Don’t Let AI Steal Your Voice
Tax panic is setting in.
You’re knee-deep in old Christmas decorations, yelling at a box labeled “Receipts 2019.”
Then you find it. The book. The one nobody told you existed. How did this get here?
It’s your great-great-grandfather’s autobiography.
Suddenly, taxes can wait.
It’s got gossip, tragedy, war stories, love stories, how they made soup, how they lost everything in a card game in 1894. Your bloodline suddenly makes sense.
You’re not just reading. You’re time traveling.
Look…
I WISH I could find something like this. Forget secret trusts. I want to read my ancestor’s thoughts on love, failure, money, and why he left home without pants one day in 1911.
I don’t even know my great-great-grandparent’s names, let alone what their days were like. How they were born. How they lived. How they died.
That’s why I just recorded the most important podcast of the year.
Today, I’m going to convince you—no, I’m going to plead with you—to write your autobiography. Or at least something close.
And it’s not because I want to make you think you’re the next Hemingway.
It’s because no one—and I mean no one—has lived your life but you. And in a world being swallowed by AI, algorithms, and synthetic voices…
Your story is the one thing it can never fake.
Do It Now. Here’s Why.
Most people think autobiographies are for celebrities. Presidents. Rock stars. People with yachts named after failed marriages.
Wrong.
You could be a baker from Buffalo or an Uber driver in Tallahassee—your story matters. Not just to your great-great-grandkids, who will probably read it while drinking algae smoothies on Mars—but to you.
Writing your story forces you to look at your life as a movie worth watching.
And suddenly, you're not just surviving. You're editing. Directing. Scoring it like Hans Zimmer.
Here’s a dirty little publishing secret: The best books? They’re all autobiographies in disguise.
You think Atomic Habits is about habits? No. It’s about James Clear getting smashed in the face with a baseball bat and building his brain—and his life—back one tiny step at a time.
That's an autobiography.
You think The Things They Carried is just about Vietnam? No. Tim O’Brien bled that book. That’s his soul on the page, camouflaged as fiction.
Even The Puzzler by AJ Jacobs—which is about crossword puzzles, sudoku, and Japanese puzzle boxes—is really about AJ's obsession. His quirks. His family. His year of unraveling the world’s weirdest minds.
That’s autobiography wearing a sudoku t-shirt.
And guess what? AI can’t do that.
AI can regurgitate a summary of World War II. But it can’t tell you what it felt like to eat soup from a tin while bombs fell 40 miles away and you were thinking about your mother.
Let Me Ask You This: Who Are You?
Seriously.
Write it down. Who are you?
You’re the only person on the planet who can answer it.
James Frey wrote A Million Little Pieces—a memoir so intense Oprah invited him to her show and then publicly shamed him when she found out parts were fiction.
And still… it sold millions. Because it was real. It was raw. People saw themselves in it.
Same with Annie Duke. Poker champion. Brilliant thinker.
Wrote Thinking in Bets.
I didn’t read it because I wanted poker tips. I read it because I wanted to know how someone uses probabilistic thinking to survive life.
My bestselling book, Choose Yourself, is basically a memoir of me failing, going broke, nearly dying, and then… choosing myself.
You know what happened when I wrote about failure? People thanked me.
People still write to me and say that book saved their life. And all I did was write down what happened.
You don’t have to be Freud or Viktor Frankl or even Freakin’ Batman. You just have to write the truth. Your truth.
Five Easy Steps
So here’s your assignment:
- Listen to the podcast.
- Write down the five most important events in your life.
- Then, the five most influential people.
- Then, three strengths. Three weaknesses.
- Then ask yourself: what are the themes here? Where’s the story?
Maybe you write a full memoir. Maybe you write a “mini memoir” about one crazy summer.
Or maybe you write a book about puzzles, parenting, or poker—and slip your story in like a Trojan horse.
You’re not doing this for Random House. You’re doing it for your future readers.
And maybe that reader is your great-great-granddaughter, sitting in a spaceship, reading about how you once got dumped, lived in a van, and figured out how to turn grief into a superpower.
Or maybe that reader is you.
Five years from now.
Needing a reminder of how strong you are.
So write the damn book.
And if you don’t know where to start, start here:
“I was born.”
Then tell me what happened next.
Subscribe to the show. Rate it. Review it. And write your story—because no one else can.
