(Gem State Chronicle, February 18, 2026)
Those of you who have been following this platform for a while might remember the Podcast of the Gem State Chronicle. I published between 25-30 episodes over the course of two years, but it’s been a long time since the last one. (Which was a banger, mind you.)
While Substack has an AI text-to-speech engine, I’ve heard from some readers who would prefer to listen to me personally. However, recording and editing a podcast episode to my standards, even just 10-20 minutes long, takes me 1-2 hours, and I really don’t have that kind of time these days.
Enter ElevenLabs, an AI platform that said it could build an AI-generated clone of my voice. I was somewhat skeptical, but I figured I’d give it a shot. After letting it digest more than two hours of my old content overnight, I logged in this morning and gave it yesterday’s column.
I was amazed. It sounded exactly like something I had recorded, even down to the way I emphasize certain words and phrases. It was incredibly surreal listening to my own voice knowing it was not a real recording.
So I’m giving this a shot. I recorded an intro and an outtro (that’s me playing Here We Have Idaho on guitar strings via Apple GarageBand) and published it as a podcast. I will aim to do this for each article I post, so if you find this a valuable outlet please let me know.
You can find the Podcast of the Gem State Chronicle on all your favorite podcasting platforms. Here are links to Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. If you don’t mind taking the time like, subscribe, and leave a positive review, I’m sure that will help with the algorithm.
Thank you as always for your support, and for bearing with me as I find new ways to make this platform more useful.
Speaking of useful, check out the new legislative tracker over at the https://gemstatebrief.com/. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do something like this for years, and they just dropped it out of the blue today. It looks like it’s going to be incredibly helpful for those of us glued to the legislative session.
Take care y’all. Thanks for making everything possible!
