Then Jake White Called: The Real Origin Story of Megafoon Rugby and Lekker Rugby Pod!

MV and I have been shaking in our boots. This is the most nerve-wracking pod episode that we've ever been a part of. And along the way, I lost sight of home. I lost sight of goodness. I lost sight of family.

And so my journey back was in strange ways, but one of them was through Podland. And then we started spitting out names and it just was a long conversation. Do you remember Harry? And it just ended up as Laka Rappi Pod. I just had this picture in my mind what it's gonna look like and the logo, it just sort of clicked.

So, weirdest thing, now that I think back to it. It was about a year after I started the channel, just over a year. We started this pod, the North-South Derby Stormers Bulls, and now we've like it up already because everyone hates us. We're not gonna get any access. So, you know, NB and I, we get together and we write to be like, you know, we kind of massage, we wordcraft this thing to go to the Stormers.

and we get a response and it's sort of a debate. I believe we're already successful. I believe this has been beyond wildest dreams successful. When we sat down at the table for breakfast in Pretoria and chatted through, we did some of that stuff, scenarios. We didn't think high enough.

Our dreams were too modest. We've actually exceeded them already. So that makes me cautiously optimistic. This is The Long Way to the Game, only on Megaphone Rugby. Welcome everyone to a very special episode of The Long Way to the Game.

And today you'll notice I'm introducing the pod which is different than ever before. And this is an episode that I've literally wanted to do since before I met Emilia and Harry. And today we're talking to Emilia and Harry. They are our special guests. the cocky wearing safari puck comb in the sock dyed in the wool blue bull supporter Envia and then the who knows what jean wearing t-shirt bald likely being in jail poet from America Harry Jones and I'm genuinely genuinely excited guys thank you for agreeing to do this Thank you, man.

We're going to lift our kimonos with great trepidation. Envy and I have been shaking in our boots. This is the most nerve-wracking pod episode that we've ever been a part of. I am famously happy to speak for hours on end. I think everyone would be interested in what I have to say.

Envy is diametrically opposed. He's the opposite of that. Why would someone want to hear me talk for a long time? And now you've got us both under the lights, and we're ready to be fried. Let's go.

remember I've got the the veto option Paul I can cut out whatever I want to so whatever yes whatever I say in this part of the you know needs to be reviewed afterwards before it's published TMO you guys are you guys are so funny that you're both so modest I have literally asked for this forever and Envio always says okay we can maybe do it somewhere in the future and then he never does it and then to show that we're a fan-centric odd last week someone yaku kukamur 1831 i think that's his birth date maybe uh he suggested we have that and i sent that to both of you and said okay now you cannot deny this and here we are on monday morning recording this bob so excellent thank you guys i'm going to start with guys this is i'm not going to you're free to talk about your personal lives, but I'm not going to go into your personal lives and stuff like that. What I'm interested in and what I think our audience is interested in is how did this megaphone thing get started and why, and how did you guys get together and how does it work? And where do all these connections that you have that make for such an interest? So that's kind of the gist. It's not going to be about personal questions.

So Harry, maybe I'm going to start with you and I just say there is an over under for who will speak the most on this pod, your Envia. So if you could keep that in mind, could you start with like before Megaphone, just what were you doing in the world? You often allude to some of it. It's very intriguing. But could you say a little bit more about what you did before you crossed paths with Megaphone?

Yeah, 100%. I will consult two agreements now, my parole agreement and my partnership agreement to determine whether how much I can reveal and it turns out I can whatever I want. I have been for a long time someone who straddled worlds. I was always sort of a person wandering around, you know, so in Cape Town with, you know, because of my background, my father being a nuclear scientist with an American accent who was on, you know, SCBC radio sometimes, interviewed. It was always like I had two...

I thought about America, I knew about it, but I didn't go there, you know? And then finally when we did, I never felt at home there. And so for a long time in my career, I straddled. I was a cross-border and have been a cross-border investigator and fixer for a long time, for almost three decades of straddling you know where do i do work i work everywhere where is um a scandal it's wherever people read um if someone runs away with money where do they go everywhere um so i i kind of try to um to satisfy a market it's a very small market but it's very lucrative and it's a niche in the sense that only a few of those types of things happen every year but if you get most of them, then you have them. And so when people talk about a fixer, they think about there's Olivia Pope as a show, there's a Ray Donovan show.

Those are too dramatic. The better one to refer to if you wanted to watch a movie that was the most like my professional life would be Michael Clayton with George Clooney, where he operates inside a very respectable white shoe law firm. But within that firm there has to be one guy who just fixes all the problems that happen in all the cases and can also help the ceo of a fortune 500 company whose son goes wrong with no apparent connection to any sort of like practice area of law so whether it was from cape town to london from london to new york from new york to la i basically lived my life in such a way that i could apply the skills of rugby the lessons i learned in cape town um the typical south african ability to not need a lot of resources to solve a problem in honduras um to be able to straddle to australasia i just tried to have the world as my market and along the way i lost sight of home i lost sight of goodness i love sight of family and so my way my journey back was in strange ways but one of them was through potland and writing about rugby i found that i could reach back to a time when i recognized myself better and where the lessons of the locker room were more clear to me and who i loved and who i'd fight for and who i'd have allegiance for because my life lent itself to not being loyal but a man without a country a man without a cause just you know a genteel thug for big capital um but i i realized i was still finding my way back you know to the southern suburbs and to the lessons i learned on the field and um and i had a fair amount of rugby acumen having played you know at high levels in the cape but also playing uruguay argentina france and then my final senior game ever was at age 50 that's 10 years ago um and coaching consulting but i just wasn't very public about it i felt shy you know when you lose your accent when you don't have the right you know credentials the bona fides how can you walk back into rugby and get into the locker rooms and get into the coaching boxes the answers you cannot um you have to have the right you know the right pedigree and so you know pod land and writing about it afforded me this ability to get in touch with players who like me and the players told the coaches and then and then they said be a part of us you know come be with us and we'll talk to you whether it's michael checker or john dobson or um you know france malherberg we could we could we could commune again and and realize Whereas maybe in 23, the World Cup, the idea of the whole diaspora coming together and people in line to get a crap sandwich in the middle of the halftime when we're on a knife edge and a knockout. You know, it's like, where are you from? Ah, Seattle.

Well, Potsdam. You know, LA. Well, PE. And so it was just this double, you know, straddle that everyone had. And I realized we're all trying to find our way back home.

And most of us as men have a part of our life that goes awry, we get lost in a dark wood, and we have to find our way back. What's the thing about the first mountain, second mountain? Your first mountain is career, and you're working so hard, you think it's everything. Then you go into a valley where you lose everything, or you realize everything I won wasn't even that important. I have all the money I need.

I don't really have to work that hard. What could I do? And the second mountain is, what do you care about? What do you want to leave behind you? And who will you help and who will you serve?

And will you do things for free? And will you help another man up? And will you stop hurting people? That, the second mountain. I think Podland is part of that journey, is how to be a better person.

So, sorry, long-winded answer, but that's my answer. I'm sticking to it. That's a great way, Harry. I have a lot of follow-up questions, but I'm going to go to Envia next. Envia, while you were talking, looked like he was about to have a heart attack.

and I think he was hoping you would just keep on talking so that I wouldn't come to here. Envia, I've been dying to ask you, the first time I met you, my perception of you was a little bit the role that you play in this odd couple between you and Harry, that you were the conservative Afrikaans, Afrikaner guy, but also I assumed you had a background in journalism and sports journalism. could you talk a little bit about how you got to megaphone i actually want to get to the point of why did you start megaphone what made you do it what were you trying to achieve and what background did you have to make you think this is a good idea yeah i have to be very careful our our couch this um covert happened my dad and i had a business for many years together we talked about it the other night when we spoke to Rito. Started in Ghianni and under a tree literally, quite a tree. Moved to Polakwane, had it for many years and then COVID happened and that went south as many other people did.

So here I am in my mid-50s and highly qualified, overqualified, over experienced and nowhere to go basically. And then I met Isak de Placif from Nispad, who's an Afrikaans guy used to work for Aris Gia as a presenter. And he started a channel on YouTube called Nispod, huge channel, Afrikaans channel. And I started talking to him, I became friendly, I helped him with his YouTube channel. I designed his YouTube channels, Luke, the logo and everything you still see to this day, I helped him with.

And then in 2022, I mean, after the business has closed down, so I'm sitting there twiddling my thumbs kind of a thing. and my very patient wife hovering in the background to see when I'm going to get my life back together. And I spoke to Isak and he said to me, we talked about that second test against Wales in 2022 and Rossi just picked this very experimental side. I don't know if you remember. It's a completely different side.

The one in Bloemfontein? Yeah, one in Bloemfontein, yeah. And Isak asked me, why do I think of it? And I told him what I think of it. I'm not a rugby expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I feel understanding what's going on.

And I told him and then he said to me, why don't I start doing something for him on his channel sports wise at that stage my interest was mostly formula one and we started talking about formula one a bit and a bit of rugby and then I decided for a variety of reasons to rather do it on my own so I started a sports channel Megafuon sports don't ask me where Megafuon comes from I have no idea just sort of came to my head one day and also don't ask me why it's still well it is actually it started as an afrikaans channel focused on formula one mostly on my own i still look at those very first videos and i cringe looking at myself it was so bad not that it's any better now but it was really bad then this is terrible anyway and um you know i sort of fell into rugby kind of a thing and uh yeah we'll talk about how he just now started out as afrikaans and then um i really i started understanding how youtube works you know you can't mix afrikaans and english no matter what the content is because you completely upset the algorithm you said you have a guy in ireland starting to watch your content and the next video he gets in afrikaans and he's like completely what the hell is this and he doesn't click on the next one that comes out so youtube says oh he's no longer interested so i just i split it up into an afrikaans channel and an english channel but anyway that's sort of the background we'll get into me and ari just now maybe ari can talk about that a bit more so you started with you when you started the sports was the main focus formula one and then it shifted to rugby over time yeah it was mostly yeah and just to be clear you didn't have a journalism in background before that it was more in it or technology that was in business my entire my entire adult life like i said my dad and i we were we made some stuff with piping let's let's leave it there a couple of you know we made stuff to connect pipes with that's my background you know in business. I've been in business my entire life, studied law, never practiced law and then studied a bit further in business and I was in business my entire life. I've got no, absolutely zero background in journalism and I've got absolutely zero background in training rugby, in all honesty. Okay, so I think that's kind of fertile ground for the next set of questions because honestly, what attracted me to this channel, and Envia, I think I either saw you on your original Afrikaans channel or I saw you on Rockwood. And because I don't speak Afrikaans kind of generally, it wasn't something that really interested me.

But then you kept coming up on my feed. And what attracted to me to this channel was the cast of the core characters, especially you and Harry, and the variety and the quality of the content. So let's get to that. You guys know that you are a little bit of an odd couple when you like stereotypically you look like complete opposite Stormer booze everything How did your paths even meet Like how did you even meet And then how did you decide let do something together My memory is that MVA reached out to me, but I almost think it came through an intermediary. But I'm not sure of that.

But I think there's a guy, a friend of ours named Johan, who's a good Pretoria man and deeply steeped in rugby. someone who knows his own son, also a very good player, but he knows the dads of some of the players in the Bok picture, deeply inside the Bulls. We had always chatted, Johan and I, on social media about rugby. I wrote for an Australian platform called The Roar, and I had a pod on there that started to learn how to pod. My first ones were also as excruciating as MVAs.

I didn't know how to speak in simple declarative sentences. It was unclear when I was finishing a sentence. It was unclear when I was starting a sentence. I sort of vomited a lot of facts out onto the audience, but whatever, I had sort of honed it a little bit. And by that time, when Envia reached out, I think he had formed a decent impression of my ability to tell a story and to come at rugby in a different way.

I thought from the very beginning Envia was a curious person. Yes, speaks Afrikaans, but not Afrikaana, like, you know, like profound, more of almost hearkening back to a Dutch era of philosophers where he's extremely interested in everything, which is daunting. He was almost a duemani, almost a policeman, almost a lawyer, almost a Formula One driver, who knows, but he was everything. and you know so that appealed to me because his ego was right-sized he had an incessant curiosity about how things worked he doesn't he's not content with simple responses about a statistic or why something's working yeah but no why you know and and so he's one of those like a kid asking you why why why until the end you know and what is the what is the final answer to the why you know who knows god everything whatever um and so that was good because this is a conversational craft and you have to be able to talk a long time with each other and enjoy each other and the brains have to fit but i i soon understood that he was um whatever stereotype it was that i could have formed i'm not really a person who does that that much but i could have wasn't there envy was all over the place um what he read and what he thought about and what and and and what he cared about might have been very different from what i thought about uh what i thought he would and so he made the pitch which i don't even remember exactly uh maybe just come on do some stuff i don't know you know and we started collaborating and um it's been really cool because i think it's hard for guys to be friends in some ways you know you there's a lot of barriers there's There's a lot of, you know, appendant swinging, as Gronja said. You try to compete with this and that.

You've got childhood issues that you don't want to talk about. You've got, you know, a lot of things pulling on you. We're competitive people, you know. And so I think that's difficult, but it's been amazing. In some ways, I'm not nearly as roguish as I might appear, even though I am a rambling man with some difficult traits in my personality.

and Envia is not quite as locked down simple as, you know, straight laced as it might appear as well. So, you know, behind the scenes, you get to know someone pretty well doing this. So Envia, can you give your kind of side of that? How long into Megaphone was it? And what caused you to kind of reach out to Harry?

How did you get to know him and what caused you to reach out? No, it's interesting because I started getting 8-9 combo pop-ups on my feed all the time. So I started listening to Ari and Brett. And then I said to Jan one day, I'd love to speak to Ari. You know, kind of a thing.

All I do is I would, you know, write a WhatsApp, I get a number, write a WhatsApp, send it to somebody and see if they respond. And that's exactly what I did with Ari. I wanted to do a podcast, talk to him, like an interview. And then we started talking. And in that same conversation, it just meandered into a new podcast series kind of a thing.

I don't know if I suggested, I think Ari suggested, I can't even remember. and then we started spitting the you know spitting out names and and just was a long conversation do you remember and it just ended up yeah ended up as like a rugby pilot and I just had this picture in my mind what it's going to look like and the logo just sort of clicked so weirdest thing now that I think back to it was about a year after I started the channel just over a year it was middle 2024 yeah then I just thought and then I resuggested it and then the biggest thing for me was obviously that I had to start really honing up my English you know sort of learning um sorting out my english so that i don't lapse into africanisms because that tends to be a thing i like to think i'm fairly bilingual but i do sometimes forget words and it's interesting especially how do you know this late at night my english deserts me so it's quite a funny thing we had alder clo on once and he said he had a certain amount of english and once he exhausted that store the grain was you know was spent he just he knew it was done clad all the day yeah yeah and uh well i do remember that and i remember one thing about it which is important and i suppose i was trying to allude to that is conversation came easy which is if you think about it really important if you're gonna pod together uh it cannot be like pulling teeth so we ended up having you know we were the about the same age we had experienced um south africa in many of the same ways sometimes probably not even that far apart from each other i didn't know it um but yes we had we had gone through it different ways and a lot of the interests that he had were not mine a lot of the experiences i've had he's they're not his um but we understood each other and we generally have a classically liberal view of the world in the sense that we believe the world can get better we believe that you can enlighten people we believe that you should be fair with facts that science and numbers are true if you can discern them properly and so along the way we built something that we were trying to imagine that would make i don't know this sounds a bit too preachy almost but it's would edify not just titillate the audience you know not just click baity but more like well it is interesting i didn't know that i didn't know that's how that worked because it was the same thing we were interested in and we just got lucky or or we were good you know a combination maybe that people started being interested they were in the know coaches administrators players and that's the best part of the audience because once they get interested then it just has a self-fulfilling thing so the the kind of guests we could pull um but we to be honest we actually prefer the episodes which is the two of us talking but we know that our journey together as two guys is charming to people it's fun it's interesting it's interesting it's two different people with different voices both audio and visually you've you've got to be different. That's the comedy, the cop, you know, the bromance kind of thing where you have, you know, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. You've got to be different enough where the thing works and you've got to have a journey together. So when you run into an interesting guest, like we're sitting down talking with, you know, this week coming up with Sasha Feinberg and Gomazulu, seeing Envia relate and I and me relate is going to be interesting, the difference.

So it's not that people are, you can watch a guy like that, Sasha on so many shows you know there's so much video of um Dobbo talking but is it it's interesting to see Dobbo talk to Envia and tease him about being a bull that's the fun yeah and waking up to what's up from Dobbo by the way highlight of my life wouldn't have to but anyway it's one of the best things that that like when he sent that he screenshot and sent it to me I was like oh we're doing something here, man. But we're doing this. Now I woke up Paul, I woke up to your WhatsApp, my phone started vibrating because my Do Not Disturb was off because I slept in a bit on the holidays and nights. And I opened it up and it was this message from Dabo. Leave it there.

But it sort of validated everything we've been doing, Harry, everything. And yeah, even if it was a sorry Dabo, it was a message from almost almost goes what i mean i'm going to frame it honestly i'm going to blow it up and frame that's that's i have to tell you so mb sent me that too it was three o'clock in the morning by time but he didn't send who it came from so he just sent a message that i legitimately wrote back that said how cool is this like assuming it came from a viewer or like something and then i wrote who's it from?" And he writes, Dabo like it's nothing to him. And I freaked out at three o'clock in the morning. I wrote so many messages back to him to say how cool that is, like he didn't know it.

It's really just awesome. I'm here for the fan experience and you guys have to know that from a fan perspective, we're living vicariously through you. And that message was a perfect example of envy. So thank you for sharing that. I'm glad you kind of put your toe into the water there and sharing a little bit of it.

You're going to get people saying, show the message, show the message. Sorry, Thilman, we're not going to show the message. It's confidential. We keep confidences. I'll say there's one word in there that I will betray, which is truth.

And we know that applaud. Why do people do this, watch this or listen to this in lieu of a broadcast studio? It's because the feeling of authenticity, which can be cheaply pointed out by, you know, a cough or a burp or a swear word but more deeply it's portrayed by a long-form discussion that is not permitted inside the commercial breaks of um television television and the need to to sort of excite people or infuriate them we're really trying to do something so dobbo's message was about that like thank you for doing that and and what it leads to is that we've had a couple of dark nights of the soul too i got a message from jake white you know and i woke up to it on it and it was just him telling you know directing me to call him um immediately and uh and you know real there could be real anger when you are truthful there can be real anger when people people don't always like the truth um and so i think the journey there is if you do commit to that though in your fair over time a stormers coach could be whatsapp being a bulls fan uh and i don't know if the right word is it it's just sharing with each other the idea that we're trying to make the sport grow we know that it grows because people are factual and truthful and interesting and and and then he supported that and we found you know there's very few people that have have said no to mv and i we pretty much we've been landing people that no one else can land we've been creating a series for example the stormers where it's a coach and a player maybe an assistant coach and a player sitting shoulder to shoulder maybe their shoulders touching talking to us and sometimes the player turns to the coach and looks at him and doesn't like and bj dixon didn't know that rito schlongwani uh had that feeling of guilt of letting them play against Connacht. He just turned to him and thought, wow. And so that kind of thing isn't being replicated.

We don't know. We haven't seen it anywhere else. So maybe that's a bit of a hot story. So maybe that's a good segue from that. I was going to ask you later on, but you guys kind of touched on one of the highlights in the last few months is that Harry, you were embedded with the Stormers before a game, like really kind of on the inside, in the coaches meetings, in the breakfast and Envia the same with the bulls like it's for a whole week in every meeting with the ceo with the coaches with the players and then what you touched on Envia could you talk about because both of you have like a challenging balance that you have to walk of having access to these people but commentating and analyzing fairly and my sense is like you kind of hinted that at harry at some point this jake white was not very happy with you uh the stormers were not very happy with this pod at some point and mbi i feel like i remember you telling me some jake white kind of i don't know calling you out in a press conference or in a phone call could you guys if you're comfortable talk about that a little bit and then how did how did we end up mb i'm going to start with you how did it end up with you spending a week behind the scenes with the bulls and Edgar Raffbone, you having his name, number on WhatsApp and Johan and stuff.

Like, what was that journey like? What did it feel like to be called out publicly or not publicly? And how did the journey evolve to where it is now? That's an interesting one. I started going to Loftus just after I started the channel with my friend Simon Rikert to attend his press conference.

So you walk in there and you're like this big, wide-eyed, you know, almost like a little boy. and you feel intimidated as often as it's intimidating and because you've always been on the outside now suddenly you're on the inside you go into the auditorium for the first time you see what that looks like and you know you sit there and hear Jake White walks in or Ruan or Kia or whoever it is a little bit intimidating especially like I said to you I'm not a rugby expert so now I'm expected to sit there and ask an intelligent question which is not easy and what I learned for example, I'm going to just, you know, lose my train of thought about it here, but I sit there, and then I just hope that I don't get asked too soon and don't get asked too early because you have only so many questions. And if you get to ask too late, then if somebody's asked, somebody else has asked your question, the one that would have made you sound intelligent, now you have to scramble to come up with something new. And so what was I like I said, I'm curious, I always try and ask you a question i i'm a bit of a big picture person if that makes any sense i'm interested in the bigger you know i'm interested in you know two steps to the left and one step to the right kind of a thing more more what's the plan rather than what's the the strategy rather than attack if that makes sense anyway i was at loftus so lunga the press officer at that time came up to me and said listen here's a coffee for you and that's how it started and then i started asking questions and And then talking to Andre Petorius, I asked Andre about Jake White specifically, because Andre played with Jake White in the World Cup. He knows how Jake thinks and he gave me a couple of heads ups or ideas And the one match that game against Saracens where the wind was blowing so badly I think it was Champions Club game and then Andres said to me, ask Jake about this but ask him it this way, so I'm not prepped I'm going into this meeting and I'm asking Jake this question and Jake looks at me like this and he says to me, Envia let me teach you a rugby lesson and he proceeded to teach me a rugby lesson which I enjoyed And then, Harry, to me, the funny thing was when he asked me to translate dress rehearsal, remember that one?

And I said, it's clear to the repetition. It was the highlight of my life. He believed me, number one, and he asked me, number two. And then I realized, listen, you know, I'm sort of in here. And then, I don't know, it's difficult to say, how do you say, how did you fall in love with your girlfriend?

It just sort of happened kind of a thing. It didn't happen on the 21st of January at 7 o'clock at night. It sort of gradually moved into that. And the thing with the bulls for me to get embedded with the bulls, I just said, listen, Harry was hit the storm. How can we allow that to happen?

we cannot be left behind here and it worked like a charm um and i mean edgar i just get along very well you are and i get along jack and i got along very well come to think of it i actually thanked jake after everything calmed down for actually to me giving me the chance to you know to be a voice somebody that people listen to and he was the man who gave me some credibility that's what i'm looking for so yeah that's a sort of a sort of like everything in life i sort of fell into it cool if that answers your question. That's a great story and I know how introverted you are so I know how stressful that would have been for you. Now Harry with the Stormers like really the level of connection and the way Envy is falling in love with the Stormers because of your relationship with them is really a thing to watch but when you went you've talked about it so maybe don't go too deep into that but when you got invited and you showed up with Mrs. Jones at the airport to go to this embedded thing you weren't a hundred percent sure if they were just messing with you to get you back what was it that you did to make them upset with you and have to worry about whether they were just messing with you and then how did it get to where it is now it seems to be like a really uh i don't know it's just it feels like a very unique relationship and And I mean that in a very positive way. Yeah, it's like family.

So who do you fight with the hardest? Who's your family? Who do you make up with and stick with? What's the love you fight for? That's the biggest love.

So yeah, there's a lot of threads in that. So one is that the first piece of heaven that I ever saw was Newlands. I got to play on a barefoot school boys curtain raisers got to sniff at it at representative level you know I was sure in isolation if we could just have a few tests with a few people that would you know deign to play us filthy you know out of favor guys you know that I could be a buck that was like really something that was important to me but I'll tell you the truth I was more excited about playing in the hoops and um it seemed to me to represent not only what i loved about rugby in the way that they played rugby province did but also the particular stance at that time on integration and um i hated authority and it was the most anti-authoritarian team um it was the loosest and it still is the fact that we were at the airport not knowing it was coming through is because that's the way the stormers kind of fly. They roll very, very cool. And it's not as regimented.

You know, the socks are not pulled up. There are no socks. And for me, that was everything. The roar of the crowd from the brewery by the station as you come in mixed and jawling, having, you know, hitchhiked there in a car that was being driven by a woman of the night. I mean, Newlands was everything to me.

That roar when I heard that, you know when a line break happens in rugby, because that's a different roar on outside the stadium, the grand old lady. So for me, my love of Western Province, which grew into Stormers, is so apparent and so obvious to the people that run the club, many of whom either played with me back in the day or heard of me because I was a very dirty player. And so, or the dads, you know, there was some authenticity there already. I didn't have to do much, but I kind of messed it up because I got excited, you know, talking about things that I was mad about. And I was mad about our scrum.

I was upset with our defense. I didn't like the double tackles going awry that left dog legs everywhere. so 2025 was having a shitty year anyway in life so i just kind of ranted a little bit you know i used the pod almost as a way to vent and i wasn't really venting about the dog leg i was venting about something else probably um and the stores didn't like that because it was one of their own airing the dirty laundry um a lot of it was true but some of it was disproportionate which is a problem in life sometimes i'm doing the right thing but then i get disproportionate you know so you know someone does me wrong and my vengeance is too much so i i kind of did that um so we kind of were on apology tour mv and i we were apologizing to the bulls and trying to make a good with jake and we were doing apology tour with the stormers and we like we started this part of the north south derby stormers bulls and now we've like it up already because everyone hates us we're not going to get any access so you know mb and i we we get together and uh and we write to like you know we kind of massage we wordcraft this thing to go to the stormers and we get a response and it's sort of a debate and so dobbo comes on um you know to debate us but it turns into a love fest you know i mean two minutes in he's dying and we are having such a great time and um and then and we just you know kept going and then out of the blue i think mostly through players like anything foucher or maybe guys like sasha or guys like um dion free you know told the coaches yeah we like this guy he's a you know he's a strange cat but we like him so you know i don't know exactly what caused them to say come to hbc belleville and spend a day at the high performance center and really dig in because that's when i really got in with a lot of the guys like rito um but then it went well and part of it is that i'm just naturally confident about going places i um you know i think it's something innate about capetonians that move abroad and have to do stuff is you kind of fit in but you kind of don't and you have to adapt all the time. So I don't mind being the only person in a particular place. I don't mind being in the middle of Paraguay having to solve a problem and not being like anyone else.

So I think I just kind of fit in and I didn't overplay my hand. I didn't take selfies everywhere. I never betrayed any confidences. So one thing led to another. And then I got this invite to go to watch La Rochelle play PE in the Champions Cup.

And it was everything, jocks and socks. It was like airport, bus, every meeting, every meal, and embedded. And there were moments there where I kind of wanted to pinch myself. But just in general, I don't feel overawed by things. I don't mind going into a press conferencing, making sure I get the microphone for the first question, and tee up Rossi with an odd question about Honcock.

I just don't care. When Jay came at me, I don't think he's better than me. and I wasn't overawed by him. I mean, probably just because I'm a competitive guy and I've done well in life. I don't know how much money you make, Jake, but don't talk down to me.

I don't think that way. So I think he might come to me for help and I would have to save his art. So I don't like people coming at me full frontal and I always fight. But if people come like the Bulls have and the Stormers have, Marco Masotti for the Sharks, man i'm so happy i'm so happy because now we can be vulnerable with each other i try to put on you know i try to be a real person in there you know when i was talking to the stormers at npe i was just talking about life you know but some i'm right about a contractor or uh mkunu about how you how you show love you know to the woman you love or you know emmy khan like you know what is the best way you know to move forward in this life uh ben jason dixon famously talking to about how do you know what you think you know, like philosophical questions. Yeah, then you just then I think that part of me that's humble comes out, because now we're just having a good time.

And but yeah, you have to fight this business to get where we've gotten, we had to kick a few doors down. And we had to not run away squeak crying because Jake yells at me. It wasn't that long after that, that Jake and I were sitting in Munster at a kitchen, having a great conversation, and spending 30 minutes during the captain's run. Didn't even know what was going on behind the scenes. But so our point is like there's some bravado you've got to do to self-promote yourself as a content creator where you have no assistance, you have no one helping you, no machine, no platform, no budget, no giant super sport pushing you, no recognizable test career behind you to follow back on stories of whatever um but that's just how i live my life anyway i when i go to open a gold mine on duras i get no one helping me i got no army behind me you know airstrikes to help me so i think mb and i are cut from the same cloth in that we are stubborn we're fighters we're quiet warriors we don't we don't accept lose losing we don't like losing and um but at the same time we want to do it the right way when we get in we're not you know tourists taking pictures of people in the shower and people in the shower sorry for you like for harry because of his like nature and the way he's an extrovert and you had a background that had some connection to rugby and you've kind of thank you for walking us through that and so for envy can you talk though because your personality is legitimately different in the sense of more introverted.

You didn't come from a rugby background, a journalism background, but yet I am still amazed by how connected you are. As like a real outsider, I sometimes ask like, hey, Embia, could we try to talk to this person? And of course, sometimes you go to Harry, but sometimes you know legitimate people you caused me to send you a meme of a of a godfather consigliere uh recently is how did you make like andre pretorius is something that is just like it's just accepted he's on this channel and he does analysis for us but if you ask me to get andre pretorius to do analysis on my little fledgling youtube channel i'd have no idea how to like how did you get andre pretorius or or other people that you know how did you make those connections especially as an introvert six degrees of separation you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone so we do afrikaans rugby commentary on our afrikaans channel and one of the guys on there is called tux kotsa and he was at school with andre petores that's how i got under petores number and that's when i approached andre the biggest thing for me was to get over my fear of rejection and send that WhatsApp and then get an either either a rejection which I have never got um well I'll qualify that just now but you know and I sent it to Andre and he was yeah he was keen so we started you know that's how it goes so I know someone who knows someone who knows someone and as you it's normal business um Paul you know this you've been a businessman yourself you get someone to know and then your your network sort of expands but all of this started after I started the channel. The biggest thing for me was to get used to, to get over myself kind of a thing, you know. Imposter syndrome, that's me personified.

Classic Embiid. Do I really belong here? You know, how long is it going to be till I'm finding out? Do people actually know that I realize that I don't know anything? And I'm the first one to say that I really don't know anything.

So yeah, that answers your question. What does help though is that we, like Harry just said, now we become a little bit more legitimate, like the women's rugby and the likes. We've got a lot of support from that from higher up we're trying to push that as well we've got contacts lots of people coming up on that as well so that's how it is paul you get to know people who know people and then eventually it just forms sort of a circle that keeps expanding all the time so this might seem like a little bit of a softball question but it's like for me the emotion of things is is really like do you sometimes wake up and have to pinch yourself as to who you've just talked to in the last week or who's peed up for next week or who's whatsapping you like davo it's to you and the first and then to harry too like is it legitimately do you guys sometimes just wake up and say how cool is this yeah i do i suppose but you also get a little bit used to it not not that i'm saying that i'm being lazy about it you know you get to a point i just said now that you know you're not an army you're one guy going to ontaris you know this is a one-man operation you know between the three of us if you know what i mean so oftentimes i would sit at 11 o'clock at night saying why the hell am i doing this that's the kind of thing that's that's a more prevalent emotion i would think what the earth am i doing why am i working this hard for what all the satisfaction lies in the actual satisfaction not the monetary side of it how's what do you think yeah there's a possibility that this does down the road lead to that and there are things you can do to make sure that if that did happen you're ready but it's not the primary motivation um i suppose it is exactly what you just talked about paul it's exactly that is the motivation is to to matter to have an influence to have an insight behind the curtain um it's cool to have a coach reason with you you know maybe even uh like jake white talked to me about cross kicks and the perfect height for them and me saying it needs to be a lot more like an out route in the nfl so if you can get the ball there on time canaan moody's gonna win that if you give the defense time to gather with a high cross kick they actually and counter-intuitively have better scramble back gather jump mess you up but if it just straight up straight up um you know the kicks that you know Sasha does sometimes for the box they so flat it looks like a spiral and you could imagine us a rugby going the way where superior aerial athletes that are six foot six with rangy arms with you know incredible speed uh like a four by 100 South African relay type speed and you have a quarterback fly off that uses kicks in a way that's more like an out pattern, it's almost indefensible. It's just impossible because of the way rugby works that you could defend that. You'd have to have a similar size of wing and ability to react.

So having that type of discussion where you're talking about the future or running into Rossi and him saying, I like what you're doing, and making sure that I know that he knows who I am because he's talking about drawings. I bet you're drawing during a match. That's kind of crazy, but cool. I like the idea of how players really think. So it's nice to make friends with a guy like Frantz Monarba who looks a certain way.

And I think I'm that way too. I think sometimes I look a certain way. People think I'm going to be that kind of guy, but then I'm not that kind of guy. I'm more thoughtful than they thought I would be. Or I look like maybe just a duet sometimes.

and I could be kind. I could be nicer than you think. So I think it's fun to see people behind. Like Franz Malerba is such a thoughtful daydreamer. Is that the right word to describe him?

It's funny. Yeah, I like that. I like getting to know that someone's very different from what they appear. And sometimes you find that people are not as nice as you think, which is bad, but that's interesting too. I like the feeling of being trusted.

My clients can trust me. You give me a problem. I only get the problems that are really messed up, you know, bet the business, crazy stuff. And I love it that they just give it to me and then they go away and they don't fret and they don't worry. They know that I will do everything in my power.

I will stay up all night. I will break every law. I will do whatever I need to do to win. I love that because I love that feeling that they gave it to me. And so I think the same thing in Podland is can we get to a point where people trust you, where they can WhatsApp you and know that you're not going to blab the contents to everyone.

Or if someone has experienced this doubt about an injury or they're not sure they still have it, they don't go, oh, you know, and go public with it. I think MV and I share a lot of values and they're the most important values. And that's one of them that you can trust us. And I think people feel that or they wouldn't have had him in at Loftus and they wouldn't have had me in at HPC and embedded to PE, never. And it's an open invitation.

So, you know, if we get to the finals, yeah, I'll be there and I'll be in, you know, in the URC. And that's an open invitation as long as you don't betray the trust. So, yeah, that's probably what I get out of it mostly. And then the feeling of connecting back, you know, it's fun to be able to be noticed acceptably, not too much. you know so if i'm walking around and i was in auckland or i was in sydney or in cape town i get stopped by hundreds of people and have a great chat and people introduce their kids or their wife when they and she'll say oh that's the guy you listen to in bed every night you know and uh it's funny you know but it's not too much you know so it's acceptable amount uh i could see that if it got too far i might not like that because then people are fighting with you all the time and picking fights with you online like you see with Andy Good this weekend with um Squidge having a big you know tussle and people are really weighing in saying horrible things to each other yeah I don't think MV and I ever want that level of success that we're constantly fighting with people for no reason that we don't know so actually because people can't see both of you at the same time when you're talking Harry I just want to say like a lot of while you were talking and yeah I was watching him here he was kind of nodding his head vigorously in terms of And despite the odd couple kind of joke that we have around you, there is a lot that's the same.

And I would say I value the integrity a lot. There is a number of times which I've been aware, sometimes because I've been in the loop on the information, of information that we have, but that shouldn't be devolved, even though it would be great clickbait information. And that's an important thing. I just wanted to say that Envia was kind of nodding his head all the way. It's kind of classic though that you went to kind of the poetic way in terms of the joys of the job and Envia went to the, there's a lot of work behind the scenes here that happened.

So Envia you've opened that door for me a little bit. I want to go in there a lot. Could you give, because like we just show up like and think oh it's really nice a new pod dropped. There was a lot of work happening behind the scenes and envy. I don't know if people realize you're the one doing most of the lifting on getting the pods out and getting them produced and getting them settled.

What does it take to get a pod out? How much work is there on the prep side and then afterwards? The work side of it is one thing, like I said, just now 11 o'clock at night, I'll catch myself editing something and wondering why I'm doing this. It is a lot of work. I always joke I work 18 hours a day, seven days a week.

It's not far from the truth, you know, some breaks in between. And it's a lot of work. I'm not complaining about it. But like last night, I was lying in bed. I think it was you mentioned it's 11 or 12 o'clock last night because I couldn't sleep.

And somebody was saying, turn on your music. And while I'm at it, change the names and you know, all kinds of shitty comments that people were making part of my French I don't like swearing, but I just ask him anything else and you laugh at me. But I kind of take it a little bit personally. You know, sometimes people don't realize I'm not super sports. I don't have this whole crew of people behind me.

A whole truck full of editors and everything else is me, myself and I. When it comes to the editing, not the actual content, because that's what's most important. So what I'm saying is that work is a lot of work. Harry and I are having a meeting very soon, Harry. Maybe you want to expand on that.

We can have a couple of get-togethers during the Spremo games this year. Harry can talk to you about that a bit more. Yeah, there's lots of ways to get there. In rugby world, there's not really that many big pods, actually. And a lot of the ones that are big are fronted, they're funded already from the outset.

So I wouldn't even count those, but on the ones that are organically formed, like our friends, the Egg Chasers, Tim Cocker, he's been doing this 11 years. And so to get to the point where you're almost you know breaking even you have enough money to build a studio get the right equipment this is not really making money right this is kind of having the tools to trade it can take 11 years you know we're still early in it so i don't foreclose the idea of it being um a thriving lucrative thing but to do it there's no way around it you have to have audience so we're our focus is on quality and building an audience it's not any hacks and tricks and watching all these different you know um how to so it's really if we put great quality together conversations that people are not having insights that are different analogies and storytelling that's good it's got good enough sound and view uh vision doesn't have to be you know mood lighting like you would have in a proper studio studio but we compare fine you know um and we build well but it's going to be around that um Where that looks like later is you become well-known. You become a celebrity in the field. You become a pundit of notice, like a Bernard Jackman type. And that does spell money.

It at least means that trips are paid for. Maybe an embedded trip to PE becomes something that you get. And you better think of that as a reward. Otherwise, you're being ungrateful. But yeah, there is a way.

it's a slender way it's a small tiny tiny pathway to money and most it's just like an acting or any entertainment which is what this is sports entertainment most people are not doing very well as actors but then there's a few that do really well so you know is there some way to get there yeah but it's going to have a fair amount of luck to it i would say that you know year off into it less than two years into it if we're having what we're doing with stormers and bulls being that we built ourselves as a stormers bulls north south derby um rogue capetonian and loyal praetorian pod it ain't bad this is not a bad two-year uh beginning i would say the first act of this play and we look back later and we're rolling in some doughs sleeping on beds of money we might say there were signs there were signs it was work it would work but we're not tied to that I'm not saying that is the only way we can call ourselves successful. I believe we're already successful. I believe this has been beyond wildest dreams. When we sat down at the table for breakfast in Pretoria and chatted through, we did some of that stuff, scenarios. We didn't think high enough.

Our dreams were too modest. We've actually exceeded them already. so that makes me cautiously optimistic. Ari's actually pointed out something very important there. I love what I'm doing, and I think Ari loves what we're doing as well.

Make no mistake. It's just the point I'm trying to get across is a lot of work and everything else, but that aside, this is a dream come true, honestly. Not just the rugby side or anything side, but the fact that I like building something and I like to see it grow, and that's where I get my satisfaction from. And the fact that Ari just said, like, we trusted and we've got access everything else that to me is sort of validation on its own. I want to make that point.

Sorry. I think that was good. I was almost going to summarize and ask you, am I correct in understanding? And I think what you and Harry have said is, this is a very cool job. And Harry, what I heard you say in Envia Affirm is in terms of what we've achieved with the channel, in terms of the kind of guests we have, the content we have, we feel really proud of it.

and it most likely exceeds your expectations from when you guys kicked this off. But, M.D., you're just saying it's a lot of work that has no monetary reward for it. That's the downside of the yin and the yang of this cool thing.

Does that pair? Yeah, of course. I mean, I'd love to be able to buy myself, my wife, you know, take out for lunch ones for dinner maybe every night again. It's that bad. So, if it was one and three rewarding, it would be nice, but it's not a must have.

It's a nice to have, if that makes sense. Okay, I'm going to be respectful. I feel like I could go for another hour and I'm hoping if our viewers are interested in this and a lot of people watch this, that we can have a follow-up because there's so many questions I could ask more. But in terms of respectfulness of time, I want to kind of wrap it up and I want to ask you guys so far on this journey is there something that stands out as kind of the most frustrating or most disappointing have we already talked about it or there's something else or the worst thing that's happened the thing the worst thing that's gone wrong that no one knows about is there anything that stands out and then I'm going to ask a positive way to end on a high note connection problem is probably the worst I think there was a couple of times where we had I was in the right spot maybe I was in New Zealand or something somewhere perfect at the thing doing ready and then we could not make it work technologically and we're not alone in that you know I'm surprised being around people like Matt Pierce and Motz and how much technical difficulties they have they they're the experts and they're you know stalling out you know you know and that's where it's really cool that we band together like I got like Tim and I literally solving a problem together at Twickenham and helping each other. So technically we're competitors, but we're super good friends.

We plan things around that. We are happy to see each other and we help each other. So I think even in the calamities, it wasn't that bad. Plus in pod world, it's less formal. So I guess the catastrophes are not as bad as if you're a super sport.

Imagine how nerve-wracking that is. amazing thing, probably the most amazing thing was sort of this idea that Xena would get the microphone to me to have first question because Rossi pointed and I'd have my first shot and be above all these career long Hendrick Cronier types. It was kind of cool. That was a pinch me moment. Why are they even accrediting me?

I don't even know the rules. I'm drinking beer on TV. I walked on the field. Did everything wrong? What's, you know, come on.

This is crazy. yeah it's a little bit more suppose sideways for me the highlight was the day you Harry and Hugh Griffin were at Twickenham together and you sent me that picture you sent me that picture of the two labels one said megaphone rugby and other one said like a rugby pot next to each other both accredited by the RFU the English rugby union and the Springboks at Twickenham and that was a pinch me moment for me the fact that you were both there you were allowed to be there and then know afterwards when Hugh Griffin said for example he didn't want to wash his hand because he shook his hand and you know little things like that to me that that that makes it worth the while you know meeting Johan Akerman just after he was appointed seeing the excitement on his face like a little boy he just got handed this big new toy I could see it and I could also see his trepidation because I met him I was talking to him literally looking at him standing next to him and then seeing his journey for example the way that he's sort of grown into it and how he's developed and everything else, that being that close to people, to me, to be able to see that and experience that, that's what makes it worth the while for me, I think. That's a good way to close, I think, Envia. What a great way. So thank you for your time, gentlemen.

I know, Envia, this was not something you were looking forward to. I appreciate you doing it. For people that watch this, I hope you'll get in the comments and tell us what you thought and tell us that you'd want to see a follow-up episode so that i can convince harry and envia to do that and then as a fan i would just say i feel privileged to be able to have had this chat with you guys and to be able to know you and be able to watch it so thank you very very much this is the long way to the game only on megaphone rugby Thank you.

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