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Turn Your Biggest Podcast Errors Into Armor, Not Exit Signs · Your Mic

• 0:00
  Twice a year. That's how often I'd have the dream. I'm on the radio, something goes wrong, and I'm standing outside my program director's office waiting to answer for it. And right before the door opens, I wake up. Every damn time.
• 0:18
  For more than 25 years in broadcast radio, a mistake was not just a mistake. It felt like a verdict. Like the whole machine, the whole apparatus was going to grind to a halt because Freddie stuttered, because Freddie loaded the wrong file, because Freddie, and this happened more times than I care to admit. Misjudged the drive to a station appearance and showed up late. How late? Late enough to lose half my talent fee. And you know what happened every single time?
• 0:47
  My dog lost his mind when I'd walked through the door after the appearance as if I had been gone for six months instead of eight hours. The moon came out that night, and the sun came up that very next morning. In other words, the world kept spinning. This is your mic. My name is Freddy Cruz, and today I'm going to tell you some things I've never said out loud because you, the aspiring host, the current host, the host who hasn't yet had their first catastrophic recording session...
• 1:17
  You need to hear this before it happens to you. If you're already hosting or about to launch and you want some help building a show that survives these kinds of mistakes and still sounds pro, go to speakpodcasting.com and hit the contact form. Tell me you came from this very podcast episode and what it is you're trying to build. I'd love to help. And before we get into my own disaster reel, I want to start somewhere else.
• 1:42
  You know the name, Malcolm Gladwell. Outliers, the tipping point, one of the most celebrated journalists and storytellers of the last 30 years. He cold called Cliff Asness. And if you don't know who Cliff Asness is, he's a hedge fund manager, co-founder of AQR Capital, one of the sharpest financial minds alive. Malcolm had read a paper Asness wrote about pulling the gully. The concept fascinated him, so he reached out.
• 2:10
  cold. And Asness happened to be in Manhattan. They agreed to meet at a hotel conference room just like that. Boom. Meeting. Now think about that moment. You literally cold called a billionaire. How cool is that? And the billionaire said yes. Even cooler. You're walking into that conference room and the whole conversation you've been mentally building toward is about to happen.
• 2:40
  No sound file. Nothing to record with. He's sitting across from this guy, this billionaire guy, this financial genius. A man who said yes to the cold call when he clearly didn't have to. He cleared his schedule. He showed up to a hotel conference room. And Malcolm, one of the most genius journalists of the past 30 years, has no way to record the conversation. So he had to go and excuse himself.
• 3:07
  In Manhattan, which I guess is fine. You can find anything there, right? But that's not the point. He came back a half hour later, flustered, embarrassed by his own account, totally thrown off. And Cliff, he couldn't have been more gracious. And the reason this particular incident hit me, the reason I can't seem to stop thinking about it, is this. If it can happen to Malcolm Gladwell, it can happen to you.
• 3:34
  Hey, it's happened to me already many times. Now, here's the deal. I don't care how much you prepare. I don't care how good your equipment is. I don't care how many episodes are in your feed. You can call yourself a grizzled veteran. You will make a mistake. Not because you're bad at it. Not because you don't care enough. But because you're a human being operating technology in a world that occasionally decides to go completely sideways for absolutely no reason at all.
• 4:03
  And this is why I want to push back again on this idea that making intentional mistakes proves your humanity.
• 4:12
  You don't need to manufacture imperfection like the anti-AI people want you to. It's coming for you whether you asked for it or not. The question is not whether you'll mess up. It's how long you can go before you end up messing up. Now here are mine. These are real screw ups. Some of them are funny now, but none of them were funny at the time. Mistake number one, and you will definitely encounter this, especially if you are new at it.
• 4:41
  The phantom recording. I was recording an episode for one of my clients, and we were about six, seven minutes maybe into the interview when I realized I didn't hit record yet. The little red button on the ROGECaster board that was supposed to be on, it wasn't. The client and her team and I were like, oh no, in fact, I got a look from her marketing person. Okay.
• 5:09
  But we stopped the conversation, we reset it, and then we started over. Lesson learned always. Check that you're actually recording before your guest says anything worth keeping.
• 5:25
  Mistake number two, same client, mid-session, everything going well, and somewhere under the table, my foot found the power surge protector. Tapped it. I didn't think anything of it, except, well, it didn't record anything after my foot touched it. We had to reschedule. Of course, I apologized. And the humility, well, I did not enjoy.
• 5:54
  Mistake number three, the battery in the camera. Early days of offering video services, I did not yet fully know what I was getting myself into. The camera battery overheated mid-session, it stopped recording without warning, and we sat there for about 10 minutes waiting for it to cool down, quietly reconsidering every choice that led me here. That was definitely not fun, and thank goodness I have got the best clients in the world.
• 6:21
  Mistake number four, and this one is probably one of my personal favorites, and I say that with full awareness, which makes it even more painful. 30-minute episode, great convo, the kind of session where the energy is right and the words are flowing and you finish thinking, that is the one. This is going to be great. I'm kicking so much ass. I'm learning videography quicker than I ever thought I could. The shutter speed was set to 1 over 500 instead of 1 over 50.
• 6:49
  The entire episode was recorded in slow motion. Now, here's what nobody wants to put in the welcome email when you launch your podcast. Every single mistake that I described, the phantom recording, the foot on the power surge protector, the battery, the slow motion episode. Well, every one of them happened to somebody who had already spent decades doing this professionally. And Malcolm Gladwell...
• 7:16
  He's a man who's conducted more interviews than most of us will ever attempt. He walked into a hotel conference room in Manhattan to sit across from a billionaire he cold called and forgot his sound file.
• 7:28
  That's not a consolation prize. It's the whole point. The goal is for you to not become mistake proof. The goal is for you to become mistake resilient. So build your checklists, know your browser requirements, check the red button before your guest says word number one, charge the battery, keep the battery compartment door open, check your shutter speed, put the SD in the recorder before you leave the house.
• 7:55
  Build the kind of professionalism, the kind of relationship with your clients and your guests where one bad session doesn't define the whole body of work. Because here's what I know. The client whose session I stopped seven minutes in, they've been one of our longest clients ever. So,
• 8:13
  We just kept going and the show, well, it's still successful. The mistakes become stories, not failures. And while I've been outside of radio for the longest time, I still have variants of that dream. Standing outside some sort of office waiting to hear from a client who wants to stop doing business with me for something I have no idea about because it's a dream and I'm about to find out what I did.
• 8:38
  But that different version of that dream that I was always having when I was in radio, it doesn't seem to hit the same way it used to. Because I've been on the other side of enough mistakes now to know what they actually are. Tuition.
• 8:51
  Expensive, occasionally slow motion, sometimes SD cardless tuition. And the education is worth every cent. So go make your podcast. Make your mistakes. Learn them. Own them. And whatever you do, don't manufacture new ones just to prove you're a human. Because some anti-AI bro on LinkedIn said, oh, you got to leave in your mistakes. No.
• 9:16
  Don't do it. And if you would like some assistance building your show, maybe getting it relaunched, or if you have an idea that you just need to execute on that'll take your podcast as it is right now to the next level, please hit me up, Freddy, at speakpodcasting.com. Thank you so much for listening.