The Opposite of Doom Scrolling
The Opposite of Doom Scrolling
A climate communicator's dispatch from the media trenches of Hollywood.
👋 Hi to 1,645 climate buddies 🌳
Climate is not a technology problem but a story problem.
Delphi Zero is a consultancy and newsletter about the narrative potential of climate.
I had the pleasure to chat with Kip Pastor - a Hollywood producer - who creates compelling climate content to fight Doom Scrolling.
We discussed:
🎥 How to leverage media in our Race to Net Zero
🎬 Why traditional media is not set up for quick experimentation
🗣️ What his TED talk to Hollywood execs would look like
Enjoy ✨
The Opposite of Doom Scrolling
By Art Lapinsch
How does a Hollywood producer with a degree in Diplomatic History end up in climate? What was the timeline? What were the main inflection points and what was your thinking behind it?
This is going to be a long answer because I’ve never actually written it all down.
There are two through lines in my life and in my heart. The first is a deep connection to wilderness, and the second is an inescapable desire to effect positive change in the world.
My mom’s family celebrated the outdoors. They hiked, climbed, camped, and skied. I was told that my aunt was the youngest woman to climb the Matterhorn in the 1950s. As a family, we prioritized time in the wild.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent time in the backcountry and in nature. I’m a mountaineer, ultra runner, and avid hiker. When you spend time in wilderness, it is impossible not to feel something deeper, spiritual. Ansel Adams (the photographer and explorer) said, “I’m off for the high mountains for a good, long soul-building rest.” This resonates with me deeply.
There’s a stillness but also a resounding energy in the woods. That’s what made me an environmentalist. I’ve hiked and climbed all over the world from month long stints in Alaska twice to the Himalayas to Patagonia, and all over the US. I led month-long wilderness trips in the Pacific Northwest for several summers. My family has always supported environmental and conservation organizations. That passion for the outdoors was always a grounding force for me, but it never felt like a rational pursuit.
At the same time, I come from a family of doers who have worked tirelessly to effect change in the world. My grandfather was in public service, my grandmother started a non-profit, and at 29 years old, my father was on the National Security Council for President Carter. From the earliest of my days, I knew that I wanted to create positive change in the world, and I thought it would be through politics.
Climate wasn’t a career path at the time, at least not outside of non-profit or NGO work. Yes, I took AP Environmental Science in high school, but I never thought that I would study climate in college. Nor did I think I would study film. Both seemed impractical at the time. So, I went to UPENN to study Diplomatic History.
After college, I moved to DC with the intention of working my way up in politics, but I couldn’t find the right place and politics felt much more about winning than ideas.
I had written a few scripts in Mexico and outlined a documentary that I fantasized about making about immigration.
Inflection Point #1. My dad was teaching at American University at the time, and I saw a path to find out how serious I was about filmmaking. I enrolled to take some night classes in the MFA program. The stakes weren’t high because tuition was free, and I had a day job. But it was an opportunity to learn, experiment, and discover if this was really a passion with a future.
This was the ah-ha moment. It clicked, almost immediately, that storytelling is the best way (for me) to disseminate ideas to effect change. I wanted to make documentaries to give the choir what they needed - new information, compelling human stories, and inspiration - and I aspired to make feature films that had climate and social issues as background and texture.
Inflection Point #2. I wanted the best education that I could get and be in the place where movies were made, so I applied to the American Film Institute, moved to LA, and got my MFA in production.
Out of grad school, I started a production company with some friends. We made commercials, music videos, etc. At the same time, I started directing my first feature documentary called IN ORGANIC WE TRUST. It was inherently a climate film that was solutions based. We looked at pesticides, fossil fuel fertilizers, and then we explored organic food, school lunch programs, rooftop farming, urban agriculture, and food access.
Simultaneously, I was producing all sorts of commercials. If you told me that I would make commercials after moving to LA, I never would have come. But they were fantastic because I sharpened all sorts of tools and learned new skills with other people’s money.
Since then, I’ve put together hundreds of productions from soup to nuts. I produced commercials for Activate, Gillette, Red Bull, and worked with Leo Messi and Roger Federer. I helped build 60 Seconds Docs from zero subscribers and a few videos into a brand with 450+ films, 5+ billion views, and over 7 million followers. I directed and produced documentaries about sustainability, opioids, tar sands pipelines, and early childhood education. By producing multi-million dollar commercials and low budget films, I learned how to tell compelling stories with a high production-value by squeezing a nickel.
Inflection Point #3. I produced the first ever SnapChat movie, called Sickhouse. It was a thriller/horror film that we shot on an iPhone over the course of a week.
As someone who went to film school, I was not excited about shooting a movie on an iPhone and even less thrilled to be framing it vertically. But during development, I started to see things differently. The vertical format opened up new ways to tell the story. It was a first-person POV for a lot of the film and the narrow horizontal perspective invited more scares and reveals. I embraced this new storytelling. And it worked. It had 110 million views and garnered a bunch of awards.
The biggest insight - new formats with new distribution outlets lead to new opportunities for storytelling.
Inflection Point #4. One of my current advisors at Pique was completing his PhD at Stanford focused on climate economics, and he told me about the innovations happening in climate tech just as the nomenclature began.
Award-winning vodka made out of sequestered CO2? Food waste into plastic? Replacing fossil fuels with algae or microbes?
Mind-blown! These are stories that can connect, inspire, and galvanize.
The famous New York Yankee, Yogi Berra, said, “you can see a lot just by looking.”
I was looking everywhere I could, and I found more and more celebrations of humanity’s ingenuity.
We created the climate crisis, and we can solve it too.
Why did you start Pique Action? What made it the best use of your time vs. other opportunities? What’s the goal?
This is such a good question because it is so thoughtful. What is the best use of my time and what is the goal. Questions I asked myself all the time and revisit.
Pique Action is effectively the culmination of everything I have seen, done, and learned. It combines my life experiences, work history, passions, and desire to improve others lives. As Steve Jobs said, “you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
For me, all of the dots connect to Pique.
I started Pique because virtually no one was focused on producing films about human centered stories solving the climate crisis. We can make high quality content faster, cheaper, and better. At a startup, you experiment, you iterate, but most importantly, you make things. We don’t have bureaucracy or legacy brand considerations. We aren’t hamstrung by the same business cycles. We get an idea, and we make it.
Hollywood is slow. Making a feature film (tv, feature docs, etc.) requires a lot of people, money, and time. On average, documentaries take 5 years to make. I always toggled between working for others to learn, acquire new skills, and then back to working for myself. I don’t have a lot of patience, and we don’t have a lot of time.
Admittedly, I’ve always been DIY in most aspects of my life. I believe that I can do almost anything myself, and I like to figure it out. I can be a great cog in a big machine, but I can be a much better creator untamed by traditional corporate structures.
The broadest goal is to use storytelling to accelerate the change to a sustainable world. That takes many different forms. We’ll know we’ve been successful when climate innovations, policy, and hope are entrenched in the zeitgeist.
Creating, learning, iterating, and communicating about tangible solutions to climate change at the same time is the best use of my time.
200k subs on TikTok don’t lie. Your micro-documentaries seem to resonate. How did you arrive at the format? Was it intentional or did it crystallize over time? Why do you think does it work?
One of the first things that someone told me when I moved to Hollywood was - “no one knows anything”.
It’s a funny adage but there is some truth to it.
Why do expensive movies with talented writers, directors, and actors bomb? Why are creatively exciting projects left unproduced?
When we think about producing a series, we first think about is the content/creative but just behind that is the audience, then the format and distribution platform. We want to meet people where they are with formats that they expect. We are not in the business of making art for art’s sake. We want to reach an audience and have them be compelled.
Some things work today, but they won’t work tomorrow. That’s even more true with how quickly platforms like TikTok and Meta change their algorithms and how they work with creators.
Much like life, the only constant is change.
We’re developing, producing, and testing new formats, new creative, and new series all the time. We are focused on good creative and collaborating with the best talent. There’s a certain alchemy, and when you know the right ingredients, you can make magic.
What are the biggest struggles in your day-to-day? What is a major obstacle you see on our path to Net Zero?
There are many major obstacles on our path to Net Zero, but ultimately, I think it comes down to political will/courage.
The biggest lever in climate is public policy. If the US government really wanted to reverse climate change, they could create the right carrots and the right sticks. But it can’t just be the US, it really has to be global, and China and India are massive players.
As for my day-to-day, there are bandwidth challenges. There is no shortage of excellent, creative content ideas. The limitation is our capacity to make them and the potential to get them funded. Not unlike the lack of political will to foster policy changes, there’s a lack of creative will to make climate content.
What is your best guess how to solve this obstacle?
In order to move politics, you have to get the right information into the right hands and disseminate it. Not to be overly simplistic, but politics follows behind culture, which is why we’re focused on culture.
You need to inspire the masses. At the same time, you need to exert a targeted messaging campaign to reach the decision makers. It’s not an either/or, it’s really both.
Content for everyone, information for decision makers presented in compelling, cinematic ways. And do it again and again.
The role of media in the climate race? Which media is overrated or underrated? Why?
I’d say that one of the major issues facing media in the climate race is that traditional media isn’t designed to address climate.
They chase events (aka the news), which for climate, typically involves catastrophic events like floods, fires, heat. Entertainment is also not designed to deal with such a global, interconnected, existential issue.
To take it another step further, the traditional media business model is broken. Print journalism has been dying/evolving for a while. The studio model has been disrupted and faces existential market realities now as well as everyone unbundled and is now forced to constantly chase new subscribers.
All of that said, climate content is absolutely vital in the climate race. Fundamental.
Storytelling is the largest white space in climate. But people are starting to pay attention.
What type of media gets you excited? What would you like to see more of in the climate context? Why?
I wish I could say that CliFi gets me excited.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a single good example of a successful, non-disaster fiction film or series that is climate centered. Arguably, the most interesting one is Interstellar, but it isn’t hopeful for our planet.
There are a bunch of inspiring documentaries, however. But big budget, four quadrant movies that give you all the feels about what the world could look like if we get it right? There aren’t any. That would get me super excited.
The reality is that eco-anxiety is growing not just in breadth but in depth. Globally more than half of young people believe “humanity is doomed”. Google searches for “climate anxiety” are up 565%.
What we need is more hope. We need it on TikTok, we need it on TV, in movies, in documentaries. We need a conduit that channels that hope into action.
Imagine you can give a TED talk to all the top producers, actors, directors in Hollywood. What would be the idea you want to get across? Why?
Climate is the ultimate story.
The quintessential David vs Goliath. In this story, humanity is both David and Goliath. Nothing is more existential than climate (maybe nuclear war or AI). You have good (humanity) vs evil (unregulated/non-incentivized corporations).
In simple terms, for this story:
Identify the villains 😈
Demand action/regulation 💪
Make the future without fossil exciting ✨
You can do it one of two ways:
Just put these innovations/world as the background, the fabric or texture and stick with an archetypal story.
Make it about climate change, make it a hero’s journey, show us what a circular/sustainable work can look like and why we should aspire to build it.
I want people to laugh, cry, and cheer.
One of the reasons why I love films so much is because they can transport us. They enable us to use our imaginations and connect on emotional human levels. We can experience breakups, love stories, thrilling heists, and the triumph of good over evil in 90 minutes.
Visual storytelling impacts us in deep and profound ways. If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, a movie is worth millions.
Climate is a pretty brainy space - very quantitative and engineering-minded. What can climate learn from the movie business?
Everyone needs a hero.
Climate needs to tell more inspiring, relatable stories.
We need to know that we can overcome this existential challenge. The stakes couldn’t be higher. We need heroes. They can be reluctant heroes or even shy heroes, but they need to let people know what they’re doing. So much of business is marketing and sales, and the movie business is the same.
Storytelling sits at the heart of everything.
What is something that you have changed your mind about since working in the climate space? What is something you have doubled down on?
On one hand, the more I learn about the science of climate change and what could lie ahead, the more scared I become. But on the other hand, the deeper that I get into solutions and innovations, the more optimistic I am that we can profoundly shift the direction that we’re going and mitigate human suffering.
We can do it. Many of the best and the brightest are working on this. But that’s not all we need. We need everyone. And everyone needs us.
As for the perspective that I’ve doubled down on, it’s that we can’t do it without public policy. Domestic policy and international policy with true collaboration.
What is the most valuable idea you teach climate people on a regular basis? Why is it so little understood? Why is it valuable?
Ostensibly everyone says that they need video. But if that was true, it would be a greater priority and there would be a lot more inspiring, galvanizing, and impactful content.
Secondly, drill down on your audience. When asked who the audience is that people/companies/brands/NGOs are trying to reach, the answer is typically fairly general - “everyone?” That does not lead down an effective path.
Focus on a specific demographic and be prepared to provide a clear value proposition to that audience with your story. Similar to being ruthless when prioritizing business sequencing and operations, be diligent about identifying a specific audience and know who you want to reach.
Thirdly, the beauty of video is that you don’t have to say everything and you don’t have to see/say it either. As an off-shoot of that thought, say less and visualize more. From there, you have an amplifying impact of your content, 1 + 1 = 3.
As we look back from a net-zero future, what do you hope they will say about us?
We inspired hope, and we didn’t give up. We helped bring people together because we needed everyone.
🙏 Thanks, Kip for taking the time.
I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch and tell me whom I should interview next ✌️
love this one! right down my alley