Episode 213: Alison Smart and Spencer Glendon, Probable Futures

Today's guests are Alison Smart, Executive Director, and Spencer Glendon, Founder, of Probable Futures.

Alison Smart

Probable Futures is an unconventional initiative that brings together leaders across culture, business, technology, and design in collaboration with scientists at the renowned Woodwell Climate Research Center. They're committed to and guided by their shared set of core principles. Probable Futures offers frameworks, tools, and storytelling to help people understand, prepare for, and choose between the futures that the climate offers us. The online platform currently provides educational materials about the workings of Earth’s systems and climate models as well as local and global projections of heat, cold, and precipitation. All Probable Futures materials are free to anyone in the world.

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Spencer Glendon

Spencer has an interesting background in that he spent 18 years as macro analyst, partner, and director of investment research at Wellington Management, an investment management firm with more than a trillion in client assets. He also holds a BS in Industrial Engineering and a PhD in Economics. Prior to helping found Probable Futures, Alison was Vice President for Strategy & Advancement at the Woodwell Climate Research Center (Woodwell), a leading source of climate science that informs policy, decision making, and the urgent action needed to combat climate change.

We discuss the pair’s respective climate journeys, what motivated them to work in this space, and what led them to create Probable Futures. We also talk about how they measure success, what stakeholders they’re serving, and the nature of the climate problem in general, as well as what’s holding us back.

Enjoy the show! 

You can find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 (me),  @mcjpod (podcast) or @mcjcollective (company). You can reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Episode recorded June 3, 2022.

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In Today's episode, we cover:

• Alison and Spencer’s respective climate journeys and what led to the creation of Probable Futures

• The visualization and utility of data presented on ProbableFutures.org

• Earlier climate science models and how they resonated (or didn’t) with different audiences

• How Probable Futures measures impact and inspires action

• The nature of the climate problem, some of the barriers holding us back, and what changes could accelerate progress

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• Episode Transcript

  Jason Jacobs: Hey, everyone, Jason here. I am the My Climate Journey show host. Before we get going, I wanted to take a minute and tell you about the My Climate Journey or MCJ, as we call it, membership option. Membership came to be because there were a bunch of people that were listening to the show that weren't just looking for education, but they were longing for a peer group as well. So we set up a Slack community for those people, that's now mushroomed into more than 1,300 members. There is an application to become a member. It's not an exclusive thing. There's four criteria we screen for: determination to tackle the problem of climate change, ambition to work on the most impactful solution areas, optimism that we can make a dent and we're not wasting our time for trying, and a collaborative spirit. Beyond that, the more diversity, the better.

  There's a bunch of great things that have come out of that community: a number of founding teams that have met in there, a number of nonprofits that have been established, a bunch of hiring that's been done, a bunch of companies that have raised capital in there, a bunch of funds that have gotten limited partners or investors for their funds in there, as well as a bunch of events and programming by members and for members and some open source projects that are getting actively worked on that hatched in there as well. At any rate, if you wanna learn more, you can go to myclimatejourney.co, the website, and click they Become A Member tab at the top. Enjoy the show.

  Hello, everyone. This is Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey. This show follows my journey to interview a wide range of guests to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and try to figure out how people like you and I can help. Today's guests are Alison Smart, executive director, and Spencer Glendon, founder at Probable Futures. Probable Futures is not a business, it's an unconventional initiative that brings together leaders across culture, business, technology, and design in collaboration with scientists at the renowned Woodwell Climate Research Center. They're committed to and guided by their shared set of core principles. Now, Dr. Glendon has an interesting background in that he spent 18 years as macro analyst, partner, and director of investment research at Wellington Management, an investment management firm with more than a trillion in client assets.

  In that role, he spent several years focusing on models in climate science and finance, and understanding the gaps between the two disciplines and their practitioners. What he found was that the models were surprisingly accurate yet they weren't getting utilized that much. Well, why is that? Well, that's what Dr. Glendon set out to find out, and what he uncovered was that it wasn't so much the data wasn't there but that it wasn't in a format that could be easily understood and utilize in a wide range of circumstances for a wide range of stakeholders. So that's what Probable Futures set out to build. They are essentially taking the data and the models and providing great UX and visuals- visualization, personalization, customization and helping make that data more useful to more people.

  We cover a lot in this episode, including the climate journeys of both Alison and Spencer. We talk about what- what motivated them to do the work that they're doing, how they got going, what it was that led them to realize that Probable Futures deserved to exist, and then how they set out to space it? What they've done so far? How they measure success? What kind of stakeholders they're serving, and where the data is resonant the most? We'll also just have a great discussion about the theory of change, the nature of the climate problem, some of the barriers holding us back, what changes could accelerate progress, and of course, where Probable Futures fits in. I really enjoyed this one. I'm excited for you to listen to it. Spencer, Alison, welcome to the show.

  Alison Smart: Hi, Jason

  Spencer Glendon: Thanks, Jason.

  Jason Jacobs: I'm so excited to have you both. We were chitchatting a little bit before we hit record, but the work that you're doing with Probable Futures is so important, and journeys for doing this work seem to have some similarities to mine, although coming from very different places. And so I've excited about having this discussion for a while.

  Alison Smart: Us too. Thanks for inviting us.

  Jason Jacobs: Why don't we jump right into it? What is Probable Futures?

  Alison Smart: Probable Futures, I'm the executive director of Probable Futures, and it's educational initiative that offers useful tools to visualize climate change along with stories and insights to help people understand what those changes mean. So probablefutures.org hosts a freely accessible digital platform that aims to serve as a, a global utility that can help individuals and organizations and governments to understand what is coming everywhere on earth in terms of heat, lack of cold, humidity, rainfall, drought, wildfire. The data and maps offered on probablefutures.org are, are global in scope, but they have the ability to scale down to a resolution that's really usable and useful for communities and organizations. And to do all of these, we bring together leaders across culture, technology, business, and design in collaboration with really world-class scientists at the renowned Woodwell Climate Research Center.

  Spencer Glendon: The way we think about it is twofold. The first is often the future is portrayed either as basically like today but with electric vehicles and modernist architecture, or as Mad Max. And neither of those two vision to the future are very useful nor are they likely. We are no longer in the past, no mater how much modernist architecture and how many electric cars we build, it will not be the past climate. We will have a different climate, and that climate is something we need to be prepared for both physically but also culturally. And the culture part of it is as important as the physical. I'm sure we'll talk about both, but we wanna distress and the reason to call this Probable Futures is there's a range of likely outcomes and that range needs to be the range that we engage with, both in terms of being prepared for the outcomes we can't avoid but also avoiding the outcomes for which we really couldn't prepare.

  And so we think about it a- as, as this ranges. We think a lot in ranges in probabilities as opposed to specifics forecast of when things will happen. These are scenarios that are extremely likely, extremely robust scientifically, and they should be vivid and resonant in a way that makes it easy for people to say, oh, that is different than the world I live in and I need to be prepared of that. Or, or and/or that's so different from the world I live in that we need to avoid it because it would be extraordinarily difficult to live in those terms. And so it's making physical this future that people often refer to, in statistical terms, one and a half, two, two and a half, three degrees C are these small sounding numbers that don't really sound that different as a Probable Futures' a way of understanding: A, how do we get to those numbers? What are tho- they mean? But B, what will it physically be like if we are at those levels of warming in a way that we think is clarifying and hopefully helpful to decision making.

  Jason Jacobs: So if I'm hearing right, it almost sounds like taking maybe what's on a, a spreadsheet and abstract and hard to really internalize and almost bring it life it both in terms of detail of what those numbers would bring about in terms of the world that we do understand, but also, is, is there visual components as well where, where it's not just saying so or having a bullet at least but it's actually kinda bring it life graphically?

  Alison Smart: Yeah, exactly.

  Spencer Glendon: Yeah. Go ahead, Alison, why you don't talk a bit, a little bit about the visual and I'll talk a little bit about this idea of a utility.

  Alison Smart: Sure. Climate science is really best understood through maps. It is climate change is a physical phenomenon. It's happening in the real world. One of things that Spencer and I would talk about a lot in the early days is how climate science is portrayed that often we see confusing graphics with RCP, trajectories, and graphs, but that it is this thing that we can, we have the ability to understand it because it's something in the physical world and we live in the physical world every single day.

  So really we saw that climate change was intuitive, anyone could really understand it and that we could present it in ways that would help that understanding, help build that understanding in that literacy. So we put a lot of work into building the maps in a way that would be intuitive and they are really geared towards the average person.

  Spencer Glendon: To give some background, to 10 years ago, I was working in finance and one of the largest, uh, investment institutions in the world, and I have developed a practice of essentially given a lot of latitude at the firm. And I would run a little what you might call little one man skunk works at the firm, working on projects that I got to define. And the way I define projects at that time was based on a long history of working with experts. And what I discovered about expertise over many years was that expertise in the Western world, in the modern world is divided up into small slices that are quite orthodox. So to make the world tractable, humans post the enlightenment, divided the world into various small slices, ever smaller slices in fact. The physics department is now at MIT has physicists who can't really talk to each others about their work because even their specialty is so deep. And so I developed a practice for sniffing out topics in the context of investment firm actually that actually nobody worked on because they didn't fit in any slice.

  And so there are other topics I worked on with a lot of success, others I worked on with less success but I started working on climate change a little more than 10 years ago because A, it seemed like it might be big, B, it didn't really seem to have a price, and C, it didn't fit into anybody's job, which meant that it could matter a lot and nobody would work on it. And so I was in an institution that had hundreds and hundreds of researchers and nobody worked on climate change, and when I started paying it more attention to it, I realized people talk funny when they, when climate change comes up, they get squeamish, they used language that they wouldn't otherwise used like, I don't believe it.

  But in, in a finance setting, you would normally say, well, what, I don't care what do you believe, what are the odds of it, what is the likelihood of it, as opposed to I, I rule it out completely. Anybody who says it has a zero probability because I don't like it would lose their license essentially to be part of a conversation about an investment but that was okay with climate change, to just rule it out and leave it alone. And those signals made me think there's something interesting here, let me see if I can get at it. And so I started reading science journals from the '70s and '80s, which is my through odd practice. I don't read newspapers, I read science journals, books and magazines.

  Jason Jacobs: As one does, right? I mean, that's what I do when I learn about something new, I just go find the journals from the '70s and '80s. [laughs]

  Spencer Glendon: So I found each journals from the '70s and '80s and I was astonished to find how good they were, how clear they were, how many predictions there were in them that were accurate, and I, I was working in high finance where people use models that if they're slightly better than terrible they make you rich. And so you could have a model of interest rates or of currencies and if it's right 60ish percent of the time, you're George Soros. And I was finding these models that had provided speculative forecast based on what humans would do from the late '70s and early '80s that had proven to be not only extremely accurate but framed with a kind of uncertainty that also as tractable, like the range is this range and that range will extend overtime but this is roughly what we should expect.

  Even today, that range is still the range. So if you, uh, to talk about what people expect, it's basically the same as they had in the '70s and '80s. So I had this insight that I'm working in an industry with mediocre models at best and lots of frankly just dart throwing as a practice. And here are these models that are really good and nobody's using them and they are truly about the future, which is what finance should be interested in. So I would start these projects work telling anybody I was gonna work on and be, to see if I could find something. But the first email I sent to the firm where I worked was just called unused models, and in it I said I have these models and these models have been running since the early '80s.

  Let me show you the results and look how good they've been, but I stripped out all the labeling identifiers so you didn't know what they were of. It didn't say CO2 or temperature. It just said, here are the models, here's the fan chart they produced and here's where the data has gone. Do you want to know what they are? And they were models of temperature, of sea ice, of sea level rise, of intensity of storms, and I, and people are like, "Yeah, that's, like those models are so much better than my models, tell me what they are," and I said, "well, they're, they're climate science models." And for most people, the reaction was, well, that's a dirty trick.

  I was so interested that the reaction was negative when in fact I saw, I, you now have the ability to know something about the future that's just lying around, that nobody's using. That's, that's mono, that is like, you know, a wonderful gift. But I came to realize it was hard for people to conceive of how to use this information, so I had good access to great investors and prominent people and CEOs and so I just tarted asking them, "Is climate science useful to you?" And everyone said, "No." And I said, "Well, how do you know it's not useful? Have you asked a question about climate science?" And no one had ever asked a question, and I realized I needed to find scientists who would be willing to answer questions if I could get them generated by other people. If I could find question, people who are willing enough to engage enough to ask questions, can I find scientists who would help us find the answers?

  And so that's how I found the Woodwell Climate Research Center at the time known as the Woods Hole Research Center, because it was a group of practical scientists who were world-class experts and also wanted to collaborate. And so I started talking, Alison actually made the introduction. Jason you've talked in the past some about philanthropy. Part of what I did was start giving money in medium-sized chunks to organizations so I could be noticed and have access to leadership and ca- talk to them more easily. And so Alison followed up after something I had done and brought, uh, Phil Duffy. And so Alison, Phil Duffy and I had a meeting. Phil Duffy who's been on your podcast, I believe?

  Jason Jacobs: He has, Phil's great.

  Spencer Glendon: Yes, and so Phil who's currently in the White House but is, uh, will soon return back to being the president of the wood, of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, we had a meeting and I said, "Here's what I'm interested in. Here are all the papers I've read. Here are the people I'd like to meet," and he helped facilitate introductions but in particular, "Could we use climate science to ask practical questions?" And he said, "Sure, we could," and I said, "Well, has it been?" He says, "Not really," and I said, "Why do you think it's not been done?" He's, "Well, part of the reason is it's actually not that hard." And I realized that one of the biases of science is to keep pushing the envelope, keep looking for the incremental insight, but the application of known things in the real world isn't the job description of anybody at a research university.

  And so we had to find a way to bridge basically the science and culture. And so Alison was, uh, was ideal for that and really, uh, helped make this happen. So we started a project of bringing together people. I was able to coke some people who didn't think they wanted to do this but also identify people who were interested in this. Some of them in finance and a group of them actually from McKinsey to start asking questions that the Woodwell team could provide answers for, and then I was like, "Look, if the answer is... If after we get the answers you don't care, that's fine. Like now, we've, we've had an honest conversation." But the result after every question was oh, my God, I had no idea. I had no idea that this was that important. I had no idea this was so valuable. I had no idea this was knowable.

  And part of what came across was nobody really makes decisions based on average atmospheric temperature, but those articles from the '70s and '80s, the testimony from George Woodwell, who's the founder of the Woodwell Research Center, to US Congress in the early '80s. So it's here are the things that are gonna happen, with extremes, with more drought and dry places and more intense rainfall in wet places, you're, like a whole list of things that would start happening. And that list has been perfectly accurate and that list is super useful. That list is very insightful. It's not like abstract average temperature and it's not 2100, it's now. And so we thought there needs to be a way to take this data that actually already was theoretically public but nobody knew how to get access to, make it public, make it accessible, make it a utility for everybody.

  And I'll get a little bit to one of, some of the insights around it, but the idea was we need to create a tool that encourages people to start asking their own questions of climate science to start imagining, oh, I care about this thing no matter what my narrow specialty is, no matter what my job is or occupation or way of moving in the world, and no matter where I am, I need to be more aware of the physical world that I depend on and how it might change. And so we built something that could be a prompt to ask questions and a tool for answering those questions without saying to people, here are the answer upfront, but instead, here's a way to start asking those questions and bring climate into your world, give an example of where this is gone for the people who really dug in.

  So I collaborate on a pro bono basis with, uh, institutions when they're willing to really take responsibility and make their work public. So I've helped McKinsey with a lot of work that they've made public and folks at McKinsey's now say, "Climate needs to be thought of like information and money." It's part of everything and it's at the C-suite level in an organization like the ones McKinsey would advise. It is involved in every decision you make and you need to bring it into that kind of awareness. It doesn't belong in some small ghetto in an organization and it doesn't just belong in the domain of scientists. You need a literacy and an awareness and the ability to interrogate climate and so we build a tool that would enable that whether what you're interested in is planning the sewer system for your town or understanding the fire risk where you are, or understanding the health risks posed by changes in temperature or changes in agriculture. And so every aspect of life has questions it could ask and nobody had really been asking those questions, and that's the goal of Probable Futures is to be complementary to whatever it is people are doing in there, they're slice of life as we say.

  Jason Jacobs: There are some natural follow-ups there and a direction I know I wanna go and it's so important that we go there that I actually wrote it down and put a little asterisk, but before we do, what I love to do is Spencer that was really insightful in terms of your journey and what led you to doing this work at Probable Futures. Can we talk a little bit about your journey, Alison?

  Alison Smart: I am in a way the embodiment of Probable Futures' mission. In that, I, uh, am a person who was not from the science space, but I came to a deep understanding about climate change and climate science eventually. Once I realized that I wouldn't be going to UConn and playing basketball, I actually went to school for music and theater and I did that in Miami, Florida at the University of Miami. And while I was there, I lived through some major hurricanes. It was, it was a very active four years as far as the hurricanes season. While I was there, I lived through Hurricane Katrina which then went on to New Orleans after that. I lived through Hurricane Wilma which was hugely destructive, and so I really saw how powerful the climate could be and I also saw how quickly system can fall apart. Just how soon living without electricity and without other kinds of systems that we rely on, just really kind of makes things fall apart very quickly.

  I also saw there during that time, the value of community and how important community is to resiliency. I mean, in those time we were sharing food with neighbors and water and such. So that was a, a pretty formative experience for me, and at the time, there was more about climate change that was coming out in the news, more that you could learn about. So at the same time, I was paying attention to climate change in the background but I ultimately went on, I built my early career advancing great arts organizations: theaters, ballets, and eventually, museums. And I did that by using some of my training and being a good storyteller.

  And so in that context, helping people to understand why the arts are so important to having a strong society. Then I was recruited to the Woodwell Climate Research Center and I was recruited there, uh, by Phil Duffy in part because I had, uh, because of my background in the arts. I mean, I found there that climate scientists really wanted help from people outside of their domain, who knew how tell stories, who cared about aesthetics and who were willing to learn. And that relationship ended up being really catalytic. I'm, I'm super proud of the work that Woodwell did during my there and that is doing, and that they're doing now as well. Proud of the partnerships that we built, some of which we did in partnership with Spencer and really how we transformed the organization's ability to tell stories about the science that, that they were doing.

  So when Spencer and I started collaborating at Woodwell, we really saw the parallels in each other's stories and that we were both people who had not been formally trained in climate science but we had really both come to deeply understand it, and we had a good sense for the context of climate change. We- we'd really both become translators and bridge builders between climate science and other parts culture. At the time, as Spencer mentioned, very few people and very few industries were actually using the insights of climate science and then he saw really how useful, intuitive, and beautiful climate science could be. And so he invited me to help create Probable Futures.

  So in a way, like I said, I'm the embodiment of Probable Futures' mission, but I think my experience is really now being repeated with many people in different industries around the world. There are so many people that now have to start thinking about climate change and planning for it in the context of their work or other parts of their lives. So first, thousands and then millions and then tens of millions, and literally billions of people will have their own climate journey, and we built Probable Futures in the hopes that, it, they could start that journey with a framework and an orientation that would serve them well no matter where they lived or, in the world or what kind of work that they do. So we had our journey and then created this resource to help people not have to do the things that we did, like reading journals or embedding ourselves in a climate science organization.

  Jason Jacobs: Thank you both for that. I think what I heard, I'm gonna say it back to make sure I understand it before we move on, is that the, the insight was that here's this climate science and the models have, you know, maybe they've not been a hundred percent accurate but relative to models that we take as reliable and useful in other areas, they outperform yet from an applicability standpoint they aren't being applied and instead of just pushing to make the models incrementally better which we should keep doing with there needs to more of a focus on taking what we already know and applying it and that given the way that climate science organizations that that is nobody's job so there's both an opportunity and the, and a need. I just wanna stop there. Is that right so far?

  Spencer Glendon: Yeah, I would say, that, that's entirely right. I wanna give, uh, one more piece of context that I actually think is really relevant given the communities you've been a part of Jason. So I'm, I'll back up slightly or actually in my case, 52 years. I was born outside Detroit and grew up in Michigan while Detroit was really failing in a way that was really painful, there was enormous amount of suffering. So in the '50s and '60s, and, and the... From the '20s to the '50s, Detroit was the fastest growing perhaps most prosperous city by some, in some ways in the world. And then by the late '60s, there were riots and real suffering. And throughout my childhood, I was born at the end of the '60s, throughout my childhood, Detroit was a mess and tragic, and I grew up in an area in Ann Arbor where things were nice. and I was obsessed with this juxtaposition where I lived was forward looking, encouraging, hopeful, safe, and nearby where these places were I could have been randomly, but instead I was here and they were really radically different.

  And it made me become obsessed with two things. One is success, and the other, or prosperity, and the other is catastrophe. And so I actually started out first as an engineer. I thought I would fix Detroit one car at a time or one factory at a time. I became an industrial engineer, actually worked in a Ford factory, but I became more and more interested in the, the, the deeper problems. Partly Ford seemed unsolvable at the time, they made quite mediocre cars and had a pretty poor culture of quality. So I got interested in well, what are the deeper sources of this culture? And so I, I actually worked and studied. I studied a bunch of places there were in the late '80s, there was a robust middle class and great manufacturing and so Japan, Scandinavia, Germany. I went up moving to Germany to learn how did they have a real middle class? How did they not have a Detroit? How did they have...

  And so I went back and forth over the ensuing years between doing research and working in communities that either succeeded or failed and wound up eventually getting... I, I, I ran a small business lending program in central Russia for a while. I worked on the south side of Chicago for a while. I wound up getting a PhD in economic history and urban economics to understand how do we get here? And that whole time, I was looking for insights about prosperity, insights about how to reduce suffering, insights about how to make the future better, and I never once considered the physical planet. Like it just did not cross my mind. And so when I started that work in 2012. I was still thinking about how to understand something that was tractable and that would be incremental or marginal provide an insight? And instead I discovered that climate stability was the reason for civilization. I went out to Stanford to meet Ken Caldeira and-

  Jason Jacobs: He's been on the show too, by the way.

  Spencer Glendon: I'm, I'm aware. I'm giving the shout out for your previous episode. I'm helping you, uh, you know-

  Jason Jacobs: [laughs]

  Spencer Glendon: ... make hyperlinks here. So I had nice lunch with Ken and after lunch I'm walking him back to his office, I said, "I just, just wanna understand one thing. It's right, isn't? I think it's gotta be right that's civilization started about 10,000 BC because the climate stabilized. That until then the climate was unstable, moving up and down, and humans never settled. And then about 10,000 BCE, the climate stabilized almost perfectly for what was then called then, by now called the holocene, this perfectly stable climate period. And that's why people settle, because it came clear to me is that a predictable climate allows you to plan and planning is the basis of civilization. If you can't plan, you're a nomad. If you can plan, you settle in place, you make, you have intention, you build things to last, you have dur- duration."

  And he said, "Well, yeah, everybody knows that." And I was like, "Nobody knows that. Nobody knows that civilization exists because the climate is stable and when the climate was not stable, we were all nomads." He's like, "Yeah, that's kind of obvious," I was like, "There's nothing obvious about that. Now that I know it, it's obvious." But that should have been in like sixth grade or seventh grade and what I realize was that when I was in sixth grade or seventh grade or eight grade or any of the grades, when I'm saying I wanna be told about the world, scientists didn't know that. Scientists didn't know why humans didn't settle. I sure remember being told around 9,500 BCE archeologists have been able to figure out that people started building permanent structures and domesticating agriculture, some in Asia, some in Africa, some in other places, some in Central America, and it's a mystery why.

  And I was like it should have been three weeks of the front of the paper saying, mystery solved, civilization exists because of a stable climate. And so this idea that a stable climate underpins absolutely everything was so shocking to me. I had been going around, looking for marginal ways to understand the world, insightful things to add to a conversation. I realized, no, I understand why everything is the way it is. It's because we could expect the future to look like the past, and that's the thing that I think is most important to understand here and clarifying about this work we're trying to do is it's not that it will be marginally warmer or there will be more hot days, it's that we will go from, we are going and have already gone likely from a permanently stable climate that we don't need to anything to maintain to one that is unstable that we have to maintain.

  And so I used this analogy is that the climate is like a house and amazingly, around 10,000 BCE, humans inherited a house that was awesome and required no maintenance. And we've behaved so recklessly now that the house needs maintenance, we need to constantly maintain the house, that climate in order to live in it. And if we don't, we wind up homeless. And so we're now in a position where we have a house that's needs work, if we go further, we're gonna have a house that is constantly needing repair. That's what geoengineering is and will be. And if we go too far, we won't be indoors, we won't have control. It will be out of control. And so that transition went from this idea of an engineer, I'll, I'll find a small system I can control that will make the world better to economics.

  I'll just have a framework to realizing, oh, all of this exists because of the atmosphere. The atmosphere created everything I care about and everything that everybody I know cares about. And so that idea of moving from stability to instability was what made me think I gotta quit my job, I gotta find a way to make this public, everybody needs to know this. This is not just an in- an insider or an advantage that should be had privately. This should be public.

  Jason Jacobs: When you talk about how like we knew the science and, and the science more or less predicted within ranges and, and things like that and, and that what was missing was being applied, if take out the word climate and just use the word science, has that same phenomenon been happening in other areas of, of science? And what I'm trying to get at is how unique is the climate problem versus other problems, and are there corollary problems that aren't climate that we can learn from in terms of the best ways to address them or address it?

  Spencer Glendon: I think it's a great question and I think the answer is yes, that there are corollary, there are comparable domains. I actually think social media is a comparable domain. I actually had the mixed fortune, I guess or good fortune to, to a sit next to Mark Zuckerberg during his roadshow in one of the meetings, and I said, "Do you understand human nature better because of your ability to observe humans up close?" And he said, "No, humans, people just like what they like and like what their friends like. And that's, that's how they work." And I thought that's, that's an uninterrogated view of how humans were. That's on a set of assumptions and not understanding those assumptions deeply is gonna lead some place you didn't expect.

  So I think there are ways that we think, oh, this is the way things have always been, and we can take them for granted. And so I think this idea of assuming, we take assumptions with us about the way the world works. And a lot of those assumptions are very circumstantial and I didn't realize how many were, were the circumstance they depended on was the stable climate, but there are lots of other things we say, well, this is the way it works, this is the way it is. And new information is kind of violent for that because the world is complex and it's really convenient if you could just assume a bunch of things away. I mean, that's the real benefit.

  I, I... You might be interested in, in this. I did a bunch of work on the history of language as one of my projects and I discovered that the term someone else was basically never used in the English language until around the turn of the 20th century, because someone else is really specific, it's not you, it's not me, it's not, you know, somebody else, not anybody I can note, I can name. It's not the mayor, it's not the governor, it's not the priest. It's, it must be somebody though. There's somebody else and it speaks to a level of complexity in society where I don't even know who does that. Like I don't know whose job that is, but somebody, someone else has to deal with this.

  And I think that that's a really comforting assumption is someone else's dealing with it. And so I think when we live in a world that has this someone else mentality as part of it, lots of parts of life are assumed to be under control, are assumed to be taken care of by somebody else, but there's one piece of climate that I think is really different which is that it turned out much to my surprise to be intuitive. There's nothing like blockchain. It is nothing like CRISPR. It's nothing like DNA. It's basically like the, the metaphors are good. The greenhouse is a good metaphor. The blanket of the atmosphere is a good metaphor, but the other is like albedo. Sounds like a technical term. It's basically how reflective is the earth. If you have worn dark clothes on a sunny day and light clothes on the sunny day, you understand solar energy perfectly well.

  And so there are all these ways in which actually turns out if you've been in a forest where it's cooler because the trees are respirating, you understand that. You understand that actually in hot places there seem to be either swampy places or deserts, there's no middle ground in the tropics. Those are things that people can get in a way that is much more approachable than how the internet works. And so I think this is a case where delegating science to the scientists was unnecessary and probably deleterious, it was prob- bad for civics essentially, bad for social life because it turns out to be intuitive. So there're definitely areas we hand off to the scientists in way, or experts, but this is one where we don't need to. The scientist have discovered it's all pretty intuitive.

  Jason Jacobs: So I'm picturing almost like this Paul Revere, the British are coming moment where it's like, oh, man, the, the climate was stable and our whole civilization was built on assuming that the climate will always be stable yet the models are using that it is rapidly destabilizing. So you have this aha, you say, well, everything that we built, every way that we operate is, is based on the assumption that a stable climate will continue and if it is stabilizes it has implications for everything. So, so stop right there. Once you, once that hit you between the eyes moment happens then what? What do you do with that information? What do you hope others do with that information? How do we move forwards?

  Spencer Glendon: So first of all, it's a great comparison, uh, not least, because I was working seven blocks from the church where the lanterns were hung for Paul Revere and I was working in a building that was built on the water in a new construction that I was quite sure would flood but that the developers had assured my firm wouldn't flood. It actually happened to flood a week after I left the firm, when tides came in and, and swamp the parking lot. And so my reaction was very com... I've never thought of that comparison but it was very much everybody needs to know this and we need to figure out a way for everybody to know this. And if we live in a world that had much better governments, they would already know it. It would already be part of curriculum. It would already be part of public messaging. It would be like clean water. It would be pretty much everywhere, and we'd be working to get it to everywhere I wasn't yet.

  But I realize actually I'm in the, I'm in downtown Boston and the hub of so much information and nobody around me knows this. So at least when Revere went out riding, everybody was thinking the British might come. But I was looking out of 25th floor window at construction on the Boston seaport that was already flooding during construction thinking, nobody knows. And I had to just pause, I had to stop my job and go talk to Alison and actually go talk to Tammy Dayton, who's now the creative director of Probable Futures, who runs a great design agency called Moth. And she and her team had done beautiful things not related to climate and I said, we'll use your analogy again, I need a really good lantern. I need a really, really, really good lantern. I can't just ride around on a horse and yelled into people's windows. We need good design that would get across the people. We need storytelling that will be effective. We need a way to make people understand that this is not only necessary but worthwhile, it's valuable. You'll see the world in ways that are more meaningful.

  I was like, uh, I need to collaborate with generalists who get this, people who can reach people. People who can help tell stories. People who can make this feel approachable so that they can listen, they can take it in 'cause it's not easy, it's scary, it's a scary thing to learn. You know, that's why I reached out to Alison and to Tammy and to some others, and it's why also with Probable Futures we decided, and Alison could talk about this, what the structure of the initiative was in terms of who did what work and how we, how we collaborated with people, because we wanted to work with people who hadn't yet internalize this, to see what experiences they had when they did.

  Jason Jacobs: But to what end? Okay. So the science and then the stabilizing and so now we, we wanted people to vividly internalize it, but what you hope that they do with this information once they internalize it?

  Spencer Glendon: Sure. So I made the comparison earlier to money and information, and I make this comparison sometimes that a CEO of a company that had a big data leak or something. 20 years ago, it was the, it was the IT guys fault, and now, it's, it's a corporate failure. The idea was to raise this perception of risk across society, and risk is not something the most people wanna hold. It's actually not part of the modern vernacular very much. It's why I made the point about being a scholar of both success and catastrophe. And most people in the United States are inclined educationally towards just success. We needed to bring people along to understand the potential bad outcomes that could happen so that they would prepare for them, be motivated to limit them.

  And so the idea was we need to make this a vernacular in everybody's work and that one way to do that was to start by collaborating with people in different walks of life. People in design, people in technology, people in business. Say, will you help us build this thing, and along the way we'll get insights from you about how to use it. So we didn't know if there would be uptake principally by the educational sector or by governments in poor countries who need to pro- figure out how to provide insights for agriculture, insights for water supply, but we saw the need for that. And concurrently we saw a need that I think is worth illustrate. We saw something happening at the same time which is the creation of for-profit climate insight firms.

  And we thought, those, it's fine that they exist, it's fine that there's a market, but there needs to be a public version of this for even, for markets to work. And so the idea was it's kinda like providing good data about the world in a way that everybody can access, and we don't judge in advance who's gonna use it or how. We just wanna make it widely applicable and available. So maybe Alison, you could talk a little bit about whom we work with and why we chose to build it less as a company and more as an initiative.

  Alison Smart: Just to go back for a minute to, to your last question. Ultimately, what we want to do is help set norms and standards for assessing and acting upon the risks of climate change, and these norms span from business and dis- and government decision making to new social norms and new ways of living. So that is what were trying to achieve with this, and their, I'll point out three things in particular that we're doing to advance that. One, as Spencer mentioned, is just democratizing access to climate data and in particular climate model data. It is actually information that is in the public domain, but before Probable Futures, only a small slice of even the climate community knew how to access it, much less make it available in a way that was really understandable. So that really is just for part of the mission is just making it available, that that, that is a big advancement in and of itself.

  Two, training people to understand what the data means and what the context for it is learning about the fundamentals of a stable climate to civilization and also learning the fundamentals of earth system. So and then ultimately, understanding the data and the limitations of the data and how to use the data. So part of what we're doing we think as training the trainers, educating people who'd can then bring this into different parts of society. And then the third thing is providing a new framework and a new way of thinking which we call climate awareness. So Spencer has made this, uh, reference a couple of times to climate. It'd like, information and money, it's in everything. And often, the question around the climate change is always what do I do? And so we end up oftentimes with these lists of 10 things that the org- that organizations will put out, which are real and we should do those things. But it ends up feeling unsatisfying and the reason is, is because climate underpins everything, it is part of every aspect of life and we can't distill that down to a list of 10 things.

  So what we encourage is something that we call climate awareness. So it's just really starts with paying attention to all of the ways in which a stable climate underpins our everyday life. And that may sound like minor step, but what it is, is it's a seed of mindfulness about the earth and how it interacts with our human constructed world and that seed can really quickly grow and help us see all of the opportunities that we have at work or at home or in our communities to not only prepare for climate change but to mitigate the worst possible outcomes. If you're living day to day with an awareness and appreciate for what the stable climate brings us, ultimately, that leads to action and it leads to a more organic action we believe than a list of here the 10 things that you're supposed to do.

  So back to what Spencer mentioned earlier, so who are we actually working with? I mean, we built Probable Futures to be widely accessible and really universally applicable because the climate is universally applicable. We built it with the idea that anyone could use it and that it would be useful in any industry or any community. So that's a theory of change, you could think of it that way. And it was untested at the time. So we built Probable Futures with this idea and now, you know, it's two-thirds of the way done and we are starting to see the outcome of that. So we're, we're just for the first time starting to hear back from people about how they're using it and where they're using in it.

  And so it's being used, first of all, in classrooms, straightforwardly in traditional education down from fifth grade to graduate students are using it. It has proven to be universally applicable across age ranges, which is kind of incredible. And from traditional educational settings to also professional development. So it's being used by organizations and different kinds of people who are trying to get up to speed on climate change for their professions. It's being used in news rooms. Journalists are using it to support storytelling, also for agricultural planning, urban planning, architecture, advocacy efforts, and also communities that are working to get support for resiliency, local resiliency initiatives.

  So it is playing, we're starting to see the evidence now that this is really applicable across every industry and across every community, and that the orientation and the data that we provide doesn't have to change across those industries. That the same orientation works. No matter where you live or what you work on, it's the same fundamentals and then you can then take those fundamentals and start thinking about climate change and planning for it through the lens of your community, whether that community is an industry or a company or an actual physical community where people live.

  Spencer Glendon: One way I put it, Jason, is that we'll take another one of guests, Adam McKay, when, when Adam McKay is asked, "How did you get interested in this?" He said, "Well, read the IPCC report." And when Greta spoke at Congress, she was asked by a member of Congress, "What should we do?" And she said, "You should read the IPCC report." I don't know if you've tried to read the IPCC report.

  Jason Jacobs: Yeah, not easy.

  Spencer Glendon: Part of the way we design this was to give Greta a better answer so that she could say, spend a couple hours on Probable Futures and you'll get it. Spend a couple, or... And for Adam McKay to say, I could here and I could get the idea. I don't need to wade through this thick jargon, and so making it easy for people to get started. That's our, our... Where we are most effective, people are starting their, their climate journey, whatever it is, and whether it's they chose to make it or somebody told them, this is your new job. This is your new reality. We spoke with a bunch of TV meteorologists who said, "I never trained in this but now I have to work on it. Now I have to have a view on it." This is really helpful for me.

  Jason Jacobs: So as a light bulb goes off and people do internalize like, ooh, I mean, everything's gonna change, right? I think there's still a question of time horizons and there's also a question of who gets affected when, and call me a cynic but I just think if, you know, if a CEO needs to choose between like doing right for climate versus nailing earnings this quarter, or an employee needs to choose between doing what's right for climate or exceeding expectations with their product launch and driving their bonus and promotion path, or a consumer needs to choose between taking that vacation versus not flying or eating that delicious steak versus eating something that was made in the lab that, that I don't know anything about. That there's like a, well, yeah, for the collective good but, but the collective good is that odds with what's best for me, myself and I. How do break that, that cycle and, and how far out do you need to stretch the time horizons before collective good and self-interest intersect?

  Spencer Glendon: That's great question and I'm grateful for your framing, which I would say most of those are false choices. So I don't say that as a criticism but their framings of the problem in a way... Uh, I spend a lot of time, I spent many, many years with investors who are under, are under a lot of stress at all times. They're making hard decisions and their living with those decisions. And what I experience talking to them about climate change was for them to instead of them saying, you know, actually the decisions I thought was so hard. They're not nearly as hard as this. This is actually a much harder decision. And in fact, the reason it's hard is because it goes home with them.

  I spoke at a sown conference in New York which you can see on YouTube to... A huge hedge fund conference and the all other speakers are actually hedge fund managers. And afterwards, I was in the green room and lots of hedge fund managers came up to me to talk to me, and all of them talked about their families. None of them talked about their portfolios. All of them talked about their vacations, their children, and so what happens is this is not something that can easily compartmentalized and for a lot of people who have been working in the last 50 years, the work environment was separate from the rest of their life. And keeping that separation is untenable.

  And so the challenge of this is changing your culture so that that trade-off you gave as an example, the trade-off of the CEO doing what's right for their children versus doing what's right at work. Never, that's not a trade off they ever faced before. Their presumption was well, if I do the right thing at work, I'm bringing more money home for my kids. And so I'm making them better off. That's no longer the such obvious calculus. But they don't have any practice thinking in that those trade-off terms, and so having a culture where that starts to be conversation that they have because their kids are asking them. The kids know.

  We've been getting questions from users. The quality of question is inversely correlated to age. Fifth graders asked the best questions. They're just so clear. So what I say to people is try to explain to your kid that we're making, we're increasing the chances of future suffering because it would be a little bit expensive not to. And now imagine as a parent, your kid giving the same argument, you know, why did you, why did you steal from the store? Why did you take Johnny snack? Why did you do this thing? You said, well, you know, it would have been costly not to. It, it was easier. And you start realizing that having your work stay separate from the climate is not possible and that culture need to change, so that's true.

  The, the last example you gave is one about having a delicious steak versus something made in a lab that you don't know what it is. I think that's an interested framing and the reason is there are lots of better things to do when faced with a trade-off, but we're not used to making those trade-offs. And so what's been presented are trade-offs that feel weird like, don't worry, you're still gonna have something that's steak like. So your decision is between steak and steak like, as opposed to, you know, there are lots of delicious things to eat in the world and most cuisines in the world don't rely on steak. In fact, even the American diet didn't rely on steak not that long ago. So we've been recently acculturated to steak being the thing, right? We have steak houses everywhere. I don't know why they're called the houses, they're never houses. But there are steak houses and if wherever you go, you need to go to a steakhouse...

  So where I worked in finance was a, a LEED certified platinum building. Supposedly the first one in Boston, and it had a steakhouse on the ground floor, 'cause, you know, it's grade A office space, needs to have a steakhouse. I was like, okay, we save all this money and all of this energy building a LEEDpace certified building and then we default it to this norm of you gotta have Smith & Wollensky's on the base, on the ground floor to make it a real office building. They coulda given that over to... Like there is a great Turkish chef in, in Boston. You coulda put it in a amazing Turkish restaurant on the bottom floor. It would've been more tasty than the steak, but instead it's like, you know, do I get a burger or an impossible burger? Like there are lots of things to eat but we need to change the trade-offs so that it isn't work and home or separate, and the choices between steak and lab.

  And so this is... It may seem farcical. It may seem fantastical, but this is a cultural change that has to happen. This is a countercultural change we're asking for, we're hoping happened. And we have belief that's grounded in our experience and the experience people we collaborated with is that we don't have live this way, we could live better. We may live in compromised climate, we could live a lot better than the way we live now. Those simple assumptions we made about how we should follow various trends, we can reinvestigate those trends, we could live differently. And so broadening that conversation about what's possible invokes imagination and it brings me back to my point about electric vehicles versus Mad Max. We need storytellers to tell us stories about the near future and the choices were between which we're choosing. We need Hollywood to make better script. There are so many TV shows right now, prestige TV about space, and there are none about the perspective climate we're gonna live in.

  We need stories that say, actually, this is the trade-off we're facing. These are the choices we can make. These are ways we can live with climate change versus my opting out, I'm going to create a new world in a different planet. That probably has no atmosphere or magnetic field so it's blasted by cosmic rays and there's no greenhouse effect. And but that's missing, and so we're hopeful that there will be some mix of cultural prompts that come from kids asking their parents to regulations forcing those CEO and leaders to political parties feeling pressure to take the future into account. And if the worst thing we do is help young people understand more dramatically how much they need to rest control from the old people, that's also a good thing to have done. One of things I say to senior leadership is if you're making a decision in a corporate or governmental setting and there's no one under 40 in the room, you're probably making a bad decision, because the people who will live with the consequences of this aren't in the room.

  Alison Smart: If I could add one thing to that, and Spencer talked about that we need to change the culture. Changing the culture is not a choice at this point. The climate is changing. Life is going to change. It's not gonna be the same as what we've had for the past 50, 75 years. So staying the same is not going to happen. So we have the choice to either engineer something that looks like what we've had for the past 50 or 75 years, or we could use that opportunity to reinvision how we live, to update how we live, to evolve how we live in order to live within the constraints that the earth and the climate provides.

  The idea that we can continue with never-ending growth of all kinds is not consistent with the physics of the planet. And so we can live in really wonderful ways living within those constraints. And that is what we will need to do to continue on. So we are faced with this transition. It's happening one way or another, and we can use the transition to make life better or we can use it to engineer something that we haven't even been doing for all that long.

  Jason Jacobs: I love the vision and I also, it's like all this consumer behavior change work is irrelevant what we really need is government and policy, it's like, well! How do you think the government and po- yeah, how do you think the policy comes about? But I can't help but think on the one hand, time is our enemy and we need to move fast, and so then it's like, well, are we gonna get there faster by trying to tear down the system that exists and start from scratch or if I take this system that we already have and, and, and/or systems. You know, the system of capitalism, the system of democracy and, and try to incrementally get them to move in the right direction.

  Do, you know, do we work with the oil majors and get them to incrementally move in the right direction? Or do we cu- cut them out at the knees, right? And, and there's a bit of inconsistency where it's like on the one hand we have so little time, it's an emergency, it's like, okay, well, let's say it is an emergency and I'm not disputing, shouldn't we work with what we've got, right? A- and, and how do you determine when to work with what we've got and when to go rogue?

  Spencer Glendon: Gorogue.org is not our organization. You know, our, our approach is entirely to work with the organizations and the, the institutions that we have. It's why even our branding was meant to look good on a, on a cloud of logos that included Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg, or look good on a cloud of logos that included extinction rebellion, like both are part of the culture that we need to collaborate with and empower. And so what I would say is that the existing... I mean, this is partly why I have hope about this, which is that as an economic historian, I can tell you capitalism has worked in lots of different ways. Markets have worked in lots of different ways. There are ways to turn around even big ships if you change the rules by which they operate and their priorities. And so you have, you need regulatory change. I think one of the biggest catalysts for change likely is industry groups or industries decide for themselves, all right, we need to change the rules by which we operate in order for all of us to survive, on all of us to thrive.

  One of the most interesting phone calls I've gotten is from one of the largest hedge funds in the world, reaching out, saying, "We support your work," and I said, "We- we- well, what? Can you tell why that is?" They said, "Because we really love capitalism, and we understand that the more climate changes, the less capitalism there will be." Because the more chaos there is, every time there's a crisis the government expands. And so the people who think we, they like to have free markets. Those free markets, which aren't actually, they're regulated, they are underpinned by institutions. The stability that enables latitude to do whatever you want comes originally from kinds of expectations about the future.

  British merchants sold material to the Nazis until the government stopped them, until the UK nationalized them, because it was the right thing for shareholders to keep making sales until the government said, no more. Some of those lessons have been learned by some of the smartest capitalists in the world, they say, "If we like climate change continue, we're not gonna be given the trust of society to operate freely." And so some of amount forbearance, some of amount self-governance, and some of amount of advocacy for good regulation should be well within the scope of businesses do.

  And, uh, I- I'll give an example of this, which is that there didn't use to be fire departments anywhere in the world. Those are, those didn't exist. The history of creating fire departments was caused because the insurance industry got together and said, "We're not underwriting any more cities until you build a fire department." The first building code zoning laws were in response to the great Chicago fire. The last big city fire. So San Francisco burned down, there are these great documents in the San Francisco Public Library; the first great fire, the second great fire, their five great fires in chi- in San Francisco. And then after the great Chicago fire, insurance companies said, "We have to regulate real estate." And people said, "Oh, my God! Regulating real estate is anti-capitalist," but actually it created the real estate industry and we haven't had a big fire since.

  So there are ways of having regulation that reduce risk and increase collaboration that are well within the scope of, some of this well within the scope of memory, but there has to be some interest in maintaining the system in order to thrive. And so there needs to be some amount encouraging oversight, encouraging collaboration, encouraging cooperation but that's within the scope of institutions we have. If everybody's just arbitraging, it's hopeless, but if there's some amount of coordination even between institutions that just have norms. If you think how many businesses have benchmarks and norms, those benchmarks and norms are more powerful than anyone's CEO. And so I think there are ways that the incumbents institutions can change enormously, hardly by just incorporating some information, making some organizational changes that are already in their best interest, responding to customers and people who want change in ways that take advantage of the speed and as you say, the power of the existing institutions.

  So I think harnessing what exists is why I make the point like we didn't used to work the way we work now, there are lots of surprises. If I had offered you a 1999, a vision of how industry would work today, there's lots of things you would've said, well, that's super unlikely or even inconceivable. Well, they were governed partly by luck, partly by regulatory changes, partly by accidents, we can have more purpose about those accidents, regulatory changes, and luck in ways that embody and/or empower existing institutions and existing leaders. And yeah, they need to step up a bit more and have a slightly different conviction or, or conception of their work, but I don't think we need to, we don't need mass revolt, we need to change in frameworks and change in rules and change in mindsets. Those happens naturally, we're just trying to accelerate them. And as Alison said, they're gonna happen one way or the other.

  Jason Jacobs: You talk before about specialization and how, you know, no one was kind of looking across, and, eh, I mean, the same thing you could argue is happening with people working on climate, right? You have an organization who exists and their, their sole reason of existence is to pass a specific carbon tax, ra- or carbon dividend proposal or, or you've got another one that exists specifically because there's 10 million eligible voters who climate is their top issue and, and they don't vote, so that organization exists just to, just to get them to the polls and that's how they exist.

  There's another one that exists specifically just to influence big companies and get them to advocate for climate forward policy. Eh, i- i- 'cause they're talking about cleaning up their footprints and their net zero commitments but like, if policy is lever that matters, why aren't they using their might to organize that policy? But it's, it's very specific, and you kind of rightfully, it not knock the top 10 lists of like, you know, do this and do that. But like the advantage of those top 10 lists is at least or the benefit is at least it's tangible in terms of knowing that you're having an impact whereas what you're talking about essentially is winning hearts and minds holistically. So it almost, it sounds more like brand, like if I'm doing ad dollars, how do I know if my advertising spend is helping with my brand equity for exe-. It's just brand equity, it's a harder thing to measure. How do you measure whether the work that you're doing is, is having an impact?

  Spencer Glendon: I'll let Alison an- answer that question. She's more thoughtful about it than I am. I would just say one thing which is we don't think everybody in the world needs to become a generalist, we just think there need to be some generalists. And so they, the absence of su- so the, being a resource for all the specialists who have their own ways of making impact in the world, if everybody spent their days the way Probable Futures does wouldn't get anything done, but we need some people to do the things we're doing in order to empower those people. So some of those organizations you talk about, we actually know them directly and they're using our material in part to galvanize people, in part to organize that. And so our, our ideas, we're helping them along. But Alison, you wanna talk about how we measure success or how we think about success?

  Jason Jacobs: I wasn't suggesting that you don't value those, but with those, it's kinda like red light, green light like, or like checkmark or X mark, like did the thing get passed? Did you drive more voters to the polls? And so as a generalist, how do you know? Because you're so mission driven and you've spotted this gap but just how do you know if it's working?

  Alison Smart: So I mean, the one thing that I would say about those... The one thing that I would say about everything that has been tried thus far, there has been progress. Also, emissions are still going up. So nothing has, the trajectory has not changed. So I think that tells us that we don't necessarily know what works. There are lot of things being done, I believe a lot of progress. There's certainly much, much more awareness that they're, than they're used to be, and climate change creeping up on the priority lists and it hasn't yet translated into the thing that is actually measurable which is carbon concentration, CO2 concentration of the atmosphere. You know, that is a fundamental part of our philosophy is that we're- we're not going to say that we know what works. We don't think that anyone actually knows what works. We're all just doing what we can to try and push this forward.

  This is the thing that we knew and there is a thought leadership aspect to it for sure, and there's also a really practical aspect to it, which is making the data available and helping people understand how to use it. So one of the most basic ways that we can measure success is just our people using it. Is, is the information, the framework, the, the things that we're making available helping people to incorporate climate awareness into their lives? And we've just started to collect that information as I mentioned, and so far we're seeing that it, that it is useful and that people are using it in professional contexts and in personal contexts. We have heard from people that have said, "I'm trying to decide where I want to move to in response to climate change, and I've used your resources to do that." That is just one really practical thing.

  And the other thing that we pay attention to that also comes from feedback from the community is, is the work that we're putting out into the world good? I mean, the only thing that we really can control as an organization is, is the quality of work that we put out. How well we present and translate the information so that people can actually use it? How well people understand the stories and the context that we provide? So as an organization we focus on the quality of work above everything else.

  Spencer Glendon: Things very helpful to say here is that I was very fortunate to work in finance, essentially by accident. I was hired in 1999 by an organization that had done poorly in Asia and wanted somebody to figure out what would happen in Asia after the Asian financial crisis? And they took a chance on me. It was a lark really, but taking a lark in finance starting in 1999 made it possible for me to accidentally earn a lot more money than I thought I would ever have, because finance became such a big part of the world. And so this is what seems reason- it seems like the right thing to my wife and me to do is use our money to do this as a way of participating in the world. And so we don't have metrics that say, well, we're, we're failing if we don't do this or we're succeeding if we do this, but it feels like the right thing to do.

  And what I would say about it is it may not work right away. You're trying to build it, as Alison said, about quality in a way that when there is action, when somebody comes to it, it will still be great. It will still be useful to them. And so this is yes, there's urgency, there's still gonna be urgency in three years, there's still gonna be urgency in eight years, there's still gonna be urgency in 10 years. And so we have a commitment to maintain these models, maintain this for the long run, have it be there. I'm the owner of messagesinbottle.org also. I started buying websites to like, I don't know if anybody's gonna come. It's like throwing a bottle into the ocean with a message in it and somebody's gonna come to the shore one day and say, oh, I'm not alone.

  And so if we can create a community, you talk about your own community. We can create a good community and we can be helpful to people whether it's today or tomorrow, in six months or 12 months. We're trying, and it feels like the right, a, a good way to participate and so far it's been encouraging. And we don't have all the answers but this was a thing that didn't exist that felt like we could make it and we would be useful. And so far we're hopeful about it.

  Alison Smart: The last thing I'll add is that anecdotes are real too, because of Spencer's network and networks that I'm involved in. We've had the opportunity to help educate people in leadership positions and we have seen this framework change the way that they think about climate change, and we have seen some of those organizations be very vocal about the need for change when they weren't necessarily before. So one of the things that we focus on as an organization is, is working with the people and organizations that have the most ability to spread this way of thinking and even when it's just an individual person that thinks differently, that is, that is a form of success.

  Spencer Glendon: Last thing I'd say is I don't have a po- podcast, [inaudible 01:12:43] podcast, but I write a, a letter on every solstice and every equinox. And the mailing list keeps growing, and it's a mailing list we're proud of. There are a lot of people on there who are in important position, positions of power who pass the letter along. I welcome anybody to sign to get it, and it's the sign of a community growing. It's a mix of, uh, all kinds of people but it includes people in places where we don't know they came to us but they reach out and say this is valuable. And so there are small private ways but there are ways that anybody can join up and, and participate in the way that you're growing your community. So it's been in the same way that I guess you wake up some days and think, "I don't know whether I'm making a difference here." But then somebody reaches out. We encourage anybody to reach out who's, who's inclined to.

  Jason Jacobs: The last thing I wanna poke on is there's the kind of defensive catastrophe avoidance of like the way we've been doing things isn't gonna work for the future, you know, we assume things are stable, they're rapidly destabilizing, everything needs to change. Like that to me, it might be the truth but it's a, it's a defensive, it's a catastrophe avoidance, it's to put out a fire, and then there's another, which is another way of framing it, which is an aspirational vision of the future one of abundance, one of more equality, more inclusiveness, higher quality of life for everybody, more innovation, more personalization, more something we can really get behind and feel good about, and, and work towards. So, so I have two questions. One, what is your unfiltered view of what is in store for us and our children and our children's children? Like are our best days' behind us as a, as a species. And then two, no matter what your answers for is, for number one like does the truth sell? If we actually wanna inspire action, like even if that's true, is it actually effective to say it?

  Alison Smart: So the first thing that I would say that's the truth is that earth is still the best planet in the universe. It still can sustain lots of life including human life. It is an incredible and amazing place. And even in a changing climate, where we will lose things, we will lose things that we have had in the past, it can still be a wonderful place. There are still a lot of things to save and there's still many, many ways that we can live well in that world. That is the truth that we have an incredible place and we have the opportunity to keep having it be pretty incredible, even if it has less diversity than it did before.

  And one of the things that we often talk about that you might not hear a lot about is just the pace of change and we can keep a lot more of the diversity of life on earth if the climate changes much more slowly than it's changing now. We'll lose a lot more if we keep the same trajectory and, um, the pace of change. So that, that is our vision is that this is still the best place to live and we have a lot that we can keep.

  Spencer Glendon: I would say a couple things about that. Agree entirely with Alison, so two things. One is young people in the future, young people when they grow up will look back and see the people who are now adults as the last people who do not pay attention to the physical world. I think they'll feel badly for us, because living in ignorance of the physical world is a weird way to live. It's totally a historical, and so I think we can live so much better by just paying attention to the physical world we live in. It's one of the things that's most consistent across the people we've met and worked with is the discovery, and I'm, I'm sure you've seen this, people discovering that they live in a climate makes them more aware of the physical world around them in a way they had been not paying attention to before.

  And so this idea of can we have more abundance in the future? Well, we can live better, right? More and better are not synonyms. And so there are ways of living that I can be much richer and much more fulfilling. And so a couple, couple things I would say is that first, there is a big difference between anxiety and fear, and specifying what to be afraid of is very clarifying. We've worked quite a lot with psychologists and psychiatrists on this, which is that most people have climate anxiety. Anxiety is an emotion that's unstructured that's like, it's bad. Well, anxiety does not prompt activity, it prompt, it prompts watching television. And fear says, I know what the problem is, I can name it, I can prepare for it, and I can do something about it.

  And what most people have is a vague sense that Mad Max is out there, a vague sense that Miami will become an inhabitable as opposed to a specific sense of, oh, this is the way I relate to the world, this is how it will change, I can value that and I can decide whether to prepare for it, to change for it. I think that there's a way of saying, I need to articulate what the problem is in order to have an emotion about it that's clarifying. So does the truth sell. Well, we're not selling, it's for free. People can use it or not use it. Do people incorporate the truth? They incorporate if it is structured and if it's something that prompts a coherent, consistent sort of actionable emotion and actionable reaction. And anxiety doesn't do that.

  Vaguely afraid that the future is worst, or vaguely having the notion that our best days are behind us is totally unconstructive. We have friends, my wife and I do, who are Greek and, uh, we walked up to the Acropolis and I asked my friend, "What's it like to have all these statues around?" He says, "It sucks. You're told from birth that the best Greeks lived 3,000 years ago and you'll never be as good as them." That's a terrible mindset. We have no such view. Like the best people probably are ahead of us, and people living the most interesting lives are probably ahead of us. But they're probably not people who believe that the best way to live is to ignore risk, and they're probably not people who think they can just take the physical world for granted. And they're probably not people who think humans are so miraculous that even when living on a totally dystopian planet we’ll engineer our way out of it.

  I- I was an engineer. It's hard to build an automobile. It's really hard to build a climate, and we inherited a really nice one. And so my argument would be the future is going to be more climate aware, we can get to that future much more quickly, or we can make people be climate aware because it's how they survive is by being climate aware. One way to think about this in your terms maybe, Jason, is we're trying to minimize the number of people who have to work on climate. And so having people all worked... I mean, more people work on climate now means there will be more kids in the future who can work on whatever they want to, and if we don't work on it now, everyone's gonna have to work on it in the future.

  And so we have the opportunity to ac now in a way that changes how people internalize and live in the physical planet in the future. They can either live on its terms or be constantly engineering it, or they can, we can modif- we can moderate what we're doing so that they can have a much wider scope of freedom. And so I think that [inaudible 01:20:20] are still ahead of us, but they don't include being ignorant of it or just hoping that Silicon Valley solves it. Hoping that Elon Musk solves it. Hoping that there's some silver bullet. I mean, this American term of a silver bullet is the, is the great expression. It's a magical property of a form of violence that kills the thing that we're afraid of.

  We can learn to just live with it and moderate it. It's a little bit like aging. Are your best days behind you, Jason? I don't know. You're not gonna be 20 anymore. I don't know how old you are but you're not gonna be 20 anymore. There's some things that will be different but you may enjoy it more. And so this kind of living on the terms that the physical world gives you, they can be pretty great. Expecting everything from it is probably setting yourself up for disappointment. And so I don't know whether that sells or resonates, but it's more consistent with the kinds of stories people told themselves before the last 30 years. For the length of civilization, it was a form of balance, a form of risk awareness, a form of preservation. Those are pretty great ways to think about life and they tend to be pretty healthy. And so I have a strong sense that the people who come after us, the people who live in the future, whatever we leave them are likely to have pretty awesome lives in part because they've internalized ways of living that are just more honest. That may be overly romantic or overly hopeful.

  Jason Jacobs: So for anyone that is intrigued by this discussion and wants to learn more about the tool sets that you've built and are building, what's the best way for them to do so?

  Alison Smart: Well, they can visit probablefutures.org and reach out to, to me if you are thinking about a specific way that you could use the tools or that your community or organizations could use it. We are... The platform is not complete yet, we're two-thirds of the way done. We've launched the heat volume, the water volume, and land will be launching in the fall. So once we complete the platform in that way, we will be looking for organizations and people to partner with and to help them incorporate both the data and this way of thinking into their systems and their communities. So their systems could be something like software where the data goes into software for a certain community that works in a certain way, or it could look like training sessions, or it could look like thought partnership or publishing and thought leadership. So we are very open to different ways of helping people incorporate this. And so we are very... We, we welcome, uh, people reaching out. So my email address is asmart@probablefutures.org.

  Jason Jacobs: And in addition to utilizing the tools and working with you to figure out how to apply them, how else can we or, or listeners support your work or be helpful to you as you're scaling the organization?

  Spencer Glendon: The feedback of any kind is always welcome and that's not just a, a truism, it's also the case that this is what we're doing, we're trying. It's, it's not proven. As you said, Jason, it's not clear it will work. So people telling us, hey, this is working or hey, this makes me nuts or if you did this would be helpful. That's great, we're excited about that. We have some alpha users of components of it. We've had good feedback from other people. Any input is, is helpful. I think the other is understanding how people are incorporating climate into their work now newly is very helpful. So an example would be that teachers have reach out and said, "We're not even sure how, where this should exist in a classroom. Like what class should climate change should be in? Can we talk about how to do that?" And so we're collaborating some with school principals and with administrators because just putting it in earth science is pretty limiting.

  And so how do you... People who are experimenting, we'd love to experiment together and we're happy to designate resources for that and find time for that. So people who have experiments they want to conduct with where, how do they get climate awareness into their institution or their, or their community, we're interested in. And then people who are trying something different and think that we're either making a good choice or a bad choice. We're really like, uh, grateful for that kind of outreach. And lastly, like you s-, like for yourself, we're trying to grow this community, just even saying hello is great. Um, we're glad to know people are out there, and so they're pretty mundane but they're, they'd all be helpful.

  Jason Jacobs: Well, we've covered so much ground. Are there any other parting words you'd like live, leave listeners with that we've not already covered?

  Spencer Glendon: One of the things we talk about is that we're not optimistic but we're hopeful. Optimism is a sense that things will work out but I'm not a part of it. I don't know how but somehow it'll just workout. Hope is a much more active idea that there are ways to do this, there are ways to move forward. I can't articulate what they are, they may not be more of everything, they may not be great in a way that ain't anticipate or can imagine, but we are quite hopeful that there are, that the future can be very good. And so we're trying to increase the odds of that, but this difference between passively thinking well, the future will be what it will be, versus I'm engaged in it and I'm hopeful for it even if I don't know exactly what to hope for, I think is a, a mindset that we, we find encouraging and nourishing when, when days are hard. And so happily share that which is at least partly borrowed from the author Rebecca Solnit.

  Jason Jacobs: What about you, Alison, a- any parting words?

  Alison Smart: My parting words would be that, uh, some, uh, a theme that we've repeated often here but climate change doesn't just exist in the domain of science and I encourage everyone to learn about it. It really, it's beautiful, it's fascinating, and it can change your life, too. So I would encourage anyone who kind of feels like maybe they're sitting on the sidelines or that they don't have a way to engage with it, to, to engage with it and that's what Probable Futures is, is for. So we can all build our own climate literacy and I get a lot of satisfaction empowering people to do that. Only you are going to know how increase heat is going to impact your life. Only you're community will know how the changing patterns of precipitation are gonna impact the industries in your community, or the cultural practices in your community. So no one can do that thinking for you, so that's why we all need this climate literacy because we are the best people to think through those futures for ourselves.

  Jason Jacobs: Well, that's a great point to end on, and, and this was a, a really wonderful discussion. So thank you both for coming on the show and for all the work that you're doing.

  Alison Smart: Likewise, thank you for what you're doing,

  Spencer Glendon: Jason. It's been a great source of encouragement to us, and, uh, it's a treat to spend time with you.

  Jason Jacobs: Hey, everyone, Jason here. Thanks again for joining me on My Climate Journey. If you'd like to learn more about the journey, you can visit us at myclimatejourney.co. Note, that is dot CO, not dot com. Someday, we'll get the dot com, but right now, dot CO. You can also find me on Twitter @jjacobs22 where I would encourage you to share your feedback on the episode or suggestions for future guests you'd like to hear. And before I let you go, if you enjoyed the show, please share an episode with a friend or consider leaving a review on iTunes. The lawyers made me say that. Thank you.