Last weekend I attended the lovely wedding of an ex-colleague in Delhi. It was great fun catching up with old friends and sharing evergreen stories.

It was also lovely to experience pleasant weather in Delhi! Pune is burning - with temperatures in the high 30s... summer is well and truly here.

I'm also doing some final edits to the book, after a conversation with my editor. I'm trying to bring the word count a bit lower, smoothening out the language in parts, and changing some images... The list seems never-ending, but, for me, its great fun.

Any time this week when I was working on the book, I've been very engaged. And at times, when I've been stuck with other work or personal commitments, I've almost been like, 'Can I please get back to the book now?'

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the hundred and seventh 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

Lovely analogy about writing. I would add one key strand - storytelling techniques!

Context really matters - great point.

Fascinating chart - love how the chart manages to get its main point across (that rising tariffs will harm both nations) and also land in a couple of analogy-punches: a downward spiral OR getting caught in a tariffs web!

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. 'Robotaxis Are Here' by Tomas Pueyo

Even as the latest AI releases are grabbing most headlines, Waymo (a Google unit) has quietly been trasforming how we commute.

I spotted my first Waymo taxi when I was in San Francisco last April. And now, they are slowly taking over the city:

In this fascinating long-form piece Pueyo lays out the inevitable takeover of commuting by robotaxis in the future. Apart from Google's Waymo, Tesla is also poised to enter the market.

And if you worry whether we will be ok getting into a car without a driver, here's how Pueyo sees the future playing out:

In the beginning, you’ll take self-driving cars because they’re new and fun: “Look, it’s moving the wheel alone!” It will help that you’ll look at the stats and know that they have fewer accidents than human drivers.

Then, you’ll notice that self-driving cars are more convenient. You don’t need to talk with a human, manage their expectations, fear their driving skills, suffer their eating or smoking… You will start changing your habits, and instead of ordering an Uber or hailing a cab, you’ll default to Waymo or Tesla’s robotaxi.

Then, you’ll notice that they tend to be cheaper! At first, they will be just a bit cheaper. Then, prices will drop more every year. You’ll forget about human cabs.

Of course this is mainly for the US and other western countries (where driver costs are very high and especially those countries without good public transport systems). But in countries like India and other developing countries with cheap labour costs, the adoption is likely to take a long time.

Pueyo then gets into several details in the piece:

Market size estimate and other dynamics
Why it has been difficult for companies (other than Waymo and Tesla) to build the unique combination of skills needed to win in this space
Why Tesla seems to be holding the best cards in the space (and is therefore undervalued)

b. 'The Creative Review' by Tom Fishburne (The Marketoonist)

Tom Fishburne shared this hilarious strip on 10 March 2025:

Tom shares some examples of bad reviews and shares a study done by two leaders from a company that works on improving advertising briefs:

Matt and Pieter-Paul found that it typically takes a whopping 5 rounds of creative development to get to a signed-off idea (up from 3 rounds in 2007, as reported by the IPA). Only 10% of ideas are evaluated against clearly defined criteria. 70% of creative agencies don’t trust the creative judgement of the marketers they work with. The top words used to describe the process are “inconsistent,” slow,” subjective,” and “painful.”

The state of affairs seems to be quite bad in creative projects - with both sets of parties being unhappy. Brand leaders who are able to learn how to give better briefs and manage the review process better can benefit:

That chasm leaves a lot of room for marketers and agencies to improve how creative is briefed and ideas are evaluated to do their best work. These are teachable skills, and ones that can help brand teams punch harder than their weight. Because the norm is so lackluster, marketers and agencies that buck the typical process can stand out.

One inspiring takeaway from The BetterIdeas Project: “Marketers who inspire their agency to do their best work are 3X more likely to feel proud of the work they’re involved in.”

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'The Most Practical Conversation About Writing With AI – Tyler Cowen' on the How I Write podcast with David Perell

In this eye-opening episode, Tyler Cowen (well known economist and prolific writer) shares specific tactics on how he uses AI.

Cowen's first revelation - he mainly uses it for reading and research (not so much writing):

Cowen: ...most of all I use AI when I read things. So I use it as the secondary literature. So I'm preparing a podcast for a British historian. She does history of Richard II and Henry V. Now in the old days, I would have ordered and paid for 20 to 30 books on those kings. Now maybe I've ordered and paid for two or three books on those kings, But I'll keep on interrogating the best LLMs about the topics of her books. Helen Caster is the historian and just keep on going and I acquire the context much more quickly. It's pretty accurate. Keep in mind I'm the questioner, so if there's a modest degree of hallucination it doesn't matter for me, I'm not giving the answers. And I can now do many more podcasts than I used to because I'm using AI for my prep.

For the main writing, he wants it to be in his authentic voice, warts and all:

I don't let it (AI) write for me. I want the writing to be my own... it's like my little baby so to speak. I don't care whenever it's better than I am... I'm still not not going to let it write for me

Perell makes an interesting point - we tend to use AI like a texting partner. Instead we should assume that we are working with a creative mind and we need to give a detailed and clear brief:

Perell: ...part of the problem is that it's a text window that makes it feel like a text message so people use text message lengths ... In particular the first context setting-setting question should be super long. So one of the things that I'll do is I'll use voice dictation and I'll actually dictate it for a minute-and-a-half, three minutes get something very substantial and my follow-up questions tend to be shorter. But my first one tends to be extremely long and that's why I use voice dictation so I can just get it all out and I find that the that ChatGPT is quite good at sorting what's really important

Perell does a good job of summarising the key insights (I'm guessing, with ChatGPT!):

1) Don't let AI smooth out your idiosyncrasies. Let your writing stay weird and uniquely yours.

2) Generic content is dying and the burden is on you as the writer to be distinctive.

3) The more personal your writing becomes, the more future-proof it is. Nobody wants to read memoirs from AI, even if they're technically "better."

The last one is especially important. All of us needs to reflect on what is core and authentic to us and how to bring that into our writing.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

Tyler Cowen on using AI in Writing (3-2-1 by Story Rules #107)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

Why the Indus Valley Report is so Popular (3-2-1 by Story Rules #113)

What Bali can Teach the World (3-2-1 by Story Rules #112)

Extracts from an Acclaimed Novel (3-2-1 by Story Rules #111)