When I was little I tried to write a book about the chess pieces themselves. We didn’t have a computer, so I was writing it out on lined notebook paper. I got about five pages in and stopped. I was probably 10.

I have no idea where it is. It’s long gone. It’s nowhere. It’s in the landfill somewhere, probably, turned back into something.

I just never really pursued writing after that, because I don’t like putting pen to paper and I don’t like typing. When I start, my brain moves faster than what my fingers can do and then it gets lost. So I’m sitting there trying to figure out how to spell difficult. And I’ve already moved on in my head, past that word. And then I messed up a bunch on difficult. I finish writing it, probably misspelled, and my brain’s already two paragraphs ahead. I can’t catch up with my fingers.

Somewhere in there I decided I was a bad writer. I told myself that. My grammar is horrible and I can’t spell to save my life, and I don’t really know how you’re supposed to write. Two English classes in college is the whole of my training. But I do like the thought of writing. I love reading, and I see what those writers are like.

No one has ever told me I’m a bad writer. I ran a blog a long time ago called The Marzipan Incident. People liked it, I guess. They thought it was pretty funny. I stopped because with my ADHD brain I didn’t have the bandwidth to sit and type it out. Typing it out was the deterrent. That was the part I hated. I hated typing.

So when I started this blog I wanted to hand over the writing so I didn’t have to write it. I could just say it. To me, writing is typing anyway. It was lined paper with a pencil, now it’s a keyboard, but it’s the same job. So I talked into voice to text and had Claude write a blog off that, and what came back was kind of slop.

Two posts went up. I knew from the very first one. I was sitting at this computer, during the evening I think, reading a post with my name on it, and what I thought was: well, this is good enough. I wanted that part taken away from me, but I still wanted it to sound like me. What happened is what I thought was going to happen. I ignored it for a while.

Looking back at those posts, pretty much none of it is mine. It’s all someone else’s writing. It’s about the subject I talked about, but it’s not my voice at all. It sounded a little too perfect, that’s really what it does. I joke, I say self deprecating things, and it tried to do that and it couldn’t. It was too symmetrical, and mine is flawed and deadpan.

Here’s a line from the first post:

in the way a shirt can technically fit and still feel wrong every time you put it on

I don’t talk like that. That one’s the least me. Then here’s one from the second:

Right now I’m CEO, janitor, and the only shareholder currently suing myself for mismanagement.

That one’s hilarious. That sounds like me, it’s something I would say. And it still isn’t mine.

I tried to fix it. I gave Claude the address of the old blog and it went and read it and told me back what my style was, what my voice was. It tried its best, I guess. It still wasn’t me. So I stopped. I just couldn’t do a third.

Then I heard a podcast. Claire Vo’s How I AI, an episode with Alex Lieberman, who co-founded Morning Brew and built himself a whole system for this. He gets interviewed. And I was like, that’s what I need to do.

So that’s what this is now. I have four interviewers and they’re all personas of real people. One is Joe Rogan, one is NetworkChuck, one is Jimmy Fallon, one is Zach Galifianakis. They’re all Claude, same as the thing that wrote the slop. I talk how my brain works with no filter, and it’s raw. I can just keep talking and talking and talking and ramble on and on and on.

I think the whole thing is funny. The funny thing is that I’m too lazy to type. I could do it, I could sit down and grind through it, but I don’t. This was easier, so I’m picking the easier path.

I’ll tell my kids and my grandkids that I had a computer write it for me, and I’ll tell them why I don’t think it’s cheating. It’s not here to take over me, it’s here to make me better. I can’t type as fast as I think, and that’s what the real roadblock is.

I think that kid at 10 would have thought this was amazing. He would have thought it was the coolest thing ever, because the kid that is 49 thinks it’s the coolest thing ever.

What I needed was somebody to ask me things and not judge how scattered and shattered my mind is. It doesn’t move in a linear line. Sometimes it moves too slow, sometimes it moves too fast. I haven’t been able to finish very many things in my life because the ADHD brain takes over, and I think this could be what’s going to help me finish it.

I think Joe brought it out, and I guess I’m not a bad writer. I don’t know. I think it’s working, but we’ll find out when I look at the product that is produced.