Once you’ve made it as a podcaster, its easy to presume you know it all. An academic with tenure, sitting in a leather armchair by the fire, swirling a McCallen 24 in your hand, ready for any question that comes along.

The truth is that theoretical deduction and inference doesn’t a good podcaster make. We’ve made podcasting so available and easy to start, we think we’re all experts simply by taking part.

Today I’ll be talking you through something that’s been niggling at me for a while: The collective nature of social media and our ability to share whatever we want has meant that our knowledge & experience doesn’t really matter - we are an expert if we want to be.

And in flooding the Internet with that “expertise”, it is shared and reiterated without practise, evidence or even a basic knowledge of the craft. This results in a collective hivemind of misinformation that is supported by anti-gatekeeping rhetoric to ensure the individual voice is still relevant.

I have no problems with the individual being vocal and appreciated online, but I think we need to address the elephant in the podcast studio: the apparent “skill” of Armchair Experts.

This one could be a bit spicy, but stick with me - I think you’ll like where I’m going with this…

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Chapters:

(00:00) Opening — Why Armchair Expertise Hurts Podcasting
(01:35) Part 1 — The Problem with Crowd-Sourced “Advice”
(05:35) Part 2 — A Priori vs. A Posteriori (Get Out of the Armchair)
(08:01) Part 3 — Armchair Experts, Gatekeeping, and Credibility
(12:13) Part 4 — Growth Mindset over Ego
(13:56) Closing Reflections
(14:10) Listener Mail & Contact

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

On Armchair Analysis, a priori Deduction and Growth Mindset