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And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the one hundred and seventeenth 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

Loved the framing of '18-inch pilgrimage from head to heart'!

Useful advice. These steps are pretty much how I design a training module. Framework, examples, practice, feedback.

Superb visual - especially the decision to get the line to 'break through' the graph and chart its own path to unprecedented heights.

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. 'Calibrated Force: Operation Sindoor and the Future of Indian Deterrence' by Dr. Walter Ladwig

This piece on the recent India-Pakistan limited war came highly recommended by Nitin Pai, one of my favourite geopolitical experts, so I had to read it.

It makes some great points. For one, India should have taken more control of the online narrative space from the beginning. But overall he feels that that doesn't matter:

In any military campaign, shaping the strategic narrative is nearly as important as shaping the battlespace. Unfortunately, India ceded that narrative space. The initial silence from Indian military spokespeople created an information vacuum. Into that vacuum poured commentary that was often technically uninformed and strategically misleading.

What emerged was a distorted framing of the conflict. Rather than serious analysis of India’s targeting methodology, command intent, or escalation thresholds, coverage focused instead on the air-to-air engagement that led to the loss of Indian aircraft. Undue prominence was given to the performance of specific platforms, with little regard for the broader operational context or the rules of engagement that shaped the encounter. As a result, Chinese arms manufacturers enjoyed a perceived PR win – one arguably disproportionate to the tactical or strategic context of the engagement.

My translation of this: Narrative battles matter. Sure, India might have lost an advanced French aircraft or two to some Chinese-made equipment. But what mattered was: What were India's overall objectives, the rules of engagement and did India achieve those objectives. Dr Ladwig thinks that India did:

That misleading narrative obscures a more consequential truth: despite Pakistani tactical successes, India appears to have largely achieved its stated objectives. On the opening day of strikes, the Indian Air Force (IAF) demonstrated a credible capacity to identify and destroy what New Delhi characterised as terrorist-linked infrastructure in Pakistani territory, employing stand-off weapons to deliver precision strikes at speed. In the following days, operations expanded in scope, penetrating Pakistan’s Chinese-supplied air defence network to target select forward airbases for the first time since the 1971 war.

He also makes a key point - the reason why India might have lost the aircraft is because of its self-imposed constraint of not taking on military targets in the first round of attacks:

Arguably more impressive than the operation’s reach was its restraint on the first day. According to Indian officials, pilots operated under strict rules of engagement that prohibited initiating attacks on Pakistani aircraft or pre-emptively suppressing air defence systems. This decision – to accept heightened operational risk in order to confine the conflict strictly to terrorist-linked infrastructure – is telling.

Another key insight - this conflict showed there is a larger space available for limited military conflict without risking nuclear war:

This conflict illustrates that limited military engagement under the shadow of nuclear weapons can be contained – provided escalation thresholds are mutually understood, signalling remains disciplined, and objectives are narrowly defined.

The biggest takeaway - such retaliation is now expected to be the norm, not the exception:

Perhaps the most significant legacy of Operation Sindoor is the precedent it sets. In the eyes of the Indian government, the use of cross-border force against terrorist-linked targets in Pakistan proper has now moved from exception to expectation. Whereas past crises often relied on signalling and symbolic action, future attacks on Indian soil – especially those traced to infrastructure across the border – are likely to draw a response of equal or greater magnitude to degrade the assets enabling terrorist action.

b. 'No, Graduates: AI Hasn't Ended Your Career Before It Starts' by Steven Levy

In this Commencement speech given to students at Temple University, Wired editor-at-large Stephen Levy makes a strong point for showcasing our unique humanity in the AI age.

Levy injects some gentle humour in the talk:

My guess is that every single one of you has used a large language model like ChatGPT as a collaborator. Now I hope this isn’t the case, but some of you may have used it as a stand-in for your own work. Please don’t raise your hand if you’ve done this—we haven’t given out the diplomas yet, and your professors are standing behind me.

Levy makes his main point here:

... my mission today is to tell you that your education was not in vain. You do have a great future ahead of you no matter how smart and capable ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama get. And here is the reason: You have something that no computer can ever have. It’s a superpower, and every one of you has it in abundance.

Your humanity.

He makes a crucial distinction between thinking like humans and as humans:

The lords of AI are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to make their models think LIKE accomplished humans. You have just spent four years at Temple University learning to think AS accomplished humans. The difference is immeasurable.

Levy claims that we will value human-generated output more than AI-generated:

In 2023, some researchers published a paper confirming just that. In blind experiments human beings valued what they read more when they thought it was from fellow humans and not a sophisticated system that fakes humanity. In another blind experiment, participants were shown abstract art created by both humans and AI. Though they couldn’t tell which was which, when subjects were asked which pictures they liked better, the human-created ones came out on top.

He ends with a (vague) exhortation to put more 'heart' in your work. I like the spirit of the idea, but he could have added some specific examples!

Yes, you can use AI to automate your busy work, explain complicated topics, and summarize dull documents. It might even be an invaluable assistant. But you will thrive by putting your heart into your own work. AI has no such heart to employ. Ultimately, flesh, blood, and squishy neurons are more important than algorithms, bits, and neural nets.

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'My Thoughts on Tariffs, Economic History, and the Market Decline' by Morgan Housel

This is an old episode (from April 2025), but it's a masterclass in how to gently provide historical context in a knotty and controversial issue... and how to use concrete details and a kind and empathetic tone while doing so.

(Morgan Housel is the bestselling author of the global blockbusters 'The Psychology of Money' and 'Same as Ever')

Now, Housel is clearly pro-free trade. But he makes his points with gentle empathy, almost as if he's talking as a kind therapist with someone who has had a rough time. (think Robin Williams from Good Will Hunting)

Make no mistake. He begins with the a clear BLUF - the bottom line upfront:

I think the tariffs are a terrible idea. Not just a terrible idea, but a horrendous idea.

And then immediately follows it up with empathy and acknowledgement of the opposing position:

Now, I understand that all of us, everybody, including me, everybody, can live in their own little bubble, particularly for these topics where it's very hard to divorce economics and money from politics.

So if you disagree with that broad view and you think the tariffs are a good idea, let me just state, I respect you. I'd love to hear you. Everyone sees the world through their own unique lens, and it's naive to assume that my lens is clearer than yours, even if it might be different.

Housel uses some norm-variance to put the opposition of economsts to tariffs in perspective:

There is so much disagreement among economists and politicians and investors over how to run the economy. What's the right level of taxation? Should it be more? Should it be less? What's the right level of regulation? Fierce disagreements among very smart people.

But one of the most agreed upon topics in economics is that tariffs are bad and trade wars are destructive.

And then he gives some useful historical perspective. One of the most overlooked drivers of job-losses in manufacturing is automation:

...yes, the United States has lost a lot of manufacturing employment over the last 50 years. Of course, it absolutely has. And often when that is addressed, it is immediately jumped to that's because we ship those jobs overseas.

The factories that used to be in Indiana and Tennessee and Mississippi, we ship them to Mexico and Canada and China. There is some truth to that, of course, indisputably. There is, I think, a bigger truth that gets lost, which is that where a lot of those jobs went was not necessarily to another country.

It was to automation.

He adds some concrete data to support his point:

... a US steel factory in Gary, Indiana. In 1950, this individual factory produced 6 million tons of steel with 30,000 workers. In 2010, I guess it was 15 years ago that I wrote it, it produced 7.5 million tons of steel with 5,000 workers.”
...

China, the manufacturing powerhouse of the globe, has fewer manufacturing workers today than they did 10 years ago. They are making more stuff than ever before. They are building factories faster than ever before, and they have fewer people working in those factories, because China, more than anybody else, probably throughout history, is installing and using robots and automation in their manufacturing at a ferocious pace.

He then speaks directly (with empathy) to his target audience - people who are upset about the manufacturing job losses...:

You know, the people who are working in the auto plants and the steel mills in the 1950s and the 1960s and through the 1970s. That's, I think, by and large, the world that a lot of people want to go back to.

Very understandable. I do not look down upon them for wanting to go back to that world in the slightest because it was a great world. It was amazing when there were tens of millions of manufacturing jobs in the industrial parts of the United States.

... and gives them some historical perspective of how a unique set of circumstances coalesced to give the US a free rein in the 1950s onward:

But let me tell you at least part of why it occurred at the time. At the end of World War II, in 1945, Europe and Japan were decimated into rubble as a result of the war. Whereas the United States, of course, had all of its manufacturing capacity intact, and had all these GIs coming home.

During these decades, the inequality between blue-collar and white-collar jobs was not very high:

That was also a period when for many different factors, we don't need to go into all of them, but white-collar workers were not making that much money. If you worked on Wall Street in the 1970s, that was not a place to make a lot of money.”

...

“But this came during a period in the 70s and 80s when gas prices surged. And all of a sudden, those tiny little engines in a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla were what people wanted

... but that has increased significantly now. Notice how Housel makes the feeling of inequality so concrete with this vivid example:

In one era, that might feel great. But if all of a sudden your neighbor who is a project manager at KPMG is making 300 grand a year, your $25 an hour doesn't feel that great anymore, because your neighbor has a bigger house and more cars and is sending their kids to private school. So by comparison, you feel worse off, even if your wages just for inflation may have been going up.

Housel's empathy shines in this portion:

I think it is naive and insulting for people who are on my side of the tariff debate, who say tariffs are a bad idea, who cannot understand the views of those kind of people.

Listen to the episode for a masterclass on empathy, providing historical perspective and using concrete language to explain abstract concepts.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

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

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

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)

How to Communicate to CXOs (3-2-1 by Story Rules #114)