Paris On Air

by Oliver Gee

  In Sweden, it’s customary to meet with the local priest ahead of the wedding so they can get to know you and learn your story. We met ours in the town’s white stone church, which was built in 1624 and stands proudly on a little hill by the lake. Our priest, a soft spoken man in his fifties with the faintest hint of a lisp, took us to his office to flesh out the details. When we asked if he could hold the ceremony in half-English, half Swedish, he admitted that he’d struggle with the English part. We said we didn’t mind if his speech was a little Swenglish; but I was more concerned that he couldn’t pronounce my last name.

  My last name, Gee, is pronounced exactly like the seventh letter of the alphabet in English. But he kept saying Oliver Yee, explaining that the Swedes simply don’t have the soft G sound like English people have, in words like genius or gem. The priest looked at me in consternation. And I was worried that Lina would be married to Oliver Yee, and not me.

  “I know!” I said. “It’s pronounced Gee as in Jesus. Gee-sus!”

  The priest looked dismayed.

  “But in Sweden we call Him Yeesus,” he responded with a sigh.

  It crossed my mind to suggest he say Chee, which sounds more like Gee than Yee does, but I feared he would end the ceremony with “I now present the Cheese”.

  The priest promised he’d practice his pronunciation - and I went back to Paris to knuckle down on work. After all, I thought, who wants to marry a struggling podcaster?

  7.5 The salary

  Even though podcasts have been around for decades, believe it or not, there’s no script for how to make money out of them. Adverts are the obvious answer, but I didn’t know how to get them, and was reluctant to dilute the show with promotions about mattresses, as many other shows do. At this point, I’d been running the podcast for about a year, and I was still broke. Sure, I’d given the occasional walking tour, put on a couple of live shows, and taught podcasting classes at university, but I had no regular income by any stretch of the imagination. So I was left with one probing question: How do you make money out of a podcast? This is, incidentally, the question that I get asked the most in my life, so here’s the answer, once and for all, and how I figured it out.

  While I didn’t have a salary, I did have a following. And it was a kind and generous set of followers. I’d met with many of them over the previous year; they often told me that they were coming to Paris and would love to buy me a drink. In those days I met with everyone, thrilled to know that anyone was listening to my show. I used to be so flattered that I would even buy the listeners drinks as a thanks. It was surreal to meet actual human beings who listened to the show, because up to this point they’d been just emailers or online statistics.

  After a while, as I met more listeners, I stopped buying the drinks - that wasn’t helping with the whole salary thing. But I still met them, and I started to see a pattern. Firstly, it was clear to me that many of them were Paris addicts, desperate to soak up anything about this enchanting city. And I’d been quenching their thirst for Paris while joining them on their often long commutes on the other side of the world. And unlike the other Paris blogs, books, or YouTube channels, I was quite intimately introducing the listeners to real-life characters who made the City of Light shine. Giving the guests 30 minutes to talk about themselves and Paris revealed a raw and honest perspective on the city that people weren’t getting elsewhere.

  But the funny thing was that many of the listeners felt like they knew me too. I mean, I suppose I was sharing a fair chunk of my own life, but it was fun to see how listeners handled this differently. Some figured that since they knew me, I must know them too; so they’d sit down and start telling me about their lives, their hometowns, and what they were doing in Paris. Others would sit silently and wait for me to talk, perhaps feeling like they didn’t want to interrupt the live podcast they were experiencing. Some wanted to pick my brain about what to do in Paris, or how they could move here. But heck, everyone was different, and I was happy to meet them all. Some listeners took it a step further, sending me photos of their pets, or gifts in the mail, like books about Paris, or treats from their home city. As time passed, some would invite me to dinners, parties or trips out of Paris. Eventually I decided to draw a line - and I drew it at meeting for a coffee.

  But, the problem remained: as pleasant as it was to meet new people and to be treated to a drink, I needed to turn a switch somewhere and somehow create a salary - otherwise I couldn’t justify doing the show anymore. The podcast was getting around 30,000 downloads a month, which I learned - in those days at least - was enough to put it in the top 10 percent of all podcasts in the world. Not bad for a one-man job, not least considering how many other podcasts had big companies behind them, or came from radio stations like the BBC.

  So rather than trying to get advertising, I decided to try to get the listeners to fund the show. I discovered a crowdfunding website called Patreon, which allowed followers to give regular pledges to small creative platforms. It was like a magazine subscription. People paid a monthly fee, but instead of getting a magazine, they got some kind of extra access. It took me a while to figure out what to give in return for people’s subscription, and how much to charge for it. But as luck would have it, my crowdfunding launch occurred at the same time as Facebook rolled out live videos, where you can press “record” on a “live stream” and the followers would get a notification to watch. And it made sense for me. Paris is the most beautiful city on the planet, so why should I only focus on audio? I decided to carry out bonus interviews with my guests as we walked around in Paris, pointing out anything worth seeing. It was kind of like a talk show, but while walking: I called it a “walk show,” and that was that.

  The podcast remained free, but if you wanted to see the live Walk Shows, you’d have to become a paying member. I made it clear from the outset that membership wasn’t a sympathy crowdfunding thing; rather, it was access to a club where people could choose to see more of Paris. It felt like a pretty big risk at the time, because it meant doing a lot of extra work and then “hiding” it. But I took the chance and I did it, and I’m glad I did. The early days were rough. There were so few members and they were spread out across the world. This meant that if I were to do a live video in the morning, the Americans would be asleep and I’d have to hope an Australian or two was awake. The first Walk Show I did was me alone, walking around the Left Bank, and only one viewer tuned in. It seemed so hopeless, so pointless, and I felt like I was wasting that one person’s time - yet I pushed on. Because I believed in the idea.

  Gradually, more members joined and I made more live videos. I made them as engaging and as interactive as possible. If someone at home typed a question in the comment field, I’d answer it or read it out to the guest as it came in. It was live, and it was raw. I took cues from the audience, zooming in on something they’d seen in the distance, showing the road signs so they could find the same streets for themselves, and making them feel like they were in Paris too. The advantage I had over all the countless travel shows about Paris and beyond was that my shows were immediate and in real time. There was no editing; if something went wrong, we had to deal with it on the spot.

  And believe me, things went wrong in those early days. Once I did a video with the Australian ambassador to France, Brendan Berne. It was a huge deal for me, the first guest where I had to go through a press team. They’d put the word “Unclassified” on all their emails, which made me nervous from the outset. We were to walk along the Bir Hakeim bridge by the embassy - the same bridge from the opening scene of Last Tango in Paris. I planned to do the same walk as Marlon Brando had done before me. The ambassador’s press team followed us along worriedly in the distance; the same press team that had advised him against doing a live video. And they were right to be concerned. When I pressed the “live” button on my phone and we started the show, my camera equipment went berserk. The stabilizer spun out of control like a headless chi
cken, like something from The Exorcist. And there was nothing I could do about it, it was live. I forced the camera into submission and I tried to steer a serious interview while the camera kept trying to spin. The ambassador laughed it off, but I still have nightmares about it. It’s a wonder he ever agreed to let me host a blowout soirée in his magnificent residence one year later; but that’s for the end of the book.

  Those early Walk Shows, they were a crazy ride, I can tell you. If you’ve never seen one of them, let me explain why they’re so mad. First, I had to concentrate on operating the camera to focus on me and the guest (or whatever we were looking at). Second, I needed to make sure we were going the right way, and never just standing still. That’s crucial: we had to be walking, otherwise we might as well have stayed in the studio. Plus, Paris was the real guest of the video, and people wanted to see it. Third, and perhaps most importantly, I needed to maintain an engaging conversation with the guest, keeping in mind that they weren’t always comfortable with being live on the internet. Fourth, I needed to make sure I was keeping an eye on the comments from people tuning in from around the world, because without them, there was no point doing it live. Interaction was key. And last of all, I needed to make sure I wasn’t going to get hit by a car or step in any surprises that a dog or a horse may have left behind.

  Yes, it was mad but I absolutely loved it. And I was fortunate that at the time, no one else was doing live interviews on the streets of Paris. It was something new, and there was an appetite for it.

  As I started to promote the membership platform more, and as I managed to convince more guests to go for a walk with me, the members began to sign up more regularly. Gradually, the Paris podcast fans became too curious about the videos - or maybe they just wanted me to succeed - but either way, they kept trickling in and the group kept growing. It wasn’t a quick process, but I gave it my all. When I hit that “live” button I’d find people were ready and waiting, and there’d be 15 people watching, where once there was only one. I got to know the names of the more talkative members and learned their personalities from their comments. Kerrin in Australia would never miss a show. Brian in Victoria would always be first with feedback. Cindy and James in Chicago would set an alarm and get up at any hour to watch. Deborah in Virginia would always be the first to comment.

  This thing was growing. I stopped doing all other forms of work, whether it was freelance journalism or teaching at the university, and I set my sights on a tangible target - reaching France’s minimum wage via podcast subscription. If enough members joined the club, if my total monthly earnings could equal that of the elusive minimum wage, then it would be official. It would be a job.

  Around nine months after I did the first-ever Walk Show with its solitary home viewer, the collective monthly pledges added up to match the minimum wage. It was an incredibly satisfying feeling. Yes, I’d invented a job. My own job. As a podcaster, no less. Now, I don’t know, this might not sound like such a big deal to all you people out there earning much more than minimum wage, but for me it was such a validating moment that I could have cried. Sure, I was only earning the kind of money that I could get flipping burgers at a fast food joint, but I didn’t care. I had quit my old job, aimed to make it on my own, and I’d done it.

  7.6 The catacombs

  There’s a certain point in the life of a podcast where things just change. It’s definitely not an overnight thing, but there’s a perceptible point where you realize it has become its own entity. It could be when it starts to earn money, but I don’t think that’s really it. I think it’s more about the moment when people start to accept its existence. I suppose it’s like anything: trends, fashion, computer games. As long as enough people give it a seal of approval, the crowds will follow. For me, I started to realize that it had become a real thing when I started to get much more regular emails.

  Sometimes they were really touching; people who said they used the show as a kind of therapy when they were going through hard times. Some people emailed to tell me how they bonded with their loved ones while cooking at home, with my show on in the background. Others said they had binge-listened to all the episodes back-to-back on long road trips. These were my favourite emails, especially when people told me where they were listening. One had his earphones in while mowing the lawn in Texas. One listened while doing the laundry in Peru. There was one fan on the commuter trains of Tokyo, and there was a fairly vocal Fiji contingent. In fact, it was quite easy to organize the statistics to see which cities the downloads were coming from, and it boggled my mind. There were listeners in Greenland, Namibia, and Jamaica. There were listeners on islands I’d never heard of before. And all this added a weird kind of pressure. I felt that even though it was just an independent little show, I had a responsibility to give it my best shot; and so I did.

  In addition to the listeners, people who wanted to be guests on the show would email me. This was often exciting too. At first the emails were often way off the mark, but sometimes there were nuggets of gold, like the beekeeper. He’d heard about the podcast through a friend and told me he’d like to show me something special. He explained that he kept beehives on top of the city’s prominent buildings and made his own Parisian honey, which was impressive enough. But he wanted to show me his latest project - honey wine. Or mead, I suppose it’s called. And where do you think he aged the mead? Down in the catacombs, of course. But not in the touristy part with all the skeletons; no, he had a private little labyrinth that you could only enter if you went through a hospital and gave a secret knock on a door.

  I accepted the invite and met him at the hospital. When his colleagues opened the door and let us in, we went down, down, down 30 metres under Paris, into a stone maze. We turned left, right, and left again, all with his pet beagle following along. We eventually came to his corner of the catacombs and we feasted on wine and cheese that was slathered in his own Paris honey. Unfortunately, the beekeeper’s English wasn’t great, so he never made it onto the podcast, and he was reluctant to let me film in the catacombs for fears that urban explorers would find his secret tunnels (and take his wine). So the beekeeper was never on the show - but his tale remains one of the many follow-up stories I’ve got in my notes that I hope to share one day. Whenever I think of the beekeeper I wonder just how many stories there are in this city that I’ve not heard of - and I’m reminded how much I want to find them and tell them.

  But these stories were about to take a back seat - I had a wedding to host, a honeymoon to plan, and my Paris mates had organized a bachelor weekend in Amsterdam. And if you think eight mates together in Amsterdam sounds wild, then you’d better strap in. France was about to hold a party that would blow everything else out of the water and into the stratosphere.

  7.7 The World Cup

  A young woman was standing on the bridge, almost totally naked, and peering down into the murky waters of the Canal Saint-Martin. With one hand she held the railing behind her, plucking up the courage to make the mighty leap into the water below. Thousands stared at her from the waterside, cheering.

  “Allez les bleus!” she yelled, leaping from the bridge and hitting the water with a splash that was drowned out by the roar of the crowd. As the cheering continued, another man climbed over the railing, and hung from the bridge by his fingertips. With his other hand, he removed his shorts and his bare buttocks shone in the Paris twilight. He hung free and easy in the gentle breeze while the crowd broke into hysterical laughter. Then he let go and fell into the water too. More nudity, more splashes, more cheering. On the road behind them, young men with faces painted red, white, and blue climbed onto moving vehicles, drinks in hand, and danced on the rooftops. All the while, car horns were beeping, people were cheering, and music was playing. And I stood there with mouth agape, wondering what the hell was going on.

  Now, of course I actually knew what was happening. France’s national soccer team had just beaten Croatia 4-2 and won the World Cu
p for the first time in 20 years. And it was pandemonium in Paris. But nothing could prepare me for just how extensive the party was. Soccer is like a religion in France, and the celebrations went on long, long, long after the final whistle was blown. I imagine no one got much sleep that night, all on a Sunday too.

  For a little perspective, when I first moved to Paris I remember sitting in a pretty typical bar - definitely not a sports bar by any means. On the wall was a digital clock that had stopped ticking. On closer inspection, I saw that it had stopped during the evening of July 12th in 1998. I asked a French friend what had happened at that time and date and he looked at me with a nostalgic twinkle in his eye and said, without missing a beat: “That’s when we last won the World Cup. It was the best day of my life”.

  I am not a huge soccer fan, but I always find mobs of people to be interesting. I walked along the canal trying to fathom why the result of the game had made these people so ecstatic. I filmed a few live videos to capture the mood but the throngs of people all using their phones at the same time meant that the internet didn’t last long. I walked towards the Place de la République, the same square where I’d seen millions gather after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. There were similar sized crowds now, but it was a wildly different mood. It was the middle of summer, there was a lot more skin, and a lot more drunkenness.