Climate Acceptance Studios: Welcome to the Communicating Earth podcast by Climate Acceptance Studios. This is the podcast by and for climate and nature communicators. So I met Boaz Palade in Paris when I filmed him in Change Now 24. It was lovely to get to know him then. I'm so pleased he's on the podcast today. He was until very recently the Chief Creative Officer for the United Nations Development Program. And in this role, he oversaw their advocacy, their flagship campaigns, their events and activations.
Boaz: Thank
Climate Acceptance Studios: He launched the Don't Choose Extinction campaign that's been viewed by over 2.2 billion people across the world. And recently he conceived the Weather Kids campaign where the kids of today play the weather forecasters of 2050. Prior to joining UNDP, he worked as a TV journalist for 17 years. He covered conflicts, natural disasters, interest stories in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, first for the BBC, then for Reuters TV. He has just launched full frame advisory. Boaz believes there is no evil genius out there to destroy the world and it's up to us to find the solution. Boaz, welcome.
Boaz: Thank you. That's a lovely introduction.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So I think I know the answer to this already because you're quite open about it within your comms. But for the audience, we always start off with a piece of identification. So are you an activist, a campaigner, an advocate, an environmentalist or something else?
Boaz: I think I'm a little bit of all of that, but something else would be the answer. I'm an advocate ⁓ for the climate emergency. ⁓ I'm an activist in a way that ⁓ I have kids, I want them to have a better future, ⁓ and that's the reason why I act. So first and foremost, I'm a dad who is concerned for his children's future, and that's my motivation and my go-to.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So you're a dad and that's the primary thing, is it? So why do you identify yourself in that way? Is that just an emotional connection or is there something?
Boaz: I'm a dad. Emotional connection, you know, I never thought I would have it, but you know, the minute that my elder son was born, he's 13 now, there was something, there was like a chemical switch in my body. And all I cared about from that point on is his well-being. When my second son was born, he's eight now, he was added to the mix. And now I care deeply about their future. I also know that our generation, has it up a little bit. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to swear in this podcast. ⁓ we fucked it up pretty royally. ⁓ so I It's my duty, my job, ⁓ my North Star try and have a small difference and try and make my children's life better my own to try and give them a planet that they can actually live on.
Climate Acceptance Studios: ⁓ yes, can swear, can swear, it's fine. So we're all about action in this podcast. We're all about this idea of stories of action, inspiring action. So why do you think it is that more action is not being taken? Or indeed, do you agree with that question? Do you think loads of action is being taken?
Boaz: think it's also somewhere in the middle. think a lot of action is being taken. A lot of people don't know about the action that's being taken. People take action, they don't relate that to the rest of the world. They don't know how to relate that to the rest of the world. ⁓ You know this very well, Tom, but people who are active in certain things are not necessarily good storytellers. They're not necessarily good communicators. So they need help with that. So that's part of the problem. And then other part of the problem is that
Climate Acceptance Studios: you
Boaz: I don't, honestly don't think that there's enough action being taken. I think that every human being on the planet, from the highest person in the world to the lowest person in the world, if there is such a thing, from north to south, from east to west, has to take action in order to really try and figure out how to create a better tomorrow. How to get out of this conundrum. As you said in your intro, I really don't believe that there's an evil genius sitting out there going... ⁓ I'm going to destroy the world, climate change is a good way of doing it. I think it's something, you know, we took a wrong turn. We ⁓ used ⁓ cheap energy. We didn't know where we were going. And now we have to course correct. And that course correction will take all of us to do. So I think, yes, there's action being taken and it's wonderful. And we want to tell more of those stories and we want more of that to be out there. But I also think that more people need to take action.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Thank But that makes our life as communicators quite tough, doesn't it? Because we thrive on stories of heroes and villains. We need an antagonist out there. So if there is no antagonist, if it's just this collective ⁓ misfortune of a wrong turn, then how do we overcome that? What stories are we telling that don't have heroes or villains in them?
Boaz: think of it as a war. This is a war we're fighting. The enemy this time is not Nazi Germany and it's not kind of like, you know, any evil empire or it's not a dictator of some sort or another. It's a man-made issue, but we are fighting a war. There's also an opposition to us. There is an army on the other side that wants to keep the status quo and we need to continuously fight that battle. But we all of us need to fight that battle. There's no... It has to be... The best way that I can describe it is that we need to be like we were in 1942. Everyone needs to do his part in order to win the war, in order to win the battle against the evil that this time is not the Nazis, it's man-made, it's a wrong turn, but it has to happen. And as I said, there is an opposition.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So, yeah, I want to focus in on your fights, Boaz. There's plenty of other podcasts out there that will talk at length about your career, but I want to focus in on a specific tale of action inspired by the work of the amazing Chris DiMero where it's stories of action that inspire action. So within your career, I mean, you know, 2.2 billion and so on, you've been one of the the largest scale climate communicators on the planet. What is a tale of action that you can tell us today to inspire our audience?
Boaz: I of action is that there's so much out there that's happening all the time. All of these people are taking their small actions and their stories are the stories that need to inspire us. I watched recently the incredible show on Bloomberg TV called The Optimist's Guide to the Planet by Nicolai Costa Waldo and he runs around the world and talks to people that are taking climate action. And I remember specifically that there's this woman in Nairobi, my hometown, that's probably why I remember it so well, that invented a new cooking stove because her children were suffering from a cough. So it wasn't like she wasn't thinking about the larger picture of... of the climate emergency, but she was solving a problem that she had to solve. But that problem then became, she became an entrepreneur, she became quite wealthy, she allowed herself to get out of the slum and into proper housing, and she solved the problem. And now that problem is something that other people can use, and other people of her former status in the slums can really kind of benefit from. That's the kind of stories that are happening all over the world all the time. And that's the stories that inspire me. That's the stories that I wanna try and shout out from the rooftops and make people understand that it's possible to make change in your small way, in whatever you do. Whatever action you wanna take is the right action to take. We're not all climate warriors at the same level, but we all have to be climate warriors.
Climate Acceptance Studios: But what about you, Boaz? I want to talk about you. I want you stop being modest. So tell me about a thing that you've done within your career where you've taken action.
Boaz: So you talked about the Don't Choose Extinction campaign. That was a big, big action that I took. Let's be honest here. I was very lucky. The campaign went viral. We're all asked as communicators, can you make this go viral? And we all say, no, we don't know how. It's not a science. It's kind of a little bit of something else. So of course, when the new NDP asked me, will this go viral, I said yes. But I had no notion that it would. So the success of it is a lot of planning, a lot of building, a lot of fighting, but in the end, kind of like we were also lucky. So I just want to caveat it. But UNDP came to me in ⁓ January 2020. I don't know if you remember what was going on in January 2020 in the world. There was like a small virus in China that was...
Climate Acceptance Studios: I forget, I forget, yeah.
Boaz: And so, you know, very opportune time. And so they came to me and said, listen, ⁓ you know, we want to run a big campaign. We want to do something that's going to reach like, you know, people around the world. ⁓ What do you think we should do? And I kind of came back. We were having this kind of like ⁓ brainstorm with various ⁓ policy teams. So UNDP does a lot of stuff. You know, we have 6,000 programs. We, it's not we anymore. They have... 6,000 programs operational every day across the world, across so many ⁓ issues. ⁓ And so we were having ⁓ a bit of a brainstorm with the policy people of UNDP who are the worst communicators in the world, perhaps. There's no one worse. And I say that lovingly. If they listen to this, they'll understand. But I've told them this to their face a million times. ⁓ And so... ⁓ So I said to them, I said, what is it that you want to say that's important to say not about what you're doing, but something, an issue that you really want to highlight? And they said fossil fuel subsidy reform. And I took out my little Google machine and Googled it because I had no idea what they were talking about. ⁓ So I Googled it. I found out that ⁓ fossil fuel subsidy reform is an extremely complicated subject that doesn't
Climate Acceptance Studios: Mmm.
Boaz: in any way allow itself to be tamed into some sort of communication ⁓ extravaganza and it's going to be difficult. But I thought this might be a fun little challenge. So I said, sure, let's do that. And so we set about building a campaign that would somehow have impact on the fossil fuel subsidy reform. I'm sure that everyone listening to this podcast knows what that is, but for anyone who doesn't, it's the idea that governments pay subsidies to ⁓ manufacturers of fossil fuels as a subsidy. So Shell last year, I think, made $35 billion in profit. They still got subsidies from governments. ⁓ So at that point, was 600 $650 billion being paid out in subsidies every year by governments around the world, in pure subsidies, that 80 % of that was going to the manufacturers themselves. And so that to me seemed like a line in the red. This was negative impact on the planet. Because if we don't take care of that negative impact of 650 billion people, we're not getting anywhere. So even if we put 30 billion dollars into an amazing climate initiative, we're still 620 billion dollars in the red. So it seemed like such an important issue to tackle. But again, it's dense, it's complicated, it's a little bit scary. Most people don't know about it. Most people don't know that their actual tax dollars or their tax bounds are going into this. And so we kind of like ⁓ started thinking about how we can relate this to the everyman. ⁓ And we came up with a idea that was so foreign to the United Nations that it took me a year to convince them that we should do this. And that was that we should be funny. ⁓ We should make a funny video ⁓ about a very, very serious subject, but we should use humor to get through. And ⁓ so, and we also somebody from the outside. We needed somebody from the outside to tell us how incredibly stupid we are in doing this crazy thing of giving away billions billions of dollars to fossil fuel manufacturers. rather than spending that money on something worthy like girls education ⁓ or, know, at that point the COVID-19 was in full bloom. ⁓ You know, we imagined that we could give a vaccine to each person in the world for free if we use that, if it was just one year of that, of those subsidies. And so we set about doing it. And so we needed somebody to say how stupid we were. And we thought that, you know, together with two incredible creative directors that I was working with in this wonderful little company called Activista out of Los Angeles, ⁓ Paco Conde and Beto Fernandez. we decided that the best possible outsider would be a dinosaur. A dinosaur that somehow had survived the extinction and had come back now to tell humanity how incredibly dumb we are. ⁓ How incredibly stupid it is that we ourselves are choosing our own extinction. And so what the dinosaur said, and we were very lucky because very early on Jack Black agreed to sign on to it and he was the...
Climate Acceptance Studios: Okay, wow, wow, wow, yeah, okay.
Boaz: And so we kind of like, we frame the dinosaur as Jack Black. He was modeled on Jack Black. And so ⁓ dinosaur, who was called Frankie, AKA Jack Black, ⁓ said in the script, you know, we had, we had asteroids, we had, know, we had, we had meteors that were hitting the earth. It's as if you are paying for asteroids to hit you. That's what you're doing now. That's exactly what you're doing. But it was all kind of done in a little bit of a funny way. And so we did it. We made it. It took two and a half years, literally one year of convincing UN that it was allowed to be funny. Because I don't know if you know this, Tom, but UN is the least funny organization in the world. And so we did it. And we launched it. And we launched it about a week before the conference. before big conference ⁓ that was happening. ⁓ we waited to see what would happen. And what happened was that The campaign took off insanely. It became viral. It was everywhere. It was in every newspaper. It was on every TV station. People were talking about It. People were bringing out, know, on day three of the campaign, suddenly someone called us and said, in UNDP for procurement, they said, you're not allowed to sell t-shirts. Why are you selling t-shirts? And we said, we're not. And they go, and they sent me a link. It was somebody selling t-shirts of Don't Choose Extinction with Frankie on It because they were just monetizing the phenomenon. And that was for me the biggest... signal of success that somebody was actually selling our merch, you know, so we didn't think about selling it. I kind of kicked myself that I didn't, but somebody did. ⁓ And so, you know, we had a cartoon in one of the biggest French newspapers with Greta Thunberg and Frankie trying to get into the cop and being turned away. That's the level of cultural infusion that we had with the campaign. And then
Climate Acceptance Studios: Do know why it happened? Have you got any idea why it happened?
Boaz: think It's because It was relatable, because everyone loves the dinosaur film. I don't know if you've seen the Don't Choose Extinction clip, but It out with this dinosaur barging into the United Nations General Assembly and he's quite menacing. And he's walking down this island and you're absolutely sure that he's going to munch on a bunch of delegates. And so you're of like you're waiting the horror, but you can't take your eyes away because It's like a Jurassic Park film. You want to see the dinosaur. And so we were tapping into something that people wanted to do anyway. They want to watch film. They want to engage. And then it tear in a corner, know, 20 seconds in, and the dinosaur immediately became funny because he goes up to the guard that's standing next to the podium of the General Assembly and he says, are you okay? Do you need a moment? And so the guard kind of nods and he lets him go in and he starts his speech. And the speech is funny. And so kind of like we turned the corner and we decided that we were going to be funny. We found a script writer that was one of Obama's, President Obama's speech writers, and he was in charge of the funny script. He works for Funny and Die Now. He's a great, great guy. And so he wrote the script for us. And it was a funny script. It was generally funny. So the combination between the dinosaurs, the films that people like to see, we did it very cinematically, and the fact that it was funny and relatable. I think that's what made it happen. so, and the result, the net result of it is that we actually managed to change climate policy with it because in that COP, for the first time in 25 years of COP negotiations, fossil fuel subsidy reform was put on the agenda. So in the final communique of COP, they put in that negotiations on the phase out of fossil fuel subsidies would forever be part of the agenda. And so We actually managed to have impact with it. no one, of all me, thought that that would happen because you don't really have impact on policy with campaigns in general way. It's very, very hard to do. It's very rare. So that's my tale action. ⁓
Climate Acceptance Studios: So ⁓ I just want to circle back a bit. So it seems to me that once the campaign was up and running, it was like a runaway success really, really quickly. But the problem was getting to the point where the green light was given. And I know that many in this audience were within big bureaucracies. So how did you do it? How did you overcome the internal red tape? How did you get a profoundly serious organization like the United Nations to say that being funny was the way to communicate this message. Like technically, like did you have to like have a bunch of presentations? Did you have to speak to a number of people? How did you go about proposing the idea and win them over?
Boaz: stubbornness. I was stubborn. But that stubbornness then translated into ⁓ endless, endless briefs to the executive office of the United Nations Development Program. I had to go and meet with a with ⁓ the executive director of UNDP is called the administrator. ⁓ And I have to go and meet with the administrator every two weeks and assure him that nothing bad would happen. They were terrified that member states would turn against us. And member state turning against us is the last thing that any UN entity wants to do because that's our bosses, that's our executive board, that's who runs us, that's who gives us orders. And so they were terrified that we would make ⁓ governments angry. And we had a heat map of places where fossil fuel subsidies reform was a hot issue. And so we had to kind of like constantly be talking to those missions and making sure that they understand what we're doing and making sure that they weren't angry at us. And so this ⁓ was a constant ⁓ struggle. ⁓ The ⁓ creative directors that I was mentioning, Paco and Beto, after many, many months later and we launched and we were happy and we were sitting, I think in Cannes, in the Cannes Lions Festival and we were having a beer and they said to me, know, Boaz, doing that campaign was like watching a ⁓ Argentinian soap opera that every day you're about to die and then you live to tell the tale the next day. That's how we felt for two years because every day it was like, yeah, we won't be able to do this. And then we somehow managed to get through. and do it. Just filming at the United Nations General Assembly during COVID was an unbelievable difficult thing to achieve because they didn't allow it. And so we set a date with an incredible production house that did the film called Framestore. They were insanely fantastic. ⁓
Climate Acceptance Studios: No no
Boaz: And so we set a date, everything was set, we had everything, we had the crews, we had everything, and the United Nations were supposed to give permission to do it. And then they didn't. And then our cost of money because we had to pay everyone that was on crew for that day. And so then we set another date, a month in advance. And as the days were ticking off, we could see that the same thing was going to happen again. And it took us and some very, very, very wonderful people at the United Nations that supported us at the high level to really go all the way up to the Deputy Secretary General and make her sign the paper that it will allow us to do this filming. And then only 24 hours before the filming started we got permission to do it. mean we only allowed 42 people into the General Assembly. So the entire cast of Don't Choose Extinction is 42 people. ⁓ And so we had to kind of do a lot of digital maneuvering. But everything about it was difficult. There wasn't any part of it that wasn't a struggle every single day for two and a half years.
Climate Acceptance Studios: And that's what we've all got to do, haven't we? We're all working within, you know, hierarchical structures or little silos, be it our family or a company or whatever. And we've all just got to take that bold step and be a bit of a disruptor. I mean, do you think that you are naturally a disruptor, personality wise?
Boaz: I think so. I think, know, I like to get things done. You know, I have a similar background than you, think, Tom. I was a TV news producer for a very long time. And what that taught me is that, you know, you land in, you know, in Congo, Brazzaville during a war and you have to manage everything. still get footage out that day, so it hits kind of like the wire services and everything works. And that taught me that, you know, there's only solutions. There's no no. And so I took that when I left to work at the United Nations, that's the attitude that I took with me. So I don't know if I'm a disruptor, but I think I just brought an attitude of like, I'm not, I'm going to do what needs to be done and the bureaucracy be damned. And so now I can tell you after I've left the United Nations, it's been 10 days almost, ⁓ that I may have broken a few rules. I probably did break a couple of rules as I was going through this, procurement rules, other rules, ⁓ but it had to be done. And so I think the lesson of that is that for me it was like, had this idea that this needed to get done and it was going to get done. And so I was gonna do everything within my power to make it happen.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So I want to return to the aftermath of the campaign. I'm very interested to see about that. But before we get to that, we now move on to the quickfire round, which has been quite a challenge. not going to lie over the, I think it's 14 or 15 episodes so far, because you people who care about the planet, you've got so much to say, but let's give it a go and see whether we can keep to brief answers. So we start with a bit of word of association. First word that comes to mind when I say climate.
Boaz: Emergency.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Who is your greatest inspiration in climate and nature communications?
Boaz: I don't have a single person. think Ingmar Retshog from We Don't Have Time inspired me greatly. He's doing amazing things with this platform.
Climate Acceptance Studios: He's got such energy, hasn't he? He's amazing.
Boaz: It's endless. He's like a do-or-sell ⁓ bunny.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Is there someone's work out there that you think should be receiving more attention than it has been currently?
Boaz: No, not this single specific person. I think everyone who's a climate warrior needs to receive as much attention as they possibly can. And that's our job. We need to communicate about it.
Climate Acceptance Studios: here, fucking here. Is there a favorite book or movie or TV show on environmentalism, climate or nature?
Boaz: I stay away from them, I read science fiction so I can get away from all this shit.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Wow, fair enough, fair enough. What's your favourite communications channel?
Boaz: I'm a bit of a traditionalist, I love TV still. I still think that TV is so wonderful and tells such great stories. I think I'm a bit biased on that. But I would have to say TV, but I love newspapers too. I'm a bit old fashioned.
Climate Acceptance Studios: And do you think TV is the most effective communications channel or is there something else?
Boaz: No, I think social media is definitely the most effective. I TikTok is incredibly effective. ⁓ think ⁓ many, many social media platforms are very, very effective and I think we need to use them as much as possible.
Climate Acceptance Studios: but you would highlight specifically TikTok in the social media world.
Boaz: I think so, I think TikTok ⁓ is an incredible phenomenon. I have my issues with TikTok, but I think it's an incredible phenomenon. And I think the short form is very, very clever.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Is that because it's entirely based around short form? Like what is it about TikTok that you think makes it so effective?
Boaz: I think it's a short form of government. think the attention span is lessened and lessened. Instead of fighting against it, Tikitaka went directly into it. And I think they did it. I think trying to tell stories in that short format is also a challenge, but it also makes it very succinct.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So do you have a favourite stat or fact about the climate crisis?
Boaz: I think stats are a little bit overrated. I've always been against them a little bit because for me, the overall stat, the 1.5 degrees, we can't pass it or we're gonna die. We're past 1.5 degrees. We may not be past 1.5 degrees because it changes a lot and it's a 10 year average and we're all alive. I think we need to concentrate on the positive of this. need to concentrate on what's working and we need to make sure that we don't get overwhelmed by facts and by the enormity of of the issue, but we can, each of us as individuals, actually have an impact.
Climate Acceptance Studios: That's a brilliant answer. Deconstructing our format. I love it. What's the one climate myth or misconception you wish you could permanently retire?
Boaz: I'm. that we're all gonna die. I mean, we're all gonna die. That's the But we're all gonna die because of climate emergency.
Climate Acceptance Studios: I was gonna say that, yes. What's your number one source of climate information?
Boaz: I read so much, it's hard to say number one source. I read all the reports, I read all the technical reports. I'm constantly consuming information about the climate emergency. I have no number one. It's all of it.
Climate Acceptance Studios: And finally, is there a favourite analogy or metaphor for explaining the climate crisis?
Boaz: There's this wonderful woman that works at UNDP called Cassie Flynn who has the best metaphor and I use it all the time. She says, imagine you go to the beach and you go and you spend a wonderful time at the beach and then you get back into your car and it's hot in the car because the car has windows and the heat got trapped inside the car. And so you start driving and you open the windows. Climate change is the fact that you can't open the windows.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Very good. I've never heard that before. Well, here ends the quick fire round. so, though I like it, we're here to be disruptive. We're disruptors, right? You you have to break the incumbent rules to create a brave new world, even within the confines of this podcast by us. Okay, let's return back to...
Boaz: I'm sorry I disrupted your format. Thank
Climate Acceptance Studios: know, the amazing campaign. what was the aftermath, first of all? So we had this runaway train success. I mean, was there a moment when you defined it as being ended? And when was that? And did you sort of sit back and reflect on what had happened?
Boaz: Thank you. We had really strong measurements of the campaign almost instantly, so we knew what was going on as we were moving forward. And at first we did think there was going to be an end date. We just thought, you know, this is going to be campaign and it's going to end naturally and that's it. But very quickly we realized that Frankie the Dino, as we named him, became kind of like this avatar, that was a very, very useful avatar. So ⁓ With some partners, we figured out that we could make a real life Frankie the Dino. Dino. So we commissioned a puppet, a puppet with man inside it that ⁓ Franky the ⁓ It's in my ⁓ ⁓ And ⁓ we started taking it around the world. So Frankie started visiting countries and helping governments with their green agendas. And so we had the most incredible experience with this. We went to Rwanda for a big conference, a youth conference in Rwanda where Frankie was a big, big hit. And really kind of the government requested it. They wanted Frankie to be there so they would help them with their outreach around their green initiatives. We went to Egypt during the COP in Egypt with Frankie. We went to Colombia, the Colombian government And the government at the time ⁓ had a very, very strong green agenda, but they ⁓ were in a minority government. So the parliament was against them. And so they needed support to try and kind of push this ⁓ climate agenda that they had out. And so they asked for Frankie's support, so we took Frankie there. And everywhere we went, we had our little puppeteer that was inside Frankie and dancing around and meeting kids. scaring kids. had the most horrible experience in Rwanda where you went to a kindergarten and everyone burst out in tears. ⁓ But it was just a huge incredible phenomenon. We took him to Japan because the Japanese government asked us to join them and help them figure out how they can better communicate their green agenda. And so this was like this went on for years and years years after Frankie. So we kept him alive. had a social media feed of his own.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Wow, okay.
Boaz: He posted a lot of stuff. And so it kind of like went on for a long, long time. So the campaign itself was ⁓ over, but Frankie lived on as an avatar, as a climate activist in himself. And of course, the film keeps being seen, keeps being referred to. It's one of those iconic films now that's become part of the climate discourse in a very big way.
Climate Acceptance Studios: The dinosaur costume, I assume, where is it in the garage? Is it hanging on the hook gathering dust?
Boaz: No, it's kind of bundled up in a kind of like a it's in a golf bag, if you can imagine. Not a, know, like a bag that you put all your golf stuff in. It's quite, it's big. It's 15 feet long when it's fully. Last time it was used by my wife decided to put it on to barge around the neighborhood on Halloween. I can see in your photo. It's hilarious.
Climate Acceptance Studios: 15 feet, wow. Okay. Okay. So, Well, I think we need to put that in the show notes. We need to dig that out. That would be in the spirit of you being funny. Let's make this podcast a bit more funny. So obviously you've got your metrics, right? You've got your traditional communications metrics. You've got your impressions and your views and your clicks and your so on. were there other impacts that you measured, like influencing policy and so on?
Boaz: haha Yeah, so I think the influencing policy thing was really the most important thing. As I mentioned, of like, know, it really seeing fossil fuel subsidy reform in the final communique ⁓ of the COP was incredible to us. was obviously we didn't do it alone. There was a lot of pressure. There was a lot of activists. There was a lot of talk. But I think we pushed it over the line. I think that Frankie was able to push it over the line and get that into actual policy. So that was really incredible. Except for that, know, there's so many other things that happen that are almost anecdotal. I remember one of the directors at UNDP came up to me about a week later and he said, you know, he's Brazilian and he said, my mom lives in Rio in this building and she sent me a clip of Frankie because her doorman told her that she has to watch it and she sent it to me not knowing that we'd made it. So she sent it to one of the big directors of UNP, not knowing that he was connected to it and said, you have to watch this film because her doorman told her to. that's how, you know, it kind of like, it showed me that it really kind of reached outside of our networks. You know, we're pretty used to seeing our own stuff in our feeds and then our peers and our compatriots kind of like reflecting it back to us. But when you kind of, when you're completely outside of your network and you see it, it's incredible.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Hey!
Boaz: I had people, we had a big cinema campaign with Frankie the Dino. There's an organization called Sawa, is the Screen Advertisement Association globally. And the woman who used to run it, she's now retired, Cheryl Savage, was incredible, a huge, huge, huge, help and influence. And she basically got Frankie into about 30 countries. cinema-wide. So we had like a distribution. Pearl and Dean did it in the United Kingdom. ⁓ And so Frankie was in cinemas for at least six weeks. ⁓ And I got people from Indonesia sending me pictures of Frankie while they were in the cinema with their kids. That's the kind of thing that
Climate Acceptance Studios: Okay. just realised something as you were talking that there is this similarity between Frankie and between the weather kids in that both examples are of like different eras, different ages, sort of connecting together magically. I mean, presumably you've had that thought yourself. So can you, you know, can you you tell me a bit more about that? I mean, did that happen organically or is there a conscious choice there?
Boaz: Well, the thing is, in both cases, as I mentioned, we needed a messenger. It couldn't be us. It couldn't be, in the case of the weather case, couldn't be adults. We needed something else. We didn't know it was not going to be adults, but we knew we needed some kind of messenger. In the case of the dinosaur, we knew we needed someone outside. At first, we thought it would be an alien, honestly. We were like, oh, an alien should come here and tell us how stupid we are. But then the idea of a fossil, fossil, know, fossil fuels, that just captured our imagination. in terms of the Weather Kids, we were also looking for a different messenger. We were trying to figure out how we can step outside of ourselves so we could see ourselves from the outside in a way. And for us, at that point, kids were ⁓ such a wonderful way to do that. It's also a truism that kids are an incredible way for us to try and get people to take action.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Mmm.
Boaz: Because I'm not the only dad out there. There's other dads and we all want the best for our children. And it doesn't matter what else we believe in. The truism is that we all want the best for our children. And so ⁓ essentially that's how we came up with the idea of a kid in the Weather Kids. But it started off as from we need a different messenger. We need somebody else to tell us this.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So the first was from the past and the second was from the future.
Boaz: In the future, exactly.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So, yeah, all many congratulations and we'll put full details of the campaign in the show notes for those who don't know about it and obviously a link to the film itself. Okay, for the final section, for the third act of the podcast, we always go on to sort of more general opinions. So firstly, within the climate and nature communication sector, this is what it's all about. What is our future as a sector, do you see?
Boaz: You know, I think the... We've had a difficult time, let's be honest, Tom, in the last two years or so, it's been more difficult to communicate around the climate emergency. We've had to use an enormous amount of euphemism to try not to say climate change or climate emergency. So that is happening and it's still happening, but I think that the pendulum is gonna swing back and it's gonna swing back hard. I think we have to be ready for it when it does swing back. I think we need to be prepared to communicate communicate with everything we have as soon as we possibly can. We can't let this go. This is such an important issue that all of us, all the communicators out there need to think about what their next steps are when the pendulum swings. What can we do? How can we be bigger? How can we be bolder? How can we reach more people? How can we get more people to take action? How can we tell more action stories? How can we highlight those people in Nairobi? and Lima and Sydney. How can we tell those stories of the people who are taking action out there? And how can we help the community take more action? I think we should all be thinking about it all the time and constantly be ⁓ thinking about new ways of communicating and new ideas on how to communicate. You you yourself are doing that in your organization and I know you're.
Climate Acceptance Studios: We are, we are.
Boaz: Incredible job.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So why do you think the pension is going to swing back then? Is just because of the nature of, know, the cyclical nature of, you know, cultural history or something more?
Boaz: I think so. also, know, it's, know, climate deniers are a small minority of the population. When we kind of like did kind of like studies around it for for don't choose extinction we We we kind of figured out that there was about 10 percent In the margin that were climate deniers that thought that it was a chinese conspiracy and and that's it And then there was like another 10 on the other side that were Greta Thunberg and were extremely active and then everything in between the 80 in between were just people and those people were the ones we wanted to reach. Those are the people that we needed to reach. We're not going to reach the people that think that it's a Chinese conspiracy. There's no point. But also, they're only 10%. And we don't need to reach Greta Thunberg and the activists, because they're already doing whatever they can to do this. So what we need to do is reach the people in the middle. We use the metaphor of the Simpsons. We had... We had Lisa on one side ⁓ and the dad, I can't remember dad's name, ⁓ Homer on the other side and Marge was in the middle and all the others were in the middle. But we have Lisa on one side and it kind of went on a scale of how close they were to Lisa and how close they were to Homer. ⁓ And we use that metaphor a lot to show this idea that 80 % of us believe that this is a problem and.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Roma. Yeah.
Boaz: We need to solve it, but we're not quite solving it yet. So we need to act on those 80 people. We need to make them realize it. And I think those 80 people are going to make the pendulum swing again. And the other thing that I believe very strongly is that market forces are going to force this. Too much investment is being put in already. Too much is going on. We're not going to let this go. We're going to make it happen. And climate, the climate emergency in the end will be solved because the market wants it to be solved, because it's good for business. It's...
Climate Acceptance Studios: Yeah, the insurance industry, I mean, how are they getting insured anymore, quite frankly?
Boaz: Exactly, insurance industry, the construction industry. It's like there's so many people that can benefit from this. But on the other hand, if we look at the transition, that could be the biggest boon in history. mean, the gold rush will look like a little blimp in the radar compared to the trillions and trillions of ⁓ funding that will flow through the transition.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Cheers, hoping. I I love your optimism and I share it on some days and others not. ⁓ To what extent do you follow and apply the science of climate communication itself?
Boaz: I'll share it on some days too.
Climate Acceptance Studios: How much do you follow this amazing social scientist out there who is serving, messaging and opinion and stuff like that?
Boaz: Yeah. To me, communication is communication. To me, I could be selling chewing gum. It's all the same. I need to break through. I need to reach the people. I need to find a way to get through the noise. It's not science. least it's not rocket science. It's communication. It's storytelling. It's narrative.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So leading on from that then, what's the best piece of advice about climate communication that you've ever received?
Boaz: Someone once told me don't let subject matter dictate how you're talking about the subject matter. So when I thought back on that and I said, okay, here I have a very, very difficult issue to try and communicate around, the best way to do it is probably through doom and gloom and a bit of sadness, but what if I don't? What if I don't let it dictate the enormity of the problem and the difficulty of the problem? What if I can communicate in a different way and I can make it funny? So for me, that was the best piece of advice. Don't let... the subject matter dictate how you communicate about the subject matter. You can communicate funny about sad things, can communicate sad about funny things. It's like, just do what needs to be done in order to break through.
Climate Acceptance Studios: I have a favorite phrase is that the world is far too important to be taken seriously.
Boaz: Exactly, exactly.
Climate Acceptance Studios: What advice do you have for that ⁓ young person with passion and purpose that's coming out blinking from the education system into the world for the first time and they say, right, I want to be a climate communicator. What advice would you give that person at the start of their career?
Boaz: First of all, be a climate communicator. It's very easy to be your own climate communicator right now, at this minute. Open an account and you're a climate communicator. Do good content and you'll rise to the top. So, you know, I think there's an easy way to do it. But, you know, continuously be out there. Network, communicate, try and figure out if you want to get a job somewhere and go for it. We, you know, the... The community needs good communicators more than anything else. To me, the climate emergency is in large parts a communication emergency. It's us that can solve the problem, but it's us that are not solving the problem fast enough. So we need every single good communicator out there. And if there's a young communicator, we need them. We need them back.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So thing that I hear on that note from my clients is that, you know, when they're to cap in hand to their funders to keep their organization going, know, communications comes very, very low down in the pecking order of allocation of funds. So you and I obviously disagree with this. So, you know, what message do you have to the funders of the world on this specific allocation of budget?
Boaz: I think people who are looking into the further future, people like Morgan Stanley, for instance, just as an example, know that what's happening is happening. They have no doubt and they're already acting towards it. So good business is staying ahead of that curve. And if you want to do good business, you must be part of the transition. But to do really good business, you have to help communicate about that transition. And so for me, it's a no-brainer. If you want to succeed in business today, you have to, first of all, you have to be sustainable. You have to be, you have to think about the transition. You have to think about your footprint. You have to think about your supply chain. And secondly, you need to communicate that because it's going to get you sales.
Climate Acceptance Studios: What do you think is the most important environmental message that the public needs to hear?
Boaz: that we're not all gonna die. I think It's very important that we turn this doom and gloom scenario around. This narrative has been with us for many, many, many years. It's very easy for us to fall into It. And that leads to inaction. It doesn't lead to action. It leads to apathy. It leads to the fact that we stay home and say, okay, if we're all gonna die, I might as well just hang out here and not do anything. So we need action. You know, I know you, do you remember Rosie the Riveter? Like, you remember her?
Climate Acceptance Studios: I don't get the reference, I'm so sorry.
Boaz: So, Rosie the Riveter was this poster that they made in 1942, I go back to 1942, of a lady that was working in a rivet factory in California for gunboats. And she had this poster where she was like this. And it became kind of the symbol of the resistance to the idea of this evil that's happening in Europe. That everyone, even though she was only making little rivets, for a gunboat, she was as important as anyone else. And that's the attitude that we have to infuse. All of us have a job to do. That job is to do something, anything that you can to help with a climate emergency.
Climate Acceptance Studios: And that's proven by the science of climate communication as well. They're actually market tested. The world's gonna end and it's been proven conclusively not to work in focus groups and studies as well. Final question, a little thought experiment. You're ⁓ on the stage in Madison Square Gardens and in the audience is all of the climate and nature communicators of the world. And you've got this opportunity to guide them to just one strategy. that all of them cross sector, whether they're oceans or justice or built environment or plastics or whatever it might be, what's the one strategy that you would advise them all to follow?
Boaz: I'll go back to the last question, positive narrative. Let's all think about how it can turn out okay, not how it can turn out badly. What if we get it right? Let's tell stories about what would happen if we all got it right. What if we could do this? What if we are capable of fighting this and making it happen? That's the strategy.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Bravo, what a great ending. So as this is the podcast of the Working Climate Communications Professional, I'm always as a little epilogue, what's next on your to-do list as a leading climate communicator? What have you got next up today, Boaz?
Boaz: Today I'm meeting with my friend JC. We are together planning a TV show that's an environmental TV show, a scripted TV show. That's my next agenda.
Climate Acceptance Studios: How very exciting is it just, is it in development or pre-production or what stage is it at? Well, I wish you the best of luck with that. Boaz, it's been an honor. Thank you so much for coming on and goodbye, best of luck.
Boaz: Good evening. Thank you so much, thanks for having me.
Boaz: Thank
Climate Acceptance Studios: He launched the Don't Choose Extinction campaign that's been viewed by over 2.2 billion people across the world. And recently he conceived the Weather Kids campaign where the kids of today play the weather forecasters of 2050. Prior to joining UNDP, he worked as a TV journalist for 17 years. He covered conflicts, natural disasters, interest stories in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, first for the BBC, then for Reuters TV. He has just launched full frame advisory. Boaz believes there is no evil genius out there to destroy the world and it's up to us to find the solution. Boaz, welcome.
Boaz: Thank you. That's a lovely introduction.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So I think I know the answer to this already because you're quite open about it within your comms. But for the audience, we always start off with a piece of identification. So are you an activist, a campaigner, an advocate, an environmentalist or something else?
Boaz: I think I'm a little bit of all of that, but something else would be the answer. I'm an advocate ⁓ for the climate emergency. ⁓ I'm an activist in a way that ⁓ I have kids, I want them to have a better future, ⁓ and that's the reason why I act. So first and foremost, I'm a dad who is concerned for his children's future, and that's my motivation and my go-to.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So you're a dad and that's the primary thing, is it? So why do you identify yourself in that way? Is that just an emotional connection or is there something?
Boaz: I'm a dad. Emotional connection, you know, I never thought I would have it, but you know, the minute that my elder son was born, he's 13 now, there was something, there was like a chemical switch in my body. And all I cared about from that point on is his well-being. When my second son was born, he's eight now, he was added to the mix. And now I care deeply about their future. I also know that our generation, has it up a little bit. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to swear in this podcast. ⁓ we fucked it up pretty royally. ⁓ so I It's my duty, my job, ⁓ my North Star try and have a small difference and try and make my children's life better my own to try and give them a planet that they can actually live on.
Climate Acceptance Studios: ⁓ yes, can swear, can swear, it's fine. So we're all about action in this podcast. We're all about this idea of stories of action, inspiring action. So why do you think it is that more action is not being taken? Or indeed, do you agree with that question? Do you think loads of action is being taken?
Boaz: think it's also somewhere in the middle. think a lot of action is being taken. A lot of people don't know about the action that's being taken. People take action, they don't relate that to the rest of the world. They don't know how to relate that to the rest of the world. ⁓ You know this very well, Tom, but people who are active in certain things are not necessarily good storytellers. They're not necessarily good communicators. So they need help with that. So that's part of the problem. And then other part of the problem is that
Climate Acceptance Studios: you
Boaz: I don't, honestly don't think that there's enough action being taken. I think that every human being on the planet, from the highest person in the world to the lowest person in the world, if there is such a thing, from north to south, from east to west, has to take action in order to really try and figure out how to create a better tomorrow. How to get out of this conundrum. As you said in your intro, I really don't believe that there's an evil genius sitting out there going... ⁓ I'm going to destroy the world, climate change is a good way of doing it. I think it's something, you know, we took a wrong turn. We ⁓ used ⁓ cheap energy. We didn't know where we were going. And now we have to course correct. And that course correction will take all of us to do. So I think, yes, there's action being taken and it's wonderful. And we want to tell more of those stories and we want more of that to be out there. But I also think that more people need to take action.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Thank But that makes our life as communicators quite tough, doesn't it? Because we thrive on stories of heroes and villains. We need an antagonist out there. So if there is no antagonist, if it's just this collective ⁓ misfortune of a wrong turn, then how do we overcome that? What stories are we telling that don't have heroes or villains in them?
Boaz: think of it as a war. This is a war we're fighting. The enemy this time is not Nazi Germany and it's not kind of like, you know, any evil empire or it's not a dictator of some sort or another. It's a man-made issue, but we are fighting a war. There's also an opposition to us. There is an army on the other side that wants to keep the status quo and we need to continuously fight that battle. But we all of us need to fight that battle. There's no... It has to be... The best way that I can describe it is that we need to be like we were in 1942. Everyone needs to do his part in order to win the war, in order to win the battle against the evil that this time is not the Nazis, it's man-made, it's a wrong turn, but it has to happen. And as I said, there is an opposition.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So, yeah, I want to focus in on your fights, Boaz. There's plenty of other podcasts out there that will talk at length about your career, but I want to focus in on a specific tale of action inspired by the work of the amazing Chris DiMero where it's stories of action that inspire action. So within your career, I mean, you know, 2.2 billion and so on, you've been one of the the largest scale climate communicators on the planet. What is a tale of action that you can tell us today to inspire our audience?
Boaz: I of action is that there's so much out there that's happening all the time. All of these people are taking their small actions and their stories are the stories that need to inspire us. I watched recently the incredible show on Bloomberg TV called The Optimist's Guide to the Planet by Nicolai Costa Waldo and he runs around the world and talks to people that are taking climate action. And I remember specifically that there's this woman in Nairobi, my hometown, that's probably why I remember it so well, that invented a new cooking stove because her children were suffering from a cough. So it wasn't like she wasn't thinking about the larger picture of... of the climate emergency, but she was solving a problem that she had to solve. But that problem then became, she became an entrepreneur, she became quite wealthy, she allowed herself to get out of the slum and into proper housing, and she solved the problem. And now that problem is something that other people can use, and other people of her former status in the slums can really kind of benefit from. That's the kind of stories that are happening all over the world all the time. And that's the stories that inspire me. That's the stories that I wanna try and shout out from the rooftops and make people understand that it's possible to make change in your small way, in whatever you do. Whatever action you wanna take is the right action to take. We're not all climate warriors at the same level, but we all have to be climate warriors.
Climate Acceptance Studios: But what about you, Boaz? I want to talk about you. I want you stop being modest. So tell me about a thing that you've done within your career where you've taken action.
Boaz: So you talked about the Don't Choose Extinction campaign. That was a big, big action that I took. Let's be honest here. I was very lucky. The campaign went viral. We're all asked as communicators, can you make this go viral? And we all say, no, we don't know how. It's not a science. It's kind of a little bit of something else. So of course, when the new NDP asked me, will this go viral, I said yes. But I had no notion that it would. So the success of it is a lot of planning, a lot of building, a lot of fighting, but in the end, kind of like we were also lucky. So I just want to caveat it. But UNDP came to me in ⁓ January 2020. I don't know if you remember what was going on in January 2020 in the world. There was like a small virus in China that was...
Climate Acceptance Studios: I forget, I forget, yeah.
Boaz: And so, you know, very opportune time. And so they came to me and said, listen, ⁓ you know, we want to run a big campaign. We want to do something that's going to reach like, you know, people around the world. ⁓ What do you think we should do? And I kind of came back. We were having this kind of like ⁓ brainstorm with various ⁓ policy teams. So UNDP does a lot of stuff. You know, we have 6,000 programs. We, it's not we anymore. They have... 6,000 programs operational every day across the world, across so many ⁓ issues. ⁓ And so we were having ⁓ a bit of a brainstorm with the policy people of UNDP who are the worst communicators in the world, perhaps. There's no one worse. And I say that lovingly. If they listen to this, they'll understand. But I've told them this to their face a million times. ⁓ And so... ⁓ So I said to them, I said, what is it that you want to say that's important to say not about what you're doing, but something, an issue that you really want to highlight? And they said fossil fuel subsidy reform. And I took out my little Google machine and Googled it because I had no idea what they were talking about. ⁓ So I Googled it. I found out that ⁓ fossil fuel subsidy reform is an extremely complicated subject that doesn't
Climate Acceptance Studios: Mmm.
Boaz: in any way allow itself to be tamed into some sort of communication ⁓ extravaganza and it's going to be difficult. But I thought this might be a fun little challenge. So I said, sure, let's do that. And so we set about building a campaign that would somehow have impact on the fossil fuel subsidy reform. I'm sure that everyone listening to this podcast knows what that is, but for anyone who doesn't, it's the idea that governments pay subsidies to ⁓ manufacturers of fossil fuels as a subsidy. So Shell last year, I think, made $35 billion in profit. They still got subsidies from governments. ⁓ So at that point, was 600 $650 billion being paid out in subsidies every year by governments around the world, in pure subsidies, that 80 % of that was going to the manufacturers themselves. And so that to me seemed like a line in the red. This was negative impact on the planet. Because if we don't take care of that negative impact of 650 billion people, we're not getting anywhere. So even if we put 30 billion dollars into an amazing climate initiative, we're still 620 billion dollars in the red. So it seemed like such an important issue to tackle. But again, it's dense, it's complicated, it's a little bit scary. Most people don't know about it. Most people don't know that their actual tax dollars or their tax bounds are going into this. And so we kind of like ⁓ started thinking about how we can relate this to the everyman. ⁓ And we came up with a idea that was so foreign to the United Nations that it took me a year to convince them that we should do this. And that was that we should be funny. ⁓ We should make a funny video ⁓ about a very, very serious subject, but we should use humor to get through. And ⁓ so, and we also somebody from the outside. We needed somebody from the outside to tell us how incredibly stupid we are in doing this crazy thing of giving away billions billions of dollars to fossil fuel manufacturers. rather than spending that money on something worthy like girls education ⁓ or, know, at that point the COVID-19 was in full bloom. ⁓ You know, we imagined that we could give a vaccine to each person in the world for free if we use that, if it was just one year of that, of those subsidies. And so we set about doing it. And so we needed somebody to say how stupid we were. And we thought that, you know, together with two incredible creative directors that I was working with in this wonderful little company called Activista out of Los Angeles, ⁓ Paco Conde and Beto Fernandez. we decided that the best possible outsider would be a dinosaur. A dinosaur that somehow had survived the extinction and had come back now to tell humanity how incredibly dumb we are. ⁓ How incredibly stupid it is that we ourselves are choosing our own extinction. And so what the dinosaur said, and we were very lucky because very early on Jack Black agreed to sign on to it and he was the...
Climate Acceptance Studios: Okay, wow, wow, wow, yeah, okay.
Boaz: And so we kind of like, we frame the dinosaur as Jack Black. He was modeled on Jack Black. And so ⁓ dinosaur, who was called Frankie, AKA Jack Black, ⁓ said in the script, you know, we had, we had asteroids, we had, know, we had, we had meteors that were hitting the earth. It's as if you are paying for asteroids to hit you. That's what you're doing now. That's exactly what you're doing. But it was all kind of done in a little bit of a funny way. And so we did it. We made it. It took two and a half years, literally one year of convincing UN that it was allowed to be funny. Because I don't know if you know this, Tom, but UN is the least funny organization in the world. And so we did it. And we launched it. And we launched it about a week before the conference. before big conference ⁓ that was happening. ⁓ we waited to see what would happen. And what happened was that The campaign took off insanely. It became viral. It was everywhere. It was in every newspaper. It was on every TV station. People were talking about It. People were bringing out, know, on day three of the campaign, suddenly someone called us and said, in UNDP for procurement, they said, you're not allowed to sell t-shirts. Why are you selling t-shirts? And we said, we're not. And they go, and they sent me a link. It was somebody selling t-shirts of Don't Choose Extinction with Frankie on It because they were just monetizing the phenomenon. And that was for me the biggest... signal of success that somebody was actually selling our merch, you know, so we didn't think about selling it. I kind of kicked myself that I didn't, but somebody did. ⁓ And so, you know, we had a cartoon in one of the biggest French newspapers with Greta Thunberg and Frankie trying to get into the cop and being turned away. That's the level of cultural infusion that we had with the campaign. And then
Climate Acceptance Studios: Do know why it happened? Have you got any idea why it happened?
Boaz: think It's because It was relatable, because everyone loves the dinosaur film. I don't know if you've seen the Don't Choose Extinction clip, but It out with this dinosaur barging into the United Nations General Assembly and he's quite menacing. And he's walking down this island and you're absolutely sure that he's going to munch on a bunch of delegates. And so you're of like you're waiting the horror, but you can't take your eyes away because It's like a Jurassic Park film. You want to see the dinosaur. And so we were tapping into something that people wanted to do anyway. They want to watch film. They want to engage. And then it tear in a corner, know, 20 seconds in, and the dinosaur immediately became funny because he goes up to the guard that's standing next to the podium of the General Assembly and he says, are you okay? Do you need a moment? And so the guard kind of nods and he lets him go in and he starts his speech. And the speech is funny. And so kind of like we turned the corner and we decided that we were going to be funny. We found a script writer that was one of Obama's, President Obama's speech writers, and he was in charge of the funny script. He works for Funny and Die Now. He's a great, great guy. And so he wrote the script for us. And it was a funny script. It was generally funny. So the combination between the dinosaurs, the films that people like to see, we did it very cinematically, and the fact that it was funny and relatable. I think that's what made it happen. so, and the result, the net result of it is that we actually managed to change climate policy with it because in that COP, for the first time in 25 years of COP negotiations, fossil fuel subsidy reform was put on the agenda. So in the final communique of COP, they put in that negotiations on the phase out of fossil fuel subsidies would forever be part of the agenda. And so We actually managed to have impact with it. no one, of all me, thought that that would happen because you don't really have impact on policy with campaigns in general way. It's very, very hard to do. It's very rare. So that's my tale action. ⁓
Climate Acceptance Studios: So ⁓ I just want to circle back a bit. So it seems to me that once the campaign was up and running, it was like a runaway success really, really quickly. But the problem was getting to the point where the green light was given. And I know that many in this audience were within big bureaucracies. So how did you do it? How did you overcome the internal red tape? How did you get a profoundly serious organization like the United Nations to say that being funny was the way to communicate this message. Like technically, like did you have to like have a bunch of presentations? Did you have to speak to a number of people? How did you go about proposing the idea and win them over?
Boaz: stubbornness. I was stubborn. But that stubbornness then translated into ⁓ endless, endless briefs to the executive office of the United Nations Development Program. I had to go and meet with a with ⁓ the executive director of UNDP is called the administrator. ⁓ And I have to go and meet with the administrator every two weeks and assure him that nothing bad would happen. They were terrified that member states would turn against us. And member state turning against us is the last thing that any UN entity wants to do because that's our bosses, that's our executive board, that's who runs us, that's who gives us orders. And so they were terrified that we would make ⁓ governments angry. And we had a heat map of places where fossil fuel subsidies reform was a hot issue. And so we had to kind of like constantly be talking to those missions and making sure that they understand what we're doing and making sure that they weren't angry at us. And so this ⁓ was a constant ⁓ struggle. ⁓ The ⁓ creative directors that I was mentioning, Paco and Beto, after many, many months later and we launched and we were happy and we were sitting, I think in Cannes, in the Cannes Lions Festival and we were having a beer and they said to me, know, Boaz, doing that campaign was like watching a ⁓ Argentinian soap opera that every day you're about to die and then you live to tell the tale the next day. That's how we felt for two years because every day it was like, yeah, we won't be able to do this. And then we somehow managed to get through. and do it. Just filming at the United Nations General Assembly during COVID was an unbelievable difficult thing to achieve because they didn't allow it. And so we set a date with an incredible production house that did the film called Framestore. They were insanely fantastic. ⁓
Climate Acceptance Studios: No no
Boaz: And so we set a date, everything was set, we had everything, we had the crews, we had everything, and the United Nations were supposed to give permission to do it. And then they didn't. And then our cost of money because we had to pay everyone that was on crew for that day. And so then we set another date, a month in advance. And as the days were ticking off, we could see that the same thing was going to happen again. And it took us and some very, very, very wonderful people at the United Nations that supported us at the high level to really go all the way up to the Deputy Secretary General and make her sign the paper that it will allow us to do this filming. And then only 24 hours before the filming started we got permission to do it. mean we only allowed 42 people into the General Assembly. So the entire cast of Don't Choose Extinction is 42 people. ⁓ And so we had to kind of do a lot of digital maneuvering. But everything about it was difficult. There wasn't any part of it that wasn't a struggle every single day for two and a half years.
Climate Acceptance Studios: And that's what we've all got to do, haven't we? We're all working within, you know, hierarchical structures or little silos, be it our family or a company or whatever. And we've all just got to take that bold step and be a bit of a disruptor. I mean, do you think that you are naturally a disruptor, personality wise?
Boaz: I think so. I think, know, I like to get things done. You know, I have a similar background than you, think, Tom. I was a TV news producer for a very long time. And what that taught me is that, you know, you land in, you know, in Congo, Brazzaville during a war and you have to manage everything. still get footage out that day, so it hits kind of like the wire services and everything works. And that taught me that, you know, there's only solutions. There's no no. And so I took that when I left to work at the United Nations, that's the attitude that I took with me. So I don't know if I'm a disruptor, but I think I just brought an attitude of like, I'm not, I'm going to do what needs to be done and the bureaucracy be damned. And so now I can tell you after I've left the United Nations, it's been 10 days almost, ⁓ that I may have broken a few rules. I probably did break a couple of rules as I was going through this, procurement rules, other rules, ⁓ but it had to be done. And so I think the lesson of that is that for me it was like, had this idea that this needed to get done and it was going to get done. And so I was gonna do everything within my power to make it happen.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So I want to return to the aftermath of the campaign. I'm very interested to see about that. But before we get to that, we now move on to the quickfire round, which has been quite a challenge. not going to lie over the, I think it's 14 or 15 episodes so far, because you people who care about the planet, you've got so much to say, but let's give it a go and see whether we can keep to brief answers. So we start with a bit of word of association. First word that comes to mind when I say climate.
Boaz: Emergency.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Who is your greatest inspiration in climate and nature communications?
Boaz: I don't have a single person. think Ingmar Retshog from We Don't Have Time inspired me greatly. He's doing amazing things with this platform.
Climate Acceptance Studios: He's got such energy, hasn't he? He's amazing.
Boaz: It's endless. He's like a do-or-sell ⁓ bunny.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Is there someone's work out there that you think should be receiving more attention than it has been currently?
Boaz: No, not this single specific person. I think everyone who's a climate warrior needs to receive as much attention as they possibly can. And that's our job. We need to communicate about it.
Climate Acceptance Studios: here, fucking here. Is there a favorite book or movie or TV show on environmentalism, climate or nature?
Boaz: I stay away from them, I read science fiction so I can get away from all this shit.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Wow, fair enough, fair enough. What's your favourite communications channel?
Boaz: I'm a bit of a traditionalist, I love TV still. I still think that TV is so wonderful and tells such great stories. I think I'm a bit biased on that. But I would have to say TV, but I love newspapers too. I'm a bit old fashioned.
Climate Acceptance Studios: And do you think TV is the most effective communications channel or is there something else?
Boaz: No, I think social media is definitely the most effective. I TikTok is incredibly effective. ⁓ think ⁓ many, many social media platforms are very, very effective and I think we need to use them as much as possible.
Climate Acceptance Studios: but you would highlight specifically TikTok in the social media world.
Boaz: I think so, I think TikTok ⁓ is an incredible phenomenon. I have my issues with TikTok, but I think it's an incredible phenomenon. And I think the short form is very, very clever.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Is that because it's entirely based around short form? Like what is it about TikTok that you think makes it so effective?
Boaz: I think it's a short form of government. think the attention span is lessened and lessened. Instead of fighting against it, Tikitaka went directly into it. And I think they did it. I think trying to tell stories in that short format is also a challenge, but it also makes it very succinct.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So do you have a favourite stat or fact about the climate crisis?
Boaz: I think stats are a little bit overrated. I've always been against them a little bit because for me, the overall stat, the 1.5 degrees, we can't pass it or we're gonna die. We're past 1.5 degrees. We may not be past 1.5 degrees because it changes a lot and it's a 10 year average and we're all alive. I think we need to concentrate on the positive of this. need to concentrate on what's working and we need to make sure that we don't get overwhelmed by facts and by the enormity of of the issue, but we can, each of us as individuals, actually have an impact.
Climate Acceptance Studios: That's a brilliant answer. Deconstructing our format. I love it. What's the one climate myth or misconception you wish you could permanently retire?
Boaz: I'm. that we're all gonna die. I mean, we're all gonna die. That's the But we're all gonna die because of climate emergency.
Climate Acceptance Studios: I was gonna say that, yes. What's your number one source of climate information?
Boaz: I read so much, it's hard to say number one source. I read all the reports, I read all the technical reports. I'm constantly consuming information about the climate emergency. I have no number one. It's all of it.
Climate Acceptance Studios: And finally, is there a favourite analogy or metaphor for explaining the climate crisis?
Boaz: There's this wonderful woman that works at UNDP called Cassie Flynn who has the best metaphor and I use it all the time. She says, imagine you go to the beach and you go and you spend a wonderful time at the beach and then you get back into your car and it's hot in the car because the car has windows and the heat got trapped inside the car. And so you start driving and you open the windows. Climate change is the fact that you can't open the windows.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Very good. I've never heard that before. Well, here ends the quick fire round. so, though I like it, we're here to be disruptive. We're disruptors, right? You you have to break the incumbent rules to create a brave new world, even within the confines of this podcast by us. Okay, let's return back to...
Boaz: I'm sorry I disrupted your format. Thank
Climate Acceptance Studios: know, the amazing campaign. what was the aftermath, first of all? So we had this runaway train success. I mean, was there a moment when you defined it as being ended? And when was that? And did you sort of sit back and reflect on what had happened?
Boaz: Thank you. We had really strong measurements of the campaign almost instantly, so we knew what was going on as we were moving forward. And at first we did think there was going to be an end date. We just thought, you know, this is going to be campaign and it's going to end naturally and that's it. But very quickly we realized that Frankie the Dino, as we named him, became kind of like this avatar, that was a very, very useful avatar. So ⁓ With some partners, we figured out that we could make a real life Frankie the Dino. Dino. So we commissioned a puppet, a puppet with man inside it that ⁓ Franky the ⁓ It's in my ⁓ ⁓ And ⁓ we started taking it around the world. So Frankie started visiting countries and helping governments with their green agendas. And so we had the most incredible experience with this. We went to Rwanda for a big conference, a youth conference in Rwanda where Frankie was a big, big hit. And really kind of the government requested it. They wanted Frankie to be there so they would help them with their outreach around their green initiatives. We went to Egypt during the COP in Egypt with Frankie. We went to Colombia, the Colombian government And the government at the time ⁓ had a very, very strong green agenda, but they ⁓ were in a minority government. So the parliament was against them. And so they needed support to try and kind of push this ⁓ climate agenda that they had out. And so they asked for Frankie's support, so we took Frankie there. And everywhere we went, we had our little puppeteer that was inside Frankie and dancing around and meeting kids. scaring kids. had the most horrible experience in Rwanda where you went to a kindergarten and everyone burst out in tears. ⁓ But it was just a huge incredible phenomenon. We took him to Japan because the Japanese government asked us to join them and help them figure out how they can better communicate their green agenda. And so this was like this went on for years and years years after Frankie. So we kept him alive. had a social media feed of his own.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Wow, okay.
Boaz: He posted a lot of stuff. And so it kind of like went on for a long, long time. So the campaign itself was ⁓ over, but Frankie lived on as an avatar, as a climate activist in himself. And of course, the film keeps being seen, keeps being referred to. It's one of those iconic films now that's become part of the climate discourse in a very big way.
Climate Acceptance Studios: The dinosaur costume, I assume, where is it in the garage? Is it hanging on the hook gathering dust?
Boaz: No, it's kind of bundled up in a kind of like a it's in a golf bag, if you can imagine. Not a, know, like a bag that you put all your golf stuff in. It's quite, it's big. It's 15 feet long when it's fully. Last time it was used by my wife decided to put it on to barge around the neighborhood on Halloween. I can see in your photo. It's hilarious.
Climate Acceptance Studios: 15 feet, wow. Okay. Okay. So, Well, I think we need to put that in the show notes. We need to dig that out. That would be in the spirit of you being funny. Let's make this podcast a bit more funny. So obviously you've got your metrics, right? You've got your traditional communications metrics. You've got your impressions and your views and your clicks and your so on. were there other impacts that you measured, like influencing policy and so on?
Boaz: haha Yeah, so I think the influencing policy thing was really the most important thing. As I mentioned, of like, know, it really seeing fossil fuel subsidy reform in the final communique ⁓ of the COP was incredible to us. was obviously we didn't do it alone. There was a lot of pressure. There was a lot of activists. There was a lot of talk. But I think we pushed it over the line. I think that Frankie was able to push it over the line and get that into actual policy. So that was really incredible. Except for that, know, there's so many other things that happen that are almost anecdotal. I remember one of the directors at UNDP came up to me about a week later and he said, you know, he's Brazilian and he said, my mom lives in Rio in this building and she sent me a clip of Frankie because her doorman told her that she has to watch it and she sent it to me not knowing that we'd made it. So she sent it to one of the big directors of UNP, not knowing that he was connected to it and said, you have to watch this film because her doorman told her to. that's how, you know, it kind of like, it showed me that it really kind of reached outside of our networks. You know, we're pretty used to seeing our own stuff in our feeds and then our peers and our compatriots kind of like reflecting it back to us. But when you kind of, when you're completely outside of your network and you see it, it's incredible.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Hey!
Boaz: I had people, we had a big cinema campaign with Frankie the Dino. There's an organization called Sawa, is the Screen Advertisement Association globally. And the woman who used to run it, she's now retired, Cheryl Savage, was incredible, a huge, huge, huge, help and influence. And she basically got Frankie into about 30 countries. cinema-wide. So we had like a distribution. Pearl and Dean did it in the United Kingdom. ⁓ And so Frankie was in cinemas for at least six weeks. ⁓ And I got people from Indonesia sending me pictures of Frankie while they were in the cinema with their kids. That's the kind of thing that
Climate Acceptance Studios: Okay. just realised something as you were talking that there is this similarity between Frankie and between the weather kids in that both examples are of like different eras, different ages, sort of connecting together magically. I mean, presumably you've had that thought yourself. So can you, you know, can you you tell me a bit more about that? I mean, did that happen organically or is there a conscious choice there?
Boaz: Well, the thing is, in both cases, as I mentioned, we needed a messenger. It couldn't be us. It couldn't be, in the case of the weather case, couldn't be adults. We needed something else. We didn't know it was not going to be adults, but we knew we needed some kind of messenger. In the case of the dinosaur, we knew we needed someone outside. At first, we thought it would be an alien, honestly. We were like, oh, an alien should come here and tell us how stupid we are. But then the idea of a fossil, fossil, know, fossil fuels, that just captured our imagination. in terms of the Weather Kids, we were also looking for a different messenger. We were trying to figure out how we can step outside of ourselves so we could see ourselves from the outside in a way. And for us, at that point, kids were ⁓ such a wonderful way to do that. It's also a truism that kids are an incredible way for us to try and get people to take action.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Mmm.
Boaz: Because I'm not the only dad out there. There's other dads and we all want the best for our children. And it doesn't matter what else we believe in. The truism is that we all want the best for our children. And so ⁓ essentially that's how we came up with the idea of a kid in the Weather Kids. But it started off as from we need a different messenger. We need somebody else to tell us this.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So the first was from the past and the second was from the future.
Boaz: In the future, exactly.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So, yeah, all many congratulations and we'll put full details of the campaign in the show notes for those who don't know about it and obviously a link to the film itself. Okay, for the final section, for the third act of the podcast, we always go on to sort of more general opinions. So firstly, within the climate and nature communication sector, this is what it's all about. What is our future as a sector, do you see?
Boaz: You know, I think the... We've had a difficult time, let's be honest, Tom, in the last two years or so, it's been more difficult to communicate around the climate emergency. We've had to use an enormous amount of euphemism to try not to say climate change or climate emergency. So that is happening and it's still happening, but I think that the pendulum is gonna swing back and it's gonna swing back hard. I think we have to be ready for it when it does swing back. I think we need to be prepared to communicate communicate with everything we have as soon as we possibly can. We can't let this go. This is such an important issue that all of us, all the communicators out there need to think about what their next steps are when the pendulum swings. What can we do? How can we be bigger? How can we be bolder? How can we reach more people? How can we get more people to take action? How can we tell more action stories? How can we highlight those people in Nairobi? and Lima and Sydney. How can we tell those stories of the people who are taking action out there? And how can we help the community take more action? I think we should all be thinking about it all the time and constantly be ⁓ thinking about new ways of communicating and new ideas on how to communicate. You you yourself are doing that in your organization and I know you're.
Climate Acceptance Studios: We are, we are.
Boaz: Incredible job.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So why do you think the pension is going to swing back then? Is just because of the nature of, know, the cyclical nature of, you know, cultural history or something more?
Boaz: I think so. also, know, it's, know, climate deniers are a small minority of the population. When we kind of like did kind of like studies around it for for don't choose extinction we We we kind of figured out that there was about 10 percent In the margin that were climate deniers that thought that it was a chinese conspiracy and and that's it And then there was like another 10 on the other side that were Greta Thunberg and were extremely active and then everything in between the 80 in between were just people and those people were the ones we wanted to reach. Those are the people that we needed to reach. We're not going to reach the people that think that it's a Chinese conspiracy. There's no point. But also, they're only 10%. And we don't need to reach Greta Thunberg and the activists, because they're already doing whatever they can to do this. So what we need to do is reach the people in the middle. We use the metaphor of the Simpsons. We had... We had Lisa on one side ⁓ and the dad, I can't remember dad's name, ⁓ Homer on the other side and Marge was in the middle and all the others were in the middle. But we have Lisa on one side and it kind of went on a scale of how close they were to Lisa and how close they were to Homer. ⁓ And we use that metaphor a lot to show this idea that 80 % of us believe that this is a problem and.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Roma. Yeah.
Boaz: We need to solve it, but we're not quite solving it yet. So we need to act on those 80 people. We need to make them realize it. And I think those 80 people are going to make the pendulum swing again. And the other thing that I believe very strongly is that market forces are going to force this. Too much investment is being put in already. Too much is going on. We're not going to let this go. We're going to make it happen. And climate, the climate emergency in the end will be solved because the market wants it to be solved, because it's good for business. It's...
Climate Acceptance Studios: Yeah, the insurance industry, I mean, how are they getting insured anymore, quite frankly?
Boaz: Exactly, insurance industry, the construction industry. It's like there's so many people that can benefit from this. But on the other hand, if we look at the transition, that could be the biggest boon in history. mean, the gold rush will look like a little blimp in the radar compared to the trillions and trillions of ⁓ funding that will flow through the transition.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Cheers, hoping. I I love your optimism and I share it on some days and others not. ⁓ To what extent do you follow and apply the science of climate communication itself?
Boaz: I'll share it on some days too.
Climate Acceptance Studios: How much do you follow this amazing social scientist out there who is serving, messaging and opinion and stuff like that?
Boaz: Yeah. To me, communication is communication. To me, I could be selling chewing gum. It's all the same. I need to break through. I need to reach the people. I need to find a way to get through the noise. It's not science. least it's not rocket science. It's communication. It's storytelling. It's narrative.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So leading on from that then, what's the best piece of advice about climate communication that you've ever received?
Boaz: Someone once told me don't let subject matter dictate how you're talking about the subject matter. So when I thought back on that and I said, okay, here I have a very, very difficult issue to try and communicate around, the best way to do it is probably through doom and gloom and a bit of sadness, but what if I don't? What if I don't let it dictate the enormity of the problem and the difficulty of the problem? What if I can communicate in a different way and I can make it funny? So for me, that was the best piece of advice. Don't let... the subject matter dictate how you communicate about the subject matter. You can communicate funny about sad things, can communicate sad about funny things. It's like, just do what needs to be done in order to break through.
Climate Acceptance Studios: I have a favorite phrase is that the world is far too important to be taken seriously.
Boaz: Exactly, exactly.
Climate Acceptance Studios: What advice do you have for that ⁓ young person with passion and purpose that's coming out blinking from the education system into the world for the first time and they say, right, I want to be a climate communicator. What advice would you give that person at the start of their career?
Boaz: First of all, be a climate communicator. It's very easy to be your own climate communicator right now, at this minute. Open an account and you're a climate communicator. Do good content and you'll rise to the top. So, you know, I think there's an easy way to do it. But, you know, continuously be out there. Network, communicate, try and figure out if you want to get a job somewhere and go for it. We, you know, the... The community needs good communicators more than anything else. To me, the climate emergency is in large parts a communication emergency. It's us that can solve the problem, but it's us that are not solving the problem fast enough. So we need every single good communicator out there. And if there's a young communicator, we need them. We need them back.
Climate Acceptance Studios: So thing that I hear on that note from my clients is that, you know, when they're to cap in hand to their funders to keep their organization going, know, communications comes very, very low down in the pecking order of allocation of funds. So you and I obviously disagree with this. So, you know, what message do you have to the funders of the world on this specific allocation of budget?
Boaz: I think people who are looking into the further future, people like Morgan Stanley, for instance, just as an example, know that what's happening is happening. They have no doubt and they're already acting towards it. So good business is staying ahead of that curve. And if you want to do good business, you must be part of the transition. But to do really good business, you have to help communicate about that transition. And so for me, it's a no-brainer. If you want to succeed in business today, you have to, first of all, you have to be sustainable. You have to be, you have to think about the transition. You have to think about your footprint. You have to think about your supply chain. And secondly, you need to communicate that because it's going to get you sales.
Climate Acceptance Studios: What do you think is the most important environmental message that the public needs to hear?
Boaz: that we're not all gonna die. I think It's very important that we turn this doom and gloom scenario around. This narrative has been with us for many, many, many years. It's very easy for us to fall into It. And that leads to inaction. It doesn't lead to action. It leads to apathy. It leads to the fact that we stay home and say, okay, if we're all gonna die, I might as well just hang out here and not do anything. So we need action. You know, I know you, do you remember Rosie the Riveter? Like, you remember her?
Climate Acceptance Studios: I don't get the reference, I'm so sorry.
Boaz: So, Rosie the Riveter was this poster that they made in 1942, I go back to 1942, of a lady that was working in a rivet factory in California for gunboats. And she had this poster where she was like this. And it became kind of the symbol of the resistance to the idea of this evil that's happening in Europe. That everyone, even though she was only making little rivets, for a gunboat, she was as important as anyone else. And that's the attitude that we have to infuse. All of us have a job to do. That job is to do something, anything that you can to help with a climate emergency.
Climate Acceptance Studios: And that's proven by the science of climate communication as well. They're actually market tested. The world's gonna end and it's been proven conclusively not to work in focus groups and studies as well. Final question, a little thought experiment. You're ⁓ on the stage in Madison Square Gardens and in the audience is all of the climate and nature communicators of the world. And you've got this opportunity to guide them to just one strategy. that all of them cross sector, whether they're oceans or justice or built environment or plastics or whatever it might be, what's the one strategy that you would advise them all to follow?
Boaz: I'll go back to the last question, positive narrative. Let's all think about how it can turn out okay, not how it can turn out badly. What if we get it right? Let's tell stories about what would happen if we all got it right. What if we could do this? What if we are capable of fighting this and making it happen? That's the strategy.
Climate Acceptance Studios: Bravo, what a great ending. So as this is the podcast of the Working Climate Communications Professional, I'm always as a little epilogue, what's next on your to-do list as a leading climate communicator? What have you got next up today, Boaz?
Boaz: Today I'm meeting with my friend JC. We are together planning a TV show that's an environmental TV show, a scripted TV show. That's my next agenda.
Climate Acceptance Studios: How very exciting is it just, is it in development or pre-production or what stage is it at? Well, I wish you the best of luck with that. Boaz, it's been an honor. Thank you so much for coming on and goodbye, best of luck.
Boaz: Good evening. Thank you so much, thanks for having me.
