The ability to make people feel something about your product, your company, or your idea is worth as much, and in some cases more, than the technical skills that got you in the door.
Today's Prof G deep dive is on storytelling and how it became the most valuable skill in the economy. I'm often asked, "What is the one skill I would teach my children?" And it's not computer science or Mandarin, or even STEM. It's storytelling. Not too long ago, the conventional wisdom was clear: AI would kill writing. If a machine can draft an email, write a press release, or generate an essay in seconds, what's left? Meanwhile, jobs including plumbing, surgery, even coding, felt much safer. But we've been to this movie before. When AI got good enough to read medical scans, the prediction was immediate and confident: radiologists were done. If a machine can read them, then why do you need a doctor? But the opposite happened. Since those predictions, the Mayo Clinic's radiology staff has grown by 55% according to the New York Times. And in 2025, radiology was the second highest paid medical specialty in America, with average incomes 48% higher than a decade ago. Why? Because we confuse the most visible part of the job with the most valuable part of the job. A study of radiologists across three hospitals found that only 36% — a little more than a third of their time — was spent actually reading scans, the part AI can do. The rest was human judgment: deciding what matters, guiding treatment, asking the right questions. AI didn't replace radiologists. It replaced the part of the job that was never really the point.
I can relate to this personally. Growing up, my mother was a typist. 98% of typists went away, and this was happening during the '80s when I was growing up. But my mom went upstream and did the hard part of the job, and that was managing her boss and making his life easier. My mother became a personal assistant, or what some people refer to as a secretary. Typing was still part of her job, but an increasingly small part of her job, but she went after and was good at the hard part of her job.
Writing is no different. We assume the value was in producing words, something AI can now do instantly. But once the internet got flooded with generic, cookie-cutter content, it became clear the words were never the point. So, for example, I love to write. I write a book every 18 months. I write a newsletter every week. And people often ask me if I ever write under the influence, if you will. I've tried writing under the influence of THC, and while I think what I'm writing is brilliant, the next day I find that it's pretty, like, incoherent. But occasionally I do write after one or two drinks, and I find I have an easier time being emotional. And quite frankly, some of my writing is just better and more gripping. I stopped doing that because I didn't want to ever become reliant on alcohol for the written word. But the point is, it takes down the barriers, or the screens, or the thoughts, and doesn't look at patterns. I just write what I'm feeling. And I think that that's the problem with AI. AI is essentially looking at patterns and trying to guess what the next word should be, and such that it's a regression to the mean. AI takes everything to the average, and people aren't interested in reading average, or average doesn't grab your heart. It's something that's an outlier that you haven't seen before that resonates with you. The value is judgment, perspective, taste. Again, it's emotion, or specifically the ability to evoke emotions, that's really difficult to automate, which is why companies are now paying a premium for it.
The percentage of LinkedIn job postings mentioning storyteller doubled between 2024 and 2025 to more than 50,000 listings in marketing and 20,000 in media and communications. Corporate executives mentioned storytelling on earnings calls 469 times in 2025, up from 359 in 2024 and just 147 times in 2015. OpenAI has listed multiple communications roles above $400,000. Anthropic tripled the size of its communications team to about 80 people, with some roles paying as much as $400,000. For context, the average director of communications in America makes $106,000. Netflix posted a director of communications role with a salary range reaching up to $775,000.
People have often asked me what is the one job that is most immune, or is going to have the fastest growth in a digital economy. And even before AI, I said it was going to be strategic communications. Your ability to craft a story and create a narrative is almost as important now as the actual underlying numbers of the company. At the same time, companies across tech are building their own media empires from scratch so that they can attempt to better control the narrative. I'm not sure that's going to work, but they're doing it: Substacks, YouTube channels, podcasts, because earned media is shrinking and owned media compounds. At L2, a big innovation for us was I started doing this weekly series called Winners and Losers on YouTube. Started getting 12,500 views, and by the time I sold L2, it was getting 70, 80,000 views, which back in the late teens was real. Most recently, Andreessen Horowitz launched its new media team to help founders win the narrative battle online. That sounds a little scary, but anyways. Microsoft launched a print magazine in 2025. A print magazine. Think about that. In 2025, calling it an antidote to the ephemeral nature of digital. That sounds like AI wrote it. And Palantir, a defense contractor not historically known for its public image, recently launched a merch line of hats, totes, and T-shirts, which analysts describe not as fan service, but as a proactive communication strategy to build passionate supporters.
And earlier this month, we saw a great example of just how valuable storytelling has become in the marketplace. OpenAI acquired TBPN, a two-year-old tech livestream with 74,000 YouTube subscribers, for what the Financial Times reported as a low hundreds of millions. Think about this: a podcast that recently launched, you know, decent listenership but not big listenership, got sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. The show generated about $5 million in ad revenue last year. I think that means Pivot is worth about a billion dollars. Anyways, I can dream. And what did OpenAI immediately do? It shut down TBPN's advertising business. Why? Because it's interested in creating a narrative and storytelling. It's not interested in being in the media business — at least not that media business. They weren't buying a media company. They were buying a voice: the credibility, the audience, the access, a show that some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley wanted to go on. In their words, the standard communication playbook just doesn't apply to us. Our research lead said it best: OpenAI has a brand problem and TBPN could be the solution. I'm a little bit more skeptical. I think it's going to take more than buying a podcast, but I guess it's a start. The lesson here is that the ability to build a brand and make something feel credible, even cool, is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, especially to a company like OpenAI that has such incredibly cheap access to capital, it's worth it. If it's a one in ten chance it'll help them with a brand image, it's worth the two or $300 million.
An analysis of 900,000 newly created web pages in April 2025 found that 74% contained detectable AI-generated content. By late 2024, more than half of all new English-language articles published online were primarily AI-written. Get that? By 2024, half of all articles primarily written by AI, up from just 5% before ChatGPT. And there are reporters and journalists out there who are leading the charge. Fortune magazine editor Nick Lichtenberg produced more stories in six months than any of his colleagues delivered in a year. When news breaks, he uploads press releases or analyst notes into AI tools and prompts them to produce articles, and then edits and publishes. AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune's web traffic in the second half of 2025. But even he admits this won't be seen as some people's idea of journalism. Probably what it ends up being is adequate news for a much lower cost, but nothing that really resonates or breaks through or kind of leads the day, if you will. Meanwhile, A.G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, has warned that AI is almost certainly going to usher in an unprecedented torrent of crap, or what a lot of people refer to as AI slop. Who's right? The answer is yes. It's working and it's crap simultaneously, which is exactly the problem.
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In people's minds, AI slop has become synonymous with brain death, the death of craft, the death of a real point of view. A cultural wave of aversion followed. Nearly a third of consumers now say they're less likely to choose a brand that uses AI-generated ads. What's the takeaway here? In a world where AI can produce infinite competent content, what's scarce is a genuine human perspective, a real point of view delivered with craft. That skill is now priced accordingly. Design is a decent metaphor here. As a percentage of their total employment base, tech companies now have a greater number of designers, even after Sora, which was eventually shut down, as real human-centered design is now the point of differentiation as coding has become the easy part of your online presence. If you're a student, a career switcher, or a founder deciding where to invest your time, the market is telling you that the ability to make people feel something about your product, your company, or your idea is worth as much, and in some cases more, than the technical skills that got you in the door.
I've been saying for years that storytelling is the weapon of mass attraction. The companies that figured this out are building media teams, not just marketing departments. They're hiring writers who think like strategists. They're spending hundreds of millions to better craft stories via podcasts, positioning of the brand, words, visual design, video, things that shape perception in ways that products alone cannot, that resonate with consumers, that grab their emotion. I had a recent experience that sort of summed a lot of this up, and that is my son was going to Kensington. We live in London, and he wanted to meet a friend and was looking for a coffee house on High Street and asked me, and I said, "We'll just type it into AI." And his response really grabbed me. He said, "I don't want to be relying on AI for simple things. I want to be a critical thinker and come up with my own ideas." And that's the advice I would give to people in communications: be very careful about becoming so reliant on AI.
And another kind of weird analogy, and that is the downside of testosterone or hormone replacement therapy is that your own body stops production of testosterone. And when you lean on AI for anything resembling creative, your own brain gets atrophied and stops producing its own creativity. Do you want to be a great storyteller? I would start with writing. I think it's very difficult to be a great storyteller without mastering the ability to write. There's the famous Bezos dictum that he likes to get all ideas in a written memo. And from there, pick a medium. There's all sorts of mediums, whether it's Threads, whether it's texting, whether it's speaking, whether it's the written word, long form, short form, post on LinkedIn, and find out what is your medium, what is your craft, what is your weapon for storytelling. And then give yourself an objective. And I do this with my class. I ask them to pick a platform or a medium and then to identify a metric that will let us evaluate if and when they get into the top 10% in that medium, and I challenge them to get into the top 10% in that medium by the end of the class. Whether it's number of followers on Threads, the number of likes they get on Instagram, or the number of reads they get on Substack with a written article. But that's the key here. What is your medium? How do you craft a voice? Start with writing, pick your poison or your weapon, and hold yourself accountable to becoming a top 10% storyteller.
Also, in terms of actual presentation in person, you need to get to the median. Some people would rather, you know, it's that old Jerry Seinfeld quote that people's biggest fear ahead of death is public speaking. So the guy giving the eulogy is in worse shape than the guy in the casket. You're not maybe going to be a great speaker, and don't hold yourself to that standard, but you have to be a competent speaker. You have to be able to stand up and give your views. The most underappreciated people in companies are people who have great ideas under their breath that aren't able to articulate them in a group of people and aren't able to move people to action. You'd rather be someone who gets it wrong on occasion but moves people to action than someone who's always right in retrospect. Storytelling: look at data, craft a narrative, and then articulate that narrative in the written word or across different mediums, and hold yourself to the top decile of storytelling. That is the ultimate Kevlar, the ultimate antidote to AI. That is the enduring skill set.
