The Impact of Effective Storytelling

Austan Goolsbee:

Good afternoon. I'm Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. I wanted to welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today for The Meeting of the Minds. This event series is a collaboration between Chicago Booth and the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. We bring together other faculty to explore the intersection of business and the human, and how that can lead us to a richer grasp of the human experience. Today's topic will be centered on storytelling and the power that stories have on the way we think and make decisions. We have the privilege of discussing this topic with a fabulous group of speakers. Our first speaker is Guy Rolnik. Guy is a clinical professor of strategic management at Booth. For the past 28 years, he has lived and worked at the intersection of business, finance, regulation, politics, and the media, first as a financial journalist and editor, later as a business entrepreneur and founder of a media company. And in the last decade, as a policy entrepreneur, using media to drive structural reforms in the economy.

Austan Goolsbee:

Rolnik's work as founder and chief editor of a leading business newspaper dramatically influenced the ideas, norms, and values in Israeli political economy, and brought about significant changes in regulatory policies and legislation. He also literally teaches the class on storytelling in business at Booth.

Austan Goolsbee:

Next we have Vu Tran. Vu is an assistant professor of practice in the arts at the University of Chicago. He's a novelist and a short story writer, whose fiction primarily concerns the Vietnamese diaspora in America, and the ongoing and inherited effects of displacement. His first novel, Dragonfish, was a 2015 New York Times notable book. His fiction has also appeared in publications such as the O. Henry Prize Stories and the Best American Mystery Stories. He won a 2009 Whiting Writers Award for Fiction, has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and other organizations.

Austan Goolsbee:

Our conversation today will be moderated by Alison Cuddy. Alison is the Marilynn Thoma artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival, where she leads the creative direction of the festival. She brings more than 15 years’ experience developing humanities programming for diverse publics, including 10 years at WBEZ, our NPR affiliate here in Chicago. There, she gained a national profile as the host of the station's award-winning flagship program, 848, and helped launch Odyssey, a nationally syndicated talk show of arts and ideas. Alison moderates public forums in partnership with many of the city's cultural institutions and community organizations. She has an MA in English from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in Cinema Studies from Concordia University in Montreal. In 2019, she was appointed by mayor Lori Lightfoot to co-chair the city of Chicago's cultural advisory council. She also serves on the boards of the Arts Club of Chicago and The Chicago Reader. We are thrilled and lucky to have the three of them with us today at our Hyde Park campus. So with that, let me turn it over to Alison.

Alison Cuddy:

Thank you so much, Austin, and it is great to be here. Thanks to the Stevanovich Institute and Chicago Booth for hosting us and obviously, to Guy and Vu for being here with us today. So I'm going to talk you through the format of this event and what it's going to look like. We're going to talk for about 50 minutes, have a conversation together, and then we received lots of questions. We have so many people joining us today. We have 3,000 people registered from around the world, right here in Chicago, in Dubai, and everywhere in between. So we've got lots of questions that I'll pepper throughout the conversation, but we also encourage you to ask questions in the Zoom chat now. So as you're listening to the conversation, things come up, feel free to drop them in the chat, and we'll try to get to as many of them as we can toward the end of this conversation.

Alison Cuddy:

And to start things off, so you feel fully invested in this, we're going to do a short poll. So we ask you to weigh in on the question, where does storytelling impact your daily life the most? Is it through advertising? Is it through news? Is it through your personal life or social media? So think about that. Fill in the poll. We'll keep an eye on the results, but Guy and Vu, it is so great to be here with you. And I wanted to start with a pretty basic question, which is what got you interested in storytelling? So, Vu, why don't you start us off?

Vu Tran:

Well, I guess what made me consciously aware that I wanted to write stories, I mean I've always wanted to be a writer. I remember very vividly in the first grade, you'd go off into your reading groups and anytime the teacher would assign a fiction writing assignment, I was just, there was something so thrilling about it, not just the act of writing it, but then sharing it, and from then on, I didn't want to be anything else. It's always been kind of a blessing and a curse to know exactly what you want to be when you grow up. So from the age of six on, I realized that that's what I wanted to do. I could psychoanalyze it all sorts of ways, but I think one big feature is that I've always been a control freak, to be honest. And I think there's something, you have complete control when you're writing a story, especially on paper, and you're not necessarily performing to outside eyes. And there's just a level of control when you're shaping a story, the people in it, the world that you're exploring, that always appealed to me and appealed, especially to my need for control.

Alison Cuddy:

Need for control, we’ll probably be talking about that, controlling the narrative.

Vu Tran:

Absolutely.

Alison Cuddy:

And when you can't control the narrative, Guy, you come to storytelling from so many different points of view. You are a journalist. You think about storytelling in the context of policy decision-making, in finance. You teach storytelling. So what for you was the first thing that made you realize, "Oh, this is of interest to me"?

Guy Rolnik:

First of all, I just learned something, and it probably has to do with me also being compulsive. That's a much easier explanation, instead of going through my whole life story, I can say, "Well, I'm compulsive, so I need to control the story." Okay. So thank you for that, Vu. So here is what I think. First of all, there is the question when did I become a storyteller? And then when did I become interested in storytelling? So you'd think that, so I started to be a journalist like 30 years ago, and you'd think that this has to do with journalism. And actually now, when I look back at my career, it turns out that I became a storyteller, started very much interested in storytelling and to tell stories when I founded my company, because when you're an entrepreneur, actually you survive only if you're able to convince and persuade a lot of people.

Guy Rolnik:

So, pretty soon after I founded my own company, I ran out of money and I had to tell stories to investors and to the board of directors and to the employees that wanted to leave. So I really had a lot of hands-on experience, like for me, storytelling in the first year until the company became successful, for the first years, it's all about storytelling. And so it's about survival for me. And this is what sometimes I tell students, "At some point in your life, the only thing that's going to save you in your business career is storytelling." And then when did I become interested in storytelling, not as a storyteller? This is a couple of years after I started teaching. So I teach classes on the political economy of regulation, in way is how do, companies are trying to shape their non-market environment? How they're trying to influence legislations, policies, the media, how media influences politicians and regulators and so on. So the more I taught this class, I realized that actually you think that it's about lobbying, it's about money, it's about power and all that. And the more I develop my thinking about those non-markets environments, I realized that at the end of the day, it's all about storytelling. So companies, lobbyists, media, politicians, they all use storytelling to persuade.

Alison Cuddy:

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. That is very interesting, and that tension between being persuasive and also telling an authentic story is something I think we'll come to a little bit later in the conversation, but I want to go to our poll results. And I'm a little bit surprised by this, but I'm curious to hear what you two have to say. So in terms of where storytelling impacts your daily lives the most, social media 13%, advertising 8%, that's intriguing, news 23%, but topping the chart, in-person relationships 56%. More than half of the people watching this think storytelling impacts them the most in their personal relationships. So what do we make of that? Guy?

Guy Rolnik:

So I think maybe people are more aware of how storytelling is important in their interpersonal relationships and communication and so on. But if I had to choose, I would say that storytelling is central to politics. In many ways, politics is a theater. Our ability to understand really what politicians are doing and to evaluate them is very minimal. The world is very complicated out there. So politicians are storytellers. They tell, they have their own personal stories. They have the stories that they tell. They have the stories out there in the market of ideas that they have to tap into it. So politics is storytelling. Now I'm surprised that people think that advertising does not influence them. Advertising influences everyone. The reason that we buy Nike shoes for $130 has to do with the story of, well, who is Nike and why we like Nike, and brands are stories in many ways. And we pay premiums for brands because they are stories. We're not fully aware of that. We drink the sugar with water, but we call it meaning, the taste of life, but at the end of the day, it's that a brand has usually, behind a brand, a story.

Alison Cuddy:

Yeah. Yeah, well that might have something to do with why people don't think advertising influences, because they think they can see through it. They're smarter.

Vu Tran:

Well, I think I'm both surprised and unsurprised that it's so low because yeah, advertising is in the background of our lives, but it absolutely affects everything we do. Actually, 56% you said was personal interaction?

Alison Cuddy:

Personal, yeah. Personal relationships.

Vu Tran:

Personal relationships.

Alison Cuddy:

Family, friends. And it's true. We do tell each other stories all the time.

Vu Tran:

Yeah. Actually, that was what I would've said. I was actually expecting people to say social media or advertising or the news, one of those. I think your personal interaction, I think every single day when you interact with people, you're telling a story about yourself, the way you dress, how you talk, how you gesture, these are not always conscious, but you're telling a story about yourself with every element of that. When you get home to your partner or to who you live with, you're telling them a story about your day, and whether it was a good or a bad story, a good day or a bad day. And I think that's something that we both consciously and subconsciously do anytime we interact. But the funny thing is that we also do it when we're alone. I think you tell yourself a story about how you should be feeling and what you want the next day. I think there is a narrative there, I think, because there is a beginning to it, what you want, and then there's the what you got to do to get it. And the end of the story, which is you fulfilling it, we subconsciously do that I think every day alone by ourselves.

Alison Cuddy:

Right. Well, and even a lot of like self-help or wellness is sort of predicated-

Vu Tran:

Absolutely, yeah.

Alison Cuddy:

On that continually telling yourself a narrative and often it's a narrative of improvement or I'm going to come to this.

Vu Tran:

And I think you of all people know this. In the book industry, self-help is one of the biggest parts of the book industry.

Alison Cuddy:

Right, yeah.

Guy Rolnik:

Now, people have to tell themselves stories all the time to build their identity and stories are key to our emotional wellbeing and to our wellbeing generally. And the more you know who is in your story and what you stand for and who are your characters in your story and what are the values in your story, it's easier to navigate life and to make decisions.

Vu Tran:

Well, I'm sorry-

Alison Cuddy:

Go.

Vu Tran:

I'm just going to say, because you were saying it's about survival and I absolutely agree. I think stories are about survival and sanity, not to make it to, you know-

Guy Rolnik:

Sanity also, I agree.

Vu Tran:

Because I mean I just think in general, I mean they're always different motivations for why we tell stories, but life is so messy and confusing and uncertain. And I mean, I think stories do like some very crucial things that it distills incoherent information into, like I said, that manageable narrative, beginning, middle, and end, that you can create a coherent portrait of who you think you are. It puts the audience in the story. So it comes alive in a way that that makes the audience believe it, not with their head, but with their stomach, with their heart.

Alison Cuddy:

Gut instinct, yeah.

Vu Tran:

And because of all that, stories are remembered more easily. They're more memorable than say, a list of facts. We always believe a story and feel a story much, much more powerfully than we do a list of facts or a report of some kind. And for all those reasons, I think stories help us organize our ideas of an otherwise very chaotic and-

Alison Cuddy:

Disorganized, yeah.

Vu Tran:

Confusing world. That's what keeps us sane. I mean, that's religion.

Guy Rolnik:

Yeah. I think one way to think about it is that the human species is burdened with a brain that is very sophisticated, and we are constantly bombarded with so much information, stimulation, social interactions, and the only way to make sense out of that and the only way to navigate life is through storytelling. First of all, the stories that we tell ourselves, who am I? What am I doing here? What's important for me? Why I did that? Why I chose that job? Why I chose that friend? So stories help us organize our life. And the minute you are not sure about your story, that, as Vu said, becomes very messy, so this is why I agree that it's about survival in a very difficult world.

Alison Cuddy:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Joan Didion has that famous quote about storytelling. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, like literally they give us a life story. So that, and Margaret Atwood talks about, it's something in us in the way that you were both talking about. It's like we come into the world with this sophisticated brain you mentioned, and you can't really destroy that in the human, not like that is a function of how we-

Guy Rolnik:

And I think Aristotle said that we quest for meaning all the time and only through stories we can actually make meaning of life, make meaning of what we-

Vu Tran:

Yeah, yeah. That's why I've always thought both the dumbest question, but also the most crucial question in life is what is the meaning of life? I mean, it's such a silly question. If you think about, well, what does that mean? What is the meaning of life? But also that's why we tell stories because we need that. We need some source of, we need that push, that motivation to find meaning in everything we do. And the story is the vehicle for that.

Guy Rolnik:

I think I would say it's very difficult to get out of bed in the morning if you don't have some kind of story, why are you doing it and why you're here.

Alison Cuddy:

We know the meaning of life. It's football, right? Football is life if you're watching Ted Lasso. I want to go to one question. So again, we've gotten a lot of questions from all of you who preregistered, thank you. And we encourage you to keep dropping them into the Zoom chat. But this is a great one. It's another kind of basic question. It's from Awale who is in Hargeisa and asks what are the qualities … So we know storytelling matters. We know it's important. It's how we make meaning. But what are the qualities needed by a person who wishes to become a perfect storyteller? A perfect storyteller?

Vu Tran:

How do you define a perfect storyteller? I don't-

Guy Rolnik:

You can never be perfect in storytelling. And the question is why are you telling the story? Okay, so in Vu's world, you tell stories to entertain and to ignite the imagination. And it's more of an art. In the business world, if you talk about perfect storytellers in the business world, in the business world, when you tell stories, you have a purpose. There is a reason. So every now and then you'd meet someone that is like a very talented storyteller, intuitive storytellers who like to tell stories and people are listening to them, but sometimes they tend to forget why they're telling the stories and they tend to forget the stories are also impactful. So they would tell the wrong stories.

Guy Rolnik:

So they are great storytellers. People listen, but then people leave after they heard that story and they get the wrong message, not what they wanted to say. So in the business world, I'd say that the perfect storyteller, first of all, understands the power of stories, understands that stories can be very dangerous also. And then you start with the purpose, you know exactly why you're telling the story. And then you go through the whole methodology of storytelling that I think in the business world and in politics and in literature are the same. You start with, you have to have at the center of your story, a universal value, an archetype, some kind of an archetype. And you have to say something about that value. This is how people connect to your story. In the business world, and I think not only in the business world, I think at the core of the story, the engine of a story is the conflict because yeah, people tend to think that intuitively some of my students think that when I tell a business story, I don't want to be conflictual.

Guy Rolnik:

People think this is... No, there is no story in my eyes without a conflict. And the conflict is the engine that drives this car, and only through those, you have to decide, you have to decide right from the start who are going to be your antagonists in the story. There could be several antagonists. It can be nature. It can be society. It can be your boss. It can be a peer. It can be your competitors. And only through those forces of antagonism, you are able, actually be able to flesh out what is the value in the story? What are the real choices that our hero protagonist makes? And we only learn about those, about the ideas and the values and about the true character of our protagonist through those forces of antagonism.

Vu Tran:

Yeah. I mean for me, it's not just your audience that you need to know and why you're telling the story. I think if the questioner, the person asking the question, the phrase “perfect storyteller” is just basically an effective storyteller. You can only be effective if you're telling the story, how do I put this? I tell my students, you can only write well if you write yourself—not autobiographically, but you have to know yourself to write well. And I think storytelling of any kind is the same way. I can't tell a story the way Guy tells it and not if I want to be a truly effective one. I have to tell it the way I tell it. And that requires understanding who you are.

Alison Cuddy:

Well, in that sense, Guy said earlier that purpose is really important. You have to know what your purpose is in telling a story, but for you, writing fiction, do you need a purpose to drive the engine?

Vu Tran:

I never think about, I think about purpose in very broad ways, because again, go back to the question of effective storyteller. Well, an ineffective storyteller, the effect of that is just indifference. I think that's pretty simple. If you're not a good storyteller people don't listen to you. The question of being an effective storyteller, a quality storyteller, that I think people need to think a bit more hard about, much harder about because you can be a great storyteller, but if your goals are, it really depends on the goals because it can be both a very constructive and beneficial thing, but also a very destructive thing. The way I view my purpose in telling a story is if I am seeking truth in a way, if I'm seeking a deeper truth, then what I'm trying to do is offer the reader a deeper understanding of humanity. That is my goal. Some people, some storytellers, their goal is to kind of reshape the truth for their own purposes, and when they do that, I think they offer a more shallow idea. Humanity is not necessarily deepened. It's kind of curtailed-

Alison Cuddy:

To where it even sounds almost like propaganda in a way, right?

Vu Tran:

Yeah. I mean that's one version of it. That's one version of it, absolutely.

Alison Cuddy:

Yeah. But I mean, I guess-

Vu Tran:

But that's still effective storytelling. See, that's the thing, that's still a good storyteller. So I think it really matters. The goal like Guy says is really key here when it comes to being a good, perfect, effective storyteller, whatever you want to call it. I'm sorry.

Alison Cuddy:

No, no, but the idea that you're trying to tap into a deeper meaning of the human or understanding of the human, that can be really messy. That's a messy narrative. Does storytelling in your context, Guy, have to simplify that? I mean, it can have an antagonist, it can have multiple characters, but do you have to simplify the narrative for it to be effective?

Guy Rolnik:

I'm not really sure that you have to simplify it. Actually sometimes, storytelling can make it, even in the business context can make, give some more complicated and a richer meaning to what we do. Or not here just being about increasing sales. There is other things, other values, universal values, other values that we care about, and this is why we are doing it. I think that the main difference between the business story and literary story or artistic story is again, in the business setting, in the business setting, you start with the purpose. You better know what is the purpose. It's not just that we have a great story, I'm a great storyteller. I can tell you a lot, all kind of stories. No, you ask yourself first, number one, what is my purpose?

Guy Rolnik:

Number two, who is the audience? And this is key. So when you are directing, when you're writing a script for a movie or a book, usually you want to get everyone interested in your story. In the business world, most of the time you are targeting a very, sometimes you tell stories to your team, and sometimes you're telling stories to your shareholders. And sometimes you're telling stories to your consumers and sometimes you're telling a story to a regulator and politicians. And this is where I think storytelling in the business context differs because what I go through with my students is actually, okay, you need to understand the biases, the prejudices of whoever is your audience. And then you craft the story. You cannot ignore…they have their own, they came to the conversation with their own stories and you should acknowledge, I call it like when you're starting to write a story or something and craft a story for your audience, I call it do your due diligence, due diligence about who the audience is, where they come from.

Guy Rolnik:

So you want to know their political leanings. You want to know their religion. You want to know their age, and then you start with the story. You cannot just say, this is a story that fits everyone. So this is what I think, this is the main, another thing that I quibble with myself many times is, I do feel that in business stories, there has to be not only a resolution that we have in most stories. Usually there are stories with happy endings. You can use a tragedy when you want to warn workers about safety, you can tell them tragedy. But most of the time in the business context, we use stories that have some kind of happy ending. And another thing that I think is very relevant is that business stories usually end with an exclamation point and not with a question mark. When it's a question mark, so people tend to think, we'll see what happens. Our hero ponders. He's not sure. She's not sure. Well, usually when you are doing that in a business context, you risk having some of your audiences get the wrong message. So if you really need a message, you want to make sure at the end of the story they understood what is the message and not end up with a question mark.

Vu Tran:

I have a quick question for you, Guy, because I guess the question is, do you think when it comes to knowing your audience and knowing what they want, is it to appeal to as many people as possible or not? Because what I would say to my students or to any person writing fiction is that you should not try to appeal to the universal. You've heard this, the specific is universal. The more specific you are about your characters and the world of your fiction, and the more convincing you make the specific, that is what will appeal to more people. And the mistake is always to think, write a story that will appeal and that people will identify with, as many people will identify with as possible. And I feel like that's always the mistake in literary storytelling, but do you think that's not the case in business?

Guy Rolnik:

First of all, I totally agree that you have to be very specific and it's about very specific people and events and details and all that. As for universal, yes if you can tap into a universal value that will capture most, the heart of our story, our business story is our controlling idea, which is some kind of a universal value usually, or value that is dear to your audience and some message about that value. The value can be, I don't know, teamwork and some message about teamwork. If we work together, we are going to be very successful. So this is important, but in the business context, I think that you have to know what are the values of your audience.

Guy Rolnik:

Don't try to tell them a story that they don't share the same value. If this is the value in the heart, that's central to your story and they don't share that value, they will be less responsive to it. You won't be able to persuade them and to engage them. So again, when you are, the question you always ask is there this tension. On one hand, you want to instill your readers or your viewers with your ideas. On the other hand, you have to acknowledge that they already have the ideas. You cannot ignore them. You might want to introduce new agenda, new ideas, but even if you want to really change their minds, you have to know where they come from. Otherwise you will not be very successful.

Alison Cuddy:

We have a question that I think, so you used changing minds, persuasive selling, and Lars Echo from Dubai says, where is the fine line between storytelling and manipulating?

Vu Tran:

Well, first of all, I think manipulation is not inherently a bad thing. By definition, the word manipulate is to do something with skill, to do something well with skill in a skillful manner, basically. So I don't think the question is about manipulation. Again, I can't help come at this from a more cynical literary view, but I feel like the question should be again about purpose. If you're coming at a story, if you're trying to fight against reality, if you kind of see reality in a certain way, but you're trying to fight against it and kind of reshape it for your end goals, that's one thing, but if you're open to reality as you see it, because we all, I know we all approach and see reality differently, but if you are open to it and you're willing to capture it the way it is, and what you're shaping is really just about making it more coherent and alive for the audience, I think that's the fine line—fighting against reality or being open to it. I don't know if that makes sense, but I think that's a very big difference.

Guy Rolnik:

The fine line is the intention. So stories that manipulate us or stories that are trying to fight reality for good causes are actually, you've looked the structure and the impactful stories, the manipulative stories, and the stories that are trying to make the world a better place, actually, they have the same techniques and the same structure. So just by looking at the story, and emotions are very important to stories. And so just by looking at the story, you can say that a manipulative story and other stories are the same. The question is, what are the intentions of the storyteller? Why is he telling that story? And you know, one person would think this is manipulative, because this is the set of values and the other one would say, this is the story that will lead us to a better world, because she or he has a different set of values.

Alison Cuddy:

Right. It's trying to make you see something different. So in a sense, it has to manipulate to make that happen.

Guy Rolnik:

Or as Vu said, fighting reality, I like that definition, that most of the time, we're trying to, in the business world, we're trying to fight reality. We're trying to, this is the reality you'd see out there, but we want to offer you a different way to look at things.

Vu Tran:

Another way to look at is I find it very, I don't know, my first word was amusing, but when people say that nowadays bias, if anyone's biased, that's a bad thing. Bias inherently is not a bad thing. It depends on how you came to that bias. If it's informed and not prejudiced information or way of thinking that brought you to that bias, I think that's perfectly human. You have to have bias. You have to be discerning. It's the same thing with manipulation. It matters where it's coming out of, like Guy says, what its goal is, and what is the source of it. If the source is coming from a thoughtful discerning place, I think that's what matters the most.

Alison Cuddy:

Yeah. Well, we've been talking about some really big ideas about human behavior and making meaning. Let's dive into some examples. I love this quote from Ira Glass, who created This American Life, which is a very powerful storytelling machine. And he says, "Great stories happen to those that can tell them." So let's talk.

Vu Tran:

I don't know that quote. That's a great quote.

Alison Cuddy:

Yeah. As you look across the cultural or media landscape, and I know you both have examples, who are some people that excel at storytelling and why? So Guy, do you want to start us off? I know you have covered, we're going to do deep dives into some master storytellers as we see them.

Guy Rolnik:

Yeah. So, first of all, I totally agree. Every now and then I would have a student coming to me and say, "Well, professor, I don't have any story." I say, "No, no, everyone has the stories. The only difference is who is willing to try to find his own stories and tell his own stories." I never met anyone who doesn't have really interesting stories actually. And now, so the masters that I think if we're looking at the business world today, I think that probably two of the top storytellers of this time and age are Elon Musk and Warren Buffet.

Guy Rolnik:

So Buffet has been around in the center of stage of the business world for, I don't know, now 50 years. And I believe that a lot of people will tell you Buffet, everybody knows Warren Buffet because he is the best investor in the world. The more I studied Buffet, and actually I had the opportunity to sit down with him a couple of times and see him in action, I realize that actually Buffet is a storyteller. This is, the real reason everybody knows Warren Buffet has to do with storytelling. I'll give you an example that is very, so every year, some 30,000 to 40,000 people buy a plane ticket, a very expensive one, by the way, and fly to Omaha, Nebraska, for the annual shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway. That's Warren Buffet. And I went to those, to this meeting twice, and you enter a stadium with 30,000 people.

Guy Rolnik:

Now this is streamed live on the internet. You don't really have to come there. And actually what happens is that you have two guys, Buffet and his partner, Charlie Munger, cracking jokes for eight hours. So why would people come and spend so much time? And the answer is because Warren Buffet in the last 40 or 50 years has been able to organize all this communication, whether it's his shareholder letters or those events or hundreds of interviews that he would give every year. And so he has this big organizing story of who Warren Buffet is, who Berkshire Hathaway is. And this is a story about, the value of the story is capitalism. The message about the story is that capitalism done right benefits to everyone. And in many ways, people who are buying stocks of Berkshire Hathaway are not only making money, they are part of that American dream, capitalistic dreams and so on.

Guy Rolnik:

So they feel that they have some meaning and they would spend time and they would follow every word that he says because they feel now, we live now today in the world, and especially since the financial crisis, that this value of capitalism is under constant attack all the time. And a lot of people lose their faith. And so Warren Buffet is a figure that helps people restore, people need some organizing story to restore their faith in capitalism. If we do capitalism in Warren Buffet's way, actually it benefits everyone. Now, interestingly enough, when you look at all the small stories that Buffet tells in his meta story about capitalism, you look at the details, actually you see that there are a lot of counter narratives and counter data points that if you look at them, actually, you see that Berkshire Hathaway is not that different from many other companies and nor is Warren Buffet.

Guy Rolnik:

There are numerous scandals in his companies. There are a lot of problems there, but and you'd think that those problems are staring in front of us. And yet people look away. Why? Because they have this amazing story. So this is, so let me give you another example. So everyone who invests in Warren Buffet stocks knows about the moat. You know what is the moat? Okay, so the moat is rule number one of Warren Buffet about investment. He only invests with companies with moats. What is a moat? So in Warren Buffet's words, moat, you have this valuable castle, medieval castle that is run by this duke. And in order to make sure that people don't come and take business from the castle, he builds this moat around the castle with water, deep water and crocodiles. This is a great story.

Guy Rolnik:

You immediately see the corporate story is something very nice, but the truth of the matter that in economics, we have another word for a moat. It's called monopoly or market power. This is the real moat, and Buffet actually invests in companies that have a lot of market power and then don't have a lot of competitors and they make sure that they don't have those competitors in many ways. But Warren Buffet cannot, one word, I like investing in with companies that have a lot of market power that they can raise prices, or I like to invest in companies that there is very little competition. No, this is about capitalism. So how do you reconcile it, that you want to be this capitalism is great, and I invest only in monopolies of companies with market power? You come up with a story, a moat.

Guy Rolnik:

And he uses it all the time. So every time there is some question mark about the business model of Berkshire Hathaway, or whether is it really benefiting society at large or just shareholders in these companies, he would come with some kind of an amazing story. And it's amazing to see how the reality is stirring in front of our eyes, but we hear that amazing story. And when I studied Warren Buffet, I looked at him telling stories 50 years ago. And what I realized is that 50 years ago, the guy didn't know to tell stories. So while he developed his acumen investing, he actually developed an acumen and became a very professional storyteller. So he says for instance, he's against oversized paychecks and he's against stock options for executives, which makes him very unique in Wall Street.

Guy Rolnik:

So about eight years ago, Coca-Cola Company, one of his biggest investments, they announced they're going to give something like $7 billion option plan for the management team and Warren's son Howard sits on the board. And it was interesting to see what's going to happen. There is this story Warren Buffet thinks that, he calls stock options like stealing money from your shareholder. It was very interesting to see what's going to happen. And actually what happened is that Warren Buffet's representative abstained. So he was asked in the media, “how come did you abstain? You have these rules about investments and they are, in your words, they are stealing money from shareholders.” So what did he do? He told a story. He says, "You know what? If you keep belching at the dinner table, they will send you to eat in the kitchen." A story. We can see it immediately. It's like one arc of a story, but actually, what is the story? The story actually says that corporate governance and boards are just rubber stamps. You cannot really do anything meaningful in that board, but again, you can get away with it because he is a gifted storyteller.

Alison Cuddy:

Wow. So I know you have a story about Elon Musk, but I'm going to give Vu the platform now to talk about someone you think is an effective or not effective storyteller, someone who is able to spin tales.

Vu Tran:

Oh man. Well, I was thinking of someone. So if you had asked me like a year ago, who is a great storyteller and was able to say, retell his story in a way that was successful, I would have told you Bill Gates, because for so long, in many ways, the media told his story for him. He was this kind of tyrannical businessman. And if you're an Apple person, then he's totally enemy number one. He did not have the kind of, the portrait of him was not what has kind of come about through the Gates Foundation after he left Microsoft. And how long has the Gates Foundation been around?

Guy Rolnik:

Microsoft, I think he was running Microsoft like 18 years ago or something like that.

Vu Tran:

Yeah. It's been a while that he's been able to kind of retell his story. And now, especially over age, he's this kind of, he's wearing these sweaters, he has glasses and he seems much kinder, much more grandfatherly, if not avuncular, and he's saving the world. And it's very pointed that he does so much of his work in Africa, for example, where he can work out these technologies. Technologies will save the world is basically part of his narrative. And he's at the center of that with the Gates Foundation. Now that story kind of fell apart after this year with all this stuff that comes out about his wife and his other relationships, et cetera.

Vu Tran:

And that seems to me a good example of when a story can fall apart if your personal truth is not stable, but at the same time, and I'm hesitant to talk about Trump, but I have to, because Trump is an example of a very good storyteller, a quite masterful storyteller, but it is not based on a stable, personal truth, in my opinion. And for some people that's okay, or at least they're willing, I think actually, and this might dovetail with your ideas on Elon Musk. I'm not connecting Elon Musk and Trump. I'm not trying to connect them, only in one way, which is that idea of authenticity, that is both part of their narrative.

Vu Tran:

The thing about Elon Musk for example, is that he traffics in the idea that he is authentic. He smokes weed on Joe Rogan, these kind of like erratic, very controversial tweets. I think more than any well-known CEO, he feels and seems authentic, but that authenticity, like it is with Trump, when you can kind of cultivate that idea of yourself as authentic, it really seeps into everybody's idea of you, especially people who support you so that when you do something questionable, say for example, Elon Musk, when he tweets out something really problematic, even if it's problematic to his supporters, they'll still say, "Well, at least he's being authentic."

Alison Cuddy:

That's who he is.

Vu Tran:

And that's the same argument that a lot of people who support Trump will say when they advocate for him or defend him or whatever. And I find that narrative of authenticity quite powerful these days, because people, I think the world at large, for example, because of social media, we inherently are suspicious of things that feel inauthentic. We know the world is much more performed nowadays. We just know this inherently. So we are desperate for that feeling of authenticity. And I just find it deeply ironic that we find authenticity in people whose authenticity is more a narrative than anything, a more kind of manipulated story.

Guy Rolnik:

One technique that Warren Buffet used to make sure that we know that he's the third or the fourth or the fifth richest person in the world, investing in company with moats, that we feel that he's very authentic because if you Google Warren Buffet and look at the images, you'll find something interesting. There is tons of photos of him on the internet taken from news magazines and from television where you'd see Warren Buffet eating an ice cream. Now, so it’s true one of his companies is an ice cream company, but even the CEOs of Unilever or the biggest manufacturers of ice cream, this is not how they take their photos. And this is not how they hang around in shareholder meetings eating ice cream.

Guy Rolnik:

And I also said, what is it about? Does he really need this ice cream when he gets off the stage because he has a sugar rush? Of course not. When we see someone that is having an ice cream or a milkshake or a Big Mac, and we see all the time those photos, he's like a real person. He's like, this comes out as very authentic. He's like everybody else. And then he has this story that a lot of people believe that, you know what, actually investing is super simple. These are the rules of investing. Everyone can be an investor. You can be if you follow those investments. So this is a way to create this authenticity also that we are just, I'm just like the common person.

Alison Cuddy:

Right. But there's something interesting. And we got a lot of questions from people about the impact of social media. We had a question about what's the difference between a story and a meme, and that we do know the world is more performed, but we also know you can perform authenticity and we're expecting people in some way to perform for us. So how is this, I think about someone like Aaron Rodgers, for example, and what's happened to his narrative around vaccinations, that the way social media plays a role in that, what do you think is happening to storytelling up against the pressures of any of these platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, where there's kind of the story, we talked at the beginning about being control freaks, and wanting to have control of the narrative, but here it just keeps spinning. And it goes through the hands with so many different people, gets interpreted, turned into a meme that then becomes something that people came back to and feel really satisfied.

Guy Rolnik:

So at this point today, and we are in the fall of 2020, so we had this intuition for years now that social media, also known as Facebook, talk about moats and monopolies. So social media is, they prioritize the wrong kind of content, lies, manipulation, polarization, hate, and so on. That was our intuition for a while. There was not enough data, but what we've seen now from the whistleblower that came out of Facebook two months ago, Frances Haugen, is that Facebook people are looking at the internal data and they are the only ones that have all the information because they're not willing to share it of course with scientists and with the world at large. We see that actually, what gets viral on Facebook is the worst kind of stories. And this is how the algorithm, this is how algorithm works.

Guy Rolnik:

The more there is hate, the more there is rage, the more there is fear, the more lies by the way. So I think it was like MIT. I think it's MIT, scientists did it on Twitter, is that they proved that actually lies are more viral than the truth.

Vu Tran:

So you want to engage more.

Guy Rolnik:

Yeah, and we want to engage more with lies than we want to engage with... and with lies, with hate, with polarizing ideas. So I think we are in a point of time, it's not like we have different stories. We've always had manipulative stories and lies and false information and propaganda. What we have today that we did, and we had it in traditional media. We had it in media that was controlled by governments for years.

Guy Rolnik:

We had it by rating hungry television channels that just want the sensation. But what we have today is the most sophisticated machine in the history of mass media, a machine that actually can craft stories, according to what... They prey on our weaknesses. They prey on, they know who we are. They know what our prejudice is, they know what will go viral, and they target each one of us with different stories. So I think one of the questions when it comes to storytelling in this time and age is, how do we rein in on those machines? Because those machines are designed to spread the wrong stories. There was a story up until 2000 and up until the last 2016 election, the dominant story that Facebook crafted really, in a very calculated way was Facebook is democratizing the world.

Guy Rolnik:

Everybody has a voice. Now we know that this is absurd. This is like, there is one company controlled by one person who cannot be fired because he has those kind of shares that actually decides what goes viral in our society and what people are exposed to. And not only that, they already know that virality is caused by lies and by fear. So this is the most anti-democratic machine in many ways. I don't know if you remember that in 2011, beginning of 2011, we had the Arab Spring and people said the Arab Spring was organized by Facebook. So there is this story about Facebook democratizing the world. It took us, I think, 10 years actually to understand that this is not what Facebook is doing.

Alison Cuddy:

Right. Well, that's a repeated narrative though. Every new technology says that its goal is to democratize information or content or access. I want to ask you based on this conversation about Facebook, which is a serious one, an ongoing one, but who needs the most help in storytelling, do you think? Is it government? Is it social media platforms? Is it business? Is it the humanities? Who really needs, who's not telling good stories or who needs some hard core lessons from the two of you?

Vu Tran:

That's a difficult question.

Guy Rolnik:

I would argue that some companies like Facebook lost their ability to control the narrative in the last three or four years. And Mark Zuckerberg is now horrible in storytelling, and nobody believes the words he says, but I don't think that he needs to be a better storyteller. No, no, we don't need him being a storyteller. What we need now is the people who would like to rein in big tech monopolies, these people need better stories in explaining to people that if you are coming now and trying to regulate or break up big tech, it's not that you are, they needed a story that explains that if we rein in on big tech, actually we are going to improve innovation and we're going to be more democratic and we're going to have more growth. And sometimes the people who are trying to do it fail because the dominant narrative was, if you're going after big tech, you're going to stymie innovation. So we need to come up with new stories, using history, using other disciplines to show you actually, when reining in those big monopolies and company, actually everyone is going to be better off, except maybe for Mark Zuckerberg.

Vu Tran:

I mean I can't think in terms of institutions to be honest. I can only think in terms of the individual and I just feel like we need to pick who we listen to much better. Especially if you want to be a storyteller, I think you really need to pay attention to who tends to listen to you, because if gullible and discerning people, if gullible and undiscerning people tend to be the ones that gravitates towards your storytelling, you will continue to appeal to only gullible and undiscerning people. And I think you really need to pay attention, more attention to who you, the kinds of storytellers you tend to listen to, because if they are, because we can't help, but shape or fashion ourselves around the people that we admire, especially if we're telling stories. We want to tell stories like the people that appeal to us and so I think that really matters.

Vu Tran:

And I think, just a real quick thing about social media is that I don't think that the huge difference with social media now is that never before in human history has the individual had the ability to select and control who they are in the world and to disseminate it. I mean a nobody could have like millions of followers, essentially. So not just access as many people as possible, but to disseminate yourself the way, there's so many more stories now, and there's so many more ways to, control it, to be selective about it.

Alison Cuddy:

Gatekeepers.

Guy Rolnik:

When you have so many stories, of course, people are, it's very difficult to understand what are the truthful stories and what are lies. And there is no hierarchy anymore. Okay, the only hierarchy is determined by what goes viral and what does the algorithm decide that they're going to prioritize in your news feed, but going back to your questions about when we need better storytelling, I think that the obvious answer for where is climate change. You'd think that this is the biggest story of our generation. And still, if you look at the results of the conference in Glasgow last week, we didn't get what most people want us to get. And I think that it looks as if everybody, it's now the agenda everywhere, the news agenda everywhere, but still the story is not convincing enough for all the politicians and all the leaders of the industrial world to come together and to take a firm action.

Guy Rolnik:

And we should be, you should be taking all of the energy of storytelling to find out ways to make sure that people understand it and feel that this is here and now, and not something in the distant future for the next generation. And then, because reorganizing our life to combat climate change means we will have winners and losers, and now we need another story, which is that the winners will compensate the losers. And this is something that we're not very, in many, most countries around world who are not very good in telling those stories. Actually in many ways the only cultures and countries where they have these dominant stories that the changes are good and disruption is good and technology is good because the winners compensate the loser. This story, you can see only in the Northern European countries because they have a lot of common stories for everyone. When everyone believes, and we have common ground and believe in the same facts, we can also tackle very existential threats and challenges.

Alison Cuddy:

Some of the themes that have been part of our conversation just now, I mean, talking about social media, is about truth, the connection between storytelling and truth and about intentions and impacts. I want to turn to some of the questions that we've been getting. Thank you, everyone, for submitting your questions. They're really terrific. And I think this, we are all storytellers and we can use that skill to good or evil ends. We get a question here from Denise who says, what process or method do each of you use to be a responsible, accountable, ethical storyteller? And do you think there's such a thing as a storyteller's fiduciary duty to an audience? So I mean, in some ways I think Denise is getting at not just the intent, but the impact of storytelling with her question. So I'd love to hear your thoughts about that. Vu?

Vu Tran:

Repeat the question again.

Alison Cuddy:

Sure, it's what do you, what methods do you use to be a responsible and ethical storyteller and be accountable? So there's, again, I think Denise is thinking, what is the impact of all this storytelling? Because you may intend to tell a story that has this outcome, but the impact can be very different. So what accountability do you have and how do you think ethically when you use the power of storytelling?

Vu Tran:

I mean, there's so many ways to, to answer that question. I mean the thing that I just return to and which I've already said before is that it's, am I open to the world? Am I receiving it as it is? Am I then translating what I see in my stories, or am I just trying to shape the world as I want it to be? I mean I feel like that is central to my ethics as a storyteller or as a writer, but just as a person. Every interaction I have with people, I'm kind of performing. I think we all do that, and I'm aware of that, but at the end of the day, am I trying to understand myself better when I tell a story and am I trying to understand other people better when I'm telling a story? That's the only, that's a very simple goal for me. And that's all I can really do because everybody's ethics are kind of different, and everybody's goals are kind of different when they tell stories. And that's where I start, and out of that, there's all these other quite ethical questions and moral questions, but that's what's most important to me.

Guy Rolnik:

Yeah. I agree with that actually. So when you tell a story, first of all, with great power, the more you have a stage, the more you're influential in your storytelling and you know that you influence people, you have more responsibility to think about what kind of stories are you telling and-

Alison Cuddy:

Spiderman's credo.

Guy Rolnik:

Right. And what is the impact that you are going to have? And I think Vu's starting point is good. You want to ask yourself, this is normative or this is positive, the story that I'm telling. This is me trying to influence the world. This is me because I have this set of beliefs. And this is me just describing what I see out there. And you want to make sure as a professor, as a scientist, as a journalist, that people understand that when you are describing, when you're telling a story describing the world, you may better make sure that this is how the world is and I don't think that this is how the world should be, you better make sure that you communicate it. And I think that if you want to be ethical about the storytelling, you should make sure that the audience knows where you're coming from and why you're telling the story. Be very explicit about what we are doing here and not just tell the story out of the blue, because when you're just telling a story and people don't understand where you come from and what is the purpose of your story, this can be manipulated for some audiences.

Vu Tran:

I think it also depends on how you approach the whole idea of like certainty and uncertainty. I am okay with questions. I'm okay with uncertainty and doubt. I think it's a very productive state of mind. A lot of people are not. And a lot of people who tell stories, I imagine in business, want to kind of remove that idea of uncertainty, the idea of doubt and questions. I mean, that's the other aspect of how I approach storytelling is that am I moving towards questions or am I moving towards answers? I don't know how to come to a certain answer about anything. And I like that because the world opens up for me.

Vu Tran:

When people ask me for general advice about writing, I always tell them to be aware of good advice. I'm not talking about bad, silly advice. Obviously you should ignore that, if you already know that it's bad. I'm talking about the kind of wisdom that people give you that sounds earth shatteringly true. You have to be wary of that because the instinct is to always to apply that to everyone and to apply that to yourself at every stage of your life. Things change. What is true for you one day will be less true or more true another day, but always you have to question it, you have to challenge it. And so that's how I approach storytelling, from that view, that things can't be certain, but that's a good thing.

Alison Cuddy:

Guy, is that questioning of value when you're crafting stories in a business context, or is it that you really want to provide answers?

Guy Rolnik:

No, you don't need to provide always the answers. You can raise questions, but first of all, when you raise questions, you say you already bring value is because these are the important questions. This is how we, this is our agenda. And when we choose the questions that we want to think about or try to answer, we're already instilling some values into our conversation. I think that most business leaders, they understand that, the audience understands all about uncertainty. And most of them don't want to tell the people, we know exactly how the future is going to look like, and we know exactly why, where we are going to be in two or three or four years. They say what they offer to all the other stakeholders is that there is some kind of value in, there is some kind of value in why we're doing what we're doing. And the way we do things is tied to those values. I don't think you want your story to think that you have all the answers.

Alison Cuddy:

So we have some questions that are just really looking for advice. We have a good question from John in Dallas, how can storytelling be utilized to benefit one's career?

Guy Rolnik:

Tremendously. Actually, so in my storytelling class, I offer students three activities or themes that we'll be learning. Number one is how to tell your own personal story to advance your career. Number two, how to understand the world around you. Once you understand that, actually everybody's telling stories, politicians, regulators, companies. Number three, how do companies craft stories and control narrative, and how they sometimes lose the narrative. And what I see almost every year is that most students are interested in the first one. Let's talk about my personal, my ability to tell, to craft the story, my story, and how to use it for my career. So the answer is that you use storytelling to get a job. When you are interviewing, you use storytelling to convince or to persuade your boss. You use storytelling to lead your team. Storytelling is critical when you want to introduce change to any organizations, because people hate change and you need to come up with stories of why we need this change and why.

Guy Rolnik:

And sometimes you need to come up with stories about the future. So a story about change usually starts at the bottom, we are now at this bottom of the arc in this crisis, and we need to get out of here. And the end of the story is going to be much better. And this is a story about the future and story about the change. We use stories with investors. We use stories and become more and more important this time and age. Companies use stories to influence politics and regulation. So if you want someone to, if you're sitting, if you are in dinner and you want someone to pass you the salt, you really don't need a story, but whenever you need persuasion and you need to move people out of what they're doing, and to act in a different way, you need stories.

Alison Cuddy:

Go ahead. And then I have a question for you.

Vu Tran:

This goes back to telling. I think the most crucial thing is the stories we tell ourselves, back to that point. And I think if the question is how can this improve my career, the great benefit of telling yourself a story about yourself is that it tells you what you want. It gives you motivation. If I tell myself a story that I came here as a refugee from another country, and I worked my way up and I became the greatest writer of my generation or the greatest CEO of my industry or whatever, that is a story that we tell ourselves to motivate us, because the goal is clear. The key and the danger is, is that you have to be willing to change that narrative as things develop, but that's the number one thing about telling stories when it comes to say your career or your profession, or just your life, is that tells you what you want.

Guy Rolnik:

And I would say that if you want people think about how can I change my career? Should I change my career? It all starts with knowing what is your story, telling yourself your story and asking yourself okay, now do I want another story? So this is the way to think about changing one's career is first to understand what is your story? And interestingly enough, so if I have a group of, I don't know, 80 or 100 students, I would say that sometimes half of the students, when they're starting, I'm talking about business school and not the humanities, they would have difficulties intuitively answering what is their story, because they haven't given it a thought. So I say, you want to start with thinking about your stories, where you come from, what is important for you? What is dear for you? What kind of crises you faced in your life? What are the important dilemmas that you faced? How you made those choices? So I'm going back to what Vu said at the beginning, maybe the best storyteller maybe should start his journey with 10 or 20 years of psychoanalysis, if you have the time.

Alison Cuddy:

That's a perfect setup for the question I wanted to ask you, Vu, which comes from Arenak from Gang... No, I'm sorry, that's the wrong one, Joseph from Bakersfield. What is your best advice for balancing getting a quick response versus deep thinking, as we tell our stories. So the stories that might be about reflection and going deep, like psychoanalysis versus trying to kind of like spin out those quick effective stories. Do you have, as a writer, I mean, you have to think about that rhythm in your stories. How do you do that?

Vu Tran:

Well, that's a great question, actually. I've never thought about that question. My quick answer to that is that if you want a quick response, then you create a visceral effect. For example, violence creates a visceral effect, but also a portrait of love creates a visceral effect. If you want people to think, then you introduce ambiguity and there's a difference between an ambiguity and vagueness. Vagueness doesn't make really people think. That just kind of makes people confused. Ambiguity is when you give at least two possible outcomes, usually the opposite of each other, two or more. But you don't tell us what happens or what the actuality is. And that's the kind of ambiguity that makes people think, I think, and of course there's millions of versions of that.

Guy Rolnik:

I'd like to rephrase what Vu said. So if you want to, the most impactful stories, and if you don't have a lot of time, you want to be impactful, brings a lot of emotion. Even in the business world, the more emotional is the story, people will listen, and if you know your audience and you find the right value that is center to the story, people will pay attention. And you will also be able to transport your audience to your own world. And the other thing, I wouldn't say violence, but I would say conflict. The more we have conflict, the bigger are the antagonistic forces that are playing out in your story, the more powerful the story will be.

Alison Cuddy:

I have another advice question, and then I'm going to come back to what you were just talking about. So I read a great quote about stories, which is maybe a little, we all know this at this point, but marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make but about the stories you tell, which is sort of what we've been talking about. It was Seth Godin who said that. But we do have a question. We've been talking more about telling stories about people and telling stories to people, but Mary Patrick from Athi River says, how do you use storytelling to sell a product? Are there some basic fundamentals there, Guy that you would say?

Guy Rolnik:

I think that the only way to tell all that is through stories. Most of the stories that... There used to be this funny quote. I don't remember who it was is that this cartoon that says, "I like when…" this is when Steve Jobs was still running Apple, "I like paying double for Apple devices because I feel closer to Steve." There you have it. So the machines are slick and nice definitely, most of the time better, but the premium is also, and Apple has this story, which is very much intertwined with Steve Jobs is this visionary. And we have this entire, a lot of people know the story of Steve Jobs and how he was fired and how he came back and all the antagonism and he's a visionary. We like the story.

Guy Rolnik:

So we are willing to every three years, buy a new iPhone, which is exactly the same one, just with another camera and another camera, because it's a great story. So brands are stories. The premiums that we're paying for brands are a story. I can't think of a lot of maybe commodities don't have stories around them. There are stories about why they fluctuate and why they will go up and down, but commodities. So you look at the list of the richest people in the world today. So I think Elon Musk today is on the top with, I don't know, 250 billion. And I think the third place is, Arnault, the guy who owns LVMH. Why would people spend, why would people buy those, apparel, a bag or anything like that-

Alison Cuddy:

Louis Vuitton, Givenchy-

Guy Rolnik:

Louis Vuitton. Why would they pay? They believe in... All those brands have stories. And this is how stories are the greatest engine of most valuable companies today.

Vu Tran:

I think one way to look at it, to tell a story that removes friction for people, if you want to sell something, sell a service or a product or an idea, I'm kind of borrowing this from, I forget his name, a psychologist at Northwestern who talks a lot about the friction involved in every, especially in business, but the best kind of story that removes friction is what Elon Musk is selling. You buy this car, it's good for the environment. So you're removing the friction that the fear that indulging in this product will ruin the earth. And that's a big friction for a lot of people. And that is the story that Tesla is telling. Whether it's true or not is another thing.

Guy Rolnik:

Let's talk about that. Tesla, as of today, you asked me that before we started. So the market cap of Tesla today is $1 trillion. So this is totally unprecedented in the history of financial markets. The combined value of all car manufacturers in the world, and you throw in Goldman Sachs and General Electric, still you don't get to $1 trillion. And if you ask people who buy Tesla cars or people who are investors why you're doing it, they'll come up with a lot of technical explanations and financial explanation why they're doing it. But actually, I think it's all about the storytelling acumen of Tesla, of Elon Musk. So Elon Musk is telling us these stories, there is the story about Tesla, which is where the value is caring for our planet.

Guy Rolnik:

And the idea is that in our individual hands, everyone can make buying decisions. Then there is the story of SpaceX, which is about life. And the idea is that the only way we will prevail, because we will be able to conquer the space. And then there is the story, that he jumped on another story recently, the story of Bitcoin. Here, the value is power and Bitcoin giving power to the people.

Guy Rolnik:

Now, if you look at those three stories and you add them up, this is the story of Elon Musk. The story here, the value is technology. And the idea is that visionaries like the entrepreneur himself, not government, not collective action, the entrepreneur himself, the technology entrepreneur will solve the problems of our world. All those stories, now, if you look at the data and the facts and the facts are staring in our face, we know if you look at the financial accounts of Tesla in the last five years, you know that without government subsidies, Tesla would've been bankrupt a while ago. But you also said, why people don't notice it? Because he crafts such a holistic story about within, and we want to believe in that story because technology, there is so much critique of technology and here comes something, we can save the world. Technology can be for the best if you just have the right visionary people.

Alison Cuddy:

Elon Musk is winning as far as I can tell based on his appearances in these conversations. But it does make me feel little cynical, like you, Vu, to think about that, but we are almost out of time. And so I wanted to give you both the opportunity for a brief closing thought and end with a question from Chicago from Kylie, who asks, what new ways do you expect people will tell stories in the next five to ten years? So no big deal. Tell us a story about the future.

Vu Tran:

Oh God, you have an idea?

Guy Rolnik:

So I don't know, I don't want to predict the future since it's recording and I'll be able to watch it. Everything now is recorded and you can see what kind of stories you're talking.

Alison Cuddy:

But you are allowed to change your story. We determined that.

Guy Rolnik:

So first of all, I think that the basic element of a good story will not change, whether we stream it or it's on TikTok are not going to change. And we still tell our children today “Cinderella,” a story that was written, I believe almost 400 years ago. And it works. So the basic element of stories work. I think that the biggest challenge that we are facing today is with technology and the way that technology disseminates stories and information, that the question is, are there going to be machines out there, artificial intelligence that will decide what kind of stories we are exposed to? And if you look at the stories that we have coming out of social media, on TikTok, on Facebook or on Netflix, in many ways are the same stories that we've been telling each other for hundreds of years or thousands of years. The question now is that everyone can tell a story. What happened to hierarchy, what happened to who controls the flow of information and what kind of stories, and this is, I think in many ways the biggest challenge that we have today as a society.

Alison Cuddy:

Vu, final thought, short.

Vu Tran:

I think the metaverse kind of embodies the future of storytelling in the sense that we are now telling stories without showing our face or interacting with human beings. I think what we're doing right now, this event, which is great, but it's different when there's a human audience. The stories that I tell with humans there is different than the stories I tell when they're not.

Alison Cuddy:

This is an age-old story, the machine usurping human power, and in this case to tell stories, so we'll have to see where that story goes. But thank you, Vu.

Vu Tran:

Thank you, Alison.

Alison Cuddy:

Thank you, Guy so much. What a wonderful conversation. Thank you, everyone, who joined us for your fantastic conversations, for your fantastic questions that is. Thanks to the Stevanovich Institute and Chicago Booth. We will wrap it up today, but we will have another program in February 2022. So something to look forward to. So please join us then. Thanks, everybody.