Waiting Worked…Until AI

Speaker 1 (00:04): Welcome to Raw Data with Rob Collie. Real talk about AI and data for business impact and now CEO and founder of P3 Adaptive, your host, Rob Collie.

Rob Collie (00:20): Hello friends. When I was writing my new book, I was sharing the work in progress with a circle of trusted reviewers for feedback. I included a deliberate mix of people who knew a lot about AI, who could evaluate technicalities or nuance, as well as people who knew very little about AI who could tell me whether it was understandable and helpful. But in both groups, there was a subset of people who just did not want to read it. "Give me the audio version," they said, "so I can listen in the car or at the gym or on walks." And I planned from the very beginning to have an audiobook, which is kind of what finds me in front of a microphone today. But I certainly didn't have time to record one in parallel while I was writing it.

(01:01): So naturally, I sat down with Claude Code and built a workflow that fed my book into the APIs from a company called ElevenLabs to produce a temporary audiobook just for the reviewers as read by an AI narrator. And folks, the results were impressive. So good in fact that they were bad. All of my books are written in a very conversational style, much like I sound in these solo podcasts. I make use of a lot of italics and parentheticals and air quotes because there's a lot of extra meaning to convey. If you were listening to me, you'd hear every last bit of inflection and emphasis and I put a lot of thought into conveying every bit of that nuance on the written page as well. Think of it as like capturing verbal information cues in written form. And the AI auto narrator didn't do a great job round tripping those back into verbal. They did a lot better than I expected, the AI narrators, honestly, but still falling well short. And that wouldn't have been so bad if the AI narrators had been worse overall.

(02:03): When you hear something robotic and stilted, your brain kind of stays on the lookout for what the author really meant. But the ElevenLabs voices were so warm, so seemingly human, there were even like some deliberate rough edges in there like inhaled breaths to simulate a need for oxygen that no LLM requires. And it created the impression that the AI narrator was a real person who actually understood the book perfectly and was yielding a perfect reading. And I listened to it and just cringed. I'd hear sentences voiced by the narrator in ways that either lost or changed my original meaning. It was a different book. Unacceptable.

(02:43): I ultimately just held the line and for most of the reviewers, I made them just either read it or not review it. The funny thing is I think the same thing might happen if I hired a voice actor to record the audiobook. Unless they read the book through the eyes of an actual reader and absorbed all of the nuance and then recorded it, they'd likely do the same things that the AI did. We'd have to do test runs to make sure they were on the same page with me, long auditions and reviews and iteration. Or we could just do the obvious thing and have me record it, which is what we're doing.

(03:16): So today I'm going to share with you the audiobook version of the forward as well as my introductory note about my AI editor buddy Eddie. Those of you who pre-ordered already through fairgamebook.ai have already read these two intro sections, of course, because those plus the actual chapters one through four are part of the instant download bundle you get on that site. But even for those folks, this serves as a preview of the audiobook they'll be receiving along with the hardcover and the ebook when the book releases on August 11th. If you've pre-ordered through Amazon or elsewhere, consider canceling there and reordering through fairgamebook.ai because that's the only place to get the ebook and the audio formats at launch as well as the other perks like early access to certain chapters.

(04:01): Now, before we dive in as a favor to me, please take a moment and think of one to two people in your life who could really use a down to earth explainer about AI, how to use it in business and how to get started. And then either point them to this podcast episode or to fairgamebook.ai, because I genuinely think the book will help a lot of people and of course it helps us the more people see it. Everyone wins, so it's a kindness that pays off many times over. So thank you for being a listener and thank you for being yourselves. With that, let's get into the beginning of the audiobook titled Fair Game: Customizing AI to Your Business is Easier Than You Think.

(04:40): Forward

(04:42): The opening quote is from the 1995 movie, Get Shorty. Karen, "Yesterday you were a lone shark. Chilly." "Yeah, but I was never that into it. A reluctant technologist. For someone who has spent his entire career working in the technology field, I've always been not nearly as into it as many of my colleagues. For 30 years, I watched as my peers repeatedly devoured the new tech du jour while I hung back and waited to see if it was worth it. I've always been good at tech and have had a successful career in it, but it's certainly not because I've loved it." That exchange from Get Shorty has always stuck with me because I feel what he's saying in that moment. He spent his entire adult life as a mobster and was always good at it, but not because he was into it and that the movie character is based on a real life mobster named Chili Palmer just makes it all the more delicious.

(05:40): But there have been a couple of times when I was early to adopt a significant new technology and those have been major inflection points for both my career and my life. The first time I was early was with Power BI. In 2010, before it was even called Power BI, I was uniquely positioned to see the disruption coming. At Microsoft, I led the team responsible for all of the BI, business intelligence, functionality, and Excel and BI was the headline focus of that release. From there, I moved on to design most of what became Power BI's first desktop product then called Power Pivot. Along the way, I'd also managed internal BI projects at Microsoft where I got a front row seat to just how slow and dysfunctional the traditional approach to business intelligence really was. So I didn't need to hang back on the Power BI wave. I was already in it and I could see exactly what was about to change.

(06:37): I left Microsoft, started a consulting firm built around this new vision for BI and wrote three books along the way. But the second time I was early, I was almost late. I am, of course, talking about AI. This was a case where I was not already in. When ChatGPT hit the scene and dumped the world on its head, my existing tech background didn't help much. It was just as foreign to me as it was to anyone reading this. For a while, I did my normal, not that into tech du jour thing and I hung back. But by late 2024, a sense of AI-induced dread was creeping in on me. Few lines of work are more exposed to the threats of AI than people who tell computers what to do. If your profession involves building software, dashboards, mobile apps, websites, and/or even spreadsheets, AI is already undermining your existing niche.

(07:37): There are few things AI is better at, in fact, than writing code, scripts, and formulas. If you're ahem, the CEO of a data and BI consulting firm, watching all of that unfold can be a touch unsettling. Fear isn't fun, which is why most people try to avoid feeling it, but it serves a crucial role in keeping us afloat. It spurs us into action. By telling us that the place we're standing today is about to become dangerous, fear drives us to look for safer ground before the threat becomes dire. So if we listen to it early rather than suppressing it, we gain the advantage of a head start.

(08:19): So if you're feeling anxiety these days and who isn't, I think it's helpful to reframe it. Nothing is wrong with you. You're doing things right. The early warning system in your brain is working as designed. You're being courageous by listening to it and it is going to pay off. And that's what fear did for me in mid 2024. It told me, Rob, you need to get moving. But this was not going to resemble my Power BI journey, which had been all about possibility and took place in my own backyard. This was stepping off the ledge into the unknown, compounded by the existential dread of, is this going to kill our business someday? The early stages of that journey were uncomfortable, but the picture that emerged over time surprised me.

(09:11): AI success isn't really an AI problem. It's a data problem and a traditional software problem, and fear started to slowly give way to excitement. An excitement I want to share with you. If that sounds surprising and reassuring, now you know why I'm writing this book. It's the book I wish I'd had 18 months ago and I don't yet see that book on the market. I think you might be needing the same book.

(09:43): We named this book Fair Game because I love both of its double meanings. First, I want to make AI fair game for you to bring it within your reach, to empower you to pursue it and to prepare you to lead its adoption. And the second meaning that the game should be fair, not stacked in other people's favor is equally important to me. Right now, AI capability often feels like an ivory tower priesthood beyond the comprehension of the rest of us who make the world run. That's just a temporary information advantage masquerading as expertise. Gatekeeping like that hurts the many to benefit the few and I've always hated it. Tearing down ivory towers and sharing what's inside is one of my favorite things.

(10:34): I know what it's like to hang back, to not instantly devour the new thing and not always because I was wisely waiting for the why. Sometimes the new thing just scared me a bit. I like to think that makes me a better tech ambassador to the real world than my tech enthusiastic colleagues because it's easier for me to relate to where you're at. I've got one foot in the tech world and one foot in yours. At times, that dual citizenship hindered me, but today it feels like my whole career was building for this moment. So when your tech ambassador tells you that our shared experience with data and software is the primary foundation we require for AI, that's good news indeed.

(11:16): Data and traditional software systems have been the focus of my three decade career and even though you might not have been building those kinds of systems like me, they are far from foreign to you. You've been working with both your entire career. We will use that familiarity as a base from which to explore and ultimately conquer the unfamiliar. As we embark on that journey together, I want you to know that I do not take your time and attention for granted. In your shoes, I'd be expecting what follows to be a slog, to feel like homework. Well, I don't plan to do that to you. Honestly, I can't do it to myself either because I would not make it through writing that kind of a book. If I'm not earning your attention in the book's middle chapters, I won't be holding mine either.

(12:05): That's what you should expect from this book, a style chosen to sustain your attention and mine like we are chatting on a long road trip. Conversational, approachable, and a little bit irreverent. Like me, you will be early to AI even though we were almost late. Rob Collie, December 30th, 2025.

(12:27): Eddie didn't write this book. I wrote every word you're about to read, me, a keyboard and noise-canceling earbuds. Every sentence, every analogy, every aside, I crafted them all the old-fashioned way. The backspace key second only to the space bar in the pecking order. And if my fondness for starting sentences with and but reads like AI to you, my 2012 and 2015 books are guilty of the exact same crime. This voice has apparently been suspect for 15 years. I did, however, have an amazing editor named Eddie. It's fair to say that I made Eddie, trained him, grew him, but Eddie can do things I cannot do, things I could not afford to hire someone to do and things no human would want to do. Eddie has read this book at least 30 times over, devouring entire chapters at once and providing thoughtful feedback in under a minute. He never tired out, not even when I asked him for a third opinion on his own opinions.

(13:36): Eddie learned and embraced my writing style and then held me responsible to my own voice, enforcing the best version of me rather than reverting to humorless business author. He told me when I was being lazy and when I was beating a dead horse. He reminded me of promises I made in chapter three when I was writing chapter 12. Eddie and I had disagreements. We resolved them constructively. When I'd push back on a piece of his advice, sometimes I'd convince him and other times he'd convince me instead. I never winced at his feedback because there was never any judgment of me, only a desire for improvement.

(14:16): Eddie is impossible and yet he exists anyway. Eddie is built on Anthropic's Claude plus intentional investment from me. His brain is written in English, lives in a folder and improves every day. I've published three books before this one. They did well. People seem to like them and I now have no idea how I pulled that off without Eddie. It's like finding out you've been driving cross country with the parking brake on. Eddie and I built specialized versions of him beyond the core editor role, one for publicity strategy, one for competitive book research, one for LinkedIn promotion and others I've forgotten about. Each purpose built for a specific job loaded with specific context, tuned to a specific way of working, not an off-the-shelf chat experience. A trained collaborator. That's custom AI, that's an agent. And by the time you finish this book, you will know how to build your own.