Your Mic

Get the FREE Speke Roadmap: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/givethemroadmap Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/pricing-plans In this episode Freddy drags your fear of rejection into the light with the story of how Linkin Park got rejected dozens of times before anyone got it. He uses Chester walking out on his own birthday party to take a maybe call as a gut punch reminder of what commi...

Get the FREE Speke Roadmap: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/givethemroadmap Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl Somebody on LinkedIn said the quiet part out loud. They showed up to a small podcast and resented every second of it. Freddy had...

Free resources: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/freeresources Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/pricing-plans Steven Bartlett deletes twenty episodes a year. Flies the guest in. Spends weeks prepping. And if the conversation isn't good enough — gone. No apologies. Freddy's been there. An author with a Netflix series attached to his last book. Real prep. Dog-eared pages. Genuine curiosi...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl Learn more about Katie: https://katieread.com/ Learn more about the Castle Guard Framework: https://buyerpsych.com/ Freddy Cruz chats Katie Read on Your Mic unpacking her Castle Guard AI framework from ps...

Work with us: www.spekepodcasting.com/ (https://www.spekepodcasting.com/) Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203s://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203) Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl Listen to Dr. Eddie Patton’s podcast Your Health, Y...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ (https://www.spekepodcasting.com/) Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203) Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl Freddy Cruz drops a solo rant on Your Mic pulling from INXS rejecting a million bucks to rework Kick. He la...

Work with us: www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203s://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl Listen to Dr. Eddie Patton’s podcast Your Health, Your Wealth (start with these): Understanding Teen Brains https://omny.fm/shows/yourhealthyourweal...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl Freddy rips apart podcast editing myths around silence. New hosts walk away knowing exactly what to cut and protect so your episodes grab ears and hold them. You get the beats breaths brakes system to mak...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl A pottery class accidentally solved the biggest lie in podcasting. The students chasing perfection made one beautiful bowl. The students chasing quantity made art. On this episode of Your Mic, Freddy kill...

Freddy tears apart the fantasy that you can wing your podcast and still build a real show. This episode is a Waffle House level reality check on what happens when you treat your feed like a 24 hour operation instead of a hobby that folds every time life swings. You walk through green, yellow, and red zones for your pipeline so you know exactly when your show is healthy and when you are one sick da...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl Imagine your podcast as a beat‑up character in a movie, throwing punches at shadows in an alley. That’s what it feels like when your show is getting hammered by enemies nobody else can see—not trolls, not...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl This one starts in a morgue and a lab, not a podcast studio. Freddy opens with 19th‑century doctors walking straight from cutting open corpses to delivering babies without washing their hands—and the one...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl Cruz Through HTX was a love letter to Houston—stories, people, and weird corners of the city that felt like destiny for a former radio guy turned podcaster. But destiny doesn’t care about your calendar, y...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl You don’t need to be an audio engineer to hire one. You do, however, need to know what to ask. In this solo riff, Freddy breaks down how to spot the difference between a real producer and someone just pus...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ (https://www.spekepodcasting.com/) Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl Listen to The Rose’s podcast Let’s Talk About Your Breasts: https://therose.org/podcasts/ Be sure to subscribe to @TheRoseHouston! Taking a nonprofit podcast to 100,000...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl Listen to The Rose’s podcast Let’s Talk About Your Breasts: https://therose.org/podcasts/ Taking a nonprofit podcast to 100,000 downloads is not as easy as you think. Founding CEO of The Rose, Dorothy Gib...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl From branding sex workers to crowning movie stars, lipstick never changed—only the story did. Freddy shows how your mic is the same weapon. Are you painting in corporate nude, suffragette red, or punk bla...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl AI wants to nuke every “umm” you ever uttered. Freddy breaks filler into anchors, tangles, and panic loops—and shows you which ones to murder, which ones to protect, and how caffeine, Slack wars, and bad...

Free resources: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/freeresources Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Never compare your first mile to somebody else’s 19th—especially in podcasting. In this episode of Your Mic, I share a story about my neighbor Marcel, a former 150‑pounds‑overweight runner turned marathon machine, and what his mile 19 struggle can teach you about sticking with your show whe...

In this episode of Your Mic, Freddy takes a blowtorch to generic “target audience” talk and replaces it with one real human: Listener 37. Drawing from podcast avatar best practices and audience-first strategies, the episode shows how knowing one detailed, messy, specific listener can transform your hooks, stories, CTAs, and growth. When episodes feel like one-on-one conversations, people binge and...

Work with us: https://www.spekepodcasting.com/ Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-mic/id1777171203 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1PQNHuqxIVhkLfjGYuWcxl Subcribe to Podcast the Newsletter: https://podcastthenewsletter.substack.com/ Subscribe to Earbuds Collective: https://arielle-nissenblatt-4cfp.squarespace.com/ Arielle Nissenblatt and Lauren Passell sit...

This solo episode of Your Mic is a friendly exorcism for every creator who’s turned “the algorithm” into a deity. Freddy breaks down what recommendation systems on platforms actually do—sort and surface content based on behavior—and how people still primarily find new podcasts through search, social, YouTube, and old-school word of mouth. Then he draws a hard line between building episodes for hum...

Podcast graveyards are full of good intentions. Stats float around saying 40–50% of shows die after just a few episodes, and only around 15–20% of the Apple Podcasts catalog is actually active in the last 90 days. People don’t quit because they’re lazy. They quit because: they overcommitted, had no plan, expected money and fame too fast, got crushed by life and time.  New Your Mic episode: how not...

In this episode of Your Mic, Freddy goes after the beige monster: brand-safe podcasts that sound like internal town halls instead of real shows. We break down what makes the best branded podcasts actually work—story-first, audience-first, emotionally honest content that just happens to be funded by a company—and how case studies consistently show that authenticity and subtle branding drive higher...

Cristiano Ronaldo bets on curiosity and Perplexity AI. Your favorite podcasts already own your time. This episode dares you to stop lurking in the audience and build your industry’s next favorite show in 2026.Key takeaways • Curiosity is capital. When someone worth over a billion bucks backs a tool they actually use, it is a signal to stop treating your own curiosity like a hobby. • Every week you...