Episode 213: Alison Smart and Spencer Glendon, Probable Futures
Episode 213: Alison Smart and Spencer Glendon, Probable Futures
Today's guests are Alison Smart, Executive Director, and Spencer Glendon, Founder, of Probable Futures.
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.
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, 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!
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?