Zach Obront is co-founder of Scribe Media, a company he and his partner, Tucker Max, built into a category-creating business. From the beginning, Scribe was focused on giving authors the power to achieve creative freedom—the theme at the heart of The Burning Castle Podcast. And, if you check out the Scribe website, you’ll see it’s really succeeded.

Zach could have optimized this success, scaling Scribe and reaping the fruit of much hard labor. But instead, he climbed down the hill (to borrow a term from Chris Dixon), and is now in the midst of doing something few would expect the head of a book-related business to do: he’s taught himself to code web3 technologies, like blockchain, and is exploring the frontier of an uncharted technology.

That sounds daunting. And it is. But, as you’ll hear on the episode, the spirit of creativity and exploration that Zach brings to his radically different new endeavor makes what could be an enormously difficult lift into something that sounds…dare I say, fun?

Check out this episode and don’t forget to forward this email, or share it on your favorite attention-gobbling social media platform, so we can spread the good gospel of creative freedom.

Sharmaarke Mohamed was born in a country where virtually all of the things we taken for granted—food and water, education, and, most of all, stability—are in short supply. But Somalia gave Sharmaarke other things, like a deeply rooted sense of community, a feeling that family is a pillar of his individual existence, and, maybe most of all, a burning need to (re)create his own future.

On this episode of The Burning Castle Podcast, Sharmaarke and I speak about this drive to create your own destiny—in his case, virtually from scratch. We talk about how Sharmaarke used his passion for soccer (he was a pro player in Somalia) to lever himself into a new life as an actor developing and producing his own projects in the US.

We also talk about something that many artists toiling away in small rooms miss—the importance of nurturing a community of likeminded people around you, who share your interests, ambitions and challenges as a creator. This is what the great British musician Brian Eno called scenius—the genius of a being part of a scene—and it’s what makes all the difference in the often lonely life of the arts.

I hope you enjoy this episode. As a reminder, the podcast—like The Burning Telegraph newsletter—is free. We work hard to keep it that way, so a share by you with someone in your network—by email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even the boring old word of mouth method—is hugely appreciated.

In this episode of The Burning Castle podcast, I speak with opera singer Gideon Dabi about drew him to the opera from a young age, why he think there’s a future in one of our most enduring and deeply rooted art forms, and how opera can unlock new creative horizons for artists and music lovers alike.

As you’ll hear on the episode, Gideon’s onstage charisma translates offstage too. He’s a big presence with the kind of joie de vivre that sits at the very heart of the opera.