Tony Doe: Into the Podverse

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We're heading to Lagos to talk about the past, present, and future of podcasting with one of the most thoughtful voices in Nigeria, Tony Doe. Tony's a former radio broadcaster who fell in love with the intimacy of audio long before cameras invaded the studio. We will talk about why he believes video is not the next phase of podcasting. The hidden risks of building your show inside walled gardens

And what happens when a platform can quietly take your work away? Tony also shares why he built the Nigerian Podcast Index. What the data is really telling us about creators in Africa, and how language access and infrastructure shape who gets heard. This is a masterclass in protecting your feed, your freedom, and your voice. Before the show gets started, you might remember in late July of last year that I had Norma Jean Bellenkey on the show to ask the question. Where's the money in podcasting?

This week on her show, Podbiz, she has asked me the same question and I've tailored the answer towards Canada and all the small buckets of money that exist out there. You can listen to this episode of Podbiz on the same podcast app you're using right now. And now Tony Doe joins me from the podcast capital of Africa, Lagos, Nigeria. Tony, do you still have a working or functional relationship with radio? Interesting question.

Working, functioning. Let's just say I haven't been on radio since. I think I was a guest on radio sometime in 2022. I haven't been on radio since. But I have been part and still a part of a community of radio and now we are making space for other broadcasters as well. So there's a guild. It started off as a radio guild. private radio broadcasters guild and now it's the National Guild of Nigerian broadcasters. Yeah, we've flipped the names too many times, so I'm still kind of involved.

I still have conversations regularly with my friends in the space. Um I'm still sending out letters. I'm still paying attention to what it is they're doing, paying attention to their challenges. helping to look for talents, especially when they put out notices for new talents. Helping with conversations generally around the space as well. But holding on to the console, working a typical radio shift.

That hasn't happened in a while and I think I think I'm beginning to miss it. I was certain I wasn't going to miss it, but maybe I am now. Do you know specifically like what you miss about radio? The intimacy and I don't know if it's still there because to be honest with you, the way a lot of radio stations are built there's too much attention to its visual appeal.

We have a lot of radio stations with cameras. I feel it's invasive. I miss the days where I could actually walk into a radio studio without a shirt on and just fully get intimate, you know, in conversations with whoever's listening at that point in time. I think my favorite times used to be Saturday mornings. They were not very popular with structure and in the sense that weekends were not exactly, you know, big crowd pullers at the time.

And I sort of created something that worked for me for six hours, between six and twelve. Um whatever came in, because we always had some independent shows in between. Whatever came in between seven and say nine was part of my world. You came into my world. you blended into the into my universe for that time and then between ten and twelve it was something else. But there was

There was a level of intimacy that I'm not sure I hear as much anymore and I think it's what radio is missing now. Everybody's Well, let me not say everybody, but every time I listen is it's there's there's always this rush to share information. There's always this rush to think you're the first to present new music or

the new piece of information. There's very little stop, pause. You've probably heard about this, but what if? And you bring in a different perspective to it. Too many of my friends have become lazy in the process.

trusting reactions and the entire structure of your show to the listener or to whoever is active on social media. So You turn on the radio these days, you put out a question, and you start taking reactions from people on social media and then you interrupt those reactions with a little bit of music and one or two lines in about fifteen seconds and well you know what's happening, your show's over, but there's no connection.

There's no intimacy, there's no oh, I'm glad I had you here today to tell me this as you. Well, there there's radio stations that are, as you mentioned, putting on video and now you can't do your show with your shirt off anymore. But I'm sure you can probably go to those radio people and say, wait till I tell you about podcasting and the amount of video we are supposed to be doing now.

I'm getting into a lot of trouble over my stance. I won't call it anti video because it's really not what I'm about, but I'm really not comfortable with the fact that people who should know better in the space are admitting and accepting that video is the next phase of podcasting. I don't think it's about next phases. I just think it's about his system.

if you respect it enough, accommodate whatever you do with audio and video. But in the first place audio was what made it so intimate, what made it so powerful, what made me get into it in the first place. The things I couldn't say on radio, the things

I didn't want to be seen for on T V. I could express them in audio. I could tell longer stories. I could, you know, really let go and just express. But right now everybody's about one walled garden or well one walled garden and another walled garden trying to fight that one walled garden for possession of

creators and I'm worried that people are just willingly throwing away their freedom for what they think would be an advantage to them and I've already seen how it turns out for some of us. I had a friend who lost his show after seven years. And they never really told him what he did. And this was just audio, but he was locked onto a particular wall garden or where he was locked in a wall garden. And the stories that came out were just not adding up, but it just made it clear that if you

uh a podcaster and you willingly put yourself in this situation, there's very little that anyone can do for you. I found myself in a similar situation just early this year as well. And this is just audio, I'm not even talking about video. Video is a lot worse with you know those terms and conditions. I was on a free platform for a very long time, for about five years. It was home to me as far as I was concerned.

Even though they weren't really doing much for me, but they did enough, giving me unlimited space to put up as many shows as I could, because it wasn't just one show. Now the question is, did they violate the terms and conditions or do I assume they did? I assumed they did and maybe I was wrong because I was told in explicit terms that it was part of the terms and conditions that they could put stuff on your show

telling people that they powered your show. And I thought that was a violation of my space. Now the thing is, after I complained, they took it off and they took it off all the other shows as well. So That leaves a a very vague space for conversation. But regarding video, it's a problem for what we're doing. I remember I was on a panel in twenty twenty two or twenty three.

It was very early that year and it was the first time I'd even heard that, you know, we could have a podcasting panel here. And it was during this we used to have this event called Next Africa. It was a big tech event and someone was able to get a podcast stage. And then the conversation about video came out and I was like, if you'd been following my content, which was an audio fiction series, And

You now decided you would rather enjoy me on YouTube. Would you really enjoy the same show that had immersed you in? Or that you'd been immersed in for so long, you practically closed your eyes to enjoy the show and you now insist it has to be in video. How do you want me to go about that? So there's you know, there's the conversation around the fact that not everything we do in podcasting has to be video. I'm fine with those who do chat shows and

It's fine, really, but that's not all there is and you really should stop forcing people to think that that's what's next. It's really not what's next. It's good for who knows what to do with it, but it's not for everybody.

Well, some people might think that your view is antiquated, but I'm beginning to see signs that your view is ahead of its time. I made a prediction last year that a lot of people would be selling their video equipment because they are not getting any return of investment on the video that they are doing. I'm beginning to see a lot of people who put video up are getting a few views. Consumption that is lower than twenty percent.

And then I say, show me the audio numbers. And the audio numbers have h way higher completion rates and way more downloads. And I'm not here to say the download is the greatest metric of all time, but the fact that people are listening and getting through 70 and 80% of the show on audio.

really says something and I think people are looking at this the wrong way and by looking I think they like the look of a video. Listen, one of us is very good looking on the screen and the other one's doing a podcast from Canada. So, you know, when I people love the looks of things. You know, they like to have access to it. They think they do, and then say, okay, well, you're gonna watch this for, you know, you know, 30, 45, 60 minutes, and they don't do it.

No, they don't. I had a conversation with someone too in the same space and it's it's a problem here too and it makes me laugh really because I think we spend a lot of time just feeding our eyes because we think that's how we consume and understand what we consume. But I'm learning that it's really just distracting. I'll be honest with you, I actually spend more time on YouTube than I spend on a podcast. If I'm gonna listen to a podcast, I'm fully immersed in that.

On YouTube I'm looking for a variety of things and none of them involve an SM seven B hanging on a boom arm and two people laughing over each other. It's never been I've never seen the appeal of that per se. I can see it in shop bits, but not for an entire show. and it's concerning for me there's a lot of really great content on youtube that far outperforms what some of my good friends in podcasting are doing.

Now my own quarrel really is if you're doing it only on YouTube, it's fine. Why do you have to call it a podcast if it's not available anywhere else? I notice that the phrase is disappearing. Available everywhere you get your podcasts. We need to bring that freeze back.

I love it'cause I always thought I was always comfortable saying it. And then Tom Webster I think did a tweet one day and said, Well, that may be a good idea, but if your podcast is not on SoundCloud, then you're not available wherever you get your podcast. And if you're not available on YouTube, then you know, the same thing, right? So

I still think the term's a lot of fun. But you know why you know why I don't say it anymore? And I think this is something you can speak to because I do think you wrote a blog about this. And that's you should probably say that you're available on platform one like Apple and Spotify.

But also at my website dot com. And that's sending people to your website and making sure that when people go to your website that they can connect to the podcast in whatever ways that you're offering up. So can you speak to the importance of having a website for your podcasts? Oh, it's very important and I'm speaking to myself as well because I need to get back to doing that. I actually stopped for a while.

And this is also an opportunity to shout out the great tools that popped out not too long ago. Especially the web building features, uh pod pages, podcast page. I don't know if podcast page still exists. Under a new name, I believe. And I mean that was really looking ahead'cause I do remember when I had my shows up on pod page. There was the opportunity to interact with my content on YouTube if I chose to. So it was also

one of the options for how to consume my content. So it's important really. But then again, I don't want to push or put too much pressure on creators. Creators already think they're doing too much. I don't know if we'll talk about this in you know in the course of this conversation, but I've been doing a bit of research. I've been curating shows of Nigerian origin. And one thing has been constant.

So many, so many of them stop creating from the first episode. They don't even get to episode three. It's like Okay, I figured out how to record. I've published, but I'm not sure I want to do this anymore because it's actually more work than I thought. So it's hard enough creating and then looking for different ways to get people to calm enjoy what you're doing. But if you're able to understand the basic principle of how your content is distributed in the first place.

you can then take your time with doing everything else. Again, you know, the whole idea of it is it has to be available everywhere else. So if your podcast hosting platform is good enough to even give you a personalized websites, I think that's a good start too for what you do. And then you can bring people to it. But if you're available in all the major podcast hosting platforms, that's just as great.

You go to your dashboard, you check out what you're doing. If you're using OP3 for instance, you get deeper analytics on how well your podcasts are performing. But the important thing is be available in the key places where people actually go to listen to you. And then you can bring them in when you're sure you have a community. But having a website is good, but I don't think it's the only thing that will determine the success of your show.

So I'm gonna ask you a question that is very v there's many, many answers to it. But I know I'm gonna get a very good perspective from you because you actually tackled it, you researched it, you wrote about it, and that's what is a podcast? And is the answer to what is a podcast different, you know, where you're from, which is in Africa and Nigeria? Yes it is. It's very different. The article which I rewrote was a follow up to an article that I'd written in twenty twenty two.

then I think Tom I took a view from Tom Webster, I took a view from Dave Jackson. They were very generous with their perspective. So some of that was still reflective in the current definition. And what I was addressing basically was the fact that people equate YouTube with podcasting and don't know anything else about podcasting. So it's a question of, Oh, I want to start a podcast. You're basically saying you want to start a video.

channel and you know nothing else about podcasting and it bothered me because I've been teaching podcasting with its origins, its foundations. its perspectives and the future of what it could be since twenty and seventeen. I'm now in a space where rather than protecting the foundation or at least having people understand that this is what it is and then agreeing that it could be other things as well. We're having people who are saying no, it doesn't matter what it is.

We want it to be this way because people who don't know anything about it are calling it this. And it's I think it's a problem. It's like somebody waking up one day and calling himself a tree and you're looking at him and asking, Do you have branches? Do you have leaves? And he says, no, all that doesn't matter. But like I'm looking at a tree outside. That's what a tree looks like. You look nothing like a tree. Do you have roots? Do I have to water you?

And you're like, no, but I'm a tree. Um I get confused. And that's what we're facing in the space now. It's not even a question of audio versus video. It's a question of the structure, the nature, the very foundation that makes it what it is. Whether we want to agree on the RSS feed or not, the fact that podcasting is free. is what people are missing out on.

So people are not free with their content. They're going to lock themselves in walled gardens and calling these walled gardens that have no respect for the structure nor the distribution of your art form. And making those ones determine what they call you. It's problematic for me.

Yeah. And so that brings us to Spotify, right? One of our favorite walled gardens. I think it's probably the second favorite walled garden we've referenced in here. We've said walled garden a number of times and it's really up to the listener of the show to figure out which one it is. We'll play a matching game with the whole thing, but When we mean that, we mean YouTube sort of that's a walled garden, right? You put your video in there, you don't re you lose control of it.

It's the same thing, you put a podcast in there, you lose control of it. I don't know whether people get it. Okay, for instance, I I was advocating for YouTube making RSS feeds available. But the option for that means you submit your RSS feed and it still gets encoded as a video. Meaning that if I make edits to my primary feed to that episode, it doesn't reflect on YouTube unless I resubmit that RSS feed.

And when I was doing that, I saw my shows multiplying, you know, different episodes with multiple versions appearing on the same encoded feed. It became problematic. It wasn't helping me in any way. And I I just it was a waste of time as far as I was concerned. And I told myself, you're either doing content specifically for YouTube or you're paying attention to everything else. And so how did you feel about Spotify when they had a video offering?

I had a great laugh. I had a great laugh because I'd warned people about it. I was on Spotify for a very long time. I still use Spotify to consume content that I really like I can't find anywhere else. But I also saw what do it it was just a desperate fight. Personally I feel it was just a petulant younger sibling trying to get the best of what the older sibling had. Case of Jacob and Eso in the digital space.

And it it didn't make sense to me because the first problem with that was If I was creating audio already on the platform and I decided to create video, for someone like me, I would want to serve two different audiences. Right? I want to serve who's watching. I would want to serve who's listening, which means there will be a measure of edits to either content. But what Spotify did was if you decided to bring your video along with your audio, they would suppress your audio with the video.

And that means whoever is listening to your show, whether or not they like it, will get the video version of your content. And it it didn't matter to them. They didn't think this was a problem and creators were like, oh well, you know, Spotify, uh Spotify is big, so let's do this. And that's the problem. People are too quick to give away their power.

It's really crazy. Sound design of the Is inspired by Megatron. Sound effects for radio. and media professionals. For library and custom track. Start your music search now at Dot com The sounding off newsletter. Delivered free to your inbox, featuring Matt's media hacks, hot takes, and retail. Sign up now at sounding off.news. I mean, there's a lot people say a lot of things about the RSS feed.

Maybe some people find it too complicated. Maybe it's because it is easier to put it in into YouTube. Maybe it's because places make it seem like it's easy to submit your video to to Spotify. But People are giving away their power in that moment and they don't really realize that they just want to be on YouTube or on video. It's odd. It is. It really is.

And it gets worse when you see the kind of conditions you're given to monetize, for instance, and you're like, Oh well, they're giving me everything. The argument has always been YouTube has the most powerful discovery engine. And that's maybe where podcasting in its traditional sense still struggles. But I don't think it's a struggle to say I just think it's being in a place where people actually, if they really want you, will have to find you.

On YouTube it's not so much the same case. You're actually fed with something similar to something that's assumed you'd like. So you're not even really giving what you're looking for. I use myself as a case study. I go to YouTube, I specifically search for one thing. I find that one thing. That's the only thing really I'm looking for along those lines or in that format or in that genre.

And then I want to look for something else. But instead of that, I'm having suggestions limiting me to that one thing I had already checked on. So I'm reduced to following that line. The algorithm keeps me in that space.

And then with creators it becomes problematic for them because if you're creating content you have to look for people who are looking for something similar to what you have and if you're doing it a particular way and it's not exactly working you're going to have to adjust it and at the end of the day you're really not doing anything creative or expressive.

You're not sharing your story anymore. You're just trying to beat the algorithm. There's a lot of education that has to take place in the space that's not happening. And even for those of us who try to make it happen. We have other voices telling us, nah, you know, keep up, you know, you're past it. And I'm like, No, I'm not, because it's still gonna blow up in our faces.

And we'll come back to the raw bases again. And I'm just glad for people like James Cridland who just manages to at least give me hope and keep us structured. I moved on to a new platform recently and when I reached out to him telling him about what I was doing with the podcast index, he recommended it and was like, look, for some of the shows you're actually going to look for This platform actually has features that makes it easy to find these kind of shows.

And then it became a talking point again. I have a lot of friends I know a lot of people who are stuck on platforms they don't know what to do with. and don't know how to get discovered and it could just be minor tweaks or certain, you know, podcast features that could make the difference. But if nobody's talking about these things, we get stuck with it, everybody else, you know, seems to agree with. And that's where we are now.

So this is a good time to talk about something that you've been working on and working with, and that's the Nigerian Podcast Index. So why did you feel the need for this to be done? I've been asking questions for the longest time. One of the biggest problems we have on the continent is accurate data. Um if you want to upgrade what it is you're doing, because I mean, I can't tell people I'm actually making money from podcasting. I'm making money from podcast related services, yes.

Production, voiceover work, music and all that, yes. But podcasting itself, no, because we have constraints. Dynamic ad insertions using CPM doesn't work for us here. We don't make those kind of numbers to be measured in that way. Two, the payment platforms are not the things we have access to. We have strict restrictions here. Most of these platforms pay out through Stripe and PayPal. Those are not available to us here.

We have a running battle in Nigeria with PayPal. So even with PayPal returning, there's still a lot of skepticism around it. So we have those actual challenges.

And it's one of the reasons people are running away from the medium because you really can't see a way out of it. But there really is no, there are many ways out of it. So data. Somebody's like, oh, you know, what are you doing with podcasting in your country? How many shows do you have? Well genres are popular there. A lot of us have to wait till the end of the year for Spotify to give us a list. Spotify won't respond to emails when you ask about this data, Apple doesn't have my time.

So how do we do this? I ask the regular data collection companies and they're like, they don't think what we're doing podcasting is big enough for that kind of attention. So I decided to do it the way I know how. The same way I was doing the survey a little while back. I created a form, I found a way to find RSS feeds, and then I started curating my lists.

The alternative was to actually put out broadcasts and ask podcasters themselves, excuse me, to submit the RSS feeds. And that's where, you know, my eyes opened. People didn't know what the RSS feeds were. And it was an opportunity to be like, uh oh, okay, hold on. So you're hosted on this platform and this is your primary feed. That means you're not available in any of the podcast players.

And you've been doing this for how long again? Okay, now let me tell you how this works and how you've been short changing yourself. So the whole idea now is to have a place where we can actually look at the number of shows we're doing, the formats, the genres, another interesting aspect of course is language.

So we're seeing now that there are restrictions to language types of podcasts you can create, despite the fact that there are so many I mean in Nigeria we have over two hundred and fifty local languages. And we have people who want to tell stories in these languages but we have problems with platforms who can transcribe or interpret these languages. But of course technology is, you know, making changes.

So we're seeing the kind of languages people are choosing to tell their stories because of the restrictions they have. We're seeing the variety of formats and genres of these stories that far outweigh the chat show format. We're seeing stories from ends of the country that I didn't even think people knew what podcasting was about. We're seeing these numbers. We're seeing people who've done a lot of shows, we're seeing people who have done so very few shows will have awesome content.

So it's also raising questions. Why did you stop? What's going on here? And all this actually started last year. I have a friend in advertising who just reached out to me. As far as he was concerned, I had the numbers somewhere. And he's like, Oh, I have this client of mine who wants to place an ad in a podcast. And I was like, Oh, YouTube. No, no, not YouTube. I'm not talking about YouTube guy. We know how we can handle that.

I'm talking about a podcast audio and y you're the one I can talk to, so where's your list? I'm like I don't have one. He's like but but you should I said, Yes, I know I should and so I started it. And I should have a report and have an article to support my findings and to keep encouraging people to just submit their shows. It's not a player. It's not a chart ranker. It's just a list. It's a digital version of the yellow pages. So you come there, you type in.

You find the podcast, you see Tyrus's link, you go copy it and go play it on your favorite player. How do you know that it's a Nigerian podcast? How do we weed that out? Do you pass the test? Is do you ask for ingredients for Jollifi Rice? No really. Well, I had to come up with very creative ways, but this is also where I have to give my respect again to James because he helped out with this.

On RSS.com for instance they have this feature called location tags and I find that that really should be available in every RSS feed. I also found out that there's actually an easy way for the creator to do this. Just make sure your description has your location. And your contact details, and that would appear in your RSS feed if I search for it.

So I started telling people about it too and you know, some of the members of the team as well reached out to people and were like, Look, if you haven't done that in your description already, quickly do that and we could find it. Well yeah, location tags were one of the things I used and then the word Nigeria. Nigerian. I could search for languages. I could search for unique Nigerian names that are popular in the space.

And then I find that as you find one, all of a sudden two more pop up and three more pop up and then you're like, okay, you check their descriptions, you find there's a pattern. And then you walk around that pattern to begin to find the others as well. There's so many I still haven't found. But I broke them into different areas.

Society and culture podcasts are very popular, so that wasn't too hard to find the Nigerian ones. And then it's not just the ones that were or that are produced here. It also includes the ones produced in diaspora by Nigerians. So sometimes it's easy to find them because their names are there and they are proudly Nigerian. They put it out there. Oh, struggles of a Nigerian in America, struggles of a Nigerian in Canada. They put it there. If it's in your feed

then it's easy to find. So it's also opened an opportunity to tell creators if you want people to find you, you have to be able to put that bit of information in your show description. And then it could pop up whenever your RSS feed is requested.

No, I'm talking about Africa so far today. It's like as if it's just a sort of one place and it's all equal across the continent, and that is like far from the truth. It is. Um, I have a struggle because we have languages. We have neighbours who speak French, Bene, Togo, and they're even much closer than our Ghanaian brothers. And there's podcasting going on there. There's podcasting going on in Sierra Leone. There's podcasting going on in former Portuguese colonies.

I'm looking for these conversations as well. They're not easy to find, but it's happening. There's a lot going on in the Arabic community up north. Podcasting as well. So But again you start from where you are and then you hope that the template you're creating is replicated, modified, improved, and then helps other regions as well, so that when we have this kind of conversations, you're combining data from the different areas of the of the continent.

So does that give countries let's say like Nigeria, South Africa, and you know, possibly Zimbabwe, does it give them an advantage because There's predominantly there's there's English involved in those countries. And so that does that give them a head start over, you know, like a country like say Libya, which might lean a little bit Italian or a Senegal, which might lean French? ¡It does! The podcast platforms themselves

were shaped mostly with English as the lead language. So that was the first attraction. And maybe now we're having, you know, a variety of languages as well. I do know that Afropods on the continent is beginning to look into other local languages. So you would find a variety, but maybe not so many. But the fact that the podcast hosting platforms themselves offered homes to creators using English as the base language.

That was the first appeal. And of course on the continent we have lots of English speaking nations and those are the ones who would always be in the forefront. All the podcast well we'll see what the real percentage is. But the ones I've curated are in English. They have to be. You f find sparingly Hausa Igbo Yoruba podcasts because these are even harder to translate in show descriptions.

So would I find that that a nation that had some Spanish speaking into it that it would probably do better in the iVooks app and maybe some countries would do better in Spotify, but maybe there's some tools from other parts of You know, that might be Arabic that might do better. So when it comes to apps, what are people choosing in Nigeria, but also what do you see in other countries?

In Nigeria Spotify. It's too easy. Nigeria Spotify. Because it started with the music and of course you know how big the Afrobeats noise is. So with that, it was kinda easy to seep into that. And even when they came, I think there was a time I sat on a panel then. It was actually an Afrobeats week long event, but they found a way to come talk about Spotify for creators and then they looked at us local podcasters as well and asked us to be on the panel.

So yeah, that is a no brainer. Spotify is what reigns here and then of course because people are beginning to look at video as well, YouTube is also very big here. Across the continent I'm not too sure, but I know AfriPods is doing what they can and that's operating out of Kenya. And they're quite popular here too, quite popular in South Africa, but South Africa has quite a number of them. Iono I believe, Iono dot Fm and they work with radio stations as well.

Spotify. Spotify is all over Africa. That's that's what everybody's you know kind of using. And I think with translations now available. It even makes it easier for content creators as well as their fans and listeners to enjoy using Spotify. But Spotify is too easy. It's it's everywhere here.

And YouTube is also quite easy. Let's just talk about our favorite walled garden. They're starting to dub in and amongst other languages, and it's only a matter of time before it starts to reach a number of languages that are, you know, only found in Africa. True. I'm looking forward to, you know, whatever pushes the button for us here and then encourages us to actually be bold with the stories we tell.

Tell me a little bit about your podcast that you do. How did you ever become an Arsenal fan? Ha ha ha I'm actually wearing one now. I know. I wasn't gonna ask it, but you showed up with the shirt and it and there's a little video here that I can see, so I figure I'm gonna ask him about the podcast. So I have three active podcasts at the moment. I have into the Podverse which is dedicated to podcasting, so

I'm looking at everything from innovation challenges and the opportunities from an African perspective. Nobody else is doing it the way I'm doing it. But the beautiful thing about it is I'm having conversations with different strata of podcasters, so podcasters all over the globe who are just as curious about what we're doing and then it's an opportunity for the local content creators to see how people are making a difference in their own small spaces.

And they can be inspired as well. So I'm doing that into the podverse. I have Up Gunners, which is well over I started Up Gunners in two thousand and fourteen. Now here's the funny thing. The origin of Up Gunners, it was supposed to be a syndicated radio show. I believe I was ahead of my time. When I went to my friends on radio, I had left radio not so long ago, so I was going to my friends and I was like, I am an Arsenal fan, you know this. I know the stories, I know the struggle.

I've been an Arsenal fan since 1989 so I know what pain is. And I want to be able to talk about it within a sports show. What was constant on radio or sports shows covering everything. And I was like, Yes. You can do the spot show covering everything. I just want five minutes inside that spot show.

And it was too far fetched for these my guys. You know, like especially with things not looking too good. I said that's exactly why these conversations need to be had. Like how are we still fans of a club that appears to be struggling? That should make for an interesting conversation. So I was doing that and then I actually wanted to make it video. We have this thing, we have this habit of gathering in public places to watch matches.

It's something to be seen. It's not something you can always explain. Especially when you have rival fans gathering around. You hear the funniest anecdotes there, you hear the wildest insults. And I always used to have like fans of opponents, opposing teams rather, sharing their perspectives about my club. And it was always interesting. So I also started creating videos for it on YouTube.

So what I was doing for YouTube was different from what I was doing for audio. But it was tasking at the same time. I was pretty good with video editing, but it was taking up too much of my time. And sometimes things happened in football that were way faster. so i continued with audio and i changed its format over the years That's another thing about podcasting. You do your way. And I was doing it my way.

I was getting vox pop reactions and then I had somebody who wanted to build his skills with analysis. take over the show and I'm like, hey, have fun. And of course he used bits of the show to eventually get a job on radio where he's working now. And I'm back to just being me, however I feel about certain situations that are expressed it on the show. And I find that it's when I talk and talk alone

I get the higher li how the highest listens. So it's a fascinating situation with that. I became a fan of Arsenal Club when they won the championship in eighty nine. I was about eleven or twelve thereabouts. And it just felt like I don't know, this underdog story, they had been without a trophy for about seventeen years and then they go defeat Liverpool at Anfield 2 nil.

It was a beautiful story. It's so beautiful that I had to get the documentaries again and get my kids to watch it. So my oldest son is a big Arsenal fan than I am. even though his experience with the club is a lot different, he's growing with this team and he's able to see them in a way that's very different from the way I would see them because of, you know, my own experiences.

So yeah, that's how it started. It was too easy to build a podcast around Arsenal because you couldn't do it as a radio show. I have an idea. My idea is that you'd come to the podcast show in London and then, you know, two days before the show, I think that Arsenal's playing Burnley. Maybe it happens, yeah. Maybe it happens. Listen, I'm just I'm just throwing it out there. Just you think about it, you manifest on it. Who knows, maybe it happens.

Tony, thanks so much for uh for talking about podcasting, podcasting in Africa, podcasting in Nigeria, and Arsenal with me. Thanks for having me again, Matt. It's always a pleasure. Another Sound Off Media Company Pod.

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