I owe you a huge thank you. My new book—Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age—launched as an Amazon #1 New Release last week thanks to your support.
Even crazier: this newsletter spent most of the week atop the Rising in Business leaderboard worldwide on Substack.
I couldn’t be more grateful, and in turn, I’m extending my launch-week offer for another 7 days. If you upgrade to a paid annual subscription to this newsletter, you’ll get the following storytelling bundle for 20% off:
Personalized, signed copy of Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age, or my best-selling first book, The Storytelling Edge. (Your choice!)
Dope socks (while supplies last)
Access to my new storytelling course
Exclusive content like my quarterly storytelling trend reports
Exclusive events and live office hours to ask me content strategy questions
Note: I can only ship books within the Continental US without going broke, so outside of the US, you’ll get an e-book.
The 20% off translates to $48/year—meaning that it costs less than buying me a small cup of Brooklyn coffee each month. Your support will help me take the events, reporting, and research.
You can also buy Super Skill on Amazon and everywhere else books are sold. (You’ll get the course if you do!)
Thanks again for supporting my work. This is beyond anything I imagined when I quit my full-time CMO job a little over a year ago to bet on myself as a writer. Now onto this week’s newsletter:
On Friday afternoon, Shane Snow grilled me about whether robots will replace human writers.
It was part of my virtual book party, and it was awesome—over 100 of you signed up, and the chat was popping. We dissected whether AI can get good enough at writing to supplant human storytellers, how AI will change the way we tell stories, and why the hell Anthropic just gave its retired Claude model its own kind-of-creepy Substack. We also took audience questions and invited two subscribers (John and Hailey) to play trivia. Things got wild.
We turned the entire thing into the latest episode of our podcast, the Art of the Zag, which you can watch/listen to here or on your favorite podcast app.
Listen/watch to our latest episode of The Art of the Zag here on Substack or on your favorite podcast platform:
The 3 forces driving the business storytelling craze
One of the most interesting questions came from a reader asking what’s driving the business storytelling boom that’s made headlines the past two months. Job listings for storytellers have doubled over the past year, according to LinkedIn data. Over the past several months, we’ve seen companies like Netflix, OpenAI, and Anthropic paying up to $775,000 for storytelling roles.
This can feel a little disorienting if you’re a freelancer writer or veteran journalist and wondering, where are all the recruiters banging down my door?
I go deep on this question in the podcast, but since this has been a hot topic lately, I thought I’d also break down the three forces driving this trend—and how you can take advantage.
Force #1: AI Slop is increasing the value of great storytellers
Brands used to get away with churning out bland, inoffensive content. But over the past couple of years, something funny has happened: As AI has driven down the cost of creating mediocre content, it’s also driven down the value of that content.
To have any chance of penetrating through the slop, you need to create truly exceptional content. That’s why—contrary to popular belief—AI has actually made great storytellers MORE valuable.
Tech is often a leading indicator of what we see in other industries. Because people in tech have adopted AI so quickly, they’re also quick to see the downside of the technology—that producing generic AI content is useless.
It’s telling that OpenAI and Anthropic have been at the forefront of this trend, paying 500K+ in total comp for hundreds of storytelling roles. They understand the inherent limitations of their technology without great storytellers to wield it, and they’re scooping up the top tech storytelling talent in the market to gain a strategic advantage.
As AI slop creates more and more distrust in everything we see online, this force will only grow stronger. People—particularly high-earners—will flock to those they can trust.
Force #2: Attention has become our most valuable economic commodity—and you can’t buy it anymore
Attention has become our scarcest and most valuable economic commodity, and in the TikTok age, you can’t buy it anymore. Ads just don’t really work. As Kyla Scanlon first observed, this flips our entire economic structure on its head.
Our foundational economic substrates used to be things like land, labor, and capital. You used to start by developing a product or project, building its infrastructure, raising capital, and then acquiring attention. Now, it’s reversed. The foundation of any project or product is now attention and narrative. Your ability to capture attention becomes a prerequisite for getting anything done, and your ability to tell a compelling narrative determines the flow of money, sentiment, and momentum.
The smart CEOs and CMOs that I talk to see this, and they’re investing aggressively in developing enduring IP and entertainment that wins over customers.
If you’re creating B2B/business content, that means a powerful, big idea that you can come at again and again and attack from different angles.
If you’re B2C, that means creating episodic content that feels like TV. Brands are winning with premium, bite-sized TV shows that are tailor-made for modern social algorithms and keep audiences hooked—like Bilt’s Roomies, jewelry brand Alexis Bittar’s The Bittarverse, and Bratz’s Always Bratz Instagram series.
Those CEOs need great storytelling talent to develop that IP and bring it to market, which is why top VC firms like Andreesen Horowitz are launching specialized teams to help their founders become storytellers and “win the narrative battle online.”
Force #3: Storytelling has become a CEO-level initiative
This is the most important shift and why this era is different than the “brand journalism” wave of the 2010s.
Ten years ago, storytelling and content initiatives were confined to a small, isolated team locked in the basement of the marketing department. Today, it’s a top, CEO-level priority.
The most valuable storytellers are those who work hand in hand with the CEO to craft the narrative and then build a storytelling system that instills it across the organization. Great storytellers who can manage change and build scalable systems have never been more valuable.
It isn’t enough to just be a great writer or filmmaker. As I detail in Super Skill, you also need to apply your storytelling skills to specific business contexts: leadership, persuasion, and selling your big ideas to the stakeholders that matter. You need to listen actively and share vulnerable stories to build bonds, and you need to craft narratives that rally people around a shared vision and goal.
And most of all, you need to craft a personality and brand that compels people in power to give you a chance to do all those things well.
That’s the challenge, and it’s more complex than writing a great novel or screenplay. But if you master it, there’s no more valuable skill in business today.
-Joe
If you liked this post, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to get the storytelling bundle (book! course! socks! events! office hours!) or checking out my new book Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age.
