Presentation-Secrets-Of-Steve-Jobs

72 CREATE THE STORY
to the environment, a love for Apple (Al Gore sits on Apple’s
board), and an engaging presentation style.
Al Gore’s award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth,
is a presentation designed with Apple’s storytelling devices in
mind. Gore gives his audience a reason to listen by establishing
a problem everyone can agree on (critics may differ on the solution,
but the problem is generally accepted).
Gore begins his presentation—his story—by setting the stage
for his argument. In a series of colorful images of Earth taken
from various space missions, he not only gets audiences to appreciate
the beauty of our planet but also introduces the problem.
Gore opens with a famous photograph called “Earthrise,” the
first look at Earth from the moon’s surface. Then Gore reveals
a series of photographs in later years showing signs of global
warming such as melting ice caps, receding shorelines, and
hurricanes. “The ice has a story to tell us,” he says. Gore then
describes the villain in more explicit terms: the burning of fossil
fuels such as coal, gas, and oil has dramatically increased the
amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, causing
global temperatures to rise.
In one of the most memorable scenes of the documentary,
Gore explains the problem by showing two colored lines (red
and blue) representing levels of carbon dioxide and average temperatures
going back six hundred thousand years. According to
Gore, “When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets
warmer.” He then reveals a slide that shows the graph climbing
to the highest level of carbon dioxide in our planet’s history—
which represents where the level is today. “Now if you’ll bear
with me, I want to really emphasize this next point,” Gore says
as he climbs onto a mechanical lift. He presses a button, and
the lift carries him what appears to be at least five feet. He is
now parallel with the point on the graph representing current
CO 2
emissions. This elicits a small laugh from his audience. It’s
funny but insightful at the same time. “In less than fifty years,”
he goes on to say, “it’s going to continue to go up. When some of
these children who are here are my age, here’s where it’s going
to be.” At this point, Gore presses the button again, and the lift