Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - From Singing in Parks to Selling Out Arenas: AJR’s Adam Met on Building Success from Scratch | E113

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

As a teenager performing on New York’s streets and parks, Adam Met never imagined selling out arenas nationwide. Alongside his brothers Jack and Ryan, he formed the band AJR, playing for hours each summer while learning to capture the attention of indifferent passersby. A single tweet to Sia changed everything, launching their breakthrough. Balancing music with demanding academic work and nonprofit leadership, Adam mastered the art of building an engaged fan base that is driven to action. In this episode, Adam joins Ilana to share insights from his new book, Amplify, which blends his experiences in music and climate advocacy to inspire community building across various fields. Adam Met is a musician, climate advocate, educator, and member of the multiplatinum band AJR. He is the Executive Director of Planet Reimagined, a nonprofit leveraging media and strategic advocacy to mobilize climate action. In this episode, Ilana and Adam will discuss: (00:00) Introduction  (01:51) Early Musical Influences and Street Performances (04:04) Coping with Rejection as a Child Performer (05:52) Attracting an Audience While Embracing Nerves (09:30) How One Tweet to Sia Changed AJR’s Career (13:01) Why “I’m Ready” Became a Smash Hit (16:58) Overcoming the Fear of Being a One-Hit Wonder (21:29) The Innovative Strategies Behind AJR’s Success (26:56) Two Key Tactics to Build an Engaged Fan Base (28:48) The Birth of Adam’s Debut Book, Amplify (31:28) How Adam Merges Music and Climate Advocacy (34:21) Adapting Quickly: The Drive-In Concert Pivot (39:21) Funding Climate Action Through Bipartisan Support Adam Met is a musician, climate advocate, educator, and member of the multiplatinum band AJR. He is the Executive Director of Planet Reimagined, a nonprofit using media and strategic advocacy to mobilize climate action. Adam works closely with Congress and the White House to promote renewable energy and serves as a sustainability advocate for the United Nations Development Programme. In recognition of his efforts, Adam received the 2024 TIME Earth Award and was named a New York Times Changemaker. Connect with Adam: Adam’s Website: adammet.net  Adam’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/adam-met-38274379  Resources Mentioned: Adam’s Book, Amplify: How to Use the Power of Connection to Engage, Take Action, and Build a Better World: https://www.amazon.com/Amplify-Connection-Engage-Action-Better/dp/0593735900  Planet Reimagined: planetreimagined.com  Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW way for professionals to Advance Their Careers & Make 5-6 figures of EXTRA INCOME in Record Time. Check out our free training today at leapacademy.com/training

Wow, this show is going to be incredible. So buckle up and I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. But before we get started, I want to ask you for a favor. See, it's really, really important for me to help millions of people elevate their career, fast-track to leadership, land dream roles, jump to entrepreneurship or create portfolio careers. And this podcast is all about enabling this for millions of people to see a map of what it actually takes for big leaders to reach success.

So subscribe and download so you never miss it. Plus it really, really helps me continue to bring amazing guests. Okay, so let's dive in. We've played Madison Square Garden. We've done all the TV shows you can. We've done everything in front of huge audiences. Street performing is the most nervous I've ever been

because they are not there to see you. Adam met with me here. We've done everything in front of huge audiences. Street performing is the most nervous I've ever been because they are not there to see you. Adam met with me here, musician, professor. He is with a band called AJR. He's also an executive director of Planet Reimagined. My youngest brother, Jack, he was eight. Ryan was 11 and I was 14. And we started just performing in the parks.

We would sing there, we would dance, we would play some instruments. Sometimes the police would come after us for not having permits. It was horrendous and it was great at the same time. Ryan and I were in class together and he was tweeting to a bunch of celebrities. Sia saw the tweet, DM'd us.

She took us to lunch and she said, okay, I'm going to introduce you to a bunch of different labels. And now we sell out arenas around the country. We've built this community where people are supporting each other, because if you look at our comments online, 99% of them are wildly positive. What are steps one, two, three, four, and five that we took in order to build an effective fan base. The first one is... Adam met with me here, musician, professor. He's also an executive director of Planet Reimagined. He is with a band called AJR.

Actually, my son knows it, so it's really cool. And I'm so excited to have you here. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to get into the conversation. It's so fun. So again, you are doing a lot of things. And in Leap Academy, we believe that every single person will eventually have a portfolio career. And this is where the future of work is going.

But I wanna take you back in time to Adam, the little kid, maybe singing in the park, but take a second. Like, why music? How did that become a thing? By the way, I completely agree with your philosophy that everyone is gonna have this portfolio career because all of my friends, family, they all wanna do so many different things. So I love this philosophy to start.

But little kid Adam loved doing theater and loved listening to music that our dad played for us. So we would sit around in the living room, he would play his vinyl collection for us. And so we were so inspired by the music that he grew up on. So music from the 50s and 60s, the Beach Boys and Simon and Garfunkel. Simon and Garfunkel, my favorite band of all time. Nice. And learning music through listening was a really important thing. We took some piano lessons, some voice lessons growing up.

But we realized that living in New York City, that the way to grow your chops and to actually get good at chops and to actually get good at something was to actually do it. And so, I mean, we grew up here, going out and seeing street performers, that was a daily occurrence for us. So we then took our stuff out into the parks and we started just performing in the parks. So my youngest brother, Jack, he was eight. Ryan was 11 and I was 14.

Amazing. So they just let you go off to the park and go sing there? Yeah, we would sing there, we would dance, we would play some instruments, but sometimes the police would come after us for not having permits. But we were so young that we were like, oh, I'm so sorry, we didn't know that we were supposed to have a permit. So it was horrendous and it was great at the same time because when you're playing in a place like the park, there are thousands of people walking by,

but none of them wanna stop to see you. You have to convince them, let alone stopping, but to actually stay. Now when we sell tickets to big venues, people actually wanna be there. So to be able to convince somebody who's going on about their day to actually stop and pay attention,

that skill is what we used in order to build our shows today. So we learned so much from straight performing. This is actually so, so, so beautiful and powerful. As a kid, I assumed that feels a little bit like rejection. Like you're singing there and you're playing there and people are not necessarily clapping. And, you know, so take me there.

Was there moments of like, what on earth are we doing? Or was it just fun because you're a kid? My life was just all rejection from being a kid. We did a little bit of acting, you know, some theater, some voiceover work, some commercial work. And when you audition as a kid, it is all rejection. All rejection. There are hundreds and hundreds of kids with their stage parents that show up to every

single audition. Yeah. And that rejection, if you didn't learn how to get over that really quickly, so my philosophy was the audition was the thing. The audition was the activity. But honestly, we saw the street performing piece of it as practice. It wasn't necessarily the show itself,

even though we were performing, but we knew this was just step one in order to get us to the next level. How did you learn to recover as a kid? I know this sounds really weird, us to the next level. How did you learn to recover as a kid? I know this sounds really weird, but even to this day, I am so obsessed with Asian food that food was, I know it's crazy. But food was like my big recovery.

Anytime anything bad would happen, I would always order way too much Chinese food and just take out. I would be 200 pounds and that would be the case. Like, I would, oh my God. Okay. Yeah. But I mean, as a kid, what are you going to do? I don't know if we can talk about, but like, get high? Like, what are you going to do? So with that, with rejection as a kid, it was always food for me. So you had to create these coping mechanisms that I guess also you can apply them later on.

Okay, so now you're learning to attract people in the park. How do you do that? Because again, that's performance, right? And the truth is that I don't and you know better, but as a musician, it's not necessarily the most talented is the best performer. So talk to me a little bit about what you learned there. So because my youngest brother Jack was eight, we kind of put him in the front and honestly a lot of people ended up feeling really bad for him. And so they stopped and ended up giving us money.

And we ended up making enough money to buy a ukulele, to buy a computer, to put the programs on for us to create music. And the other thing we learned is we did a bunch of original songs at first that we had written. Nobody cared because nobody knew the songs. But as soon as we started singing Jackson 5 or things that they recognized, they started to come over. So you needed to give them a little taste of something that they already knew in order to bring them in.

And then you could transition to doing your own music. So it was all of these little strategies. What's the right visual? How long should the set be? 10 or 15 minutes, perfect amount of time for people to stay if it was a weekend. If it was a weekday, two or three minutes and they were out. So it was really amazing learning experience.

And honestly, I've never been more nervous in my life than for street performing. We've played Madison Square Garden. We've done all the TV shows you can. We've done everything in front of huge audiences. Street performing is the most nervous I've ever been because they are not there to see you. Everywhere else, they're there to see you.

But street performing, you have to convince them, which is so much harder of a lift. That is such a powerful statement. And I think what you're describing is that constant experimentation to get better and to get results, which eventually that all that matters anyway, right? Is how quick you can experiment.

But talk to me then about that nervousness, because again, as a kid, you know, I'm looking at my kids, I'm like, if they're gonna be nervous, they're out. You know, they're gonna go watch TikTok. So what made you, despite being nervous, go into it? I think nerves are incredibly valuable. I think if you're not slightly worried about something, slightly concerned about something,

then there's no skill to be built. Then you're already an expert at it, then you know what you're doing. If there's something inside of you that feels like, I'm not 100% sure, then that's the thing that's worth pursuing because you're going to learn something. Exactly. That's where growth lives. Okay, so you're doing these shows in the park, how many? Is it like two or is it like a lot? So we would go for like six hours or so, but we would do 20 or 30 minute sets and then take a little break, and then do another hour and then take a break.

We would go for six hours in a day and we did this for five or six summers in a row. Oh, wow. In order to just practice and practice and practice. In between doing that when we were back home, we would be working on music. Now, Ryan and Jack, my brothers, they write the music. But in the early days, we were figuring out what is our sound, what is going to be our inspiration, all of that.

So we spent a lot of time working on that. Did you all love music or was it a pull from one of you more than others? We all really liked music, but we all really liked different things about music. And I think that's one of the reasons why the band became successful. That we all had these different things about music. And I think that's one of the reasons why the band became successful. That we all had these different roles that we fell into.

So I was much more on the business side and the marketing side and the branding side. And my brothers wrote the music, Ryan was really good at producing, Jack is really good at coming up with melodies. So the fact that we each had our own roles was really beneficial in the long run because we weren't stepping on each other's toes Fascinating. So you're doing these things and after these few summers, what do you decide to do? it was very tiring doing it for all of those years and

In the off time when we weren't performing we would put up songs on YouTube and just make a video that cost $100 and just throw it up on YouTube. And we did this for a while and for years it wasn't working. We would get 50 views or 100 views, our friends were seeing it, things like that. And then Ryan and I were in class together at Columbia where I did my undergrad and he was tweeting to a bunch of celebrities while I was paying attention in class. And his tweets were all, at Miley Cyrus, a link to one of our videos,

at Justin Bieber, a link to one of our videos, just to try and get somebody to find it. And then the last one that he did on that day was Sia, the artist. Sia saw the tweet, watched the video, retweeted it, DM'd us and said, I'm downtown, I love what you do, come meet me at my hotel. Wow.

Insane, right? Amazing. That never happens. Right. Like, absolutely never happens. But it's kind of what you wish will happen. Oh my God, totally. I mean, it's like for years probably.

Yeah. And somebody like her, I'm really glad it was her and not Justin Bieber, right? Because Sia is a writer. She really understands the industry. She understands how management works, how labels work. And she introduced us to a whole bunch of people in the industry in order to get our career going. So, at that point, you're getting basically an opportunity of a lifetime, if you will.

And what do you do with it? So she comes out of her hotel singing the song that we sent her. So immediately we know she's excited. So that was ridiculous. Never in our wildest dreams could we have thought that was gonna happen. She took us to lunch and she said,

"'Okay, I love everything you're doing. I'm gonna introduce you to a bunch of different labels.'" We met with three different labels. Two of them were major labels that you've heard of, but I'm not going to reveal their names. Both of them said, great, we love what you guys do, we're going to get you in a room with writers and we're going to have them write all your songs and we're going to turn you into the next big boy band. The third one says, I have a label, but I really like what you're doing because it doesn't sound like everything else.

It's weird and it's quirky and nothing on the radio sounds like the thing that you're doing." He said, I have a label, but I don't want you to sign to my label. I want to manage you. I want to see if we can have a new approach. This was 2012. This was before independent artists were a really big thing. So we ended up going with the guy who believed in what we were doing.

His name is Steve Greenberg, and he is still our manager to today. Wow, that's amazing. We ended up starting a company with him that we all owned with him. And the philosophy behind it was for management in the music industry, most managers make money on the gross. But for him, he said, I'll only make money when you make money. It was a really innovative and generous approach. He really put all of his heart and effort into it. Even when things took a downturn,

a year after we had our first big song, he said, no, we're going to keep building, and we're going to keep building. Now we sell out arenas around the country. Incredible. But take me to 2013. What happened and why did that single take off? That was a song that Sia heard and that was the song that Steve, our manager, heard and said, this is quirky, this is weird. Before that, when you made that song, did you think that it's gonna be a hit?

No, had no idea. It was a song that actually featured a quote from SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon. Obviously, we would never do something like that today, but we said, what the hell, we like SpongeBob, let's put a little quote on the song. The people at Nickelodeon also didn't think it was going to be a hit. So they gave us an incredible deal to license the sound.

They're like, it's just some kids in their living room making stuff. They had no idea that it was going to be a platinum single and sell millions of copies. Oh my God. So that was extremely lucky. Why do you think it was so successful? Do you know? Yeah.

It's really interesting. That summer that that song became successful, the two big songs that were on the charts were our song and Meghan Trainor's All About That Bass. We were selling more copies per person who heard it on the radio than Meghan Trainor, but our scores for the testing that radio does was a lot more divisive. Meghan Trainor's song, people really liked it. more divisive. Meghan Trainor's song, people really liked it. Our song, they either loved it more than anything else or they hated it more than anything else. And because of that, it didn't get as high on the charts because the hate scores were too high. But even the people who hated it,

it got stuck in their head. So we realized that these kind of catchy, weird, quirky lyrics and sounds are the kinds of things that we should be leaning into. Not sounding like anyone else. What's the name of it if somebody wants to take a look at it? That song is called I'm Ready. That's incredible because I think even in startups, sometimes we say it's better if people either love it or hate it versus a

lot of people just kind of like it because it's never good enough. So that's really interesting that it's the same with songs. It's absolutely the same with music. And there was a period in the middle where Spotify and Apple Music were the people who were driving all of the listening. And yes, people still listen a lot on those platforms, but now it's social media driving people to those platforms. But when it was Spotify and Apple Music, a lot of the times you would get music directly from the artists themselves, but even more from curated playlists. And for you not to

skip a song on a playlist, at that point, the first 10 or 15 seconds needed to grab you. So there was a transition in the music industry where intros got a lot shorter, and people would put choruses at the beginning of songs as opposed to waiting. You needed the hook, basically. Amazing. Exactly. You needed the hook at the beginning. And this is what this song had. From the very beginning, you got the hook as the beginning. And this is what this song had. From the very beginning, you got the hook as opposed to having an intro and a verse and having to wait almost a minute to get to the chorus.

So this is, I think, why that song ended up going. Okay, so you see this success. What does that do to you, to your family, to where is it taking you? So many people think that having a platinum song means that you've made it. But in reality, it's not true. So we've had, on that song, I think there's something like a hundred million streams on Spotify, just on that song, which is great.

I mean, it's pretty insane. Yeah, it's great, let's be honest. We tried to do shows after that song. In the Northeast, we put up a tour that were small venues, a couple of hundred people. Some of the shows, 12 people showed up. We could not sell tickets. This was a real downturn,

because we thought 100 million streams, we thought we had made it, we could sell arenas, we could have... No. No. The song itself, and we were terrified at that time of being a one-hit wonder that we would have that song as a hit and then we would have no follow-ups. And so we thought a lot about, okay, what makes a fan base? What makes a career? What really takes people from, oh, I know that

song to I know that artist to I want to go to a show to I want to buy merch to I want to follow them on social media, all of those other things. And so we said the real thing is that people want to know things beyond the song. They want to hear lyrics where it makes them ask, who is that person who's singing that or saying that? And so this was about a year, a year and a half of us having no success after the song.

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This program helps hundreds a year, and it will help you gain the income, influence, and impact that will transform the second part of your life. Watch our free training today at leapacademy.com slash free hyphen training. The link is in the show notes. Now back to the show. In that one and something year, what does it do to you? Do you guys would like, I mean, let's quit it. Like, I don't want to do music anymore.

Like, cut our losses. What does it do? Because I think sometimes when things are not successful, it's almost easier than when things fall from high to low. Totally agree. Our manager was the key player during that year because he said, look, you've already started to build up some of your social media. People already know one song.

It's going to be way easier to knock down the door a second time than it is the first time. Also, just pre our manager, we were willing to wait a decade, right, before we had any success. So a year to us was nothing. So- But it feels hard. Feels like a lot. One of the really beneficial things that we did during our year where I'm ready was doing really well is we built a lot of relationships in the music industry with radio, with streaming platforms, with all of these other places. And so we made a lot of friends who were willing to take a chance on us that second time, but we weren't ready with the right song. And so we put some stuff up on Facebook when that was the thing that you did. We put some stuff up on YouTube,

and nothing was really clicking until we came to that philosophy of, okay, what are the lyrics that people want to hear where they want to know who is the person saying that? And how do you experiment with a song? Like, how do you know? Sorry, like somebody that has no clue about the music industry. Because sometimes you put something on YouTube and it's not going to take off. And's not because it's not good it's because the algorithms and a bunch of others so how do you experiment? Having people who you trust around you is the number one most important thing. So many artists are surrounded by yes people and so many artists intentionally hire yes people. Because it's fun to hear. Oh my god it's beautiful. It's fun to hear that you're the most amazing person ever.

Yeah. Nobody on my team is a yes person. My chief of staff, oh my god. She just calls me out literally on everything. She's in the room right now. But honestly, that's- And she's nodding by the way. That's why you bring those people to call you on your shit.

Because if you get to that point where you're having success, sometimes you lose a little bit of perspective when there are so many fans out there saying, we love you, we love this, this is great, this is amazing. But having that dose of reality. So to get back to your question of how do you experiment with a song, is having those people around you. I'll give you an example.

Our song after I'm Ready that started to do well was a song called Weak. And the writing process for my brothers, there was a line in the chorus that was, I'm weak and I fell for that. Both of those lines are headed in the same direction emotionally. So I'm very, I'm weak, fell for that, right?

Our manager said, what if you rethought that line? What if you tried to change the emotion of that line to make it more interesting? And so, my brothers came back and the new line is, I'm weak, but what's wrong with that? That completely changes the thought process behind people who are singing along to this song, and then it becomes anthemic as opposed to depressing. So these kinds of little changes, thinking about that, our manager is brilliant. He's done so many things, but he is so great. But even that little change turned to that song. That song has something like 600 million streams on it, which is ridiculous. And that was the thing that started to grow our audience,

because it was a song that people said, oh, who are the people who said, I'm weak, but what's wrong with that? Like self-deprecating, but also strong at the same time. And so that weird dichotomy took us on a path for a lot of our future music, saying something weird that other people wouldn't say, and then take a new perspective on it. Okay, you have this amazing song and it's starting to take off. How was the flow for that one? So that one, we visited pretty much every single radio station in the United States. And now you have connections, which is really cool. Exactly. So we called on these connections and we said, okay, we're going to drive around the country, literally the entire country multiple times,

stop at every radio station, play the song acoustic for the program directors, do little fan events, really get it going. Then we put up a tour. This was the first tour that we put up since we had those 12 people show up to random shows. What year was that? This was 2015.

So 2013 was I'm Ready, 2014 was the down year, and then 2015 things started to happen. That tour started to actually do okay. Okay, meaning a couple hundred people. The real thing that helped us take off from touring was this different approach that no artist had ever done before. And it was a strategy that we came up with.

So we were opening for another artist. And you probably know that opening acts, it's great because you get in front of other people's audience. But when you're an opener, you rely on people remembering you or following you to come back and see you. So we developed a strategy to put a show on sale in the market that we were playing every single night of the tour to create demand in the moment. And we put it on sale during our set, live on stage. So we were in Chicago and we were playing our 30-minute opening set. We finished playing that song week and we said, guess what, guys?

We just announced 20 minutes ago a show that we're playing that song week, and we said, guess what, guys? We just announced 20 minutes ago a show that we're playing in Chicago on this date. It's a super small venue, so tickets are going to sell out fast. Buy them now. Brilliant. Everybody in the audience bought tickets because they felt the demand for it, and they were in the moment that they wanted to see more of what we were just doing on stage. We gave them a little teaser, and then they wanted more of it. It's like any media or news platform, right? You get a little taste of it and then you have to subscribe. This is the thing that we built on tour. We sold about 40,000 tickets on that tour just

from this strategy. How brilliant is that? It is one of the hardest strategies because agents who book shows, they don't want to do this because they have to put 20 different shows on at different times. But for us, it was so effective. That's a brilliant move. Is everybody doing this now? Because that's so brilliant. Nobody's doing it because it's too much work. But I'm telling you, for any artists out there, this is the thing that built our live touring base. To me, that's so smart because you're creating the scarcity. You have the audience. You have just played the great song. So everybody's emotionally there. Like it's so smart. Thank you. I love that. Maybe I should be a musician. No, I'm kidding.

Do you play anything? Do you play any instruments? I used to play piano. I hated it. Did you hate piano or did you hate practicing? Practicing! I could like break the piano. That is not my zone of genius. But this is so, so smart because I think one of the things that I see as a pattern in our podcast is that sometimes, and it doesn't matter which industry, so it's super fun to hear it also in the music industry.

But you fall in love with something like music. But essentially, 90 percent of the time, you're actually doing sales, marketing, business development, partnership. You're doing tactics that are not necessarily just music-related. Absolutely. My fundamental question, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a little while, how I applied it in other spaces,

is how do you build an effective fan base? What does it mean to have a fan base? Talk to me about that. Yeah. So all of these strategies from the live touring to us staying independent and being really honest with our fans, giving them behind the scenes looks and how we built our shows, how we recorded our music, how we plan everything. That and a dozen other strategies are why I really believe we became successful. Because the intention was behind, yes, how do we create music, but it's how do we build

a community? And that community is key. Because if you look at our comments online, 99% of them are wildly positive. That, you don't really see in music. We've built this community where people are supporting each other. If the fans have meetups without us, they do all of these things there, writing their own music, doing their own events, doing all these things. Building that community was our goal. So now, I'm looking back on all of that and saying, okay, what are steps one, two, three, four, and five that we took in order to build that community?

And now I'm doing the same thing for all of the other work. Which we're going to go into in a second. But talk to me for a second about these communities, because I think we all try to create these movements or communities. You know, if somebody's listening, what are some of the key things that make that happen? In my book that I have coming out, there are like 10 different studies on how to do this. Yeah, we're going to talk about amplifying in a second. Yeah, yeah.

But I'll give you a couple of them. The first one is good storytelling versus effective storytelling. That's the first thing. Because telling a good story is one that people will say, oh, that was interesting, or maybe they'll share it with other people. An effective story will actually make people go do something about what they heard. So if you can tell effective stories to a group of people, that makes them bond over the action that they're going to take as a result of the story. So understanding what the difference is first between those two,

and then how whether it's for a brand or is for the music or through marketing, whatever it is, how to tell an effective story. Everyone talks about calls to action. That's fine to have calls to action, absolutely. But an effective story doesn't need a call to action because people will just do it because they're so inspired by the story itself. So that's one piece of it. Another random piece of it is this idea of gamification. I've been thinking a lot about how to gamify things because there's competition games, there's world building games. In video games, people build worlds. But with our fans, we've done a lot of collaborative games. So I'll give you an example. Two albums ago, we took the track list for the album and we had not released it yet,

but we divided it up into 50 jigsaw puzzle pieces and we released each piece on a different social media platform. So one on Twitter, one on Discord, one on Reddit, one on Facebook, one to our email list, one to our text list. And we forced the fans from all of these different places to work together to create the tracklist. Oh my God, that's so smart. That is so smart. They were the first ones to post it before we did.

They felt ownership over it in a way that was so strong that they then became evangelizers for the work. And we had so many more impressions on that than if we had posted it ourselves. So that kind of forced collaboration is an incredible way to build that community. Who thinks about these things? Is it you basically? Yeah.

Okay. I mean, the three of us come up with a lot of things, but a lot of these kinds of strategies are me, like the touring one and this. Yeah. but a lot of these kinds of strategies are me, like the touring one. Okay, so now you basically put that into a book, Amplify, how to use the power of connection to engage, take action, and build a better world, which I love the name of it. Why a book? That's a big undertaking. So in putting together this book, I might take a step back just because the other side of what I do was

very relevant to the ideas behind this book. So all the while we were on tour, while we were building all of this, I stayed in school. So I did my undergrad at Columbia, my master's at NYU, and then I did my PhD in the UK in human rights law and sustainable development. I started working in climate. I was working with the Biden White House. I started an organization that does this. And I was thinking, okay, everything I'm working on in the climate space is how do we build a more effective climate movement? Right. And a lot of my realizations came around this idea of fanbases and communities, the exact same strategies that I had done

for a decade in music. So everybody who I spoke to, I was either using my climate brain or my music brain. And so this book is a way to show that both of these things can be merged. Because so many people that I talk to, whether it's fans on the road or people online, they all wanna do many things, right? We are living in a time where people can do a lot of things at the same time. Exactly, we just talked about it. Orphanage careers, exactly. So this book takes a lot of the strategies

that I learned from music, and plus I interview a ton of other people from comedy, from all of these other places who have built fan bases effectively, and tease out those strategies and say whether you're doing climate or working in any other social issue, even in business. I talked to Astro Teller who runs Google X. I talked to the person who invented Pokemon Go. All of these different kind of companies use these community building and fan building strategies

really effectively. So I said, why would we just keep those secrets in music? Let's apply them everywhere else. And so that's how Amplify was born. Oh my God. And I love that because the truth is, in Leap Academy, I think we have these amazing communities and people helping each other and bringing each other to the workplace and introducing each other to opportunities. And I think when you can create these movements that actually pushes results, right? Whether it's climate, whether it's music, whether it's career, right?

It doesn't matter. But again, seeing you growing this music thing, touring, et cetera, and then doing PhD, writing a book, it almost feels like how do you juggle it all. It's funny because I don't really think of these things as different. When I'm working in music and come up with an idea to do a fan event or create some fan strategy, I'll immediately take that same idea and move it to the climate space or build a rally or build an event or whatever it is.

One of the other ideas that I really like that came out of this is we have featured other artists on our songs, right? We featured the lead singer Weezer on one of our songs and a bunch of other people. This idea that the music industry has gotten so good at, at using other people's audiences in order to try and grow your audience is the exact same thing we need to do more of in social movements. So the gun sense legislation movement, there's a lot of overlap between them and the climate movement or the LGBTQ movement or healthcare or immigration or education. There's a lot of ways to create featuring like we do in music. And so when you think about how to use audiences effectively

and how to grow an effective audience, it's the same thing. It's not I'm working in this space and then I'm working in this space. LS. I love that you said that because at least from what I know from any nonprofit world, and I might be not updated, but I remember, and I was a little bit on the board of International Peace Accelerator and a bunch of other things But there's always a little bit of a more of a competition field versus let's work together You have audiences that will care about climate or peace or whatever and we have audience and it's not necessarily Competing because if I want to donate money, I don't decide between peace and climate. Like, these are not the thing.

I'll decide about causes that I care about. Every day there are more and more billionaires, there are more and more people who have hundreds of millions or even just a few million dollars. And none of them are going to say, I'm just going to choose one thing to put my money towards. That doesn't exist. Nobody puts all of their donation money towards one thing. So by partnering, you really show opportunities of how things are interconnected. And that's one of the things that

I love about the climate space. And that's why I chose to work there is that all of it is systems. Climate is health. Climate is education. Climate is infrastructure. Yes, of course, it's how hot it is or it's how cold it is, but it really impacts all of these different things in our life. So, for any of these massive audiences that are out there, if somebody's really passionate about urban planning, that's climate. If somebody is pre-med in school, that's climate. If somebody is studying international relations, that's climate. If somebody is a visual artist, that's climate.

We need amazing climate communicators out there. So, that's why I live in this climate space because everybody can participate in the climate movement. Which is amazing. You chose some pretty hard path. None of them are like easy. And I think 2020 probably was COVID. I assume that's been really, really hard

on the music business or any business, but especially in the music business. How do you cope with hard times like that? There have been a lot of hard times in the last 10 years, COVID being a perfect example. For me, any time a door closes, I see five other doors opening. So I'll give you an example. When COVID happened, we obviously weren't able to do live shows.

We put out a song right at the beginning of COVID and we said, oh shit, this song is not going to do anything. We can't go out there. We can't promote it. We can't visit radio stations. We ended up virtually visiting almost every radio station in the country, and that was our biggest song on the radio to date. Really? Wow. Then we said, what?

We can't do live shows. We said, but what if we could? We ended up doing a bunch of drive-in shows, where we would go into parking lots in different arenas. So innovative. Hundreds and hundreds of cars, up to 1,000 cars would show up. We would play a show on

a stage that was built in the parking lot, and all of these cars were separated from each other. And because speakers can't reach across the entire parking lot, what we did was we worked with this transmission. Yes. And it sent the songs that we were playing through every individual car radio. They had to go to a certain frequency, and every car was playing the music.

But here's a weird thing. Normally when we finish playing a song, people applaud, right? We didn't hear any applause. There was silence because everyone was in their car. Then about the third song in, people started to honk their horns after the songs. And with honking, you associate it with danger, right? By the end of the show, a thousand cars are honking their horns after each song. And it was just the most incredible feeling because over that hour and a half, our mind shifted

and that became a positive thing as opposed to a negative thing. So COVID brought about all of these different kinds of transitions that I think were really beautiful because once one person started honking their horn another person said oh yeah that's good and it built a new kind of community in that audience so we ended up doing live shows in that way during COVID. That's incredible I don't think I've ever heard of this but this is insane and I think what I love about all this story is the adaptability because that's a pattern that you keep bringing in. Because no matter what comes up, you're finding a way to adapt. And I think specifically in COVID, but entrepreneurship, everywhere you go,

it's the adaptability that wins. Absolutely. It's funny that you bring that up because the last chapter of my book is called, Where Do You See Yourself in 10 Years? And that's because that is my least favorite question on earth. And whenever I'm in an interview, I always get asked that question, where do you see yourself in 10 years? Because to be able to pivot and to be able to be adaptable, those are the people who end up winning. To be reactive to your circumstance, my nonprofit, about a year ago, there were six employees. Today, there are 35 employees. So we've grown tremendously over the last year. But that's because we've been

able to pivot really effectively to the political climate, to the changing funding environments, to all of these different things that are happening in our world so fast, we can actually pivot because we were built in order to pivot. And I think that anybody who is building a career, anybody who is building a brand, anybody who's in marketing or strategy, they have to understand how to be able to pivot really effectively and how to be responsive. Because we live in a day and age where things happen so quickly that we need to respond to things in a way less than a 24-hour news cycle. That shows who can win and keep up. And I love that you said that because I think in order to adapt or in order to keep up and reinvent yourself, etc.,

the big thing is that you have to be very intentional and strategic throughout. And I think you need to be essentially awake. I think one of the things that we hear very often from clients is like, I used to sleep through life and this woke me up to start being a lot more intentional and strategic with every move I make. And I think what I'm hearing from you is that, I mean, obviously you're very awake, but you know, it's really like, you know, it's like, it's that every single time was that extreme ownership of, okay, what do we do now? What do we do? Where do I want to take? How do I see opportunity? I mean, you immediately is like, oh my God, you should have remarkable, you know, like sponsored the podcast, you're probably right. But you know, I think it's that curiosity or ability to just look all the time and think all the time, which is really, really interesting. But talk to me about the nonprofit, because I think

you are, again, between music and nonprofit, I don't know which one is harder. Like I'm trying to wrap my head around them. But you chose both. Especially funding these things, it's not easy, and the wins are not kind of against you, especially this year. The idea behind the nonprofit was that so many people do research, and that lives in the academic spaces at universities or think tanks. Completely separately, so many people do advocacy, and there are incredible advocacy organizations out there. Love that. There are very few people that bridge the gap between research and advocacy. When I did my PhD, literally three people read it, and it sat on a

shelf. I put all of that effort and wrote 400 pages into a thing that only three people read. The point of Planet Reimagined is this philosophy and this method that we developed called Action Research, which is how do we do research with an eye toward it being implemented as fast as possible? We think of ourselves as a creative climate incubator. So like a tech company would incubate, but this is in the nonprofit space. And so we start with a three-month program and we throw around ideas with fellows from around the world. Then we'll grow it up into a year if there's a there there, and then we'll spin it up into something that we call an impact project.

We have a handful of those. Another piece of it that is core to what we do is that pretty much everything we do is either nonpartisan or bipartisan. We are not going at this with a, we are far to the left or we are far to the right. We have a bill that was just introduced in the Senate a couple of weeks ago that has equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats supporting it that is about expanding solar and wind on top of oil and gas land. We spent a lot of time doing the mapping research, working with both Republicans and Democrats.

We're building out these facilities now in Utah and Colorado, one red state, one blue state. So everything we do is about making people's lives better, the economy stronger, more jobs, and protecting the planet all at the same time. Did you need to raise capital for this, or are you trying to make it sustainable? Okay.

Yeah, we fundraise all the time. We have incredible partners and we have some individuals who donate and a lot of foundations who see the value in this non-partisan or bipartisan approach. Because even under the Biden administration, we were growing this and it was still non-partisan or bipartisan approach because even under the Biden administration, we were growing this and it was still nonpartisan or bipartisan then.

And even now under the Trump administration, still we are keeping the same approach. And when a foundation or an individual donor sees, oh, this is something that's not going to change or not going to have to stop because of government, this is something that has longevity. Like I was saying before, we're exponentially growing and some of our new projects engage with the most innovative tech. We have a brand new AI project that is taking policies that work at the local level at cities and

states and figuring out ways to take them from one city and apply them to a 100 other cities at the same time so we can scale these things. We have a lot of really amazing strategists. So tell me because again fundraising, I've done it a little bit. I mean that can suck. Sorry for the language. It sucks. Are there moments where you're coming and you're like, you know what, why can't I just

find a regular job? What was I thinking? Is that? That thought very rarely crosses my mind. But one of the reasons why I do so many things at the same time is I like to spend a little bit of time on each thing. If I'm in a Japanese restaurant, I'm going to order a bento box,

or I'm going to order a lot of different things. I don't like homogeneous things. I don't like where the same bite is the same thing over and over again. And so that's how I built my career. So when I'm fundraising for the nonprofit, as the executive director, fundraising is a lot of my responsibility. We have a great development department, but a lot of the initial outreach is me. And sometimes I think, I wish I could just be doing the thing, right? Working on the climate strategy is doing the thing that I have my PhD in that I'm qualified to do. But then I realize, okay, I'm never going to be able to do that unless I actually bring

in the money. And the band has a platform that also helps me get into some rooms that I otherwise would not be able to get into. And my PhD is another thing that I have that I can talk to people. Everything is connected and necessary in order to do it. So it's the fundraising, it's the actually writing the policy, it's the PhD, it's the music, and now this book is going to be another piece of it because it's a big calling card that shows this is how I did everything so people can learn more about me. And even though it's not investing in the traditional sense,

it's more investing in me and the work that we're doing in order to grow the non-profit. Right. As a founder, I think there's a lot of fear of, oh my God, what if I don't have salaries? What if I don't find the funding this time? What if the pockets are shrinking? Do you feel like it's,

I don't know, taking your sleep away? Is that something that, I mean, as a founder, at least it does for me. Sleep is hard and I'm sure we could do a whole hour on sleep. Probably. I travel so much that I've learned to sleep really well in planes.

And at the same time, like if I don't get any sleep, then I have to take a nap in the middle of the day. I absolutely have to. But when so many people are relying on you for their salary and for their health care and for their well-being, for all of that, it does put a lot of stress on a person. But at the same time, I am really doing things that I love doing. Right. And so at the place where I am with the nonprofit with everything,

as soon as I find something that doesn't bring me joy or at least satisfaction, I don't love everything that I do. There's tons of stuff that I do. But if I at least understand the satisfaction of it and understand how it contributes to the larger whole, if there's something that falls outside of that, I will generally outsource that project. So I make sure that my mind stays focused on things where I can bring energy to it.

That's incredible. So one of the questions that I like is actually not to take you 10 years forward because I think that's useless, but I actually want to take you 10 years back. Okay. What would you say to yourself a decade or two, three, what would you wish somebody told you earlier in your career? Honestly, there are a couple of things I could think of, but most things, I would say that I needed to learn those lessons when I learned them. And the stumbling, I mean, this sounds so cliche because everyone says, oh, you need

to fail, you need to fail in order to learn, and you need to fail fast, and you need to, you know, everyone says that. But I really, really think it's true. The low part of the band that we talked about was absolutely necessary. Finishing my PhD and realizing no one was reading it and no one was looking at it, absolutely necessary. All of those things inspired that strategy of putting on shows on sale while we were opening on tour, of starting the nonprofit, of all of that.

So I guess if I could give my younger self advice, it would be to start working out when I was younger. Because that, honestly, I work out most days in the morning and that gives me the energy to get through the day. I know it's not the answer you were looking for. I think that's fine. That's perfect. I'm really curious about the different answers that we're getting to this because I think there's just, you're right, there's a lot of scraping knees that has to happen anyway. And I think it's really interesting to see the patterns in your life

because those scraping knees clearly pushed you to do things that now impact in a different way. Absolutely. I'm so thankful for them. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you. This is so fun. I love this. This is not the kind of conversation

that I've had before in interviews. I love how kind of deep you push. So thank you so much for that. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. If you did, please share it with friends. Now, also, if you're feeling stuck or simply want more from your own career, watch this 30 minute free training at leapacademy.com slash training. That's leapacademy.com slash training. See you in the next episode of the

Leap Academy with Ilana Golanshchuk.