BLOG: KnoxvilleVoyager Online Magazine Features 'Conversations with Tony Merkel'
KnoxvilleVoyager recently shared a Local Stories feature about a brand new local: Tony Merkel, host of The Confessionals podcast and Merkel Media CEO! Check out the story below or visit KnoxvilleVoyager to read their full interview with Tony as he discusses his journey into podcasting, launching Merkel Media, his networking advice, and more.
Thank you to KnoxvilleVoyager and Voyage Group of Magazines for including this great piece about Tony!
Conversations with Tony Merkel
Today we’d like to introduce you to Tony Merkel.
Hi Tony, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Ever since I was a kid, I have enjoyed a good mystery or story that defied everything considered normal. Growing up in a large trailer park in rural Berks County, Pennsylvania, my friends and I would imagine hunting the Loch Ness Monster and proving to the world it existed. I would walk through the woods on a summer afternoon, wondering if there was the mysterious beast known as Bigfoot lurking in the shadows. It was just the stuff we were into and what occupied our curious minds living in the heart of Pennsylvania, a Dutch country. As I got older, those dreams and fantastical ideas dissipated as dreams of becoming a basketball star became the focal point of my teenage years and early college life. I attended Bible college about 40 minutes outside of Philadelphia, knowing I wanted to be a leader. I originally thought pastoral ministry was the direction I was supposed to go in. Still, long story short, I never came close to becoming a basketball star, and I never graduated from Bible college. My greatest accomplishment at this point in my life was marrying my wife of 15 years, Lindsay.
Once we were married, I needed to pursue earning a full-time living to keep our household afloat. So as a 21-year-old college dropout, I spent the next 10 years trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I worked on cars, wrote parking tickets for a local city, worked in sports memorabilia, drove commercial vehicles, and probably half a dozen other things. But I could never find anything that offered personal fulfillment other than knowing I was working extremely hard to pay the bills- I did find pride in that. But in that mess of career hunting, I found a group of people who took me under their wings and mentored me within a business environment. In the long run, things did not end up working out for me in their organization, but the biggest thing I walked away with was the birth of the entrepreneurial spirit within me. I knew I would only be happy once I was working for myself on my terms. The only problem with that was I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I had responsibilities I couldn’t just walk away from to take a risk on myself. So, I started driving a truck for a local trucking company, hoping that I might settle there and find fulfillment in landing a job that would financially provide for my family. Truck driving was fun initially, and I had a lot of time alone with my thoughts.
Then a change happened unexpectedly: I started watching TV shows like Monster Quest on the History Channel and Finding Bigfoot on the Travel Channel. In watching those shows, I was brought back to the curiosities of my childhood. I also began listening to some paranormal podcasts and YouTube shows. While my rekindled interest in these subjects continued to grow, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that God had designed me to be a more impactful person in this world, but I didn’t know how that could be possible, spending 12-14 hours alone every day in my truck. So while truck driving through North Philadelphia and listening to paranormal shows, I also started praying for direction. One day while driving down Germantown Pike, the Holy Spirit spoke to me and told me I would be a podcaster and that I would one day work alongside Wes Germer from Sasquatch Chronicles, which is a podcast focused on bigfoot encounters. This wasn’t the first time I heard God speaking to me, and as a common practice, I went home that night and told my wife, so she was my witness when these things would come to pass. But I still had doubts because podcasting was not on my radar. I didn’t even know Wes Germer and had never spoken with him. I listened to his show sometimes, and that’s it.
About a month later, I had just backed my truck into the dock for the night and was preparing to go home when my phone started to ring. It was a call through Facebook Messenger and Wes Germer calling. He had watched a YouTube video I made talking about bigfoot and thought he would call to chat with me. After a 45-minute conversation, he encouraged me to start a podcast before we hung up. At that moment, the wheels were in motion, and I found the perfect combination of doing what God wanted me to do, satisfying my entrepreneurial spirit, and doing something where I could positively impact the world around me.
On January 19th, 2017, I started The Confessionals podcast, a show where I have open conversations with people who have gone through wild paranormal experiences. There is a real supernatural element to these encounters. One of the best ways to understand what could happen is to hear first-hand stories and gather as many details of the experiences as possible through raw and unfiltered conversation. Over the next four years, I worked on the podcast like it was my job, interviewing witnesses and producing every episode. My wife became the operations manager, handling emails, scheduling interviews, and running the show’s social media accounts and blog. I would drive 12-14 hours a day, come home, and work on my podcast until 2:00 am to 3:00 am. Then I would get back up in the morning and do it again.
Through that process, some things that kept me going each day were seeing the impact the show was beginning to have on people worldwide. The more the show’s reach grew, the more positive impact a paranormal podcast had on people’s mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. I finally found something that was bringing fulfillment, and I was becoming more at peace with who I was as a man of God, husband, and father.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No, not at all. I was a college dropout who barely graduated high school. I had real self-confidence issues about whether I could pull off anything considered successful. I had to figure out how to run a business and not mess it up too badly in the process! No high school or college degree will ever prepare you for the audience’s reception of your podcast. The overwhelming response to the show has been incredible, which is why we’ve only continued to grow over the years, but you will always receive negative responses from someone no matter what you do. Seeing people saying rude or cruel things or making assumptions when they don’t even know me took some time to learn to navigate. But at the end of the day, what they think about the work you’ve created boils down to their own opinion, and any hate they want to express is theirs and doesn’t need to affect the things I’m building.
It was also an experience with some people in my everyday life, like when I walked into work at my trucking job and told truckers who had been trucking for over 30 years that I was starting a podcast about bigfoot, aliens, hauntings, and other strange phenomena. They practically laughed at me out of the building. I had many doubts creeping in from my everyday life and trolls on the internet. I had to learn to put up blinders, keep my head down, and keep moving forward.
Finally, finances were also a struggle, and we reached a point when my trucking income wasn’t enough to completely support my wife and our one-year-old son at that time. We were getting down to a few hundred dollars in the bank and always wondering whether we could cover the next month. But in those moments, God has always provided for us. Sometimes it was exactly what we needed, and sometimes there was more than what we needed; He kept us in His hands.
In going through these adversities, I constantly needed to remind myself that God told me I would be podcasting and that this was exactly where I needed to be. I wanted to quit many times, and I would call my wife in tears because I felt like I was crazy, just spinning my tires and not getting anywhere. I was exhausted physically and mentally, and it could be hard to see the forest through the trees. But through the adversity over the years, I have become the man that the younger me felt was inside. I learned to let that inner man come forward, and I became the man I needed when I was younger. As I continue to move forward, I am constantly chasing the man I want to be because I am an unfinished product with lots of room to grow.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
On February 26th, 2021, I said goodbye to the trucking industry and went full-time into my new career as an entrepreneur. I had big goals, as at this point, I was not only hosting and producing The Confessionals podcast, which has reached over 500 episodes and built up a large audience all over the world I was also going to build Merkel Media, a media company focused on inspiring the future of culture in this wild world we live in. Over the first year of Merkel Media’s establishment, I made many connections and saw growth on an unexpected level. We recorded and released our first film, Expedition Dogman. This documentary follows my team and me into the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky to explore the scene of a traumatic walking canine encounter from Episode 335: Dog vs. Dogman on The Confessionals. Merkel Media also began producing other podcasts along with The Confessionals, and recently we released a new project, a creative children’s coloring book called Crypto-Color that features all kinds of legends and cryptids.
In early 2022, after much consideration and prayer, my wife and I decided to relocate to East Tennessee, where we felt our family, especially our 4-year-old and two-year-old children, would thrive within the culture and community. That decision has satisfied me since we arrived in April 2022. I opened Merkel Media headquarters in downtown Maryville and have had many people visit me in the studio for face-to-face recordings about their unusual experiences. So far, we’ve had people travel from Michigan, Virginia, West Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Indiana, and Maryland, as well as local Tennessee towns.
In the summer of 2022, we also shot our second film in Utah and plan to release it early this year on streaming platforms such as Amazon, Tubi, and more. The film is The Shape of Shadows and focuses on my team’s journey as we chase down an elusive entity known as the Skinwalker.
The leadership team of Merkel Media has expanded recently as well, with two new additions. We brought on the Head of Film and Streaming Development, Joseph Granda, who has 30 years of experience in the Hollywood industry and has performed on Broadway. Our Executive Producer, Caleb Moore, Senior Vice President of a bank in Virginia, also joined us. We are planning to shoot two more films in 2023! Another documentary will be shot at the end of February, and the other will be Merkel Media’s first feature film, coming out later in the year. We are amazed at how far we have come in the last six years, from God talking to me in a tractor-trailer to building a media company as an entrepreneur. It’s been an exciting ride, and something tells me we are truly just getting started.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
I would say it’s all about relationships. If you don’t know anyone personally, you should find someone or a company that has achieved what you want to achieve. Most likely, they don’t have the time to sit with a walk-in and go through coaching sessions with you. But if you put yourself in their environment and offer them a few hours a week to work for free in exchange for learning about the industry and how they handle their business, that would be a much more appealing pitch, I believe. It would be a fresh approach if someone came and said, “I want to learn from you. Can I volunteer a few hours a week to help wherever needed and soak up some experience and knowledge in the environment along the way?” I only say this because countless people have asked me to mentor them on building a successful podcast. But with so many endeavors and projects in the works, I’m swamped doing what I do, which is the only reason the podcast is successful, and they even know who I am, to begin with.
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