The Most Human Thing I've Done All Year (+ the Audiobook is Live!)
Hi all,
I've been thinking a lot lately about where AI should lead and where it should follow.
I talk about this constantly in my keynotes: the idea that AI is a tool, not a replacement, and that the humans who win are the ones who figure out where to deploy it and where to stay in the driver's seat themselves.
Ethan Mollick, one of the smartest people writing about AI right now, made a similar point beautifully in his recent newsletter on Choosing to Stay Human: the goal isn't to avoid AI, but to be intentional about it.
Easy to say. Harder to practice.
So let me tell you about the two most humbling creative decisions I've made this year.
The Book
When I sat down to write Future Proof, I did what any self-respecting AI evangelist would do: I went AI-first. I leaned heavily into AI tools to draft the opening chapters.
And then I read it back. The urgency felt manufactured. The anecdotes could have been about anyone. The voice was smooth, professional, and entirely unplaceable. It covered the right ground — it just didn't sound like me.
So I scrapped it and started over. Human-first, AI-assisted. I wrote every draft myself, used AI to pressure-test arguments and check facts, but the words were mine. The difference was immediately obvious to anyone who read both.
I've copied Claude's evaluation of the two drafts below side-by-side so you can hear objective feedback on the two manuscripts.
Early AI-Written Draft: The urgency gets announced so many times that by the third repetition, the reader stops feeling it and starts feeling lectured. The anecdotes are structurally fine but generic enough to have been written by anyone — competent, but never quite the voice of a specific person with something specific to say. | Final Human-Written Book: Each chapter opens with a real story — specific names, real numbers, details that could only come from someone who was actually in the room. When the urgency argument finally lands in Chapter 3, it's earned — built on evidence rather than announced by a heading. |
Same tool. Very different inputs. That's the whole point.
If you haven't grabbed a copy yet: Hardcover | Paperback | eBook
The Audiobook
Then came the audiobook. Same experiment, same result.
I had an AI-narrated version from ElevenLabs. The voice was clean, professional, and paced perfectly. It was honestly impressive.
And I hated it.
Not because the technology was bad. Because something was missing. I give keynotes for a living. I spend hundreds of hours a year standing in front of rooms full of executives trying to get them to care about something. That requires a very specific mix of excitement, urgency, and self-deprecation that a synthesized voice, no matter how good, simply can't replicate.
So I built a recording studio out my closet.
What you're looking at is a round side table, a laptop, a microphone on a boom arm, and a black stool — surrounded by shirts, jackets, shoes, a shelf full of ties I haven't worn since 2019, and what can only be described as a "laundry situation." No acoustic panels. No soundproofing foam. Just the ambient silence of a man alone with his chaos, which, it turns out, is actually decent sound dampening.
I spent 14 hours in that closet — plus additional sessions going back for pickups when I mispronounced something or simply ran out of whatever energy it takes to sound enthusiastic about exponential math for the forty-seventh consecutive minute. My fiancée has been extraordinarily patient.
Many painstaking hours of recording later, the human version of the audiobook is live! You can listen to both versions below and decide for yourself which one you'd rather spend seven hours with on a road trip.
ElevenLabs Version: | Human Version: |
For those friends and colleagues who told me that they don't like to sit down with a book, the audiobook is now available everywhere: Audible | Spotify | Apple Books
The Bigger Point
I'm not sharing all of this to be anti-AI. I'm the last person who would make that argument.
I'm sharing it because I think we're at a moment where the defaults are being set. And if we're not deliberate, we'll end up outsourcing things that actually matter to us without even realizing we did it.
For me, the book and the audiobook mattered. People who book me for keynotes are going to read this first. They should hear what I actually sound like. An AI voice — even a great one — would have been a shortcut that cost me something I couldn't get back.
The question I'd invite you to sit with: where in your work are you going AI-first out of convenience rather than intention? And what might you be giving up in the process?
Figure that out, and you've already done something most people won't.
Best,
Dr. Michael "House" Housman