Zibby welcomes Adam Met—musician, climate activist, academic, and now author—to discuss his powerful new book AMPLIFY: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World. Best known as a member of the band AJR, Adam shares how his journey from indie musician to arena headliner taught him the secrets of building a passionate fanbase, which he now applies to activism, advocacy, and policy change. He and Zibby dive into how entertainment strategies like gamification, community-building, and storytelling can power social movements, how to find your role in the causes you care about, and why local action is more powerful than most people realize.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome Adam. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about Amplify, how to use the power of connection to engage, take action, and build better world. Congrats. 

Adam: Thank you so much, Zibby. I'm really happy to be here. 

Zibby: Yay. So you told us in in detail about how your whole path to life has been a bit unlikely, particularly.

Being a musician and then moving on to how you built your fan base and how we all can take what you've learned and apply it to the causes and things that we care about the most, which is really great of you to share with us. So thank you for that. Why don't you tell listeners a little bit about your path to getting here and then we can go into the nuts and bolts of it. 

Adam: Absolutely. That sounds great. So I am a musician. I'm in a band called a JR, and the band has been growing and growing for the last 18 years, and it was never one of those moments where we had a song that just blew up and we immediately had success. It wasn't that overnight success story, it was.

Growing it day by day, fan by fan playing the kinds of venues where we would play for 12 people and then 20 people, and then a hundred people. And then finally this past year we reached arenas and we played a bunch of sold out arenas across the United States, but it took 18 years to get here. So every step is something that we spent a lot of time and effort on, and really understood how to grow a fan base from nothing, all the way to being able to sell out arenas and having billions of streams on our music.

And so as I was thinking about that, at the same, at the same time, I stayed in school for the last bunch of years. So I did my undergrad, my master's, and my PhD, and I worked, uh, a lot in the climate space. So I spent a lot of time in climate trying to figure out how to make it more accessible to younger people, how to work in policy.

Um, I worked, uh, a little bit with the Biden administration on their, um, big climate initiative. I worked with the un. But the thing that kept coming up over and over again was fans coming up to me saying, I wanna participate in something. I wanna figure out what the thing is that I care about and I want to do more, but I just don't know how to do it.

So this book was really, to answer that question. I had done a little bit of problem solving by doing it with the band, but then realize that all of these strategies that the music industry is so freaking great at. Those strategies can be applied really effectively to any movement you care about.

Whether it is the climate movement or if you're working in gun reform or immigration or healthcare or L-G-B-T-Q rights. Really anything, all of these strategies from the music industry and entertainment industry more broadly can be applied. So that's how this book kind of that was, was ideated to begin with.

Zibby: Amazing. Wait, take me to the time in your life when you were like, should I get the PhD or not? 

Adam: It's so funny because. As I was starting to work in policy, I would meet with mayors and governors and senators and members of Congress, and the conversation would be, I dunno, 60, 70% music and then 30% policy. And then as soon as I got my PhD, it became 5% music, 95% policy.

And so not that I did it, so I would be taken more seriously by the people that I was trying to kind of move legislation with. But also at the same time, I have been obsessed with school. And when I was working with my PhD advisor who was amazing, she was saying, oh, do you want to go into academia? Do you want to teach?

And I said, I just love being here. I love continuing to learn. And I ended up writing a PhD and that that book essentially is over 300 pages and like three people read it. So I wanted to do something that was more accessible this time, and that's how we got to amplify. 

Zibby: Amazing. I thought about getting a PhD in multiple subjects 'cause I just like you, I'm like, I just wanna stay in school. But then of course I did none of them. I got an MBA and I was like, that's enough. 

Adam: MBA is great though because I, I, I like that idea because you get to touch on so many different things in business. So..

Zibby: Yeah. 

Adam: Yeah. 

Zibby: We all end up. 

Adam: Of course. 

Zibby: Basically life is just how do we find our place now that school is over and we also.

Adam: Yeah. Love it. 

Zibby: Okay, so you have found a way to apply these principles of fandom to whatever we all care about, whether it's like you climate or like me spreading literary world and the power. Books and all of that. You know, for me it's like one podcast at a time and of course for you. So tell us what is the secret? What do people in the entertainment world get right, so much that you wanna to write a whole book about it. 

Adam: Yeah, so there are a couple of core principles, and then they're really interesting in different ways to apply it. So one of the core principles that I love is this idea of creating evangelizers.

So when you first are starting a band or a movement, the key thing is to bring new people as close to you as possible. Give them all the tools to be able to go out and be the evangelizers of the movement itself by having a really kind of. Strong corporate structure, that doesn't work. So historically, movements have been built on this idea of a ladder.

People take one action, they become part of the movement. They then attend a rally or a protest. They go and sit in a city council meeting, they do whatever it is, and they keep climbing up this ladder of engagement. That's the historic approach that doesn't work anymore with the way communities have been built in the digital space and in the live space.

It looks a lot more like a hurricane. And there's a whole chapter in the book about this. With a hurricane, it brings people in really close to the center. So with music, we bring our new fans in really close, give them the tools to be able to go out in the world. We give them first access to concert tickets, um, zoom sessions with us.

We give them early listening to our music. They get really kind of first look things. Then they take those and say, oh, I'm really excited about that. I wanna share that with my friends, my fam, my family, and my community. They go out into the world and they end up being part of the movement that is the music.

And so if you think of it that way, it's more about different ways that you're treating different segments of the fan base in order to have them go and be the people. Who can help grow it for you. It's not just about the musician growing the thing, it's about the fan base as a whole. And so that same idea can be applied to movements.

So this ladder of engagement doesn't work anymore. We're looking to build hurricanes, giving people the tools in order to go engage their communities towards collective action as opposed to focusing on the individual actions of participation. 

Zibby: So how do you make the evangelizers. Into an actual structured thing?

Adam: Yeah. 

Zibby: Like do they know their evangelizers or is that your shorthand in the band? 

Adam: That is the shorthand in the band. And I'll give you two examples of how we do this. So a handful of years ago, for one of our albums, we employed this gaming. Strategy. And again, there's a whole chapter on gamification in the book.

So Taylor Swift does an amazing job with gamification with her fans, right? She puts her fans in competition with each other in order to solve puzzles, and it reveals new things competition, great strategy for gaming. 21 Pilots. Another artist uses a strategy called Open World Building where like a video game, they keep expanding on this world album to album.

And the fans get to explore, learn more about this world, uh, through the the lore. Of it, but we tend to do something that's a little different from both of those. We do something that we call collaborative gaming. So what I propose with this is when we put out this album, what we did is we took the track list before we released it.

We divided it up into 36 separate jigsaw puzzle pieces, and we put each piece in a different area of social media, one on Twitter, one on Facebook, one on Instagram, one on Discord, Reddit to our text list, our email list. And we forced the fans from all of these different places to work together to create something.

They then took this and shared what they had created across social media, unlike anything we had seen before, because they took ownership over it. They created the track list. They worked together. They made it. They posted it before we even did. And that kind of ownership they felt over the product allowed.

10 times more eyeballs to see the content than if we were just going to post it ourselves. So this kind of gamification and ownership over the idea itself allows the fan base to grow in a much bigger and more organic way. That was one 

Zibby: Who, who thought of that? 

Adam: I did. 

Zibby: Who thought.. that puzzle? You did? 

Adam: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So these kinds of strategies are my favorite things ever. 'cause they're a mix of psychology and business and creative. You can probably tell from the fact that I stayed in school forever while also doing music, while working in the climate space. I can't focus on one thing at a time. So these kinds of solutions that apply all of these different strategies at once.

Are my favorite things to think of, and that's just one. There are, you know, dozens and dozens of strategies in the book. We do the same thing with the live space. How do we create a new kind of live space? In the movement world, you're either at a protest or you're at a gala where the food isn't very good, right?

It's always one of those two things. What if we created something in the middle where the live space was actually fun? What if it really was a dance party? What if it really was a concert kind of approach? What if it was something that had merch that you could take home with you? What if there was a way to participate in a much deeper way?

And I kind of lay out how to do that in the live space, in the book. So these kinds of strategies are the things that I find to be the most fun. 

Zibby: Wow. How willing is your whole. Team to experiment. Are you just like, this is our, this is the ethos of how we do things, and let's just give it a shot. 

Adam: Yeah, we've always been a very outside the box band.

We stayed independent for a really, really long time, and by doing that, we kind of wrote our own rules. And another one of the chapters in the book is about how to effectively break the rules without kind of stepping over the line. But breaking the rules is such a fun thing to do when you think about it as, okay, this hasn't been done before.

Why hasn't it been done before? And if there's a, if there's no good reason why it hasn't been done before, it's. Probably worth trying. So that kind of rule breaking is something that we do all the time. On our, our last tour last summer, we had all of these advocacy moments where people could actually register to vote, volunteer with nonprofits, sign petitions, and also phone bank, and call their representatives on site asking for specific uh, votes on local legislation.

We had 35,000 fans take action on climate during our tour last summer, so this is actually working because they're doing it with their friends, with their family. The band is incentivizing them to do it. It's just this kind of great mix of energy all happening at the same time at these shows, and now we're expanding and doing it with a bunch of other artists this summer.

Zibby: Amazing. So what if you believe strongly in a cause, but it's not your nonprofit? 

Adam: Yeah.

Zibby: Like childhood mental health or just for an example, how can the individual participate more? Is it aligning closely with organizations that are already doing them? Is it trying to start new things? How can you take your energy and creativity without having to start your own thing?

Adam: So there are two different, well I guess there are like 10 different answers to that question. Um, but there are two kind of main categories. The first thing that I always advocate for is looking at what already exists out there. 'cause so many people have tried to jump into movements and say, I want start an organization.

Without looking around to see if there's something just like it. We don't wanna repeat other people's work. We want, we don't want to do unnecessary work. So the first thing is, you care about something. Go see if there's an organization that you can volunteer with, participate with in your area, and that's great.

And if there isn't really to make a case why it's necessary for this movement, this protest, this campaign, this organization to exist, and in chapter two of the book. It's all about all the different roles you can play, and not everybody needs to be a leader of a movement. Not everyone needs to go out in the streets and march.

Not everybody needs to do letter writing campaigns. Those are not the only things I, I give a lot of toxic colleges to students about climate. And so often they say to me, oh yeah, I wanna do climate on the side, but I'm studying pre-med and that has nothing to do with climate. Or, I'm studying art and that has nothing to do with climate or poli sci, or whatever it is.

And I literally go around the room and explain to everybody how the work they're doing is related to climate. Your pre-med, the amount of insect born diseases that we have in the United States now have increased tremendously since the temperature has started to increase because as the temperature increases, these insects move from the equator.

Further and further north and further and further south, and we have more and more hospital related cases from insect born diseases. That's a health issue. Immigration is a climate issue because we're gonna have more and more climate refugees as uh, an immigrants as a result, and that's something that can be absolutely be addressed.

Same thing with our food systems. If you're in farming, agriculture. Pretty much every job, whether you're, you know, in construction or um, you work in water or whatever it is, you work in art. We need more climate communicators. Every role, everything that people do that that people do for jobs can be applied to the climate space.

And so what I help people to do in this book is think about the things that they're good at and think about the things that they're love, that they love doing. And this model has been used before, but I also lay out. A bunch of different, uh, philosophies. So it's not just the things that you do, but it's the way that you think about things.

Are you somebody who likes to bring people together who disagree with each other? Are you a convener of people? Do you like to listen? Instead of participate in the conversation? What kind of person are you? And then we figure out how you all can contribute to the movement that you care about the most.

Zibby: Are you going to be launching Amplify Consulting for different clients. 

Adam: I mean, I have not thought of that, but you know, you heard it here first, and maybe this is the beginning of Amplify Consulting. Thank you for the idea. 

Zibby: Thank you.

Adam: I'll cut you in. 

Zibby: Oh, great. I'm in, fabulous. What does the person need to know about..

Adam: Yeah.

Zibby: Climate these days? Obviously I follow the news, I read the papers, blah, blah, blah. But what should you have an inside scoop, if you will? What should we know and what is the most helpful thing we can do? 

Adam: Yeah, so everybody is in this kind of doom and gloom moment, uh, when it comes to climate because a lot of the climate legislation that has actually moved forward over the last four years, uh, is being rolled back or has been rolled back by the current administration now.

At the federal level, a lot of climate action can be taken, but so much more climate action can be taken at the local level. Community boards, state legislators, mayors, they determine where petrochemical plants are built, what waste systems look like, farming protocols. All of these things are decided at the local level.

Community boards. There are many, many across the country where these elections have been decided. By less than 10 votes, your vote at the local level is thousands of times more powerful than your vote at the federal level. So my call to action for people on climate, because it is everything like we were talking about before.

Is to go look up when your next local election is. So I'm in New York City. We have a primary for our, uh, mayor, and that's happening at the end of June. But in pretty much every city, every state, there are local elections that are happening at some point during a year. Go look it up. Take the time, go look it up and see what the profiles are of the people that are running, see where they are on climate or any other issue that you care about.

And commit to going to vote in a primary and a local election. That is the number one most important thing that you can do to have a real impact. 'cause like I said, your vote could literally be the deciding vote in that election. 

Zibby: Have you thought about running for office? 

Adam: I've been asked that question before and I've been asked to run for office and at this moment in my life, because so much of my work is bipartisan and non-partisan from the ground up.

I think that my role is to stay outside of political office because I can work with Republicans, I can work with Democrats and bring them together effectively over certain issues. And as soon as I run on, uh, a ticket, I lose that ability. And I think that I, at the moment am meant to focus on the non-partisanship and bipartisanship side.

So who knows? Maybe in the future, but at the moment, I'm gonna stick where I am. 

Zibby: I mean, it would be so cool to have a president who's also a musician and employ all of these skills to getting people to vote. I don't know. It feels like it's in the bag. 

Adam: I appreciate that. I mean, bill Clinton played the saxophone.

Zibby: That's true. That's true. That's true. Sorry, I forgot. Of course. All those, um, images of that. Of course. 

Adam: Yes, yes. 

Zibby: In addition to everything, you are now a writer, right? How can you employ all of your strategies and smart thinking to releasing a book? 

Adam: Great question. So we have done some of these similar ideas as in building the a JR fan base, uh, in order to release this book.

So engaging deeply with fans who are kind of close to us, giving them the tools to go out and spread the word about the book. The book tour is something much more than a traditional book tour. We're not going to bookshops and signing. What I'm doing is I'm going to all of these different cities and basically putting on a show.

There are musical moments, there are special guests. We're doing all of these kind of gamified things. There are advocacy moments in the show where all together, everybody in the audience is taking a local advocacy action that's being sent. To their local representative, and it's different each night. So it's meant to be a more fun advocacy experience.

Again, not the protest and not the sitting in a gala, but this is where action can happen when people are in community, in spaces where they're having fun that's built around entertainment. So we're, we're using as much of the strategy, as much of the strategy as we can on this tour. 

Zibby: Do you feel like readers are as receptive?

Adam: We'll see.

Zibby: I mean, this may be a new model. Everybody who publishes a book is always looking for the next way to break it up. 

Adam: Yeah, I, I hope so. I'm happy to share any insights that I have after I finish this tour with any authors, because that sounds so much more fun. Right. Than sitting in a a, a Barnes and Noble or an indie bookstore, whatever it is, and just signing book after book.

Wouldn't it be great if you got to talk about it with a guest that's different in every city and you actually played games and had all of these different things in order to promote your book? Sounds fun. 

Zibby: It does sound fun. I'm gonna have to stop in on your tour. 

Adam: Yes. 

Zibby: Are you going all over the place? 

Adam: All over the place. All over the US. 

Zibby: Amazing. I'm sure I'll, we'll put it in our show notes for where to find you on tour. What do you like to read when you're not. Reading about climate and devising your own theories? 

Adam: It's funny, I listen to a lot of nonfiction and I tend to read more fiction. So I listen to nonfiction 'cause I feel like I need to stay up to date on all of the stuff.

That's happening. So I don't tell anybody, but I put it on like 1.5 or double speed in order to, you know, listen to like people do when they're in school. But, oh, there's a book. So this is probably the last fiction book I read that I really, really enjoyed. It's called Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow.

Um, I'm sure, yeah. It is really excellent. It's a story, um, about three students and building video games, and I'm not a big video game person, but it was really interesting to learn about that industry through the lens of these three fronts. It's really excellent. 

Zibby: Yes. And into your, to your gamify point too, that, that.

Adam: Exactly.

Zibby: On brand for you, I like.

Adam: Uh-huh.

Zibby: Uh, 1.5. I've tried that. I can, I can't go past 1.2, but I can read really quickly, but I can't listen quickly, so. 

Adam: Got it. Okay. 

Zibby: I'll have to. Did you train yourself? Did you work your way up? 

Adam: I did. And even with each new book, I start at one and then I go up to 1.2 and then 1.5 and then 1.7. So I need to get used to the author, uh, and their voice.

Zibby: And when do you, how do you divide the time in your day? How, what does a typical day for you look like? 

Adam: Yeah, so nowadays it's mostly working, uh, on my climate nonprofit, which is called Planet Reimagined. And we've grown tremendously over the last year. About a year ago we were five people or so, and now we're more than 30 people, uh, working in it.

So that takes up a good chunk of my time. Now I'm all book promo all the time, and this summer we're doing a tour with the band, so that's gonna take out more of my time over the summer, but I really try and divide my life in a way. That makes me happy. I also teach climate policy and campaigning at Columbia University, so I'll be jumping back into that in the fall once the book tour and summer tour is over.

Zibby: How have you found things to be at Columbia? 

Adam: What a loaded question. I just, it's funny, I just gave the commencement speech at the there at graduation for the Columbia Climate School and I think it's impossible not to speak truth when you're giving, when you're put in a position like that. And so I have a lot of problems with the way the administration of the school has failed to stand up to authoritarianism, and I think it has been a massive slight on the school itself, and the students feel it, and the professors feel it.

And at the same time, the curriculum in places like the Climate School and the International Affairs School around teaching really focus on making and preparing the students to go out and actually do the work. The framing of the speech really was, we have all the, whats. To solve climate change. We could, we could solve climate change today if we wanted to.

We know what the what's are, but the how's are the things that we need to be focusing on. So the students need to take everything they learned and figure out what implementation looks like. And that's not something that you teach so much in school. That's something that you need in the real world. So I love Columbia.

I went there as an undergrad. I went and did a fellowship there while I was doing my PhD. I now teach there. And I really hope that, uh, things are going to improve very soon. 

Zibby: That was a good answer. I mean, you know.

Adam: Maybe people can listen to the, listen to the subtext.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. What have you learned from one of your students? 

Adam: Oh, well it's funny, two of my students, I've ended up hiring for the nonprofit because I'm just so inspired them by them. I love teaching in the International Affairs School 'cause the last semester that I taught pretty much every student was from a different country and from a different background and brought something different to the table.

And when you're working in campaigning to have that diversity of ideas is. So key. 'cause everyone brings something completely different. And when students from, uh, Southeast Asia are talking about social media approaches to campaigning there as opposed to what's happening in the US or South America, I learn new things every day about campaigning, about how to reach people, about the language to use, about how to engage celebrities, about how to give speeches, things like that.

And so the, the most impactful things are when students disagree with each other. And it's really because they're coming from such different backgrounds. And what I love talking to students about is how to find your audience. Because an audience is not one thing and an audience is not stagnant. It is this ethereal, amorphous thing that ebbs and flows.

And there are audiences within audiences and I mean, I thought about that in writing of this book, but it happens in campaigning. All the time. So I think that's probably the thing I learned most from my students is how to expand my definition of audience. 

Zibby: Love it. Any advice for aspiring authors? 

Adam: Yeah, so I was very lucky I found somebody to partner with on this book.

I have a, a co-writer and her name is Heather Landy. She's an incredible journalist, and what I learned from writing this book with her is that for me, collaboration is key. I love working with people that will push back against me, that will make me think harder. I also did a lot of interviews for this book, and there some of them made it in and some of them just the ideas made it in, not the interviews themselves, but engaging people along the way as you are telling these stories, is vital because you might have a lot of amazing ideas, but they're not gonna resonate unless you test them out with other people and let other people who you trust be the, the shapers of your ideas.

That was kind of. Key for me, there are multiple chapters that didn't end up making it in the book because it wasn't resonating with people in the right way for me. 

Zibby: What's one chapter you cut out? That there was something really good in it and you're like, ugh, if only. 

Adam: So there was a whole chapter about digital and instead of having a separate chapter about digital, I took different pieces of it and wove it through the rest of the book because I realized that digital doesn't live in a silo anymore.

It's a tool that's working across. The live space and the rule breaking and gamification and building a bigger tent and how you tell stories and all of these different pieces. So instead of it being its own silo, it now kinds of kind of lives as this horizontal piece in, in each chapter. 

Zibby: And do you have any tips on working with family?

Adam: Oh, working with family. It can be incredible and it can be tough. And I think that family needs to come first and the work needs to come second no matter what. 

Zibby: Excellent. Adam, thank you so much. Thanks for coming. 

Adam: Thank you. 

Zibby: Thanks for helping us all amplify and collectively change the world. Thank you.

Adam: That's so nice. Thank you so much for having me, Zibby This was great.