No Mercy / No Malice: The Prof G Storytelling Playbook

Written by Mia Silverio. As read by George Hahn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:00Speaker 02

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• 1:27Scott Galloway?

  This week, we're airing a post originally published last August. Entrepreneur is another word for, wait for it, salesperson. And a salesperson is really a storyteller. Every business begins with a story compelling enough to capture people's imaginations and their capital. None of the businesses I've started made any sense at first. Then, they did, or they didn't. Prop G Media is no different, except stories are our product. Today, our research lead Mia Silverio explores the art and science of effective storytelling.

• 2:09George 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 Prop G 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.

• 2:52George Hahn?

  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."

• 3:11George Hahn?

  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.

• 3:37George Hahn?

  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?"

• 4:21George Hahn?

  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," et cetera. 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.

• 5:06George Hahn?

  Scott has worn wigs, lip synced onstage, 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.

• 5:47George Hahn?

  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.

• 6:30George Hahn?

  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.

• 7:16George Hahn?

  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.

• 7:58George Hahn?

  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.

• 8:39George Hahn?

  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.

• 9:21George Hahn?

  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 2 in 5 GLP-1 patients are considering surgery, and 1 in 5 already went under the knife. Now zoom out further.

• 10:00George Hahn?

  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're 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 US automakers delivered mediocre returns thanks to competition and consolidation. The real windfall came decades later from the ripple effects. Cars enabled suburbs.

• 10:44George Hahn?

  Suburbs fueled demand for big-box retail. And Walmart stock returned 1,600X 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,

• 11:29George Hahn?

  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 healthcare 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

• 12:13George Hahn?

  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

• 12:58George Hahn?

  microsieverts 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.

• 13:40George Hahn?

  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."

• 14:23George Hahn?

  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.

• 15:05George Hahn?

  The Crocs Test correctly predicted the collapse of Quibi, 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 liken to Howard Stern, always sharp, sometimes crass, gets surprisingly emotional onstage during his presentations.

• 15:50George Hahn?

  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."