Al Gore

[MUSIC] >> Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, Founder and Director of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome back to the Fost podcast. It is my great honor to have on today's episode the former vice president of the United States, Al Gore. Most people know vice president Gore as an inspiring politician and Nobel laureate. But in fact, he is also an incredibly gifted and dedicated storyteller. For over 40 years, he's been sounding the alarm of human-caused global warming. Since 1976, when he was a freshman congressman from Tennessee, he's been telling and retelling this urgent narrative to get people to wake up to the dangers of the climate crisis and act before it's too late. He's taken his message across media to great success with several best-selling books, an Academy Award-winning documentary, a Grammy-winning audiobook, and an Apple Design Award-winning iOS app. I feel fortunate to have worked closely with him on several of these projects, including the companion to the documentary and inconvenient truth and the app our choice. Coming off that incredible string of successes, vice president Gore launched the Climate Reality Project and traveled around the globe to train tens of thousands of activists on how to use climate science and the emotional power of compelling stories to raise awareness and inspire action. I'm awed by his unwavering commitment and his ability to constantly update his methods and venture into new forms of media. I invited him on the show today to learn from his years of experience and experimentation as a master storyteller. But before we get started, I'd like to take a brief moment to acknowledge our generous sponsor for this episode, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is working alongside others to build a national culture of health that provides everyone in America a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being. To help us all imagine what that could look like, we recently collaborated with the Foundation on Take Us to a Better Place, a collection of short stories from some of today's most gifted fiction writers. It's an extremely powerful read, and as we find ourselves in the middle of a pandemic, also a timely one. I highly encourage you to check it out by visiting rwjf.org/fiction, where you can download a free ebook copy or audio version. And now, my conversation with Vice President Al Gore. Al Gore, it is such an honor to have you on the future of storytelling podcast. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Charlie. It's such an honor to be on your podcast. We work together on so many books and I've been looking forward to it. It's really been one of the great pleasures and honors of my life to be able to help you tell your story. So thank you, sir. It's been, it's just been an amazing journey to get to work with you all these years. I thought today what we could do would be to talk about the fact that you've devoted the better part of your life to telling one story. You've been committed to telling the story of how humans and their activities have led to the heating of the planet to global warming and the urgency of our need to act to change our ways. You've been telling that story for a long time and I'm hoping you would be willing to share with us some of the learnings you've had from from being someone who's told one story over and over for so many years in so many different ways. My involvement with the story of the climate crisis when I was an undergraduate, I took a course taught by Roger Revelle who is now recognized as one of the greatest climate scientists of all time. He opened my eyes to this crisis. It was then called global warming mostly. Several years of data had come into Revelle at the time that he was teaching this course and the data told a remarkable story, one that I later recapitulated in an inconvenient truth, the revelation from Roger Revelle that humanity had reached a stage in civilization's development that we were capable of rather significantly changing the ecology of the entire world. That was the basic aha moment that I experienced courtesy of Professor Revelle. I began to ask myself, how can this story be told in a way that takes the insights of this great scientist and his colleagues and simplify it into language that I can understand and therefore might be able to use and convey the same story to others. I remember you telling me about some early days when you would put together a set of 35-millimeter crotochromes into a slide carousel and you would go out there with a chair that you would stand up on so that you could point to how the chart kept going up and up and then I wasn't there for those early presentations but I've seen you do versions of this that got more and more sophisticated over time. You used more and more technology as the computer came around and keynote and the tools that you used to tell the story got more sophisticated and you like any great storyteller you kept honing the message. You would hear the what worked with the audience and you would adapt. You would get new information. You would add it in. I'm just interested to hear you talk about that process of continually honing and upgrading that story both for its content message and for the form that you use. I ran for president at the young age of 38. I was 40 by the time I had to leave the race. I ran largely to try to introduce that issue into the political dialogue but after that campaign was over. One of my children on April 3rd, 1988 had a very serious accident and while I was spending a solid month in John Hopkins University in the intensive care unit with my child it was quite a powerful emotional experience for me and I remember taking my schedule out for the weeks following and looking at all of these events and obligations that had seemed to be very important and very significant when they went on the schedule and they just blew away as light as feathers and the same with the issues that I was obsessed with at the time except for the climate. I began writing my first book Earth in the Balance in that hospital and I began using props to try to illustrate the shocking increase in CO2. I mean you basically use every kind of technology that's available to you and by the way almost always you figure out how to use it to its best advantage. I mean I just think about the app that you and I did together with the Art Choice app and that one Apple's award for Best Designed App of the Year. What's your experience being able to tell this story over so many different forms? Is it additive? Is there one that you have found to be really the most impactful in terms of changing people's hearts and minds and motivating people to action? Where are you in terms of choice of media? Well I have to pause for a moment on the app that you suggested and you found these two brilliant young guys who put it together and the one thing that just blew me away was when in the chapter on wind when the windmill that came up you could blow on the iPhone and they had programmed the microphone to pick up that sound and the windmill blades would turn according to how fast you were blowing on it. I just thought that was really very cool. But your question is which of the media has the biggest impact? Honestly there are those who say that big screen movies and a scene in a communal setting in a theater is still perhaps the queen of media. I don't know if that's true anymore but there's something particularly powerful about a movie. and it creates its own energy field because there is so much commentary about movies and previews and word of mouth and in my impression a movie that hits big has a huge impact. When you have both a book and a movie simultaneously of the same title on the same topic that more than doubles the impact of the message I think that's my impression. Well certainly we've we've had that experience with an inconvenient truth that was that was a very special moment to be part of that and to see the worldwide impact that that film and that book had at that moment. I think I've had some success in getting the message out there but it has not yet reached enough people. I do think that the world is right now crossing the fabled political tipping point. I really do. We still have so far to go. The crisis is such an unbelievable magnitude. The stakes are just unimaginably high. The solutions are available but they're not easy. They will be good for us. They will improve the quality of life for everyone on earth in multiple ways not only by saving our future but by improving the quality of life across the board but the inertia of the existing legacy systems and patterns is so strong, so difficult to displace. The biggest part of this journey is just ahead of us. I was going to ask, certainly there are those who have been incredibly inspired by your message and the stories that you've told and there are those who've really resisted them. I wondered if you would talk a little bit as to why you think people sometimes it doesn't get through and why people resist it and how you have tried to address that or overcome that resistance. Well, first of all, it's a complex story. All of us have a natural resistance to giving over our opinions to someone who has a story that's very complex. If we're not prepared to take the time to really get into it and to suspend disbelief. Secondly, it is a story that is global in its scope and that is a barrier as well. There has also been a very highly organized and lavishly funded campaign by legacy businesses that see the acceptance of this message as a threat to their business models. There have been a Pulitzer Prize winning books written about the history of their disinformation campaign. Billions of dollars have been spent in an effort to intentionally confuse people to promulgate rank falsehoods and to do it in such a sophisticated way that many are not aware of the fact that they're being delusional with these falsehoods. Some are just rooted in human nature. Others are rooted in commercial and financial interests and unethical decisions to promote lies as part of the business plan. You're somebody who clearly enjoys learning the science and you're someone who I've watched you just get excited to geek out with a group of scientists and really get turned on by that. A lot of people just glaze over. They have no appetite for that level of detail or information. Have you found that the science is helpful in conveying the story? Does it get in the way? Do you have to get people connected on an emotional level in order to get their attention and really get the point across? Yeah, for sure. You have to communicate on an emotional level wherever possible. It helps to connect the climate issue to other concerns people have about their health for example, about their kids, the fate of places they deeply love. I mean all the advances in neuroscience confirm what wise men and women have long tried to teach me. That is that people make up their minds largely with their emotions and then sometimes the logic and rationale comes later and fits what the emotions drive people to award. No question about it. I also think it matters who the messenger is and whether there's a level of interest and empathy for the person telling the story. I don't know if I've ever said this to you, but I really felt that the success of an inconvenient truth, the movie and the book, was based on it being your story, the resurrection of a fallen hero, that you had come out of the loss of the 2000 election. You had taken some time off. I think people you had grown a beard. People had talked about you wandering the woods. There was this moment of you having been sort of metaphorically self-bannished and then you came out and you came out as a man with a mission and this was your mission. And I know from the movie they did a great job of showing you as this lecturing warrior with the saving of the planet and the ringing of the bell of the warning of the climate crisis as your passion and you went from a small group to big group to any group you could get in front of to tell this story to give that slide show. And I think that people responded to the message in the movie not because of the great science or the very convincing animations that showed you a Florida underwater or those kinds of things which were very memorable but because they saw you as this being your resurrection in a way, they related to you as this fallen hero. I know we made that decision in the book to help you share some of those personal stories that let people connect to you emotionally and therefore be able to care about your message. You know when I was first approached by Laurie David it was the first person to suggest that my slideshow be made into a movie. I thought it was a crazy idea. I really did. I was again very naive. I remembered being in high school and getting behind the curve and of course on Shakespeare and watching movies of Shakespeare's a few of Shakespeare's plays where the camera was set up somewhere in the audience aimed at the stage and I just thought oh my god you know stage plays put on film. I said this is going to be the same thing. You can't put a slide show on this screen. Little did I know how talented Davis and his team were and of course they did figure out how to do it in a way that I wouldn't have even begun to know about. But what I also love about it is one that's still grounded in the oral tradition that you sort of started this with which is to get out there and give a talk and two that it's it's a great example of turning storytelling into action right here you are with a message that you're conveying and you're getting a very large group of people now to be activists to actually go out and make a difference in their local communities. I think that's something that that any cause-related storyteller is trying to do. They're trying to think about how do they create a movement? How do they how can they tell a story that's so impactful that people will take action and and become their advocates for the for the message. The one time when I decided that I would start giving this slide show on a regular basis. I was on the front deck of a houseboat on center hill lake which is near my farm here in Tennessee. I had rented a houseboat for a week and a lot of my buddies from around Carthage were up there on a Saturday night we were drinking beer and I had gotten the slide show to a point where I thought it was worth I was proud of it. I thought it was good. And so I set up the computer on the front deck of the houseboat, not a very big place, and about eight or ten of my buddies were there. And their reaction was so gratifying to me. It was all expressed in the idiom of, you know, that I grew up with around here. Man, there were a lot of cuss words involved, and I'm not going to repeat them on your blog gas. But it convinced me that it was a story that could connect. When I learned something new that's really illuminating or startling, when I have a so-called "aha" moment, I love to recreate that "aha" moment for others. I thought about your history of telling this story, and I wondered, "Do you feel more that you're kind of a Johnny Apple seed figure who's going out there and planting these seeds in people's minds? Or do you sometimes feel more like Cicifis? Or you're just pushing this rock up the hill and it rolls right back down and, you know, repeat tomorrow?" Well, I don't think I've ever felt like Cicifis. No, I'm optimistic by nature, and I've seen a lot of progress, a lot of progress. I feel like we're running out of time, and I feel like the stakes are so high, it would certainly be understandable if some people get into it for the first time and throw up their ends, "Oh my God, we're not going to be able to do what needs to be done." I'm convinced that we can. The crisis, as of now, is still getting worse faster than we're deploying solutions for it, but we've been gaining momentum. What gives you the most hope? Well, the fact that young people in the gratitude-barred generation are now so vocal and passionate, when young people got engaged in the civil rights movement, it really turned the tide, and we've seen the same in so many morally-based movements. More recently, I have gotten a lot of hope from the emergence of the environmental justice movement in a much more passionate form with many more people involved in it. The solutions to the climate crisis include some new technologies, like solar electricity and wind electricity and electric vehicles, that used to be unaffordably expensive for most and just niche applications. It's hard to describe how much hope I get from the fact that these solutions now are coming down and costs so rapidly. It's almost like what happened with computer chips. Last year, worldwide, if you look at all of the new electricity generating capacity installed worldwide, 90% of it was solar and wind. Going forward, the International Energy Agency says 95% is going to be solar and wind, and it gets cheaper still to the point where fully depreciated coal and gas plants that have 20, 30 years of useful lifetime remaining still can't compete. They're shutting down existing plants now and replacing them with brand new wind and solar. The same thing is happening with electric vehicles. When I wrote my first book, Earth in the Balance, one of my proposals was to phase out the internal combustion engine over a 25-year period. That book was published in January of 1992. We are four years past when we would have been free of internal combustion engines, but it'll take a little more time. Any new big initiatives that you could share that you're working on in terms of helping to tell this story? Yes, I'm very excited about a new coalition that I helped to put together called Climate Trace. TRACE stands for Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions. This is a coalition of tech companies specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning. In Geo's, that track different parts of the crisis. Artificial intelligence is its own technology revolution. It is going to be as consequential as any technology revolution we have ever seen, maybe more so. In any case, we are hard at work and in June, we will present the world's first complete inventory of the source and amounts of global warming pollution from every significant source on the entire planet. The creation of radical transparency with the ability to tell the world where this pollution is coming from will change a lot. I think just speaking with you, Alan, reminds me of that wonderful quote about never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. And I can tell you from my own personal experience, there's nothing better than getting to work on something that is much bigger than yourself, something that is of huge importance with people that inspire you as you have me. You have led many of us to feel that way, to be able to transcend the smallness of our day-to-day problems and to work on something as global as the climate crisis. And I thank you for that personally, Godspeed, and may you live another hundred years to keep up this work. So thank you. Well, thank you, Charlie. And thanks for your kind words and thanks for your invaluable assistance. Your work with not only books, but podcasts, and movies, and apps, and everything else. You carry a lot of inspiration to a lot of people. So I thank you for that. And thanks for being my friend. Thank you, my friend. Send in you a big hug and look forward to being able to have a beer on the porch together sometime soon. Looking forward to it. All right, virtual hug back. My heartfelt thank you to Vice President Gore for joining me today on the podcast. And a special thanks again to Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. If you'd like to learn more about Gore's climate reality project and the important work they're doing, please visit this episode's page on the future of storytelling website at fost.org. Or by following the link in the episode's description. Our podcast is made with the help of our talented production partner, Charts and Leisure. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe to our show and consider giving us a good rating. We deeply appreciate your support. I hope you'll join us again in a couple of weeks for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.