AI Was Supposed to Replace Writers. It Did the Opposite.

I'll start eating chicken nuggets over the sink out of my son's lunchbox and kind of space out for a while and I'll come back and Claude's done this amazing competitive analysis and it's this moment where you just feel like Jesus Christ like am I completely screwed? Will I ever work again? Do I have maybe just 6 months to make money before my skills are completely obsolete? AI actually wasn't going to replace writers. it was going to make them more important than ever. I found myself on increasingly on these email chains where it would be like three or four people who were all writing in the same dead behind the eyes lobotomized McKinsey analyst ChatGPT voice.

When I first started pitching the book, most people thought I was freaking crazy. The Nick Standlea. Joe Lazer, welcome to the Nick Standlea Show. Let's open with a big question here. What is the importance of storytelling in the age of AI? Nick, great to be here and and that is a big question to open with. So, I think storytelling is is everything in the age of AI. We're moving into an era in which AI can take on so many of those technical tasks in our day-to-day lives, right? like analyze this spreadsheet, code this app, build this website and so much over the last two decades of work. We spent a lot of time trying to act like machines, right?

Mimicking the work of computers. And what prompted me to write Super Skill was obsessing with this question when my son was born as someone who was a CMO, a journalist, a writer, right, of what skills would be most important in this next age of work. What are our truly human abilities that even if AI gets a hundred times better is not going to be able to touch in terms of our human magic? And as I dove into answering that question, I realized the answer was storytelling. Because while AI can do all of these technical tasks in our day-to-day lives at work, it can't rally six different stakeholders around an idea.

It can't inspire a team around a vision. It can't build a culture inside of a company. And if you look at the way that AI is going to replace so much of the product development process, right? What's going to be our moat in this next stage of work? It's our ability to tell a story that connects with people that makes them believe. It's our ability to build a brand that people choose over all others. So what I believe is the number one skill that you can invest in in this next stage of work is storytelling because it allows us to build those connections with each other that persontoperson relational work all of those soft skills that we've derived derided for the last three decades that are going to become suddenly so much more important as AI takes over.

Yeah. So why is storytelling a uniquely human skill? So storytelling is what allowed us to evolve from a mid-rate species into these ultraocial learning machines that rose to conquer the earth. Uh for millennia we existed as just another animal on this planet. Even compared to Neanderthals, we were kind of the scrubs. So Neanderthals had bigger brains than us. they were stronger. But what allowed us to survive while Neanderthals went extinct well was our capacity for language and storytelling and the ability to transmit information to one another where there are different food sources where there are different threats in our environment.

Um there's a thought experiment from anthropologist Joseph Heinrich that shows this in a really interesting way which is that imagine that Neanderthals way smarter than humans. Let's say they were 10 times smarter than humans for a dramatic effect. And one in 10 Neanderthals could learn something really big, really big that a huge breakthrough like learning how to fish. And only one in a hundred humans could do the same. But the Neanderthal, his social circle was really small, right? He only ever talked to his cavemate Steve. Whereas humans had a large social circle of 10 plus people. Over time, the vast majority within 50 years, the vast majority of humans would learn how to fish from transmitting this information to one another, which we did around campfires through storytelling.

Whereas most Neanderthals would never learn the skill because it wouldn't just transmit in the same way. So storytelling for millennia has been the way that we a pass down information to one another that allows us to survive and thrive, but also how we're able to work together in really large cooperative groups. Well, so there's this idea called Dunbar's number, right? It's the number of connections that one person can have and maintain successfully. And what researchers have found is that this number sits at about 150 to 250 people, right? We can't really expand and maintain more social relationships than that.

Uh it's just beyond our capacity as a single human. But then how are how are we able to settle in Mesopotamia and build great villages and cities and civilizations and then have groups of people that work together in much larger numbers than that today. you know thou hundreds of thousands of people inside some companies and and countries. It's through our shared myths and our ability to come together and work together because we all have built trust because we believe in the same story. And when you dig down on a neuroscience level, you see that stories are incredibly powerful in our minds. It triggers the production of oxytocin which engenders a feeling of empathy and human connection.

when we tell a great story to between the mirror neurons between the storyteller and the story listener literally mirror each other. It's like our minds are in sync. There's this magic to storytelling that's actually beneath the surface a science. And so if you look at this next age of work in which the thing that is going to be driving the economic value of humans is our ability to build trust with one another, to work with me, to buy something with me, to be able to persuade people inside of your organization that this is the direction that we should go in. We should pursue this product path, this market, etc.

Storytelling is the meta skill that unlocks all of those abilities. The ability to build trust, the ability to lead effectively, the ability to collaborate effectively, and the ability to persuade people to be on your side and to move in one direction together. Yeah, Yuval Harari had touches on that extensively in Sapiens and Nexus and pretty much all his writing that that was the initial superpower that that put humans over the top. And it's interesting that you're looking at that skill and saying like that's one of the few untouchables where this incredible new technology is not going to be able to grab that because even if AI gets to the point where it can write a incredibly compelling story, it still can't be a human storyteller that really connects with us face to face in that visceral way that only people can.

And so it's this this is going to be one of the skills that will set you apart a moat as you said out in the workplace over the next for for the foreseeable future. Yeah, exactly. And I I think you can tell a lot from our cultural response to different AI use cases. And you see this really playing out right now, right? Where I'd say the approval rating for AI is a little bit on the decline at the moment. It's a lower approval rating than ICE. You can combine the negatives for Elon Musk and the IRS together right now. Generative AI is lower amongst the general American public according to the last NBC news survey that came out.

Uh but it isn't sort of universal AI use cases that we're allergic to. It's very specific. So just look at the language that we use when something is coded by AI, right? We have a very positive name for it. It's vibe coding. When content or stories are created by AI, we call it AI slop. And study after study shows that humans have this very visceral push back to AI generated content when they know it was created by AI. And and sort of it's an interesting question. Why is that? Well, human communication isn't just about language or the words on the page or the words being said. It's not just what you say, but how you say it.

We infer a lot about other people from the way that they communicate. So, what this big meta analysis that just came out shown is that there's this huge inauthenticity tax that comes with using AI to write and communicate. So when you get say like an email from a coworker and you can just tell that it was written by ChatGPT. It sounds nothing like them. It's like they've been body snatched, right? And you're like what what is this that that you're getting? The reason that that feels so icky is because it's almost triggering this deep-seated human instinct that we just don't care about the words that they're communicating.

But what are the hidden intentions behind it? And what are you learning by the way that they're saying it? And actually, when you go and just outsource your writing and communication, your LinkedIn posts to AI, you're secretly saying a lot about yourself, right? Which can be interpreted a lot of different ways. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, had this screed on X where he talked about he doesn't even read an email that he could tell was written by AI from founders anymore because what it communicates to him is that you don't trust yourself enough to communicate your own ideas. All you're showing is that you know how to use AI, which isn't very impressive at all, right?

But that you're not willing to stand on top of your own voice and your own thoughts. So there's all these little implications that we see around using AI, around the thing that we expect to come from other human beings, which is our voice, our language, our perspective. And we're going to see a split over the next few years. We're already seeing this split where there is going to be a group of people who outsource most of their writing and communication and as a result, a lot of their critical thinking to AI because writing is thinking. It's how we puzzle out the ideas we should be pursuing from those that we shouldn't.

And those who might use AI for a lot of things. Listen, I use AI every day as an executive assistant, as an analyst to help me code, but those who still hold on to their thinking process by writing their first drafts themselves, who ideiate on their own before turning to AI, who continue to build relationships with other people by communicating as them and not outsourcing that to cla GBT. I would argue the people in the latter camp are going to have an even bigger advantage than they do today because they're going to continue to refine and improve their critical thinking and communication skills while the former group is going to see those skills atrophy.

And as AI is able to do more and more of that day-to-day work, right, and take that over, the communication and critical thinking skills will become more important. and they're going to be supercharged by the people who have not let go of those skills and just outsourced them to AI. Yeah, that's interesting that you mentioned that with emails. I mean, that really rings true to me. I likewise. I mean, I have multiple AI agents that I manage each day almost like additional employees. I'm very deep in the trenches and love what the technology can do. At the same time, I'm also hyper aware of the risks and potential pitfalls with AI.

And I recently have become turned off by emails that I can tell were not written by the human that is sending them. And and really found for me personally because I've been guilty of it too. I have had Claude or Chad GBT write some emails for me, but have switched to okay, I'm going to write the first draft of it. And yeah, I might have forgotten a word here. There could be some typos in there. Great. I want you to clean it up, Claude. But I don't want you to come up with the original ideas because it won't sound like me. And if I'm picking it up on it on with other people, well, certainly people are going to pick up on it with me.

And that's not going to ring true anymore. And I the last thing I want to do is degrade trust with people that I work with because like you said, we only get 150 to 250 people that are in our circles that we're actively communicating with and and can build that trust with. Yeah. Have you heard the term for this? No. Message slop. It's our latest type of slob that we have. Uh Ryan Levesque, I think that's how you pronounce his last name. He he coined it in a Substack post which I found really interesting. I was like, "Yes, that's what I'm experiencing." Because we had the big work slop research that came out a year ago from Stanford which found that I think 40% of workers at the time, it's probably higher now, were being hit with work slop, which is when someone you're working with just gets an output from ChatGPT, copy and paste into Google Docs, sends it to you, and kind of outsources the entire process of discerning whether the AI output was good to you.

And but then I found myself on increasingly on these email chains where it'd be like three or four people who were all writing in the same dead behind the eyes lobotomized Mckenzie analyst chat GBT voice and I'm like man I feel like I'm in like anomorphs and everyone's been body snatched their brains taken over by these little alien slugs like where where am I? Um, and that disorienting experience is is message slop. And that inauthenticity tax I was talking about a second ago, like that's why we have such an adverse reaction to it. And listen, like I don't and I don't say all this to like shame people around doing it.

Like I get why people do it. We're all overworked. We've all seen our companies lay off way too many people over the last 5 years and throw more on our plate. If you can be like, man, like I can just like not have to write emails or like these memos or these strategic briefs anymore and I can just outsource that to AI. It seems like a great idea. And certainly there is some communication that you can outsource to AI. It's something that's just like an administrative memo. People don't expect it to come from a person, but if it's something that is supposed to come from like your original perspective and thought and really come from you, what the research is showing over and over again now is that people just really don't like that for reasons that I think are are inherently tied to how we evaluate each other and how we build trust as human beings.

If we want to be better storytellers, we want to take ownership of this process and our words and the stories we're telling. What are the steps to becoming better storytellers? Yeah. So, I I give a lot of, you know, keynote talks and workshops to different groups, especially since this book came out. And I I'll talk to some groups, right, like a a conference of accountants that I did a couple months ago, and you'll get a reaction from some people beforehand that are like, "Oh, but like I'm not a storyteller. That's not something that I even would think I have the capability for." And my argument would be is that we are all born natural storytellers.

My son Max is three and a half right now, and this kid lives in a world of story. like he exists in Neverland. I' I'd say about 99% of his waking existence is spent in a world of imagination. You know, we're we're pirates on a ship. We're getting in his rocket ship. We're driving a boat car plane to Mimi and Poppop's beach house. And this will just be in like one four minute span. Like he probably has, you know, developing ADHD like me, you know. But but we're all like this as children. Like he's not unique. His friends are like this. The kids down our neighbor kids down the hall are like this.

Every all of his classmates are like this. But as we grow older, we tend to tell ourselves this story that we're not storytellers. We feel self-conscious about it. But if you just pay attention to one day in your life, you will see that most of your waking time is spent interacting with stories in some way. Listening to them, reading them, watching them. Most of the way that we communicate is done through stories. Pay attention to what you talk about at the next conference happy hour or when you're out with your friends. We spend this time exchanging stories. So, we're all born storytellers. We all do it.

The question of how do you get better at it? A, it starts with committing to it, right? So, saying, "Okay, there's one storytelling practice that I'm going to try and get better at." And it doesn't have to mean you have to start a podcast or a Substack or write a book or a TV series, but maybe it's going to be that you're going to open every big presentation you give each quarter with instead of just dry data or this is the agenda for the next hour, you're going to open with a story to grab your audience's attention. Maybe it's that you're going to commit to just telling a story about yourself and your life to your team every week in your team meetings so they start to see you as a human being they can relate to, right?

And not just another management figure. Or the next time you're going to have a one-on-one with someone who's screwing up on your team that for each of those you're going to try and tell a relatable story about when you were in a similar situation to them and what you did to get out of it. There's just all these small tiny ways that we can focus on being a better storyteller. Next just comes from kind of studying and noticing some of the core elements and shapes of stories. And this is a lot of what I go through and in Super Skill. Shameless plug right here cover. which is I've done a lot of neuroscience research talking with neuroscientists getting to to actually run some of it myself over the years and we've pinpointed these four core elements of great stories which is relatability, ease, novelty, and tension.

So you can start to kind of pay attention and and master these elements as well as just noticing the different arcs of the favorite stories that you like to watch. If you're watching an episode of Succession or Hacks, kind of notice the way that the narrative shifts and the the way that it goes kind of weaves between good fortune and ill fortune. It's kind of simple things you can do when you're doing the things that you love the most, which for most people involves watching TV, going to the movies, reading books, listening to podcasts, engaging with stories. Once you kind of do those acts of noticing, right, understanding what goes into a great story and developing those core elements, then it's just about applying those day after day in those different contexts of your life.

Telling better leadership stories, telling better sales stories. When you have a big idea, packaging that through a story. It's through this constant practice in your day-to-day life of applying these kind of four core fundamental building blocks that anyone can master and applying them to all the different places in our work and personal lives where stories rule supreme. Yeah. I something a thought that just popped into my head. Yeah. Is the show The Bear, which I am personally obsessed with. I just I just love the show. Part of it is I have rewatched episodes of that show and it's like how do they make this interesting?

Cuz someone will ask me if I mention it in conversation, what's it about? And it's like it's about a restaurant and and they're like okay so what happens? I'm like it's really just about these people running a restaurant and yet it has you on the edge of your seat watching it with the tension. I mean, in a in the grand scheme, they are not saving the world from aliens. No one's about to die. There aren't these huge dramatic events. But I think it speaks to what you were just saying, which is that an accountant who doesn't think of himself or herself as a storyteller has stories to tell if they're told well and they are relevant to the audience that they are speaking to.

And that's what I think about with that show, The Bear. We can take really mundane stuff and make it super interesting if the story is told well. Yeah. And I think if you look at that show, right, and lay them against the different elements of great storytelling, you can you can kind of see it pretty simply. They're very relatable characters, right? Like Carmy is that Everman. He comes from like the [ __ ] up family background stuff that a lot of us deal with. We can see ourselves in the characters in that show in some way and we see our we see ourselves in the relationships that they have to one another.

Like most of us have that kind of found family that we can we can graft on to. There's a great degree of ease. Like every single episode tends to start pretty hot with some dialogue or conflict that's pulling you in immediately. There's novelty. Like, most people don't know the drama and intensity of a of the kitchen, which is kind of mindbending when you think about all those times that you've been in a a fancy restaurant or even your favorite neighborhood joint and you're thinking like, "Oh, is that the type of chaos that's going on behind the back door?" Um, and then as you said, there's incredible tension.

It could be about small things, right? Are we going to get this plate out, like someone screwed up, you know, the the sauce? like how are we going to overcome that? But we love that stuff and like it's why we love you know Gordon Ramsay and all the other cooking competition shows that have come over the years because there is a ticking clock which is like an amazing hook and there's a great degree of tension in getting something right in a set amount of time and then plus you add in all the interpersonal conflict in that show. you know, Carmu's mental health issues, all of those things ratches it up the tension constantly, sometimes to a point where you're like, it almost hurts watching that show, right?

Especially what was the super depressing season? Was it the second season or the third? Like losing track of them at this point. I think I think it was I think it was the third. Um, yeah, the third was dark as hell. Yeah, my wife was like, I don't know if I can keep watching this. Like that was that was Vonnegut has his different shapes of stories. That was from bad to worse. Yes. Which is Yes. Which is also Yeah. I'm so glad you mentioned him because him the old YouTube videos of him describing story structure are some of the best stories I have ever found on the internet. I mean I Vonnegut is just one of my all-time favorites.

It's amazing. And the crazy thing about Vonnegut shapes of stories theory is that he came up with it when he was in grad school right after he got out of World War II. just from reading a bunch of fiction, he was like, "You know what? I think all these stories have a kind of similar arc." So there's, you know, there's Cinderella, there's boy meets girl, there's man in a hole, there's from bad to worse, etc. And a few years ago, these AI researchers ran all of the most popular book, all the most popular fiction books in the global cannon through an AI model to have it trace the arcs and they came out exactly like Vonnegut Shapes of Stories.

Yeah. Which I thought was super fun is that you know what, the man was just a right. Absolutely. and his personal story. And this is Kurt Vonnegut for anyone that's listening to it and wants to follow up on this author of oh my gosh, I'm blanking on the names of his his books. Uh Breakfast of Champions is a is a classic and Slaughterhouse Player Piano. Yeah. Cat's Cradle. Yes. Yeah. He has I read like 27 Vonnegut books when I was 16. I was absolutely obsessed. Nice. Nice. It was my it was my first I think true great literary love. This episode of the Nick Standlea Show is brought to you by Zapier.

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Try the Zapier ChatGPT integration using the link below. Yeah. Yeah, I have a similar experience to that. Now, a story that I am curious about with you is you're your name on all your profiles is Joe Lazer, but it also has a formerly known as with a different last name, and I'm curious how that came about. Yeah. Yeah. So, my legal name is is now Joe Lazer. And how that name came about is I was on one of the first employees in the founding team at this company called Contently. was a journalism founded tech company and we started in the early 2010s. Um I left the media journalism world to go work there and kind of run a separate media editorial operation.

Um but I also did some client work and our first account manager changed my name in Gmail to Joe Lazer from Joe Lazauskas. Uh it was like a Jersey Shore joke. He was like, "Ah, like Joey Lazer." Um, cuz I'm from Jersey. And so then everyone just started calling me Laser. It became like the thing that everyone called me was was Joe Lazer. Um, I used it as my pen name a lot. I for some reason didn't with my first book, The Storytelling Edge. I was like, "Oh, this is what my legal name is, so that's what needs to be on on the book." Um, but it's what everyone called me. Like everyone just called me Joe Lazer.

And so when my wife and I were getting married, we were, you know, kind of discussing the name thing, right? And no one really ever called me Lazauskas. Uh, and was raised by my mom, much much closer to her. And we thought like, okay, like like none of us love the name Lazauskas. Like, do we take your last name, Balsam? I was like, I would be fine with that. But then she had the idea of like, what if we just change our names to Laser and then we could give that cool ass last name to our kid as well. And I was like, all right, like let's go through the the Byzantine New York name change paperwork process to make that happen.

Uh but yeah, we were able to which was great. Um and yeah, it's just that thing where you know was the identity that actually feels like you is what everyone calls you. Uh, Lazer has the same kind of regional background. It's still a Lithuanian last name. Uh, it's actually a Jewish last name, whereas, uh, I'm half Jewish. My mom's Jewish, so that was a nice little added bonus. Uh, and, you know, it's just good branding for my son, too, who is Max Lazer, which I think will ultimately help him if he wants to become like a race car driver or a writer or or, I don't know, a stunt man. Like I think that should generally benefit him, but he can also change his name one day if he wants.

I won't be mad. Pretty much anything. I mean, that's just Max laser. Really? Yeah. That that connects. That's got a that's got a good ring. It's punchy. It's short. Like I It was tough for me, man, as a kid to remember how to spell Lasus when I was when I was not his age, but you know, in kindergarten. So, I think you should have an easier time with laser. I have a friend who works in in film and said it a great name will have one syllable in the first name and then two in the last name and Max Lazer hits that like it it it just pops a little bit. I mean as does Joe Lazer. Um yeah when we were we were when we were starting Contently we had like an amazing kind of group of names amongst the early employees.

There was Shane Snow, Sam Slaughter, John Hazard, and so I think me getting the name Joe Lazer was just to help me fit in there really. You know, they're like, "Might as well give this guy a cool name, too." Yeah, that sounds like a group of superheroes right there. Yeah. Just really a lot of exjournalists trying to figure out what the hell to do to grow a tech company. Now, you made me think of this earlier. I I wrote a note when you were a few minutes ago on with kids and young people today. They're entering a very different world than the one I grew up in or you grew up in because of AI and its infiltration into all facets of society.

How do you think education needs to shift to prepare kids for the world that they are entering today? Oh man, how much time do we have? It's been very interesting here in New York lately because there's been this huge backlash to AI in schools. they were going to open this AI high school and it got kind of viciously mocked, right? And eventually there's so many parents kind of protested it that they can the idea. Um there's been a lot of push back to these AI reading apps in schools that it turns out were training on the voices of kindergarteners. Oh wow. as well as these instances of you know some middle schoolers the New York it was in a piece in New York or the New Yorker I can't remember which but detailed how a lot of middle schoolers are getting these souped up Chromebooks right with Gemini loaded in so you're you know you're in sixth grade and you open up a word document to write your paper and Gemini is like do you want me to write this for you open up PowerPoint it's like do you want me to make this slide deck for you it's like well no this is my homework and this is what you're supposed to be learning.

Um, the last kind of age of tech and education, I think, put us in a a really bad president and a bad spot where the big tech companies have infiltrated the public education system in the United States to a horrifying degree. And there can be really bad ramifications of that. I think what we saw in the last era was getting a lot more technology and devices into schools which more and more research has shown is generally bad for kids to be on on phones and laptops and distracted from learning to that degree. Uh you can also see it in aspects like every tech company got in and told kids go into computer science, learn to code, become a coder.

and now we have a really high amount of kids who are graduating with computer science degrees and not able to get jobs right now. Uh the data as of late last year was that an art history major coming out of school has something like a 3 and a half% unemployment rate while computer science majors have over an 8% unemployment rate. And that's because a there's to some degree fewer junior coding jobs. But actually it was kind of a lie by big tech in the first place where they never were looking to hire coders out of Sunni Albany. They were primarily hiring from the big Ivy's and the very elite of elite liberal arts colleges.

Um so that's kind of how that played out in the last era. Now we enter this new era where big tech continues to have a real you know foot in the door in our education system. And they're saying the same thing that they said last time, which is, well, we need to train the next group of kids for this next era of work. And the last time that was learning how to code, which by all means sounded really reasonable. I thought it sounded like a smart idea at the time. It hasn't worked out nearly as well as we thought. This time it sounds absolutely freaking bonkers that we need to teach kids AI in schools now.

So in 15 years, what? like it like the AI systems we're going to be using in our 10 or 15 years look anything like the AI that we have today that a 11year-old learning how to use chat GBT is going to somehow benefit their job prospects in 15 years. That's absolutely nuts. I I do not know why you would want to send your kids to one of these schools that's pushing AI on them, that's writing for them, that's thinking for them, that's researching for them. when the thing that kids need to learn how to do the most is these fundamental critical thinking and communication and writing skills that's going to allow them to be able to communicate well in job interviews to persuade other people at work to build trust with folks to figure out what they actually think versus what the machines are telling them to think.

Um, so I'm a huge advocate that schools should really be built around a teaching communication skills, reading, writing, critical thinking through writing, but then also simply the ability to dissect and puzzle through whether something is true or not and what they you what they personally think about it. Because the core research skills that even millennials like me developed, right, by going and sorting through Google and reading different sources, that's going away with the advent of AI where you just ask Google something. Now, it's not sending you to the open web. It's just giving you an AI overview.

You go to ChatGPT or Claude. It's giving you a research summary with some links, but most kids aren't going to go and click those links. Um, what I would advocate teaching is the ability to actually go through and evaluate those different sources to puzzle through whether an idea or a concept is true, where it might have flaws. Because AI systems aren't like an all- knowing genie, right, that tell us exactly what is right. They still make mistakes even if they didn't hallucinate. they contain a ton of biases within their training data that are going to skew our perspective on things. Um so the ability to kind of think critically and find where you might disagree with the common you know commonly accepted opinion or approach to a problem or situation that's going to be really really valuable and allow you as you know someone growing up in a world like I believe my kid will probably grow up in a world where he can do way more on his own than any generation could before thanks to this technology that you could find those pathways days for new innovation and new breakthroughs and then you can get people on board around that idea.

You can attract customers, partners, co-workers through your ability to communicate really well and tell a great story. Yeah. My gosh, so much there. So many. Sorry, I kind of went off there, but I've got I've got a lot of feelings as someone who has a three and a halfyear-old, you know, about to enter the public education system here in New York. And like I'm worried about it, you know, like I I I really worry about schools ability to handle this. Um, I it could increase also the like private school versus public school divide in the US because private schools are likely going to be able to adjust a little bit faster than public schools will.

Um, but I I feel 99.9% confident that the approach is not just shoving AI into the hands of elementary school kids or or middle schoolers. like teach them how to read, write, communicate, think. Absolutely. Because you're only going to exacerbate the problem if kids are using AI in school to do the basic work for them. That when they become adults, they are not discerning adults. And it's very tempting to think of the AI chat bots as magical genies that do have all the answers. Like it feels that way sometimes when you say, "Can you summarize War in Peace?" And it does it in 10 seconds and then can you translate that into Greek for me?

And it can just do that instantaneously. If I was able to do that right now in front of you, you'd be like, "Well, Nick is the smartest guy I've ever met." Um but that doesn't mean that like the the jump there the assumption is that so that airgo these AI models have all the answers to all my questions and we stop questioning and then they're really tricky in those ways they tell us how brilliant we are and how incredible our ideas are and that also I think lowers our skeptic our natural levels of skepticism towards what it is saying through that subtle flattery that they have for whatever reason been trained it seems very deeply ingrained into the training of these models probably because they got high satisfaction scores in the training process from people who were using them.

You had a seemed like you had a thought so I I'm going to pause. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean AI is No, you're right. AI is is designed to gas you up. They it's to satisfy the user and to increase retention. And so they tell you that your ideas are great. That's why they're they're sycophantic. Even if you try and fine-tune the hell out of Claude or ChatGPT to not be sycophantic, it's still like pretty sycophantic. It's still more sycophantic than most humans. And that underlies one of the bigger dangers with kids too. Like being in middle school sucks. And so if we host these chat bots on these kids as an alternative companion and suddenly you have this chatbot that's telling you that you're always right and you're great and is always agreeing with you and then you shift and you have to deal with like your shitty hormonal seventh grade friends who are being mean to you.

Like it's very easy to just flip and be like I'm just going to talk to the AI because it's easier, right? But we need we're social creatures. like we need to be, you know, putting our kids in a position to learn these social skills. Um, and and you're right, too, that these machines seem like absolutely brilliant much of the time. Like I'll go through these these moments, you know, where I ask Claude to do a strategic analysis, you know, strategic competitive SWOT analysis for a a project that I'm working on. And then I'll go into my kitchen and I'll start eating chicken nuggets over the sink out of my son's lunchbox and kind of space out for a while and I'll come back and Claude's done this amazing competitive analysis and I'll be like, "Oh my god, like we'll ever work again." and Claude will be like, "Yeah, when you you're being a disgusting human and eating those lukewarm chicken nuggets over the sink.

I just did a SWOT analysis that would have taken you 3 weeks." And it's this moment where you just feel like, Jesus Christ, like am I completely screwed? Will I ever work again? Do I have maybe just six months to make money before my skills are completely obsolete? And that feeling can completely overwhelm you. And then the next day I'll be putting a proposal together and having Claude help and it'll tell me that a,000 plus 1250 equals 5250. And I'll be like, where did you get the extra thousand, man? Like you're off the end. So we we constantly have to deal with this jagged frontier of AI capabilities and be on the lookout for where it might be wrong, but also just not have this defeatist attitude that because it can do things often in like a seemingly impressive way, it lacks some of that special juice and insight that can only come from the incredible neural network that's in each of our brains, you know, and that often runs on a lot less energy and cost than some of these models.

Absolutely. I the the other thing that popped into my head when you were discussing education, there is a I don't know if it was the same one that was pushed out of New York and I won't name any names here. Uh but there is a a AI based school network that has been very successful and and I really like the model because they are trying to do some very innovative things where they want kids to use AI in the mornings to get through the basic curriculum as quickly as they can so that they can spend the second half of the day and the majority of their time on these life skills like communication and and public speaking.

and connecting with others in messy human situations. So I do think they are trying to do very good work. But I found it very interesting that across their campuses that initial part of the day where the kids were just going to work with AI to get through the basic the basics of what was required in elementary and middle school. There were only I think it was like a 30 to one adult ratio like one adult floating around during that time and they found that the while the the second half of the day was going great where they were working on the human skills which I think is the important part of their model.

The first part was not going according to plan where they really let AI be the guide, the teacher in the process and they have since moved to having more teachers in the classroom basically small classroom sizes and now it looks a lot more like a traditional private school where if you have a class where you only have let's say 10 kids per teacher and they can help you work through the basic curriculum and then you move on to these more important, maybe not more important, but these skills that are not often emphasized in school. That was a much more effective model for them. But because of all this, they have not been able to follow through on the initial promise of, oh, this is going to be like private education that's really inexpensive.

Because, as it turns out, we really need good teachers and good humans in the loop in order to really help kids learn and retain information. I think this question of where can AI tutors fit in is a really interesting one. Like I'm not dogmatic here in saying that there's no role for AI in education at all, but I think we just have to be really really careful because what the last wave of technology showed us is that these things that we might not think are going to mess up our kids have a really high chance of messing up our kids. And I think our default mode should be extreme skepticism around just thrusting new technology in the hands of developing minds.

Now like there's problems that are are really tough for teachers like I was in Teacher America and and taught in in New York. Um, and when you have a classroom of kids with a wide range of reading abilities, right, that can go from, you know, some people, some kids in a seventh grade class reading on a kindergarten level to some kids reading at a 12th grade level. It's really hard to tailor the curriculum to that. And teachers will be told, you know, in this one teacher with 28 kids type of room, like, oh, you need to be teaching on three or four different tracks simultaneously. It's impossible to do.

Like, no one can do it. So, if you have customized reading apps that aren't connected to the internet that allow kids to kind of level up effectively, like I think something like that could have real potential, but we also at the same time need to not just have this like techno optimism like it's all going to work out fine standpoint. I think we sort of have to assume there are going to be some harms with putting new technology, especially technology that mimics the social interactions of a human being in the hands of developing minds inside of our kids. Um, and I also don't think we can assume that AI can just replace the interactions that you have with a teacher.

To your point about that school, like we are very much designed over, you know, hundreds of of thousands of years of of evolution to learn from each other, to learn from other human beings. And it's harder than I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley think to just flip a switch and say we're suddenly going to be learning from chat GBT. If you find yourself guessing at your kids's college odds, know that it doesn't have to be that way. There's a website. You pick a college, any four-year college in the country. Type in your student's GPA and their SAT or ACT score, and you get to see their odds built from that college's own published admissions data.

Change the score, watch the results change. You can look up any high school in the country as well to see their results at getting kids into the UC's. It's free. It's called Reach and you can get there at www. highschoolreach.com. Yeah, I mean I have told this story before, but there does seem to be this prevailing thought pattern in amongst tech companies that if we record someone teaching and get enough of that training data and then feed all that good teaching into an AI model that all it needs to do is say the same words and respond with similar responses. to those excellent teachers. And yet there is so much that happens.

I mean, we're back to storytelling here. So much that happens in humanto human communication nonverbally that is so important to the storytelling communication process. And the story I have have told before is that I am the founder of of Test Prep Gurus that does one-on-one tutoring in schools and prepares kids for standardized tests and pretty much anything you you need to learn on an individualized level, we can we can do that. And I poked my head in on a session between a teacher and a student. This is now a couple of months ago. and young young gentleman who did not do his assigned homework for the SAT is sitting there opposite the teacher but the kid says that he did do it and I noticed the the teacher he did not actually say anything.

He cockked his head to the side and he just looked at the kid for a second and suddenly the kid broke down and said, "Okay, all right. I didn't I mean I did I did like like this much of it and and he confesses, right?" And I thought that's that's the magic right there because the teacher knows that the kid needs to do this work to go achieve this goal that he has in the future. The kid just for whatever reason because he's young isn't he he skipped that that step and is trying to to get away with it. Um but just with a look it's like no we're going to get you back on track because you said you want to achieve this thing.

These are the steps you got to take to get there. And that's what learning is at the end of the day. Yeah. Yeah. And that and that feeling of being accountable to another person. Do we feel that same sense of accountability to an AI? You could almost blow all of this up to the larger macro question with AI of is a language model the right approach to AGI and to true you know super intelligence where so much you know the the general theory of chat GBT and or you know rather open AI and anthropic is that if you just scale AI models and these neural networks with enough language and text that you will eventually get to super intelligence because language kind of encompasses our entire understanding of the world.

And then there's an alternate view of AI is that well actually there's much more than than language that you need to understand. Just understanding language is like someone who has experienced the world living in a a dark room and doing nothing but reading every book, every blog post, every paper, every YouTube transcript, every YouTube interview that's ever been published, but seeing nothing else about the world like a modern Plato's cave. Whereas our intelligence as human beings comes so much from the way that we experience the world, experience the things around us, the the gestures, the, you know, pupils, the subtle communications, you know, science of other human beings as well as everything else in our environment.

Um, and so much of the investment over the last seven years has gone into these large language models, but there's still a lot of researchers who believe that the true path to super intelligence is more of a combination of a large language model and a world model, essentially understanding that broader context. And I think if you look at a lot of what Google is doing right now is have you noticed that they've kind of dropped off the model for model tick fort race? not releasing, you know, new AI nearly as frequently as anthropic open AI. I think a lot of what we're probably seeing is that Deep Mind is pursuing more of the world model approach because they believe that just scaling LLMs won't get us to super intelligence.

Um even if the AI is able to start training itself through RSI in in the coming months. So, I kind of buy into that theory that you need more than just language to actually get to like true human intelligence or super intelligence. Um, and I think that ties into some of those things that you see in in teaching and tutoring, right? If AI just understands the language but not all of that broader context about how we communicate and exist with each other, like does it really understand what it means to teach? Yeah. So, I did have a chance to talk to Chris Summerfield, who he's he's not at Google now, but he was with Deep Mind when they were building the the initial AI that would become Gemini because Google then acquired Deep Mind and that became the basis for everything they were doing there.

And he expressed similar concerns. I mean, he was very delicate with his language and he just said, "Well, it is an unproven theory that we can get there just with language to where we want these models to eventually go." And he also noted that it it is important to remember when ChatGPT because it was mindblowing what they were able to achieve just using language initially, right? To get these AI models off the ground. And so it seemed in that moment that anything was possible simply by adding more training data, more compute, we can get to wherever we want to go. But he said you also have to remember that so they come on the scene well what what are their underlying assumptions and motivations that are going on with the story that they are telling and chatt was very much in a moment of oh my gosh we got something magical here what's the right story we tell around this to raise investment to levels we can't even imagine which would be we crack the code all we got to do is more and more of this and this company will be worth trillions and trillions of dollars and and we have yet to see whether you know how this story is going to play out.

Are they correct? Was it just a story that would really increase investment in the space or or will it prove out to be true? But I think you bring up a really good point which is there are a number of researchers who think that may not be sufficient to really make the next big leap in this process because there is so much more to human experience than just language. Yeah, it's going to be super interesting how this plays out. It's just that this LLM direction has sucked so much of the investment out of the room. But if there's anyone who can continue to pursue a different path, it's Google because the their massive business essentially allows them to underwrite, you know, the rest of their AI work.

You know, if the AI bubble burst, anthropic, open AI, Nvidia to some extent are going to be kind of screwed. Nvidia will be fine in the long run, but they'll take a serious short-term hit. I'm not sure Google would actually be affected that much, right? And in a lot of ways it's a pathway where if they say were to pursue world models which they seem to be doing to some extent in addition to LLMs could get them a huge leg up if it turns out that LLMs aren't our pathway to true super intelligence, right? Or at the very least it makes sense to to hedge your bets. Um so yeah, that's super that's awesome that you got to talk to to Chris.

I've read some of his work before and he seems like an incredibly smart guy. He's he's an incredible human for sure. Um, now you have a Substack called The Art of the Zag. Why? That's the podcast. Actually, the Substack is the Storytelling Edge. Oh, well, my apologies for that. Let's let's talk about the podcast real quick because I just thought that was a really interesting name and I was curious about a a big zag you made in your life. Why why did you decide to call it that? And then maybe a follow-up anecdote on on a zag you've made. Yeah. So, I started The Art of the Zag with my friend and writing partner Shane Snow.

We wrote The Storytelling Edge. Uh my first book together, which is about the art and science of storytelling and how to apply that to grow your business. Uh we wrote a TV pilot together that got made, but so far not picked up for by a streamer. Fingers crossed there. Uh we've done a lot of work together, but we're also just both huge nerds. And we've long been obsessed with people who do things differently. When everyone is zigging and going in one direction, they zag. Like for example, pursuing world models over LLMs. Um, and we just wanted an excuse to kind of interview really smart people who are taking zaggy approaches to different problems as well as explore, you know, new research, new ideas that we find fascinating that are particularly zaggy that are counterintuitive.

Uh, and so that was the the genesis of that. In terms of something that I've done that's particularly zaggy, that's a great question. Um, I don't mean to put you on the spot. I I'll give you No, no, no, no. I'm just like there's a few that I could choose from. I'm thinking well I'd say that the process of writing this book right felt very a bit zaggy to me cuz what happened was I the genesis of Super Skill was I my son Max was born a few weeks after ChatGPT and I got back to this apartment on paternity leave and you know as a father you're new father you're at some points relatively useless right you can cook dinner, you can clean diapers.

Um, but there's those nap times and in between times where I'm like, what what do I have to do? Um, and so I just ended up really going down the the AI rabbit hole. Like I was leading marketing at an AI startup at that point, of course, had heard about ChatGPT and used it and my team had been experimenting with generative AI tools even before ChatGPT came out. But was was breathtaking at that moment were so many of the projections that AI was going to completely wipe out writers and storytellers. You had that from Accenture, McKinsey, Deloitte, it was all over LinkedIn that writers and storytellers and creatives were essentially screwed.

And it made sense. A writing was the first main use case we saw from AI right when it came out. It's how most people first experienced AI and we thought it's just going to keep getting better and better. And I grew obsessed with this question of like, okay, what does this actually going to mean for the future of work? What will this mean for my ability to continue to pay the mortgage on this apartment and support my son? What would this mean for his life? Um, and so as I went into paternity leave and then got back to work, I I really dug into this question. And you know, I'm a an author and a writer and a a journalist by trade first and I basically co-opted our company's marketing program to try and answer this question because we were a future of work AI company.

So it made relative sense. launched a AI salon series in New York and started digging into this with AI researchers and corporate leaders and around the you know early midpoint of 2023 from these conversations I had this realization which was the the thesis for superkll which is that AI actually wasn't going to replace writers it was going to make them more important than ever it was going to make storytellers more important than ever and that's because I From talking to them, I really believe that AI was likely to become much better at coding than writing based on how the training data is set up, based on how AI models learn.

Um, and that AI slop would flood the web, increasing the value of human storytellers. But that was a moment in which it was completely contrary to what everyone else thought. Like when I first started pitching the book, most people thought I was freaking crazy. you know, they're like, "No, like it's very clear like everyone thinks it's going this other way that writers are essentially screwed. It is known writing is done." Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so I but I continued to go all in on the book. I was like, "No, this is a book that I have to write." There was something that just burned inside of me.

And that's how, you know, books and big writing projects work for me. It's like, I can't not do this. And I was working 60 hours a week as an exec at a, you know, fast growth startup. I had a new, you know, a new kid. Um, I had, you know, my newsletter and a lot of demands. And so, I was so committed to the idea that I quit my job. It was like, I'm going to I'm going to write this book. I'm gonna consult and work fractional, but I'm going to write this and I'm going to write this fast so that it can get out and get published before because I found a a small indie publisher before the you know everyone realizes that this is coming true.

like I was in a race against the clock to before everyone else would realize it to have the book written that would show it, but also to to kind of change the minds of all these CEOs who are out here firing their entire content and and creative teams thinking that AI can do their jobs. Um, and I guess the big satisfaction in that is, you know, I think we all like to feel like we're getting proven right is that as the books come out, I think more and more we've seen this backlash to AI generated content. We've seen storytelling become, you know, the hottest business skill this year with job listings for storytellers more than doubling.

Um it being the new buzzword on CEO's earning call, earnings calls. Uh but that, you know, the idea for this book was one that I really had to fight for and that most people thought was dead wrong when I started working on it. That is interesting because that was the conventional thinking and now I mean deeply entrenched conventional thinking was that storytelling was dead at that at that moment and and now fast forward to present day. I mean, you have the big AI companies have job listings out for authors to just come in and write stuff because they are really struggling to get the models to actually tell compelling stories.

Whereas coding with a very defined rule structure and a very clear definition of success, can this app that was created achieve the goal that it was designed to create? It the AI models have taken off in that direction with these clearly defined structures. Encoding is kind of the the perfect domain for that. But something that is a little bit unclear. Do we know exactly? I mean, yes, there are elements to good storytelling as you listed before, but it's not like there is a just paint by numbers structure that if I just follow it, oh, everyone will love this story and I will suddenly write a bestseller or a hit TV show.

and and and there softer skills that as it turns out it may be humans are just going to be better at that than a siliconbased system. Yeah, there's a lot in how AI models are trained that just lead to it struggling to write nearly as well as it can do other tasks. It's a due to the scaling trained on a ton of terrible content like the most abhorrent stuff you can scrape from the web child pornography you know technical manuals like that runs the entire gamut X I mean is that like that's that's the better training data that's like in the top 10% of their training data like most of their trained data training data is is really like the worst stuff you'd find from the most abhorrent dark web forums as well as just weird technical nonsensical you know manuals and things like that.

When AI models are fine-tuned in these digital sweat shops in in Kenya and Southeast Asia, the people who are fine-tuning them are instructed to sway the models towards safer, more jargony, fluffy language. And then if you talk to a lot of the people trying to make these models write well, they describe it as almost an absurd task to try and define objectively like what is good writing to your point there because like voice is hard to define like that feel where like you you have that sense of connection with the writer is really hard to define. So like is it the number of exclamation points in a sentence?

You know, is it is it you know your your comma placement? like there's grammatically good writing and there is some degree of where you say this is a confident voice you know like Gmail will do for you but that sense that there is voice that there is another person on the other side of that page that I can hear you in my head that I I feel like I'm talking to my friend that's something that's so ephemeral that it's just hard for AI models to capture and maybe they will eventually I'm willing to concede that's possible and that they will slowly get better at this, although they don't seem to be lately.

Um, in part because the AI companies are making tradeoffs and having them get better at the more economically valuable work like coding and financial analysis. But even if they are, there's just still a that underlying aspect where humans want their stories to come from other humans. What makes art meaningful is the choices that go into it. That they come from your lived perspective. That there is struggle and heartbreak and effort that's put into that creative process. And we just want that from our stories in a way that we don't from our apps. We don't care about the amount of like effort and labor and love that went into programming and application.

We just want it to work well. But with writing and with art, we want to feel that process and that struggle behind the human being. The reason we everyone's flocking to and buzzing about the Odyssey right now is like they did this with no CGI. The human feet where Matt Damon had to climb like a freaking mountain every day to film this. It makes us love that movie more that they went out for weeks on a Viking ship. Makes us love that movie more. We're just we're drawn to this. This is in our DNA. It's in our evolution. It's who we are. And I just don't think that's going to change. Like that's the one thing I I just don't buy from the AI boosters is that's going to change.

I think AI is is often great. Like it allows me to do so much more as an entrepreneur in in my consulting business and my speaking and with my, you know, helping with research, my writing than than I could before. But I just don't think we're going to get to a point where humans want their stories to come from AI because it loses that struggle and that really important human meaning. And that's a good thing, right? Like we should hold on to some of those things that are distinctly human that make us feel something. Like that's what's what's beautiful about being alive. Like and that's you know I I I often say to people I speak to about the book is like there's one thing that you just get out of it is that like storytelling is so [ __ ] beautiful and that if you just start to see that power of stories that are all around you and the way that stories enrich your life, you can't unsee it.

And it brings this richness to our existence that's so satisfying. Um, and that's, you know, a lot of why I I wrote this book and I I love coming and having conversations like this is just because sharing that one little idea or helping people see that, I think just brings a lot to your life and and just makes it more enjoyable at a time where so much can seem crushing and depressing and overwhelming. I love that what you just said so much. I just want to let it breathe for a second. That was that was good. My brother is a art teacher and and an artist in the true sense of the word. I mean, he's a a a sculptor and a painter and he's into digital works and just across the board.

Um, and we had a good chat about AI art because he is interested in how AI can help the expression through artwork. And one of the things he mentioned is he says, you know, he's and he can draw really well. I mean, better than I don't know, let's say 95 99% of the human population. Certainly a hell of a lot better than me, but he's not an elite when it he's not elite when it comes to drawing. And he said, you know, and it's it's exciting that the AI can take me there to that place. But he said the thing that he's really found is the art exhibits were like AI created this amazing art and he's like you know people don't show up to that and they don't care but it is perfectly fine to use it as a tool in the creative process and really echoed just a lot of what you said where it's like we want to feel there's a reason we want to know about the behind the scenes of of different movies and stories that that we like and we don't really care about the behind the scenes of how chat GBT made an image.

Um I I think what might be you know George Lucas has this quote that all storytelling is technological right like even writing is inherently technological with the pen I do think that we're going to see AI as a tool in storytelling and art inevitably but I think what's going to define how people feel about it is what is who's making the choices because you can if you prompts a piece of art into existence through AI. It's not very impressive because there's no individual or it's not very meaningful. Let's not even say impressive. It's not meaningful because there's not all those little human choices that come from your perspective and your experience that's informing the final product.

There's not that creative process. But I think there's some examples of even AI film making now that are that are interesting from an artistic perspective because you can tell that the creator kind of chose and prompted and tweaked and created like every little millisecond and frame and and moment of that narrative to bring it together. And and how different is that really from modeling CGI using Unreal Engine, right? like when it comes down to it and the storytelling is theirs, the characters are theirs, right? No, it comes with a whole lot of ethical quandries around how the models they used are trained and these AI companies taking the IP of of creatives and that's going to make a lot of people, I think, justifiably say like no, never, no, AI art can be interesting.

But I don't think that's the probably the majority of people. So I do think we'll see a world in which AI gets used as a creative tool more and more and more. To me, my guess is the litmus test will be like how much of you and those individual choices went into creating this thing, right? Did you just use it as a tool to bring a story to life that you couldn't tell otherwise? Um the same way CGI in last generation brought that together, but still obscenely expensive to do, you know, CGI animation for most films. So if this leads to a world where you have a bunch of filmmakers who can bring these say animated films to life using AI tools and they can tell their story that way.

I could see a very justifiable argument that that's that's art and that's great storytelling, right? Um you have artists like Holly Hurnen who have built their own AI models to make really interesting music and collaborate with their fans in crazy ways. Like I'd still say, you know, that's a really interesting use of AI as art. So it there's ways this technology can be integrated. A lot of it's in our hands just to choose the use cases that we want and to create cultural boundaries and expectations around what we find acceptable versus just handing all this over to the machines. Yeah, absolutely.

And I don't want to get totally lost down a blind alley, but I am I am still completely confused how that there is not like gross massive copyright violation by just training on copyrighted material for these models. I because it's because they don't spit it out whole cloth. So it's seen as not violating the fair use doctrine, right? It's seen as transformative. Uh because you're ingesting all this and then you're transforming it. So they're arguing that it's transforming it the same way that a human brain would, even though the process is different. Um, you know, the only lawsuit that's really held any weight is the one by all the authors against Anthropic, which they had to just pay out a $ 1.5 billion settlement on that, but that hinged on the fact that Anthropic pirated the books instead of buying them, right?

And so that was that was why the judge ruled in favor of the authors. But now Anthropic in a real like Fahrenheit 451 dystopic moment just got busted for buying up all of these rare used books, scanning them for their content, and then destroying them like tens of thousands of books to train the their latest models. And it seems like other AI companies are doing this as well. Um, but that's seen as fine according to this last ruling by the judge because they bought the work. But it's all this co it's all copyrighted IP by these writers like they train on my first book. Like I can I know that you know surely both from their outputs and from looking it up.

Um, no one's giving permission on that IP, but they're saying that because it's a fair use remix the same way it is a writer reading a book and then writing something inspired by it that it's fine. Um, and that's I think really unfortunate. I think it would be much much better for the future of our society and you know the AI industry as a whole if that was not something that was allowed. Agree with that 100%. Um what as we wind this down here if your kids we have one one child at this point. Okay. Okay. One. Yeah. One right now. So your your your kid or you know potentially there may be more. Um if they inherit out there somewhere.

I hope not. one one thing about what you've learned about storytelling and take it into their lives in the future. What would that thing be? So like one lesson I would pass down to my son Yeah. about storytelling. It's tension. What tension and conflict is what makes a story a story. If you're going to just focus on one thing in your stories, it is playing on that tension, that gap between what is and what could be. And storytelling is as simple as opening and closing that gap again and again and again. You think about your favorite romcoms, right? It's the guy wants to get the girl, but then starts to close that gap, and then what happens?

The jerk boyfriend swoops in and that gap opens again. But then they start to get close and what happens? gets drunk at the sisters engagement party, falls into the cake, the gap opens again until finally it closes. Same thing with our favorite heist movie. Seems like they're gonna pull it off, something goes wrong, gap open. Seems like you're going to pull it off, something goes wrong, the gap opens. Kind of writing and storytelling is simple as that, right? If you want a great hook, you know, there's different techniques you'll see on Instagram. It's curiosity gaps. There's ticking clocks. Often the best thing is just to set up conflict and stakes off the bat from the very first line.

Um, if you want to get good at storytelling, like that's often what it comes down to. Just play on tension. Play between that gap between what is and what could be. You'll have people on the edge of their seats. Love it. Joe Lazer, where can people find you on the internet if they want to learn more about all this good stuff? Yeah, you can. Uh if you want to just find out more about my books, keynote speaking, workshops, consulting, all that stuff, go to joe laser.com. Um I am very active on Substack. Uh the is the storytelling edge on substack. So storytelling edge.substack.com. Uh also publish a LinkedIn newsletter and I'm active on LinkedIn.

I like hate to say that that's probably my primary social network. It's the least addictive one and the one where people will listen to me rant about AI and storytelling the most. Uh so you can find me on LinkedIn active there. Uh occasionally will post a real on Instagram or Tik Tok but LinkedIn Substack website. Uh and you can get the Super Skill anywhere books are sold. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, uh, Porch Light, uh, you know, all of the indie bookshops as well, The Strand, and, uh, go to my, uh, website, joeazer.com/superskll. I have like bonus content you get for, uh, ordering a copy, so you can check that out there.

And really appreciate the support. And also, Nick, you having me on. This was a super fun conversation that went by really fast. I hope you don't have to cut this down too much. No, I think we're going to we're going to leave it leave it all in there. This was fascinating and fun and all the things that that make me want to do this show and I'm I'm just grateful there's an audience that finds it interesting and and helpful as well. Um but as I've said many times, a conversation like this I would gladly just do it for free. I mean I learned a ton and I you've given me a lot to think about. Um, and we will of course get all of for anyone that wants to follow up with the links and places that Joe mentioned, they'll be in the show notes be a link to his book, Super Skill.

And yeah, thank you for coming on. Thanks for having me. Okay, everybody, until next time, ask questions, don't accept the status quo, and be curious. The Nick Show.