NA - No mans friend

 Welcome to Nigerian American. My name is Toke and this is my dad's podcast. 

Hi everyone. And welcome back to Nigerian American. I know it's been quite a while since our last episode, but today I'm thrilled to bring you something special. I recently sat down with a friend of mine by the name of Garrett Vantine. On his podcast called No Man's Friend, Garrett and I had a conversation that truly embodies what this podcast is all about, a multidimensional exploration of ideas, stories, and life itself.

We covered many topics, including fame, Afrobeats, fraternities, and the Nigerian civil war. I can't wait for you guys to hear it. This conversation weaves through topics that I know is going to resonate with many of you. Whether you're navigating your own creative pursuits, or you're Or simply seeking a deeper understanding of the world around you.

So without further ado, here's my conversation with Garrett Fantine. 

Hello and welcome back to No Man's Friend. I'm your host, Garrett Fantine. And today I'm speaking with a very special guest, Nigerian rap pioneer, eLDee the Don. eLDee, thank you so much for coming here today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for, thank you for having me. I really just want to jump right in.  to kind of a bit of a background on your home country of Nigeria.

I think that's going to be important for the, the, the whole of the conversation. So I was born in a city called Zaria, which is in Kaduna. Kaduna is the state,  um, in Nigeria, and this is in Northern Nigeria. So Northern Nigeria to kind of set the stage is, um,  primarily dominated by the Hausa tribe.  Um, I'm actually Yoruba, which is more from the western part of the country, but my family, right after the independence in Nigeria, there was an initiative to sort of like integrate, right?

So they had people going from different parts of the country to go live in other parts of the country, right?  Um. What do you, mean, uh, cause I know Nigeria was British run, right? Up through 1960? Up till 1960. So 1960, independence,  what are the tribes? Um. Um. So there's the big, there's like 250 plus tribes in Nigeria.

Um, but the biggest ones are Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo.  And so a lot of the people you'll come across for the most part would be, You know, be from one of those three tribes, right? I'm Yoruba, which is from the western part of Nigeria. There's Igbo, which is more on the eastern side And then there's Hausa, which is more on the northern side Um, there's also Fulani, Tiv, Bibio.

There's so many tribes, but all of those other tribes are embedded sort of somewhere either on the west, east, or um, northern. And these are all historic tribes. So yes, these are, yeah, these are tribes that have been there for the thousands of years. So when the British came, pretty much what they did was, you know, how the British did with their colonies.

They just drew a little circle and said, okay, this whole area is all British now and you guys are one country. And so all of these different tribes had never really had a reason to sort of come together to do anything. So, Pre independence, what was happening was they had different people running the different parts of the country in order to be able to relate to the different tribes, the different, like, you know, kings that they had and the different, like, groups, you know, that existed at the time.

And so, after independence, when Nigeria was sort of left to run on its own, um, there was sort of a push to try to get people more integrated for Nigeria to become one country, right? Right. And so one of the things that they did was they started this program called the NYSC. That's the National Youth Service, um, Corps, right?

And essentially what that was, was if you graduated from college anywhere in the country, they would intentionally post you to a different part of the country, um, to go live in a different part of the country, which is how most people started to discover other tribes and, you know, learn about the other cultures.

And that's sort of how the cultures sort of began to integrate, um, together into what is, I guess. Nigeria. So my parents ending up in Kaduna was actually a part of that initiative, right? Was my mom went to school in Kaduna. Um, my dad met her in Kaduna, um, while he was, he was an engineer. So he was, he was doing work out there and that's how they met.

And so I was born in Kaduna,  right? And so, because I was born in Kaduna, I got to learn the language, Hausa. Um, so I speak Hausa and obviously Yoruba, which is my mother tongue. Um, and obviously the country speaks English. So most people in Nigeria, if you lived in a different part of the country, you would speak at least two to three languages.

English being one of them, right? The main. Okay. So that's the more uniting language. Correct. Correct. And you said, so the, the actual line that makes the borders of Nigeria was made by the British. Correct. And then there's all these tribes that now coexist. It's interesting that they would relocate people.

I guess I understand the thinking, but wouldn't that also cause unrest? Cause you're forcing different people together. It's interesting you say that because in 1966 there was a civil war, right? And part of the reason that happened was because certain tribes felt like, you know, this integration was causing disruption to their systems, right?

Um, so you have people coming from the east to the north. There was Big push of people from the East going to Northern Nigeria and they were more like business oriented. So they own a lot of the businesses. You had the Western part of Nigeria, where the main focus of the leaders at the time was education.

So a lot of the most educated people at the time were from the West. So what happened over the years shortly after independence is you'll find that a lot of the administrative. Positions were held by people from the West. A lot of the businesses were owned by people from the East. Obviously that made the people in the North a little bit uncomfortable. 

Um, they have more of a, um,  I guess Arab system in a sense where it's sort of a top down approach with the way that they organize their people. So education was not really a big thing for them. Um, it was more of like a trickle down sort of system where you have a few people at the top and they take care of everybody else, right?

But then you have the independent mindset of the people who are Igbo who are more like entrepreneurial, right? And then you also have the education mindset of people from the west who are more like, okay, you know what we're gonna go and we're gonna put in all the systems in place and that didn't sit quite well.

with many of the tribes. So there's a lot of conflict, right? And so the civil war actually started because of that, right? Was the Northerners saying, Hey, we don't want to deal with the evil people. So there were a couple of riots. They would go and burn down people's businesses and all that kind of stuff was going on.

Oh, we don't want these administrators from the West and so on. So  conflicts, conflicts, and then the Easterners decided, you know what? We want to secede from this country. We don't feel like we're welcome.  like in all of these different parts of the country. So we're going to go on our own and they actually try to get the West initially, you know, to come with them.

So the proposal at the time was Northern Nigeria and Southern Nigeria, right? Um, but somehow the Westerners felt like, no, we think this integration thing makes sense. Let's all stick together. Yada, yada, yada. And so the Easterners were left alone  and that's what was considered. They wanted to call their country Biafra.

Right? And so Biafra was trying to secede from Nigeria, and Nigeria, now meaning the North and the West, basically fought the Biafrans and defeated them.  Okay. And so that's how Nigeria remained one country. And this is all in just a couple years after Independence after independence. That's correct. Yeah, and I think in an interesting way in retrospect people would say the british people set it up that way Just so that they could have control because they felt like if they let all the different regions exist on their own Then it would be difficult to manipulate them But if you put people in place to control resources in all of these different regions Especially if those people were not from the region then they would be doing the bidding of the british as opposed to You You know, focusing more on Nigeria being, you know, one country that's unified and can sort of keep the British people out of, um, what they were trying to sort of keep their hands in, even after independence.

So, that takes us through 1965, 1970. When do you come into the picture? Because you're not that old. No, I'm not that old. I was born in 77, um, in Kaduna. Um, Kaduna was, was an excellent, uh, place to grow up. And it was interesting, I tell people that it, growing up in Kaduna feels like growing up in suburban Georgia.

Like, it's pretty much the same vibe. Very laid back, um, very chill, people are very nice. Um, it also helped that my family's Muslim.  So, and, and most of the people in northern Nigeria are Muslim, so that integration also was kind of very easy. Now, if you weren't Muslim and you lived in the north, eh, it was a little bit more challenging, right?

Because they're very religious, um, and I think the easiest way to describe northern Nigeria, it's, it's very much like, um,  The Arab countries, right? They're more like very religious, very strict, very conservative. Whereas if you go down to the West or the East, they're more liberal. They're more like progressive in their mindset.

So those things clash, right? Um, so for me growing up, it was, uh, it was, it was really interesting. I went to, um, initially I went to a military school.  So my elementary was sort of one of those military elementary schools that feeds into  the military academies and then you either go join the army or go do something else. 

But so you're not forced. Uh,  not forced, but it, it, it was an option. Right.  Okay. Um, but, but you know, it was, it was an option. And because Nigeria was trying to build its military at the time, they wanted people educated, you know, feeding into the military. Right. And our parents, and I say our, when, when I say our parents, I mean like my parents' generation were the first set of people that were educated,  um, in Nigeria, at least British formal education.

Right. So there was that push to sort of grow the economy by educating people and feeding them into all of these different sectors of the economy. So,  um, somewhere along the line,  uh, an American school was set up because the American embassy was actually in Kaduna at the time. So Kaduna, just for additional context, was sort of the central, um, Government of Nigeria when the British were there, but as soon as the British left they moved the capital to Lagos Which is in the west?

This is one of the things that aggravated the northerners because they felt like they were close to power and then now You've moved power somewhere else, you know, so anyway What that did was it set it up in such a way that?  There was a lot of like struggle for power so even the military You They started to figure out ways to not allow people from certain parts of the country to become, to join the military.

The North was like, okay, you know what, since the military bases are here, we're going to take control of that, right? So there was a bit of pushback. If you showed up and you were from the West or you're from the East, there was a lot of resistance to you even joining the military. But anyway, the American school set up in Kaduna.

Because the embassy is there, and it was set up by an American lady who actually came from Philadelphia. And it was supposed to be the school for all of the folks who worked, you know, at the consulate, the embassy. Uh, the, the U. S. mission in Nigeria. Uh, but then at some point it was privatized because the embassy then moved to Lagos, because Lagos now became the capital.

But then the school remained in Kaduna, but she still ran it as an American school.  Was it safe in Nigeria growing up? Because it was still fairly new independence. So was there infrastructure? Was it safe? What, how did the government form?  So it was relatively safe in the beginning. Obviously there was a civil war shortly after independence.

So that definitely caused a lot of unrest. But as soon as the civil war was over, as soon as Nigeria defeated Biafra, every other part of Nigeria was developing Biafra, not so much initially, um, but because they have like more of an entrepreneurial mindset on the, on, on the Eastern part of Nigeria, they were able to sort of come back up at some point and sort of reintegrate into the you know, the Nigeria entity, right?

Now, from a safety standpoint, it always been safe. But if you lived in the North, there was still those aggressions. Like every now and again, there would be like riots and people would revolt. Oh, we don't want our businesses owned by these Southerners. We want to take things back. We want to take back control of this ministry and that industry and things like that.

So there were civil unrests. from time to time where tons of people would, you know, be massacred. Um, but it was safe, I guess, for us because we were also Muslim living in the North. So there was some level of  protection. based on that, right? Now, if you were Christian living in the North, it was much more challenging.

So sometime, and those things would happen like every couple of years, right? And sometime in the early 90s, it got really rough where these aggressions were becoming more and more frequent. And so a lot of people who lived in the North started moving, you know, back to wherever they came from. So a lot of the Easterners moved back to the East, a lot of the Westerners moved back to the West.

So like my mom, for example, she ended up moving back to Lagos.  Right, just before I graduated high school. But then, because I was already in this school, and it was kind of tricky pulling me out of this American school to then go back and try to reintegrate into a Nigerian school. She was like, you know what, you got two years left, just wrap up, and then you can go to college.

You know, at the time the plan was to come to college in the U. S. Um, and so I stayed back for the, for the next two years. And then after that was when I then moved back to Lagos to join my family. Okay, I wanted to ask about the safety, because in your podcast, Nigerian American, you have a story, well, I guess two, but they're both in the same episode, where you said when you were a kid, your house was robbed?

Yeah.  Can you tell me about that? I know you said there was, in instance, the first time that wasn't a full robbery, because your mother was able to defend them off. Right. And then there was a much worse incident after that. Correct. Correct. Correct. Correct.  So I guess what was happening around that time was insecurity was becoming more, you know, like I said, in the early 90s, right?

Um, there was a lot of like the uprisings and the civil unrest and things like that. And people started having ideas because they would get away with doing all kinds of things. So that basically meant that a lot of robbery started to take place. Um, and so I, you know, in my episode of Cold Night, I talk about.

That one time when you know, this is just before I started high school where  you know, people came over to the house  It was like I don't know like 2 3 in the morning. This is gonna be my first day in school So I was super excited and that's probably why I was up, you know, wasn't able to sleep so well that night  And I just heard like clanking noise banging.

I heard like a truck outside of our house  Next thing I know, I'm hearing like glasses shattering everywhere, they're breaking down the windows, you know, they cut through, we had like, um, bars, like the burglar bars, you know, on the windows, and they're, they're sawing through those, and my mom is like screaming, yelling, trying to get attention, my dad didn't live at the house at the time, my dad was on the road a lot, um, when I was growing up, like I said earlier, he's an engineer, and he was actually at the time building the, um, telephone network.

In Nigeria, so he was one of the supervising engineers to build a telephone network So he had to be and he was a on site supervisor So he had to be in different parts of the country at the time. So he was rarely home So he would show up in the summertime, you know Spend a couple weeks and then he's back on the road and if he happens to be passing through Kaduna He would stop by so I didn't spend a lot of time with him And so this is one of the times when he wasn't around right?

So they came in  I mean the episode You explains it in even more detail. Um, but essentially we were robbed, they broke into the house. Um, we were lucky that they just made away with stuff and we didn't get hurt, you know, in the process, but it was a very, very traumatic experience. Um, just being in a situation where you're just defenseless and you're not really able to do anything and you can't call the police.

Um, and I mean, cause if you do call, they cut the, they cut the phone wires, right? But even if we were able to call the police, like, I didn't,  it just didn't feel like there would have been anything that they would have been able to do. They did show up eventually,  but it was too late. Wasn't there, wasn't there a detail in there about the, the boots they were wearing?

Correct. And that was the other thing too, is some of the robberies were actually being perpetuated by forces. So it would be policemen, you know, military folks. It's people who had access to weapons, right? Um, that were committing a lot of those. There were either.  handing out their guns to robbers or doing the robberies themselves.

And prior to that incident, someone had come over to the house one day was asking about my parents. Oh, your parents home. And my mom worked at the bank at the time. So she would be at work from like, I don't know, 7am till about 8pm. She was an assistant bank manager. So she would be at work pretty much all day.

So when we got back from school, we would hang out on our own for a few hours before she got back. So this Guy came over and oh, yeah, you know, is your parents home? He's looking around like oh, so what and but I recognized what he was wearing and he had one of those like, um, sweaters over his what appeared to be like a uniform, right?

But then the boots is what I recognized because I mean, those were unique boots that, you know, only the military or the police would wear, you know, at the time and I did recognize that when those guys came in. So my conclusion, I mean, I don't have any proof. other than that, was these are probably people who were, you know, kind of just looking around, surveying, trying to see what they could get.

And then they came back and, and robbed us.  So why, why, why was this being done by police officers or military members? What does that say about the corruption at the time? Well, corruption, I mean, corruption is a universal thing, but it's only possible where there's no enforcement, right? And if the guys who Have weapons and are dealing with all kinds of civil unrest and uprisings get to kill people get away  Then they start to have ideas, right?

Where it's like, hey, you know what we're protecting all these people we can go rob them ourselves, right? And what's gonna happen? No one's gonna investigate. It's just gonna go down as hey, you know something happened and then we just kind of all just move on Right. So, I mean, I don't know what their motivations are except that they could do it and get away with it, right?

You  So, and a lot of that was beginning to happen, you know, at the time. Yeah. Is, is there any kind of, like,  country wide? Maybe this isn't the case because of all the different tribes and groups that are trying to live together. But is there not, like, a shared code of morality of any kind?  Um  Or if there was, is this just, are these just bad actors?

These are just bad actors, I would say. Um, and at the time, I mean, it's gotten worse over time. Yeah. But at the time, it was just a few bad actors, right? Okay. And the fact that they were getting away with it is the reason why it pretty much just continued to grow, right? Because if you have a colleague that's out there, it's almost like having bad cops in the U.S., right? There may be a few cops here and there, sprinkles, right? Who are in bed with, you know, the drug dealers, or the murderers, and the whoever, right? And those guys Getting away with it energizes everybody else like oh, okay. So and so is doing this. He's building houses. He's buying cars He's doing all this stuff outside of his nine and five Let me go explore that as well, right?

It was an option because there really wasn't any recourse. There wasn't any kind of um punishment that came with it, so  Okay, it just was more bad actors at the time That grew and I want to get to that later in the interview like how nigeria is today um You But earlier, you mentioned how you went into university.

And I think this kind of makes sense as a good progression from, uh, school, your upbringing. Uh, how, so this, this happened early high school, the incident with, um Very first day of high school, actually. The night of, crazy. The morning, the morning of. My first day, um, in high school was, was when this happened, yeah.

Okay. And then high school was pretty normal?  Pretty normal, really cool. I mean, it's, it's interesting when I look at the experience that my kids are having right now at their school. I mean, it's very similar. I mean, like I said, it was an American school, so pretty much everything that we did. In school was similar to what you would experience at an American, you know, middle school, high school, um, and so because of that, too, we were exposed to a lot of like hip hop and a lot of basketball.

Matter of fact, we had some really interesting things happen that I have mentioned on my podcast, which was when we launched our basketball court, our proprietress, the principal. At the time, she actually brought the Harlem Globetrotters. Really? Um, yes, to Nigeria. Um, you know, when they did the launch, and they played with the kids, and they got a bunch of people playing basketball, and she brought trainers from the U.S., and it was like a big thing.  Now,  when I was moving to Lagos, Lagos is totally different from Kaduna. So it was a huge culture shock for me. And a huge shift in everything that I knew. Lagos is more like,  New York on steroids.  Kaduna is like I said a suburb in Georgia. So imagine the shock of being lifted out of that peaceful quiet surreal environment and then just being dumped right in the middle of Times Square where there's like a you know, rough. 

Sort of fend for yourself mentality and then the security level is like Significantly, I mean the security situation rather is significantly worse, right? So there was a lot of like trying to just navigate, you know, that was happening to me my first year,  you know in lagos Um, also when I went into the schools, I talked about this on one of my episodes.

Um, I believe it's episode three karate kid where I talked about my experience learning about the gangs and the cults and the And this was easy University or high school? This was in university. Yeah. So I, so high school I completed in Kaduna and then when I was done,  then I went to Lagos. This was in 1994.

Okay. Um, so I moved to Lagos in 94 and I started college in 95  at the end of 95.  Um, and yeah, it was, it was really, really rough. It was a, Difficult transition. I mean, I'd had it in my mind that I was going to go to the U. S. That was the plan, you know, from the beginning and my dad came in last minute. It was like no, no, no, no You're not leaving.

I'm my mom's only son and in our culture  just because  Well, not just because but the fact that I'm my dad's Only son for my mom. He has other kids. He has my half brothers, half half brothers, but for my mom He felt like we needed to have someone to sort of  Um, and being the first kid to, um, help the other, my, my siblings pretty much.

And he felt like if I had left and gone to the U S that I would never come back.  You know? So,  so his whole thing was, uh, yeah. Who's going to take over the family business. I've got this whole thing going. Um, I need you to stay back, you know, he wanted me to be an engineer cause he was an engineer and most of my other siblings are engineers.

But you know, and I think it was part of me revolting as well. I went down the path of architecture, which is in a way still engineering, right? Um, so I, so I went to study architecture and so he insisted that I stayed in Lagos because  that's where the whole family was at the time. So I went to university of Lagos and you know, like I said, it was a rough experience. 

Um, I grew up, I had to grow up very, very quickly.  Um, When I was in Kaduna, I was already driving a car in high school, you know, when I moved to Lagos, my dad was like, no, no, no, no cars, nothing, you got to go learn how to be a regular person, you know, figure out the transportation system, oh, well, but it's dangerous, there's crime, he's like, nah, that's how you become a man, you need to go and experience these things so that you can thrive in this environment, because this is probably, you know, what you're going to do, this is where you're going to end up.

So.  You're going to stay.  So you're in this crazy city. Uh, you're going to university. Where'd you live? In Lagos. So we lived in Lagos. And I was probably about an hour and a half away. Not that it's that far. It's just a lot of traffic in Lagos. Because it's a really congested city.  Um, and so I would have to commute two, three hours.

Um, in either direction every day. And then at some point my mom was like, Okay, you know what? We need to figure out a way for you to stay on the campus. So you don't have to keep going back and forth. But then on the campus, it was just like really, really rough. It was dangerous. I mean, Um, the fraternities and the cults and the gangs, they just ran rampant.

Can you explain that? Because fraternities in the, in most places in the West are just idiots getting drunk and living together and doing stupid things. Fundraisers now and again to continue, right? So what's the difference in Nigeria? So a fraternity is just what a fraternity is group of guys come together  Give themselves a name phi theta beta, whatever whatever Um, there's just guys trying to have fun on the campus, right?

however in nigeria, it's a unique thing that happened in  um After independence, after the civil war, a lot of people are getting educated. The university campuses became sort of the voice of the people, right, in a sense. So a lot of the, um,  resistance to the military leadership came from the campuses. It was the professors and it was the students. 

So at some point, some of the military dictators decided that they would, they needed to suppress that movement. And so what they did was they would plant, um, I guess what you would call agent provocatories. on the campuses, right? Who would then sort of blend into groups that were influential on the campus and use those as a way to sort of gather Intel so that the government knows when things are about to happen so they can move in and shut it down before it becomes anything.

A lot of the protests that were happening at the time, that was how they were able to get wind of, you know, whatever was happening so they could go in there and like shut it down before it, you know, escalate or whatever. And so it starts as that.  And then at some point, they start to arm these people so that they could sort of quell the resistance,  um, before the kids could get out of the campus.

So for example, They're organizing a student union type rally thing. Oh, we don't want this governor. He's not doing what he's supposed to do. This is what the constitution says, yada, yada, yada. And someone starts a fight and it's easy for people to fight when they're just fistfighting. But when someone's pulled, pulls out a gun, It changes the dynamics, right?

And they realized that that was a very powerful way to suppress all of that. And so they armed them, and then that just sort of spiraled out of control. And then what started to happen was some of these groups started to have conflicts, and those conflicts would end up in gun violence.  And so what used to be just fraternities, then sort of started gradually  moving more towards becoming gangs. 

And then at some point, because of the secrecy and all of these oaths they have to swear when you join these fraternities, it started moving more towards becoming cults.  Okay, I was going to ask for clarification on that, because there's nothing religious about the cultism, it's more just the honor code?

Correct. Okay. Correct. So it's almost like a Blood Crips type, you know, gang type situation, um, where you don't even get recruited into this, these fraternities. At one point you couldn't be recruited unless you were a soldier, so to speak. So they targeted specific kinds of individuals to bring into those fraternities and they were still operating on the campus as just simply fraternities, but there were all these conflicts.

They were fighting. They were fighting. They hired,  essentially, kids. Killers,  , you know, to go from campus to campus. You know, they started taking people out, like, oh, if you weren't aligning with things that they needed to be done. And then also when we started moving more towards like, um,  democracy,  the military folks would use these gangs to disrupt a lot of the activity on the campuses and off the campuses as well. 

So they pretty much had free reign. If they got caught, they were let go because obviously they were working for people in the government.  Um, and so, yeah, so it, it just, it went really, really  wild at one point. Matter of fact,  you know, things  sort of died down a little bit, but it's,  it's, it's, it's kind of, kind of come back up again.

And did you ever,  did you ever have run ins with them? Oh yeah.  I had no idea. I was just, I just moved from Kaduna. I didn't know that this stuff was happening on the campus. Um, and so one day I'm coming back, um, from my, uh, karate class, uh, karate lessons or whatever, and I'm still wearing my gi and everything, and I'm walking into, um, my dorm, and some guy just like, you know, whistle calls me.

Hey, you, come over here, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, we start going back and forth, and I don't, I, I, I don't feel I need to be disrespected by anybody, you know. From where I, where I was coming from. Everybody's equal like showing up to this place where somebody feels like they can just like whistle call me from across the street And ask me to sit down.

He needs to talk to me and I just so I blew him off  Did you know who he was? I had no idea. I had no idea. I just knew they were just a bunch of  Crazy guys that just hung out outside of the the dorms, right? And so we get into a an altercation and somehow I mean I don't know what he was thinking. I was out there in my karate g.

I he definitely should have known that That was probably not a good situation for him. So,  long and short, I kick his ass.  And as soon as he's down, I sense tension.  And there's like a big crowd that is gathered, right? And so now I'm feeling a little unsafe. And I'm thinking, hold on a second. Are these people watching? 

Because They're just watching or am I in a really dangerous situation without really knowing? I just felt something. And so I took a look. Are you surrounded by students or are you surrounded by his, his guys? By his guys. And I was surrounded by his guys. And I think they just took an opportunity. They just wanted to see the whole thing play out.

And who knows? This might've been a recruitment  mission too.  Oh, cause yeah, you're in a gi. Maybe they're like, there's a guy who does karate. Yeah, so guy that doesn't you know if we can get this guy to join our gang or our fraternity or whatever, you know So we can so so I take off and I run off to my room and you know I lock the doors and everything and then they come banging on the door boom boom boom boom boom and Turns out my roommate at the time who had no idea Was high up in one of the fraternities  So then this whole situation happens where he grabs the guy, they beat this guy up, the guy who came to the door banging, right?

They beat him up. He's kneeling down in our bedroom. He's bleeding from his nose, his mouth. He's just like, you know,  and so that night they schooled me. Oh, LD. Hmm. Yeah. Let me, let me tell you a little something. You probably have no idea this is going on, but this is this, and that is that. And for the rest of my time in the university, I lived in fear because I realized at the time, you know, that a lot of the stuff that was happening around me, like we would hear about attacks, right.

Where they would come to the dorms and they would shoot up the place and kill 10, 20, 30 people at a time. Right, and we always just thought at the time Oh, you know, there's some people in gangs and some bad actors from outside of the campus, but my understanding that night Helped me realize that there was more of it going on around me than I then I you know paid attention to  Yeah, if your roommate was a high up and you didn't know that's pretty wild.

I had no idea I mean, he didn't tell me that that night, but I but I found out I mean his whole Persona his reaction to the situation How everything was squashed in the end? You I mean, yeah, it would take an idiot to not realize. He never said, Oh, I'm one of them, but clearly he didn't try to recruit you either.

He wasn't like, Hey, you kick that guy's ass. And he told me too, he was like, listen, I'm going to do something for you. I'm going to make sure that you're protected. Cause I realized that you just didn't know. Right. Um, however, you're going to have to appease these guys by bringing them a bottle of whiskey and some cigarettes every weekend for the next, I don't know, it was like six months or something.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, so, so every Sunday, I  have to bring him a bottle of whiskey, you know, and some cigarettes and go hand off to this  dangerous looking guy,  you know, um, but they in a sense protected me because they realized I just, you know, didn't know enough to be in that world. I guess maybe they looked at me and just thought, yeah, nah, he's not, he's not a candidate, you know what I mean, to become one of the, one of theirs, you know, um, And I think it also helped that my mom was very, um, kind to them. 

And they just thought, you know what, let's just keep this going because my mom would come and she would give me an allowance and she would give the money too. If she brought me food or brought me groceries or whatever, she would bring for them as well. So they kind of took me in as their little, little brother, so to speak.

Gotcha. And that came with the benefit of that protection. Correct. Correct. So that's kind of how I got through.  I say the first three, four years. Well, you said your roommate called you LD. That's a stage name, right? So were you already doing music at this time? I was, but LD was actually my nickname before music.

Okay. My mom started calling me LD when I was four years old.  What does it stem from? It's my nickname. Oh, there you go. My first name is Lanre and my last name is Dabiri. So ld, you know Larry DeBerry. Oh, is that why it's stylized with the ld Uppercase? Correct. So you keep the initial space, the L and the D.

Exactly. So if you look at it, I, I always write it as a lowercase e, uppercase, L and d, and then lowercase e's. Yeah.  Okay. When did you get into music? How, how, how early did that start?  Quick interruption, if you're enjoying this interview with LD, please consider subscribing, leaving a like, or posting a comment, uh, responding to something that you found interesting or completely disagreed with in the interview.

Um, I'm very open to that criticism. Um, I love to be corrected and I think that is a big point of this show. Um, so please, uh, consider interacting, following, because we've got a lot more to come. All right, back to the interview.  That started in high school. Um, again, American school, American influence, a lot of hip hop.

Um, we also had cable TV growing up. So, I literally watched, like, UMTV Raps start.  You know what I mean? Like, first episode type thing. Like, I, that, so I grew up on hip hop culture. And that was sort of the most relatable, cool version of who I thought  I was going to be when I grew up. So that's kind of how I started moving. 

You know, gravitating towards music. So I started creating music in high school. And so when I moved to Lagos and I went to university of Lagos, my whole thing was with all of this fraternity and cults and gang stuff going on, I needed to find something that would keep me away. As soon as I got out of class, I would go straight back to my room. 

Like my roommates told me, and I would just stay there for the rest of the night. Right. And so I had to do something and music was the one thing. That I kind of already had as a sort of passion. Um, so I was creating music literally in my dorm room. And so we started making some demos and somehow those demos started to get around and people started getting really interested.

People started coming to my room, wanting to listen to demos. And I had this other friend that we went to high school together, who also happened to be in my dorm. And so me and him would get together. We made some music together and then we met this third guy.  And so we started a little group.  Um, cause it's right group.

Yeah. All right. Big group. Right. So, so we started tribesmen, um, you know, while I was there on the campus. And so music was my kind of getaway, um, from everything else that was going on in my life at the time. And so, um, we started creating music and, you know, because the baseline of it was really hip hop and the hip hop culture, a lot of the stories that I had understood about how hip hop became what it was in America, I felt  we could replicate. 

Can you explain that a bit more? Cause maybe I'm not as educated on hip hop. On hip hop. Okay. So because I witnessed sort of like Run DMC and everything. progressively to the Bad Boy Death Row era, which was kind of around the time when I was graduating, you know, high school. I had a good understanding of how a lot of those groups came up and how a lot of those record labels were built. 

And so all of these dreams that we had about making music in Nigeria, we didn't have any kind of music infrastructure at this time. And there is a backstory. There was nothing where there were there famous artists or? There were, um, there were famous artists, but. Okay, let me try to shrink that story into a condensed version, right?

So sometime around, well, the British ran the country. So when the British ran it, we had PRS, which is like their, their own version of, I guess, BMI ASCAP, right?  We had the big labels, all the British labels. So we had DECA, Polygram, You know, EMI, Sony, and all of these labels, they were present in Nigeria, and they signed local talent.

But a lot of the talent they signed were people who made traditional Nigerian music. And then sometime in the late 70s, one of the military presidents basically decided that if you were going to run a company in Nigeria, it had to be 60 percent Nigerian owned. So a lot of those companies left.  Now, artists who were still signed to them still got to tour internationally and still had their deals, but nobody else was getting signed between 1979, 80 all the way through to the 90s.

Oh, wow. So the music industry literally tanked because there was no infrastructure, there was no, you know, finance. It was nothing. And so even aspiring to become a musician at that time was kind of a stupid thing because it wasn't a thing. Right? Yeah. And there was no internet, no YouTube. There was nothing.

It was absolutely nothing. And there was no infrastructure, no distribution, physical or digital. Um, there was, there were no, no touring venues. It was nothing right. So all the artists who were signed to the, to the, uh, big labels. We're essentially still doing that thing, but it was mostly internationally, right?

So there's Fela Kuti, there's King Sunny Ade, there's Ebeneezer Obey There are a lot of artists at the time who were signed to these labels who still kept doing their thing business as usual But for the new artists, they were all independent  Because you know, there was really literally no infrastructure to support what they were doing.

So we came at that time, right? So in the early 90s, well actually early 2000s I take mid 90s, which is around the time when I was, you know, starting to kind of do music.  I was thinking, right, that  And a lot of the stories that I'd heard from the early pioneers of hip hop was, Hey, nobody wanted to sign us.

We needed to kind of figure out a way to do this on our own. So we are going to go out and promote this stuff by ourselves. We're going to make our own tapes, demos and whatnot, hand them out to people, try to organize little tours, um, figure out a way to print.  And do the sleeves and everything. Um, and so that was the blueprint.

And we started going from campus to campus trying to promote the music. And now the music that we created, it was, there was something unique about it. And it was something I was very intentional about. Which is,  We love hip hop r& b pop music or whatever  but  you know reggae and all of that, but  a lot of the  People in nigeria, even though they were familiar with it There was still there was still more of like a traditional palette so to speak right in terms of their music taste So we had to figure out a way to integrate the traditional music  with hip hop r& b reggae and everything  In order for it to, like, be accepted.

In order to be accepted.  At least mainstream. Now, the younger people, they love hip hop. We could do hip hop for them. But the older folks and everybody else outside of the university campuses, we need it to be more relatable. So I was very intentional about that, and I told my, you know, group members, I said, listen, if we're gonna create music that's gonna resonate, we have to make sure that it's local content. 

So we have to make sure that we put Pidgin English. So Pidgin English is kind of like a Creole, kind of like a patois, right?  The, it's its own dialect, West African version, right? Yeah, it's kind of its own dialect, right? And pidgin English was kind of what people spoke before a lot of the population was educated.

So that's the one common sort of way that the entire country was able to communicate outside of people who spoke like fluent English, right?  Um, so I think Patois is probably the easiest way to describe it, like Jamaican Patois, right? Is it's slang  and everybody understands it,  but people still speak fluent English, right? 

I'm a bit more familiar with that because I, I listened to like Queen Omega, Lieutenant Stitchy, and they definitely use it though. I understand less of what they're saying when they do.  So that's, that's Western ignorance.  I mean, if, if, if you don't, if you're not immersed, you, you, you don't know. So it's not, you know,  it's not ignorance by any means.

It's just, you know, it's just, you know what you know, right? Um, so Pidgin English was one thing that I was really intentional about. And I also wanted to make sure that we. Also embedded like Igbo, Western culture, Yoruba, East, I'm sorry, Igbo, Eastern culture, Yoruba, Western culture, and Hausa into the music as well.

Because I felt that if we did that, then we would be more mainstream.  And so a lot of the music that we created at that time was, it was fresh, it was new, it was different. The first few demos that we made,  we already started to tour. Based off of the first few demos and I'm talking about people didn't even have access to the actual music at the time It's just that we would go perform and people would come see us and then the word just spread  Well, what do you what do you think gave you that insight since clearly other people weren't coming to it? 

We don't have Record stores that people can go and get this stuff We don't have any kind of distribution. We don't have any record labels that would sign us So why don't we start a record label? Why don't we try to establish the distribution? What was Busta Rhymes doing when he was part of Leaders of the New School? 

What was EPMD, EPMD doing? Eric in, uh, in Parish, right?  They basically would print their cassettes,  have them in their, in the trunk of their cars, and drive up to like Times Square or Jersey City or someplace, right? And try to sell those cassettes out of the, the trunk of their cars. This is exactly what I did. 

I would take my car, get my tapes, and when CDs started to become a thing, you know, burn CDs and literally just hand them out. I'm sure you've come across those guys if you've ever been to Thailand. Oh yeah, listen to my demo, listen to my demo. That's how they started.  And they went from that to having their independent labels that were then absorbed by the bigger labels once they created traction.

So we were hoping that we would be able to create something like that, that would then get some kind of attention. And hopefully we would be absorbed by, I don't know, a Sony and EMI or somebody else internationally.  So we could then take it like to the whole continent or the world. And so then we could take it to the continent into the world.

So you can imagine how I feel right now, seeing everything that's happening. Like this is my  baby, so to speak,  you know, it was a vision that I had. You know, I was, how old was I, 16, 17? When this whole thing came up. And by the time we were doing this, I was like maybe 21, 22.  Wow.  That's insane. That's very ambitious to be so young. 

I'm curious too, what did your parents think of you driving around? Did they know? Or were you doing this in secret? Well, my dad didn't. He wasn't buying into any of that. He was very conservative. Um, he wanted me to just focus on education and, you know, come run the family business. Like, he didn't care for any of this other stuff.

But my mom, because she felt like  I was,  Missing out a little bit on that relationship with my dad. She overcompensated, I think. Right. And so what she was doing was saying, Hey, as long as you keep your grades good, whatever it is that you're interested in doing, I'll support you.  And thankfully she also had the means to do so.

Right. So she bought me studio equipment. Um, she paid for recording. She paid for music videos. She pretty much, I mean, my mom should have a statue in that country. Um, for what she, for her contributions, because, because at the time, you gotta, you have to try to  see what I mean by there was no industry, right? 

This was like throwing money into a well, that's a Nigerian saying, right? Because you were never going to recover it, right? And she kept investing in it, but she did it, I guess, so that she could, I don't know, make me happy. She just felt like, oh yeah, whatever, keeps him quiet, is, you know, and he's not nagging.

She, uh, liked, did she like your music?  She, um,  I don't know that I would say that she liked it initially. She was just supportive. She was just a supportive mom. What about your dad? Did you ever catch him, like, tapping his foot or something? Eventually. Yeah, when everybody else, when the whole country was, was, was screaming about it.

Yeah, when he would go to play tennis with his friends and my music was,  In the background and his friends are like, well, hold on a second. That's your son, right?  And he's like,  well, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. So at that point he started kind of getting excited about it. So after the success, he became somewhat supportive. 

That feels kind of like those Disney movie moments where, you know, the parents aren't supportive and then they see the crowd all cheering and then they're kind of like,  all right. I get it now. I guess there is something there. and high water. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So that was, that was his thing. But my mom, she just supported it from the very beginning, from the days when I wanted to just go do talent shows to when I say, Hey, you know, I want to buy, uh, a synthesizer.

What is this? Synthesize it. It's 800. What? 800? This is, I'm talking nine, 1989.  800 is a lot of money to buy a synthesizer. You know, like, what are you doing? What is this? And that, but she did it for some reason.  And the success that we had as a group inspired a lot of other people. Right. Yeah. You guys are credited also for pioneering or being of the pioneers of Afro beat.

Right. Yeah. So the genre essentially that we created is what is known today as Afro beats.  Is the S specific? Is it Afrobeats? Okay, that's another thing. So, Fela Kuti created a genre called Afrobeat without the S. Right? And somehow, when this music started to permeate in Europe,  they just called it Afrobeat. 

And someone was like, uh, yeah, I don't know, I feel like that's a little disrespectful. Because it's not the same genre, it's different, right? And so they just added the S, which is really stupid, don't  Slight difference, but like oh, yeah, we're just gonna call it afro beats. It's african beats. So we're gonna call it afro beats Plural now, it's plural now.

It's you pluralized it  Yeah, but I mean, but then again, you know, that's what happens when you don't if you don't name your baby They're gonna get named somewhere by someone and that's essentially what happened. Like we didn't  intentionally name the genre  And so when the music started to get out across west africa across, you know Um, Asia and, and in Europe,  people needed to call it something, right?

And so they just called it Afrobeats, and that stuck.  In a way, that's kind of cool, because it's organic, obviously, how that name came to be. And it is kind of nice to have it linked to somebody like, uh, Fela Kuti, and then like, his son too, Sean Kuti? He continues to band?  Yeah, yep. Yep, that's wild. I think that connection is kind of cool Even if I can understand you being like, well, I can't have its own name that stands out a bit more that doesn't confuse people Right, but no, but that's fair enough.

So you then went on to do how many albums with tribesmen? Because I know you've done five solo. Yeah, so tribesmen had one album  um And then we had, and then at the point when we were starting to become successful, just like the blueprint that I had seen, I felt this is an opportunity to bring on more artists.

And so we had the tribe, which was sort of like the collective. And this is when I'd signed, uh, 12 other artists to the label.  And by signing, obviously, I didn't give them any advances or whatever because I didn't have it. But they saw what we were doing and they wanted to be a part of it. So I, so I had all these other artists that became part of the imprint.

And, and, um, so we had one album, which Tribesmen was also a part of. So technically we had two albums as a group.  Okay. And then when did you go solo? Uh huh. So I went solo, I'd say 2003.  Okay.  Um, and part of that was because when I graduated from the university, I wanted to leave and go to the U. S. I wanted to, I mean, I intended to come to the U.

S. for university in the first place, but I, you know, at the time just figured, you know what?  Let me get through architecture, get my master's degree, and then I'll go figure it out. And at that point, my dad, I guess, didn't really have much of a say anymore, right? Like, I was, I was earning my own money. As a, as an artist, so I could afford to do what I wanted to do.

And so, you know, I moved to the U S and what should I moved initially? It was just like back and forth 2001. Right. Um, and what I was trying to do at the time was.  Still related to music like I wanted to come to the US and try to introduce Afrobeats and you know See if I could get some collaboration and see if I could you know get to shoot better quality videos Better quality mixes for the music and things like that, right?

So because I was away a lot the group started to and And you know a little bit of fame had come in For everybody so people started to feel like hey, you know, I could probably do this on my own I don't need to be part of the collective and you know, that kind of stuff started to happen Um, so the the group eventually broke up Really 2003 after we did our first uk tour  Now it's interesting too because we were the very first independent music group out of  Nigeria, maybe even west africa at the time That were able to tour the uk independently  Oh, wow.

How many shows and how big was that? It was just, it was just like six venues, but it was, you know, still considered a tour, right? Um, the biggest one, I think the kickoff one was, uh, probably about 5, 000 people, which was insane at the time, you know? I mean, we had smaller venues, but the biggest one was like, it was a, it was a big venue, right?

Um, and it, and it sold out.  And so, you know, things were starting to happen. We were starting to see a little bit of money, um, and, you know, I was spending more time in the U. S. And so while I was in the U. S., I was still recording for the rest of the guys that were part of the collective, um, and then I started, and I had a lot of music that I already created that was just sitting, and I was trying to get this second Tribesmen album,  um, but my guys were, you know, you know. 

flip flopping. It's starting to fray. Yeah, it was starting to fray. That's the best way to put it. And so I decided to put that out as my first solo effort.  And so my first solo album, I actually created while I was here in the U. S.  And then my subsequent, you know, albums pretty much were made with me, you know, while I lived here. 

Now, interesting thing, and I know we're probably going to get to the transition from like music to all this other stuff, is when I came to the US and I started spending more time here, I needed some type of sustenance, right? Because it wasn't enough to go tour and then come back and spend all that money on rent and food.

Like I needed to generate some income. I did have a degree, and that was one of the things my friends used to tell me, was like, dude, you have a master's degree in architecture, you should be doing something, you can earn a ton of money. All right, but then there was also like the concern of oh, you know, you're black you're from africa You have a bit of an accent.

You're probably not gonna get a job Um, but I never really had that mindset i've always had the mindset that it doesn't matter where you put me i'll be fine I grew up in kaduna in the north where I was a minority  So I understand what it's like to be a minority  In any in a system and still thrive, right?

So, okay. Yes, there is all of this talk about  Racism and this and that and the other but and people say that to me, you know When I first came to the u. s. Was all you gotta be careful. You gotta do that.  But to me, I always just felt like  The u. s. Is what I make of it  Yes, there is Systemic, but guess what where I grew up there was a systemic  tribalism as well  And I was able to thrive in that environment so I should be able to thrive in this environment So anyway, long story short is put a resume together and I got a gig as an interactive media developer  Now because of my music background and I was already shooting videos at this time I was able to edit audio and video which was a rare skill in Early 2000s and then I became you know down the road became a project manager now I'm doing all of this stuff while I'm still putting out music  That's a bizarre contrast. 

So you're kind of in like the technology, IT industry on one side, and then you're still a famous rap artist on the other side. What was that like? Um, the internet wasn't as big, so people, so it was possible for me to live two lives, so to speak. When I'm in the U. S.,  I'm in corporate. When I'm in Nigeria, I'm a celebrity.

And I'm talking about like,  big time. That's what But people didn't know what I was doing, you know, over in the U. S. and vice versa.  That's, that's so interesting though, because I feel like a lot of people who are, uh, who make it big in the arts, they don't have that weird dichotomy of being,  you can kind of be a no name and then you can go, and then you're just back to being on top of the world.

Do you think that, like, leveled you out a little bit in terms of dealing with fame?  I think it did. Um, and I think it also made me appreciate  life outside of being famous. Can you speak to that more? Yeah. So when I'm in the U S and I'm, I'm working at,  say, for example, going interactive, right? This is an interactive media agency here in Georgia that I worked at for a couple of years  and I'm working with them and I'm just there as a developer.

So I'm living that life. And even the guys that I worked with at the time had no idea  that I had this other life. You know back in Nigeria, and I guess also the internet wasn't really as It wasn't what it is right now where you can just look people up, right? So I just never said anything to anyone because I also didn't want them to treat me different I wanted them to just treat me as a Guy who works here as opposed to this famous guy that we have in our office matter of fact when they found out It was time for me to leave because, you know, unfortunately I'll tell you the story about it, how they found out.

But  you know, and back to your question, the fact that I was able to live that life. And at the same time, every time I got on a plane, as soon as I got out the plane in Nigeria, it was like red carpets. It was limousines. It was, it was at the time Hummers. It was the Hummer limo, right? It was, it was that lifestyle.

It was champagne. It was, you know,  nightclubs and. private planes and all of that other stuff. It was interesting. I, I kind of enjoyed it, but it also, like I said, made me appreciate  my life in America even more. And I think it's why it was easy for me to transition completely away from entertainment into being more of a private, because I enjoyed my life in the U.

S. more than I did. Because  when everyone around you is  Yes, man. Yes, man. Oh my god, LD. You're this, you're that. I value genuine connections, and I feel like I didn't have a lot of genuine connections on that side, but on this side I did. I had real friends who just appreciated me for who I was, not everything else that was happening around me. 

So, yeah. Oh, I was going to tell you how they found out, so. Oh yeah, please do. So there was, um,  there was an award ceremony The Nigerian Entertainment Awards was happening in New York.  And I'm in Georgia, I'm at work, you know, doing my thing or whatever, and I needed to go on tour  to Europe. And what I used to do was I would fly out on Friday night, go to London, do a show, come back Sunday,  and just go back to work Monday.

Right? And I was doing that  constantly, like for like months or even years, I would say, right? So this one time,  they called me and said, Hey, you, so I was at, I was actually at the award ceremony, but you know how it is at the award ceremonies, you have the plaque that you have on stage, but then they actually send you the one with your name engraved and all that kind of stuff after the fact.

That's usually how it happens. I did not know that, but that's good to know. Yeah. No, you don't get to take the plaques that you pick up On stage home. No, they they actually why so they have they keep one that's got your name on it Because they can't engrave the names  While you're on stage don't forget no one's supposed to know who's going to win So all of the ones that you actually hold on stage are dummies Oh And then so after the announcement is when they go do the you know Engraving and all of that stuff and all the people who are going to get the plaque then they mail them out  So they were going to mail out my plaque, and for some silly reason, when they sent the email asking for the address, I was like, man, I'm probably going to be in London this weekend. 

Um, let them mail it to the office. But I thought they would mail it in a regular, sealed box.  And then they send this plaque to my office. And it's got Nigerian Entertainment Award, yadda, yadda, yadda, on the box.  And so I get back to the office on Monday morning.  We have a stand up. And I get to the stand up.

We literally had like a stand up talk. Desk, you know where we kind of kicked off the day every day and I get to the desk and I see the box Right there on the thing and everyone's looking at me and they're like, what's this?  I'm like, uh, I Mean, it's a long story. I mean, we'll talk about it later. Yeah, is it?

Okay that I sent it here I mean I had stuff that I you know picked up  there  You know, in the past it wasn't an issue. So I was like, yeah, you know, that's cool, but they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're not gonna let this go. You gotta tell us a story. And then everyone runs to their computers and they start to Google it.

And they're like, wait, hold on a second. This is you. Wait, you had a show? Oh my God, there's a YouTube video.  And the whole day  I'm talking about how well, you know, and they're like, wait, how did  They're playing your music throughout the office. And they're playing the music, and everyone's talking about, Oh my God, this and that and the other, blah, blah, blah.

And um, they, my group actually facilitated my, one of my music videos before I eventually, you know, quit.  Um, cause they then became involved. But, like I said, once people know,  it changes everything.  So the dynamic sort of shifted, and I was now LD in the office, and I didn't really quit.  I didn't really like that.

And that's when you knew it was time to go. And that was, yeah, it was time for me to kind of move on. So you didn't come over to the U. S. at all as LD. No. What was then, what was Culture Shock like? Because you'd already had some international experience, but was there Culture Shock? This was early 2000s?

Yes, early 2000s, 2001 actually.  Um, there was a bit of Culture Shock. Um,  A lot of what I thought I knew about the U. S. wasn't what it was. What did you think about the U. S.? I mean, when you watch movies and you see a lot of these shows and you come to the U. S. for like a week or two on holiday,  it's a totally different experience from actually living in the U.

S.  Um,  there's so many stereotypes that get sort of implanted from like watching movies,  watching the news.  listening to talk shows at the time because, you know, media was still very controlled by a few groups,  um, that it creates some, it creates a narrative, right. Of what to expect.  And so my first time in New York, which I talk about in one of my, my podcast episodes, um,  I thought I was in way more danger than I actually was because I had heard all these stories about New York and, um, My uncle at the time lived in Linden Boulevard and all the crime and dangerous situations and things like that.

So it took me some time to sort of  unravel  from those narratives, you know, that I had.  You're being so vague. Tell me, what did you think about Americans? What are the stereotypes? I mean, so, I, okay, all right. There's no way to offend me on this.  And, and I'm not, and hopefully, you know, no one, no one's offended, like your listeners as well, don't get offended, but  the general sense that you're given about Americans is that Americans are aloof, not very intelligent,  is that, you know, black people are, Um, crass and rough on the edges and not refined and just like  uncouth.

I'm using many words to describe the same thing, but you get the picture, right? I like uncouth. That's a good  word choice.  Um, and that, you know, black people are lazy and they're uninformed and, um, you know, they're bottom of the barrel. They're not productive. This was your understanding outside of the U. S.?

Yes. That's crazy. Okay. I mean, because think about it. Everything that you see is pretty much movies and the news, right? You watch the news. Oh, somebody got shot. It's a black guy. Oh, somebody did this. It's a black guy. Oh, this and that happened. It's a black guy. Oh, the war on crime. It's black people. Oh, it's, you know what I mean?

So that's all you see outside of what we enjoyed in like the music and entertainment and like basketball and stuff. That's, that's the only thing  that. You could experience from outside of the U. S. See, now, things are democratized a little bit, where people have access to social media, and you can make connections.

And you can learn more about different things. And you can hear, also, varying perspectives  on any topic that you can imagine. Right now, you can do that. Back then, you couldn't. It's just whatever CNN and Fox said. Alright? So you're saying that their narrative, Was wrong or accurate when you came to the US?

It was absolutely wrong. It was wrong, very wrong. So what was, what was the reality of it? I mean the reality of it is that the United States of America is what you make of it,  right?  This is by far  the greatest country in the world, at least in my experience, and I've experienced different countries. You know, I've spent time in the UK.

I've spent time in Africa, across various countries. I've been to 30 countries. Two countries.  This is the greatest country in the world. By far. Because this is the country where you have the most opportunity to be whoever you want to be, however you want to be it.  And people take that for granted. That's not the narrative outside of America.

That's not what you understand. You think of America, when you're looking at America from outside of America, you think of America as a racist country. You think of America as a country where all the white people are going to suppress everything that you try to do. This is not a place where black people have freedom.

This is not a place where you can become anything unless you have a certain skin color or you belong to a certain group. You know what I mean? And I've come to understand that a lot of that stuff is false. It is not. At least that's my reality and I know that it is true for some people  and I'm not saying that their reality isn't  true but my reality as someone who grew up in Nigeria and has spent more of I'd say I spent more than half of my life now in the U.

S. right  I can compare both and I and I know what I thought before I came to the U. S. I know what I think right now  and a lot of those Narratives are incorrect.  You said that, uh, the two stations, you, you said earlier, was, one was CNN, the other, Fox, so these are American, the American news are the ones who are spreading this message.

I mean, that's the only time you heard about America, was through these  large media companies, right? And it's, it's essentially the way that things are worded. Like, I understand it now. Now I really understand it, right? But back then, Or for anyone who's looking at it from the outside. It's just whatever you hear.

Let me give you an example So we went on tour  on a tour of Europe family tour just a holiday and Everywhere in Europe that we went to and all of the people we interacted with once we said we were from the u. s He had a lot of negative things to say about the u. s  Oh, it's dangerous. Oh, when are you guys gonna get rid of all your guns?

Oh, how do you feel safe with your kids going to school? Oh, why do you?  And I'm like, well, hold on a second  I'm in Paris and Thankfully we knew to be around the 9th arrondement that so there's different like neighborhoods in Paris and They call them arrondements and we were in the 9th arrondement, which is supposed to be the safest Of the neighborhoods and every time we got in an uber and they took us back to the ninth They'll be like, oh you guys are staying a really nice place.

This is where you need to be Don't go to eighth. Don't go to seven. Don't go to this. Don't go to that. This place is dangerous. That place is dangerous That's what we kept hearing, right? So for someone who's coming from the u. s. To Paris, I thought man, France is super dangerous Like I don't want to be here.

That's exactly how they're hearing things about America. The only things they hear are the negative things  And so they think oh the school shootings How can you let your kids go to school? I would homeschool my kids, and I'm like, hold on a second. I live in Georgia, like, I get that these things do happen,  but it's not happening as much as you think it is.

It's just being, like, over sensationalized. And I'm not saying one death is enough, Garrett. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying,  um, that these things aren't bad, or that these aren't true fears that people should have. I'm saying  it's safer here than it is in Paris. So why are you as a Parisian  worried about the US? 

I grew up in Nigeria. I lived through all of what I've lived through. I understand security issues. And I can tell you for a fact that where I live right now is the safest place that I've ever been. Do things happen? Yes. But is that sort of the brush we're going to paint the entire country with? I disagree.

Because that's not the reality. That's not my reality. It might be the reality for someone who lives in a really dangerous part of the U. S., but it's not my reality. And I'm pretty sure it's not the reality for 99 percent of the people who live in this country. This feeling of unsafety that we're talking about.

You know what I mean? So there is a lot of that, and I feel like it's the media that presents that. If the only things that get reported, it's like when you watch the 7 o'clock news, right? The only thing you see on the news is Oh, somebody got shot. Oh, somebody got killed. You're going to feel like there's a lot of danger out there.

No one's talking about the good things that are happening. No one's showcasing the happy things, like the good morning America type of things, right? At 7 o'clock in the evening, all you do is come back from work and it's like, oh my god, somebody got shot. This bank got robbed. This and that guy. Those things do happen.

And they will happen wherever you are in the world. However, it is not  The majority of the incidents is going on in the country. There's a lot of positive things happening as well, but that doesn't get reported. You get the point. Yeah. I actually worked in local news for three months in Indiana. And I remember being pretty shocked that every night the red lights would be on, which meant breaking news, usually a stabbing or something.

And that was like the bulk of what we reported. And there were a ton of stories that would come in and they'd get thrown out because they just didn't think anyone would watch them. So it's like the majority of stories paint a different picture than the the the like exactly what you said the few they're promoting There's this whole thing about if it bleeds it leads, right?

Yeah, exactly It leads like, you know, so if that's the mentality of the media companies The negative consequence of that is people who are seeing it from the outside are just gonna think man y'all crazy You guys are just walking around shooting at each other I think the other side of that too is a lot of people and I think this is why some people give the reactions that you're describing is whenever you try to say a Like, oh, it's not really that bad.

It's almost like a, I don't know if it's virtue or a, uh, a lean towards compassion. That people think, oh, well, I don't want to say it's not a problem. I don't want to invalidate what is a problem. But it's like, well, yes, but you're not accurately assessing the problem. Correct. So, there's a middle ground there that I think definitely the news is better.

A big cause of it in social media as well, but like it just seems oh, yeah walk that line anymore. Oh, yeah Oh, yeah, and I think that that's one of the problems that we have. Um today just in general is people live off of Sound bites and little video clips on tiktok and instagram and that's not reality  Yeah, and especially did you see the now that google's ai? 

I hate that. I don't know if you've seen that but now when you go to You on Google and you type stuff in, a lot of times the first answer will be an AI. And I'm like, okay, people already weren't doing research. People already were typing in, um, like the thing that agrees with me already, rather than what is true about this or what happened.

Yeah. Or a lot of times what I'll do is when I think I know the story, I will type the opposite of that to see if what the other spin was of it. And it's hard to try and make yourself do that all the time, but it's better because then you're like, okay. It's not as bad. You have to these days because it's hard to get to the truth on anything  You know, it's it's it's um, it's really it's really disturbing.

I mean, I don't know where all of this is gonna land with AI but um  yeah,  I Worry about the truth being sort of lost right where it's just like oh, what's your perspective? All right. Let me feed you that and let me just tunnel you into this echo chamber That's pretty much what all of these platforms feel like.

Yeah, the algorithm too. I mean, I understand how they came to the idea of using algorithms to feed people what they want. They like, so they'll watch more things, but that just created the, the, what do you call it, the echo chamber. Where it's like, yeah, you watch one video on one thing, that's all you see on YouTube, until you purposely go look at other things.

And it's like, that's a hard thing to get out of, or be aware of, because then all, like what you were saying, all the news you're seeing is those same algorithmic regurgitations of the same stories. So then you start to think, oh man, this is what everyone's talking about everywhere, this is what everyone, and then it's like, go touch grass, it's not.

It's not  yeah, I was in London and someone said oh my god all of these school shootings And I said well hold on a second how many stabbings happened in London this week  I'm pretty sure it's more than the school shootings. No one's talking about that Cuz guess what it's not interesting news in the u. s.

People in the u. s. Don't even know that you guys have these stabbings, right? If everyone was focused on what you what was happening with all of these stabbings and everything is no one would come to London ever Well, you touched on that too, that there's also stories that they don't push. Like, I'm seeing it more and more reported on YouTube now, which maybe this is my algorithm.

But, since you mentioned Paris, they have a huge problem with multiculturalism and just too many people coming in. And a lot of that is like creating, sort of back to what you're talking about in Nigeria, where there's A push towards tribalism now where there's whole communities that are not Parisian at all.

There'll be whatever country they came from or whatever religion And I don't know if you want to go into any of that specifically, but you did not mention you were muslim Your family was all right. Do you practice islam? No, I do not Okay, not anymore I was wondering then what you thought of paris when you were there because 2021 you probably saw some of that Well, we were in the 9th Rondemont, which is like where all the embassies and all of the those high security in that area.

So in a sense, we didn't get to like integrate much, right? We went to Times Square, did all the touristy things and, and we left, right? Also because we were being told, Hey, don't do this. Don't go to this place. Don't go to that place, right? We went to Versailles.  We did tourist things. And left so I didn't get to experience Paris at that level I mean the one thing they kept telling us is man pickpockets are like just everywhere right like even in the ninth Oh, don't don't walk around with your cell phone.

Just like loosely in your hand. Don't you know what I mean? so I know that there is There are these problems, but that's not the perception that people have of Paris globally But then people have this perception of america that it's this dangerous place where people just wielding guns around and shooting at each other Which is not true But I mean, that's, that's, that's what happens, right?

When, um, people aren't very intentional about, you know, what goes out. If it's all profit driven, then, you know, the, the social media companies are going to do whatever it is they need to get the eyeballs and to get people to spend time on their apps. And if, if that means creating a perception that is not true, then  I guess so be it, right?

And  And I'm not, I'm not advocating for regulation. That's not what I'm saying here. I'm just saying that we have to also, there needs to be, um,  Responsibility, I think, by, Entities that are looking to profit from these situations to, you know, recognizing the negative sides of it, right? But at the same time you got to realize that that's how we get January 6th You got to realize that that's how we have a bunch of people who have all of these very very extreme ideas right, because all you feed them is You know this little piece of information.

They don't get to see any other perspective On anything and that's very dangerous very dangerous. Yeah with Jan 6 wasn't it like They only gave 12 hours of edited footage to the media, and there's like 40, 000 hours from the Capitol, and it's like, are you kidding me?  It doesn't matter what you showed us.

That wasn't the whole story. It wasn't 1 percent of the whole story. So yeah, that it's like there's no wonder why no one trusts anything right now. It's all very And that's, and that's where it leads to, is people stop trusting, and when we have a lack of trust,  the system breaks down.  the system breaks down.

I actually talk about that on one of my episodes too, The Value of Trust is what it's titled, um, on my Nigerian American podcast where I talk about a lot of the things that we see, right? And how we react to those things and how and what those things actually really do for the larger society, right? If people don't have, safety is all about perception. 

If people, if people don't feel safe, then  they won't be safe.  And they won't act towards others as if there's trust in their safety. Exactly. So we need to make sure that there is balance. Things are happening. Things will happen. It's human nature, but we have to find a way  to maintain some, some type of balance.

Otherwise we tip the scale in a direction where every, I mean, it's a slippery slope and then there's nothing we can do about it. And it just goes, you know, to, to shit from there. Excuse my, my French. Um, I was watching, I watched this movie.  Um, I don't know why I chose to watch that on July 4th, but I watched, uh, I don't know if you've seen Civil War.

Have you seen that? The new one? The new one. Yeah, I did see that.  Whew, yeah, that was, I understand  the art behind it, I understand the creativity in trying to sort of explore that  path, in a sense, but I thought it was kind of a dangerous narrative to put out there. That's just my personal. Oh, right. Yeah, right next to an election for sure.

That was my personal. I was like, oh, yeah I don't know if you want to put stuff like this out because people don't even realize it subconsciously It's an idea. It's not planted  and then some people are gonna run off with this idea because there are people who already feel  That that is a path that is worth pursuing  Yeah, I've, I've noticed that in podcasting lately, um, people do keep bringing that topic up.

Well, what would it look like if we did, if we had a civil war? And the movie prompted a lot of those discussions. So then you get that into the podcasting sphere, which is where most people get their day to day conversational news. So you're absolutely right. It propagates an idea. Very dangerous. Very, very dangerous.

For a country that understands propaganda,  yeah.  We're still very susceptible to it. I was like, okay, this is a bit much, you know, you're a filmmaker. So I guess I can have the conversation with you too, is like, we just have to be more intentional about, um, kind of what we put out there, you know, on our, on our platforms.

Like we need more unifying messages, you know, people are going to feel, um, extreme.  They'll feel ext they'll have extreme feelings about certain topics, but it can't just always be about that, right? Because even those people, they still sit down and have dinner with their families and do normal everyday stuff.

That extremism shows up every now and again, but if we make it, if we consume them with it, then they'll act, right? So we have to sort of, yeah, find balance. This is actually, um, a really good lead in. Uh, we touched on this at the beginning and I said I wanted to come back to it, but  what are your thoughts on Nigeria today? 

You said it had gotten worse?  Security wise, yeah. Security wise. Uh, corruption wise, I don't know if I would say it's gotten worse. I think  it's just one of those things where I don't feel like Nigeria is unique. I feel, feel like  if you do not enforce,  every country in the world can be Nigeria.  The U. S.

could become Nigeria in a matter of months.  Right? And what happened in Nigeria, unfortunately, is that the people who wanted to rape the system took control.  And they've sort of kept themselves in power for the last 20, 30 years.  And so it's hard to then say, hey, I'm going to police myself when I'm here to steal. 

Right, and they're a parasite that steals. allow it to operate as one, basically. Correct. Well, do you, do you think that's not happening in the U. S.? I think it is, not at the scale that it is in Nigeria, and I think that the fact that the government is set up the way that it is in the U. S., there's limits to what you can actually do.

And there's also  consequences, right? When you do do these things. It may not be now, could be Eight, ten years down the road, someone's gonna be like, Hey, let's pull this file and take a look at this real quick.  What did you do when this happened and what did you do when that happened? And that's a deterrent for most people because they don't want to be in that situation.

But in Nigeria, you can get away with anything. You can literally get away with murder. I guess I should have asked at the beginning, what is Nigeria's, uh, government type? It's a democracy that presents itself as being  a progressive.  But it's really more,  um, like a mafia.  Okay.  But you do have elections, like one of your most recent podcasts was about the last election, right?

Yeah.  How do you think that went? We do elections, um, they rig it and we accept whatever the outcome is of the rigging. And we just kind of move on.  Um, and that's happened repeatedly.  And nothing happens. And the guys who rigged, the guys who killed people to get in positions of power, they remain in power.

And we just move on like nothing happened. So again, if there is no consequence at any point, then people are not going to care. If you allowed for all of a sudden, and this is like  a super dumb way to explain it. But you may get the point of what I'm trying to say, right? If you said to everyone in America for like a week, we're going to turn off all of the street lights. 

And people, you can just drive however you want.  Can you imagine what would happen?  People will drive however they want. Right.  So, if you don't have any kind of enforcement, the only reason you're not on the highway going 200 miles or 100 miles per hour, you know, every time you get on the interstate, is because you can get a ticket. 

And it doesn't matter who you are. You can still get a ticket. You can be Justin Timberlake. You can get a DUI. Right?  But in Nigeria As LD, I couldn't get a DUI, it's impossible, it just can't happen. Because they're going to pull me over, they're going to realize it's me, and they're going to be like, Ah, boss, don't worry, don't worry, just, you know, drive safe, slow down a little bit, just go. 

And if the majority of the people can get away, in that manner, then people are going to drive at 100 miles per hour. So if I can always get away with doing the wrong thing, then I'm, I'm not incentivized to do the right thing. Like I'm always going to just do whatever the hell I feel like. Also, if you can get away with doing the wrong thing, then that clouds what is wrong and right anyway.

Exactly. And therein lies the biggest challenge I feel like Nigeria is facing right now is we've had  an entire generation of  of people who have now grown up in a system where the wrong thing isn't really clear.  It's, we've been at it for so long that it's hard for people to actually  tell what's right from what's wrong.

People find ways to do mental gymnastics around things that are pretty black and white.  You are right that Nigeria is not totally unique. Cause like I've met multiple people in the last couple of weeks who are telling me that our current president is cognizant. And I'm like, no, he isn't. You can, you can, you can tell you don't have to be a Republican or like Trump to say we need a new Democrat.

It's like, it's so obvious. And it's like, well, what mental gymnastics allows someone to watch the debate that just happened and go, yeah, no, he's there. Trump has dementia.  Yeah,  exactly. And I say, you know, if you believe in something strong enough, you'll make a reason for it to make sense, right? Um, most times people are able to get away with literally anything when no one's holding anybody accountable.

When accountability is not even Really anything of concern and if someone ever raises a voice to say something there are ways to quiet those voices, right? When you have a system that's set up that way people stop talking people stop  you know resisting people stop revolting and then you have  This thing that just becomes systemic that just goes on and on and on and you're birthing kids into a system like that Who have never seen a system that works  the way it's supposed to properly.

Kids, there's a reason why when you go to elementary school, they make you line up. There's a reason why they teach you about order. There's a reason why they teach you about collaboration. There's a reason why you sit around the mats and it's like five kids at a time and they split you up into groups and they're teaching you these things, preparing you for a world that is organized. 

Now, if you just let people go in there and just do whatever they want.  And that's all they know. They've never had to go through a system that trains them to do things the right way.  What do you expect the outcome is going to be?  Well, let, let me ask, since we are coming up on our hour and a half and you've been really generous with your time, I really appreciate that LD.

Um, but let me ask you this final thought then.  What would be your message to Nigeria as it is now, being someone who's as worldly as you have and clearly as smart since this conversation has been great. And it seems, and the ones you have on your podcast are absolutely worth checking out by the way.

Everybody should go listen to Nigerian American, but what would be your message? First of all, thank you for your kindness. I appreciate that. And I'll, I think that it's, uh, it's great conversations to have. So I'm always available to talk. We can do this again. Um, I'd say my message would be that we need to reflect  on where we are  and start looking at  where we need to be and then walk backwards from there. 

Um, I feel like there's too much focus on the now and the challenges that we're facing right now that we're not able to see what a better Nigeria looks like and then figure out what we need to do to get there.  There are sacrifices that we're going to need to make. It's going to start from within, right? 

Um, So I think that that And I don't know I can start to break it down It's all kinds of different things But I think that that's really the biggest thing that we need to focus on and this this isn't necessarily A message to like every Nigerian out there. It's for people who have the power or influence to shift things  Right because we have to see the potential that Nigeria has and really start figuring out ways to get there  because we have a lot of potential and I don't,  I don't know that we even recognize it.

Everyone's too focused on  gratification today to see what Nigeria could be, you know, 10, 20 years from now.  Would you hope, uh, especially given  Some of the insanity that's going on in the U. S. now. Would you hope for a future where Nigeria looks more like the U. S. in structure?  I would hope for,  that's a tricky question.

I would hope for  Nigeria to be as developed,  um, I would expect that we allow some of our  cultures and ways to sort of influence how we do it. So we're not just doing a copy paste cause it's not going to work.  Um,  so yeah, they're, they're very different dynamically, very different. Um, you have all of these different interests, all of these different tribes and all of these different people that have different visions of how the country should be.

So maybe the solution is to allow those  various,  Um, parts of the country to function in a way that suits them. And then we can have a United States of Nigeria, so to speak. I think that might be one of the ways to kind of make it make sense. Cause it's different over here. It's over here. It's just  all these people that have come from all over the world and have created this government and we're all a democracy and yes, there are racial and religious and ethnic  differences, but at the end of the day,  we've all come here to exist in.

with a very similar ideology, I would say. Yeah, we're fairly homogenous.  Despite all the states having their own, you know, asterisks next to their laws, we're all, it's pretty much, you go to one state, you go to another outside of South and North, they're fairly similar. Fairly similar, fairly similar. Now in terms of the, what you would describe as insanity that's happening in the U.

S., it's insanity in the U. S. based on U. S. standards. Um, but it's,  it's way ahead of where the majority of the rest of the world is, so we should still be appreciative. of this country, I think.  So you'd say where we're at now is something we can also walk back from and try to reaffirm the vision that got us to this point.

Absolutely. I believe that very strongly. And I think that in the U. S. it's easy to self correct because we have institutions  that function, for the most part, as they ought to. And when things get stared in the wrong direction, there's an opportunity to, to kind of stare them back.  Um, and I think that that's one of the most beautiful things about the democracy that is the United States of America, as opposed to, you know, what exists in other parts of the world where it's, it's one way. 

It's just, think about Korea, North Korea, think about China, think about,  um, think about Nigeria, think about, you know, Ghana, Kenya, and all of these other countries, right? Where it's just one direction at any point in time and if anyone says anything they get cut down, literally. But in the U. S. you know there is, there are freedoms that we enjoy that allow for things to, allow for us to even have a conversation about, about a reset. 

Right? Those are the things that I feel like, um, if you are American, you've grown up American all your life, you take for granted. It's not, it's not common  around the rest of the world. Even in countries that  Suggest that they're democratic.  That's not the way it works anywhere else. So I have hope.  Well, that's a great place to leave it.

And LD, thanks again for coming on. Uh, this has been one of my favorite interviews so far. I've not done too many yet, but this is, this is definitely top ten. Very kind. Thank you very much. I appreciate that a lot. And I, I really enjoy talking to you as well. And like I said, you know,  There's so much, I mean, I can talk forever.

There's so much that we can talk about, too. So if you ever wanted to chat again, just hit me up. Yeah, let's do it. And also, I want to see more episodes of Nigerian American. I know you're playing this for a little bit. I gotta find time. I gotta find time. Alright, man. Garrett. Alright. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Nigerian American. I hope you enjoy this podcast with Garrett. If you want to see the video of the full episode and more like it, be sure to subscribe to Garrett's YouTube channel, which you can find in the description of this episode. Thanks again for tuning in after all this time.

Stay tuned for more episodes coming your way soon. And until next time, keep exploring, keep learning and keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Take care.