When Pop Fandom Becomes a Force for Good with AJR’s Adam Met

Fanbases are some of the most powerful forces on the planet. They show up. They buy the tickets. They travel across countries and time zones. They memorize lyrics, study interviews, hunt for Easter eggs, and turn the smallest detail into an entire universe of meaning. They collaborate, they organize, and they care deeply. Fan communities are savvy. They are smart. And when they are invited in, they create extraordinary momentum. Adam Met, best known as the “A” of indie-pop band AJR, believes that this kind of energy can extend far beyond concerts or comment sections. He is asking a bigger question. What if we harnessed that same passion, creativity, imagination, and sense of belonging to improve the communities we live in? Adam has spent years studying how to move people from curiosity to action. He’s also a climate activist, the founder of the nonprofit Planet Reimagined, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, and the author of the bestselling book Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World. In our conversation, Adam explains how the same principles that make music meaningful - ownership, storytelling, participation, and belonging - can be applied to social movements, civic engagement, and climate action, to name a few. From designing fan-first concert experiences to rethinking how we engage people around complex issues, Adam argues that emotion is the engine of progress. This episode isn’t really about music. And it’s not really about climate either. It’s about how we bring people together, help them feel invested, and create experiences that inspire them to act. This… is A Bit of Optimism. --------------------------- To buy Adam’s book Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World, head to: https://www.adammet.net/amplify If you want to learn more about Adam’s climate work, check out: https://www.planetreimagined.com And don’t forget to stream AJR’s latest EP, What No One’s Thinking: https://www.ajrbrothers.com ---------------------------

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Two albums ago, we didn't release a tracklist. Instead, we took our tracklist, we cut it up into 36 jigsaw puzzle pieces, and shot the jigsaw puzzle pieces out across the internet. Our fans had to work together across the world in order to put together this jigsaw puzzle. They posted it, and that post got more pick up than pretty much anything that we ever posted.

• 0:22Simon Sinek?

  And it wasn't even your post, it was their post.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  It was their post. It gave them ownership over the music, over the album.

• 0:28Simon Sinek?

  So your fans posted the setlist to all the other fans?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 0:31Simon Sinek?

  That is beautiful. It's good to be back in New York City. There's something about this place, the rhythm, the chaos, bagels that actually taste the way bagels are supposed to taste, and the chance to hang out with cool New York City kids, like my guest, Adam Met.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Can we skip to the good part?

• 0:50Simon Sinek?

  Adam is the A of indie pop band AJR.

• 0:59Simon Sinek?

  He's also a climate activist, founder of the nonprofit Planet Reimagined, an adjunct professor at Columbia University,

• 1:06Speaker 00

  When writing this book-

• 1:07Simon Sinek?

  and the author of bestselling book Amplify.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  People become fans.

• 1:10Simon Sinek?

  There's no doubt that Adam is a very busy person. He's also very educated. He has a PhD after all. But it's the education he got from inside the music industry that's particularly fascinating. More specifically, how he's applying what he's learned from making pop music to develop strategies for effective social and environmental change. It's true, pop music could actually save the world. This is a bit of optimism.

• 1:48Simon Sinek?

  Did you go to Broadway as a kid?

• 1:51Speaker 00

  I went to a lot of Broadway as a kid, yeah. My first Broadway show was Music Man.

• 1:57Simon Sinek?

  I don't think I ever saw Music Man.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Oh, but have you seen the movie?

• 2:01Simon Sinek?

  No.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  Oh, it's worth it. It's absolutely worth it.

• 2:03Simon Sinek?

  Is it a musical?

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Right, you're not a musical person.

• 2:07Simon Sinek?

  Hmm.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  You're more of a play person.

• 2:09Simon Sinek?

  I mean, I, I like them. I mean, I have an opinion about musicals, which I'm gonna get people writing in with angry letters, but it's, it's more of a business. Broadway is more of a business than anything else. It's kind of like TV news.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  It's not a good business.

• 2:25Simon Sinek?

  No, but it's not a good business, but it's a business. It's entertainment.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:29Simon Sinek?

  And occasionally it's art.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  It is also a way for rich philanthropists to try and one-up each other in New York by being producers of Broadway shows. It's about clout in New York City.

• 2:42Simon Sinek?

  Become a Broadway producer?

• 2:43Speaker 00

  Exactly. That's what it, that's what it is on the other side.

• 2:46Simon Sinek?

  I got it. Okay, yeah. But I mean, look, there's a lot of, there's a lot of musicals that I love.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. Like?

• 2:51Simon Sinek?

  I mean, I do like Hamilton.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Name nine.

• 2:54Simon Sinek?

  Nine?

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:55Simon Sinek?

  I mean, I can't name nine that I like, but it would be just a trick to see if I could name nine. Okay, let me try. Hold on.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Great. Hamilton.

• 3:01Simon Sinek?

  I get Hamilton.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:02Simon Sinek?

  Okay. Annie.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Okay, that's a good one.

• 3:04Simon Sinek?

  By the way, I like Annie.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:06Simon Sinek?

  I thought the movie was great. I don't, have I ever seen it live? But, you know.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  I haven't seen it live.

• 3:10Simon Sinek?

  But it's a great movie.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Great movie.

• 3:12Simon Sinek?

  And the music's great.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Yes, agree.

• 3:13Simon Sinek?

  Like Annie, Producers.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:16Simon Sinek?

  Cabaret.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  The movie, you saw Producers?

• 3:17Simon Sinek?

  No, I saw the, I saw.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Oh, you saw the show. Okay, good. All right.

• 3:20Simon Sinek?

  And, and Cabaret, which I loved. I'm cheating because my friend was in those two, so.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:25Simon Sinek?

  But that's okay. I, so.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  We're almost halfway.

• 3:27Simon Sinek?

  So I saw Cabaret many times because my friend is in it. And, and it's good. Also, great music. Money, money, money, money.

• 3:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:34Simon Sinek?

  Da, na, na, na, na, na. I like anything in the minor key.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 3:38Simon Sinek?

  And now I'm gonna dig into things that I probably don't like or wanna see, but like, a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Okay, that is absolutely a show.

• 3:44Simon Sinek?

  Wicked.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Great.

• 3:46Simon Sinek?

  Cats.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 3:48Simon Sinek?

  I saw it. Starlight Express, Jesus Christ Superstar.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 3:52Simon Sinek?

  I mean, they're all Andrew Lloyd Webber.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  We've gotten to nine so quickly.

• 3:55Simon Sinek?

  I mean, granted, I don't, I couldn't name a new one. They're all very old. Some of them are even older than me. Jesus Christ Superstar, I think, is older than me.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Sure. What do you not like about musicals, though?

• 4:09Simon Sinek?

  In general, I find the music for American musicals sounds the same.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Like Les Mis is my favorite show of all time.

• 4:16Simon Sinek?

  I've seen that.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 4:17Simon Sinek?

  Seen that a few times.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Did you like Les Mis?

• 4:18Simon Sinek?

  Very much.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 4:19Simon Sinek?

  Very much.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  So Les Mis is...

• 4:20Simon Sinek?

  Liked Les Mis a lot.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  But to your point, every song sounds the same because it uses this same motif over and over and over again. It's almost like an opera rather than a show.

• 4:32Simon Sinek?

  I'm not complaining about the music having themes in a show.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 4:35Simon Sinek?

  I'm complaining about all musicals sounding the same.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Oh, musicals sounding like each other?

• 4:40Simon Sinek?

  Yes, there's an American musical,

• 4:44Simon Sinek?

  like, it's kind of like heavy metal has a heavy metal-ness to it.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Got it. So you don't like the genre of Broadway musical?

• 4:52Simon Sinek?

  I don't like the genre of Broadway musical, right.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Got it, okay.

• 4:54Simon Sinek?

  So it's not like I hate the shows.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  All right.

• 4:56Simon Sinek?

  Plenty of exceptions. Javert's Theme?

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:59Simon Sinek?

  Again, minor key, love the minor key.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 5:01Simon Sinek?

  Javert's Theme in Les Mis, I can't sing.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:04Simon Sinek?

  Javert's Theme is the only thing that I can sing and it sounds like what it's supposed to sound like. The only... I know, I know I'm not going to. But...

• 5:12Speaker 00

  You knew where I was going to.

• 5:13Simon Sinek?

  I know, I know, exactly. I have to, we have to say it. Uh, I know you first, before I met you, because I was actually a fan of your music.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:22Simon Sinek?

  You are the A of AJR, the hot pop band. Pop band? Is that what you call it?

• 5:28Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 5:29Simon Sinek?

  Pup? Pop genre?

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 5:30Simon Sinek?

  Sure. And it was my nephew who introduced me to your work.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  Well...

• 5:34Simon Sinek?

  Like so many, Bang was my introduction to AJR.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Well, thank you to your nephew. I really appreciate it. Without him, I would not be here today.

• 5:41Simon Sinek?

  That is partially true.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:45Simon Sinek?

  I mean, you've played huge arenas as AJR, in AJR. And yet, it is fair to say that your music career may be the least impressive thing about you.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Thank you?

• 5:57Simon Sinek?

  Yes. You are, you are one of the hardest-driving, smartest entrepreneurial sort of do-gooders I've ever met.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Wow. Coming from you, that means so much. I really appreciate that.

• 6:12Simon Sinek?

  But it's true. How did you, so were you always driven to be a part of having a positive change in the world? Or did that come later in life? Give me a little history. I don't, and by the way, I'm asking you questions that I, I don't know any of the things I'm asking you.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Great. Excellent.

• 6:29Simon Sinek?

  I'm gonna assume... Uh, that you're three musical kids and like, you know, play for all the parents' friends and,

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:38Simon Sinek?

  you know, took music lessons and, you know.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. So our start was, we were, because we grew up in New York City, we were street performing in New York City as one does. Literally. We put out a hat for money. We, we didn't grow up well off. We all shared one room. So the three of us were living in one room. We had triple bunk beds and we raised enough money on the street to buy Pro Tools, a computer, to buy a ukulele, to buy like the setup to actually make music. And for me, yes, it was about the music and I loved storytelling and I loved art. But really, once I think back and reflect on it, the core of it for me, and I'm not speaking for my brothers in this instance. For me, it was about how do you effectively move people? What are the strategies to get people from one place to another?

• 7:25Speaker 00

  And I'm not saying physically, I'm saying emotionally. So whether it's through the songwriting or what the live show experience is, or anything from the merchandise to the storytelling of the whole narrative of how we went from three guys, street performing in New York to playing Madison Square Garden in the Hollywood Bowl. It has been all about how to tell those effective stories in order to move people. And every single thing that I learned from music, I've applied to everything else that I do in my life.

• 7:56Simon Sinek?

  So one thing I do know about you, which is you, I would argue that you are on the cutting edge of understanding how the music business has changed and what it has become. Right? Because there's a lot of artists who complain that they're not getting money from their music, from Spotify and the rest of it. And you recognize that, that you can't really make the money from the music anymore. The music is the marketing tool to create an experience that people will pay money to come see in a show.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 8:23Simon Sinek?

  Which, you know, Taylor Swift and others have figured that out too.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:26Simon Sinek?

  When people think of concert, they think pay, buy your ticket, show up at venue, wait, maybe there's an opening act.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 8:33Simon Sinek?

  That's your like Lucky Strike Extra, band performs, leave, maybe buy merch.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 8:37Simon Sinek?

  That's, that's it. That's not what your concerts are.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  No. So because.

• 8:44Simon Sinek?

  You design them.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:45Simon Sinek?

  You make shows.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  We do. And I think it has to do with the fact that we did grow up in New York City, going to, oh, we're circling back already.

• 8:52Simon Sinek?

  Musicals.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  Going to see musicals.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  If you're listening to this and you've ever been to one of our shows, they're very much Broadway shows that we take on the road. We take the album and as the album is being written, and to be abundantly clear, both of my brothers write the music. So I'm not involved in the writing process of the music. But as they are writing the music, the show is being developed. It's not, let's write the album and put it out and then we'll build a show around it. It's, let's figure out what the narrative is through the album so we can create this show.

• 9:30Simon Sinek?

  So you think of it right from the, it's all conceived of at the same time.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 9:34Simon Sinek?

  Which is kind of astonishing.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  And there are some songs that are built around what is this gonna sound like and look like onstage? Just as much as what is this gonna sound like when people are listening to them in their headphones?

• 9:44Simon Sinek?

  So it's really, your albums are really the pre-release soundtracks of the show.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  That's exactly what it is. And so we have an album called Neo Theater, which, I mean, and a couple of our albums have overtures on them. Literally a song called Overture, which takes pieces of all the other songs on the album and does a modern version of an overture and mashes them up. So it's very theatrical.

• 10:03Simon Sinek?

  I love that. So, okay, so now-

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Now, do you love that or do you not?

• 10:06Simon Sinek?

  No, as an artist, that, I mean, it is the most customer service orientation. You're like, what can we give to the human beings who are gonna be consuming our work?

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 10:18Simon Sinek?

  And how do we make it the most magical experience for them? What if we design the show and the album and all of the merch and the experiences at the same time?

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. A fan-first approach has always been our strategy. Even, so when we first started out, we would always have a $10 ticket available. Even today, we have a $30 or $40 ticket available, even in arenas. We wanna make sure that our shows continue to be accessible to people. But our shows, like I was saying, don't just encompass the music and the storytelling and the live experience. There are all of these ways for fans to participate online, continue to take the show home with them, learn about it before. You look at some of these Discord groups and these Reddit threads, the engagement in there is insane. They're noticing- Details that we thought nobody would notice. And honestly, Taylor Swift pioneered this, right?

• 11:10Speaker 00

  To be able to take something like a fanbase and move it to use them for good, which we can talk about in a bit. But also to play into the games that they like to play, play into that culture. We embed things in our albums. And I'll give you an example. In one of our albums, in every single song, there was a very small snippet of another song on the album. So people had to go on a hunt through the album itself to try and find the pieces of the other songs.

• 11:42Simon Sinek?

  For no other reason than the fun of looking.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  The fun, the fun of it. Yeah.

• 11:45Simon Sinek?

  You don't win a prize, it's just the fun.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, just the fun. It was also, it was like Les Mis. Les Mis has little pieces of other songs playing their way throughout. But then we would do something even more intentional that would have a winner. So when you think about games, when you think about people playing games, generally there are a couple of different strategies, right? One strategy is competition. You put people in competition with each other. There's going to be a winner and a loser. There's also a world building game, you know, like Minecraft, where people are just building the worlds. Twenty One Pilots uses this strategy. They build this world with this lore and all of these stories and keeps expanding with their albums. We said, okay, what if we used a different strategy, not competition, not world building? What if we forced our fans to collaborate on something?

• 12:31Speaker 00

  So we created this experience. Two albums ago, we didn't release a tracklist. Instead, we took our tracklist, we cut it up into thirty six jigsaw puzzle pieces, and shot the jigsaw puzzle pieces out across the internet. We put one piece on Twitter, one to our email list, one to our text list, one on Discord, Reddit. Over the next three hours, our fans had to work together across the world in order to put together this jigsaw puzzle. They posted it, and that post got more pickup than pretty much anything that we ever posted.

• 13:03Simon Sinek?

  And it wasn't even your post, it was their post.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  It was their post. It gave them ownership over the music, over the album.

• 13:08Simon Sinek?

  So your fans posted the setlist, the tracklist to everybody, to all the other fans?

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 13:14Simon Sinek?

  That is beautiful.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:16Simon Sinek?

  How did you even come up with that? Because I'm, by the way, absolutely gonna steal it.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Go for it.

• 13:21Simon Sinek?

  It's a genius idea.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Oh, when I do work in climate and movement building, I take that strategy and work with nonprofits to do the same thing. Because if you think about it, it gives them ownership over the product, over the idea in a way that you could never do if you were forcing it. That is just a beautiful way of redefining what ownership looks like. And it makes them, you know, really focus on it.

• 13:43Simon Sinek?

  That is so inspiring. Okay, so now I understand how your brain works. Right? Why not just be a pop star for the rest of your life? And, you know, travel on the road and do concerts and make music? I mean, that's joyful.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:56Simon Sinek?

  And you're giving people a better experience than a traditional, you know, artist experience. Why the all of the, all the other stuff? And you don't do one other thing. You do like 10 other things. You wrote a book.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:11Simon Sinek?

  You called Amplify, which we'll get into because I'm curious.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  So why am I unsatisfied?

• 14:17Speaker 00

  It might be my Jewish genealogy. Being perpetually unsatisfied. But really, when we were kids, we had one goal with the band, which was to sell out Madison Square Garden. That was the goal. And a year and three months ago, we sold out two back-to-back nights at Madison Square Garden. And when you achieve something that you've been working on for so long.

• 14:45Simon Sinek?

  A finite goal.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. Of course, there's more to do. We could go and sell out stadiums. We can go and be, try and be bigger and bigger and bigger. We could try to be the biggest artist in the world. I have always been inspired by the music industry. And I've always been inspired by so many different things because of what I mentioned before, that there are so many different ways to move people. There are so many different ways to figure out how to use emotion effectively to succeed in things. And so, music was my first love, and it was my first step in this journey.

• 15:21Simon Sinek?

  And seeing how something that you made, made people feel.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yep. And now, as much as I love it and as much as I want to keep doing it. Looking at how we can use all of these strategies in different movements to make the world a better place is my next goal. And so I'm not doing as much music as I have been before. This past summer, I didn't do all the shows with my brothers. I did New York and LA and a handful of other markets. And I really enjoy performing and being on stage. And I'll even, when I'm at home, I'll stay up till three in the morning playing piano. My neighbors are very unhappy with me. I play mostly Broadway songs.

• 16:02Simon Sinek?

  I'm one of your neighbors.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  I always felt like I had to be doing many things because I argue with the premise because it's not one thing or another, because fundamentally, it's all the same thing for me. So when I'm doing-

• 16:21Simon Sinek?

  Different media, different mediums-

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:24Simon Sinek?

  For the same-

• 16:25Speaker 00

  For the same ultimate goal.

• 16:26Simon Sinek?

  For the same ultimate goal.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. So when I was doing my PhD, the creativity behind it, the way I was coming up with ideas, is the exact same part of my brain that I used when I was working out new touring strategies or models for the music industry, or this puzzle idea.

• 16:41Simon Sinek?

  What's your PhD in?

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Human rights law and sustainable development.

• 16:45Simon Sinek?

  Are you an attorney also?

• 16:46Speaker 00

  I mean, I do not, I've not passed the bar in the US, but my background is in human rights law, so. Sure.

• 16:54Simon Sinek?

  I mean, you have a PhD in human rights law.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:59Simon Sinek?

  Okay.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Don't look so sad.

• 17:02Simon Sinek?

  Sorry, just like you're such an overachiever. I find you, you're so creative, and I love how fan focus now becomes sort of like do-gooder focus, you know? So first of all, what is the movement that is occupying most of your time right now?

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Right now, it is the climate movement, but I hate calling it that because I fundamentally do not believe the climate movement should exist. I believe that- I mean, we're getting deep into it now. But I believe we, as the climate movement, have completely failed over the last bunch of years. There has been some legislation that's been successful, but nobody can connect to climate change. Nobody knows what 1.5 degrees is. Nobody knows what net zero is. It's a big problem. If we take the whole movement and divide it up into things like farming and transportation and energy and water and how we build things, how we grow things, how we get from place to place, that's so much easier for people to engage with than I want to fight for the

• 18:00Speaker 00

  climate movement. The era of Greta and fear and anger around climate is over.

• 18:07Simon Sinek?

  You and I met at a party.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:09Simon Sinek?

  In London, of all places. And I think when I heard that you worked on climate, I think I went on a tirade.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 18:17Simon Sinek?

  Because I can't help myself.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:19Simon Sinek?

  And at the end of my tirade, you go, "Did you read my op ed? Because that's what I wrote." And that's when we bonded. My tirade is very similar as you, which is, "Don't let scientists run social movements." Right? Because scientists are about uncertainty and science are about things that are vague and they're terrible communicators.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:40Simon Sinek?

  The fact that we debate, you know, climate change is funny to me. You know, like, we debate whether it's a natural climate cycle or whether it's caused by, by human beings.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 18:54Simon Sinek?

  And who cares?

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:56Simon Sinek?

  It's like, if there was an asteroid heading towards the earth, we wouldn't debate if we should let the asteroid hit because it's just the way the natural world works, or whether we should intervene and push it out of the way. Of course, we would intervene and push it out of the way.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Would we now?

• 19:08Simon Sinek?

  Would we?

• 19:09Speaker 00

  In this day and age?

• 19:10Simon Sinek?

  I'm pretty sure we would. If we could all, the problem is, would we all agree that the asteroid's heading towards us? But of course, we would intervene. So there's nothing wrong with human intervention.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 19:18Simon Sinek?

  To make something better if something is tending towards worse. And who cares where it came from? Who cares if it's a natural cycle? Who cares if we did it through industrialization? Doesn't matter. We are where we are. And I wish, wish people would stop saying we're killing the planet.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:32Simon Sinek?

  The planet's fine.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  The planet is gonna be fine long after we're gone.

• 19:36Simon Sinek?

  Like, the problem is, we're killing ourselves.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  We are.

• 19:39Simon Sinek?

  We're creating conditions, or conditions are being created, either one.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:43Simon Sinek?

  That will make life unsustainable for the human animal to survive on this planet. We will die, and new species will replace us, and life will be, the planet's fine.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Planet might even be better.

• 19:51Simon Sinek?

  Planet might even be better, exactly. So, this is where you and I bonded, we agree.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:56Simon Sinek?

  So, how do you take this cynical point of view and turn it into an action and movement so that you actually can positively affect the world in which we live so that the species is more likely to survive? And hurricanes won't be as bad, you know, tornadoes won't be, like.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Forest fires.

• 20:14Simon Sinek?

  Forest fires, whatever your local disaster is.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  But the other things that most people don't recognize is that immigration, big, climate is a big cause of immigration because people's places are becoming uninhabitable.

• 20:27Simon Sinek?

  If there's no water, they move.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  And there's no water, it gets too hot, there's no farming ability.

• 20:32Simon Sinek?

  Then they move.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Healthcare issues, massive relation to climate change. As it gets hotter and hotter, further and further north and further and further and further south, the insects that carry diseases that are traditionally living in places like the Caribbean, chikungunya, malaria, things like that, they expand further north and further

• 20:51Simon Sinek?

  Because the conditions are favorable for the.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  Exactly, for mosquitoes. So, you're moving into hospital areas that are not used to treating those diseases. So, healthcare, immigration, these issues that we talk about as if they're their own thing are deeply related to climate. So, I like to say climate is everything, and that's one of the reasons why we haven't been successful. It's because climate is everything and is related to everything.

• 21:14Simon Sinek?

  Which is part of the problem, right?

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Totally. But your question is, how do we take this and turn it into something actionable?

• 21:21Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  And in this day and age where, it's funny, because we have two things that are kind of converging, right? We have, in the US, we have a Republican Party that's saying we shouldn't be addressing climate change, we shouldn't be talking about climate change. And you have me, as somebody on the left, who's saying, we shouldn't be talking about climate change. Climate change is the wrong approach to be using to address these underlying issues. My response here, just for people who are listening, is not in response to the Trump

• 21:47Simon Sinek?

  It's not political.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  No, it's not political at all.

• 21:50Simon Sinek?

  You agree we shouldn't be talking about climate?

• 21:51Speaker 00

  I agree we shouldn't be talking about climate change.

• 21:53Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Let me put it this way. I firmly believe that you are only going to get people engaged on this issue if you focus on the hyper local level. So at the national level, sure, you can do things, create incentives for more solar and more wind and water and all of these different things. At the hyper local level, community boards, state legislators, town councils, they decide what transportation looks like in your town, what zoning looks like in your town, how waste is removed and moved around, what water policy looks like in your town. All of that happens at the hyper local level. You voting at the local level has thousands, if not tens of thousands of times more power than your vote in the presidential election. There's an election that happened

• 22:39Speaker 00

  in Texas last year where a community board, this woman won her seat by 12 votes and she was the deciding vote on this community board about all of these different climate policies around zoning, around construction, around transportation. 12 votes, literally 12 votes. That is where most of the change happens in the United States on climate. And so my belief system, it's rather complicated. So I'm going to kind of narrow it down. I believe that we need to redefine what the town square looks like. We need to relook at what town halls look like. This idea has not been reexamined since the 1800s, when presidents were going

• 23:21Speaker 00

  to campaign, when elected officials were going to campaign. Understanding how you bring people together effectively for civic engagement, just as much as entertainment, because those are the same thing. So one of the things that I work on a lot, and both in my nonprofit and I talk about in the book, is how to create these kind of environments where people are gathering, whether it's for music, or sports, or comedy, or really anything, and use that space to get people civically engaged. Not having them be rallies. I mean, AOC and Bernie do all this thing, this, they have thousands of people come out and they say we need to vote, and it's true, but- People aren't really taking any sort of action.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  They don't go home and say, okay, now I need to do this in my life.

• 24:08Simon Sinek?

  It's just a big rah rah.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Right, it's a big rah rah. This is why my focus is on getting people engaged around the issues that are deeply important to them. Not about the politician, but about the policy. And we've moved away from the policy and it's not as much about the policy. It's about the celebrity of the politician.

• 24:26Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  And so when we built out our tour last summer, we've done this with a bunch of other artists now. In each city, we create a way for fans to engage around a policy that's hyper local to that city. And I'll give you an example. Last year, we pulled into Phoenix. It was 109 degrees out, literally 109 degrees when we pulled into Phoenix. The action that we had people taking onsite at our show was to sign a petition to get FEMA to designate extreme heat as an emergency so that funds could be unlocked. We didn't phrase it in the way that I just phrased it to you. It was, isn't it too hot out? Your friends and family are feeling it. Sign this petition so we can get more money in order to protect you all from the heat. You know, something very simple and easy.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  That kind of thing resonated with people. We did this in every single city with an issue that made sense for that city. In Salt Lake City, it was about preserving the level of the Great Salt Lake. Everything was hyper local.

• 25:23Simon Sinek?

  Stuff that people do recognize and care about.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 25:26Simon Sinek?

  Like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, the things, forest fires, the things that are affecting wherever where I live.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:33Simon Sinek?

  Because I live in LA now, I don't think of hurricanes at all.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  No, you think of fires.

• 25:36Simon Sinek?

  I think of fires.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So we just, we did this on Billie Eilish's UK tour. We did this on a couple of shows on Tyler Childers tour, who's a country artist. And on Tyler Childers tour, we did this partnership with a group called Appalachian Voices, which was about coal mining and protecting the coal mining communities from the effects of coal, right? But that is about a health issue. That is about a jobs issue. We're not framing it in terms of climate change. Sure, coal is a climate change issue, but to that community, it's about health and it's about jobs.

• 26:08Simon Sinek?

  And I think that's what people misunderstand. When you take it down to that level, like the people in these coal mining mining communities aren't anti-climate change. They're just like, I was a coal miner, my father was a coal miner, my father's father was a coal miner.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 26:20Simon Sinek?

  It's like, this is how I provide for my family and then you lefties come in and be like, we're shutting down your coal mine for the environment. Like, I can't think of the environment if you're telling me you're taking away my paycheck.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 26:30Simon Sinek?

  And so I'm not anti-climate change.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:34Simon Sinek?

  Or anti that movement. I'm anti you taking away my paycheck without setting me up with anything new.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Exactly. Audience is key. So I teach climate policy and campaigning at Columbia. The first thing I always teach my students is that when you're developing a campaign, you need to understand who your audience is. My brain is an academic one, just as much as it is one that's emotionally driven.

• 26:55Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  And so in order to do this work that I was just talking about on tour, we did a really big study with Ticketmaster and with another organization called Reverb. And all of us together, we did this poll that we put out into the field. It went out to about 350,000 recent ticket purchasers. To understand from the audience, the actions they were willing to take, the areas that they cared about in terms of causes. And we did this across a variety of different artists, not just us. We looked at Taylor Swift fans, Dave Matthews fans, Beyonce fans. And this is how we built it. We listened to the audience first before we built anything.

• 27:31Simon Sinek?

  Brilliant.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  So that is key. What are we calling climate change? Within the movement itself, for people who are listening who are in the climate movement already, fine, we can call it climate change. We can call it environmental justice. We can call it net zero, whatever. I don't care. A friend of mine is a farmer out of Michigan. And he was telling me this story, this idea that he does soil science work. The way that the language of the soil scientists gets published, the data that gets published. The people who work in farming science and atmospheric science and all these related fields, they don't understand that language. They can't use the same data because it's published on a platform that they cannot use.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  This idea of having a new lexicon that is more universal is something that has been really important to me. Outside of the climate movement, we should call it how we're getting from place to place. We should call it how we're growing things, how we're making things, how we're building things, how we're powering things. Those are the things that people care about. And even if nobody else that I ever come across says, I'm joining a climate movement, I'm fine with that. Somebody tells me they're really passionate about water. Great. Go be a water advocate. Water is going to be one of our biggest issues in the next 10 years. I think that moving away from words that we're stuck in.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  Al Gore made this kind of fear of climate change big and existential and part of the zeitgeist in popular media. And one of the things that I love about this new world that we're living in is that there are so many places for people to get together. And I had a fight with Al Gore about this. Not a fight, I get this. Mini disagreement.

• 29:18Simon Sinek?

  He's a lot bigger than you.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  But I'm more spry.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  So a year ago, Al Gore and I were at a dinner and he says, Adam, I need some help thinking about how we can build better digital advocacy strategies. And I said, no, that's the wrong question. It's how do we use the digital space to move people in person? Because I promise you that in the next two, three years, in-person connection is going to be the most valuable currency. And we're already seeing that. We're already seeing with the growth of AI-created content that people are having more and more mistrust of what they're seeing online with misinformation and disinformation. Same thing. People are craving personal connection with other people. We're seeing a huge rise in things like book clubs, running clubs across the country.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2024 sold 250 million tickets in the US. That's a huge number of tickets of people going in person.

• 30:21Simon Sinek?

  Going to see something.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  In June, they announced a new billion-dollar investment in new venues because they see this demand for people having this connection to other people. So I said this to Al Gore and I said, "You should be creating these digital platforms as an off-ramp, as a way to move people in person. It's a gathering space to then move them somewhere else."

• 30:40Simon Sinek?

  It's a halfway point.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And so he didn't necessarily believe me, but you know, I will prove to him that I am correct with time.

• 30:51Simon Sinek?

  I mean, I think you're right. And the data shows it and my work reflects that as well.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:56Simon Sinek?

  I mean, we can see it. We see young people becoming disillusioned with social media and they are the ones raising their hands saying, "Can we get off this stuff and how do we find ways to go do things?"

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:05Simon Sinek?

  And one of the things I think that goes within person and all of the things that we're seeing in the world, none of them are to blame by themselves, but they all contribute. Social media, clearly. Cell phones, clearly. AI and not knowing what to trust, clearly. Highly polarized media, clearly. Highly polarized politicians, serving themselves, not us, clearly.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:23Simon Sinek?

  Like, all of these things are contributing to this idea. And the net result is not just that we don't know what to believe, but we don't feel like we belong. And we crave that. And there's a decline in optimism.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:35Simon Sinek?

  Because when you don't have a sense of connection with people and a sense of belonging, you know, at the minimum, it's, "I don't feel very optimistic." At the maximum is like, "I'm full on depressed."

• 31:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:45Simon Sinek?

  Right? But all of those things are cured with human connection. And with human connection comes trust.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay, I'm going to tell you a quick story.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  So at my organization, Planet Reimagine, we do a lot of kind of creative climate-related things. One of the projects we do is about putting renewable energy on top of oil and gas land, which has never been allowed before in the United States. I spent about three years going into Congress, working with senators, working with members of the House, and figuring out how to get them to a place where they could agree on this. I would work with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats. And I would just use slightly different language to get to the same space. And it was really only the fact that I did this in person with them in order to build this trust, that now we have a bill that has been introduced in both the House and the Senate that has Republican and Democrat support

• 32:39Speaker 00

  that opens up 18 million acres of land across the West. That's oil and gas land to put renewables on top of it. And then... At a show about, I don't know, four years ago, let's say, we were in Dallas, did this show. I got offstage, I looked at my phone, and then I saw I had a tweet. And this tweet said, you know, "I love AJR, so excited to be at their show." You know who this tweet was from? Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck came to our show, and then for those of you who are listening who don't know Glenn Beck- Right wing. Right wing, like Fox commentator, precursor to Tucker Carlson. Yep.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  And the end of his tweet was, "This show and the AJR's music really helps me connect with my son." So I started to think about that. This was an in-person event. And when I was writing this book, Amplify, it's like, okay, I'm gonna have a chapter that's about how to bring people together who disagree with each other, using this in-person, using this specific language. So I wrote to Glenn, and I said, "Can I come down to Texas and talk to you?" And so I sat in-person with Glenn for four hours, interviewing him. And my secret goal, that he didn't know, was to find one thing we could agree on. Because we fundamentally disagree on pretty much every social issue.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  We spent four hours talking about gay rights, about religion, about immigration, about healthcare, about literally everything you could possibly imagine. And he knows that I'm pretty far on the left in terms of climate. We started to have a conversation about the different places that he lives, and he has a house in the Intermountain West, I forget where it is, I think Idaho. And he goes, "Adam, you're gonna be so happy. My house is completely clean. You know, I use solar on the roof and we use natural gas." And I said, "Oh, that's great that you use solar. Um, natural gas." You know, he said, "Yeah, it's completely clean." And I said, "Who told you that?" And he said, "Everybody knows. It's natural."

• 34:41Speaker 00

  And I say, oh, well, just so you know, natural gas is made up mostly of methane, which is about 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide in terms of warming the planet. He's like, you're trying to take my stove. And I said, no, no. One of the biggest contributors to climate change is leaks from methane gas pipelines. They're literally pipelines that are sending this gas from place to place and they're leaking.

• 35:06Simon Sinek?

  Which is not well taken care of.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 35:07Simon Sinek?

  If they were perfect, then it would have a different conversation.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Correct. So the one thing-

• 35:12Simon Sinek?

  It's not the gas, it's the taking care of the gas.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 35:14Simon Sinek?

  Ah.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  So the one thing in four hours we were able to agree on-

• 35:18Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Is creating incentives to plug leaks in methane gas pipelines. And so Glenn Beck, so fundamentally different from me, took four hours to get there. But if he took that forward with his followers and influencing politicians, that would have huge impact.

• 35:34Simon Sinek?

  But again, this goes back to human responsibility, right?

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:36Simon Sinek?

  Which is, it's not the gas.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:38Simon Sinek?

  It's the negligence of the companies-

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 35:41Simon Sinek?

  That don't really have much of an incentive to plug the holes because there's a cost associated with that. And they're not going to get that cost back when they sell you the gas. It's just a cost of doing business.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:50Simon Sinek?

  So if you don't have to, and nobody really puts any pressure on you to plug the leak, screw it.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 35:55Simon Sinek?

  I mean, literally.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:56Simon Sinek?

  It's not taking somebody's stove away, it's agreeing, let's get the oil companies and the gas companies to just look after their property.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. I had a fight with somebody yesterday. I feel like I'm saying I'm having a lot of fights with people. I had a constructive disagreement with somebody who was like, I'm, you know, impacting climate change because I'm choosing not to fly. And for me, making the choices about what you eat, how you're going from place to place, you as an individual, for me, that does nothing. That means you've become victim to a massive campaign perpetrated by oil and gas companies.

• 36:30Simon Sinek?

  It's virtue signaling. It's virtue signaling.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  It is absolutely.

• 36:31Simon Sinek?

  A friend of mine who never flew for this reason.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:34Simon Sinek?

  He actually came to the conclusion that plane's going with me or without me.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:38Simon Sinek?

  And so it actually makes more sense to put a person in the seat-

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:41Simon Sinek?

  Than have it fly empty.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 36:43Simon Sinek?

  You know, so like if it's gonna fly, fly it full because at least-

• 36:46Speaker 00

  And if you're gonna take even the time to think about it, there's so much advocacy you can do to advocate for more sustainable aviation fuel, electric vehicles, all of these things.

• 36:55Simon Sinek?

  And what I have learned is, and you probably actually know the real numbers, so correct me. Aviation pollution accounts for something like 2%?

• 37:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, 2% to 3%.

• 37:03Simon Sinek?

  2% to 3%. Construction is 30%.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, construction and building things like cement and concrete.

• 37:10Simon Sinek?

  Yeah, so construction and all the things around construct. So people think they're saving the planet by not taking a plane.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:17Simon Sinek?

  It's minor impact.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  It's minor impact. Also, think about the number of planes that are out there. A lot, most of them don't have humans on them.

• 37:24Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  It's getting packages and food and all of these other things from place to place.

• 37:28Simon Sinek?

  You know, I was just reading this article about AI accountability.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 37:31Simon Sinek?

  And, you know, the computer companies want no accountability, like Twitter wants no accountability. You know, Microsoft wants no accountability. Facebook and Anthropic or OpenAI, any of these companies want no accountability for what happens on their platform. If somebody, you know, tells somebody else to murder somebody on their platform, there's no liability.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 37:51Simon Sinek?

  Or if they kill themselves, worse, right, which we're starting to see from AI. This article was saying, we believe in product liability. Like, the reason our products are really, really good in this country is because we hold the car company liable when the brakes don't work.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:04Simon Sinek?

  And we hold the drug companies liable when their drugs are poisoned and kill somebody. And we hold food companies liable if their food equipment is not clean and somebody gets salmonella or E. coli or something. We hold the manufacturer responsible for the product. Why then wouldn't we hold the manufacturer of AI responsible for everything that happens on their platform? Just like taking a poisoned, a food stuff, you know, contaminated food stuff.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  So is the AI company's argument that they are not the manufacturer because they're taking in all of this data?

• 38:35Simon Sinek?

  Their argument is we're, it's like the old Napster. It's like, we're just intermediary. We can't be responsible for what people do on our platform.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:43Simon Sinek?

  Right? But, but if you held an AI company accountable for a teenager killing themselves because the AI told you to kill themselves and you held them accountable, I guarantee you, they'd put, they'd put the fixes in place because they're accountable. So now it raises the question, well, why can't we be better about holding pipeline companies accountable? If nobody's accountable, then what gets done?

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Nothing.

• 39:05Simon Sinek?

  If you make someone accountable, things get done. What I find Interesting about the way you talk is you're you you said it right here, which is I'm probably further left than most. I'm pretty far left on the climate stuff. You openly talk about your politics and yet your position on a lot of these things is pretty apolitical. You have found ways to work with both both parties. You find both parties equally infuriating for different reasons.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:34Simon Sinek?

  It seems to me counterproductive for you to even declare your politics when the work you're doing is apolitical and affects people regardless of their political persuasions. And your fans are all kinds of all kinds of people.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's funny, I've been asked to run for office a couple of times. And I don't think I've talked about this publicly before. I've been asked to run for office.

• 39:57Simon Sinek?

  Are you announcing your candidacy right here?

• 39:58Speaker 00

  I'm definitely not. I'm announcing the opposite of my candidacy, which is, I think in the moment, the work that I can do in bringing people together across the political spectrum is more valuable than me being in office representing a district.

• 40:15Simon Sinek?

  Great. So why talk about your politics at all?

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Because I think-

• 40:19Simon Sinek?

  Because who you vote for is your business. Who I vote for is my business.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:22Simon Sinek?

  But like, it doesn't really matter what your views on various social policies are.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  I think that's fair, except I have a platform with fans who are listening to me. And I firmly believed that the world would have been in a better place had Kamala Harris been president. And so I was out on the road campaigning for Kamala Harris. And I felt like it was my responsibility to tell people, this is what I believe. And it just-

• 40:53Simon Sinek?

  Does that damage your movement in climate?

• 40:56Speaker 00

  But here's the thing. I also helped out a Republican senator that was running in Utah. And I also helped out a Democrat that was running in this race and a Republican that was running in this race. So-

• 41:08Simon Sinek?

  So you have endorsed both sides of the House?

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:12Simon Sinek?

  Interesting.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  So there's this senator out of Utah. His name is John Curtis. And he's great. He's one of the people who sponsored this bill that I worked on, the Colocation Energy Act. And I just went in and in his office, I did a whole training with his entire office around movement building. I will do that for Republicans and I will do that for Democrats. I am agnostic on that because I believe it's about people and helping people that are their constituents. He has millions of constituents in the state of Utah. I want to help those people. I am not to the left on everything. There are some things that I'm further to the right on. But I think because of the platform that I have, it's my responsibility to use it in order to move things forward.

• 41:57Simon Sinek?

  You know, I have a different point of view.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Great.

• 41:58Simon Sinek?

  Which is, I think people like you and people who put out messages that are good for everyone. When they start to steer into politics for all the reasons that we're angry about the polarization of the country and people don't listen and they judge too quickly and soundbites, et cetera.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:12Simon Sinek?

  Large portions of the population will not listen to you or discount everything you're saying, simply because you announced your politics. Whereas if you kept your politics to yourself, those people who should be listening will listen.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  So we talked about trust earlier. Don't you think people would trust me more if I'm honest that I agree with this part of politics or this issue and this part of politics?

• 42:36Simon Sinek?

  I don't, yes, you can talk about that. That's agreeing with this side or that side or this policy or that policy, but it's not declaring yourself part, one party or another. Like, you know, I, I'm a registered independent for a reason, which is I find them, I find people on both sides, some of them quite inspiring and some of them quite infuriating.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, agree.

• 42:56Simon Sinek?

  And anybody who goes to the polls, the polls, meaning that the extreme sides on either party, I don't think they should hold power.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:03Simon Sinek?

  You know, because I, you know, it's not that extremes don't have voices.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:07Simon Sinek?

  The, the politics should look like what the country actually is, which is a bell curve.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:11Simon Sinek?

  Which is the small percentages of extreme and most of us are moderates.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:16Simon Sinek?

  You know, on, on various sides of the bell. And our politicians look like a U rather than a bell curve. Because for various reasons and gerrymandering and all the rest of it. And I wish our politicians looked like us, which is mostly down the middle. Like, most Americans on slightly to the left and slightly to the right are pretty moderate. We're a pretty moderate nation.

• 43:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Except the ones that have the loudest voices.

• 43:39Simon Sinek?

  That's the problem.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:41Simon Sinek?

  So this is my point, which is, shouldn't we, it's, and I will happily say I agree with some things to the, to the left and some things to the right, but I'll talk on a policy level. But I, but, but I'm keenly aware that I want to represent what the country looks like because I believe that. The message that I'm trying to promote is good for everybody and your politics comes second to me.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:02Simon Sinek?

  You know, taking care of each other is apolitical, like ensuring that you that you that you feel safe wherever you are, that you can get a good job and provide for your family, feel like you matter, feel like your work matters and trust that you can go to work every day and your kids can go to school every day in relative safety and you're able to provide. That's pretty much all anybody wants.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:20Simon Sinek?

  And that's kind of everybody's responsibility to not only provide for each other, take care of each other and our politicians to pass policy that ensures that that happens for many people as possible.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you want, I can actually answer your question. I skirted your question a little bit.

• 44:35Simon Sinek?

  Why you talk about politics?

• 44:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:37Simon Sinek?

  Why you label yourself?

• 44:38Speaker 00

  I think I feel this responsibility, not just to the fans, but to participate in a conversation that happens online that I don't really like, that I feel a pull towards. I think that the conversation that's happening online, which is mostly happening between the two poles, as we were talking about.

• 45:00Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  Is something that people look to me to jump in on. And I think that is inevitably lined up with my politics. And I know you're saying that I don't have to, I could, you know, stand back, but I'll give you an example. In a couple of weeks, I'm doing this thing for this very far-left climate organization, very far-left, the kind of organization that disrupts things and throws things and blocks streets and all that stuff. And I've done stuff for them before. And I'll literally say to their audience, like, I don't agree with your tactics, but I understand why they exist. So I was at the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act at the White House and Kamala

• 45:44Speaker 00

  gives this speech about the only reason that this law passed is because we had people who were moderate and even on the center-right and we had people who were throwing soup at paintings. She said we needed that entire spectrum of people engaged in order to get this.

• 46:03Simon Sinek?

  So would you go to a very right-leaning organization? Of hunters who want to preserve.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 46:10Simon Sinek?

  Preserve the food woods in the forest so that they can hunt.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  I do that relatively often.

• 46:14Simon Sinek?

  Oh, good.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  Absolutely. They are.

• 46:17Simon Sinek?

  They care about the environment a lot.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  They care a lot about the environment. And that's a great way into a group that I wouldn't necessarily be welcomed into. Because I'm not a hunter.

• 46:27Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  At this moment.

• 46:31Simon Sinek?

  At this moment. I'm so enamored by your customer first, fan first point of view. And it's your own interests that drive how you apply it. Whether it's through fan experience for your music or helping the climate movement. That happens to be your interest, but you can apply it anywhere.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:50Simon Sinek?

  What are three or four ways that we can be customer focused when we think about whatever it is we do? Whether we're a teacher, whether we're an entrepreneur, whether we're, you know, working in a large corporation, or whether it's a social movement, or an artist or musician.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  It's funny, these are each chapters in the book. So one of them is about how to really drill down and figure out who your audience is. And then tell stories that work for your audience. And there's a big difference between a good story and an effective story. A good story is one that you'll tell to people and they'll tell their friends and family about it. But an effective story is one that will make people get up off their ass and do something about it.

• 47:28Simon Sinek?

  Give me an example.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  When we told this story in Phoenix, the example that I gave you before.

• 47:33Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  When we told the story about what was happening in Phoenix of people dying of the heat. And provided that space for them to actually do something right there after hearing the story. The number, we got a thousand signatures in the moment. Because there was the ability to tell this story, people related to it emotionally. And there was the ability for them to take action directly on it.

• 47:53Simon Sinek?

  So there's beginning, middle and end.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  There's a beginning, middle and end, and it is personally relatable.

• 47:59Simon Sinek?

  Got it.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  So, but a good story would be as if I was in Chicago and saying, in Phoenix, it's 109 degrees out. Right? In Phoenix, it's 30 degrees out. They can't really relate to the problem as much. So it's a good story and they'll tell their friends, oh my God, did you hear in Phoenix? It's 109 degrees out?

• 48:16Simon Sinek?

  And nothing happens.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  Great, what are they gonna do? About it.

• 48:17Simon Sinek?

  Right. It's like people on the East Coast supporting legislation for forest fires, wildfires.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 48:23Simon Sinek?

  People on the West Coast signing up for legislation to help hurricane victims.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. So who is your audience?

• 48:29Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 48:29Speaker 00

  And your audience is not going to be homogeneous. There's going to be audiences within audiences within audience, and fine. And even if you want to target a hyper narrow segment of that audience.

• 48:38Simon Sinek?

  Okay.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  Who is that audience? What is the story they want to hear? And what is the thing that's going to get them to get up and do something?

• 48:44Simon Sinek?

  Got it, okay.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  So this kind of storytelling is key to it.

• 48:47Simon Sinek?

  Okay.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  Gamifying action, like we talked about before. Huge opportunity. Creating these forms of collaborative gaming, like the jigsaw puzzle.

• 48:55Simon Sinek?

  Right.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Great opportunity for people in any kind of social movement to create this form of collaboration.

• 49:02Simon Sinek?

  And I think what's really important here is usually when people talk about gamification, it's about badges and it's like, how many times did you do this? You get a badge, how many times consecutively did that? That's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about little medals for stupid stuff.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  No.

• 49:14Simon Sinek?

  When you talk about gamification, you're talking about getting off your ass, doing something.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:18Simon Sinek?

  And seeing that the gamification of it is, is the ability to tangibly see what you've done.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Yep, exactly. That's the win.

• 49:24Simon Sinek?

  That's the win.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:25Simon Sinek?

  Okay.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  This idea of bringing people together that disagree with each other.

• 49:29Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  But going down to the underlying first principles of things.

• 49:34Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Allows them to actually connect with each other. So this is how I fundamentally build movements. Even within my own organization, there are people that disagree with each other. We're, we're an incubator. So we'll have a project that is on this side of the political spectrum, and we'll have a project that's on this side of the political spectrum. And somebody from my team is like, wait, if we do this, it's going to prevent our donors from getting excited about this. I say, no, we need a thousand shots on goal in order to be successful here. And the audience for this project is going to look very different from the audience for this project. But if you can get them both at first principle levels to understand why we're doing it, this is why I love having conversations. Because to get to the underlying why.

• 50:17Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Is so, so key.

• 50:20Simon Sinek?

  You are a magical blend of left brain, right brain, of highly academic and also an artist. What about being an artist and the love of art makes you a better thinker?

• 50:35Speaker 00

  Wow. It's funny. When I'm sitting at the piano and playing or thinking about.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  Anything having to do with music creativity.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  That creativity lives in exactly the same spot in my brain as me coming up with a policy idea that has never been invented before. I don't see these as two different things. There is a flow state, and I know that's like, you know, woo woo to talk like, oh, get into a flow state. There's a flow state when I am creative, when I'm playing piano, or when I have a policy hat on, that feels physically exactly the same to me.

• 51:21Simon Sinek?

  But do you feel that you are better capable of achieving flow state for for thought?

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 51:28Simon Sinek?

  Because you're an artist?

• 51:30Speaker 00

  I feel like being an artist taught me how to open that gate. And I can't really describe what that is, except it feels like a gate, like I just.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  It feels like drugs, honestly. It feels like, I don't know if we're allowed to talk about.

• 51:51Simon Sinek?

  Talk about whatever you want.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  But it feels like if you probably know what I'm talking about. If if I'm doing a certain kind of drug that puts you into a state that opens your mind and you feel connected with nature and, you know, that kind of drug.

• 52:05Simon Sinek?

  I don't know whether to be complimented or offended when you said, you know what I'm talking about. Uh, and for the record, I have no idea what you're talking about.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Okay. All right. Thanks for throwing me under the bus there. Really appreciate that. There's something that happens with drugs like that that is very similar for me when I'm in a policy mindset or when I'm in a music playing mindset. But the music, because when I was a kid, that's when it started. It taught me what it feels like to be in that state.

• 52:37Simon Sinek?

  When people ask me, like, where do you get your ideas? What they, what I've learned a long time ago is when, when you study the thing you're trying to solve, you will not come up with the idea.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:48Simon Sinek?

  The thing you're trying to solve, the question has to be asked, and then you want to go explore and meander.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:54Simon Sinek?

  And.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:54Simon Sinek?

  And what I do to get ideas and I and is I, I'll go for a walk in a museum. Hundred percent. Or I'll watch a documentary. Yeah. Or, or I'll watch a movie. It doesn't even have to be a documentary. I'll go watch a Disney film, you know, Pixar film or something. Or I'll go for a walk. And the problem is, is I don't know when it's going to strike. But it always strikes in one of those places. Yeah. Where I'm watching a documentary and all of a sudden like, oh my God, that, that triggered something. Or a painting, or a piece of music, or, and, and this is why I think the arts and creativity and distraction and boredom are really important. Not just studying, not just thinking, not just work ethic and getting off the phone because the mind turns off when you're on the phone.

• 53:38Simon Sinek?

  They did a study many years ago. It was related to television when television, where people are afraid that television were ruining kids' minds. Uh huh. And it's even worse now for social media. Sure. And they did a study where a kid sitting in a room doing nothing has a faster metabolism rate than a child watching television. Wow. Right? Because your brain eats calories. Yeah. And being bored and your mind wandering and looking around the room and just like wondering about people. And I was on a, I was, I just got off a plane this morning and like we've pulled in, we're just waiting, we're like, half of us are standing up in the aisle, half of us are sitting down because we can't stand up on the aisle and we're just waiting to get off the plane. And I just decided to look around and everybody was on their phone. But they weren't just checking their emails that were like ping, ping, ping. Like I was looking and like, people were just flipping through Instagram. Yeah.

• 54:23Simon Sinek?

  Like, like you're about to, like you have 30 seconds to like, just do nothing. To be. And just to be. And the reason I have ideas is because sometimes I leave my phone at home and sometimes I just turn it off or sometimes I put it in a pocket. And yeah, bored. And I'm like sitting there going,

• 54:43Simon Sinek?

  and if I had my phone, I'd be on it. Yeah. Hundred percent. Yeah. And that's where my ideas come from, is the acceptance of not thinking.

• 54:54Simon Sinek?

  Or the choice not to think.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  I'm so glad we're friends because I have 200 things to say.

• 54:59Simon Sinek?

  You have six, five minutes. You have a hard out.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  Oh, geez. Okay.

• 55:02Simon Sinek?

  Because you have to go teach.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do have to go teach.

• 55:04Simon Sinek?

  So I can't prevent you from being late for your class.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. I think I am only able to have the kinds of ideas around policymaking and climate and all of these other-

• 55:15Simon Sinek?

  And jigsaw puzzles-

• 55:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:17Simon Sinek?

  To get people to, you know, put together playlists.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  Because creativity, especially around music, was a thing that was in my childhood, that was instilled in me from a young age. And it was not just the making music of itself, but it was theater. It was, you know, putting on little plays for my parents, doing all of these different things that were creative expression. And now, when I'm playing piano at three in the morning, that's when I have my best ideas. And the thing I loved that you said was that you can never research and study your way into an idea.

• 55:50Simon Sinek?

  No.

• 55:50Speaker 00

  Ever.

• 55:51Simon Sinek?

  Ever.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  And that is so right.

• 55:52Simon Sinek?

  No brainstorming session will give you the ideas.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  Never, never. And all of these ideas about renewables on oil and gas land, all this AI work that we're doing, all of these different things that we're doing around big policy changes that are actually having some impact right now are some random thing that I thought of while I was literally walking through a museum, or playing piano, or on a walk, or anything that was not focused on that idea, then I had the idea itself. And then, that's when I do all of the research and the deep learning-

• 56:23Simon Sinek?

  Exactly. Comes later.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  And the work to it all comes later.

• 56:26Simon Sinek?

  That's what people don't understand. For me, too. My research comes second.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. A hundred percent.

• 56:29Simon Sinek?

  You and I have to do another episode only on creativity.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Great.

• 56:32Simon Sinek?

  Because I think creativity is this elusive thing that some people think they have it and some people don't. And I think everybody's creative. I also think everybody's an artist. You just don't know your medium.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Completely agree.

• 56:41Simon Sinek?

  I can't draw, but I can take photographs, right?

• 56:44Speaker 00

  I talk about this with my friends all the time, that I have a friend who's a consultant right now, and he's leaving his job in a few weeks to take a full year off because he feels so creative and he feels like he's not allowed to express it. And he's literally taking a full year to try every different creative pursuit he possibly can to try and find the thing that he wants to do.

• 57:05Simon Sinek?

  Extreme.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:07Simon Sinek?

  You can just do it on nights and weekends, but the-

• 57:09Speaker 00

  I'll tell him that.

• 57:10Simon Sinek?

  It's like, you don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I had a private tour of the Met the other day. By this wonderful, she's actually a comedian. Eliza Banks Campagna is her name.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 57:20Simon Sinek?

  And just on a whim, I decided, you know, I saw, literally, I saw her on Instagram. She, I'm like, I want a private tour of the Met. Never done anything like that before.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Did you DM her and it just happened?

• 57:29Simon Sinek?

  Yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 57:30Simon Sinek?

  Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what happened. Me and my friend, she took us on a private tour of the Met.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:34Simon Sinek?

  And you have to say, and I'm, I lived in New York my entire adult life. Like, when I had an hour to kill, I'd go to the Met. When I was running early for something, I'd go to the Met. Like, I've gone to the Met a million times. I know my way around the Met. I know, I go to the places I like. I know what's there.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  My favorite statue in the world is at the Met.

• 57:48Simon Sinek?

  Uh, I mean, third best armor collection in the world, next to the Tower of London and the Wallace Collection, right? And she asked me for some framing, but I, it was, I went on her tour.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 57:58Simon Sinek?

  And she showed me stuff that I was like, eh, okay. And she told me the history of it.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:04Simon Sinek?

  And she told me the story behind it.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:05Simon Sinek?

  And I still didn't like the piece, but I had an appreciation for the piece that I didn't have before. And then there are other pieces that I'm like, I don't like the subject matter, so I just walked past it.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:13Simon Sinek?

  And again, she told me the history. And then once, she took me to this one piece. It was this, um, it was a Monet. That's like, I like some Monets, I don't like old Monets. And it was, it's a boring Monet, you know? It's just, it's gray. She said, come here. And I'm like, eh, okay. And she goes, close your eyes. Close your eyes for 10 seconds. I went, okay. Close my eyes for 10 seconds and she's just now open them. I open my eyes and the painting's moving. And she just came up with this herself. And I got to see the Met, a place I know well, with many pieces of art that I walk right past because the quote unquote, "subject" doesn't interest me.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:51Simon Sinek?

  Or I don't like the style. But because I let somebody else tell me how they perceive art, and she's a, she's a, she studied history. So she knows, she loves the history of things.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:01Simon Sinek?

  Where I don't remember the history of anything.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:03Simon Sinek?

  And, and, and she came at it with, with this completely different way of seeing the world. And I walked away with new love, new appreciation for peace. And, and I was having ideas like crazy because they weren't through my lens.

• 59:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:18Simon Sinek?

  And so- Not only go to museums, not only go to, ugh, Broadway shows, you know, but go with somebody who wants to take you.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:26Simon Sinek?

  Let somebody say, like, I want you to take me to something, and I want to take you to something, and I want to show... I have so mu... I have more excitement sharing music, or a movie, or something I'm excited about with somebody who's never seen it. Like, the joy I get with friends who are, like, really into music, I'm like, let me play you a thousand songs. I... One of my, like, I like, like, I've done it, like, is when I'm playing music with a friend, and they Shazam it. I'm like, yes! Like, like, I have one, that they want to keep this song that I introduced to them that they'd never heard before.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  So you did this with me, less than 24 hours after we met.

• 1:00:00Simon Sinek?

  What?

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  You took me to a dance rehearsal.

• 1:00:02Simon Sinek?

  I did take you to a dance rehearsal.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Because you wanted to share with me a piece of art, and a form of art, that you loved, and...

• 1:00:09Simon Sinek?

  I took you to Rambert Dance in London.

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  Yes, and we can leave this on a cliffhanger if we want, but that kind of really evoked my past life as a dancer, which I never talk about, but it is such a creative pursuit of mine, that was happening at the same time as music, and so there's other, other things in this world that we have not talked about that will feed into our creativity conversation when it happens.

• 1:00:33Simon Sinek?

  Adam, I could talk to you forever and ever and ever.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:35Simon Sinek?

  And I... This time has whizzed by, and I wish I didn't have to end. You can just cancel class.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:00:42Simon Sinek?

  Let's just, let's just stay for another three hours. Please come back?

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Please, I would love that.

• 1:00:46Simon Sinek?

  Oh, you're the best.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  No, you're the best.

• 1:00:48Simon Sinek?

  I didn't get to, like, half the things I needed to get to, but whatever.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  We'll do it.

• 1:00:51Simon Sinek?

  So good, so good. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. Lovingly produced by our team Lindsay Garbenius, Phoebe Bradford, and Devon Johnson. Subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts, and if you want even more cool stuff, visit simoncinek.com. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.