Latest / Your Mic / The Castle Is on Fire and You Have a Podcast

Transcript

The Castle Is on Fire and You Have a Podcast · Your Mic

• 0:00
  Every time regular people get a new tool, the elites call it the end of the world.
• 0:05
  Printing press, panic, typewriter, panic, internet, youtube, podcasting, TikTok, panic, panic, panic.
• 0:15
  They screen chaos. Funny thing is, that chaos is just you and me finally getting a mic.
• 0:23
  Welcome to your mic. The show for founders, creators, and slightly unhinged humans,
• 0:28
  who decided you know what I don't need permission to talk. My name is Freddie Cruz,
• 0:35
  former radio guy, current podcaster, and professional podcast producer and today,
• 0:40
  we're going to drag one big idea through history. And that idea is every time normal people
• 0:49
  get a way to speak without asking a castle for permission, the castle freaks out.
• 0:55
  And I'm not saying this as a philosophy rant. I'm asking you a very blunt question, okay?
• 1:02
  What's the ivory tower in your industry? And how are you going to breach it?
• 1:09
  Now, before you go and breach ivory towers, let's go back. All right, before the printing press,
• 1:13
  if you wanted your ideas to travel, you needed a monastery, a university, or somebody with a lot
• 1:21
  of money in a fancy coat, probably a wig and powder all over his face and an ego problem.
• 1:27
  Because those guys, those institutions, they controlled the scribes. They controlled the books,
• 1:34
  they got to control whoever they wanted to be smart. Then Gutenberg shows up with a movable type
• 1:42
  and suddenly random people can print things, you know, pamphlets, books, manifestos, stuff that's
• 1:50
  not pre-approved by church or crown. Elites at the time were terrified. They said things like
• 1:58
  too many untrained writers will flood the world with mediocre text. Ordinary people will read
• 2:03
  the wrong things. This will undermine order. Translation, if anyone can publish, who needs us as
• 2:13
  the gatekeepers? Sound familiar? Fast forward a few centuries. The typewriter hits.
• 2:21
  Now anyone who can afford one can bang out clean, legible pages at speed. No scribe, no clerk,
• 2:27
  no calligraphy certificate, just you, your fingers, and a machine. Once again, people in the tower grumble.
• 2:36
  Where's the discipline? Where's the craft? Where's the control? Notice the pattern.
• 2:43
  Every time the tech lowers the cost of expression, it raises the blood pressure of the people who
• 2:50
  used to own the proverbial mic. Now we get to the broadcast era. Oh, they're special, aren't they?
• 2:58
  And I'd come from the broadcast era. We got radio TV, the age of the voice. For decades,
• 3:05
  if you were not chosen by a network of label or a station, you, my friend, were invisible.
• 3:11
  The moat was made of spectrum licenses, expensive gear, and a handful of execs with the power to say,
• 3:18
  yes or no. And those people loved saying no. Radio shows, TV anchors, newsrooms, all castles.
• 3:30
  Then in 1979, a band called The Buggles Drops video killed the radio star.
• 3:37
  In 1981, MTV launches and that song is literally the first music video they ever play.
• 3:45
  People read it like a, like a eulogy for radio. Well, that's it. Videos here pack up the microphones.
• 3:52
  Everybody go home. Except, and thankfully, radio didn't die. It adapted. It changed formats,
• 4:03
  leaned into commuting, drove music discovery in new ways, and thank God it did because, well,
• 4:10
  if the naysayers were right in 1981, that would put me at six years old, and I got into radio at
• 4:18
  1995. And if radio, in fact, were to kill the radio star, well, I wouldn't have had a career,
• 4:25
  and you would not be listening to me right now. I'd probably be doing something very different.
• 4:32
  But here's the important bit. The song itself video killed the radio star. It was about how new
• 4:38
  technology keeps displacing old ways of hearing music and seeing artists. Every new format walks in
• 4:44
  like an assassin, but it doesn't kill storytelling. It kills gatekeeping. TV was never the problem.
• 4:53
  The problem was that a tiny cluster of people decided which faces were allowed on your screen.
• 5:00
  And that sounds absurd in 2026. But then the internet showed up and said that's really cute.
• 5:06
  So the internet hits and suddenly publishing is not made of ink and trucks anymore.
• 5:11
  It's pixels and packets. Blogs explode, forums explode, email newsletters become these underground
• 5:18
  newspapers, people forward to each other at work. The walls of the castle, they start creaking.
• 5:25
  Then YouTube shows up. Now some kid in a bedroom with a Logitech webcam can quietly pull more
• 5:31
  views than a cable network, no joke, no casting director, no studio lot, no gatekeeper just
• 5:39
  upload and publish. And you know what traditional TV said? Oh, how precious. It's amateur hour
• 5:47
  until they started losing ad dollars to creators who didn't even own a suit. Now we get to podcasting.
• 5:55
  Podcasting is wild in so many ways because it's basically radio with the locks removed.
• 6:01
  The tech is boring, RSS feeds, real simple syndication, audio files, directories, you know,
• 6:08
  Apple Spotify, I heart. But the impact is savage. Researchers have started pointing out that
• 6:17
  independent podcasts are now directly challenging legacy newsrooms when it comes to who people trust
• 6:24
  for explanations about politics, culture and science. And they do not like to be challenged.
• 6:34
  These researchers, they talked about the epistemic authority of journalism, which is every tower
• 6:40
  jargon for who gets to say what counts as truth. Not only that, studies are now noticing that
• 6:48
  creators are becoming their own gatekeepers in podcasting. You are the one who decides who gets
• 6:54
  a platform, who gets interviewed, which stories get airtime? That's what freaks out the castle.
• 7:03
  It's not that podcasting is unregulated chaos. I mean, it kind of is depending on what you listen to.
• 7:11
  It's that, well, there are no longer the ones curating reality.
• 7:16
  So let's bring this home and aim it straight at you. Because this isn't just a big media story.
• 7:24
  This is every industry within every tower. The structure is always the same. Humans are so predictable.
• 7:32
  You got the castle, you got the networks, the publishers, the agencies, the universities,
• 7:36
  the big firms, you got the moat, whatever used to be scarce. We're talking distribution,
• 7:41
  credentials, shelf space, and capital. Then you've got the gatekeepers. I kind of love those
• 7:49
  people. Gatekeepers are the tiny group of people whose job was to say yes or no, and those people
• 7:58
  are dwindling in population. In radio, the moat was spectrum licenses and transmitters.
• 8:06
  And possibly, okay, definitely producers who got to say yes or no to a pitch.
• 8:13
  In publishing, the moat was printing warehouses and bookstore placement. In consulting or coaching,
• 8:19
  the moat, well, brand logos, billable rights, and Harvard on the resume. In your world, it might be
• 8:29
  a certification body that blesses whose legit a trade association that hands out speaking
• 8:35
  slots to the same five people who say the same five things every year in a row. It could also be
• 8:45
  a handful of agencies who decide which creators get the big campaigns. And here's the glitch in
• 8:50
  the matrix because this really all is one big matrix, a self-aggrandizing matrix. The moat
• 8:59
  is not nearly what it used to be. We have direct to audience distribution. We've got the podcasts,
• 9:06
  YouTube, newsletters, online communities, and in-person. Don't ever discount IRL.
• 9:13
  We've got direct to consumer revenue. We've got subscriptions,
• 9:17
  Patreon, memberships, courses, live events. We've got direct to proof. We've got case studies,
• 9:25
  testimonial content that shows your work in the wild. Now, the castle will tell you that without
• 9:32
  their branding, you are reckless, your amateur, you're crazy. You cannot be trusted because we're
• 9:39
  the voices. We are the experts. History says they're lying. When printing got cheap, scholar said
• 9:48
  this will flood the world with nonsense. When the internet blew up, old guard media said blogs and
• 9:56
  forums are not real journalism. When podcasts started calling out legacy reporting, researchers
• 10:05
  wrote papers, treating podcasters as a threat to the established knowledge hierarchy.
• 10:11
  Established knowledge hierarchy. That just sounds like pompous garbage. Every time the same
• 10:22
  energy, the same energy, if they get a voice, what happens to us? Let's make this painfully
• 10:29
  practical. If this was just me yelling about history, you would turn this off and go back to
• 10:34
  scrolling. I get it. Here's the real question of this episode. What's the ivory tower in your
• 10:41
  industry? How are you going to breach it? Let's break it down into four moops. One, you got to name
• 10:48
  that tower out loud on paper, no metaphors. If you don't want to ride on paper, pull up your phone
• 10:53
  and your notes app or dictate it into your favorite AI chatbot. The tower could be the big four in
• 10:59
  your niche. It could be old guard media types. It could be a national nonprofit that speaks for your
• 11:07
  specific community. The ivory tower academics who never actually touched clients because they've
• 11:13
  never done a real thing in the world. They're never applying what they teach, what they claim to be
• 11:20
  experts at. If you can't name the castle, well, you're never going to breach it. Don't even try.
• 11:27
  Number two, you got to map the mode. Ask yourself, what did they use to control that I can now bypass?
• 11:37
  First thing to come to mind would be distribution because now you've got podcasts YouTube and the
• 11:44
  ultimate owned channel of email. Those gatekeepers might have expertise badges. You, my friend,
• 11:53
  have portfolios, content and outcomes. Maybe they've got money. You have a small rabbit audience
• 12:02
  that will gladly pay you lots of money directly. Now, when you're framing this blueprint,
• 12:11
  you got to be painfully obnoxiously specific about it. They control access to the conference
• 12:17
  stages is different than they control who gets printed in the trade journal. Got it? Good.
• 12:24
  Move number three is that you've got to pick a breach point. You don't need to storm all four walls.
• 12:29
  You've just got to pick one. If the moat is distribution, your breach is a show, a channel,
• 12:34
  or newsletter. Ideally, all three because we are advocates of being omnipresent.
• 12:41
  If the moat is credentials, your breach is a body of work that's public and undeniable.
• 12:48
  If the moat is capital, your breach is a small but fanatical customer base, 100 or 1000 people
• 12:56
  who would rather pay you than a faceless brand. One project, one wall, one consistent attack.
• 13:05
  Last move. Numero, Quattro. You got to ship a rebellion, not a rant. And it's easy to complain
• 13:14
  about the castle. It's harder and way more fun to make it less necessary. Start the podcast that
• 13:21
  explains your domain better than the textbooks do. Launch the YouTube series that answers the
• 13:26
  questions the big guys ignore. Write the newsletter that becomes required reading for people who
• 13:32
  actually do the work. Build the local meet-up virtual summit or a community where the real conversation
• 13:40
  happens in a pro tip. Measure your progress in castle damage, not likes. Who switched from
• 13:48
  legacy sources to you as their primary teacher? Who landed a gig, a deal, or opportunity because
• 13:55
  your content existed? Who told you? I thought I needed them. Turns out I just needed this.
• 14:03
  That, my friend, is how you know the walls to the castle are cracking. Now because this is your
• 14:09
  mic and it's a podcast for new and aspiring podcasters and maybe even a podcast host who's a
• 14:14
  hundred episodes deep and is ready to give it all up. I don't want to end on wow. That was
• 14:21
  interesting. We're going to end on homework. Yeah, I've done it before. I'm going to do it again.
• 14:26
  I'm assigning you homework for this week, not someday. I want you to write down the name of that
• 14:32
  ivory tower in your world. Once in it, that's it. The X industry is controlled by why. Then I want
• 14:40
  you to write down that one mode they used to own and how tech killed it. They used to own airtime.
• 14:46
  Now I have a podcast. They used to own shelf space. Now I can publish direct. Got it? Good. Then
• 14:53
  decide on one breach project. You'll start to or double down on. Last, you're going to decide on
• 15:02
  one breach project. You'll start or double down on in the next 30 days. Not a business plan. No,
• 15:09
  no, no, a project. It could be a 10 episode podcast season or if you're already podcasting,
• 15:15
  it could be a 10 episode series. All right, hyper focused on that one thing. Maybe it's a weekly
• 15:22
  LinkedIn video series. It's a newsletter that ships every other Friday for three months in a row.
• 15:27
  When you've got your tower and your breach written down, I want you to message me. You can DM me.
• 15:34
  You can tag me wherever I'm on LinkedIn. I want Instagram. I'm on Facebook. You can email me
• 15:39
  Freddie with a why it speak podcasting.com because here's the secret the castle never wanted you to hear.
• 15:47
  The printing press lets people write without permission. The internet lets people publish without
• 15:54
  permission. Podcasting lets people speak without permission. Now, tools like AI and automation are
• 16:05
  about to let you scale without permission. The gates, they're not just open. The gates are on
• 16:14
  fire and you, my friend, are not crazy for carving your own path and forget what people on the
• 16:20
  internet say. You are still early to the breach. This is your mic. Use it.