I do a podcast. I don’t talk in it.
35 episodes. Zero words spoken. My clone breathes better than I do.
I’m obsessed with podcasts. Like, obsessed obsessed. Most podcast addicts at least have a dog to justify the habit. I don’t have a dog. I don’t even walk. Bad back. I just consume other people’s conversations horizontally, like a podcast sommelier with a herniated disc. Five hours a day, earbuds in, lying on my couch, listening to people talk about streaming, tech, geopolitics, whatever.
So naturally, when I launched Streaming Radar, I wanted a podcast to go with it. Except I didn’t set up a mic and talk. I write every word, feed it to ElevenLabs, and publish a show where my cloned voice says things I never actually said out loud. About thirty-five episodes in now, covering everything from sports rights wars to YouTube eating TV to Nollywood reshaping African streaming. And before you judge me (okay, actually, go ahead and judge me, it’s objectively a weird thing to do) let me walk you through how this happened and why it’s become something I think about more than I probably should.
This isn’t my first podcast life. Before Streaming Radar, I co-hosted a show called On va taper dedans with my friend Florian. We debriefed Top Chef. The real one. The French one. The one with actual chefs who trained for years, not whatever the international versions are doing, but that’s a different rant.
Brick and mortar podcasting. We’d both bought the same mic to make sure our voices sounded consistent. That level of commitment, for a show that paid us exactly zero euros. I’d edit alone on Audacity, which if you’ve never used it, looks like the steampunk version of an Airbus cockpit. Long Discord conversations about titles and cover art. The recording was the fun part. Everything around it was a tax.
Toward the end, in 2023, we started poking at DALL-E for covers and ChatGPT for titles. Even back then, back when ChatGPT was basically a sympathetic mean girl who hallucinated half the time, the time savings were noticeable. Forty-five minutes of title debates became five minutes of “yeah, option three works, ship it.”
Two years later: one guy at his desk, generating thirty-five episodes without ever opening his mouth. I went from artisanal to industrial and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. (I’d spent years before that thinking about podcast mechanics as the first employee and CTO at Majelan, a French podcast platform, and now I’m building Podvore, because apparently I’m not done with podcasting.)
The first Streaming Radar episodes were awful. Flat, robotic, uncanny valley. Every sentence sounded like I was reading a press release at gunpoint. My real voice is all over the place. I speed up when I’m excited, I trail off mid-thought, I start a sentence and fifteen minutes later I’m still in it, adding clauses like a man who’s physically incapable of finding a full stop. The clone did none of that. It just... delivered text.
I didn’t care that much, honestly. I was experimenting. That’s the whole point.
Some technical context, since people always ask: I use ElevenLabs v2. The v3 model is objectively better (more natural emotions, better pacing) except it destroys my cloned voice. It doesn’t sound like me anymore. I tried it twice, went back to v2, and decided I’d rather adapt my writing than lose my voice to a better engine. As for the cloning itself, it was absurdly easy, but only because I had three years of podcast recordings sitting on a hard drive. Ten minutes of clean audio, upload, done. The whole thing costs about €200 a year, which is nothing, though to be fair, I’m the undisputed king of negative ROI. That’s not actually my nickname in the industry. Nobody in the industry has a nickname for me. But if they did, that would be it.
The surprise, though: the problem wasn’t really ElevenLabs. The problem was me. My writing. When you write something that’s going to be read, you write one way. When you write something that’s going to be heard, you need to write in a fundamentally different way, and I didn’t know how to do that yet. My first scripts were newsletter paragraphs. Dense. Packed with subordinate clauses and parenthetical thoughts and dashes everywhere. Basically exactly how I’m writing right now, which works on a page but sounds insane when a synthetic voice tries to speak it. Nobody talks like that. Not even me, and I talk like someone who’s permanently mid-digression.
So over nine months, two things happened in parallel. I learned to write for voice: shorter sentences, more breath room (literally), more conversational rhythm, less information density per sentence. And ElevenLabs got dramatically better. Like, weirdly better. The pacing improved. The intonation became less monotone.
The exact moment I knew something had shifted was in November. I was listening back to a new episode and I heard myself (well, “myself”) breathe between two sentences. Not a glitch or an artifact. A natural pause, the kind a real person takes when they’re about to change topics.
Hilarious, because in real life, I don’t breathe. I mean obviously I breathe, I’m alive, but when I talk I’m the kind of person who delivers an entire paragraph worth of thought on a single breath and then gasps like I just surfaced from a pool. My clone breathes more naturally than I do. My artificial voice has better vocal hygiene than my actual voice. Make of that what you will.
So I did what any reasonable person would do: I pushed further. I sent a voice note to Florian, my former co-host on OVTD. The pitch: what if we each record a five-minute debrief of the latest Top Chef episode, clone our voices, and then let two AI versions of us debate the episode for fifteen minutes? Completely AI-piloted. Top Chef, fully generated. I thought it was hilarious.
Florian’s response was instant and perfect. He laughed, said sure, it would be funny, and then explained why he’d never actually do it. The thing that makes OVTD work is the spontaneity. The dumb jokes. The terrible puns. “AI will never, ever make couscous nazi jokes,” he said. And he’s right. For context, that’s our running bit about people who insist there’s only one sacred way to make couscous and any deviation is heresy, a riff on the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. It’s the sort of absurd thing that happens when two friends riff on a cooking show at 11 PM and the conversation derails completely. No language model on earth is generating that.
Which is exactly what I found when I tried the next experiment: simulating an editorial conference. Two fictional people discussing the topic with my clone. A fake newsroom conversation. (You can hear the episode here. Judge for yourself.) It’s... not bad? The voices interact. They build on each other’s points. It sounds like three people in a room having a structured discussion. It’s also clearly not real. Nobody interrupts anyone, which is the dead giveaway. Real editorial meetings are 80% interruptions. There’s a politeness to the exchange that no actual newsroom has ever had. Turns out the messy parts are the whole show.
It’s almost there for solo content, though. Almost convincing enough that if you weren’t paying attention, you’d think you were hearing someone speak. And if it’s almost there in February 2026, where is it in February 2027?
I should be honest about something. I didn’t spend much time thinking about the ethics of any of this. I was experimenting, and when I experiment I’m selfish: I test, I deploy, I move on. Disclosure wasn’t on my radar. It was on my LinkedIn because I was showing off the process, but that’s not the same as telling your listeners “hey, this voice isn’t really me talking.” It hit me recently when someone offered me a gig helping build a platform with an explicit no-AI-content policy. I turned it down. Not because the project was wrong, but because I couldn’t take that job and keep doing what I’m doing. So consider this the disclosure.
And while I’m at it: I don’t think what I’m doing has much value. My podcast averages about 200 downloads per episode. A quarter of the listeners are American, which is funny for a show entirely in French. I suspect some of them are bots, or very confused. It’s a simplified audio version of my newsletter. It’s water.
The real humans will win. The ones with actual mics, sitting in shitty cafés, recording video podcasts that look terrible and sound worse. Those are the people shaping opinions right now. That’s why Netflix is getting into video podcasts. People who think AI voices will replace that are making the same mistake as people who thought photographs captured your soul. In the future, there will be a hundred AI-generated podcasts for every real one. And most listeners will still choose the real ones. Because the guy rambling into a mic at midnight, contradicting himself, getting heated about something nobody else cares about? That’s not a bug. That’s the whole product.
My podcast is the other kind. The 99%. I’m fine with that.
But every word in it is still mine. AI can clone my voice but it can’t read a Netflix research paper and decide the real story is that their algorithm only does 4% better than methods from the 2000s. It can’t notice that Hallmark invented the micro-drama model thirteen years before TikTok. It can’t do the thing where you’re lying on your couch and suddenly think “wait, HBO is putting linear channels back inside streaming. Didn’t we spend ten years burying that?” The kind of thought you’re supposed to have while walking a dog, except I’m horizontal and the dog still doesn’t exist.
The day AI can do that, we’ll talk. Until then it’s a pattern-matching machine spinning like a dervish. Tomorrow? Ten years? Anyone who tells you they know is selling something.
If you hear me breathe in the next episode, that’s not me. But everything else is.
(Listen here, it’s in French.)
or read my first article :
