335. How storytelling saved Jurassic Park's company, with Corey Rosen

0:00Phil Tippett is a legend in the movie business. He was the guy who created the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. You might even remember that tweet where they said, come on, Phil, you had one job. But back in 2013 or thereabouts, his studio was in trouble. Layoffs seemed inevitable. So when Phil and his wife called an all hands meeting, everyone in the room was already updating their resume in their head. He gets up to speak and he doesn't mention layoffs once. Instead, he tells a story about a haircut. Our guest today, Corey Rosen, was in that room.

0:32Corey Rosen:We go into the screening room and Phil is standing there with his wife, Jules, who runs the company with him. And he tells a story. He doesn't say what's happened. He doesn't say the outcome. He tells us a story that he had a meeting to go to Los Angeles to meet with Kathy Kennedy. Kathleen Kennedy, the producer of the Star Wars movies and the Jurassic Park movies, things like that. And the Jules made him get a haircut. So the first thing that he says, got to laugh, right? We're laughing, we're relating to the fact that this guy, he's got this kind of long, shaggy Santa Claus hair. And so she makes him clean up because we've got to pitch ourselves to save the company to get this job.

1:10Corey Rosen is a professional storyteller, hosts the Moths live shows in San Francisco, and spent years working on Star Wars and Jurassic Park before all that. And that one story that he remembers vividly did something an email never could have. It didn't just save the jobs in that room, it saved the whole spirit of the company. Corey spent his career figuring out why some information vanishes the second you hear it, and some of it sticks for years. Today, we're asking, what if your last big announcement fell flat, but not because of the news, but because of how you delivered it? Hello and welcome to Truth, Lives and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

1:55My name is Leanne. I'm a Charter Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al. I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work. Our guest today, Corey Rosen, ruined Star Wars, literally. Early in his career at Industrial Light and Magic, he was cleaning up a scene frame by frame and accidentally erased Harrison Ford's ear. It's still gone in the film, apparently. These days, he's a storytelling educator, and he's just written a book called A Story for Everything. And here's why we wanted him on the show. As a leader, you're constantly deciding how to deliver information.

2:26Feedback, bad news, a new system rollout, a pitch. Most of us default to bullet points because it feels efficient. Corey's argument is that this is exactly where we're losing people. There's a simple shift that gets you buy-in instead of just compliance. So after the break, we'll find out what that shift is and why the meeting that could have been an email might be the one that saves your team. Does your experience with AI sound a little like this? You prompt for 20 minutes, the output is polished, is confident, and is completely flipping useless. Well, that's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business.

2:59But you know what does know something about your business? HubSpot. HubSpot's AI. It works with your actual customer data. Every interaction, every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

3:24Corey Rosen:My name is Corey Rosen. I'm a storyteller and a storytelling educator. I live in the San Francisco area, and I guess I would be known for several things. I host The Moth, which is a storytelling show that we do here live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm probably also known for some of the media work that I've done. In fact, famously, I ruined Star Wars. So I'm known for that. And some of the other roles that I've had had Jim Henson, Phil Tippett Studios, Super 78 and other companies. You ruined Star Wars. How? I ruined Star Wars. Yeah. I so I worked one of my first ever jobs. You know, when I got out of college, I got hired by Lucasfilm, Industrial Light and Magic at a very pivotal time in cinema history where movies were still being shot on film, but we were experimenting with computer graphics and animation.

4:12Corey Rosen:In fact, ILM had just made Jurassic Park, which when I started there was the summer that that movie came out in 1993. So everything was kind of pivoting into the digital realm, including Star Wars. And there hadn't been as new Star Wars films since Return of the Jedi 10 years before. And one of the first jobs I was given was to clean the movie digitally, like to scan it in and then to clean out every little speck of dirt and dust. And I accidentally cleaned Harrison Ford's ear in one shot and it's completely gone. It's completely disappeared. And it's still in the movie that way. And I feel terrible about it, but also not so terrible because I made my contribution to the Star Wars universe, which is to open up the realm of possibility that sometimes Han Solo doesn't have an ear.

4:59Corey Rosen:Then I went on to work on the Star Wars prequels and many other films in my early career, which was also that impactful thing of going from being a sort of a taker to a maker, being someone who's consuming it to someone who is creating it for the next wave of people. And I think when I was young, I thought, no, no, I couldn't do that. Nobody, you know, that's, that's some sort of special class of people. But I realized after time, it's just a job. There's hundreds, thousands of people who are working in entertainment and doing different kinds of entertainment tasks, which was really my lead-in to a lot of the work that I do today, is helping people tell those kind of stories and make those kind of experiences.

5:39Let's talk about story. Why is story so important?

5:43Corey Rosen:As a broadcaster yourself, I think you probably know better than most that there's all kinds of information we're gathering from a million different sources, whether it's flashing by on our phones or information that's being broadcast to us on billboards as you're driving down the highway. and there's the ones that stay with us and the ones that don't stay with us. And I think I, to tell you a little story about it, I think I realized this or learned this as a young kid, like many of us do by listening to other people, by listening to your parents or your grandparents telling their stories. And in my case specifically, my mother is the kind of person, she's got many, she's got a nice social network of friends in her town where I grew up.

6:24Corey Rosen:And when something happens, like not too long ago, my mom got into a car accident. She and my dad were driving and they turned left across like a four lane road and somebody had waved them in. So they was like, said, you can go. So they were going, but then the car behind them did not see that. And they, you know, kind of hit right into the driver's or the passenger side where my mom was sitting and she's okay, but she did crack five ribs and she's in her eighties. So that's not a small thing. And, you know, she had to go to the hospital and things like that. And while she was in the hospital, my dad was there with her.

6:59Corey Rosen:And she told my dad she couldn't find one of the lenses from her glasses. It must have popped out during the car accident. So she sent him back while she's in the hospital same day to go back to the car to find the lens of her thing. He has to go to, you know, the tow yard where it's been towed to. You know, it's just this kind of crumpled can. and he goes and he finds the lens and he gets a phone call while he's there. Like, while you're there, could you go in the trunk and get the rotisserie chicken that I just bought at the store? And so now my dad's salvaging the Costco groceries from the trunk of the car as well.

7:34Corey Rosen:So it's a funny story, right? It's a funny moment. But more than that, when I was home, I was listening to my mom tell that story on the phone to one of her friends. And then, you know, know, she hung up the phone and somebody else called to check on her. And I heard her tell the same story again. But this time she was polishing it. She was tightening it. She was improving on it because probably she'd heard the way that the first person responded to it and reacted to it. And she was kind of unconsciously or consciously, you know, tightening up her story, making her own story better. And I think that I realized in that moment, that's where I get it from.

8:10Corey Rosen:People say like, well, how did you, why did you get into this world. It was unconscious for me. I've been listening to stories and I've been listening to people revising those stories. And I think that something clicked in my own brain, which is that this is a skill. This is something that we can get better at through practice. This is something that people can do. They can do it in groups together. And it's not just a natural or unnatural ability to do it. It's a consciousness. Can we think about the ways that we're communicating information? And if I wanted to tell you something about my mother, I could say, oh yeah, my mom was in a car actually be like, oh, I'm so sorry.

8:43Corey Rosen:We would move on. But in a 30 second anecdote about her and about something that she went through in the way that she is, I think that that's the power of stories and storytelling. And I try to help other people realize that is by giving us just enough that now we're connecting with you. We're connecting with your world, maybe how you see things, how you listen, how you observe. And that is all the work, like the heavy lifting, that the kindest of all things through a story, you've gotten to know somebody better and you've gotten to connect with them in some way that maybe you relate to them and you go, oh, I have a story like that too.

9:19Corey Rosen:And you're transcended the transactional nature of a lot of communications in general. You've turned it into the personal. I love this. One of my favorite books is, well, I've got two favorite books around stories. One of them is called made to stick by chip and dan heath and he taught yep talk about how stories i think they started off talking about the story of the person who woke up in a bath of ice and yeah right did you know the kidneys missing yeah that yeah so it's very famous urban legend right so we all heard this as a kid right that like he woke up in the back bath of ice and i think in many versions it says something like call the doctors and there's some sort of a backstory about um you know being careful what you what you drink in a bar who you meet because it could be somebody who is out to steal your kidneys right so it's some general common sense wisdom that you might scare somebody with about being careful in public because the world is a dangerous place but here is a legend an urban legend that we've all heard somehow um that sinks that story home and that's what the stories simple you know unexpected uh concrete credible you have this whole system success that spells out this phrase that is really you know a tool for storytellers to make your stories more successful and more memorable i love the idea that you can you can give some information via a story but can we do that at work is that possible i believe so i think that the concept, I mean, it depends on what the situation is, obviously, at work.

10:59Corey Rosen:Sometimes somebody asks you a question and they just want an answer. They don't want a whole story. I also know this from being married to someone who every time I give her an answer about something, she's like, I just want the answer. I don't need the whole story. You know, there are times in our lives it's important to just give the information. But let's look at situations at work. Maybe it's leadership situations. Maybe you're giving some feedback or critique to an employee, or maybe you've got to rally your team. You've got to deliver some news or some bad news, or you have to give a presentation, a pitch presentation.

11:34Corey Rosen:I mean, these are all obviously different situations. Maybe you're in sales or marketing, a situation where you're maybe expected to tell stories, that you're using stories in that way. So I think if you think about situational storytelling opportunities, the takeaway is usually the same, which is that facts are hard to remember, stories are easier to remember. They are stored and they activate different parts of our brains, right? Our emotional centers, our visualization, we can picture what you're talking about. So if you're using some of those tools to communicate, even in very brief ways, what you're creating is you're creating more lasting impact on whoever you're talking to, whether it's an internal conversation or an external conversation.

12:19Corey Rosen:A good example of this too comes in situations where maybe at work, you have to communicate some information to somebody who then has to communicate that information to the next person, to their boss, to their supervisor, to their client. Again, if you're just giving them bullet points or you're just giving them information and data, they may pass on that data. Sometimes that's what they want. Give me the answer and you get the answer. But if you want to influence, if you want to persuade, if you want to encourage them to see things from your point of view, a story is a better way. A story is a more effective, memorable, and kind of enjoyable way of communicating in that way.

12:59Corey Rosen:And if people know that they're going to remember this information, then they should be trying this on their own and seeing, does it work? The worst case, the worst thing that could happen is that it doesn't work, but they've heard a good story. So there could be an upside regardless. You've said there a couple of times that some people just want the answer, they don't want a store. I mean, have you got a way of finding out when someone just wants a yes or no, or a store is a better idea? Sure. I mean, it depends on the framing of the question. So if the question is a direct challenge, like, do you have this information?

13:33Corey Rosen:And you can say, yes, I do. Here's the information. That's a very transactional communication. But if there's, why do you think this is happening? Or what did you notice? Or what happened when you went to visit that client? You know, you could say, oh, I did the presentation and they said they would get back to me. Maybe that is actually what happened. But I think if you look at, if you broaden sort of the lens of that, you know, you're giving a report back to your team or your leader in your group about a client visit or a client communication, you might paint the picture of what this client is like, of what their office environment is like, of what they're facing based on your observation.

14:12Corey Rosen:What I notice is they seem to be here because of this. So now you're creating understanding and now you're developing and deepening that relationship. And those kinds of insights and observations too might turn that interaction with that particular client in something more lasting because now you're writing back to them or you're talking to them. You're asking follow-up questions about something that they said or that happened while you were there with them. So in situations where the why of the conversation is understanding or deeper insight, that those are probably the better places to use a story than if it is just, you know, like, what is the status of this?

14:53Corey Rosen:I will have it for you by four o 'clock. You don't need a story for that. So let's try and construct a story. Let's create an situation that you just said there. So I have gone, visited a client on a sales call, and I need to come back, and they've said I will think about it. Now, I could just, if someone says, how'd it go? I go, they thought, oh, they're going to say I'll think about it. I could say that. But I sense that you're going to be able to help me construct a better story. So talk me through it. Stage one, what am I thinking about? All right. Well, let's, I mean, honestly, is there a real situation that you may have been in recently where you were talking to somebody, maybe an upcoming prospect or client or maybe the other side, somebody that was hiring you or you were hiring them, some kind of a transactional business relationship that you might have been in.

15:41Okay. So I won't go into the specifics because the deal is still going, but there is a company who's interested in talking to us about creating some bespoke content for them around workplace, using the same way that Leanne and I have on our podcast. So it's like a bit more interesting content than just a boring demonstration video.

16:03Corey Rosen:Beautiful, beautiful. So if we're thinking about now what this story is that we're telling, let's also think about what is the audience? Are we telling this to the person or are you telling this to, let's pretend, for example, that somebody is investing a ton of new money into you, into your show, into your company. And this kind of deal could be the thing that helps that, right? Right. Let's imagine that, that there's somebody listening right now that says, this is the one I want to add my sponsorship dollars right here because this is exactly the kind of content that I want. Right. So framing it that way, how might you communicate to me about this meeting that you just had without going into the specifics, because everything is still, you know, the ink is wet and things like that.

16:44Corey Rosen:But how might you make me care, I guess? How would you make me interested in what's going on with that besides just, oh, that sounds like a good thing for you? So try a version where whatever comes out is framed around that, which is that you're trying to excite me about something that is happening that might sort of open me up to understanding you. now this is an interesting situation because imagine because imagine with this deal is done and i'm now telling you as someone who might want the similar kind of deal all right so this might a little bit more hey so i'm selling this idea so my instinct would be to start off and go look you have a sass that deals with hr you've got an hr-based sass it's kind of flat your website's a little bit boring.

17:40I think that we can make a better, some better content for you that might be a bit more engaging and is also a third party certified and occupational psychologist who can actually bring something to the table. Now, Corey, I know that that is an awful way to sell this. So please kick that apart and coach me on how to make it better.

18:00Corey Rosen:Totally. Okay. So the first thing you said was you criticized my sass, right? You said it was awful. It was bad. It was boring. And so you've already put me on the defensive, right? You've already told me like, what? You don't like me. You're criticizing me. Some people eat that up. Some people, they take that as a challenge and they want to go at you and they want to attack you back. My style, I'm a little bit more, I guess, on the softer side of that, which is to say, again, framing things as a story. Hey, you know, I had an interesting experience yesterday. I was working with this company that's in the SaaS space, right?

18:35Corey Rosen:They do that. And they're really concerned, you know, because they've really owned this space. Their tools are very usable. They have a strong customer base, but they're nervous because AI is showing up. People are writing their own tools. People are replacing what they're buying from this company with their own thing. And to be honest, I am doing the same thing. I'm looking at my own ways of how can I not be using that tool. And then I realized that there was something different about this particular company. And it wasn't the technology. It wasn't the tool. It was the people that I was talking with.

19:11Corey Rosen:I knew that I was getting really good customer service from them. And I liked that every time I called them, somebody was answering me and it felt like a person, not a robot, not an automated response. And what I've realized is that in this evolving world. I am putting value on the people still, even if the tools are making us faster, better, easier to communicate with. I'm still putting value on, I don't know, I'm just spitballing this. But the idea is I've taken your encounter and I've turned it into a frame, a story in the simplest definition of a story is that stories are about things that change, right?

19:48Corey Rosen:It was like this, something happened to upset that and something changed at the end. I had a different perspective. it. So even just by framing in that way, what was that too long? How long was that story that I told? That was great. And what I liked about that is that you had in that story, you had jeopardy. There's something coming for you. Um, you had empathy. Um, you had all the bits, all the, all the aphasy, all the A-T-H-Ys in there that would just build this, this story. And I want to just stick to, this is the, I know we're going to go off topic slightly or off my topic. yours um you said stories are all about change one of my favorite stories breaking bad it is literally about change tell me more about how stories about change yeah so the the ways that i try to look at stories in general is two different lenses is how i've framed stories the first and easiest one is that a story differs from an anecdote in that an anecdote is something that happened, right?

20:48Corey Rosen:I woke up, I made some breakfast, I poured myself a cup of coffee, I checked my email. That's not a story. Those are things that have happened, right? I went to see a show and I came home, right? I went to see a show last night. I went as an audience member and they asked me to tell a story in the show, right? Still not a story. This is just something that happened. I haven't told you anything there because there's nothing that's changed from the beginning to the end of that statement. The difference between it being a story is that there was some condition, any kind of condition. And because of what happened, I came back in a different way.

21:22Corey Rosen:So if I take the situation of going last night to see a show, I just went to go see a show to support some people who are doing a storytelling show, but they needed somebody to step in in a role. So they asked, would I mind? And my first instinct was no, I wouldn't mind. I should have said no to them and said, I just came to watch the show, but I found that I like to be on stage. I like to do this. So by the end of this, people were thanking me and congratulating me, even though I just kind of went to help them out. So I felt good. Maybe it was a little bit self-serving, but in the end, I had a good time and I felt like I was part of the show, or at least I helped to support the show.

21:59Corey Rosen:So now I've turned a thing that happened into a story because there was a beginning and an end. Something was changed, whether it was internal or external. I did say that there were two different definitions because I do recognize that sometimes nothing is different in the end. Even to some extent, Breaking Bad is this wonderful, amazing show where, yes, on the surface, he goes through this giant change from being a well-respected high school teacher to being the biggest, most powerful drug cartel in the world. You know, sorry, spoiler for people who are 10 years behind. But he has physically changed.

22:33Corey Rosen:But the soul of Walt, Walter White, is kind of the same in a way. Like he always had that in him. He was discovering what that is. So the second kind of story for me, where something, sometimes nothing changes. What changes is your perspective, that this is what happened and nothing changed at the end of that thing. But I look at that now. And what I realize, because I went through that, is life is like this. Sometimes you need the right conditions to discover the badass that you really are. Or, you know, like there's some internal learning or lesson that the world is no different. Everything doesn't have to affect grand change.

23:13Corey Rosen:It could be change to you, change to your point of view, change to how you will do things in the future. um so that kind of a perspective um shift is so helpful to kind of pivot in our minds because then stories can be really simple and oftentimes people want to tell every story they'll say like oh let me tell you my story and they'll tell their entire life story and it'll go on and on and on and there's actually no story there what they're just saying is a bunch of things that they've done or achievements that they've accomplished but if you want to tell somebody your life story maybe you Just tell it in 30 seconds or 60 seconds about a moment where things changed for you.

23:52Corey Rosen:And that moment kind of can sum up your life about discovering who I was and who I wanted to be. And that's my life story is who I am, not what I've done. Welcome to the break. Yes, my favorite part of the show. These two idiots have stopped talking. Yes, I want to tell you about my new favorite podcast. No, that's a lie. It's my old favorite podcast. I've been on this one for a while. Didn't know where that was going. It is called I Digress. It is hosted by Troy Sandage and it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Yes, it's got shows that are under 30 minutes and I Digress helps eliminate complexity, complications and confusion in your business with frameworks and strategies that achieve scalable and sustainable success.

24:35At least that's what it says here. And if you do want to hear a really personal story, go to episode 136. This is Troy's honest account of fatherhood, killing hustle culture, and what really matters when you stop performing and start living with intention. Listen to I Digress wherever you get your podcasts. That concludes the break. Let's return to the scheduled programming. Back to the studio.

25:01I seem to remember it might have been Hemingway who wrote the World's had a you know a company from his friends to write the shortest story it was something like children's shoes for sale never worn or something like that yeah and then i think about jimmy car