S01 E01: TRUTH IN TEN

Feb 11, 2025

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

How Do You Turn a Moment into a Movement?

In this pilot episode of The Truth in Ten Podcast, host Jeremy Connell-Waite takes you behind the scenes of a ten-minute presentation which won not one, but two Academy Awards! It's a presentation which Jeremy has given many times himself, and he shares some insights about where the presentation came from, and what you can learn from it.

"Sorry I gave such a long presentation. I didn't have enough time to create a shorter one!"

SHOW LINKS

The Truth in Ten is a cross between a podcast series and a storytelling masterclass. Each short episode shines a light on a different inspirational leader; someone who shared a short story which changed the world in some way. This is a show for anyone who wants to make a difference by sharing their story.

S01 E01: FULL TRANSCRIPT

How Do You Turn A Moment Into A Movement?

On 27th May, 2004 the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” premiered in New York.

You remember the film?

[CLIP]

Great movie.

It’s a science fiction disaster movie with Jake Gyllenhall and Dennis Quaid, based on a book called “The Coming Global Superstorm”.

The book warned that global warming might produce sudden and catastrophic climate change events.

It was one of the top grossing films of the year.

Anyway – after the premier there was a “Global Warming Townhall” to discuss climate change. And as part of that townhall meeting, there was a panel. The former US Vice-President Al Gore was one of the panellists. And as part of that panel, he had 10 minutes to make his case, so he presented a 10-minute version of a slide show that he’d been working on about the climate crisis.

[INCONVENIENT TRUTH CLIP]

One of the people in the audience that day was a movie producer called Laurie David. She said afterwards that she was “floored” by his presentation.

Interesting sidenote: Laurie David was married to Larry David at the time (the creator of Seinfeld & Curb Your Enthusiasm) – and they both know a thing or two about storytelling and how to capture an audience’s attention. (Laurie & Larry David. Bit of a mouthful at dinner parties!)

As soon as the evening was over, Laurie asked Al Gore if he would present his slideshow to her influential friends in New York and LA. She thought it was the most powerful and clear explanation of global warming she’d ever seen, and she decided right there and then that she would make it her mission to get everyone she knew to see it too.

Now Laurie is a movie producer, so Laurie did what Laurie does best…

She assembled a small team and asked them to explore the possibility of turning Al’s ten minute slide show into a movie. As far as they knew, nothing like this had ever been done before – but Al Gore wasn’t convinced.

Since losing the race to become US president 4 years earlier, he’d decided to focus all his attenion on the climate crisis, and he’d now given this presentation thousands of times.

He had slaved over this deck for years and spent hundreds of hours presenting it. This slideshow was his baby, and he didn’t want to put that baby, as fragile as it was, into the hands of any Hollywood movie makers. Hollywood executives might corrupt the story. They might take their “creative licence” too far and undermine the integrity of the message.

It was a real concern.

But Laurie assured Al that the message was more important than the money - and that what was at stake was the planet, saying "None of us are going to make a dime at the box office anyway!”

He reluctantly allowed her to explore the possibility so they met up with director Davis Guggenheim (ER, 24, NYPD Blue, Deadwood, He Named Me Malala and Netflix’s Inside Bill’s Brain). He’s a big deal. He’s even made a film for IBM! But Guggenheim wasn’t convinced it would work either.

Until, that is, he saw the 10 minute presentation for himself and he was “blown away." (His words). He left that meeting thinking that global warming was the most important issue in the world – and he admitted that he had no idea how to make a film out of it, but he wanted to try.

Not easy!

Guggenheim’s films usually take a couple of years.

But An Inconvenient Truth needed to be filmed and produced in a matter of months - and on a really tight budget of just $1.5M.

Remember - that this all started with just ONE 10-minute slideshow.

Have that in the back of your mind the next time you’re putting a presentation together.

That’s the power of a great story.

Great stories create urgency and can inspire audience’s to act. And act quickly.

When asked about the project, Guggenheim said "We all felt like we were on a mission from God just to make it as fast as we could. We just felt like it was urgent. The clock was ticking, and people had to see it.”

So what happened next?

How do you turn a slideshow into a movie?

How do you turn all those numbers into a narrative?

Enter Nancy Duarte.

She’s one of my hero’s and one of the people I most look up to in the world of business storytelling.

If you don’t know her, watch her TED Talk.

Duarte.

D.U.A.R.T.E.

Her Californian presentation company, Duarte Design, was approached to condense and update Al Gore’s slide deck, mostly by adding some video and animation. It was already a pretty good slide show, but it needed more drama to make it engaging on the silver screen.

Another interesting side note in this story - Al Gore was on the board of Apple! He knew Steve Jobs pretty well, so he had a pretty good presentation coach! That’s why Al Gore’s slides have always had a similar style to the one’s Steve used in his keynotes.

But still, Nancy made them better. And once Al Gore saw how devoted this small but motivated team were to his cause, and how impressive the new slides were, he agreed to go ahead and make the movie.

An Inconvenient Truth opened in 2006 in New York, just a few blocks away from where Al Gore gave his 10-minute slideshow just two years earlier.

The trailer claimed it was “the most terrifying film you will ever see”.

At the Sundance Film Festival, the movie received THREE standing ovations. Six weeks later, it won two Oscars.

Unheard of.

In his acceptance speech, Gore gave a brief speech. Just 48 words. That’s BREVITY for you:

“My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis. It's not a political issue; it's a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act. That's a renewable resource. Let's renew it.”

So…

A 10-minute presentation.

An Academy Award winning documentary.

And a 48-word speech.

Right after the film launched, Al Gore founded The Climate Reality Project of the back of the film’s surprise success. He trained 1,000 activists that year, teaching each of them how to give his 10-minute presentation about the climate crisis to their friends and colleagues.

He called it “The Truth in Ten.”

In 2019 I became one of those leaders when I became part of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps. I’ve now given Al Gore’s The Truth in Ten presentation dozens of times to thousands of people over the last few years, and as you’ve probably figured out by now, I love the title of this presentation so much that I named this podcast after it.

Because I’d like this show to shine a light on some short stories from a few inspirational people who made a real difference – and hopefully their words and their process might inspire you to become a better storyteller yourself.

Here’s the thing about the process behind Al Gore’s slideshow…

Truth in Ten is an unusual thing to present. It breaks all the rules of presenting.

There’s a lot of charts (with sexy animations of course – thanks Nancy!).

There’s a lot of stories.

You need to explain the science clearly but you have to make it interesting and easy to understand.

There’s a clear Aristo-telian 3-act structure: “Must we change? Can we change? Will we change?”

There’s 55 slides and you need to speed up and slow down the transitions to create drama and anticipation, but that still works out at an average of one slide every 11 seconds. That’s fast! (And not easy to do).

There’s a cadence and a rhythm to the way it’s presented.

Intense slides with lots of words sit alongside dramatic photos of wildfires and floods. A few of the photos are so dramatic I’ve broken down myself a few times when presenting them.

It’s emotional. (Both for the person presenting it and the audience listening to it).

And finally, you need to speak at around 180 words a minute – which is usually never a good idea for any audience.

This presentation shouldn’t work.

But it does.

Because this is not your average presentation.

This is a 10-minute presentation which took FOUR years to create. It’s given birth to a double Oscar-winning documentary - which to this day, is still one of the highest grossing documentaries of all-time.

It’s a presentation which changed the world.

Political agenda aside, and whatever your view of Al Gore, he took a master-deck of 615 slides and turned it into 10 minutes of truth which got the world talking. That’s a feat in itself.

Anyone can speak for a long time with a lot of slides. You might bore the audience but it’s not that hard.

But not enough of us know how to impact an audience in under 10 minutes. For anyone who wants to be an effective storyteller (given how short attention spans are these days) – this is something we should you should study: inspirational people who used storytelling to turn moments into movements.

So...

What’s the real message behind this episode?

The purpose of every story is to make an audience FEEL something. That’s what transformational storytelling is all about. Whether it’s a movie, a book, a song, a play, a poem or a keynote.

And if there’s one thing that Al Gore has taught me to do – and the tens of thousands of climate leaders he’s personally trained as part of his Climate Reality Project – it’s that the purpose of a story –

A “Mission Critical Story” (like The Truth in Ten) – is not just to get an audience to FEEL something, it’s to get an audience to DO something.

[APPLAUSE]