AI Can Clone Your Voice; It Can’t Shake A Hand

We examine how deepfakes blur reality, why detectors can’t guarantee truth, and what proof still matters when anyone can clone a voice. Then we map a practical winter reset: less automation, more in‑person trust, and using podcasting as a bridge to real‑world networks.

• deepfake tools outpacing detection
• proof of life through liveness and gestures
• winter as a reset for honest metrics
• pitfalls of AI‑written outreach at scale
• call first, then email for higher response
• local networking and trading associations
• podcasting as modern radio and trust engine
• good‑enough production over perfection

Transcript

The Rising Problem Of AI Fakery

Can We Prove It’s Really Us

Winter As A Business Reset

Overusing AI For Outreach

Return To In‑Person Trust

Tribal Futures And Local Networks

Practical Reset: Filters And Sources

Podcasting’s Radio Roots And Simplicity

Gear, Audio, And Good‑Enough Production

Sign‑Off: Be Good Or Be Good At It

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Trading Post Podcast, where we unlock the secrets of business-to-business trade, dive into powerful networking strategies, and share my exciting journey of using a podcast to market my business instead of relying on SEO. I'm your host, Trader Stew. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Trading Post Podcast. I'm your host, Trader Stew. Alright, let's get right into it. It's getting really hard to tell if a podcast or video is real. And over the next few winters, it'll get even harder as AI. Voice cloning and deep fake tools keep improving. That's what I want to talk about today. I uh was watching Prepper News and he was mentioning about how hard like how hard it is for people to tell these AI videos already. So I guess Maduro was captured in Venezuela, of course. You've heard it's all over the news, they're using that to cover something up, I'm sure. Anyway, a lot of the celebrations that they showed are fake. They were never even that's that was all AI video, right? So, and everyone thought, of course, they were real until someone was like, Oh, nope, they spotted the issue and whatever. So, anyway, the thing with podcasting, it's even harder to tell because with a voice, it's so easy to clone. So, you mean, for example, listening to Arnold Schwarzenegger hosts a uh new podcast, you know, he's cracking shooks and sharing stories, and the whole thing's 100% fake. I found out there's no Arnold in the studio, no Mike, and just it's just coding. And today, as we head into another Michigan winter of talking about what's real and what's synthetic and why this deep fake season is actually the perfect time to hit the reset button on your life and on your business. I don't I I guess I gotta find out how fake the or how fake it is. Either it's fake or it's real. But with the Arnold Schwarzenegger thing, you know, how I was just told that it's fake. And I don't I believe it is. I don't know. So, you know, right now there's AI tools that can clone a voice from just a few minutes of audio and make it say almost anything in that person's style. That's how people are spinning up the Arnold podcasts and printing clips that sound just like him without ever stepping in front of a microphone. There's already deep fake videos and sketches where creators map Arnold's face and pair it with our impression of clone voices, and many viewers can't tell where the real stops and the synthetic stars. The same tech can turn any business owner, politician, or celebrity into a puppet, and if we're not paying attention. And what there's a politician that said that he was assassinated, and I guess he had to say, get in front of everybody and say, I've not assassinated him, I'm alive and doing well. Because everyone thought that that video was real. So, how do we prove it's really us? Security companies are scrambling to build or deep fake detectors that analyze audio and video for tiny little digital footprints, so you can tell if the voice you're hearing is AI generated. And you know, but the problem is that even the best tools only give a probability score of, I guess, a percentage of how real or fake it is. But it's so, of course, there's no guarantee. Some experts are talking about using the body as proof, so unique rhythms in your pulse, tiny movements in your face, micro gestures in your hands that are extremely hard for the AI to mimic consistently. That's why that creator on the prepper news on camera started to think, what can I do with my hands with my body language to show you it's really me right now in real time? So he's waving his hands in front of the camera and whatever. It's kind of a joke, but it goes without saying something needs to be done, right? So when one prepper or one the brain the authenticity drills on camera is what it's called. So if you think about it, winter's nature's hard reset. The leaves are gone, the noise drops, and all you're left with is what's sturdy enough to survive the cold. For business, winter can be the reason you're you strip away all the fake growth, the vanity metrics, the shallow marketing, and you ask what's the real revenue and what's the real relationship and what's the real trust. So, as deep fakes get better, the only durable reason asset is a local business, as is uh provable trust customers who have shaken your hand, walked into your shop, and know you're a real human, not just a voice in their earbuds. That's the kind of trust a barter and trading association multiplies because you're not hidden behind the screen, you're in a network. And that's one thing I guess I gotta get better at too. I have been relying more and more on AI to write my emails for me and even do some of my social media posting, to be honest. And not that it's gotten me in trouble, but I post on things that well, AI, my AI agent, posts on things that I wouldn't have otherwise posted on, and then people I know that are in my local community are like, hey, yeah, let's, you know, uh not get together, but I'll see you tomorrow. We'll talk about it again. I'm like, oh crap. Like what did I say? You know, what what's going on? Because you know, they say on social media you're supposed to post like 20 times a day or something like that. It's crazy, and it's just exhausting. No one can do that. So I I programmed my AI agent. I use perplexity. I say on on do comment on 10 posts on LinkedIn and then 10 posts on alignable, and then also create a post as well, you know. And it works, it does it, it goes through, filters through all the screens and scrolls through, you know, and looks for comments and comments on things, and I'll say, hey, do it in a professional, non-salesy manner. And I can tell now that I'm doing it when other people do it too now, because the format's the same and language is the same. The spacing, the way they do the it does the paragraphs, the wording, where it puts punctuations. I've now because I've used it, I'm kind of now the expert, right? And you don't, it's funny how that works, but the user becomes the the expert in in in a lot of ways. And just my keys rattling around here, I had to get something. So, yeah, that's I guess that's a that's an upside of it, and it makes sense because you get so in depth with something, it's easier. It's kind of like how they say the trainer or the person who teaches learns the best. So if you're uh don't know a subject, that they'll put you in charge of maybe teaching it and you become the resident expert because you just inadvertently become a subject matter expert at it because you you know put your your mind sets different anyway. So I think I'm gonna stop doing that though. I don't know, maybe, maybe not. But I still I really wish I just get off of social media and go back to the way the things used to be. And I think we're getting there. I think people are getting to get back to we come full circle, everything comes full circle, right? So we went from in-person, you know, the salesman, the set, the traveling salesman uh to your face, you know, and shake hands, maybe a wine and dine or whatever, right? And then we went to selling on social media or cold calling, you know, even before that. And it's no one trusts the social media, no one trusts the emails. My email response rate is really low, but it's a lot easier. So the volume, let's just say I get one new member for every 40 phone calls that I make, right? But in the same perspective, I get one member for every maybe 120 emails that I send out. Well, the effort's the same, you know, and that's the problem, is that I I there is really no real effort, extra effort, and doing 80 more outreaches through email or social media. Because, like I just said, I have an AI agent that does it for me. It writes the emails custom, as sometimes it even finds the name of the business owner for me, and it finds all the data, it writes a little thing about the company because I give it the website, and I mean it's very cool, very personable. But I think it's also very fake. It's off it's obviously fake, and then it comes through. And also, people are so sick and tired of emails that a lot of times I've been told, even because of once they become members, like, well, we emailed you, you know, the information or whatever, or the maybe about the show, or you know, insert whatever, right? News that they should probably know about within the association. And like, oh yeah, I don't look at my emails. I don't even read my emails. So, you know, you almost got to do either an email first and follow up a phone call. This is, of course, not new news, or you do a phone call, and then nine times out of ten, they say ask for a follow-up email, but at least now they're looking for the email, you know, and now it'll get opened because you called them first, they asked for the information, so at least your email won't go either. By anyway, it's still gonna go to a junk folder, but at least it there's not gonna get it completely ignored. They'll at least click on it and open it up because they asked for it. So we're coming full circle, and I the networking groups that I go to are always full. There's always a full house, dude. So when I go to like my coffee talk, I'm going to that this Friday for the chamber. That's always at least 60 to depending on the month and the what season, summer, fall, winter, right? 60 to 80 people, maybe 90 people are there in you know a good day. So, and that's one day a month, and same goes with other things they go to. It's always a good showing. People are over the online thing, but they're doing it because it's necessary evil, but it's not preferred anyway. So, in the future, where someone can spin up a fake version of your brand or your voice in seconds, the smartest reset is to go deeper into real-world relationships. You know, like I said, with local partners, you got member events, referral circles, and communities like trading associations where people can verify each other in person. And that's what I like about groups like ours is that every purchase you make seeds a future sale for you because you are going into that business and they see that you came in there, then it becomes kind of like a small town deal. You know, I grew up in Francamuth, very small town. Every business owner knew everybody, you know, or uh each each business owner, I guess I guess I should say, back in the day. You know, back in the day, my great-grandpa was the the town dentist, like the town dentist, you know what I'm saying? And then my other grandpa, well, my grandpa, not my great grandpa, was the town pharmacist. So everyone knew them because you had to know them because they were the only dentists and maybe the only person that's that's doing drugs, you know, sending out drugs to people for the pharmacy. So we're going back to that again. I think I read a dystopian future thing, and it was talking about somebody went to the future and came back. And when they came back to whatever year it was, I can't remember, it was everyone was fractioned off into like not clans or villages, what they call it. Kind of like, yeah, it was like villages. It was tribal, that's what it said. It was everyone was kind of tribal. So you develop your own, I don't know, areas, and it might not happen in my lifetime, but I can see it going that way to where the only way to block out outside input is to close yourself off from the outside and not get you know inundated by fake news and you know, bots or whatever like that, right? So anyway, so this winter, don't just brace for that deep fake era, reset for it. So reset your filters, res question with the clips, double check the sources, and don't assume every familiar voice is real, and that sucks. Then reset your business, you tighten your circle, you deepen your in-person network, plug into a trading association where your reputation is built face to face, deal by deal, not just download by download in a world of synthetic voices and fake podcasts. That is how you prove you're the real thing. And I kind of thought about this as I was writing this up. I wonder, I don't want to say the White House, but they are the ones who did this. The White House is pushing podcasts, you know, because Trump was on there and they tribute podcasting to why he won, and they are allowing press passes now for podcasters, and they didn't say YouTubers. And I think the reason why is because it's really easy to get more information out there. It's kind of like, again, radio. We've come full circle. Remember back in the day, my dad would used to say that you know, was it called Bonanza or something like that? Was on the radio and come on at Friday night at seven o'clock or whatever it was, and all the kids would sit around the radio and listen to the story that the guy was telling on this, you know, is basically a narrator. He was reading a book or writing a story, right? But you know, before TV, that was what you did. And here we are. Here we are again. That's crazy. Who would have thought, right? And an era to where a supercomputer fits in your phone or your your pocket, your phone. We're going back to like my kid has these Tony boxes, this that are called Tonies. It's a little speaker, you put a little figurine on top of it, and it tells a story. What it's how is that any different than the radio, you know? And he loves it, you know. My the older older kid, my stepson loves it more, he's 10, he appreciates it more, I guess, whatever. But then they both have one now, so they share these little tonies, and they're listening to the radio, man. It's wild. So it's almost like podcasting is is it's the radio again, and that's set of frequencies you have channels, that's the only difference. And I have not ventured, I have ventured into the video podcasting. I just don't want to keep doing it because it's so much more work. I put minimal effort into these podcasts. I'll be completely frank and straight up honest with you. I don't really edit maybe the beginning and end, like I said, and that's it. And that's it. Like you know, I used to worry about like the audio input. I have a nice microphone, and DGI has a nice mic, and I use that because it's easier. And I used to worry about the gains and the input volume and all that stuff. But you want to know what Buzz Sprout, where I upload it, it does all of its own audio audio leveling, anyways. Now, maybe it matters, but that I can't hear it matters, but maybe it matters, and I don't I don't know, I don't care. Like it doesn't it it's good enough, right? You know, and I I used to think like, oh, this is an entry-level mic, but you know what? A lot of these YouTubers that I see making money, they are used these little DJI or Rhodes microphones, whether or not I don't know if they're real or not. Like, you know what I'm saying? I don't know if they're just using it and they just have it on for like just show, you know, for optics. Should like look at me, I'm sponsored by DJI or whatever, right? So I'm gonna wear the microphone, and but really they have like fancy studio with microphones overhead that I don't know about or whatever, and you know it's off off the off the camera, but again, I really don't think so either. In fact, you know what? I know I remember that. You know what? I was watching that prepper news and his microphone was touching his shirt and it was scuffing. So I guess he really is using his microphone. I thought about that now. I just thought it was for show because it sounds too good. It does. I mean, you can't tell that it's like a$300 microphone because I have the same thing. Anyway, I have not graced. So that's it. All right, what do we do out there? Be good or be good at it. Bye.