Seven months ago we shared a post of an AI-generated voice demo we produced of a well-known short story…

What has evolved and improved since February (when we used an off-the-shelf voice, Katharine) is quite astounding. For this updated demonstration we have used the officially licenced version of a South African voice legend - Malcolm Gooding. Yes, THAT Malcolm... from Springbok Radio, Squad Cars, and half the blue chip adverts and corporates you can think of.

Originally I was listening out for three things, specifically:

1. Pronunciation quirks - Does the AI handle period-appropriate language naturally?

2. Emotional range - Can it distinguish between Della’s desperate hope and her resigned sacrifice?

3. Pacing and rhythm - O. Henry writes with a particular cadence. Does AI catch it or flatten it?

It’s worth listening out for these same three again…

Here are both versions…

(off-the-shelf AI voice) Katherine reading (circa Feb 2026)

(AI version of) Malcolm Gooding reading (Sept 2026)

I’ll leave it to you to take a quick listen to each and see/hear for yourself the progress that’s been made. I’d love to receive your feedback.

FYI - Malcolm is the first of several Heritage Voices whose AI clones we represent. This means you can send us a script and we will quote and produce the raw audio for you, and (and this is the biggie)… we can issue you with an official usage licence. And since Malcolm will likely be out tending to his olives while his clone does the work, you can expect a sizeable reduction of the performance fee. #winwin

It’s amazing what can change in 7 months!

What an adventure!

Wireless. Horseless. Cordless. Sugar-free.

The thing that was taken away is the only thing in the name... which means it never really left. Call it the ‘ghost’. Every one of these names has one, and the trick is to watch which side of the room the ghost is on.

Follow the name tags. On the left they hang on the new invention. The horse is gone, but it haunts the car. The wire haunts the radio. That’s the ghost of the past, clinging to the future.

Now cross the white line and watch the tag jump. Acoustic. Landline. Organic. The electric guitar needs no tag... it became the default, so the ghost changed sides and moved into the wooden one. Linguists have a word for this second kind: a retronym, a name the old thing only gets once the new thing has won.

Nobody said “acoustic guitar” in 1930. Nobody needed to.

Aristotle got here first (he usually did). His word was privation: you can only call a thing blind if it’s the kind of thing that’s supposed to see. So a carriage can only be horseless while carriages are expected to have horses. And a guitar can only be acoustic once guitars are expected to plug in. (Spinoza, centuries later, boiled the whole idea down as: ‘to define is to negate’.)

Which makes the tag a clock. The moment the old thing wears the negative name, the default has already flipped. Not “is flipping”. Flipped. The name arrives after (to really mix my metaphors) the horse has bolted.

* Last week it happened in real time. The band Muse had always been @muse. Then Meta launched an AI called Muse, and the band is now @museband. Not the AI. The band!! The humans got the tag. (Yes, the ones who wrote a whole album about the machines winning. You can’t make this up.)

Now look at the last one on the right. That one’s ours.

Two years ago nobody wrote “human-narrated” on an audiobook. Nobody wrote “real conversation” on a podcast. Then Audible started printing "Narrated by: Virtual Voice" on its listings (forty thousand titles and counting), the Audio Publishers Association wrote a naming guide for the new kind, and "human-narrated" quietly appeared as a word the trade needed...

…and there it was. A brand new retronym, in our own back yard. The ghost in “human” is the machine, and it has only recently moved in.

Here’s the bit that keeps me up at night, but in a good way ;-)

Audio spent twenty years making humans sound like machines. Noise floor stripped. Breaths tightened. Every retake invisible. The whole craft was removing the evidence that a fallible human was in the studio. Then the machines started producing that exact clean signal for free. So the polish is worth nothing, and the only proof of a human left is the stuff we cut. The cough. The ums and ahs. The guest talking over the host.

The stuff on the cutting-room floor is the proof of authenticity.

And audio has something text never had: a witness. You cannot prove a paragraph was typed by a person. But a podcast has a second human in it, and that human exists, has a diary, and can be asked.

I don’t have this resolved. The listener still wants the clean edit, so the product and the proof are different files. The witness works right up until the witness is a clone. “Human-narrated” is self-declared... nobody audits it, which is exactly where “organic” sat for a decade before the inspectors turned up. (For a studio it’s stranger still: the polish we sell is what erased the proof, and the proof we hold is what we were paid to remove.) Hmmmm.... How to resolve this?

And what are we doing about it?

Well, we’re listening. Not for the technology... for the names. A negative name is a leading indicator. It shows up small and boring, on a listing or a label, and a year later everyone can see what it was announcing. Horseless. Wireless. Human.

Watch the ghosts. They change sides before the news does.

Confusion precedes learning.

Let’s have an adventure.

P.S. The philosophers have a word for being haunted by what’s absent: hauntology. P.P.S. Sting and the Police got there first. Ghost in the Machine and Synchronicity are both Arthur Koestler book titles. Perhaps every name has a ghost in it? Even the ones on vinyl.

A while back, Tamara Oberholster (the Word Chef) reached out for a chat about podcasting. Now you may already know this, but I can talk on this particular subject ad nauseam (and often do) ;-) Well, Tamara humoured me and let me ramble on excitedly for longer than I probably should have. And then, she succinctly distilled it into a really useful article that appears in the latest GIBS acumen publication under the title “Does Your Business Need a Podcast?”

Now colour me biased, if you will, but I think long form spoken word content is essential for ensuring your context is out there in the wild. The days of word density (aka SEO) are sunsetting and Agentic search is very likely to be with us for some time.

When last did you ask Google for a list of links to choose from? I’m betting you asked Chat/Claude/Gemini and appreciated the personalised answer that took your context into account?

So the big question you should be asking yourself is…

“Who is telling the Agents OUR story?”

Anyway, let me not steal Tamara’s moment more than I already have…

There’s a lot of good content in here, though my personal recommendation is jumping straight to page 23 ;-)

Read and enjoy it here..
https://mags.contactmedia.co.za/acumen/56/

Anon

The radio silence has been a combination of me being busy with work - we’re doing so many audiobooks this year - it looks like it’s going to be a thing ;-) as well as being busy building amazing value-added services for our clients (check out SolidGold.co.za/plus) - yes, this Gen-Xer has been well-and-truly bitten by the vibe-coding-late-night-coffee-drinking-creating-crack! As an aside, coding work I did in December (that took days of sweat and frustration) is now mere side quests that take literally minutes to write - and are so much better. Anyhoo… that’s not the reason for this update :-)

The real reason is to let you know that the SA Podcast Awards are back. ta-da!

Now you may recall that many of our clients and podcasts featured in the inaugural awards in 2024? And did very nicely, including winning Podcast of the Year, 3 golds, 3 silvers and 4 bronzes.

This year, the scope has been updated and there are more and new categories and different criteria and and and… Too much for me to go into here, but easy enough for you to jump across to for a look-see sapodcastawards.co.za

If you are a Solid Gold client and are keen to enter your podcast, please reply below and we will cover your entry fees. Yip, there’s a code to type in when you enter that tells them you’re one of the Cool SG Kids, and we’ll pick up that tab.

Yes please! I want to enter my podcast

Click above, and we’ll reply with how to ensure you’re on our account :-)

Roll out that red carpet!!!

Chat soon

P.S. if you have an idea for a VAS that’s not already in Plus
do let me know so I can add it to my infinite backlog ;-)

“What worried me was whether he was going to kill me first, or eat me alive.”

That’s Harry Wolhuter. He’s an old man when he says it, remembering a night more than a hundred and twenty years ago. The recording is over sixty years old. And as far as anyone can tell it was never broadcast and never published. Then it disappeared, and it surfaced again only recently after I stumbled upon a LinkedIn post that mentioned its existence.

I first heard this story in primary school, on a tour to the Kruger National Park. A game ranger, attacked by a lion, and he lived. Years later I was working with my family in Jeppestown, driving up Wolhuter Street most days to get to Joburg Tyres, knowing exactly whose name was on the street. I never once imagined I’d hear him tell the story.

He does! The lions, the knife, the tree, the dog, and the four days it took to get him to a hospital. In his own voice, unhurried, in the way old men of a certain generation describe the worst night of their lives. And as if that’s not enough to make you press PLAY, Malcolm Gooding kindly stepped in to assist the narrative piece with his magical voice. ICYMI Malcolm is a real Boer War and wildlife buff (and olive farmer more recently).

I’m not going to spoil it for you. You can hear this legendary story for yourself. Did I mention it’s in his own words?! Yes, OK, I’m a little fanboyed out here and remain amazed that this recording exists at all, and that it ended up in our hands.

Joburg Tyres has been gone for years.
Wolhuter Street is still there.
And Harry’s knife, and the lion’s skin…? Listen to find out… ;-)

We loved making this. I hope it gets you too.

I’m a paying Blinkist subscriber and Solid Gold is a fairly large (and growing) Spotify for Authors user, so Blinkist’s and Spotify’s both landed in my inbox.

Two companies in the same business… getting books into your ears.

And they reached opposite conclusions about the same technology.

On May 21, at its Investor Day, Spotify told authors it was leaning into AI narration. Its new Audiobook Creation Tools use ElevenLabs voice models to turn a finished manuscript into a complete audiobook. The framing was abundance: a new door, a wider audience, discovery “through a conversation about exactly the kind of story you’re in the mood for.”

Blinkist went the other way. After two years of quietly shipping AI-narrated Blinks, it’s pulling the plug. “No AI-narration, no matter how polished, can deliver the same depth that a human narrator can,” the company wrote. New Blinks will be human-read. The old AI ones get a label, like a nutrition warning.

So which is it? Is AI narration the future of audio or a failed experiment? The honest answer, the actual state of this emerging nation, is that nobody knows yet, and the split isn’t random. It tracks what each company is selling.

Blinkist sells curation. You don’t go there for the book; you go for the fifteen-minute distillation of it, performed by someone who knows how to land an insight. The narrator isn’t reading the product. The narrator is part of the product. Strip the human out and you’re left with a robot reading the study notes. No wonder it felt hollow. Their whole pitch is that a person made choices on your behalf.

Spotify sells a marketplace. Its problem isn’t depth, it’s supply. Most self-published authors will never afford a studio and a voice actor, so their books don’t exist in audio at all. For them, an ElevenLabs read isn’t a downgrade from human narration. It’s the difference between an audiobook and no audiobook. AI doesn’t dilute the catalogue; it fills shelves that were empty.

Same technology, opposite verdicts, and each is right for its own economics. That’s worth sitting with, because the boldest takes on AI insist there’s a single answer coming. There isn’t. The technology is an input, and an input is only as good or bad as the thing it’s an input to.

A couple of things to watch.

First, the labels. Blinkist is going to mark its AI Blinks so listeners can choose. Spotify, notably, puts the review step on the author (you can fix pronunciation before publishing) but says less about whether the listener will know. Disclosure is becoming a differentiating battleground too. Quietly, “made by AI” is turning into information consumers expect to have.

Second, the quiet part. Blinkist tested AI narration for two years and only announced it when killing it. Spotify announced before launch: “specifics may change,” “closed beta,” “still ahead of us.” One company is doing damage control; the other is managing expectations. Read both letters again and you’ll notice neither is really about technology. They’re about trust, and who’s allowed to spend yours.

And the form says as much as the words. Both came by email, but that’s where they part ways. Blinkist’s email was the letter itself, with a photograph of the person who wrote it, the whole message delivered to me. Spotify’s was a nudge with a link (go read the announcement if you feel like it) pointing to a clinical web page published under no one’s name. The company defending the human touch came to me as a person. The one automating it sent a URL.

The comfortable story is that AI either wins everywhere or fails everywhere. The week of May 2026 says something more boring and more true: it depends. It depends on whether you’re selling the thing or selling the curation of the thing. Blinkist decided the human was the point. Spotify decided the human was the bottleneck. Both can be right. And watching a streaming giant and a niche specialist bet against each other this publicly is, frankly, a grab-the-popcorn moment.

From where we sit

Except we don’t get to just watch.

We run a studio that produces a lot of podcasts and audiobooks, and we live on both sides of that line every week.

Some jobs are purely functional: on-hold messaging, training-video narration, the budget work where nobody’s buying the voice, just the information. For those, we’ll often deploy an AI clone of a voice we already work with. The talent still gets paid (less, and without doing any fresh work), the turnaround collapses, and the listener loses nothing, because there was never a performance to lose. That’s Spotify’s logic, applied one booth at a time.

But a lot of what we do is author-read prescriptive non-fiction: business strategy, change management, the books where someone is asking you to do something differently. There, the voice isn’t decoration. It’s evidence. An author who reads their own book is staking their name on every sentence, and the listener hears it: this person believes what they wrote enough to say it out loud. You can’t clone that. The whole point is that it’s them. It’s table stakes. That’s Blinkist’s logic, and we’d take that bet every time the goal is trust rather than throughput.

So the question we ask before any project isn’t “human or AI?”
It’s… “what is this voice doing?”

Sometimes a voice is simply a delivery system for words. The information is the point, and the voice carries it from page to ear. When that’s the job, fidelity isn’t what you’re optimising for. Price and speed are. (A pleasant voice is a bonus, not the brief.) You want it good enough, fast, and cheap, and increasingly that’s AI: a voice clone turns a day in the booth into a few minutes at a greatly reduced rate. Nothing is lost, because nothing was being promised.

But sometimes the voice isn’t simply carrying the words. It’s carrying the person.

When an author reads their own prescriptive book, the message isn’t only what they say. It’s that they showed up to say it. The voice is the proof that someone stands behind the page. Clone it and you haven’t cut a corner; you’ve removed the thing the listener came for. An AI version of an author saying “trust me” is a recording of a promise nobody actually made.

That’s the whole rule, and it’s not complicated. A voice either delivers content or it delivers conviction. Spotify is solving for content. Blinkist remembered it was selling conviction. They were never in disagreement. They were answering different questions.

So before your next audiobook, ask the question we ask: what is this voice doing? Carrying the words, or carrying you? If you already know the answer, you’re most of the way there. If you’re not sure… that’s exactly the conversation we love.

#SoundAdvice #BeHeard

P.S. Yes, we help some of our authors clone their own voices for the budget work, and we put others behind the mic for days on end to read every word themselves. Both, on purpose. The art is knowing which book is which. ;-)

So we took the whole lot down and started over.

This time we placed them closer together, to make room for all the shows still to come.

It filled up faster than we expected - thanks to you!

Watch Callum bring the wall back to life:

While doing this, it was evident that the Singita cover art was just so stand-out beautiful we simply had to dedicate an entire separate wall to these outstanding images.

Now the fun part… can you spot YOUR cover art? :-)

As we approach out tenth anniversary, here’s to filling it up all over again!

Thank you, we really do appreciate your support.

#BeHeard

But notice what insight actually is. It isn’t just understanding something. It’s the moment several things you knew separately suddenly resolve into a new thing you now know. The penny dropping. The pattern emerging. I see what you mean. No, you don’t. You just connected some things you’d been carrying separately and synthesised some new knowledge.

Here’s something that’s been niggling lately… there’s no equivalent word for that same event when it arrives through your ears.

You’d think there’d be four more, one per sense? Arguably more than half the human experience is auditory. We were telling stories around fires for tens of thousands of years before anyone scratched the first letter onto the cave wall. The voice carries information the transcript can’t... hesitation, warmth, the catch before someone says the thing they didn’t want to say, the half-second of silence that means I am about to share deeply with you. Most of that does not survive the transcription trip into text.

And yet there’s no English word for the connections we make from listening.

So I’d like to propose one: insound.

insound (n.) — a connection made through listening; the moment when tone, pause, breath, or inflection reveals something the words alone didn’t say.

“Halfway through the interview, the insound landed: he wasn’t proud of the deal, he was relieved it was over.”

It’s the moment the guest’s careful answer connects with the nervous breath underneath it, and you realise the answer was rehearsed. It’s the warmth in someone’s voice when they talk about a colleague, set against the cool professionalism of the rest of the conversation, telling you who actually runs the team. It’s the catch in a CEO’s voice when she describes the company’s near-death moment three years ago, still not fully metabolised. It’s the absent enthusiasm in a brand spokesperson reading his own marketing copy, which tells you he doesn’t believe a word of it.

These aren’t content. They’re connections. They’re what your ear delivers that your eye never could.

The linguists have a name for this idea (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which argues that language shapes what we notice). I’d put it more bluntly:

the thing we don’t have a word for tends to be the thing we underrate.

Which is possibly why audio gets undervalued by people who aren’t integrating it. They don’t have a word for the bit that does the work. :-)

Next time you listen to an interview, or a podcast, or a voice note from someone you know well, pay attention to what’s connecting underneath the words. The bit where you know how they’re feeling before they tell you. The bit where you trust them, or don’t. The bit where the pause…

…did more work than the answer.

That’s the insound.

Podcasts can deliver insights and insounds. Transcripts can only deliver one.

What insounds have you been missing?

Let’s have an adventure.

Solid Gold Podcasts & Audiobooks creates audio to help you #BeHeard, and apparently we make up words for it too.

It is a serious document.

If your business is selling your audience to advertisers... read it twice.

Here’s the catch. Almost none of you following this Substack are doing that.

What Reuters actually found

Eduardo Suárez, Reuters’ Director of Editorial, distilled the report into five findings in the email that announced it. His phrase for what is happening is “uneven”: some publishers pivoting to video wholesale, others converting only chat formats, others still doubling down on audio investigations.

The five findings, briefly:

• a shift from narrative series to conversational shows,

• a platform-led push to video,

• younger audiences who prefer to watch,

• publishers embracing video cautiously, and

• business models moving beyond advertising into hybrid revenue.

All five are true.
All five are true… of media podcasts.

What it reveals, what it hides

There’s an old line about statistics being like bikinis: what they reveal is interesting, what they hide is crucial. The Reuters report is the same shape. What it reveals is true. What it hides is the question that matters most for your podcast:

which kind of podcast are you actually running?

The atlas, and the number it does not name

The Reuters report is a beautifully made atlas. It maps millions of listeners across thirteen publishers in three countries.

But first, a quick word on Kevin Kelly. He co-founded Wired magazine in 1993 and has been a few years ahead of the rest of us ever since. He is also one of the most quoted voices in Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans, which gives you a sense of the company he keeps. In 2008, Kelly published a post on his kk.org blog called 1,000 True Fans.

The argument was beautifully simple. A creator does not need millions of fans, just a thousand who care enough to buy anything they make. Most of Substack, Patreon, and a fair chunk of Ferriss’s own playbook (and yip, this Substack too) are built on that premise.

While Kelly was right about a thousand, most of you do not need a thousand…
you need fifteen.

That sentence is the whole post. (The rest is just showing the working.)

Three kinds of podcast

The Hobby Podcast is a labour of love. Irregular, experimental, no commercial pressure. The metric of success is “am I having fun?”

The Media Podcast, where the audience is the product and the sponsor/advertiser is the customer. Scale matters in different shapes: YouTube algorithms and ad density for some, the cultural reach of a single investigation for others. Serial sits in this lane. So does Sweet Bobby. So does Deon’s My Only Story. This is the model the Reuters report describes in close, careful detail.

The Business Influence Podcast where the audience is your customer. You are not building a media business. You are building credibility, opening doors, warming the right relationships, having the right conversations with the right fifteen people at the right time. This is the model most of our clients are running. It is also the model almost no widely-read podcast research is written for. (Check out Hendrik Baird’s work as he undertakes a PhD on podcasts which is sure to shine more light on this.)

A critical mis-step for a Business Influence podcast is reading Media Podcast advice and acting on it.

A filter for everything you read

So when the Reuters report lands in your inbox, or any other piece of podcast research, run it through three questions…

1. Whose podcast is this advice for? If the source is talking about download charts, ad rates, or YouTube algorithm shifts, you are reading Media advice. If the source is talking about the right meeting, the right room, the right introduction, you are reading something closer to your model.

2. What translates? Plenty. The phrase the report leans on most is parasocial bond: the way a regular listener feels like they know Roman Mars, or Steven Bartlett, or Tim Ferriss, even though those hosts have no idea any one listener exists. (Not creepy. Just how humans respond to a trusted voice in their ear, going back to the radio era and probably to the storyteller around the fire.) That bond is real for Joe Rogan, and it is also real for the CEO interviewing six clients in the podcast studio. So is the discipline of treating one good story as a property that earns its keep multiple ways. So is the shift from slow turnaround to reactive content. All of that crosses over cleanly.

3. What will hurt my podcast if I copy it? Chasing download numbers will hurt you. Paywalling a small B2B audience will hurt you. Increasing ad density will hurt you. Building for the YouTube algorithm will hurt you. Each of these is a sensible answer to a Media Podcast question that you are not asking.

Norway is your tell

If you want to find your closest analogue inside the Reuters research, look at the Norway sections. Smaller market, public broadcaster dominance, slower video adoption, audiences that still default to audio for news. Bonnier News’ Martin Jönsson is admirably honest about the position: “we don’t really understand video podcasting yet.”

That honesty travels much better than a US-style “video or die” pivot. Reuters itself argues, gently, that the smaller the market, the less the headlong shift makes economic sense. South Africa is small. Your patch inside South Africa is smaller still.

Who are your fifteen?

The Reuters report is a detailed atlas of news publishing. You can read it. Underline it. Argue with it. Suárez calls the shift it describes “uneven”, and he is right. The deeper unevenness, the one his report is not in a position to reach, is the one between Reuters’ world and yours.

Or put the report down... and ask the question Newman and Suárez are not in a position to answer for you.

Who are your fifteen?

Most of you already know the answer. Your fifteen are the people whose attention compounds. The procurement director who has heard you describe a problem the same way three times and is starting to think you might be the person to solve it. The journalist who keeps your number for the days she needs an actual quote, not a press release. The non-executive director who said did you hear what so-and-so said on the podcast? over coffee on a Tuesday. The dozen other people who matter, who you can probably name on the back of an envelope.

Do not get distracted by promises of tricks and hacks that don’t even apply to your podcast

You do not need an atlas. You need a list.

Want help making your list?

If your podcast is a Business Influence podcast (and if you are reading this, it almost certainly is), the Solid Gold Podcast Masterclass is for you. One day. Six chairs. Adéle de la Reÿ and me. You leave with a strategy that is mapped to your business, a sixty-second trailer recorded on the day (proper studio mics, the lot), an episode blueprint, and a 30-day rollout plan with names against tasks.

Drop us a mail at masterclass@solidgold.co.za with the subject line “Map my podcast” and we will send you the date and the brief.

Let’s have an adventure.

Sources:

Newman, N. (2026). The Changing Shape and New Economics of News Podcasting. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Suárez, E. (2026). Reuters Institute editorial summary email, 9 May 2026.

Kelly, K. (2008). 1,000 True Fans. The Technium. (Revisited version reprinted in Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans, 2016.)

She also, at one memorable moment, says “No shit, Sherlock.”

We’ll get back to that.

When did you last use (or trust) Google’s first page?

Be honest. For most of us (and I’d wager you in particular, if you’re the sort of person who reads pieces like this), the default has quietly shifted. The first move is now ChatGPT, or Claude, or Perplexity. And it’s entirely possible there’s a new model du jour between me writing and publishing this. Google still gets a look-in for “restaurants near me” and “padel court hours.” For everything else, the questions with nuance, the ones that matter, you’re talking to a model.

So is everyone else. Including the people deciding whether to do business with you.

The conversation you’re not in

Try this…

Open your preferred model and ask it about your company…

Read the answer carefully…

Notice what’s there…

Notice, more importantly, what isn’t there, what’s slightly wrong, and what tone the model has settled on.

Someone wrote that. It just wasn’t you.

The model assembled its answer from whatever was lying around: a competitor’s better-positioned blog, a Hellopeter complaint from a customer who didn’t get their refund in 2021, a Reddit thread where your company name was misspelled, the press release your PR agency wrote when you launched a product you’ve since discontinued. All of it goes in. All of it! And it shapes what gets said about you when a prospect, a journalist, an investor, or a future hire types your name into the box.

You’re being described by strangers, in rooms you’ll never enter, to audiences you’ll never meet. And the description sticks.

SEO won’t save you

For twenty-odd years, the game was density. Pack your page with the right words, in the right places (and even the right font sizes), often enough, and Google would float your blue link above the other blue links. That was the craft.

It was a craft built for a specific reader: a human typing keywords, scanning a list, picking one. That reader is leaving. The new one asks a question in plain English and reads a single synthesised answer. There are no blue links to climb above. The only question is whether your business gets mentioned at all, and whether what gets said is what you’d choose to say.

Density doesn’t help here!
The model isn’t counting words. It’s working out who has the context.

That’s the shift worth pausing on. The old game was content: produce more of it, stuff the right keywords in, hope the algorithm rewards the volume.

The new game is context: who actually understands the territory, who can speak to the nuance, who’s been in the room.

Content can be manufactured. Context has to be lived. And the difference between the two is exactly what the models are now sophisticated enough to detect.

What it looks like when you win

Picture the version of this where it’s gone right.

A prospect asks ChatGPT about your industry. Your business comes up by name, with a credible summary of what you do and why you’re worth a look, drawn in part from things your own people have actually said. A journalist researching a story gets a quote that sounds like you because, well, it is you. A potential hire forms an impression of your culture that matches the lived experience. An analyst building a market report finds your point of view well-represented and well-articulated, because (again) you put it there.

The models become a distribution channel that runs while you sleep. Your expertise compounds. Your reputation gets built by the same machinery that’s currently eroding it.

That’s the prize. Now the question is how you get there.

You already have what the models want

Somewhere in your business, probably in more than one head, there’s an enormous amount of expertise. Years of it. Pattern recognition, war stories, frameworks, the unwritten rules of how your industry actually works. The kind of knowledge that takes decades to acquire and minutes of conversation to demonstrate.

The models are ravenous for exactly this. Not marketing copy. Not press releases. The real stuff: substantive, plain-spoken, opinionated, voiced by people who know what they’re talking about. They want it consistently. They want it in depth. They want to recognise the source.

Most businesses haven’t worked out how to get it out of the heads and onto the internet at any meaningful scale. Writing is slow. Experts are busy. A blog post takes a week and produces 800 words.

The unfair advantage

Now do the maths.

A blog post: a week of effort, 800 words.
A podcast: an hour of conversation, 8,000 words.

Same expert. Same expertise. Ten times the output for a tenth of the friction.

If you’re keeping tally, that’s not a mere marginal improvement, it’s two orders of magnitude of leverage. That’s a different category of leverage on the knowledge already sitting in your people’s heads. You’re not asking them to write more. You’re asking them to talk, which is what they were going to do anyway, in meetings and on calls and over coffee, except this time someone hits record.

Do it quarterly and you’ve laid down a foundation. Do it monthly and the models start to recognise you. Do it weekly and you’ve out-positioned every competitor in your sector. Not by working harder. By capturing the expertise that’s already happening in conversations, meetings, and corridor chats, and pointing it at a microphone instead of letting it evaporate.

Get those conversations transcribed, sitting on a domain you control, marked up so the models can find them, and you’ve quietly become the authority in the room. The next time someone asks an LLM about your industry, the model has more of your context to draw on than anyone else’s. It cites you. It quotes you. It frames the answer around your point of view.

8,000 easy words of context beats 800 hard words of content.
No shit, Sherlock.

You’re already doing the written half

You are, at this moment, reading this on Substack. Which is also being indexed, scraped, and fed to the same hungry models. That’s not an accident. It’s the written-word version of the same play. Long-form, in a recognisable voice, on a platform crawlers like, published consistently enough (well, I try) that the models start to know who’s talking.

One detail worth borrowing: this Substack lives at substack.solidgold.co.za, not on the default solidgold.substack.com URL. Our own subdomain CNAME, ten minutes of DNS work. Same words, same effort, same Substack, but every piece builds our domain reputation instead of theirs.

If you’ve made it this far down, you already understand the written half of the argument. The audio half is the same argument with a microphone, and significantly more throughput per hour of effort.

The choice

The beast is being fed either way. Right now, today, while you’re reading this, someone is asking a model about your industry, your competitors, possibly even you. The model is answering. The answer is being assembled from whatever was lying around when the crawlers came through.

The only question is whose words it reaches for next.

Feed it, Seymour. Or don’t. The plant gets bigger either way.

Solid Gold makes corporate podcasts for businesses that have something worth saying and would prefer the LLMs heard it from them first.

They don’t detect lies.

They detect effort. Specifically, the physiological effort of suppression: elevated heart rate, changed breathing, a measurable tension in the skin. The machine has no idea whether you’re telling the truth or not. It only knows you’re working hard at something.

Which is why the two groups who most reliably beat polygraph tests are sociopaths (who feel nothing and therefore suppress nothing) and people who are simply… telling the truth (they have nothing to suppress in the first place).

The rest of us? The machine catches us every time.

Now, a microphone isn’t a polygraph.

But a listener is.

We don’t consciously process what gives a speaker away. We can’t always name it. But we feel it, the slight flatness when the talking point kicks in, the energy that drops between the genuine answer and the rehearsed one, the breath before the sentence that was prepared in a meeting three days ago.

Something in us… something very old in our lizard brains (Gladwell called it thin-slicing) wired over hundreds of thousands of years of reading the humans around us… registers the gap between what someone is saying and what they actually believe. We may not call it out. But we trust less. We start scrolling. We don’t book the call.

The mic doesn’t judge. It just reveals.

Perhaps this matters more right now than it ever has.

AI has made written content cheap, fluent, and almost impossible to distinguish from the real thing. The authenticity signal that text once carried, the proof that a human being actually thought this, felt this, meant this, has been quietly (and rapidly) eroded. Even genuinely human writing now gets read with a low hum of suspicion.

Did they actually write this? Do they actually believe it?

The organisational response, almost universally, has been to add more polish. More approval layers. More message discipline. Communications that have been through Legal, through Comms, through SMEs, through three rounds of edits that sand off every rough edge, every personal aside, every sign of the actual human being who started writing it.

The result is text that is technically correct, appropriately on-message, and almost entirely devoid of any personality of the person who signed it.

And you expect staff to be excited by this message?

The more you polish, the more sterile the output.

So, back to my question...

How do you beat a lie detector?
Don’t lie.

The corollary for spoken word is as simple, and just as uncomfortable: the only reliable way to sound authentic is to actually be the thing.

Not perform it.
Not approximate it.
Be it.

This is not a hack. This is not a technique. There’s no workshop that fixes it (well… there are workshops that help, and we run one, but that’s a different post). The root of it is a decision. A decision to stop performing leadership and start practising it. To stop reading the approved message and start saying what you actually think. To show up to the microphone with something real to say, and then… say it.

Imperfectly. Occasionally slowly. Sometimes with a pause that goes half a second longer than a media trainer would recommend.

Completely, recognisably, unmistakably — you.

Here’s what that unlocks.

When a leader stops performing and starts talking, something shifts in the listener. Not dramatically. Subtly. A quiet recalibration. Oh. This person actually believes this. That’s not nothing. In an environment where everything sounds like everything else, where every quarterly update, every town hall, every internal comms piece reads like it was written by the same AI that wrote everyone else’s, the sound of a real person thinking in real time is remarkable, refreshing, and captivating.

Not because it’s polished. Because it isn’t.

A private podcast. A CEO, a microphone, fifteen minutes, once a month. Not scripted (but guided). Not committee-approved. Just the leader, talking to their people, about the thing that actually matters to them right now. That’s not a new idea dressed in technology. It’s the oldest leadership idea there is, finally finding its way back.

(We’ve covered that in another article - Caesar didn’t send a newsletter.)

The fear, of course, is the unscripted moment that becomes a headline. The off-message comment. The admission that reveals more than the board wanted revealed.

That fear is real. And it’s worth taking seriously.

But consider what the alternative is costing you. Engagement scores that don’t move. Town halls where the questions are pre-submitted and carefully curated. A widening distance between the people setting direction and the people being asked to follow it.

Gallup has been saying since the late 1990s that people don’t leave organisations, they leave managers. I’d go further: they leave leaders they cannot hear, see, or feel any connection to.

Voice closes that gap faster than any other medium. Not because it’s sophisticated. Because it’s human.

A key difference with your own podcast is that the studio experience is non-adversarial.

Nobody is after any ‘gotcha’ moment or sensationalist sound bite they’re hoping will go viral. Everyone in the studio is working together to help you get your message captured and shared.

At Solid Gold, we’ve spent over three decades helping people find their voice on a microphone and then get out of their own way long enough to actually use it. (Solid Gold started in 1993, Shannon was born in 1994, and she, Callum, and Brennan have all had turns in front of and behind the mic along the way. I remember little people in the voice booth doing in-store ads for Edgars, Jet, and Sales House still wearing school uniforms.)

It turns out the hardest part isn’t the technical stuff (though yes, please don’t record in your kitchen). The hardest part is the moment just before you press record, when every instinct tells you to be careful, be polished, be safe.

That moment is the polygraph.

What you do next is the test.

If you’re ready to stop performing and start being heard, really #BeHeard, drop us a mail. Let’s have an adventure.

* Written with AI assistance. But then, you knew that already. ;-)

Sun City. South Africa’s Temu Las Vegas. A place built on the promise that luck is random, the odds are fixed, and the house always wins.

Player didn’t get the gig because he got lucky. He got it because decades of relentless work had made him the only call worth making. His reputation walked through the door before he did.

Frank Sinatra played the same property. Different stage. Different outcome.

There are four kinds of luck. And once you know the difference, you’ll never think about luck (or your business strategy) the same way again.

The problem with luck

We’ve all met the business owner who’s waiting for their moment. The MVP is ready. The pitch deck is polished. The website is live. Now they just need a break… the right introduction, the right timing, the right person to notice them.

They’re not lazy. They’re not untalented. They’re just playing luck wrong.

Because luck isn’t one thing. Naval Ravikant, entrepreneur, investor, philosopher of the uncomfortably practical, broke it down into four distinct types.

Understanding the 4 kinds of luck changes what you do on Monday morning.

Let’s call it the FAAR Framework.

Fortune

You didn’t choose to be in business during the most connected, most documented, most accessible era in human history.

Moonshots are being built in garages. AI is doing in seconds what (only weeks ago) took ‘meat machines’ months. Breakthroughs in health, energy, education and finance are landing faster than most boardrooms can process them. Capital is more mobile than it’s ever been. Talent can work from anywhere. Knowledge that once lived behind expensive degrees now lives in a search bar.

And in the middle of all of that, mostly under-noticed, sits podcasting. A medium where any business can publish its thinking, its conversations, its expertise, directly into the ears of exactly the people it wants to reach. For cents.

You didn’t build that infrastructure. You just woke up inside it.

That’s Fortune. It’s ambient. It’s already in play. It doesn’t reward gratitude or punish ingratitude. It just… is.

Acknowledge it, don’t worship it, and move on.

The businesses waiting for more Fortune (the lucky break, the viral moment, the right person stumbling across them) are outsourcing their strategy to the universe. The universe is notoriously fickle in this regard.

Action

This is where luck starts to respond to human behaviour.

Gary Player understood this better than almost anyone. He didn’t just practise harder than his competitors, he showed up everywhere. More tournaments, more countries, more rounds, more conversations than any golfer of his era. The Black Knight was generating surface area. Creating collisions. Stirring the pot.

Action luck is what happens when you’re in motion.

You’re not chasing a specific outcome. You’re generating enough presence that outcomes start finding you.

The businesses that win at Action luck aren’t necessarily the most talented. They’re the most present. They make more calls, attend more events, initiate more conversations, create more touchpoints. Each one is a small probability. Enough small probabilities, compounding over time, stop feeling like luck at all.

Awareness

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Awareness luck is the ability to see a lucky break when it arrives, before anyone else does. This isn’t a personality trait. It’s earned. It comes from spending enough time inside a field that you develop a sensitivity to its patterns, its rhythms, its quirks.

Two people can be in the same room, hear the same conversation, and leave with completely different takeaways. One hears small talk. The other hears an opportunity nobody has named yet.

That second person has Awareness luck.

They’ve put in enough hours that the signal is louder for them than the noise.

This is why genuine expertise compounds in ways that are hard to explain to people still early in their careers. It’s not just that you know more. It’s that you notice more. And noticing (at the right moment) is worth an enormous amount.

Reputation

This is the strangest kind of luck. And for businesses willing to play a longer game, it’s the most powerful.

Reputation luck is when luck starts coming to you.

Not because you got fortunate. Not because you were hustling in the right direction. Not even because you spotted something others missed. But because of who you’ve become and what you’re known for. Opportunities arrive that may never be available to anyone else.

Naval’s example is vivid: imagine you’re the best deep-sea diver in the world. Someone discovers a sunken treasure ship they can’t reach. Their luck just became your luck, because they have no choice but to come to you. You didn’t find the ship. You didn’t even know it existed. But your reputation made their luck your luck.

Gary Player at Sun City is that deep-sea diver. Sol Kerzner didn’t call anyone else.

Reputation luck doesn’t happen fast. It’s the accumulated weight of everything you’ve done publicly, consistently, over time. But once it starts working, it’s nearly impossible to replicate quickly, which makes it one of the few genuine competitive moats left.

So where does a podcast fit?

Here’s what most businesses miss about podcasting.

They think of it as a media play. Build an audience. Monetise attention. Become a media company. And yes, Frank Sinatra sang Luck Be a Lady in Guys and Dolls, 1950. (OK Boomer.) But this isn’t about becoming the next Rogan. That’s a different game entirely.

The more powerful use of a podcast, and the one we work on at Solid Gold every day, is as a deliberate instrument inside your existing business plan. Not content for content’s sake. Perhaps see it as an adrenaline injection that helps you manifest what you’re already trying to achieve: better, cheaper, differently, easier, faster. (More on that framework here.)

When you look at it through the FAAR lens, a well-deployed podcast is one of the few tools that operates across all four luck types simultaneously.

Fortune: the infrastructure already exists. Podcasts are accessible, searchable, shareable. You woke up in a world where this medium works and people are already listening. That table is set. You just need to sit down.

Action: every episode is motion. Every guest conversation is a collision that wouldn’t otherwise have happened. A podcast gives you a legitimate, low-friction reason to initiate conversations that would be awkward to request any other way. “May I have a conversation with you on our podcast?” gets a yes far more often than “Can I have 30 minutes of your time?” Same conversation. Different door. More doors.

Awareness: run a podcast inside your industry for 18 months and you will hear things your competitors won’t. Not because you’re smarter. Because you’re having deeper, more focused conversations with the people who actually know what’s coming. Patterns emerge. Opportunities surface in conversation before they surface anywhere else. You develop the sensitivity that Awareness luck requires.

Reputation: this is where it lands hardest. A podcast becomes your proof of work. Not a claim about your expertise. Evidence of it. Accumulated, public, searchable, permanent. The kind of reputation that doesn’t chase luck down the street, it stands still and lets luck find it.

The closer

Frank Sinatra was pleading when he sang it. Luck as something capricious, beautiful, impossible to hold, a lady who might stay or might leave depending on her mood.

Most businesses are still in that relationship with luck. Hoping she’ll be kind tonight.

The FAAR Framework suggests a different question entirely.

Not would luck be a lady tonight, but what are you building that makes you worth her attention?

Sky Masterson was hoping luck would stay.

You’re building something luck can’t ignore.

Solid Gold Podcasts and Audiobooks helps businesses use podcasting as a strategic tool, not just a content channel. If you’re curious what that looks like in practice, let’s talk.

It was overthinking.

Analysis paralysis.

The blank page.

The internal monologue that goes: what should it sound like, who’s the audience, what’s the format, what if it’s not good enough, what if nobody listens, what if—

Stop. We need to talk.

When you look at what podcasting has become, Rogan, Cooper, Bartlett, Robbins, Huberman, Galloway, Ferriss — it’s easy to feel like the table is already set and there’s no seat left for you. These are cultural phenomena with production budgets, dedicated teams, and years of compounding audience growth behind them.

Here’s what they all have in common: they started somewhere. Usually badly. Always imperfectly.

“Don’t let good get in the way of done.”

Nobody knows who said it first. Everybody knows it’s true.

The question that changes everything

Before you touch a microphone, you need to answer one question honestly:

Is your podcast a media offering, or a strategic communications tool?

These are not the same thing, and confusing them is where most businesses go wrong.

A media podcast is a business in itself. You’re building an audience that you eventually monetise - through advertising, sponsorship, or subscription. The metrics that matter are audience size, segmentation, and engagement rates. Everything is optimised around CPM - cost per thousand (milia is Latin for thousand) listeners. You will become obsessed with the numbers, because the numbers are the product.

This is a legitimate model. It’s also not what most businesses actually need.

Most of our clients already have a business and a business plan. They are not looking to start a new media company. What they want - what they really want - is to execute their existing plan more effectively. To reach the right people, deepen the right relationships, demonstrate the right expertise, and move the right conversations forward.

For these businesses, a podcast isn’t a media play. It’s an adrenaline injection… a strategic tool that makes things happen better, cheaper, differently, easier, or faster than they would without it.

The microphone is in service of the business plan. Not the other way around.

Why format paralysis is a trap

Here’s where the overthinking really takes hold.

You know you need to speak to different people at different stages of their journey with you. A prospect has different questions to a new client. A new client has different needs to a long-term partner. Someone considering your category for the first time needs something completely different to someone who’s already decided and just needs to choose between you and a competitor.

No single podcast format serves all of these people. And that realisation - the moment you understand the multiplicity of what you need to communicate - is exactly where most businesses grind to a halt.

How do we serve all these different conversations without a consistent format?

The answer is: you don’t need a consistent format. You need a clear purpose for each episode. And you need to start.

Four frameworks that make starting easy

These aren’t formats. They’re lenses. Ways of asking “what is this episode actually for?” before you hit record. Between them, they cover almost every communication need a business has.

1) FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions you answer every single day. In emails. In meetings. On calls. In WhatsApps at 9pm from clients who should probably know this by now.

Make a podcast episode that answers each one.

Put it on your FAQ page. Link to it in your support emails. Send it to the next person who asks. The episode does the work so you don’t have to — repeatedly, consistently, at scale, without you in the room.

FAQ episodes can be solo or conversational, long or short. What matters is that they’re specific. One question, one answer, done.

2) It Depends

A reliable signal that you should be making a podcast episode is when the answer to a question begins with “it depends.”

“How much life insurance do I need?” It depends.
“Should I buy a diesel or electric truck?” It depends.
“Is now a good time to expand?” It depends.

These episodes don’t set out to answer the question. They set out to reveal the factors, the considerations, the decision-making process that should inform the answer. They demonstrate that you understand the complexity — and that you’re the right person to navigate it with your client.

These episodes usually involve one or more guests, and the conversation naturally leads wherever the expertise takes it.

3) Deep Dive

This is the one that sounds most like your favourite business podcast. You bring in a guest, go deep on their area of expertise, and let the conversation demonstrate knowledge, competence, and credibility in a corner of your industry.

The unspoken message to the listener: you can trust us. We know this world. We’ve got this.

Deep dives are not about explaining everything to everyone. They’re about going further than anyone expects, on a topic that matters to a very specific person.

Stop trying to make episodes that everyone will listen to.

That’s the media model’s job. Your job is the opposite. Make episodes that one specific person needs, and make them exactly right for that person. Narrow the niche. Then narrow it again. The more specific the episode, the more valuable it is to the exact person it’s for.

4) AMA: Ask Me Anything

An AMA episode is one of the most efficient formats in podcasting. Take three to five questions (from emails, social comments, or voice notes from listeners) and answer them briefly and directly. Bring in co-host specialists to help answer these too if they’re around.

These are not deep dives. They’re not comprehensive. They’re conversational, accessible, and fast. They demonstrate responsiveness, personality, expertise, and culture all at once.

They also do something quietly useful: a question that deserves a short answer in an AMA will often reveal that it deserves a much longer answer in a Deep Dive. AMAs are a content pipeline in disguise.

In nine out of ten cases we’ll recommend you start your podcast with an AMA episode. The tenth time, we’ll think about it for a while — and then recommend you start with an AMA episode.*

Start. Just start.

The frameworks above exist for one reason: to give you something to push against. You cannot iterate from a blank page. But you can iterate from a rough first episode. And then a slightly better second one. And then a third one where you finally find your voice and wonder what you were so worried about.

The biggest podcasts in the world are not better than yours because they were born perfect. They’re bigger because they started earlier and kept going.

Your move.

Solid Gold Podcasts & Audiobooks has been helping businesses find their voice — and use it strategically — for nearly a decade. If you’re ready to start, let’s talk.

* With apologies to Darrel Dawson for repurposing his golf advice on when to chip and when to putt.

there was a voice.

For most of human history, leadership was voice. The chief who addressed the tribe at dawn. The general who walked the line before battle. The elder whose stories carried the values of the community forward through generations. You didn’t follow someone because of their written communications strategy. You followed them because you had heard them, and something in what you heard made you believe.

Writing, in the arc of our 200k-year history as sapiens, is a very recent discovery. And there is growing evidence that it is failing as an effective leadership tool.

Not because leaders lack intelligence or intention. Most of the CEOs and executives I encounter are thoughtful, driven people with a genuine story to tell and a real desire to bring their teams with them on the journey.

But somewhere between that genuine impulse and the published internal communication, something gets lost.

It goes through ‘legal’. Through ‘comms’. Through ‘SMEs’. Through a round of edits that sand off every rough edge and personal aside until what remains is technically correct, appropriately on-message, and almost entirely devoid of the person’s… personality.

Your staff read it. They note the content. And they feel (without necessarily being able to articulate why) slightly more distant from their leader than they were before.

Now layer on what is happening in the broader communications environment.

Artificial intelligence has become extraordinarily capable at producing written content. Fluent, structured, professional written content. The kind that passes every grammar check and hits every key message and could have been written by... anyone. Or no one.

The result is a landscape where text has begun to lose its authenticity signal entirely. Where even genuinely human writing is viewed with low-level suspicion. Where the question did they actually write this? now hovers, uninvited, over almost every piece of corporate communication.

In this environment, the human voice is not simply preferable.

It is irreplaceable.

There is something in the voice that no language model (currently? yet?) replicates convincingly, and that your staff, consciously or not, are listening for.

The weight a speaker gives to a particular word. The slight change in register when they move from reporting facts to expressing conviction. The pause before they say something that’s genuinely important to them. These are not performance flourishes. They are the acoustic signature of a real human being, thinking in real time, trusting you enough to speak without a safety net.

That trust, extended by a leader to their people, is returned many times over.

It is, if you’ll forgive a slightly grand claim, how human communities have always functioned at their best. The voice as truth. The act of speaking… an act of commitment.

A private podcast: the CEO, a microphone, fifteen minutes, once a week/month - is not a new idea dressed in modern technology. (Remind me to one day ask the team behind Red Cap Radio to share their origin story - it’s not what you imagine.)

This is the oldest leadership idea, finally finding its way back.

To the internal comms professionals reading this: I understand your hesitation.

Getting calendar time is hard. Keeping your principal on-message without stripping out their personality is harder. And the fear that an unscripted moment becomes a headline is real, even in a private feed.

But consider what the alternative is costing you.

Engagement scores that don’t move. Town halls where questions are pre-submitted and carefully curated. A widening distance between the people setting direction and the people being asked to follow it. Staff who are professionally compliant and personally disconnected.

The research is consistent on this: people don’t leave organisations. They leave leaders - especially leaders they cannot see, hear, or feel any connection to.

Voice closes that gap faster than any other medium. Not because it is sophisticated, but because it is human. And humans are wired, after hundreds of thousands of years of living in community, to respond to it.

At Solid Gold, we have spent decades working with voices. And years (almost 10 now) making podcasts.

We are not here to automate your communications or to replace human judgment with machine efficiency. We are here because we believe the human voice is worth protecting. Worth amplifying. Worth treating as the strategic asset it has always been.

In a noisy, anxious, AI-saturated communications landscape, that is what we offer.

A safe place for the human voice to #BeHeard.