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

Two albums ago, we didn't release a track list. Instead, we took our track list, 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 pickup than pretty much anything that we ever posted. And it wasn't even your post, it was their post. It was their post. It gave them ownership over the music, over the album. Posted the set list to all the other fans. Correct. 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 Mett. Can we skip to the good part? Adam is the A of indie pop band AJR. Here we go. He's also a climate activist, founder of the non-profit Planet Reimagined, an adjunct professor at Columbia University, and the author of best-selling book Amplify. People become fans. 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. Did you go to Broadway as a kid? Yeah, I went to a lot of Broadway as a kid. Yeah. My first Broadway show was Music Man. I don't think I ever saw Music Man. But have you seen the movie? No. Oh, it's worth it. It's absolutely worth it. Is it a musical? Yes. Right, you're not a musical person. You're more of a play person. I mean, I like them. I mean, I have an opinion about musicals, which I'm going to get people writing in with angry letters. But it's more of a business. Broadway is more of a business than anything else. It's kind of like TV news. It's not a good business. No, but it's not a good business, but it's a business. It's entertainment and occasionally it's art. It is also a way for rich philanthropists to try and one-up each other in New York by being producers of Broadway shows. Is that what it is? It's about clout in New York City. You make money and become a Broadway producer? Exactly. That's what it is on the other side. I got it. Okay, yeah. But I mean, look, there's a lot of musicals that I love. Like? I mean, I do like Hamilton. Name nine. Nine? Yes. 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. Great. Hamilton. I get Hamilton. Yeah. Okay. Annie. Okay. That's a good one. By the way, I like Annie. Okay. I thought the movie was great. Have I ever seen it live? But you know- I haven't seen it live. But it's a great movie. Great movie. And the music's great. Yes. Agreed. Like Annie. Producers. Okay. Cabaret. The movie. You saw a producer. No, I saw the- Oh, you saw the show. Okay, good. You saw the show. That's okay. Almost halfway. So I saw Cabaret many times because my friend is in it. And it's good. Also, great music. Money, money, money, money. Yeah. I like anything in the minor key. Oh. And now I'm going to dig into things that I probably don't like or want to see, but like A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Okay. That is absolutely a show. Wicked. Great. Cats. Okay. I Saw It. Starlight Express. Jesus Christ Superstar. Wow. I mean, they're all androids. We've gotten to nine so quickly. I mean, granted, 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. Sure. What do you not like about musicals, though? In general, I find the music for American musicals sounds the same. Like Les Mis is my favorite show of all time. I've seen that. Okay. Did you like Les Mis? Very much. Okay. Very much. I like Les Mis a lot. 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. I'm not complaining about the music having themes in a show. Okay. I'm complaining about all musicals sounding the same. Oh, musicals sounding like each other. Yes. There's an American musical. It's kind of like heavy metal has a heavy metal-ness to it. Got it. So you don't like the genre of Broadway musical. I don't like the genre of Broadway musical. Got it. Okay. That's it. So it's not like I hate the shows. All right. Plenty of exceptions. Javert's theme, again, minor key. Love the minor key. Javert's theme in Les Mis, I can't sing. Javert's theme is the only thing that I can sing, and it sounds like what it's supposed to sound like. No, I'm not going to. You knew where I was going to. No, I know. Exactly. We have to say it. I know you first before I met you because I was actually a fan of your music. You are the A of AJR, the hot pop band. Pop band? Is that what you call it? Sure. Pop. Pop genre. Sure. Sure. And it was my nephew who introduced me to your work. Like so many, Bang was my introduction to AJR. Well, thank you to your nephew. I really appreciate it. Without him, I would not be here today. That is partially true. Yeah. 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. Thank you. Yes. You are one of the hardest driving, smartest entrepreneurial sort of do-gooders I've ever met. Wow. Coming from you, that means so much. I really appreciate that. But it's true. 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. And by the way, I'm asking you questions that I don't know any of the things I'm asking you. Great. Excellent. I'm going to assume that you're three musical kids and play for all the parents' friends and took music lessons. Yeah. So our start was, 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 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? 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 and 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. 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 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. Absolutely. Which Taylor Swift and others have figured that out too. Yeah. When people think of concert, they think, buy your ticket, show up at venue, wait, maybe there's an opening act. That's your lucky strike extra. Band performs, leave, maybe buy merch. Yeah. That's it. That's not what your concerts are. No. So because- You design them. Yeah. You make shows. 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. Musicals. Going to see musicals. 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. So you think of it right from the beginning. It's all conceived of at the same time, which is kind of astonishing. And there are some songs that are built around what is this going to sound like and look like on stage, just as much as what is this going to sound like when people are listening to the headphones. So it's really, your albums are really the pre-release soundtracks of the show. 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. I love that. So, okay. So now- No, do you love that or do you not? 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 going to be consuming our work? Totally. 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? Yeah. A fan first approach has always been our strategy. 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 want to 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? To be able to take something like a fan base 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. On 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. For no other reason than the fun of looking. The fun. The fun of it. Yeah. You don't win a prize. It's just the fun. Yeah. Just the fun. 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. 21 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? So we created this experience. Two albums ago, we didn't release a track list. Instead, we took our track list, we cut it up into 36 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 this 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 wasn't even your post it was their post it was their post it gave them ownership over the music over the album posted the set list the the track list to every but to all the other fans correct that is beautiful yeah how did you even come up with Because I'm, by the way, absolutely going to steal it. Go for it. It's a genius idea. 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 really focus on it. 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 that's joyful yeah and you're and you're giving people a better experience than 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 yeah you called amplify, which we'll get into because I'm curious. So why am I unsatisfied? 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. Amazing. When you achieve something that you've been working on for so long. A finite goal. Yeah. Of course there's more to do. We could go and sell out stadiums. We can go and 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's so many different ways to move people. There 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 And seeing how something that you made made people feel Yeah. 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 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. I'm one of your neighbors. 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 – Different media, different mediums for the same – For the same ultimate goal. 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. What's your PhD in? Human rights law and sustainable development. Are you an attorney also? I mean, I do not, I'm not past the bar in the US, but my background is in human rights law, so. Sure. I mean, you have a PhD in human rights law. Yeah. Okay. Don't look so sad, Simon. You're such an overachiever. I find you, you're so creative, and I love how then focus now becomes sort of like do-gooder focus. So first of all, what is the movement that is occupying most of your time right now? 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 climate movement. The era of Greta and fear and anger around climate is over. You and I met at a party in London of all places. And I think when I heard that you worked on climate, I think I went on a tirade because I can't help myself. 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. The fact that we debate climate change is funny to me. We debate whether it's a natural climate cycle or whether it's caused by human beings. And who cares? 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. Would we, though? In this day and age, I don't know. I'm pretty sure we would. The problem is, would we all agree that the asteroid's heading towards us? It's true. But of course we would intervene. So there's nothing wrong with human intervention 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 people would stop saying we're killing the planet. Yeah. The planet's fine. The planet is going to be fine long after we're gone. The problem is we're killing ourselves. We are. We're creating conditions or conditions are being created, either one, 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 for the planets. Fine. Planet might even be better. Planet might even be better. Exactly. So this is where you and I bonded. We agree. Yes. 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, tornadoes won't be... Forest fires. Forest fires, whatever your local disaster is. 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. There's no water. There's no water. There's no farming. It gets too hot. There's no farming ability. Then they move. Health care issues, massive relation to climate change. How's that one related? It's hotter and hotter further and further north 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 south. Because the conditions are favorable for the- 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. Wow. 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. Which is part of the problem, right? Totally. But your question is, how do we take this and turn it into something actionable? Right. And in this day and age where—it's funny because we have two things that are kind of converging, right? In the U.S., 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 administration. It's not political. No, it's not political at all. You agree we shouldn't be talking about climate change. I agree we shouldn't be talking about climate change. Right. 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, times more power than your vote in the presidential election. There's an election that happened 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 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. 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. They don't go home and say, okay, now I need to do this in my life. It's just a big rah-rah. 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. It's not as much about the policy. It's about the celebrity of the politician. 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 on site 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. That kind of thing resonated with people. We did this in every single city with an issue that made sense for that city. And Salt Lake City, it was about preserving the level of the Great Salt Lake. Everything was hyper-local. It's stuff that people do recognize and care about. Exactly. Like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, the things, sparse fires, the things that are affecting whatever where I live. Yeah. Because I live in LA now. I don't think of hurricanes at all. No, you think of fires. I think of fires. 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. And I think that's what people misunderstand. when you take it down to that level, like the people in these coal 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. 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. Of course. And so I'm not anti-climate change or anti that movement. I'm anti you taking away my paycheck without setting me up with anything new. 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. 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. 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 this idea of having a new lexicon that is more uh 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 the 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. 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 fight with Al Gore about this. Not a fight. I get this. Mini disagreement. He's a lot bigger than you. But I'm more spry. 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. 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. 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 as a way to move people in person It a gathering space to then move them somewhere else It a halfway point Exactly It a way point And so he didn't necessarily believe me, but I will prove to him that I am correct with time. I mean, I think you're right. The data shows it, and my work reflects that as well. I mean, we can see it. We see young people becoming disillusioned with social media, and they are the ones raising their hand saying, can we get off this stuff? And how do we find ways to go do things? And one of the things I think that goes with in 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. 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. Because when you don't have a sense of connection with people and a sense of belonging, at the minimum, it's I don't feel very optimistic. At the maximum is like I'm full on depressed. But all of those things are cured with human connection. And with human connection comes trust. Okay. I'm going to tell you a quick story. 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 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 I got off stage, 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. Yeah. Like Fox commentator. Yeah. Precursor to Tucker Carlson. Yep. 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 the 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. 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 going to be so happy. My house is completely clean. I use solar on the roof and we use natural gas. And I said, oh, that's great that you use solar. Natural gas. He said, yeah, it's completely clean. And I said, who told you that? And he said, everybody knows. It's natural. 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. Just not well taken care of. Correct. If they were perfect, then they would have a different conversation. Correct. So it's not the gas. It's the taking care of the gas. So the one thing in four hours we were able to agree on 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. But again, this goes back to human responsibility, right? Which is it's not the gas. Yeah. It's the negligence of the companies 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. So if you don't have to and nobody really puts any pressure on you to plug the leak, screw it. Exactly. I mean, literally. Yeah. 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. 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 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. It's virtue signaling. It's virtue signaling. A friend of mine who never flew for this reason, he actually came to the conclusion that the plane's going with me or without me. And so it actually makes more sense to put a person in the seat than have it fly empty. Absolutely. So if it's going to fly, fly it full because at least... And if you're going to 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. And what I have learned is, and you probably actually know the real numbers, so correct me. Aviation pollution accounts as something like 2%. Yeah, 2% to 3%. 2% to 3%. Construction is 30%. Yeah, construction and building things like cement and concrete. Yeah. So construction and all the things around construction. So people think they're saving the planet by not taking a plane. Yeah. It's minor impact. It's minor impact. Also, think about the number of planes that are out there. Most of them don't have humans on them. Right. It's getting packages and food and all of these other things from place to place. You know, I was just reading this article about AI accountability. 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. 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. Yeah. 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 foodstuff, you know, a contaminated foodstuff. So is the AI company's argument that they are not the manufacturer because they're taking in all of this data? Their argument is 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, right? But if you held an AI company accountable for a teenager killing themselves because the AI told you to kill themselves and you hold them accountable, I guarantee you they 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? If you make someone accountable, things get done. What I find interesting about the way you talk is 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 parties. You find both parties equally infuriating for different reasons. 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 people. Yeah. It's funny. I've been asked to run for office a couple of times. I don't think I've talked about this publicly before. I've been asked to run for office a couple of times. Are you announcing your candidacy right here? 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. Great. So why talk about your politics at all? Because who you vote for is your business. Who I vote for is my business. Yeah. But it doesn't really matter what your views on various social policies are. 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. Does that damage your movement in climate? 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 you have endorsed both sides of the House. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. 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. You know, I have a different point of view. Great. 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 in the polarization of the country and people don't listen and they judge too quickly and soundbites, etc. Yeah. 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. 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? 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 one party or another. I'm a registered independent for a reason, which is I find people on both sides, some of them quite inspiring and some of them quite infuriating. And anybody who goes to the polls, meaning that the extreme sides on either party, I don't think they should hold power. Not that extremes don't have voices. The politics should look like what the country actually is, which is a bell curve, which is the small percentages of extreme and most of us are moderates, you know, 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, slightly to the left and slightly to the right, are pretty moderate. We're a pretty moderate nation. Yeah. Yeah, except the ones that have the loudest voices. That's the problem. Yeah, exactly. So this is my point, which is, shouldn't we, and I will happily say I agree with some things to the left and some things to the right, but I'll talk on a policy level, 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. Taking care of each other is apolitical. Like ensuring 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. 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. Yeah. If you want, I can actually answer your question. I skirted your question a little bit. Why you talk about politics? Yeah. Why you label yourself? 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 polls, as we were talking about, 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 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 So would you go to a very right-leaning organization of hunters who want to preserve- Absolutely. Preserve the foods in the forest so that they can hunt? I do that relatively often. Oh, good. Absolutely. They are- They care about the environment a lot. 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. Right. At this moment. 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. 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 working in a large corporation, or whether it's a social movement or an artist or musician. 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. Give me an example. When we told this story in Phoenix, the example that I gave you before, 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, 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. So there's a beginning, middle, and end. There's a beginning, middle, and end, and it is personally relatable. Got it. So, but a good story would be as if I was in Chicago and saying, in Phoenix, it's 109 degrees out. Right, right, 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? And nothing happens. Great, what are they going to do about it? Right. It's like people on the East Coast supporting legislation for forest fires, wildfires. Totally. People on the West Coast signing up for legislation to help hurricane victims. Exactly. Exactly. So who is your audience? And your audience is not going to be homogenous. There's going to be audiences within audiences with an audience. And fine. And even if you want to target a hyper narrow segment of that audience, 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? Got it. Okay. So this kind of storytelling is key to it. Okay. Gamifying action, like we talked about before, huge opportunity. Creating these forms of collaborative gaming, like the jigsaw puzzle. Right. great opportunity for people in any kind of social movement to create this form of collaboration. And I think what's really important here is usually when people talk about gamification, it's about badges and just 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. No. When you talk about gamification, you're talking about getting off your ass, doing something and seeing that the gamification of it is the ability to tangibly see what you've done. Yep. That's the gamification. That's the win. That's the win. Right. Okay. This idea of bringing people together that disagree with each other, but going down to the underlying first principles of things 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 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 is so, so key. 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? Wow. It's funny. When I'm sitting at the piano and playing or thinking about anything having to do with music creativity, 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's 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. Do you feel that you are better capable of achieving flow state for thought because you're an artist? 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. It feels like drugs, honestly. It feels like, I don't know if we're allowed to talk about it. Talk about whatever you want. But it feels like, you probably know what I'm talking about. 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 that kind of drug. I don't know whether to be complimented or offended when you said, you know what I'm talking about. And for the record, I have no idea what you're talking about. Oh, 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. When people ask me, where do you get your ideas? What I've learned a long time ago is when you study the thing you're trying to solve, you will not come up with the idea. Yeah. The thing you're trying to solve, the question has to be asked and then you want to go explore and meander. Yes. And what I do to get ideas is I'll go for a walk in a museum. 100%. Or I'll watch a documentary. Yeah. Or I'll watch a movie. It doesn't even have to be a documentary. I'll go watch a Disney film, you know, a 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 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 they did a study many years ago it was related to television when television where people are afraid that television were running kids minds 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 being bored and your mind wondering 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 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, I'm bored. And I'm like sitting there going, and if I had my phone, I'd be on it. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. And that's where my ideas come from is the acceptance of not thinking or the choice not to think. I'm so glad we're friends because I have 200 things to say. You have six, five minutes. You have a hard out. Oh, geez. Okay. Because you have to go teach. Yeah, I do have to go teach. So I can't prevent you from being late for your class. 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- And jigsaw puzzles to get people to put together playlists. 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. No. Ever. Ever. And that is so right. No brainstorming session will give you the ideas. Never. 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. Exactly. It comes later. It all comes later. That's what people don't understand. For me too, my research comes second. Yeah. A hundred percent. You and I have to do another episode only on creativity. Great. 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. I can't draw, but I can take photographs. 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. Extreme. You can just do it on nights and weekends, but the... I'll tell him that. You know, it's like, you don't have to throw the baby out with the bath waters. I had a private tour of the Met the other day by this wonderful, she's actually a comedian, Liza Banks Campagna is her name. And just on a whim, I decided, you know, I saw her, literally, I saw her on Instagram. She, I'm like, I want a private tour of the Met. Never done anything like that before. Did you DM her and it just happened? Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what happened. Me and my friend, she took us on a private tour of the Met. And you have to say, I lived in New York my entire adult life. 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. I've gone to the Met a million times. I know my way around the Met. I go to the places I like. I know what's there. My favorite statue in the world is at the Met. 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 went on her tour. Sure. And she showed me stuff that I was like, okay. And she told me the history of it. And she told me the story behind it. 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. And again, she told me the history. And then she took me to this one piece. It was a Monet. I like some Monets. I don't like old Monets. And it's a boring Monet. You know? It's just gray. She said, come here. and I'm like 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 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 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 where I don't remember the history of anything. 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. I didn't, and I was having ideas like crazy because they weren't through my lens. And so not only go to museums not only go to broadway shows you know but go with somebody who wants to take you yeah 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 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, I have one that they want to keep this song that I introduced to them that they'd never heard before. So you did this with me less than 24 hours after we met. What? You took me to a dance rehearsal. I did take you to a dance rehearsal. Because you wanted to share with me a piece of art and a form of art that you loved. I took you to Rambert Dance in London. 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 things in this world that we have not talked about that will feed into our creativity conversation when it happens. Adam, I could talk to you forever and ever and ever. And this time is whizzed by and I wish I didn't have to end. You can just cancel class. Okay. Let's just stay for another three hours. please come back please I would love that you're the best no you're the best I didn't get to like half the things I needed to get to but whatever we'll do it 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 Devin Johnson subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts and if you want even more cool stuff visit simonsynic.com thanks for listening take care of yourself take care of each other Thank you.