Welcome to the seventy-fourth edition of '3-2-1 by Story Rules'.

A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:

3 tweets
2 articles, and
1 long-form content piece

Alright, let's dive in.

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

Great example of reframing by giving perspective. Don't just compare the current real estate taxation situation with the old one; also compare real estate as an income class with others.

Scary.

Another week, another inspiring Joy B tweet!

(Btw, did you also think that was a young Suresh Oberoi?!)

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. 'Governments have limited impact on Jobs' by Ajay Shah (Business Standard)

Clear-headed piece by Ajay. The smart (but unpopular) option to increasing employment: Create predictable and easy conditions for businesses to invest and thrive and then get. out. of. their. way. But then it feels better to announce an incentive and create more rules right?

I loved this line from the piece: "The state is more potent when it undertakes actions that reshape the desire of private firms, as opposed to applying the philosophy of welfare programs"

b. 'Money Stuff: Bad Trades Are Also Valuable' by Matt Levine

The peerless Matt Levine had a great collection of surprising news events in this edition, made even better with his insightful and hilarious commentary.

One portion of his newsletter comments on the unprecedented success of weight-loss drugs like Ozempic (known as GLP-1 drugs):

Another way to imagine GLP-1 drugs is that they are, like, demand quality sorters: They make their users demand more good stuff and less bad stuff; they enhance their willpower so they buy more stuff that they should want and fewer guilty pleasures. And so the GLP-1 trade is, like, “long companies that make good stuff and short companies that make bad stuff.”

Here, via Tyler Cowen, is a Meatingplace article [6] on the sorting: "Lean protein “emerged as the biggest winner” on supermarket shelves among shoppers who have taken popular new weight-loss drugs, according to a report using consumer surveys."

...

If GLP-1 drugs are not universal demand suppressants but universal willpower enhancers, eventually there will be studies of the effect of Ozempic on videogame microtransactions, won’t there? I’m excited for that.

The last point was very insightful - connecting sugar for the body with sugar for the mind!

Another piece was about a new marketing course in Harvard which seems to be attracting a celebrity crowd. Levine quotes from a Bloomberg story on the topic:

(Prof) Anita Elberse … is best known for her course The Business of Entertainment, Media, and Sports—or #BEMS to its alumni who post about it on Instagram and LinkedIn. The four-day, $12,000 program, an elective open to professionals not enrolled at HBS, has become a blockbuster for the university. Elberse’s case studies, ranging from David Beckham’s brand management to Beyoncé’s music launch strategies, are often announced like an album drop on social media. Which is why, along with execs from Hollywood and Madison Avenue, stars such as Channing Tatum and LL Cool J have signed up, hoping to build the next celebrity business empire.

Its appeal isn’t just that it allows C-level normies to study alongside celebrities but also that it allows famous people to feel like Ivy Leaguers. “This week I got accepted into Harvard! Words cannot describe my excitement!” posted singer Ciara online after getting into Elberse’s program in 2019

The program is growing so popular that the professor is contemplating filtering out the folks who seem to be interested in it for the brand name (and photo opps!) only. Also from the Bloomberg story:

This year marks the program’s 10th anniversary. Elberse says the more it grows in popularity, the more she has to guard against celebs co-opting the Harvard brand to further their own. “We sometimes say ‘no’ to people if I don’t get a sense they’re here for the right reasons,” she says. “This is not about you taking photos walking around the Harvard campus.”

What I loved was Matt's reaction to the above comment:

I mean, it is a little bit, right? Like if you have a lot of Instagram followers and you post yourself in a Harvard sweater walking around the campus, that is just good for everyone’s business.

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'How Top Experts Use AI to Write, Code, and Run Their Business' | Dan Shipper on the Behind the Craft podcast

Dan Shipper, co-Founder and CEO of Every (a daily long-form newsletter), is a leading expert in the use of AI in writing, coding and managing his business. He has a podcast called 'AI and I' where he interviews leading experts on how they use AI in their workflows.

In this conversation, Dan shares some of his own learnings from using AI - he essentially uses it as an assistant throughout the writing process.

For instance, he uses it as a research tool to summarise detailed and complex input sources:

"...a lot of writing is summarizing so if you're you know writing about ideas which I write about all the time you're often referencing older ideas and in order to reference older ideas like scientific theories or philosophy or you know uh what happened in a particular novel that you're like relating something to like you have to summarize what happened you have to summarize the theory you have to summarize the philosophical idea and language models are really good at doing that and I wouldn't recommend necessarily doing it for things you don't already know about but particularly for things where it's like yeah I read this a long time ago I basically know what it says but like it would take me like three hours of Wikipedia reading to like fully summarize it in a nice way ChatGPT is perfect for summarizing it

He uses AI to transcribe his spoken notes and create broad outlines from his notes:

...what I will often do is I'll go take a walk, turn on my voice memo app (and) talk out loud about like whatever is on my mind and then I'll transcribe that with Whisper then I'll throw it into ChatGPT and be like can you summarize what I said can you pull out anything interesting any ideas that you think are like particularly good and it's really really quite good at doing that and pulling at the little nuggets of like insight for me and then I'll have a big document full of notes I have no idea how to like turn this into anything because I've been thinking about this for so long and I'll often take that and throw it into chat to Claude and be like hey can you please turn this into a outline and it's actually really really good at figuring out how to take the unstructured blob of notes that I gave it and then find the simple structure

For editing:

I have like a crappy draft that I write myself and then I paste into Claude with a bunch of examples on my past posts and I ask it to like edit based on my style... it does a pretty good job of just cleaning it up and making it like my style and I don't necessarily just copy and paste it over but I just... look at what it output is and kind of like manually edit my own thing to kind of pick the best parts I love

For better editing, you can prompt it to simulate a role or give it sample before-afters:

...and then if that doesn't work then it's like often asking to simulate an expert like you are a professional editor, (or) you are a like expert in computer science or whatever see if that works. If that doesn't work then giving it some examples so like here's what I want here's like what good looks like or here's an input-output example here's like if we're talking about article editing it's like here's a raw article and here's an edited article now I'm going to give you a raw article I want you to edit it in that style

The top creators that Dan has interviewed are taking a curious, exploratory perspective towards AI:

...people I have on my show they're generally pretty patient, curious people who are interested in experimenting and don't have the sort of knee-jerk reaction of 'oh this didn't work' and are like, I'm making an investment in learning how to use this new tool and like it's actually kind of fun it's really interesting even when it fails. And so I think that that sort of spirit of open-mindedness and curiosity and exploration is what allows people to get the most out of tools like this.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

How Experts are Using AI to Write (3-2-1 by Story Rules #74)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

How to Build Lasting Memories with your Children (3-2-1 by Story Rules #88)

A Data Story on India's New Elites (3-2-1 by Story Rules #87)

Improve your Public Speaking Skills (3-2-1 by Story Rules #86)