CHAPTER TEN
Amazon, Branding, and Personal Character: How to Have a Viral Impact in Your Professional Life
Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.
—Aristotle, Rhetoric
The most powerful person in the world is the story teller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.
– Steve Jobs, 1994
Joining CreateSpace, Kindle Singles, and Kindle Direct Publishing, [are] eight new Amazon Publishing imprints…. Many [authors] write and tell us how we have helped them send their children to college, pay off medical bills, or purchase a home.
– Jeff Bezos, Annual letter to Amazon shareholders, 2013
When I tell people I’m self-publishing this book on Amazon, they tend to be surprised. But when I tell them I make seventy cents out of every dollar on all Kindle sales—triple or quadruple what most major publishers pay—they tend to be much more surprised, and they want to know how they can get in on the action. The fact is, anyone can .
Books are one of the classic ways to go viral in life. Think of all the famous people you remember—or that the world remembers—primarily or exclusively because of one or more books they wrote. But the publishing world is a classic old-media gatekeeper, deciding who gets a shot at passing through their pearly gates to potential fame and immortality. The expense of mass producing an initial run of books and distributing them around the country was, for a long time, simply too high a barrier to entry for competition.
But as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained to shareholders in his 2011 annual letter, “even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation.” In fact, the reason I’m on Amazon is that after publishing seven books on climate change and clean energy and public policy, I was simply unable to get a traditional publisher to buy Language Intelligence several years ago. Yet it was easily my best-written book at the time—and my most marketable, I thought. I even had a jacket quote from the amazing progressive champion Van Jones (who now has his own show on CNN): “This book changed my life, and it can change yours, too. Joe Romm understands the secrets of persuasion and messaging and has distilled them into this must-read book.”
I also had a very good agent help me improve the manuscript and craft the sales pitch. As a result, many leading editors and publishers saw it. But all of them rejected it over the course of 2011 and into 2012. Why? Well, one key answer is that while I had the traditional credentials to publish books on climate change and clean energy—and many publishers told me they would take a book from me on those subjects—my credentials as a successful communicator were all based on my website. And even though it had gone viral, that meant little to the traditional gatekeepers.
That’s when a colleague told me about Amazon CreateSpace, which produces a print-on-demand paperback of your writing and distributes it online. Converting to a Kindle ebook is also easy. Back then, self-publishing was still dealing with the negative brand image of the old “vanity” presses, which charged you a lot of money to publish your book but had no real means of distribution. Amazon, however, had streamlined the entire process, put it online, made it vastly cheaper, and, most important, created a distribution platform second to none.
Language Intelligence became my best-selling book—some 12,000 copies to date and still selling dozens a month. And thanks to Amazon not taking 80 to 90 percent of the sales revenues the way traditional publishers do, this book generated the most direct income for me by far. I would have had to sell over 40,000 copies at a traditional publisher to make more money.
I say direct income because the biggest value of books for me and for the vast majority of non-fiction writers is almost always the indirect income that comes from the brand created by the book. In fact, my least successful book, my collection of blog posts, had the biggest indirect impact of them all since it turned out to be clicky and sticky with James Cameron.
Anyone who can do their own online marketing—and anyone can—should publish on Amazon. If you talk to authors you will find they have one consistent complaint: “The publisher didn’t market my book.” Yet most publishers don’t appear to understand how to truly market a book in this new age of social media virality. So you’re going to have to market your own book anyway if you want it to make money or have an impact. But if you’re doing most of the work, shouldn’t you keep most of the money?
The game-changing Fifty Shades of Gray series began as fan fiction for the vampire-romance Twilight series on fan-fiction websites before it moved over to E.L. James’ own website, FiftyShades.com. She then expanded it into a three-part series, with the first book released in 2011 by an Australian online publisher. When it got to Amazon UK, it started outselling the Harry Potter books. Now, 125 million books and three movies later, James and her books are a global brand.
But it started online. Yes, you probably won’t replicate James’ level of virality. But, if you’ve read her work, then you know her virality isn’t about writing skill as traditionally defined. Indeed, in your niche, you’re probably at least as good a writer as she is in hers. Online, you have so much more flexibility, so many more options to break through, than the all-or-nothing-at-all approach of selling a book to a traditional publisher. You could start with a $4.99 novella or $2.99 mini “how to” guide or initially publish for free to generate an audience.
A few years ago, I was an editor for my friend Nick Sparks’ 125-page book on dating and communications, As You Are: Ignite Your Charisma, Reclaim Your Confidence, Unleash Your Masculinity . Sparks is a great dating coach, who has helped thousands of guys be their genuine selves when dating. He has a couple of YouTube videos online with hundreds of thousands of views. When he launched his book as a Kindle, he initially set the price at $0.99. With on online marketing push from his fellow coaches, it quickly became a #1 bestseller in the category of “Dating.”
The “best possible marketing calling card,” is how Sparks described the book to me. To go viral in life, as Sparks has, you need to first figure out your brand, your niche. As my life coach Adam Gilad likes to say, “The riches are in the niches. ”
IT’S A BRAND-YOU WORLD
We now live in a world where you need to find your own niche, tell your own story, and make your own brand. Nobody is going to do it for you. “It’s a Brand-You World” as Time magazine put it in 2006. “Need a job? Or a love life? Personal-marketing consultants can help you stand out from the crowd.” And the crowd is a lot bigger and noisier now.
In truth, “branding in one form or another has been around for centuries,” as the 2007 article, “The Hot History and Cold Future of Brands,” explained. The word derives from the Old Norse brandr, meaning “to burn,” since that’s how early farmers stamped their ownership on their livestock.
A farmer with a particularly good reputation for the quality of his animals would find his brand much sought after, while the brands of farmers with a lesser reputation were to be avoided or treated with caution. Thus the utility of brands as a guide to choice was established, a role that has remained unchanged to the present day.
These days you also want your brand to be hot, but only metaphorically.
Significantly, there’s an even more important word that has an almost identical etymology—character . The word derives from the mid-14th century, carecter , “symbol marked or branded on the body,” which goes back to the Greek kharakter , meaning “engraved mark,” also “symbol or imprint on the soul.” Even in ancient Greece, kharakter also meant, by metaphorical extension, “a defining quality.”
Your character is your most important personal brand. It’s your defining set of qualities, and it’s ultimately what someone is buying whenever you persuade them to enter into any type of relationship.
Why should an employer hire you rather than someone else? Why should they promote you over someone else? Why should anyone become your client or buy your product? Why should they invite you to speak? Why should someone go out on a date with you? Why should they go out on a second date with you? Why should someone become a follower of yours on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube?
The core questions about your brand and character boil down to these: What is special about you or what you are selling? What problem are you going to solve for the person you are communicating with? And can you be relied on to deliver what you’ve promised?
But you have to do more than merely answer these questions. You have to persuade the listener to believe you, that you have a good character, one that will be consistent and reliable over time—that you are a man or woman “of your word.” And that requires a memorable and emotionally compelling story, as we’ve seen, as well as a platform to communicate that story.
Amazon is but one of many such platforms.Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, your blog or website: these are all platforms that now allow you to bypass the traditional gatekeepers for telling your story—the news media, TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Indeed, Daria Musk, “the girl whose voice launched a thousand lines of code,” used Google to bypass the gatekeepers of the music industry, as we will see.
Ultimately, every single interaction you have with someone, every conversation you have, every speech or public talk you give, everything you write online, is a chance to go viral. Equally important, every communication you have is a chance to build and amplify your brand and your character.
Your brand is your self-narrative, your story. Stories, as we’ve seen, are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. That’s why most of the great stories, especially the hero’s journey, are a voyage of self-discovery to learn what makes the hero special. Even superheroes need a brand. Are you like a spider? Or like a bat who becomes a caped crusader and a dark knight? Are you Gryffindor or Slytherin? All of the Disney princesses not only have their own signature story about why they are special, but they also have their own uniquely colored dress, which at one point I could actually identify, thanks to my daughter’s love of all things Disney for many years.
Disney is one of the world’s great brands, which you would expect from master storytellers. “Disney Parks and Resorts exist to make magical experiences come alive,” explained one senior executive in a 2014 speech at a Hub Brand Experience Symposium. That’s true of their movies, too.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs understood the power of storytelling. His desire to match Disney’s “monopoly on the storyteller business,” as he put it, led him to acquire the Graphics Group from the Lucasfilm computer division for $5 million and re-launch it as a separate company, Pixar Animation Studios, in 1986—the year after he was fired from Apple Computer. Pixar’s first full-length animated film, Toy Story , was released in 1995. Under Jobs, Pixar set the standard for animated storytelling, with hits like Finding Nemo , Monsters, Inc , Up , and the Toy Story sequels. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock.
Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and became CEO. He then led the company, which had been near bankruptcy, on a journey to become the most valuable brand in the world with a series of game-changing and indeed, world-changing products, including iPod, iTunes, iTunes Store, Apple Store, iPhone, App Store, and the iPad. But equally important, Jobs brought his storytelling skills to sell those products and create incredible brand loyalty, starting with the “Think Different” ad campaign.
How did Jobs do that? In one of the most viral TED talks, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” leadership expert Simon Sinek explains the secret. He says if Apple marketed products like everyone else, their pitch might be “We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?” That, for Sinek, is “Meh.” That is “how most marketing and sales are done, that’s how we communicate interpersonally. We say what we do, we say how we’re different or better and we expect some sort of a behavior, a purchase, a vote, something like that.”
But Jobs did it differently. Apple’s message, Sinek says, is “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?” For Sinek, “What it proves to us is that people don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it .” Sinek’s powerful and eloquent aphorism has become a mantra for many in the business world. I’d tweak it only slightly for individuals: “If you want people to buy whatever you’re selling, you first need to get them to buy your story.”
The cost of not having a brand story is high—you’re a vessel without a chart or a map, without a home or a destination, moving in whatever direction the wind blows. You aren’t reliable or dependable. And, when a storm inevitably hits, you don’t have a reputation to act as a compass to keep you on course.
Consider Facebook. What is its “brand”? What is CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s priority—people or profits? To the extent that Facebook has a widely known origin story, it’s one written by someone else, Aaron Sorkin, for the movie The Social Network —and, fairly or not, it portrays a company founded on personal betrayal, on choosing profits over people.
To the extent that Facebook is known for a brand statement or slogan or motto or mantra, it’s “Move Fast and Break Things.” But what’s kind of cute and cutting edge for a small but fast-rising and over-achieving underdog—what works for a David taking on Goliath—can backfire like a misused slingshot once you become the giant. Giants are often clumsy and break big things, like, say America’s election process or the privacy of tens of millions of people. As Wired magazine explained in its March 2018 cover story, “Facebook’s Two Years of Hell,” that motto “wasn’t just a piece of advice to his developers; it was a philosophy that served to resolve countless delicate trade-offs—many of them involving user privacy—in ways that best favored the platform’s growth.”
Facebook has two core branding problems. First, it is not in sync with its customers on a core value—privacy. Users want their data protected. In 2010, Zuckerberg said he believes privacy isn’t a “social norm” anymore. Facebook’s business model is built around selling your information to others and micro-targeting you through ads. Facebook has been more focused on serving its paying customers than on its users. As the saying in Silicon Valley goes, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.”
Second, Zuckerberg has refused to accept that Facebook has become the Goliath of the news media, even though this was a transformation he himself led. That has left it to others to tell the story of how “Back in 2012, the most exciting social network for distributing news online wasn’t Facebook, it was Twitter,” as Wired explained. But that wasn’t acceptable to Zuckerberg, so he “pursued a strategy he has often deployed against competitors he cannot buy: He copied, then crushed.” Facebook became “the dominant force in the news industry,” but Zuckerberg never wanted the responsibilities or regulations that come with being a media giant, so he simply opened the floodgates to all news, real or fake, from journalists or Russian trolls.
So, when the news broke in March 2018 of how a data breach left Cambridge Analytica—and, through them, the Trump campaign—in possession of the personal data of tens of millions of American voters, which was used to micro-target and influence them, Zuckerberg had no story to tell and remained silent for several days. When Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked by MSNBC on March 28 what he would do if he was Mark Zuckerberg, he said: “I wouldn’t be in this situation.”
WRITE YOUR OWN STORY—OR OTHERS WILL
In politics and in life, much as in business, if you don’t write your own story and tell it over and over again in many forms, you can be sure that those who don’t like you will.
Trump is a master of such opposition branding. Jeb Bush didn’t brand himself. Not only wasn’t his choice of “Jeb!” a viable slogan about who he is or where he’d take the nation, but the only story it tells is of a guy running away from his last name—which is especially ironic since Jeb is an acronym for his actual name, John Ellis Bush. So if you think of anything when you hear the name Jeb Bush now, it’s probably “low energy,” the brand Trump gave him and repeated endlessly, amplified by the news media, which couldn’t get enough of the razzle-dazzle of this one-man reality show.
Similarly, Clinton was not comfortable with branding and with the slogans, storytelling, and repetition it requires. When you think of her, it’s hard to get Trump’s label, “crooked Hillary,” out of your head. Again, the media helped make that go viral because they kept airing Trump’s smear—and kept reading it aloud when he tweeted it out. Most media outlets still print or read aloud whatever nonsense or smear he tweets out, which just further spreads and embeds it.
Opposition branding works against an opponent who doesn’t know how to fight back. Try to remember the words President Obama used to explain why Americans needed healthcare reform in 2009 or any time after that. I doubt you can, but I’m pretty sure you can remember what the opponents of healthcare reform said about it:
These weren’t actually true of the healthcare bill that passed, but they were the poll-tested language GOP strategist Frank Luntz urged conservatives to repeat over and over again in a memo published online, “The Language of Healthcare 2009.” He repeats the word “takeover” (Washington or government) a dozen times, and the words “rationing” and “bureaucrat” appear over two dozen times each in the memo.
Luntz practices what he preaches—and conservatives preach what Luntz practices. And that kind of amplification makes branding work.
“The mistake of my first term—couple of years,” Obama told CBS News in July 2012, “was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”
Countries, communities, and families need repeated stories to create and sustain a group identity, just as much as individuals need them to create and sustain their personal identity, their brand, their character, especially during tough times.
THE GIRL WHOSE VOICE LAUNCHED A THOUSAND LINES OF CODE
For aspiring singer-songwriter Daria Musk, July 2011 saw one of the lowest points of her career followed within days by a digital rebirth. This is her story.
Each fat raindrop that splashed off my guitar case seemed to fall in slow motion. They collected and puddled in the cracked sidewalk, slowly seeping into my sneakers and taunting the tears threatening to spill over the bottom edge of my eyelids. I was banging on the stage-door of a tiny dive bar in upstate New York, getting soaked. I’d only just arrived for the little set I was supposed to play that night and the whole incident already felt doomed. And it was, almost.
Musk had been raised by old-school musicians, and, as she told me in March 2018, “because I’d chosen heroes who were in bands who broke in the decades before I was born, I was doing this music thing the old-fashioned way, trying to wow random people who just happened to be within earshot when I played.” That meant doing a lot of gigs. “It was Sisyphean to say the least,” she explained. “People always seemed to love it when I sang, but getting to the people was harder than I thought it would be.”
This night was the worst. Her amp short-circuited. The sound guy brought the wrong cables, and his mixer didn’t match the configuration of her equipment. Her clothes were wet, she redefined bad hair day—“And there were three people in the audience .” But in that moment of near-despair, she noticed that one of the three was a guy who’d seen her play at a theater the weekend before. “He had actually followed me to this very wet level of Dante’s Inferno to hear me sing again.”
With that “tiny glimmer of hope in a hopeless-looking situation,” Musk’s mood changed. She had an epiphany:
I was flooded with gratitude for being given another night when I could sing. So I belted with abandon and that little stage turned into Madison Square Garden. The bartender insisted, as I bundled up against the rain still coming down, that I was the real deal, he’d say he knew me when. That was the moment I remembered the call I’d gotten earlier in the evening.
That call, which her older brother made while she was standing outside the dive bar in the rain, was about a brand new social network—Google Plus (Google+). It had launched just a few days earlier. Musk learned the next day that Google+ had a built-in, ten-way video chat of the Google Hangout, designed for conference video-calls and the like. But Musk thought, “Maybe I could sing into this thing and play a show, without having to lug my guitars through the rain. ”
What would happen next was something no one at Google had envisioned. Three days later, she was standing in front of her laptop and its webcam, her studio equipment wired into its ports. She pressed the button to start the livestream and….
Silence. At first there was no one. But then a face popped in, and another, until every spot was filled. People from Norway, India, Portugal, Brazil, California and Texas. I saw the sunrise on a different continent through someone else’s screen. When someone left, their spot instantly filled with someone new. I couldn’t see it but a digital line around-the-block started forming.
The comment thread spread like wildfire: There was a girl singing in this video chat thing, and she’d been going for hours. I told them I’d keep going as long as they wanted to listen. This kind of audience, attention rapt, smiles wide, was what I’d always wanted.
That evening, she played for six-and-a-half hours in a show for hundreds of people around the world, who rotated in and out of the ten digital windows of Google+. She woke up the next morning to press coverage in different languages. But that was just the start.
A couple days later these new tech-savvy fans figured out how to stream the video feed so people could watch while they waited for one of those “front row” seats where I could see them. 9,000 people in 100 countries watched that one. The next was 200,000. It snowballed from there.
When I met Musk just a year later, she already had more than 1.5 million followers on Google+ and had spoken at TEDGlobal.
By spring 2018, almost six years later, she had more than 4 million followers, had given two more TED talks, and had been named one of the first “Future Now” artists for the Grammys. She tours the world regularly, from her room and “IRL” (in real life), as she says. But it started that week in July 2011, when she “broke live, online”:
And broke is the right word here. We crippled the system with the traffic and HD audio feeds and got a very confused call from Google when they went to fix it. I’m guessing it took at least a thousand lines of code to get it up to speed and build the new version I’d inspired with my singing (Hangouts On Air)
I got welcomed into the tech community, as an accidental innovator and honorary geek. I started living the musical life I’d dreamed of by day and moonlighted as a consultant for some of the biggest tech and entertainment companies in the world.
She had discovered her purpose in the world, her origin story, and her brand—“the girl whose voice launched a thousand lines of code”—a millennial twist on a millennia-old story, one that launched the twin epic narratives of the greatest bard of yore, Homer. Musk had become, in her words, an “artistpreneur —someone who makes what they love, what they do—by bushwhacking a wonderfully unexpected path into my own future.”
What advice does Musk offer those who also want to skip the whole “starving artist” cliché?
Today we live in a world that’s coo-coo for content. People need stories and books that help them cope with the crazy pace of being alive today. They need songs and movies that make them feel more connected to themselves and each other. Everyone needs someone or something to make them feel seen and heard and less alone.
The minute I stopped waiting to be discovered, I discovered a whole world of people waiting with their arms wide open. People saw me, see them. I heard them, hear me. We connected in a deeply human way, from miles away. And when you feel real gratitude for each and every person you connect with online, see them as a friend and not a number in a social count or bottom line, it makes it all worthwhile. Then when you do go viral, you appreciate it more.
THE THREE STEPS TO WRITING YOUR OWN HERO’S JOURNEY
Musk learned the three key lessons of the hero’s journey and of going viral in your professional life. First, you have to take that moment of adversity, that low point everyone hits, and rewrite the script so that it becomes your springboard to motivation and inspiration—part of your superhero origin story. Second, you have to understand what your superpower is, especially in the context of this new world of virality. What’s your unique talent, the one that inspires passion and meaning? What problems can you help people solve? Third, every communication you make matters because it is a chance to make a connection, a chance to demonstrate your character and amplify your brand, a chance to help someone on their hero’s journey.
Everyone has an origin story—a story of rebirth, sometimes called a “zero to hero” story—even Steve Jobs. As Jobs explained in his 2005 Stanford commencement address—a powerful story that went viral on YouTube—his zero point was being fired by Apple at the age of thirty. “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick,” Jobs told the graduates. “ What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months,” he explained. “I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me—I still loved what I did…. And so I decided to start over.”
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife…. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
For me, like so many progressives, Trump’s election was the brick to the head. Indeed, each week of his presidency, sometimes each day, feels like another brick. I’m fortunate to have work that allows me to respond to Trump. But I wanted to do more, especially after my brother Dave died. Hearing the stories of all the people he had touched spurred me to start working on this book intensively.
I also started working with an inspiring life and relationship coach, Adam Gilad, who happens to be an award-winning screenwriter and film producer. He encouraged me—and all of his students—to figure out our brand, to figure out how we could best leverage our skills and our passion to help people solve some serious problem in their personal or professional life.
Jobs explained to the Stanford grads that they need to figure out their passion in life because that’s what saved him:
I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
Anyone looking for help honing in on their purpose and meaning in life would benefit from working with a coach like Gilad, as would anyone who has found what they love to do, but wants to become more focused and effective. My work with Gilad led to this brand statement:
I help frustrated progressive change-makers master persuasive and memorable communications so that they become fearless viral superstars who have a huge impact on the world.
That brand statement also became a unifying theme for this book. Of course, you don’t have to be a frustrated progressive to want to become a fearless viral superstar who has a huge impact on the world. But the world needs many more viral progressive superstars if we are going to resist Trump and preserve a livable climate. So that’s my focus now.
Finally, one truth about virality is that every communication matters because we never know which one is going to go viral—and we never know which one will make a memorable and perhaps even life-changing impact.
Many years ago, I would sometimes debate climate change with conservatives on TV and radio or in person. My nemesis, the opponent I most feared, was Jerry Taylor of the libertarian Cato Institute, since he was both the craftiest and best communicator the other side had. So I was a bit worried when Taylor appeared at a small panel discussion on energy where I was presenting in 2016.
But to my surprise, during the discussion phase, he said, “I agree with what Romm said.” We talked afterwards, and he explained he was now president of the Niskanen Center where he works to turn conservatives who deny climate science into climate activists. And he thanked me for helping inspire this metamorphosis. At the time, I thought Taylor was just being kind to a former foe, but then he began to tell his story publicly.
Here is Taylor’s story as he related it in a 2017 interview with The Intercept , headlined “How a professional climate change denier discovered the lies and decided to fight for science.” As he explained, back in the 1990s, “I was absolutely convinced of the case for skepticism with regard to climate science and of the excessive costs of doing much about it even if it were a problem. I used to write skeptic talking points for a living.”
Sharon Lerner of The Intercept then asked him, “What was your turning point?” Taylor replied:
It started in the early 2000s. I was one of the climate skeptics who do battle on TV and I was doing a show with Joe Romm. On air, I said that, back in 1988, when climate scientist James Hansen testified in front of the Senate, he predicted we’d see a tremendous amount of warming. I argued it’d been more than a decade and we could now see by looking at the temperature record that he wasn’t accurate.
After we got done with the program and were back in the green room, getting the makeup taken off, Joe said to me, “Did you even read that testimony you’ve just talked about?” And when I told him it had been a while, he said “I’m daring you to go back and double check this.” He told me that some of Hansen’s projections were spot on. So I went back to my office and I re-read Hanson’s testimony. And Joe was correct. So then I talked to the climate skeptics who had made this argument to me, and it turns out they had done so with full knowledge they were being misleading.
I barely remember the conversation Taylor relates here, since I’ve had so many with conservatives over the years. But this particular one set Taylor on a path of rediscovery and rebirth. And that’s the point: Every conversation you have is a chance to help someone on their hero’s journey.