Most producers are trained to fix the mistake, cut the pause, redo the line, and polish away anything that sounds imperfect. Sometimes that’s exactly how you destroy the best part.

In this week's episode, Neil uses a legendary Gary Owens Preparation H spot, a live radiothon moment, and a couple of famous records to make the case for knowing when to leave the rough edge alone.

Not every imperfection is a mistake. Sometimes it’s the thing people remember.

McDonald's has a summer promotion built around a beautifully simple idea: one coin, one cone.

It's cheap. It's memorable. And it contains the seeds of something much bigger.

The problem? They stopped one step too soon.

In Episode 42 of The Voice In My HED, Neil looks at the missed opportunity hiding inside a billion-dollar-company's promotion - and the simple idea that some random guy on an island thought of, that McDonald's apparently didn't.

After 10,000 - 12,000 interviews over the course of a career, I'll share with you one of the most important things I learned about how to immediately improve the quality of your interviews.

Everybody is "niching down", and it's a sound strategy for everything from your podcast to your audio repair shop.

Nope, we're not going to teach you how to do that twirly thing with the mic on the end of the cord. And we're not going to make you a fretboard wizard. But Van Halen did leave a teachable moment in their decades of success that many of us failed to pick up on.

There's a valuable lesson to be learned in some Hollywood drama. Let's spend a few minutes chewing the fat on this one.

I unwittingly participated in a little experiment today, and I felt I had no choice but to share it with you and get a couple of things off my chest.

They knew what they were doing all along. We fell for it. And now, it might be too late to stop it. Even now, they tell us that “the AI revolution is coming”. No, the AI revolution started a long, long time ago. And like a science fiction movie where the bad guys have infiltrated and permeated every aspect of our lives until there’s no way to fully remove them from the system, we’re trapped.