The Barefoot Podcast and Its Creator, Who Also Walks Barefoot
“Picture this: you’ve just arrived at the café where you’re supposed to meet your date. Your palms are sweating a bit but you’re smiling: after all, you made sure you look nice and everything. You’ve been through situations like this before, right? So you enter the room and your heart is beating like a drum. You see the table with one person only sitting there. So now tell me, just before you sit down and open yourself to that person, how do you feel? Nervous? Excited? Or maybe a little bit vulnerable. That is, in a way, how I feel right now. And I call it being barefoot.”
This is the beginning of the first episode of Barefoot, a podcast created by the American University in Bulgaria alumnus and managing director of the Elevate Acceleration Program Boris Angelov.
Angelov says the name of the podcast is related to the feeling of starting something new when you’re not prepared, and you aren’t even dressed up. It also reminds him of the time when he went to India and whenever he entered a sacred place, he had to take his shoes off. “I’m a person who walks barefoot a lot,” he says.
Angelov describes his podcast as an experimental project coming from his interest in podcasting and the lack of podcasts focusing on people who are about to do something new for them. He says it may not be perfect, but the important thing is that he started it.
This idea of starting even if you are afraid appears throughout his podcast. “I wanted to explore this feeling of anxiousness, of fear, of insecurity because I thought a lot of people, including myself, were feeling deeply insecure,” Angelov says. Although he never took any classes on interviewing and had never worked professionally with audio, he decided to start recording some of his most personal conversations with people.
Each episode of Barefoot features an interview. These interviews are usually somewhat long — the latest episode is more than an hour and a half — and they resemble a natural real-life conversation. Both speakers share their thoughts, and Angelov says it is contrary to our 21st century tendency to get information fast. “If I could compare it to an article or a book, I’d say it’s a book.”
Some of the interviewees include Lubomir Nokov, founder of Harmonica Organic Foods, and entrepreneur and startup creator Hristo Neychev. All of them share stories about a point in their lives when they had to start something new. Some of these stories are very personal and so are some of Angelov’s questions. He says he does not mind asking these questions. On the contrary, he feels excited. “People don’t feel comfortable asking questions that they would not feel comfortable answering. But I think most of the times we manage to solve problems within ourselves when we open up.”
Jason Murphy, professor of podcasting at the American University in Bulgaria, says that this podcast is likely to be successful exactly because of Angelov’s personal questions. “There’s always an appetite for that — self-discovery and understanding. People are very curious about themselves. More than anything else,” Murphy says.
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Denitsa Yosifova is a second-year student of journalism at the American University in Bulgaria. She has made podcast episodes, but anxiety stopped her from publishing them.
