About two weeks back, I read some stuff online which sparked an idea for what I thought would be a clutter-breaking post about how AI is impacting storytelling at work.

I quickly put down a few thoughts in my note-taking app, and told myself - I'll flesh this out when I'm free.

Later, I sat down with my trusted notebook and pen to write it down. I ticked all the ritual-boxes - the same comfortable place where I sit to write, a cup of black coffee in hand, the phone on silent and just my notebook and pen with me. The outline for the essay should be done in an hour tops, I thought.

Oh you foolish, foolish man.

After 30 minutes of going round in circles inside my own mind, I gave up. This was not happening. I would have to try again some other day (thank God, I don't have deadlines for this stuff).

Writing is hard. As it's meant to be. And maybe AI can help be get unstuck, but I am not a natural user... So I'll have to let my mind grapple with this, till the piece comes out with some semblance of clarity.

Hopefully that happens sometime soon...!

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the one hundred and eighteenth 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

Let's dive in.

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

Such a thought-provoking implication of what would happen given the new AI video generation tools...

Superb use of norm-variance to show the dominance of Nadal at Roland Garros.

This tweet was written in early 2023. And it has been incredibly prescient.

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. 'Why Apple can’t just quit China' Patrick McGee interview by Viola Zhou

Patrick McGee has recently written a book on the oversized impact of Apple on the growth of China's technological capabilities.

Over the decades, Apple has 'taught' China high-end manufacturing and enabled the growth of many high-tech enterprises. The tricky part for Apple - it can't really exit China cold-turkey.

McGee tackles the 'perception' of Apple moving a lot of production to India. This part was a bit distressing to read as an Indian:

I think Apple wants the perception that they are moving a lot to India, that they are responding to what Donald Trump is asking for. And they want the reality of continuing to build as much as they can out of China because its capabilities there are second to none. If next year you buy an iPhone and it says “Made in India” on the box, that phone will not be any less dependent on the China-centric supply chain than any other iPhone you have ever purchased.

Even the build-up happening in India pales in comparison to the growth that had happened in China much earlier:

Things are moving to India, just way more slowly than anybody seems to understand. Apple started with zero phones made in China in 2007. By the end of the year, they had made 3 or 4 million. And by 2014, they were building about 200 million phones.

A decade later [2017], the first phones were made in India. And by 2024, about 25 million phones were made in India. At best, the diversification to India has happened at one-tenth the speed that happened in China a decade earlier.

At the end, the interviewer (Viola Zhou) asks a question, to which McGee's response is illuminating:

Zhou: As China and the U.S. negotiate tariffs and trade now, can Beijing use Apple as a bargaining chip?

McGee: The way you phrased the question is already really revealing, right? You didn’t ask, can Washington use Apple as a bargaining chip? That’s a crazy thing to say, that it’s America’s most iconic company and it’s a bargaining chip of Beijing’s. Yeah, I mean, you’re totally right. Beijing clearly has more of a hold on Apple’s day-to-day operations than Washington does.

b. 'Moderna Merging Tech and HR because AI and People are the Same Thing?' by Navin Kabra

The ever-alert-to-eventful-AI-developments Navin has unearthed another fascinating occurrence in the world of AI:

Moderna, the mRNA vaccine maker, has merged its tech and HR departments. The idea is that over the next few years, the roles of the humans and AI in the organization are likely to see a lot of overlap and hence the decisions regarding them cannot be split across different parts of the organization.

He lays out the implications for HR and Tech leaders:

What all does this tell you?

That people in HR need to quickly get very familiar with the abilities of various AI tools?

That people in IT need to understand that AI tools behave far more like humans with various human weaknesses (like lying, giving different answers at different times for the same questions, giving different answers depending on how nicely you ask, and having distinct personalities (like Claude like to play it safe, Grok is a little unhinged, etc), and many other characteristics which software tools never had before)?

He ends with a provocative question:

If your HR and IT teams are not having daily standups about your people and AI working together, why not?

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'Plain History: How Norman Borlaug Stopped the Apocalypse' by Derek Thompson

Could there be one person who can be credited with saving almost a billion lives?

Yes, argue host Derek Thompson (author of books like Abundance and Hitmakers) and journalist Charles C Mann (author of 'The Wizard and the Prophet') and discuss the fascinating work of agro-scientist Norman Borlaug, the key force behind the green revolution.

Here's how the Thompson refers to the Wall Street Journal describing Borlaug's impact:

In 2007, when Borlaug was 93 years old, The Wall Street Journal editorialized that he had, quote, arguably saved more lives than anyone in world history, maybe one billion, end quote.

Thompson starts off the episode with some powerful contrast - between the warnings of famine-driven apocalypse in the 1950s and 60s versus the reality in the 1970s:

In every generation in history, it's trendy for people of a certain disposition to believe that the end is near, that the apocalypse is coming. In the 1950s and 1960s, one fear was that population growth would soon destroy the planet, that fertility would outrun the food supply, and hundreds of millions if not billions of people would soon starve to death.

...

But then the 1970s came and went, and global famine deaths didn't skyrocket. They declined by 90 percent. In the 1980s, deaths from world hunger fell again. And again in the 1990s, and again in the 2000s. The apocalypse that everybody said was coming never came.

The episode initially talks about the impact of the Haber-Bosch process to make fertiliser, an invention with far-reaching consequences (emphasis mine):

So Haber and Bosch invent the process of synthesizing ammonia. According to the researcher, Vaclav Smil, 40 percent of the food grown in the world today uses synthetic ammonia, which means that these two Germans essentially invented a process that feeds half the planet. It's almost like the rarest club in the world is the club of people who can be plausibly credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Later, when talking about wheat, Mann talks about a pest called stem rust which was the bane of wheat farmers:

...it's absolutely pointless to grow more and more wheat, if it just gets eaten by disease. The problem is that as you get more and more productive, your field presents an ever more juicy target for pests and diseases of all sorts. In India, for example, in the 1910, 1920, if you see pictures of wheat fields, what they'll show you is a plant here and then another one two feet away, and then another one two feet away. The reason is, they're trying to say that if one of them gets infected by stem rust, you have an empty space around it, so maybe the others won't get infected.

In the early twentieth century, the Rockefeller Foundation had been set up with a whopping $100M endowment - and decided to fund agri-research in Mexico:

In 1913, the Standard Oil owner, John D. Rockefeller, creates the Rockefeller Foundation with this enormous initial endowment, $100 million at a time when the federal budget was less than $1 billion. To put that in some perspective, today the federal budget is just shy of $7 trillion, which means a proportional endowment would be $600 billion...

In the 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation decides that among the many things that it's funding, it wants to fund agricultural research in Mexico.

But why were they interested in funding Agriculture research in Mexico? Well there's an improbable Nazi angle to this story:

So now it's much later, it's the late (19)30s, early 40s, and World War II is obviously about to happen. Many people believe that the US is going to get involved in war. And down there in Mexico is a giant source of anxiety because Mexico can't feed itself. And this means that the Mexican government has been wildly unstable, and there's a great fear that Nazis are going to take over. And so the thought was, if we can help Mexico grow more food, the rural discontent that is at the base of much of the country's social instability will be alleviated and maybe they won't invade us or ally with Germany or something like that.

And so Borlaug begins working in Mexico to develop pest-resistant wheat. Mann gives us a sense of the painstaking work done by Borlaug and his team in the Mexican heat:

The first thing that you should understand is, you would not be working in a laboratory. You would not be in air-conditioned space. You would not have advanced tools because he had no budget. He literally was working in a lean-to shack. Basically, the only tools that he had was a pair of tweezers and a hat. The hat for the sun, the tweezers for everything else.

Mann then describes the mind-numbingly technical process of what Borlaug did in vivid detail and shares this reaction of other agricultural scientists to that:

...when I talked to agricultural researchers who were writing this book, and I got to this part, they would all say something like, do you know how crazy that is? Do you know how horrible that was? It's 100 degrees, and you're with your little tweezers, eight hours a day, day after day after day after day.

And there isn't like an air-conditioned lab nearby, you can say, he like has a bottle of water maybe. So it was just awful work. Then you have to individually harvest each cross, write down what everything is, and keep track of all this.

Again, no computers, you're doing this with those notebooks, those black speckled notebooks that your parents used to take tests in in high school. It's just unbelievably awful. And then keeping them all on a crude wooden bench. It's just mind-boggling what he did.

Eventually the work by Borlaug and his global collaborators (of whom MS Swaminathan is mentioned in the episode) paid off massively with the invention of the pest-resistant dwarf wheat variety, which resulted in an unprecedented increase in wheat yields globally. Later this approach was also applied to rice and ended up saving countless lives in rice-eating parts of the world.

Truly an extraordinary story of the power of single-minded devotion to the scientific process and the importance of the right financial and political backing for the same.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

The Man Who Saved a Billion People (3-2-1 by Story Rules #118)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

Using Historical Context with Empathy (3-2-1 by Story Rules #117)

On the 'Art of Interviewing' by Malcolm Gladwell (3-2-1 by Story Rules #116)

A Crash Course in Creativity (3-2-1 by Story Rules #115)