Jacob Simon is a climate educator, former internationally ranked Team USA pairs figure skater, and the creator behind Jacobsimonsays—a platform telling positive stories to replace dread & fear with hope & action. He inspires his audience of well over half a million people across social media (@jacobsimonsays) and a newsletter (Climativity) to overcome eco-anxiety and get involved with tackling the climate crisis through optimism and community. Living in Brooklyn, NY, he’s spread hope to 80+ million people taking 20,000+ actions, and accelerates a better future through impactful collaborations with the UN, NRDC, EPA, DOT, Clean Creatives, and more.
How did you go from figure skating, both as an internationally ranked pair skater and a coach to climate influencer.
Skating was my whole life. I started when I was seven. I skated through school and college, and I traveled around the world competing for Team U.S.A. But I dislocated my shoulder doing a lift with my partner and it was career ending. I was living in Colorado Springs at the time, which is a big hub for a lot of Olympic sports, and pretty much the only thing to do in my free time was to be out in nature. I hiked all the time. I’d go on night hikes, where I could just immerse myself in nature and stare at the stars, and basically, I fell in love with the planet.
I studied communications and media in school, and when I graduated, I started working at a public relations agency. But after a few months, I realized I was not passionate about the work. I wanted to do something that was more meaningful to me and could make a positive impact on the world. I started taking environmental courses as an adult, and as a capstone project for one of these courses, a fellow student and I started a newsletter called Climativity for our fellow classmates. We pulled in stories of progress and positivity to keep everyone motivated because we were pretty down by all of the doom and gloom. [Note: The other student ultimately went on to do other things, but Jacob kept the newsletter going. It is free and anyone can subscribe.]
When I saw the explosion of short form video, I thought, “Why don’t I just take the same things I’m already researching and talking about in the newsletter and just make a video about them?” Over time, and through many different iterations to figure out what style worked best, I started growing a platform. I have been doing this full-time for a year now, and I now have nearly three quarters of a million followers. I post every day about things that are going right in the climate and environmental movements, and try to pair action items with them so we can keep the good going.
How do you find your stories, and how can people share their stories with you so they might be seen by a broader audience?
In terms of finding stories, it’s mostly my own research. I try to find uplifting stories that people may not know much about. Every morning, I comb through maybe 30 publications and creators—including newsletters, journals, and scientists themselves—and look for positive stories that interest me. Once I have options of what I might cover, I then read through them, fact check them, and write my scripts.
I do get a lot of messages now from people who want to share their stories, and I’m thankful to have a lot of eyeballs on my content. The best way to share your story is just to email it over to me at jacob@jacobsimonsays.com!
In all of your sharing of things going right, have you noticed an impact on your own wellbeing and your own drive to do something?
Absolutely. I used to feel so overwhelmed by just how much negativity I was consuming. If I am constantly bombarded by all the things that are going wrong, then consciously or subconsciously I will develop this feeling of, “What’s the point of even trying? It’s too much for one person to handle.”
Now, my perception has completely flipped. Spending so much time every day learning about and reporting on stories of progress, I am almost bombarded with how many things are going right. For every problem that I know or learn about, I find there are several people working on solutions. People who are smarter than me: scientists, researchers, students, whoever it is that is working on developing or scaling solutions. It’s very inspiring and motivating that there are so many people doing so many good things.
As I started learning about things going right and seeing that they weren’t being talked about nearly as much or as loudly as the things going wrong, I wanted to commit myself to working on climate solutions the best way that I could, so that’s what I’m doing.
There’s something called the Negativity Bias, which is the reason we consume so much negativity when it comes to news. Algorithms work the same way. If you engage with a piece of content, and you stick around for the whole thing, and then you write a comment, the algorithms on social media will be like, “Oh, you like this? We’re going to feed you more of it.” Even if you watch something, and then you write a hate comment and start an argument that goes back and forth, which obviously is not beneficial, from an algorithmic standpoint you’ll be fed more of it. If you’re on a platform more often, they can feed you more ads. And that’s the same thing that works with legacy media and traditional news publications.
There are lots of studies on this. For example, one study, “Negativity Drives Online News Consumption” [which was published in Nature Human Behavior in May 2023] found that “For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%” and that negative words in news headlines increase consumption rates and positive words decrease consumption rates. So, it’s literally good business for news publications to be negative.
We’re spending so much time online… hours and hours on social media and the Internet, and if we’re seeing a skewed reality that’s pointing towards negativity because it’s better business and because those are the things that people are more likely to engage with and share, then it’s not going to be helpful for our mental health. My efforts are trying to break through that. People do crave positivity, and they do want to listen to and interact with positive stories. My content is case in point for that, and I’m far from the only person reporting on environmental progress. It’s perhaps an uphill battle to overcome that negativity bias and the systematic preferences of these platforms, but it is definitely possible.
Where do you find the inspiration, the hope, the courage to keep doing what you’re doing and battling that negativity bias?
I’m definitely the most inspired by people commenting or sending me messages of ways that my content has helped them. I’m super fortunate that I have a fantastic community who share their own personal wins. I encourage people to do that so we can support each other and also realize, again, how many things are going right. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a flashy climate news story. Someone might say they got a 98% on their final exam or they adopted a new cat. Little things like that are important to recognize as well. Anytime somebody does that in my comments, there’ll be many people telling them congratulations and liking and engaging with them.
Beyond that, people message me and say, “This is the only good piece of news I’ve seen all day.” Or, “I was doom scrolling for hours and then I came across your content and it really helped me pull out of that downward spiral.”
With any work, especially work that’s very public facing, there will be highs and lows. In those downward slumps, when I’m not overly motivated to have my face on screen every single day, it’s not always the most fun. But when I read these comments and remember that what I’m sharing helps other people and hopefully inspires them to take some action, it just really melts my heart and reminds me why I continue doing this. People have shared with me that they’ve changed their majors to sustainability an gotten an environmental job because of my content. I once covered a story on rooftop solar panels, and someone messaged me and told me how that inspired them to craft and propose a plan for their school to implement rooftop solar panels to get cleaner energy and reduce costs.
I can see my social media analytics, but that’s just a number on a screen. It’s so much less meaningful than hearing, whether it’s face-to-face or it’s through a written message, the ways that my content creates a ripple effect. I’m sure there’s a lot that I’ll never know about, and I’m okay with that. I just love doing this. I’m very, very fortunate that I get to find good things and report them for a living. What a special thing I’m able to do! It’s really fun to constantly learn new things and find out about really cool technology, studies, and improvements in the natural world.
I love that you’re just this normal person walking down the streets of Brooklyn, sharing these stories from all over the world in a very matter of fact manner.
It’s deliberate. I think that people trust people a lot more than they trust platforms and big publications and companies. I’m just being a regular guy walking around “selfie-style,” like I’m Face Timing with a friend, and sharing some good stuff I found. I recognize my biases and I’m just like, “This is my opinion. I think this stuff is great.” People sometimes disagree with me, but because I’m so positive in the way that I represent things, a lot of the time they’re respectful in their disagreement, instead of just hating on or trolling me, which is fantastic. Not always; it’s social media after all. I definitely think that keeping things casual is not just easier for me as a creator and editor; it also helps my success.
Any words of advice for Leaf Litter readers?
Social media is not inherently good or bad. It really depends on how you use and consume it. Doom scrolling—endlessly scrolling news or social media content that makes you feel sad, and angry, and anxious—is pervasive, and that’s not beneficial to anybody.
The platforms are really great at sucking us in and making us forget what we’re doing. I do this all the time, where I log onto an app to work, to post a video for work, and then 20 minutes later I catch myself scrolling without realizing it. All of us do this. There are steps we can take to limit that: get screen time apps; set a timer on our phones; delete apps on the weekends. Beyond that, be conscious and deliberate about the content you’re consuming.
I highly encourage people to break free of the doom scrolling and try hope scrolling instead. Focus on the positive stories and the things that are going right. Amplify the voices of people who are stepping up in their communities and making a difference on the local scale. Engage with content that’s highlighting solutions that we want to bring to the world.
Our actions do have an effect. By engaging with and amplifying content that we want to see, not only will it cater our algorithms to make us see it more, but it will make other people see it more as well. And it will reward the work that these people are doing. That’s what I try and do. I try and find great stories of really inspiring, motivating leaders who are doing something great and make as many people aware of it as possible. I think we all have a little bit of say in that. If we do that, then social media can actually be a great net positive. It can raise money for a nonprofit or gain huge traction behind a petition to avoid drilling in the Arctic.
Never before has a regular person been able to reach five million people for free by talking for 30 seconds to a phone camera. It’s almost unfathomable how this organic reach has the ability to have such a big impact for good or for bad. It’s a little bit of all of our responsibility to try and ensure that it’s for good.
