HAVING MY SAY - Go Loca Voca
Let me say something that doesn't get said often enough in media circles, where the prevailing culture tends to reward perpetual motion and punish stillness.
Take the sabbatical.
Seriously. Take it. When the daily grind stops serving you — when the corporate machinery and mechanical drudgery has ground you down — step away. Clear the cache. Get the blinkers off. See the full 360 degrees of the world that's been quietly happening without you while you were busy hitting your KPIs.
Time and money permitting: do it without guilt and thank me later.
The Nerd Awakens
My blinkers came off at exactly the right moment.
Generative AI was erupting across every screen, every conversation, every breathless LinkedIn post. GPT. Claude. Midjourney. Eleven Labs. Riverside FM. A new platform seemingly every Tuesday. The early versions were entertainingly glitchy — and having lived the full arc from analog to AI, I was not only comfortable with glitchy, I was genuinely fond of it. I have always been a beta-version person. I was on IRC chatrooms in the early days, dizzy with the thrill of connecting with strangers on the other side of the planet in real time.
Today's sensibilities might file that under ‘creepy’. Yet, tbh, social media has stripped away our privacy and have us in a headlock and nobody's tapping out.
The difference now was velocity. AI wasn't evolving. It was detonating. New architectures, new capabilities, new implications — arriving faster than the industry could string a coherent opinion about any of them. The algorithm had become the new digital oracle, and the question was no longer whether it would reshape the world. It was simply how quickly and whether you'd be ready.
My inner nerd, dormant but never truly offline, kicked decisively into gear.
Back to School. Voluntarily.
I enrolled in an IIT-M online course and spent a year upskilling.
Dusted off the cobwebs. Went straight back to undergrad math. Then worked through SQL, Python, Exploratory Data Analysis, AI and ML applications, SVMs, Decision Trees, MLFNNs, DFFNNs, CNNs, RNNs, Transformers, GANs, Generative AI, MLOps and deployment — yeah, the lot! Hit a damn fine nerdcore score (96.21% but who’s flexing)
That said, my ego is instantly humbled by the fact that the brilliant, obsessive tech minds have been working on the AI and Algorithm plot from the 19050s. They've been tweaking the algorithm to the point where it's now poised to run the world, if we let it. I had a lot of catching up to do. I did what I could. And I came out the other side both excited and genuinely terrified
Which, in my experience, is precisely the correct response to something that matters.
What the Algorithm Taught Me About Being Human
Here is the thing I keep coming back to, the thread that runs through everything I learned.
We are all, in a sense, individual algorithms. Governed by our own rhythms and resonance. Shaped by experience, refined by repetition, capable of outputs that no one — including ourselves — can fully predict in advance. Every one of us is, in our own way, the original model that GPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek are quietly, painstakingly trying to replicate.
But AGI, for all its incoming superintelligence, will not replicate what actually makes human communication irreplaceable. Critical thinking that operates in genuine moral complexity. The strategic intuition built from decades of pattern recognition. The creative leap that arrives from nowhere and can't be reverse engineered. The ethical judgment that holds even when it's inconvenient. The nuanced, deeply personal language of a human relationship. And that stubborn, beautiful, adaptive instinct that has carried our species through every disruption it has ever faced.
The Mad Voice Wins
Somewhere in the middle of all this — the learning, the upskilling, the reading, the experimenting — something was distilled.
I could keep listening to the noise outside. The industry chatter, the LinkedIn hot takes, the conference panels earnestly debating whether AI was a threat or an opportunity. Or I could listen to the considerably louder, considerably more opinionated voice inside.
The inner mad voice won. It usually does.
Loca Voca Media — loosely translated, "the mad voice" — presented itself not as a pivot, but as an arrival. The logical, inevitable destination of everything that had come before. Three decades of broadcasting. Education. Strategy. Technology. Entrepreneurship. Storytelling. All of it converging into a single, clear proposition.
An audio-first company — because audio has always been my first love and my native language — built to help brands create, communicate, and collaborate with genuine craft and intention.
From Podcast-as-a-Service for organisations that have a story worth telling. To bespoke sonic branding that gives a company's voice the same considered identity as its visual design. To Voice Agent development in collaboration with technologists building the next generation of human-AI interaction.
Loca Voca is the intersection of thirty years of understanding how people actually listen — what makes them lean in, what makes them trust, what makes them come back — using the powerful suite of audio tools of today and the future.
We are open for business. And we would love to talk to founders, brand builders, technologists, and investors who understand that in a world drowning in content, the brands that will cut through are the ones with a voice worth hearing.
Where I Land
My relationship with sound will continue to stretch across the full analog-to-AI spectrum — and I wouldn't have it any other way.
There'll be sunny Sunday mornings spent trawling through vinyl, dusting off an old soul record, caressing the cover, and dropping the needle with real ceremony. And there'll be busy Monday mornings with AirPods in, a podcast queued up, and the treadmill cranked to an uphill 8.
Both are real. Both matter.
Here is the one thing I want to leave you with, the thought that sits at the centre of everything this series has been building toward:
Don't confuse tools with purpose.
AI will change how we work. It will almost certainly change how we create. It will compress timelines, collapse costs, and democratize capabilities that once required entire departments. But it will not — it cannot — change why we create. Why we communicate. Why we reach for a voice in the dark and feel less alone when we find one.
The future belongs to the people who understand both sides of that equation. Technologists who appreciate the irreducible power of a story told well. Creatives who embrace technology without being intimidated by it. Builders who can move fluidly between analogue instinct and digital intelligence.
That is where the magic happens. Not in choosing sides. In combining strengths.
The future is not Analog versus AI.
It is Analog plus AI.
And as we wrap up …
Loca Voca is a company built on three decades of understanding how people listen, connect and communicate. Just with better tools. And significantly faster processors.
From magnetic tape to machine learning. From studio consoles to source code. From radio host to founder.
It has been, without question, one hell of a ride.
And somehow — I feel like we're just getting started.
That's "Having My Say” - all six of them. Thank you for staying with me across thirty years of spools, static, sabbaticals, and software. If you'd like to talk about what Loca Voca Media can do for your brand — podcasts, sonic identity, voice AI, or simply finding your voice and making it land — we're listening.
We are always, always listening.
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