Photos courtesy of Oliver Gee
Take a stroll through the streets of Paris and there’s a decent chance of running into Oliver Gee. On the afternoon we spoke, he was walking around the 19th arrondissement, recording material for an upcoming episode on his podcast, The Earful Tower, occasionally waving at strangers who recognize him — which seems to happen quite often. Before our call, a woman stopped him in a little alleyway to say she gives his children’s books as gifts all the time. He’s clearly made peace with being Paris’s most recognizable Australian.
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His widely popular podcast is celebrating its ten year-anniversary this year, and the project has since expanded into a YouTube channel, Substack newsletter, Patreon community, walking tours, and children’s books. Over five hundred episodes in, Oliver shows no sign of running out of things to say about the city. As he puts it, if you locked him in a room with a pen and paper, he could probably come up with the next five hundred ideas without breaking a sweat.
We caught up with him mid-stroll to talk about how it all began, what keeps it going, and what’s coming next.
Interview by Olivia Hoffman
You came to Paris originally as a journalist. What brought you here from Australia — via Sweden, as I understand it?
I was living in Sweden, working as a journalist, and a job opportunity came up doing the same thing in Paris. I told them my French was pretty good, which honestly it really wasn’t. But I just went for it. A lot of people come to Paris drawn by, I don’t know, the croissants and the romance of it all. I came here to write about terror attacks.
It was 2015 — right after the Charlie Hebdo attack and heading quickly into the Bataclan. So, it was quite an intense entry point. But I fell in love with the city. You just have to walk around, there’s so much on offer. It’s extraordinary.
And two years in, you started the podcast on the side.
The way it started was almost accidental. An intern at the news website I was working for, The Local, asked if I wanted to do a show on a radio station. I said yes, as long as it had nothing to do with the news. So, I just started interviewing people. And then he told me there was a noticeable spike in downloads every time I put out an episode and asked if I’d considered turning it into a podcast.
This was ten years ago, and I honestly didn’t know what a podcast was — they weren’t as popular at the time. So I looked into it, turned my interviews into a podcast, and suddenly I was way ahead of the curve on something I really loved doing.
Five hundred episodes later — how do you keep finding stories?
I think if you locked me in a room with a pen and paper, I could come up with the next five hundred episodes pretty easily. Every square inch of this city is covered in stories.
Take one fictional person who opens a café in a cool neighborhood. You could do an episode about opening a café in Paris. A separate one about that neighborhood, told through them. One about what it’s like to move here as an American. And then two years later, they open a second location and you catch up again. That’s four episodes from one person I just made up while looking at a café across the street.
And then there’s the knock-on effect. If you do a cool story, someone else sees it and invites you to do something else. The more doors you go through, the more doors open up.
Speaking of doors opening, how did you start your walking tours?
It was entirely unplanned. I was sitting at my regular café — Le Peloton in the Marais — when someone walked in asking for me by name — they thought I might be there as I spoke about it often on my podcast. They came over and told me that everything they’d done in Paris had been based off my recommendations and the only thing left was seeing the canal where the lady let a crocodile loose.
I don’t know why, but I said, “Oh, I do that as a tour. I’ll take you there — are you free now?” She said yes, we negotiated a price on the spot, and I just walked her there. It wasn’t a formal tour. We were both clear about what was happening. But that was the first one!
And now they’re sold-out months in advance.
My personal Monday morning tour is, yes. I didn’t want to accidentally become a full-time tour guide — I still want to do everything else — so I have a team that takes people around as well. But I kept it to once a week for myself because it’s like a real-life podcast. You get to meet people and share the city in a way that’s completely different.
What does your tour look like?
It’s a two-hour loop around the 4th arrondissement. Very much built around anecdotes — things tied to the podcast, things tied to the neighborhood’s history — but it’s meant to be entertaining, not encyclopedic. I can guarantee I’ll take people to places they’ve never stumbled upon, even people who think they know the Marais well. I always ask at the start how well they know the area. I love it when someone considers themselves an expert, and then I take them somewhere they’d never heard of.
It’s important to come here and do the obvious things — the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, etc. And I love when people come and just wander without any plan at all, following their instincts. But if your time is valuable to you, and you’ve got four days in Paris, a two-hour guided walk in the Marais or Montmartre where you don’t waste a single step makes a real difference. It’s very easy to walk around these neighborhoods and accidentally always end up on the boring parallel street. That’s where I can help — to make sure you see the interesting stuff.
How did the children’s books come about?
The children’s books were born during lockdown. We had nothing to do, we were stuck inside, and I said to my wife Lina, what if we make a children’s book? I’d always written little rhyming things since I was a kid. Lina has been drawing and illustrating for years. So we thought, why not? We had a great story from the podcast about a lady who supposedly put crocodiles in the canal, and we just made it into a book.
We genuinely didn’t know if anyone would want it, so we put it to the audience, asking them to pre-buy a copy so we knew how many to print. If nobody bought it, we wouldn’t make it. If lots of people bought it, we’d make lots of them. We started a Kickstarter and it went absolutely berserk. We ended up printing a huge run, then going door to door asking shops if they’d sell them. The Louvre, Shakespeare and Company, Musée d’Orsay — they all said yes. Now the fifth book comes out next month.
And you started the books with no children yet at that point, right?
We had no test audience, exactly! We made children’s books before we had children. But I just wrote what I liked, Lina drew what she liked, and it turns out other people liked it too.
How do you manage all of it — the podcast, the newsletter, the tours, the books, now with two children under five?
I honestly have no idea. But I think the answer is moderation. If I did tours every morning, I couldn’t put out a podcast every week. If I did the podcast every day, forget the books. There’s only so much one can do. I see a lot of people putting out three Instagram videos a day, trying to go viral, and it just seems like too much.
I try to put out the best version of whatever I’m doing, whether it’s a walking tour or a children’s book or a podcast, and just do the best that I can do. And honestly, I feel lucky that the different things balance each other. If tomorrow there was another lockdown and no one could do walking tours, I’d still have the books and the podcast. If everyone suddenly stopped buying children’s books — that’d be a very sad world, but — I’d still have everything else. It’s good to have a few different balls in the air.
Finally, you’ve recently bought a home in Provence. What can we expect from that chapter?
That process took a full year, and now that it’s officially done, I’ve suddenly got a lot of free time back. I think you can expect some exciting things. Not least, the Provence content.
Find Oliver Gee and all his podcasts, tours, and children’s books at theearfultower.com. You can subscribe to his newsletter on Substack, join his community on Patreon, watch his videos on YouTube, and listen to his podcast on Spotify. His Monday morning walking tours of Paris sell out months in advance — details on the website. The fifth children’s book, Sophie in Paris, is available for purchase now.