Exercising Narrative Intuition With Randy Olson

Communicating Climate Change

This episode, an extended holiday special, features a conversation with scientist turned filmmaker and writer, Randy Olson. It was recorded in November 2022.

Randy, who got his PhD at Harvard, left a tenured professorship in marine biology to attend film school, before spending 25 years making movies. His output in this field includes documentary features about attacks on science, and a comedy about global warming that Variety called, “an exceedingly clever vehicle for making science engaging for a general audience”.

By 2008, Randy noted that the anti-science sentiment in society was getting serious, and so started writing books, kicking off with Don’t Be Such A Scientist, which discussed the problem of poor communication of science. Around this time, institutions started asking Randy to run workshops, focused on the solution to this communication problem, which Randy believes resides in the power of narrative structure.

He’s since gone on to write many more books, including Houston, We Have a Narrative, which brought Randy to my attention and, well, literally changed the way I think about communication entirely.

He's done TED Talks, won all kinds of awards, and has trained thousands of scientists, students, and government staff in the power of narrative. Randy is a fountain of knowledge and has an infectious energy.

Our conversation taps into one of the tools from Randy’s latest book, The Narrative Gym, looking at how we can close the gap between a hypothetical world where the last 50 years of communicating climate change had gone perfectly and the world we live in where, in Randy’s opinion, it didn’t. Whether you’re a scientist, a journalist, a marketer, whatever, there’s plenty to chew on.

Please be warned, there is a single f-bomb in this episode.

Additional links:

Randy’s new book, The Narrative Gym

Randy’s website, The ABT Framework

Sizzle, a global warming comedy

Randy’s first book, Don’t Be Such A Scientist

The book that brought Randy to my attention, Houston, We Have a Narrative

1985 Royal Society report about Public Understanding of Science

Michael Crichton’s obfuscation paper from 1975