No Mercy / No Malice: The Prof G Storytelling Playbook

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Hey everybody, it's Andy Roddick, host of Serve Podcast for your fix on all things tennis.

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One query I often get is, what class or skill would you suggest our kids take and learn to compete in the modern economy?

A few years ago, people expected me to say STEM or make the contrarian case for a liberal arts education.

Today, the expectation is AI.

But my answer remains unchanged.

To be successful, master storytelling.

Communities with larger proportions of skilled storytellers experience greater levels of cooperation and procreation.

Storytelling equals efficient transmission of survival-relevant information.

Among men, being skilled in storytelling increases attractiveness and perceived status to potential long-term mates.

The arc of evolution bends toward good storytellers.

In the business world, the flow of capital concentrates around good stories.

Entrepreneurs, aka salespeople, aka storytellers deploy a narrative that captures imaginations and capital to pull the future forward.

Valuations aren't a function of balance sheets, but of the stories that give those balance sheets meaning and direction.

Every business I've ever started was based on a compelling story.

Prof G Media is no different.

Those stories are our product.

Mia Silverio, our research lead, plays a key role role developing the stories I tell.

This week I asked her to write about the art and science of effective storytelling.

See what others miss, the ProfG Storytelling Playbook by Mia Silverio, as read by George Hahn.

I've been on hundreds of Zoom calls with Scott, not an exaggeration.

Over the past five years, I've learned how he crafts powerful presentations.

This is how we think about business storytelling at ProfG Media.

Scott will often stop me when we're reviewing his decks to call for more drama.

Infusing a narrative with drama and emotion separates an exceptional storyteller from a mediocre one.

A good storyteller is simply a good entertainer.

Am I discounting the importance of underlying content?

Somewhat.

But the unfortunate truth is that even if you have revelatory information to share, it's not going to have an impact if no one's paying attention.

As writer and podcaster Derek Thompson observed, there's something overlapping in the Venn diagram between what is demanded of stand-up comics and what is demanded from public intellectuals, and that is, explain this shit to me.

Make me feel something.

Research tells us that experiences that elicit emotions are more memorable than ones that don't.

Your story doesn't need to make your audience cry or laugh, but it should inspire thoughtfulness or surprise, promote introspection or curiosity, or evoke longing or guilt.

At the very least, you need to be self-aware enough to make a deprecating joke about a dull topic.

Two ways to inject emotion into your presentations.

Number one,

lean into provocative, contrarian takes that surprise your audience or challenge their assumptions.

The first slide of Scott's 2024 TED Talk asked, do we love our children?

The question begs an obvious answer, yes.

But it sets up the next slides, which show irrefutable evidence that young people today have been handed a sour deal.

If we've elected officials who have let the American dream and the promises of capitalism die in the service of older generations' enrichment, Scott asked, how does that behavior square with really loving our children?

Powerful stories surprise us.

Harry Potter running into a brick wall and not getting head trauma is so delightfully perplexing that it prepares you for the magical new world you're about to enter.

Scott is well known for his surprising takes.

Young people need to drink more.

The era of brand is over.

Tesla is dramatically overvalued, etc.

But provocative statements only work when they're anchored in evidence.

If you don't have the evidence or creative leeway with your content, you can still deliver surprises through how you present.

Hide half a chart in PowerPoint and reveal it at a key moment.

Drop in a video or audio clip.

Bring in a guest.

Move, literally.

Scott has worn wigs, lip-synced on stage, and jumped up and down shirtless at South by Southwest.

No one expects these stunts, which is why they land.

Surprise gets attention and draws your audience into the story.

I never thought I'd use the words accounting and viral in the same sentence, but a professor at the University of Oklahoma changed that.

Instead of droning on about balance sheets, Jonathan Kern runs around his classroom singing about depreciation and leading chants about cash flow.

Viral TikTok videos show lecture halls full of engaged students.

He made the most boring subject in business school unforgettable by doing the exact opposite of what everyone expects from an accounting class.

Number two,

use engaging data.

Be selective with your data, and by selective, I don't mean stingy.

Any persuasive story should include quantitative evidence.

What I mean is, select quantitative data that has an outsized qualitative impact.

Use the WOW test.

If a data point, sentence, or slide doesn't challenge or surprise you, cut it.

Dig for the good data.

Don't settle for the bland stuff.

For example, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft will together spend $364 billion on capital expenditures this year.

I could leave it at that.

Or I can make that data dramatic and meaningful by telling you that for the same amount of money, you could build another international space station, reinvent the nuclear bomb, construct six nuclear submarines, dig the channel tunnel between England and France, run Japan's military for an entire year, and still have enough left over to buy everyone in Manhattan and the Bronx an iPhone.

I believe there's wow-factor data in every field, no matter how boring.

Consider this dull data point.

The IRS processed over 266 million tax returns and other forms last year.

To add drama, try this.

Cumulatively, Americans will spend 7.9 billion hours doing taxes this year.

That's equivalent to about 900,000 years, or three times the amount of time Homo sapiens have been on planet Earth.

Okay, maybe that's a bit too dramatic, but you get the idea.

Good stories teach us something new.

Good storytellers cultivate the ability to see what others don't.

I call this zooming out.

Most people analyze events as if they're looking through a camera lens, only seeing what's in focus.

Skilled storytellers pull back to capture the wider landscape, revealing potential causes and effects that were invisible in the close-up shot.

Put differently, zooming out requires moving from the what happened layer of understanding to the so what, what made it possible, what happens next layers.

Zooming out is most helpful in the analysis and brainstorming stage.

when you're deciding what story to tell.

That's how I arrived at my prediction that GLP-1s will supercharge the medical aesthetics market.

Most GLP-1 news covers how the drug will affect the food and beverage industry.

That's the obvious story.

What's a more interesting one?

I zoomed out and asked, what exactly happens after a patient loses 50 plus pounds?

Rapid weight loss can create beauty problems, excess skin, and ozempic face.

The gaunt, aged look you get from losing facial fat too quickly, often fixed with filler.

I wondered if this was already fueling demand in medical aesthetics.

It is.

60% of plastic surgeons say weight loss drugs are boosting their business.

The numbers are striking.

Surgical lifts and tucks are up 20% to 40% since 2019.

Facial fat grafting jumped 50%

in the past year.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons found that that two in five GLP-1 patients are considering surgery and one in five already went under the knife.

Now zoom out further.

Probably more than 40% of Americans qualify medically for GLP-1s, but only 2% are taking them.

As adoption scales and insurance companies expand coverage, we are looking at massive demand for cosmetic procedures to address the unwanted byproducts of weight loss.

Zooming out works in investing, too.

In 1900, betting on the automobile probably seemed smart, but U.S.

automakers delivered mediocre returns thanks to competition and consolidation.

The real windfall came decades later from the ripple effects.

Cars enabled suburbs, suburbs fueled demand for big box retail, and Walmart stock returned 1600X between 1980 and 2020, roughly 70 times better than Ford over the same period.

When everyone spots the primary trend, zoom out to spot the causes and effects.

When Scott presents in a different country, I adapt his deck with region-specific data.

Even small details get tailored.

People pay more attention when content is personally relevant, so frame your message in a way that makes them care.

Great storytellers do this.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg advanced gender equality by taking on cases where men, not women, were harmed by gendered laws, forcing male judges to confront bias in a way that felt personally relevant.

Personalization is only half the battle.

The other half is context, framing numbers, concepts, or jargon, so their meaning is instantly clear.

When Elizabeth Warren protested Trump's tax bill, she told Congress, no baby should lose health care so Jeff Bezos can buy a third yacht.

She could have cited the revenue loss in billions, but that wouldn't land as hard.

By putting the cost in human terms and tying it to a vivid image, she gave a dry budgetary trade-off context and made it impossible to ignore.

You can do the same with business data.

NVIDIA is worth $4.5 trillion

is just a statistic.

But saying NVIDIA is worth more as a percentage of global GDP than the UK, France, and Germany's stock markets provides the context needed to understand the company's scale, just like Warren's yacht line made people feel the trade-off.

Context also makes complex topics accessible.

Take this stat.

Living next to a nuclear power plant for a year exposes you to 0.1 micro sieverts of radiation.

That sounds terrifying until you learn that eating two bananas gives you nearly twice that dose.

TikTok creator Becca Bloom nails this by explaining finance terminology using colloquial Gen Z language.

She defines market cap as the total value of a company's shares, aka checking someone's hinge profile and instantly knowing if they're high effort or still figuring life out.

You can supercharge the power of context through visualization.

Data visualization is a defining feature of our work and core to the ProfG Media brand.

It also leverages a basic fact about comprehension.

The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text.

Scott's presentations reflect this.

His AI Optimist talk features 13 text-based slides and 104 slides filled with charts, images, and videos.

Back in 2021, when everyone was losing their minds over the metaverse, Scott was famously bearish.

Quote, headsets are nothing more than wearable sex repellent, unquote.

I was putting together slides to back up his position, so I pulled Google search data for metaverse.

The chart looked okay in isolation.

A big spike followed by a higher baseline.

But here's why context is so important.

For fun, I compared searches for the metaverse to something random.

Crocs.

Those ugly foam shoes consistently outpaced metaverse searches even at its peak hype moment.

If more people were Googling Crocs than the supposed future of human interaction, maybe the metaverse wasn't as inevitable as everyone claimed.

I started calling this the Crocs test.

It's held up surprisingly well.

The Crocs test correctly predicted the collapse of Quibby, NFTs, and Virgin Galactic.

Stories exist to be shared.

We tell them to entertain, teach, connect, and move other people.

Storytelling is a service, a way of charting a path, yes, but also a mechanism for generating the hope needed to sustain us on our journey.

A well-told story creates a bridge between storyteller and audience, unlocking emotions in all directions.

Scott, who the New York Times likened to Howard Stern, always sharp, sometimes crass, gets surprisingly emotional on stage during his presentations.

He almost cried while giving his TED talk, and I almost cried reading the comments on YouTube, not because we were receiving praise,

but because we'd given hope.

Good stories help us recognize feelings we couldn't name, experiences we believe no one else shared, and insights we knew but couldn't articulate.

As Walt Disney said of storytellers,

we instill hope again

and again.

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