Planet Reimagined, Founder and Executive Director

Amna Nawaz: Adam Met is best known as the bassist of the multi-platinum band AJR. But, offstage, he's a climate scholar, educator, and advocate.

His recent book, "Amplify," explores how connection drives action. Tonight, he shares his Brief But Spectacular take.

Adam Met, Founder and Executive Director, Planet Reimagined: The music industry and entertainment industry broadly is so good at building fan bases. All of these tactics that the music industry has mastered can be applied to how we can build better social movements.

So why not take the tools that are already out there and so good and apply them to make the world a better place? A lot of times, when people first meet me, they think, oh, this is Adam, the A in AJR. And when I will be meeting with members of Congress or state legislators or governors, they will think, oh, he's coming in because he's a musician with a cause.

And, funny enough, it's the opposite. I'm a policy person, a policy wonk that happens to be a musician. When my brothers and I were growing up, we had triple bunk beds. My two brothers, Ryan and Jack, are the songwriters, and they would come up with all of these ideas.

Then we would actually start street performing in Washington Square Park and Union Square and Central Park. At this point, Jack was 8, so I think people on the street felt really bad for us. I have done a lot of shows all around the world with AJR.

The Adam who isn't on stage spends a lot of time thinking about how to imagine the world that he would want to live in, working with my nonprofit organization, Planet Reimagined, writing climate policy with the U.S. government and other governments around the world, and teaching climate campaigning at Columbia University.

Our song "Burn the House Down" wasn't written about any movement in particular, but it was kind of holding up a mirror to the power that millennials and Gen Z's have to make change in the world. And one of the biggest movements that picked up the song was March For Our Lives, the gun sense legislation movement that came out of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida.

One of my favorite terms ever is collective effervescence. And it's the idea that, when people come together over one thing, their brain waves start to get on the same page, and they have this groupthink, and they're all working towards the same cause. That happens at concerts all the time.

And that same thing can happen in social movements. We actually did a big study and a big test to figure out, can we use concerts and collective effervescence to get people to take more climate action? And the answer is yes. We did this on our last tour, and we had about 15 percent of people that walked through the door at our concerts take really concrete climate action.

They were registering to vote. They were volunteering for local organizations. My new book, "Amplify," is about how we can build effective fan bases for social causes. It's about meeting people where they are, but also giving them the path to take those next five steps and come join you.

My name is Adam Met, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on building fan-based movements.

Amna Nawaz: And you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.