Writing Is Thinking: AI Slop Is Killing Your Credibility — with Joe Lazer

0:00When you think of your time in journalism and your time writing for lifestyle brands and even doing corporate branding, where does AI actually fit in? AI can give you a large output that seems perfectly fine, but it sucks you into what I call the vortex of mid, and it's filled with this slop, this like AI parable bullshit, and the reputation damage that you're doing by so blatantly outsourcing your work, your thoughts to AI, I think is vastly unconsidered.

0:34We're all drowning in AI slop, wondering if our skills still matter, feeling stuck while the algorithms feed us content to consume. Today, we're going to talk to someone who's creating and practicing one of the skills that is more important than ever, telling stories. Joe Lazor is the author of Storytelling Edge, how to transform your business, stop screaming into the void, and make people love you. And he's made a career betting on himself, pivoting several times, most recently leaving as an executive at a fast-growing startup. Today, we're going to dig into the importance of telling stories, avoiding AI slop, and how creating can help you take back control of your career.

1:11Joe, welcome to the show. Paul, thanks for having me. So I follow your work and I read the newsletter every time it goes out. I want to start with the thing that I struggle with the most is raising two daughters and trying to help them with technology. The consuming versus creating. We have a rule in our house that you're allowed to consume on the screen for 30 minutes, but it's unlimited creating time using technology. Tell me how creating has shaped just kind of your journey so far. I think there's something that's very just innate for us as human beings around telling stories, right? There's a reward system that's there from the time where our kids are a young age.

1:51How old are your kids? 10 and 11. 10, 11. All right. I've got an almost three-year-old, right? And I think one of the most joyous things about parenting is seeing how he lives in a world of story, how he's constantly taking these trips every morning to Never Never Land and bringing me along with him, right? So, you know, when we're kids, we don't even question the idea that we're storytellers. It's as natural to us as breathing. We get sucked into this world of imagination. And I think as we get older, we get discouraged from it, right? And that's actually, I love the role that you have for your kids.

2:2930 minutes, hard cap on consuming, and create all you want, because there's just this joy that comes from creating and from telling stories. And I think it's something that for me that I felt from as long as I can remember. I was 16 years old when I realized I wanted to be a writer. I had my sophomore year English teacher in high school gave this assignment to write a bonus chapter to Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. And I wrote this like pretty raunchy, like crazy chapter to go in there. And she called me up in class and I was like, oh man, I'm going to get in trouble again. Cause like I was not a very good student.

3:07The only homework that I did was English homework. And she comes up and she's like, this is amazing. I want you to read it in front of the entire class. And so like I got up there and I start reading this chapter that I wrote and like, I'm nervous. My hands are shaking. Like my, my you know sophomore year crush was sitting there in the front row um I started telling you know reading this story that I wrote and like everyone started cracking up and I immediately fell in love with it right this this feeling of creating something that brings people joy and that drives connection with other people and stuff that you know I wrote a novel when I was in high school you know became a journalist started running the school newspapers and all from there but I think for so many people, we spend so much of our life telling stories.

3:57It's the thing that, even if we don't realize it, is how we spend nearly half of our day. And when you really tap into those storytelling superpowers that all of us have, that we're all born with, just magical things happen. I think, we'll probably get into a little bit later, that storytelling now has greater implications for the future of work and where you take your career than it ever has before. Yeah, we're going to get into AI and more in storytelling, but I want to start with sort of your career journey. Because being a writer in today's age, and even like during the recession way back when, being a writer has never really been a stable place to be.

4:37Yeah, it's for fucking sure. And what impressed me most about your journey is sort of the agency that you took and you kept going and you tried different things. Let's go to your latest one. You did a LinkedIn post that I really liked. I first ran into you when you were at a startup called A-Team and you're on the executive team, fast-growing startup, and you decide to leave to go bet on yourself. Tell me the moment where Joe is sitting at his place in Brooklyn, the young three-year-old son, and says, hey, I can either stay here at a fast-growing startup with all the benefits and things that come with that, or I can bet on Joe.

5:16Yeah, and it's always a scary proposition. I have to pay the mortgage in this fancy building that has crazy-ass life pictures like this one in New York City, which is not cheap. But a lot of it came from having a son and not wanting to be one of those parents that I grew up with who you see and they're just pining for these days where they were pursuing the thing that they really loved in their life. And they're like, you know, one of my best friends growing up, his dad was stuck as an actuary to continue to pay the mortgage on their Montclair McMansion that you lived with. And you can just tell like this guy hated being an actuary.

5:57And I just never wanted to be that dad, you know, having like four whiskeys at night and just bemoaning, not pursuing the things that I loved most of my career. So, you know, I was always a writer from a young age. I always have written a lot, even through my tech and marketing career. but it was just getting to a point where my side hustles were piling up in this way where it forces a decision. I co-created a TV show that the pilot got made. I was doing some executive producing and I had a second book that I just really desperately wanted to write that I felt bubbling up inside of me in that way that I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel where, okay, I have to build this thing, right?

6:38It's not an option not to build this thing. And so I got to the point where I could not imagine a life or a pathway where I decided not to pursue that calling that I was feeling. And I'd worked at companies, at technology companies that were integrated in the gig economy for a long time, but particularly like the high end level of fractional work. creatives and content strategists that could command big money for brands when I was at Contently, AI builders and engineers and product designers that could command really high rates to build the technology of the future for companies when I was at 18.

7:17And I spent so much time marketing the idea that this is a viable lifestyle, right? That we don't have to work a nine to five anymore. That it seems like I should get back to a point of trying it out myself, which I did a bit when I was in my 20s. and it was one of the best decisions that I've ever made. It's funny you say that I, you know, my book, Gig Mindset, sort of came from that idea of working with freelancers and realizing, hang on, these aren't all sort of low skill people out there. There's people that have high skills and are making decent rates doing work and balancing freedom. And I had to write the book for me to figure out how to move on from big tech and corporate America.

7:57Like that was part of my cathartic process of making a decision. I'm sure others make the decision a lot easier than writing. Yeah. Whatever gets you there. Right. It just goes back to, I find a lot of safety in creating, thinking like writing is thinking. It helps me whether I ever publish it or not, or whether it ever sees the light of day, the stuff that gets crumpled in the trash can is still valuable. When you look at your career, Where's one time that you just straight up failed? That is a great question. And what did you learn from it? Sort of this is probably a success and a failure, but not reaching the heights that I wanted to.

8:35So when I was in college, I interned for some great, weird digital publications of the 2000s era. One of them was Nerve, which I ended up being a contributing writer for, which is this like 90s into the 2000s sex pop culture magazine. Like everyone wrote for it, like Chuck Palahniuk wrote for it. George Sanders wrote for it. I interned there. I started writing essays, personal essays for them, sort of humor essays, and became pretty close with one of my bosses. And when I was a senior in college, he decided to launch a new type of digital media company, a new site called the faster times and kind of asked me to come on and help launch it and build it and then that's what i ended up doing after i graduated college because it was the great recession the media industry was on fire the sort of ad model was completely collapsing there was no real entry-level journalism jobs so i figured screw it let me try and build something myself because the one thing that working at earth which is a digital media company it taught me was that there's kind of something really amazing and fantastic about the new world of creating content online that we were in in 2008, 2009, 2010.

9:53And so we spent three years building that. And I look back on that and it's like, I had no idea what the hell I was doing at that point in my life. Like not surprising, right? I was 22 years old and building a media company. And we had this overall thesis at first that we would create this business model in which the writers would get paid 75 % of the ad revenue that their pieces generated. And the section editors would get 15 % of their sections, right? So it was this sort of egalitarian, semi-communist way of approaching income redistribution off the business model where there's a lot of shared ownership.

10:35And that model completely did not work, right? Because it just turns out, you just do not make enough in the year 2009, 2010 on display advertising on Google. It's just not a viable business model. It's an interesting business model. Like the New York Times wrote several think pieces about us, and we got millions of readers and a lot of really good writers, but it just didn't work. And so then we had to pivot. And what we ended up pivoting into was the brand space. So got connected with Colleen DeCourcy, who is now like the CCO at Snap and ran Wine and Kennedy for a while, one of the kind of most epic, amazing advertising, you know, heads of the last 20 years.

11:17and she was starting a new agency called Socialistic. And she brought us in to be like the branded content arm or network for the clients that she was working with. And so we, from that, started building this branded content studio that really paid the bills for us, right? It's like having our writers do SpawnCon for Dove, doing social content for Homeland and Dexter, kind of things like that. Started doing some B2B kind of research writing. And what I really look back on is that there's so much that I know now about the marketing industry and tech where there's opportunities probably to build this into a real platform play to think about it more strategically.

12:01But we were really just living like month to month, quarter to quarter. And we built a decent business. We ended up selling that business. But overall, considering how early we were on content marketing, like doing it before there was an actual word for it, right? It sometimes hurts and feels like that missed opportunity where if I had probably the knowledge and perspective that I do now around marketing and technology, would have thought about how to build it into a platform play, you know, like Contently, where I went after that ended up being, but just did not have the vision for that at all.

12:33Let's talk about the elephant in the room, AI, and AI slop and AI writing. I think I do a ton of workshops with different teams that are starting on their AI journey or they're somewhere along the way. And they've all sort of followed the same framework. Hey, I tried this thing. It was amazing. And then they end up in slop land, either where they're creating terrible stuff or they're just getting so much information, they're confusing themselves. Like the idea that you can just get tons of information, they're just kind of stuck in this place where it's like, hey, I got all this stuff. Now what do I do with it?

13:06When you think of your time in journalism and your time writing for lifestyle brands and even doing corporate branding, where does AI actually fit in? So you said it, I think, really well earlier, right? Writing is thinking.

13:25An output that seems perfectly fine, but it sucks you to know what I call the vortex of mid. like there's this gravitational force when you're kind of turning the AI as the first step in your content that's going to suck you into this area of mediocrity. Like if you think of all content on a two by two that goes from like low originality to high originality, right? On one axis that goes from low quality to high quality on another, like AI is never going to be objectively terrible, right? It might give you the kind of work that you would get from a C plus B minus freelancer, but it's not going to be the type of truly good, original, personal content that breaks through to people and stands out.

14:09And I think that's where a lot of people get stuck. So when I am, you know, coaching and advising marketing teams on how they should be thinking about using AI, because I'm similarly like doing workshops and consulting around this. Like I worked for three years in an AI company. I'm not necessarily anti-AI, but I think that you have to use it in a really deliberate way. where you aren't anchoring yourself to the ideas that AI is giving you. When you're brainstorming, you're brainstorming first, and then you're using AI as an add-on to take those little parallel steps of creativity that get you to a better idea, right?

14:47Where you're using AI as a researching tool. When I was writing my new book, I didn't use AI to write a word of the book. It's something I would never do for that or for my newsletter. But as a research assistant, it's extremely powerful as long as you understand the best practices and checking the links that it's giving you in the citations and verifying all the information. It can save you quite a bit of time. I do believe that ChatGPT, Deep Research, Claude's research tools is a market stepped up from just Googling around because there's so much combination AI and human slop infecting AI in the web.

15:22I think AI can be a really effective tool for getting feedback and refining your work, right? Prompting the AI to act as the target audience that you're trying to reach, and then suggesting things that you might have missed, counterintuitive ideas that you might want to push more on, things that might be confusing. Using it as that feedback tool when you have a finished work is really, really important. But so much of what makes storytelling in content really significant and meaningful to people is a the fact that the stories are coming from you the entire story of the internet has been us falling in love with first person narratives and the real voice and perspectives that people bring to bear in the content that they publish and the second is the fact that what makes art art what makes a story a story is all of the little choices that you're making along the way and when you're just sitting here and you're saying i'm going to outsource everything that I'm doing to AI, right?

16:18I'm just going to say, okay, AI, you go and you write this thought leadership post. You write this story for me. You write this novel or this book for me. You're taking away your agency of making all of those little choices that make the thing that you produce matter. And that inherently just sucks the soul out of the content you're creating. And you can see that. You can feel that. Like you spend 10 minutes on LinkedIn And it's filled with this slop, this like AI parable bullshit that like, okay, yeah, maybe some of it from the bigger thought leaders is getting some likes, but that doesn't resonate or make a big impact on anyone.

16:54And the reputation damage that you're doing by so blatantly outsourcing your work, your thoughts to AI, I think is vastly unconsidered by most of the actors who are slopifying our feeds. So let's say that you have an idea. I'm Joe. I'm hanging out in Brooklyn. I'm walking down the street and you have an idea of a story you want to tell or something you want to say, right? Maybe it's your newsletter or something. And you're a professional storyteller and writer. What would you tell someone on how to approach telling a story and using AI? Like what would a workflow be? Like make it real. Yeah. So there's one framework that I teach, which is a colleague for say thought leadership content rights to say you're doing something like what I do.

17:40I write narrative nonfiction business books. I write a fairly popular newsletter about science and storytelling and how to apply that to your business. And the loop goes ideation, research, write, refine. So it would start with, okay, you're going to start with the ideation phase. You have an idea of what you want to write. I want you to kind of flesh that out as much as possible on your own first, but then turn to AI with a series of prompts, like what are like five other counterintuitive angles I could take on this? This is my target audience. What are uncommon things that they might be wondering about this topic, et cetera.

18:18Getting into the right phase, that phase is you write. You're always writing your first draft. But if there comes to a point where you're stuck or you're struggling for, say, a metaphor or analogy to continue it forward, the right transition into the next paragraph at that point where otherwise you might walk away, find a million distractions, go do the laundry, go walk your dog, stop writing that piece, you can use AI as that lever to get unstuck at that moment. I think that that's an ethical use of AI to say, okay, give me a metaphor for X. Probably what the AI gives you isn't what you're going to use, but it's going to help you get unstuck at that stage.

18:54And then, like I was saying a second ago, that refine point where, okay, let me craft this synthetic audience persona of who I'm trying to reach and let me get some feedback on what makes sense, what doesn't in the story that I'm writing. And I think AI can be really helpful that way. I think it also can be really helpful for something like thinking through five or 10 different variations of hooks at the start of your newsletter or the LinkedIn post that's promoting your story or the script for the TikTok video that you're using to promote your newsletter, right? The key is that you're not just outsourcing that completely to AI.

19:30Just to say, I'm gonna trust what the AI suggests to me full bore without thinking about it all myself. It has to be a creative partner that you're using and constantly pushing to modify and jump off of that as an idea to something that is truly your own. So that's the general advice that I give to folks, which is a little bit different, I think, than most people who are teaching AI to content or thought leadership teams, where they're saying, like, here are seven prompts that's going to give you the whole piece. I think that's just a path to mediocrity and a content that's going to check a box, but not make any sort of positive impact for you or your brand.

20:07You remember, it was like a year ago that the internet was just filled with like people selling prompts, 300 prompts, 200 prompts, and like, get my swipe file, this notion swipe file, comment swipe file on this post to get my ultimate database of expert prompts. Yeah. Fucking kill me. Yeah. I went down that rabbit hole and I went down the automation rabbit hole on these people who had done that. And I bought this guy's prompt, I think we're, I don't know, 99 bucks or something. And I tried all of them and they were awful. You could tell it was just people were not experts in what they were professing they were experts in and had never actually done the thing that the prompt was designed.

20:46No, it's just a bunch of prompts that chat GPT made that they put in a notion file, which is like, it's a hustle, but yeah, I don't think it really does anything for anyone. How do you help people understand the importance of the hard work of creating? Like if someone were to watch you create your newsletter or watch you write a piece, like it's hard mental work. Like there's a lot of carbon that's going back and forth in your brain to create. And everybody thinks there's a shortcut. And while AI, I think to your point is helpful, the shortcut is junk food for the brain. How do you help people understand that?

21:19I think that people need to experience it because the only way that you really internalize the idea that writing is thinking is to come to that realization yourself. There's so many pieces that I leave on the cutting room floor that I start going down the road on and then realize that this is actually not what I want to say, or this is not the piece that I want to write. And I think if you do that in contrast to having that topic idea or that idea of what you want to write and then just prompting AI to write it, you're never going to have that realization yourself because all you're going to do is end up with that finished product and then you're going to start like editing a little bit and post it, but you're never going to have gone to that mental place, right?

22:02Where you are on the third paragraph and you're trying to make this idea make sense and you realize that actually you have the wrong idea And then you get up and you go for a walk around the block and then you realize, oh, no, actually, it's this other thing, right? This is where I should be starting. This is what I should be talking about. And A, there is like a euphoric joy in coming to that moment. I think that if you experience that for yourself, you just feel so deeply satisfied in your soul for having figured that thing out and having gone through that process that there's a sort of natural dopamine hit that you get from doing it.

22:43But the second is also then getting to the point of going through that process and publishing it and seeing an idea that is truly your own that hits different. Not everyone is built to do this, right? That has the determination to do it. I think Instagram just came out with a stat that they have like a 99-1 rule, right? 90 % of people on the platform only consume 9 % remix and only 1 % truly create. Something like 90 % of on YouTube views go to 4 % of creators. So to say that I do believe everyone has the capacity for storytelling. I think everyone has the innate gifts and skills to be a great storyteller, but not everyone necessarily wants to go through that struggle and process.

23:30And like, that's okay. But I think that if you have goals to be a business thought leader, to differentiate your personal brand, you're going to have a much harder time if you're not willing to kind of put in the work and hustle and sacrifice to go through that wondrous creative process. One of the experiments I just got finished doing with a friend of mine who's mid-career kind of wondering what's next and he's sort of stuck. And we did an exercise on storytelling. He says, what story do you tell yourself? And so we sat down and talked for an hour about like, what in his mind is the story that he tells himself where he is today, where he wants to go, like all of those things that you might go to a therapist for like something like that and then we put it kind of through ai to synthesize it into a more of an action plan like say hey this is a story you tell yourself and this is kind of what that story is telling you he wasn't creating but he was using ai and storytelling in a pretty transformative way to help him think about the future and we even talked about like what stories and books and movies like what things resonated what was your favorite actor and what was your favorite movie and why.

24:37And like, it was an interesting way to think about storytelling. When you talk about neuroscience and storytelling, I'm fascinated by the brain in general. Like, what does it mean to be human? What does neuroscience tell us about story? Yeah, they tell us a few things. One is that storytelling is one of the most powerful and effective ways to unlock oxytocin production, right? Which is this neurochemical that engenders these feelings of human connection and trust. So I've followed and written a lot about the work of neural marketers who have studied this. One of them is Dr. Paul Zak from Claremont University, who found that when someone is deeply engaged with a highly emotional resonance story, in real time, you can actually see their oxytocin levels and their attention levels skyrocket.

25:25And afterwards, they're much more likely to do things like give to charity. They've been able to predict someone's likelihood to purchase from a brand based on their engagement with that story. So that's really, really powerful, right? We see that storytelling actually makes us much more likely to want to buy from brands. It also makes us feel more generous and connected to the people that we're hearing a story from. If I tell you a really engaging story and I sell it super well, something called neural coupling happens where the brain of the storyteller actually syncs with the brain of the listener.

25:59And we feel like we're going through the same emotions and the same experience, which is why storytelling is such an effective way to bond with people, whether it's friends, teammates, dates. If you want to really connect with a crowd when you're giving an opening keynote speech, the most effective thing is to open with a story that's going to build and connect those bonds. Neuroscientists have also found that when we engage with a great story, when we hear or watch a great story, the neural activity in our brain increases fivefold. It's like someone's flipped on a switchboard and illuminated the city of our mind, which is why we're so much more likely to remember a message when it's told to us through a story than through a memo or fact sheet.

26:42So here we see that stories do a lot of things that we really care about, particularly in business and in life. Stories make us remember. Stories make us care. Stories make us want to buy things and take action and help people, right? So it's really this cognitive technology that we've had for millennia that allowed Homo sapiens, despite being not the strongest hominoid species, not the smartest, Neanderthals actually had much bigger brains. They were much stronger than us, but we've been able to rise up and become these ultra-social learning machines that have conquered the world because storytelling allows us to trust each other to come together and work together, allow us to pass on information, to remember things from generation to generation, to teach lessons to one another.