic research paper on soil science, how can that be useful to people? Reach out to companies, reach out to organizations, reach out to places that are doing agriculture
1:17:45 Speaker 02 policy and figure out how you can make what you're doing as useful as possible and focus on the implementation stage and the getting it out there. We want to end the echo chambers at the end of academia before the advocacy starts. We need to break down that wall between academia and advocacy. That's my soapbox on this.
1:18:06 Alie Ward? Your soapbox is very helpful. Is there, is there one thing that is the hardest part about, let's say, writing the book? Because the book's coming out soon. I always ask the, what sucks and what you loved the most about your job. But in terms of putting this book out, what was the hardest part about it?
1:18:25 Speaker 02 The hardest part about it was knowing when I was done. There is so much in there that's up to the moment and really kind of relevant and useful. It's funny, there was a group of Democratic campaign managers that asked me to have lunch a couple of weeks ago and they said, tell us tips and tricks from the book so we can apply them as we're building new campaigns. And so I shared some of them with them and I realized like, oh, if I would have had been able to add things two weeks ago, I would add more and I would add more and I would add more. Don't get me wrong, it's all still like extremely relevant and extremely useful and sticky. But the hardest thing was saying, okay, this is the date where I am done.
1:19:09 Speaker 02 Obviously, I had to incorporate Trump being in office and pulling us out of the Paris Climate Agreement again and a couple of kind of recent big climany things. But Saying goodbye, honestly, the same thing as an album. Like, the album's done, we have to submit it. Like, it was, it felt very much the same.
1:19:28 Alie Ward? Yeah, I noodled with Ologies for a year and a half before I finally put it out. And I could have noodled another decade and, you know, made 2% more progress on it for, you know, and 90% of the time it takes. But yeah, it's really hard to let go when you care about something. What about the best thing about it? What was the most gratifying part about writing it or starting it or finishing it or doing the interviews?
1:19:53 Speaker 02 So, the funny thing is, I just recorded the audiobook. And it was the first time that I read the book out loud. I read it, you know, a million times after, you know, it was written. And we just, like, went over and over, line by line, making sure it was accessible. Reading the audiobook out loud was the first time I realized that it's actually a useful book. Like, there are things in there, and that was my goal, right? And then I got so far away from that because I was just like, oh, my God, I need to get this done. Need to get this done. And reading the book out loud was so rewarding because I was like, oh, yeah, I forgot about this. This is something I can do. This is something I can do. This is something I can do.
1:20:36 Speaker 02 At the end of each chapter, there are questions for you to ask yourself. There are some checklists. There are like things, like really specific things that you can do in your own life and in the world of movements. And that was my goal. And so I guess the most satisfying thing was that in reading it out loud to myself in a dark room, recording it, is that I achieved my goal. That was my goal.
1:21:00 Alie Ward? Again, this is his upcoming book, Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World. And that's due out June 3rd, but it is available for preorder now. So if you care about it, preorder it.
1:21:13 Speaker 02 Now, my goal for the book is for it to actually be used. If the people who do buy the book end up using it to make a difference, that really is all that matters to me. So don't let it sit on the coffee table. Open up, actually read the book and make use of it, please.
1:21:30 Alie Ward? It's really inspiring to just hearing about things on the local level and knowing that that is a good place to start. It's already very galvanizing to know that you can also bring other people into it. And you can, instead of just making one change yourself, if you can inspire a lot of people that you're, you are moving that needle a little, you know?
1:21:50 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:21:51 Alie Ward? If all of us lean on that needle.
1:21:55 Speaker 02 Sounds very uncomfortable.
1:21:57 Alie Ward? Yes. How are you spending Earth Day?
1:21:59 Speaker 02 I am spending Earth Day, I'm doing a bunch of college lectures, doing the thing that we talked about, getting students inspired to figure out how to take what they're doing and applying them. And I'm also, funny enough, doing what I said with recording content with a bunch of different YouTubers and Instagrammers who don't have a climate audience and figuring out how to tell stories to their audience to get them inspired. So I'm doing a bunch of filming and a bunch of college lectures, kind of two opposite sides of the spectrum.
1:22:30 Alie Ward? That's great. That's a perfect way to spend it. This has been so great to get to sit down. I wish I were in Brooklyn. I wish we were somewhere together, actually getting to talk. I've wanted to interview you for literally like years now, so this is the best.
1:22:43 Speaker 02 Thank you so, so much. And I will see you hopefully on our tour this summer at some point. You have to come with the family.
1:22:49 Alie Ward? Oh, of course. You know we'll be there. So ask smart people sometimes not smart questions because that's what everyone else did to get smart. And usually they're in a bit of a fervor to share, which is great. Now, share this episode with anyone who cares about the boiling ball that we live on. And if you're hearing this before June 2025, preorder Adam's book Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World. Again, that is Amplify, available wherever books are sold. It's linked in the show notes, along with his nonprofit Planet Reimagined. And he's on Instagram as Adam A J R Brothers, and we'll link the rest of his socials as well. And so much more will be linked on our website at alieward.com/ologies/climatefervorology,
1:23:34 Alie Ward? which is in the show notes, in case your hands are busy, maybe you're mixing a cake. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. I'm at @Alieward on both. Alie has one L. Smallologies are our kid-friendly versions of classic Ologies episodes, available wherever you get podcasts. You can look for the new green artwork. Those are shorter and they are G-rated. You can join the Ologies Patreon at patreon.com/ologies. Ologies shirts and hats and bathing suits are at ologiesmerch.com. Thank you, Erin Talbert, for adminning the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Avilene Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardweard is the website. Our scheduling producer is Noell Dilworth. Susan Hale also makes our world turn on time as managing director. Mercedes Maitland is one of our two beloved editors.
1:24:16 Alie Ward? But leading the charge on this episode is none other than Jake Chaffee. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And speaking of music, thank you again, Chris Berry, professional drummer and rock star brother-in-law, for the intro on this one and for all of the coffee that you make us when we visit. I also mentioned Chris a few times in our Coffeeology episode. Highly recommend that one. And if you listen until the end of the show, I tell you a secret. And I get it. Bridge and gaps. I get it. It's the only way to do these things. But I also get crashing out. And whoo, I'm getting there. But I'll also tell you that the greatest thing that's happened to me in the last couple
1:24:59 Alie Ward? of days is that our dog, my daughter, Gremmie, got a haircut. She's a poodle-shih-tzu-cocker-spaniel-chihuahua hybrid chimera. And she has fluffy hair that needs to be cut. And if you're familiar with a llama cut on a dog, it involves very short hair on the legs, a fluffy body, and a shorn face. Google llama cut dog, you'll see what I'm talking about. Got her back from the groomers, and it's one of the best things that's ever happened to me. I will, I'll post a picture on the Ologies Instagram, because you deserve it and we need it. Okay. Happy Earth Day.
1:25:41 Alie Ward? I hope your favorite artists use this strategy and we sign a bunch of petitions and lean on needles and put pressure on people and stop putting up with shit. Okay. Bye-bye.
1:26:13 Speaker 06 Can't do it alone, you know.
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