I'm so honored to welcome
to the stage,
my former boss, my friend,
Vice President Al Gore.
Thank you.
Thanks, Don.
Those pictures are,
Good for your start, huh? Yeah.
I had a woman come up to me
in a restaurant and say,
"You know, if you dyed your hair black,
you'd look just like Al Gore."
And, uh,
I was reminded of that
by those pictures.
So, I'm just so excited
to be here with you.
And, you know,
I've watched you throughout your career,
decades of fighting
and winning and losing,
go pushing through setbacks and leading,
leading us all.
I'd love to hear
about your leadership journey.
Hmm.
And any lessons you have for all these
social innovators out there in the world
who are gonna face setbacks like you've,
you've faced,
and how do you keep pushing on
to change the world the way you have?
Well, thank you Don.
And before I answer your question,
let me say,
congratulations to the Skoll World Forum
on 20 years of changing the world
in a remarkable way.
This is a wonderful gathering
and I want to thank Jeff Skoll
for setting it all in motion.
Gee, I don't know quite
how to answer that question except to say that,
I learned at an earlier stage in my life,
to realize that when you have some kind of setback
or some kind of problem
that really just seems overwhelming,
it's healing to remember
that when you walk down the street,
you're walking past people
who are carrying incredibly heavy, heavy burdens.
And there are so many people
no matter what you're going through,
there are so many people
who been going through so much worse
and they bear up
and they just keep going.
And so, that kind of gives you a sense of perspective.
And I had a teacher,
when I was young,
who said something that stayed with me all my life.
He said, we all face the same choice in life
over and over again.
It's the choice between the hard right
and the easy wrong. Hmm.
And I, I've recognized,
the choice a lot of times
and I've learned
that everybody has that little voice, you know?
And I've learned that it's always a mistake
to ignore that little voice.
Always. And sometimes
we do it anyway. Yes.
But anyway, you just, you know,
pick yourself up and keep going.
That's the only thing I know to say.
You know, it's, I've watched you do this
in the climate world and I,
I'm sure a few people here
might want to hear your views on climate.
So we, we'll get to that.
But talk to me about
how you've brought people together
around this issue,
cause we can't solve it alone.
So, talk about both the need
to collaborate to solve the climate issue
and then where you see it all heading.
Well, my most important collaboration with,
was Jeff Skoll.
I was given, hey,
I started giving a slideshow,
first of all, I gave,
I used Kodak slides,
you know,
and they, and then I, I got advanced and,
I got a system that had three projectors
and a, and the slides
would come in and out.
And I thought, wow, I got it now.
That's the cat's meow.
And Steve Jobs said, Al, you know,
we got these things called computers, and,
so, so then I, I,
I was able to evolve the slideshow
more quickly and more effectively,
but I was still showing it to like,
you know, 50 to a hundred people at a time.
And Jeff Skoll said, you know,
you really ought to make a movie out of this.
And I, as dumb as I was
about the entertainment industry, at least,
I thought that was a terrible idea.
I really did.
I'm not making this up.
And I, I did not realize
the kind of talent that Davis Guggenheim
and the others,
who made the movie had,
but Jeff made it possible to,
to show it not to a hundred people at a time,
but to millions of people.
And then I took all the profits
that would otherwise go to me on that
and put 'em into the Climate Reality Project
and started training grassroots activists
around the world.
And Jeff has stayed with me
all the way through that.
And thank you, by the way, Don,
for that as well.
We are in the last day
of a virtual training today,
the, this evening, U.S. time,
we've got 8,200 people going through
an intensive four day training
on how to quickly implement the provisions
of the new climate legislation
in the U.S.
in the Inflation Reduction Act it's called,
and the climate provisions
of the Infrastructure Act.
We'll have trainings in Ghana later this year,
in South Korea later this year.
And,
so, the good news on climate
is that this legislation is remarkable.
It's, it may end up putting a trillion dollars
in the U.S. into climate action.
Other nations, including the E.U. and Canada,
are now taking up the challenge.
Instead of just complaining, well,
you may have violated this trade law
or that trade law,
there's, okay, we're gonna match it.
And so there's now emerging
what I hope will be a race
to the top.
By the way, Jeff Skoll just sent me an article
that I had missed early this morning.
The B.B.C. had an article saying
this year for the first time,
the greenhouse gas emissions
have started to go down
at long last
because the number one source
is electricity generation.
And last year,
90% of all the new electricity generation
was renewables.
And it, it's gonna be,
you know, it's going.
And second biggest source is transportation.
Electric vehicles are now beginning to, to,
they're poised to take over the, the market, and,
and there's so much more work to do.
So there, there is good news
and we had a great election in Brazil to,
you know, protect the Amazon.
And we had a great election in Australia
to re to turn their climate policies around.
But, you know, it's a, the fossil fuel companies,
not all, but most,
are still purveying these misleading messages.
And they have a, a hammerlock
on the political systems
of so many countries.
It, it's really a, a continuing struggle.
But I'm optimistic.
I choose to be optimistic.
I think we are gonna prevail.
And I think that the grassroots activists
quite a few of whom the Skoll Foundation has,
has empowered and brought together.
I think that's where the change
is gonna come from.
And of course,
Mother Nature's the most persuasive advocate now,
these, these climate related disasters are,
you know, every, every night on the network news
is like a nature hike through the book of Revelation.
And people are saying,
you know,
maybe we need to do something about this and...
And I just can't.
Yeah.
We are here because of you.
That B.B.C. article wouldn't be here
if you had not woken the world up, so,
just a round of...
Well, I don't know about that,
but thank you all, all of you all.
But you know, the hard part comes next
because they're not gonna give up easily.
This is really, we, we've got to win this.
Right, couldn't agree more.
Back when I worked with you
in those younger pictures,
there's this new thing called the internet
and technology that was getting created.
And back then,
at least my view was we were unleashing
this incredible tool for democracy
and to help lift marginalized voices.
I don't think any of us foresaw
where it was gonna go
as Maria just described.
How do you think about that challenge now
and what we can do to start addressing
rebuilding democracy and,
and rethinking how our information ecosystem works?
Yeah. In order to solve the climate crisis,
we're gonna have to address the democracy crisis.
And in order to,
in order to meet that challenge, we,
we have to pay attention to what's happened
in our information ecosystem.
Both Maria and Carol are,
are heroes to me.
And Maria talked about the rabbit holes, the,
the rabbit holes that people are drawn down.
They're, they're sort of like pitcher plants,
you know, people try to get out
and they just slip on down
and at the bottom of the rabbit hole,
that's where the echo chamber is.
And, and when you're in the echo chamber for long enough,
it produces a new form of A.I.
Not artificial intelligence,
but artificial insanity.
And they, they weaponize artificial insanity.
And that's why the, you know,
the guy goes to some,
he drives 500 miles to a pizza shop
in Washington D.C.,
and takes out his gun because he thought there was,
you know, some kind of conspiracy
in a basement of a building
that doesn't have a basement.
That was our local pizza shop too,
so, Oh, yeah.
So it, I mean, it's worth remembering that,
in the early decades of the printing press,
it was pretty wild then too.
And there is a chance
that this will settle out
and people of goodwill will find corrective measures.
I don't want to put out
what they call toxic positivity.
I mean, it's not gonna fix itself,
but there is, there is some hope that,
that, that this will settle out.
But I, you know, I think that we need legislation
and I was glad that the Biden administration
just put forward some ideas earlier this week.
It, it, it won't be easy of course, but,
and now with the artificial,
with generative A.I.,
and ChatGPT-4 and five is coming out in December
and there's a real race now
on generative A.I.,
that's another whole subject
I don't want to divert,
but I think that we have to reclaim the integrity
of our ability to communicate
with one another
and to discern
what is more likely to be true than not
in a collective process of deliberation.
You, you know, in in, in our
in our neurosystem, in in our brains,
the fear mechanism can drive behavior.
And that's why, as they were saying,
anger spreads more quickly.
The pathway and the opposite direction
from the neocortex back down,
is a much narrower pathway.
But that's why we have to aggregate
with one another through communication
and collective decision making
so we can lift up the truth
as we can best collectively discern it.
And we have to remember,
that diversity is one of our greatest strengths
in getting at what's more likely to be true.
I'll tell you a quick,
quick story, Please,
if you will, please.
there's a, a telescope in the, Hawaii,
on top of one of the mountains called the Kecks.
And, and bear with me,
they it's still the most powerful telescope.
Well, the James Webb is the most powerful now,
but in looking at supernovas.
And they innovated incredibly
in the design of this,
with the segmented mirrors
of the kind that James Webb now has
and mathematics,
to try to paint the atmosphere transparent.
But here's one of the innovations,
they did two identical telescopes,
60 meters apart.
And here's the point I'm, I'm driving at,
even if they're looking at a supernova,
a hundred million light years away,
the fact they're, that they're looking at it,
from two points of view,
60 meters apart on the surface of a small planet,
makes all the difference
in the amount of information
and meaning that can be gleaned.
Now, when we have different points of view,
because of our ethnic, gender, orientation,
religion, ability, disability, all of the,
all of the differences
that we often point toward
when we think about people,
they are all incredibly valuable,
in giving us an ability
to see what we're looking at
with more than our own eyes,
and get more meaning
as a result of our collaboration.
So diversity is not just a,
you know, a woke principle
that people just say,
well we should before this,
it's essential to the quality and integrity
and efficacy of our collective self-governance.
During that answer,
I was reminded why it was so scary
to work for him
cause he is so much smarter than the rest of us.
And I learned so much from you,
and thanks for the job you did in South Africa too,
by the way. Thank you.
Had a great time. Thank you.
We had a great time.
He came and visited
and I took him to his, a rugby game
so we had a good time with that.
Your last answer reminded me,
and we talked a little bit about this backstage,
your home state of Tennessee Ahh.
has seen some interesting,
very sad activities.
Just talk about,
cause you knew the people involved.
Very, very, very well, particularly young Justin Pearson,
the legislator from Memphis
and I remember,
and Justin Jones from Nashville,
and the 60-year-old white woman from Knoxville,
who the Tennessee three,
I mean, what a fantastic group.
You know, in my faith tradition,
there's an old saying
that comes from Moses
and the coat of many colors
when he was thrown in the pit
by his jealous brothers.
And the saying is,
"Man intended it for evil,
but God intended it for good."
What happened to those two legislators
that were expelled was intended
to be a, a terrible blow against them
and their cause.
But it ended up
coming back
as a, a, an incredibly
redemptive
event.
And the, the conservative republican governor
of Tennessee just yesterday,
surprised people by saying,
you know, I think maybe we oughta have a red flag law
and we oughta have better background checks.
And, You're kidding.
Yeah, I'm not kidding.
So some,
sometimes these events
can turn out differently than their authors intend.
So young Justin Pearson from Justin Jones was great.
He got his start removing the statue
of Nathan Bedford Forest,
the Confederate general who founded the Ku Klux Klan,
from the capitol building.
And then he went on to be elected.
Justin Pearson started as a climate activist,
and as a climate justice advocate.
And three years ago,
I worked very closely with him.
I've been on the phone with him
quite a lot over the last two weeks, by the way,
but they wanted to put a high pressure oil pipeline
through Memphis from the Permian Basin
in Texas and New Mexico,
all the way across the Mississippi.
They snaked it through a 97% Black community,
a Freedman's community,
established in 1865,
by freed slaves,
and right over the aquifer
that provides a hundred percent of Memphis' drinking water
right through the extraction zone
that gives water to that part
of the Black community
in an earthquake zone.
Absolutely, in-insane,
it was a reckless racist rip-off.
And young Justin Pearson rose up
from the community's early 20s
and then later after that successful battle
he was elected to the state legislature.
We blocked that pipeline.
It was a great victory.
But, but,
yeah, thank you.
And, and Justin deserves
a lot of the credit
and the two young Black women who worked with him
and then the state legislature
because the fossil fuel industry
has control of them,
they passed a state law saying from henceforth,
no county, no city, no town,
in Tennessee,
will ever be able to block any fossil fuel infrastructure
from now on by state law.
So, you know, when you win a battle,
you gotta keep your focus,
and win the next battle after that.
But, you pile 'em up and pretty soon,
you're making some real progress.
And Justin, both of these Justins are destined
for leadership, in my opinion.
Well, I,
I could talk to you all day
and I know people could listen to you all day
but, the little red lights going off on us.
So, I just want to thank Vice President Al Gore,
his third forum,
for coming back
and spending time with us.
Thank you. Thanks to you.
so much. Thanks to the Skoll Forum.
You were awesome out there. Thanks, buddy.
Thank you. Thank you.