tavis: first up, a conversation with a successful studio chief and movie producer peter gruber. he is out with a new text about the art of storytelling called "tell to win." also tonight, sarah vowell is here. her latest book explores the history of hawaii and how it became an unwilling number of the united states. the book is called "unfamiliar fishes." we are glad you joined us. >> i know his name is james. he needs extra help with his reading. >> i and james. >> to everyone making a difference. >> thank you. >> you help us all live better.

>> nationwide insurance support tavis smiley. nationwide is proud to join tavis smiley in improving literacy. nationwide is on your side. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. ♪ [captioning made possible by kcet public television] tavis: peter guber is a successful movie producer and movie studio executive. his films include "rain man" and "batman." his new best seller "tell to win: tramp with a heavy -- hidden power of story" is out

now. it is good to have you here. one thing that fascinated me about the book is that you start out not by talking about winning but by losing. you talk about failing instead of succeeding. why start that way? >> the idea is that failure is an inevitable partner on the road to success. if you are not willing to confront failure, you never find out how good you are. the states so far back from the goal line to stay safe. -- you state so far away from the goal line to stay safe. they all move back. suddenly, you find yourself in the locker room. the idea is that you may fail, but you are a failure if you do not move on. the willingness to not be risk adverse is the key to success. you have to be willing to take

chances. tavis: you have to take risk. how do you calculate those so you are not constantly failing? >> if you are constantly failing, then you know. the idea is that you look at it and say that success is in the red zone. the idea is that if you look at the other thanks -- things in your life that are succeeding, you learn from it. success and failure are very close together. inside every success are the seeds enormous failure. in every failure, there's the opportunity for great success. they are not miles apart. they are close together. you are always going to have the likelihood that something is not going to work. the thing is to recognize that you can inculcate that culture

in the people you collaborate with and have great success. tavis: last week, larry king was here interviewing me about a new book i have out about failure. at the end of that conversation, he did something he is known for doing quite well. he told a very funny story. larry king is a great storyteller. i have read it the book. i have heard about you. you are a good storyteller. being a good storyteller is helpful. do you have to be a great storyteller to "tell to win"? >> people feel like storytelling is sitting around a campfire. this is about recognizing that when you want to move people parts -- hearts, the way to do that is by narrative.

they expect experiences. the idea of using narrative to imbed the information is like a trojan horse. then you have an emotional experience with the person listening. you are telling them something that allows them to metabolize the information. they hold it differently. they retelling. they own it. that is the purpose of telling a story -- to move people. think about all the people we know and were very successful. they tell purposeful stories. they move people to action by aiming at the heart. tavis: what are the ingredients, tools of being able to get the story across? >> 80% of it is the tell.

20% is the story. when you go into the room with somebody, you have to think about the following elements. are you motivated and coherent? is your intention aligned? that intentioned shines through. authenticity. if someone does not appear authentic, you do not hear the rest of the information. you have to have that as the first element. the second element is to recognize the people in the room with you. the idea is that date are audiences. -- the idea is that day are audiences. you try to be interested rather than interesting. you must be able to do that.

you must get their attention before you get their intention. you have to ask what is in it for them. then you consider the goal and why you are there. i am here to talk about the book. if i do not put that forward, i look like i am hiding something. when i am hiding something, the audience mistrusts everything i am saying. you have to be able to own the thing you are trying to tell. finally, you have to be in a conversation. you have to turn me into we. you have to be an empathetic listener. before you even get to the story, you will have captured them. the story is what you in bed the critical information in. the stories are everywhere, in your life experiences, their life experiences, movie, television, book -- anything

that allows them to be emotionally moved. that is the way we hold information. we are analog. when you bond information to the motion, it becomes memorable. the person you are telling to owns it and tells it forward. tavis: you are very good at that. you know what you are doing. you do that for the most part inside of a place called hollywood. can you extrapolate the telling of stories inside this business to the real world? most folks reading this are not in hollywood. can they apply the lessons to what they do every day? >> nelson mandela spent 29 years in prison. he is one of the best sellers of stories that i have met. he wowed the united states when he came to visit us. mohammad ali knew how to move

his audience to action. bill clinton, obama, howard schultz, steve jobs. that is the way we are wired. it is in our dna. people think it is all about digital technology. it is not about state of the art technology. it is about state of the heart technology. we have 40,000 years of oral narrative. we are wired that way. it is in our dna. that is what we call upon we want to move other people to action. we do it intuitively all the time. we always tell people stories. story is not the icing. it is the cake. it is the way it works. people will not become john grisham or nelson mandela. but if they can take 12 strokes

off of their game, success and failure are close together. if you can just move that meter 10%, you can have great results. tavis: 1 impersonal pet peeves. one of my personal pet peeves is powerpoints. everyone ries on it. it makes you lazy. i am looking at the screen so often as opposed to talking with you. talk to me about how it is face- to-face with people that you connect when so much of what we do is this until -- digital presentation. >> you are right. you can ask some of the most powerful people who have created digital presentations, they will

tell you that you have to get in the room face to face. you would not make life or business decisions unless you could look them in the arts. attitude is equally important to aptitude. when the chips are down, attitude really counts. to be able to overcome failure, you want to see that and feel that. that is the way we're wired. we have 40,000 years of genetic transportation of that. tavis: this is so much in the book. there are some great stories of wanted to get to tonight. the conversation with another way. i think you get the point he is sharing. you can in fact persuade and tryout with the hidden power of story. he mentioned a bunch of names

that tell great stories to peter about how they have told to win. up next, best-selling author sarah vowell. stay with us. ♪ sarah vowell is known for her best selling works and "american life." her new text is set in hawaii and called "unfamiliar fishes. " i love the title. >> becomes from a letter writer who was one of the first generation of the american missionaries who arrived in the 18 twenties. they taught him to read and write when he was almost 30. he became a minister and teacher. as he grew older and watched the rising tide of white people

drowning his homeland, he wrote a letter to friends saying that when the waves come in, and familiar fishes -- unfamiliar fishes come in and eat the others of. i liked the title because these white people came to hawaii. they were not regular people. they were the bible-thumpers and sailors on leave -- odd ducks representing our country. tavis: 1898 should be just as fascinating as 1776. >> it is the year we became a world power. it was not even a year. it was more like a summer.

in april of 1898, we invaded cuba. then we invaded the philippines. by the end of the summer, we have and next guam and puerto rico. part of it was the drive on the part of men in the government and military. people like theodore roosevelt, president mckinley, or senator lodge who wanted to make america great. to them, greatness meant empire. empires were built on navies. those required island bases. that is how we ended up with pearl harbor and guantanamo bay. that is when we turned the corner on the street where our tanks are still moving down the street. it kind of happened that year. tavis: in retrospect, was that wise or just being greedy?

>> it depends on who you ask. toodore roosevelt's goal was be great and powerful and not be a sissy, to have this big navy and take over the world. then it was a great idea. pearl harbor is still the headquarters of pacific command. if you were one of the wish to washy anti-imperialists who thought the united states was about government built on the consent of the governed, then you shed a few tears, i think. tavis: tell me about the annexation of hawaii. >> there were two factions that wanted it. all of them were white. people in washington wanted to turn it into a big military base. on the ground in hawaii, there were the descendants of the original new england missionaries who started the sugar plantations. they had overthrown the hawaiian

queen. they wanted ye to become american. they wanted to hawaiian sugar to become american sugar. the hawaiian people were still loyal to their queen. when annexation, before the congress, the hawaiian people rallied. they gathered thousands of signatures and sent them to washington. they said they wanted to go back to being a sovereign nation. that worked. there is no real treaty of annexation. the congressmen were persuaded by the hawaiian people and the queen who wrote this beautiful book to argue against annexation. after the treaty became impossible to pass, the mckinley administration jerryrigged is joint legislation.

it is all little less rigorous and requires a lower majority. tavis: you have raised this several times in the conversation, this notion of the white people that you keep referring to. >> we could call them howlies. it is always good to have a synonym for a variety. tavis: you have a list of the land grabbing we did in one summer in 1898. it was white folks basically doing the grabbing. people of color were being grabbed. talk to me about the relationship. >> the interesting thing about

hawaii as opposed to the other 1898 acquisitions that were former spanish colonies -- they were catholic. hawaii had been overrun by missionaries eight decades before. protestantism was entrenched. there was a white ruling class in place because of the missionaries and their sugar plantations. this may be one of the reasons why hawaii is one of the only colonies that became a state. there was this long american presence there. hawaii had been so americanized already. tavis: how unfair in retrospect was this deal to these persons of color in all of these places? >> how unfair?

i do not know. do you want to go bicolor? it was pretty unfair. tavis: we are being serious and funny in different parts of the conversation. we're talking about acquisition and annexation. there are other words we could use that are not so kind about what happened to the people in that summer. i am trying to get to the dark side of what happened in 1898. >> there are so many dark sides in white that it is like the >> cube -- in hawaii that it is like a rubic's cube. the hawaiian people have little resistance to diseases. when the first westerner arrive, there were maybe 1 million hawaiians'. a century later, there were maybe 40,000.

they were wiped out so much by disease. a lot of what happened with the white people taking over the land, a lot of that was purely legal. it goes back to the generosity of the hawaiian monarch who privatized the land and made it illegal for foreigners to buy the land. 1898, the white residents owned about 90% of the land. almost all of that was legal. it was not pretty. the fact that it was legal -- many things that are legal or not necessarily right. there is that. tavis: the bible says lawful but not expedient. >> i am not a super fan of monarchy. when the white queen was overthrown, she was a constitutional monarch.

there was fairly universal suffrage. when the missionary dissonance overthrew her -- when the missionary descendants overthrew her, they established an oligarchy that was less democratic than the monarchy that they replaced. grover cleveland was president at the time. he refused to annex hawaii. they had to wait for him to leave office before they could. they realized they would have to be a government in that time and needed a constitution. a representative is writing his old buddies in charge in honolulu saying they should check out the constitution of the new state of mississippi. the jim crow masterpiece. they have figured out how to disenfranchise all of the former slaves in mississippi. we can also apply that to the hawaiians and the asian

plantation workers. then he had the gall to say that the new country should have the word republic in the title. he wanted it to be called a republic but not be one. tavis: we know why we wanted to annex these places. you can put faces on them and want things from them. what are we using hawaii, guam, and puerto rico for these days? >> is not all nefarious. they support the independence of south korea. we also support the independence of taiwan. they do good work there. there are some other things we did in the 20th century from those headquarters like vietnam,

korea. when i was a student, i lived in holland. i lived with a dutch couple that had been indonesian colonials. they have spent their childhoods in japanese concentration camp liberated by americans that passed through pearl harbor on the way to save them. i am glad i am not one of the people deciding where to point the weapons. i am saying that before we start talking about ourselves as this flawless city on a hill, perhaps we could be more aware of some of the lint on our fine sweaters. tavis: the person who is in

charge of deciding where we're going to point our missiles and bullets happens toack man from hawaii named barack obama. there is great debate these days about the president's birthplace and birth certificate. what do you make about this debate? >> i think it is all silliness. you cannot have it both ways. you cannot take over these islands and make them american and use them as one of our military capitols and then claim that someone born there is not an american. that seems unpatriotic to me. it certainly means the contributions the hawaiian people have made to our path to world domination. i am not one to make fun of a patriot like donald trump. that is just my humble opinion.

tavis: thank you for sharing that. the new book is called "unfamiliar fishes." congratulations on the good text. that is our show for tonight. until next time, keep watching and keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit pbs.org >> join me next time with william cohen and why wall street has not changed. >> all i know is his name is james and he needs extra help with his reading. >> i am james. >> to everyone making a difference. you help us all live better. >> nationwide insurance supports tavis smiley.

nationwide insurance is proud to join tavis in improving literacy. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org-- ♪ ♪