2022, months before ChatGPT turned everyone into a prompt engineer, I spent two hours with Jonah Sachs on a question that now feels urgent: who gets to tell the story?

Jonah has earned the right to an opinion. His film for Amnesty International on blood diamonds was delivered to every member of Congress and helped pass the Clean Diamond Act. The Story of Stuff, which he helped create, reached over 60 million people. He didn’t win those fights with spreadsheets. He won them with #storytelling.

His line has stayed with me ever since: storytelling is the neglected secret weapon we all have.

Here’s what bothers me today. Machines now produce stories by the billion. So is that weapon being handed over to #AI, or is it becoming the one thing that still separates us from the noise?

We went deep on the hero’s journey, the five markers of a great story, what’s broken in our current human story, GPT-3 and two very different Turing Tests, and what Jonah calls the poison and the cure of story. Then he brought up a Buddhist test of suffering that I haven’t been able to shake.

If you work in #marketing, lead people, or care about #socialchange, this one is worth your time. Four years later, it lands harder than it did the day we recorded it.

What story are you telling, and who wrote it?

Watch or listen to the full conversation with Jonah Sachs here: [ https://snglrty.co/3Tqf9w4](https://snglrty.co/3Tqf9w4)

Jonah Sachs is an author, speaker, and viral marketing pioneer. He helped create some of the world’s first social change digital campaigns.