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Episode #132: Carmine Gallo
176 Plays6 years ago
On today’s show, I’m very happy to welcome best selling author and speaker, Carmine Gallo. Carmine is the bestselling author of Talk Like TED, The Storyteller’s Secret, and most recently, Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great. He is...
The post Episode #132: Carmine Gallo appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction to Carmine Gallo
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this episode, I am very, very excited to talk to one of the people who I have followed for a long time on learning how to give better presentations, how to tell stories when I talk, and how to create better slides. And so I'm very, very excited to have Carmine Gallo on the show, who is a bestselling author and writer and speaker. Carmine, welcome to the show.
00:00:36
Speaker
Thank you, John. Thanks for inviting me. I think this is a great topic for your audience. Yeah, I think so. I think they're about to learn a lot. Hopefully many of them have read your books.
Evolution of Carmine Gallo's Books
00:00:48
Speaker
And so that's where I want to start. Your new book is now I think just out five stars, the communication secrets to get from good to great. This is let's see, I think the fourth book in what I sort of consider a series.
00:01:02
Speaker
uh... from you starting with the presentation secrets of steve jobs that was kinda like my first introduction to your work sort of a how-to uh... and then talk like ted would sort of broaden out a little bit focus on storytelling then the stories teller secret which dove into case studies of top speakers and now five stars uh... you want to talk a little bit about the the sort of evolution of of the books in your approach generally to helping people give good presentations
00:01:29
Speaker
Absolutely. I'm glad that you saw those books in context. I am passionate about storytelling, but also passionate about communication and the communication of ideas. We can have the greatest idea in the world, but if we cannot communicate those ideas persuasively, they don't really matter much.
The Power of Persuasive Communication
00:01:52
Speaker
Research stuck in a drawer doesn't benefit anybody.
00:01:55
Speaker
So my passion has been how to unleash your research and your ideas to a broader audience. I started by looking at great presenters, people like Steve Jobs, who was, in my opinion today, still one of the greatest corporate business presenters of our time. I haven't found anyone who has the whole package like Steve Jobs did. But that book was more focused on how to deliver a better presentation.
00:02:22
Speaker
Then I wrote a book called talk like Ted, which has become one of the best selling public speaking books around the world in different countries. So that's, it's been very gratifying for me to see, but again, John, I think a lot of people are looking at that as how to give a Ted talk, which it's not what it is actually. It's what can we learn about public speaking from some of the world's greatest minds and public speakers who have had to go through this.
00:02:50
Speaker
TED guideline and the TED creation of how to build a presentation, how to deliver a presentation. It's not a formula, but it definitely has very strict guidelines, which I think helps all public speakers. But again, most people look at it as a presentation book. And so I wrote five stars to expand communication, storytelling, presentation skills, public speaking skills to the rest
Communication: Good vs. Great Professionals
00:03:18
Speaker
of us to the rest of the universe, whether you are asking for a promotion, how would you go about doing that? How do you go about getting a new job? How do you go about going from a mid level in your career to a high level? There's a difference between average business professionals, average analysts, average researchers, and truly great ones who stand out in every way. The difference often
00:03:47
Speaker
comes down to how they best communicate their ideas. And the big theme, the overall theme in Five Stars is something that I think should be talked about now more than ever. As these forces of artificial intelligence, automation, globalization, and the explosion of data all combine to make our world more complicated,
00:04:14
Speaker
It's the persuaders, the people who can package their ideas in a way that gets them noticed. They're the ones who stand out. They're the ones who go from three to five stars, both metaphorically and literally. Some of the leaders and the CEOs who run five star organizations have communication skills as well. So that's why I looked at five stars both literally and as a metaphor to stand out in your profession.
00:04:41
Speaker
Right. And so a lot of the stories, the case studies, the examples you show in across the four books tends to focus, I think, a lot on the business side, focus on people who may be selling a product or selling ideas, startups. And I wonder if we could talk a little bit about, I think
Storytelling in Data Presentation
00:05:00
Speaker
the
00:05:00
Speaker
know, people who tend to listen to this show who are working with data, maybe they're conducting research. How do you view those folks as trying to apply the lessons that you talk about in your books about telling good stories about using good slides? How should they think about they're not necessarily selling something? I mean, they're selling their ideas in some way. So how do they apply that to their presentations? Well, many of the
00:05:25
Speaker
people who I interviewed for this book, and the reason why I'm having this conversation with you is because I recognize that they're academics and they're scientists and they're researchers. Who do you think I interviewed for the book? I interviewed AI scientists at the top of their game. I interviewed data analytics researchers. I interviewed people in Sweden who are organizing these competitions for scientists to get their research across to a broader audience.
00:05:55
Speaker
And they're using some of my past books as guides to help those scientists communicate more effectively. I think one interview that I wrote extensively about in the book that I think is very applicable to our audience today is with a gentleman named Avinash Kaushik. He is a senior executive at Google. He is passionate about data. I have never seen anyone
00:06:24
Speaker
so enthusiastic about web analytics and data research. And I have a couple of videos online, actually, if you just Google Carmine Gallo and Avinash, you'll find them. But he is just exuding passion about data and what data means. But he's also equally passionate about visualizing data. He says there is something magical about making sense of complexity.
00:06:52
Speaker
and illustrating the data in visual terms. And I asked him, point blank, this is before I even knew he was a storyteller, I asked him, Avinash, how do you do it? How do you visualize data? And he said, it all comes back to storytelling. Storytelling, he said, is a powerful way to get people to think differently. If I can take the data and show people both internally and externally how it's going to help them grow a business,
00:07:22
Speaker
Make more money, help them be more successful. It creates a hard to mind connection that drives action. So data, as you know, Google is one of the leading companies in terms of data. It's pretty overwhelming how much data they actually collect and use and crunch. But Avinash told me that all of this data doesn't mean anything.
00:07:47
Speaker
unless we can wrap it in a narrative and a way of presenting it so that whoever is listening to the information sees how that data improves their lives. And that's from one of the top web analytics experts in the world. He has two books just on web analytics that are international bestsellers in that category. So the point, John, of this
00:08:11
Speaker
answer is that most of the people who I learned the most from in terms of how to communicate better are data professionals, researchers, and scientists. They're the ones who taught me how to be a better communicator because they're the ones who have to take complexity
00:08:29
Speaker
and explain it clearly. And that's really hard to do. Yeah. So when you think of stories or when you interview Avinash or other researchers, what sort of stories do they tell? I think this is one of the frustrations or challenges that researchers have, especially ones doing quantitative research where they have some big data set, but they're not interviewing a specific person or household. So what are the types of stories that you think work really well for researchers?
00:08:58
Speaker
Oh, that's a good point. I think, uh, let's not make it too complicated. I think that word storytelling scares people. And I've noticed that in the past few years too, because I wrote a book just on storytelling. I think it scares people. They think to themselves, well, I'm a scientist. I'm a researcher. I'm not writing a book or making a movie with a storytelling. How does it apply to me? Recently, the Yale Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Schiller,
The Role of Narratives in Behavior
00:09:25
Speaker
who's part of the Schiller index for housing, very famous economist, actually talked about the fact that economists often get things wrong because they don't understand the power of narrative to drive our lives. Everything about the way you and I behave is based on narrative. The narratives that we tell ourselves, the narratives that we hear, there is a reason why you invest in the stock market at a particular time and when you panic at a particular time.
00:09:55
Speaker
It's because of the stories that are circulated. So his point, Robert Schiller's point, if you don't understand story, you don't understand human behavior. And if you don't understand human behavior, you can't get people to take action on your ideas. It's really fascinating. So I think storytelling is a very, very powerful tool. It goes back thousands of years to Aristotle. I mean, he talked about the fact that if we have an idea to get across, I can give you the data, I can give you the facts and the information,
00:10:25
Speaker
I can create a logical structure, but if I cannot touch you emotionally, then it's going to be hard to persuade you of my idea or to take action on my data, which is kind of an interesting way of looking at it. So all of this gets back to the emotional connection. How do we make emotional connections with people? You talked about stories. That's the background to why we need to talk about stories and storytelling.
00:10:49
Speaker
But John, a lot of people get caught up in that. Exactly as you asked, they get a little nervous about what does it mean to tell a story. Personal anecdotes are one way of telling a story, but I understand that that's not that relevant to researchers and academics. They don't talk too much about the personal reasons why they're doing what they do. For them, though, I think it would be easier just to tell the stories of how this data
00:11:18
Speaker
affects real people. Case studies. We call them case studies, don't we, in business? Those are just stories. I've talked to economists about this as well, economists who actually write books. What they try to do, the most successful ones, is give you the data and then offer a story of a real person, a real company, a real organization who is affected by that particular data point, right? So it's data.
Creating Relatable Data Personas
00:11:48
Speaker
story to back the data data story data story There's some influential economist out there Johan Norberg in Europe Stephen Pinker who wrote enlightenment now They've got this beautiful website now called human progress These are all the progress type of economists who want to show people that the world is getting better than ever And I've talked to Stephen Pinker personally and some other ones some of your readers might know that the new Hans Rosling book called
00:12:18
Speaker
Uh, and he falls into that group too. He's passed away now, but he falls into that group. So if you read their work, you'll see what they're doing. And Pinker told me this specifically, we have to learn narrative because we have all the data. Pinker has 500 pages of data, but if it's not wrapped in narrative, in real stories of real people with real names, okay, then it's just numbers. It's just data and data doesn't connect with people emotionally.
00:12:47
Speaker
So if you really want to persuade people you need the data, absolutely. Like Aristotle said, I cannot persuade you unless I've got facts, data, and information behind me. But I cannot connect with you emotionally until I can wrap the data set, the logic into a narrative that is familiar to you. That's how you bring data and numbers to life.
00:13:11
Speaker
It's a fascinating area, John, and it takes a little creativity. I think that's another thing that scares people. What we're talking about here is not something that's the easiest thing to do. It's easy just to introduce your data. I mean, the background is hard. All of your academics, what they're doing is hard.
00:13:32
Speaker
but it's easy just to open a PowerPoint slide and just put all my data on the slide. Instead of thinking creatively about how I'm going to package that data to connect with you on an emotional, analogical level, that takes an extra step of creativity.
00:13:47
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree that it certainly takes that extra level. I want to ask, so for people who, let's say they go out, they download the census from the US Census Bureau, and they have hundreds of thousands of observations, and they investigate the data, they run some aggressions, they make some tables. I think that the thing that they would say about
00:14:09
Speaker
What you just argued, which is to pair the narrative with the data, is that they don't actually have the individual stories. They don't know if you're looking at the relationship between unemployment and food stamps. There's certainly a family or a person who's dealing with both of those of joblessness and receiving benefits, but they're not talking to those individuals or families.
00:14:32
Speaker
In that case, how do you think about that? Is it okay for, say, a researcher to tell a story that's maybe somewhat imaginary? I mean, economists, we do this all the time. We say, you know, imagine a family, imagine a person that did this. So for a person who just has the numbers and the data in front of them, but not having talked to the people, how do they wrap it in this narrative framework?
00:14:56
Speaker
Okay, couple of things. First of all, when we talk about narrative, and this is something that I go into when I wrote Five Stars, I didn't really break this down in earlier books. Because again, I'm learning. I learn all the time, and I think that's an important part of being a good communicator, is constantly learning how people communicate. When I first talked about storytelling, people were really focused on what you and I are talking about now. Real stories are real people. I don't have a real story.
00:15:23
Speaker
Let's get back to storytelling structure. You can still learn about storytelling through the structure that all great stories have. Throughout all of history, all great books, all great plays, stories, and now Hollywood movies, all follow a similar structure. And George Lucas actually studied this to create Star Wars. But all great stories follow the same structure. And this goes back thousands of years. There's the setup, there's the conflict, there's the resolution.
00:15:53
Speaker
Act one, two, and three. You would be hard pressed to find a successful Hollywood movie today that doesn't fall into that formula. Act one, act two, act three. Well, act one is simply the setup. Here's why we did the research. Here's the question that prompted us to do the research. Act two is the problem that maybe it solves. So bring up a problem or a hurdle and the research helps you answer that
00:16:23
Speaker
problem or that question that you had. The resolution is in the academic world is here is how this research is going to make this area even better or here's what we've learned that's going to help us be even better. Act one though is the setup. See if you don't have act one then there's no context. If you just throw out data and numbers at me and without any context like
00:16:48
Speaker
How did this come about? Why are we doing this? What triggered this? And maybe there's a personal story for that. We noticed that this was a problem that no one else had answered. So maybe there's a little background story to it. But think of it in terms of a structure. It doesn't necessarily have to be a story of Jane and Bob Smith. And here's how this research applies to them. It doesn't always have to be that story. But I'll tell you,
00:17:16
Speaker
You also brought up another good question. Can we create a persona? I've done this with clients before and I think it works very well. You don't necessarily have to have a real person, but we're going to be very obvious that it's a fictional representation of a particular person or someone who represents a demographic or a group. I worked with a CEO and a couple of executives who were with Toshiba Medical Systems.
00:17:45
Speaker
It's since been sold. They came out with a very high end medical device that helped identify a stroke, stroke victims much, much faster in hospitals than ever before. It was a very advanced x-ray machine. And they had a lot of data behind it, a lot of data, all data. And it was kind of a dry presentation because there was no emotional connection to it.
00:18:11
Speaker
And so finally I said, can you just give me an example? And they said, well, we don't really have this. This is all in testing. We don't have a real person. I said, let's create a persona. And so they actually created a persona. Here is David. Oh, that's right. It was Susan and David. Those are the names we chose. And they had this image of a person, David, who would be in the age group.
00:18:37
Speaker
and the background that they are looking for in terms of a patient, right? But it was obvious. Let's take someone like David here. And let's assume David is 67 years old and has a heart condition, the XYZ. So in other words, it was very clear that there is no David, but the people in the audience connected with it because they took all the data and they wrapped it into this persona of David.
00:19:04
Speaker
two years later, and this is why this was really interesting to me, two years later, the CEO said that he returned to the same conference in which he unveiled the new medical device, and he said two years later, people were stopping me in the hall going, oh, you're the guy who had that whole David and Susan presentation. Right, right, right. Right? Yeah. They remembered David and Susan. Yeah, it's right in their brain. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's very interesting. There is another part of the book, it might be my favorite part of the book,
00:19:33
Speaker
where you talk about Neil deGrasse Tyson as being one of the best science communicators of our age, and the part of it that really struck a chord with me, whereas you talk about how Tyson doesn't dumb things down, but instead he's working to translate the content. I wonder if you could talk about that section and talk about why you think it's so important to not think of it as dumbing things down, but it is to translate the content.
00:20:00
Speaker
And maybe that's why storytelling and communication and persuasion get a bad rap. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, you might be right.
Science Communication and Analogies
00:20:07
Speaker
Yeah, so I actually interviewed Neil deGrasse Tyson when his book came out, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Now, you tell me of another science book with the word astrophysics in the title. That's been a top 10 bestseller for the last year. Yeah, right. It's because Neil deGrasse Tyson is an expert at
00:20:30
Speaker
Obviously what he does, but he's an expert communicator. And he was very specific with me. He said, Carmine, this is not dumbing it down. It's putting information in a context that is relevant to the listener or the reader in a way that they would understand. So his first, and he gave me this example, take a look at his first sentence in the book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. First sentence, in the beginning, nearly 14 billion years ago,
00:21:00
Speaker
All the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence. I'm sold. That's it. Okay. Sold. That's the point. It's like he takes everything and he showed me this. He kind of pointed to places in the book.
00:21:25
Speaker
Take an abstract idea and embed it, and this is a great quote, okay? He said, take an abstract idea and embed it in familiar ground. But all of the abstract ideas, John, that Tyson showed me were all data type of examples. He gave me another one. He said, think about Earth's mountains, mountains on Earth. They're actually puny compared to the other mountains in our solar system.
00:21:51
Speaker
The largest on Mars is 65,000 feet tall. It makes Alaska's Mount McKinley look like a molehill. So what he's doing is embedding it, embedding the data in the familiar. And then he's got another really good tip. And you probably saw this. This is chapter five of Five Stars.
00:22:13
Speaker
There's nothing wrong with cherry picking the cool stuff. Wow, what a great tip. You don't have to deliver all of the information that you've uncovered. Cherry pick the cool stuff. So no, we can learn a lot from great communicators, but another thing I've learned from Neil deGrasse Tyson, he works at it, John. He's worked at communication over many, many years. He didn't start out that way.
00:22:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting. And it comes back to your comment about creativity and that it's not just dropping in bullet points and data tables into the slides where it does even require some creativity. And I think a lot of people enjoy that because it is an opportunity to be creative. It's not just running regressions and making tables, but they can tap into their creative side.
00:23:06
Speaker
Well, this whole point is if you want to make your research relevant and you want people to take action on it or understand it and make it more clear, you can't just deliver the information. You have to think about how you're going to structure and present the information. And this is more important than ever before because we are awash in data and information. In order for you to get your information across and to make it memorable,
00:23:35
Speaker
You have to incorporate some of this. Can I give you a good example that happened just within the last couple of weeks? IBM, along with the Department of Energy, released a new supercomputer named Summit. And it's the fastest computer in the world until China comes out with something a little faster. You know how it is. That's exactly how it works. They go back and forth. It operates at 200 petaflops or 200 quadrillion calculations per second.
00:24:04
Speaker
Too big a number, too big a number. If you go to the websites for IBM and for the Department of Energy, I think this is in, the supercomputer is being used in Tennessee right now. If you go to the websites, if you look at all the press releases, if you listen to the scientist who delivered the information, it's very interesting. They must have all been trained, all trained to do this because they all put these 200 petaflops
00:24:34
Speaker
into context just like Neil deGrasse Tyson did. So the constant stream of analogies and comparisons. Here's one, a person doing one calculation a second would have to live for more than six billion years to match what the machine can do in one second. So in other words, this is a pretty powerful question. Okay, here's another one. I love this one. If a stadium built
00:25:03
Speaker
for 100,000 people was full. And everyone in it had a modern laptop. It would take 20 stadiums to match the computing firepower of our new supercomputer summit. OK, now, John, are you telling me that these I pulled these quotes from spokespeople and from from the press releases? Are you saying that and the websites, by the way, so this was everywhere, everywhere this was communicated, these quotes were in.
00:25:32
Speaker
You think they just came out of the blue? It didn't just come out on the spur of the moment. Hey, so and so, how fast is this new supercomputer? Well, think of it this way. Well, they didn't think of it on the spot. It was already prepared for them because they were thinking creatively about how do we take this data and make it somewhat understandable because there's no way the average human mind can get their
00:25:59
Speaker
can wrap the head around 200 quadrillion calculations per second. So this is all communication to me. You can have the greatest idea in the world, John. If you cannot explain it,
00:26:10
Speaker
How is your idea going to gain the traction it deserves? So that leads me to my, I think probably my last question, which is on the return on giving better presentations. I mean, your books have dozens of stories on people who are at the top of their fields because they know how to tell stories. They know how to give good presentations. They know how to wrap it in narratives. And just like the story you were just telling, they know how to make it accessible to people.
00:26:37
Speaker
But how do you demonstrate to a data analyst or a researcher that giving a good presentation is going to help them get better data, get more funding? I think we've demonstrated, we being the world, that a better visualization, a better graph, even just better quality data can help you do better work. And I'm not quite sure, for a lot of people, we've demonstrated that presentations, better presentations, helps you do that.
00:27:06
Speaker
You know, that's a really good question and things for ending on the hardest question that you could come up with. I appreciate that. It's like that will just kill the rest of the president. It's like, oh, well, that was not good. Okay. No, I have been thinking about this for years and it, yes, obviously it's really hard for me to come up with a particular number, but I have found the closest number I can.
00:27:35
Speaker
and that's 50%. 50% more influence. Here's how it worked, and this is not my idea. This is by a really rich, smart guy named Warren Buffet.
Value of Communication Skills
00:27:47
Speaker
You may have heard of him, right? Warren Buffet has said publicly, and he's said this several times now, you can look it up, Warren Buffet has said that the best investment that you can make in your career is skills. It's not any one stock,
00:28:03
Speaker
It's elevating your skills. Someone asked him, Mr. Buffett, what is the number one skill that we should elevate or work on? He said, well, you're public speaking, of course. Public speaking, how you express your ideas. And then he actually said this to a group of business students at Columbia University, I think it was. He said, for all of you here, all of you here are competent at what you do. But for those of you who are better
00:28:32
Speaker
communicators and better public speakers, you have a 50% greater increase in your value instantly. For all of you, I would give you $100,000 in return for 10% of your future net worth. 10%, I'm going to give you $100,000 today. Those of you who we've identified as better public speakers, I'll give you $150,000. So your value has increased 50% instantly.
00:29:00
Speaker
based on your ability to communicate your idea. That's pretty powerful. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's your ROI. Yeah, there's an ROI. And if Buffett says it's 50%, then I'm just going to take it. I mean, that's as good a source as any. Who am I to argue? You're right. You know, speaking of that, John, I'll just take 20 seconds. In Five Stars, that's what I tried to do. I've got every chapter has, like the second part of the book is about leaders.
00:29:27
Speaker
entrepreneurs, there's a whole chapter on scientists and researchers. And each and every one of the people who I profile has had a significant increase in their influence, their finances, their job positions, their titles, their careers, because they're better public speakers.
00:29:45
Speaker
Right. And I think the book does a great job of setting things up in terms of the overview of why it's important and then these case studies. And then for those who are interested, there is, well, hopefully they are, but the last section of the book, the last part of the book is really on the details of how to actually deliver a more effective presentation. So sort of wraps everything together in one volume. I'm glad you pointed that out. It's sort of three parts, but the first two parts are
00:30:15
Speaker
all about building the case for why persuasion today is the most important skill.
Conclusion: Persuasion in a Data-Driven World
00:30:23
Speaker
More important today in this world of science, AI, and data, it's more important today than ever before. So I think that's kind of a counterintuitive argument to make, but it's not my idea. Again, it's based on some of the most successful people in the world.
00:30:41
Speaker
as well as scientists, researchers, historians, and economists. So I had to build the case first, and then the part three of the book is how to sharpen that scale.
00:30:53
Speaker
Okay, so Carmine's newest book is Five Stars, The Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great, which I will link to on the show notes. And also his three previous books also on presentations I will link to as well. They are some of my favorites in the field, so I really do encourage everyone to check those out. Carmine, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been great chatting. Thanks for inviting me. I hope it helps your audience. I really enjoy your audience because there are people who kind of, they're skeptical.
00:31:20
Speaker
They push back on things. They don't just accept anything someone says, but we have good debates. So I really appreciate being able to present this information to your audience. Terrific. And thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I hope you will take some of the lessons you learned today and apply it to your own work. If you have comments or questions, please do feel free to reach out on the show notes page or on Twitter. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis podcast. Thanks so much for listening.