Storytelling wins the Super Bowl

Hey, it’s Lucy,

In today’s issue:

🧠 THIS WEEK’S FIX

Major tech-focused brands are paying big money for storytellers. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that companies like Netflix, Vanta, Toast and Rippling are paying six-figure salaries to storytellers who can create narratives that inspire.

In fact, LinkedIn job ads with the word “storyteller” have doubled in the last year.

Beehiv founder Tyler Denk says this is likely because paid acquisition are getting more expensive. SEO is saturated. Social is inconsistent and increasingly pay-to-play. 

Meanwhile, AI has made it cheap to publish, which means the average quality level of content on the internet has dropped, even as volume has exploded.

When everything is easier to produce it drives demand for authenticity. 

And authenticity is basically storytelling:

There’s no better example of that this week than the Super Bowl halftime show. 

There was so much money on that stage, but the reason Bad Bunny’s performance brought people to tears wasn’t the budget. 

It was timing, cultural relevance, and a rich historic narrative woven into every inch of the production design. 

If you want the longer version of this conversation (including the part about why “vibe-coding everything” only gets you so far), my cofounder, Xavier, and I break it down in our weekly HyperFix rundown.

🤖 HOT TAKES

Those ChatGPT caricatures are cool. They’re also a reminder how easy it is to give up our data for a quick dopamine hit. 

When you upload a personal photo to an LLM, you are not just getting a cute output. You’re participating in an extraction pipeline that is still wildly unclear to most users.

Even if a platform promises “we don’t train on your data,” the practical question is bigger than training:

Where is it stored? Who can access it? How long does it persist? What gets inferred?

This piece lays out why people are urging caution.

My take: this is one of those trends where the cost shows up later, and by the time it does, it’s hard to reverse.

✨ AI KOOL-AID

Scientists from the University of South Florida  are using AI to detect and track a rise in floating algae across the global ocean.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know why I pay attention to this. Sargassum is not an abstract headline where I live in Mexico’s Quintana Roo. 

It’s a real, seasonal, economic, health, and infrastructure problem.

For context, here’s a Substack piece I wrote on what’s been happening in Mexico.

What I’m watching for: whether tools like this can help governments and communities make earlier, smarter decisions (and whether that data stays publicly accessible, not locked behind private platforms).

🗞️NEWSLETTER BIZ LAB

If no one can find your newsletter, you can’t grow your audience. You can solve this problem by building a channel that does the heavy lifting for you.

This week, my co-founder, Xavier and I launched a YouTube channel that complements the HyperFix.The idea is to add another dimension to this newsletter and additional topics and perspectives that don’t always make it here.

We meet once a week anyway to brainstorm editorial topics for the newsletter. Since we were already recording, we thought why don’t we share this? It doesn’t require complex production, scripts or editing software. (This AI tool makes it super easy to edit.) 

The upside:

If you’ve been telling yourself you need a massive content machine to grow, you don’t. You need one repeatable asset that creates trust, and one repeatable way for people to discover it.

🔥 EXTRA HYPE

📨 P.S. If you are building a newsletter and want to eliminate the weekly scramble, that is exactly what we help our customers do.

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