People are so much more than what they do and who they do it for.
Most people meet through a job, event or activity, and barely get to know each other at all. The interesting stuff, what someone actually thinks and why, rarely gets airtime. At United Humans, we wanted to showcase conversations that go past the résumé.
Conversations with interesting people are something that Ollie and I live for. We realized that a podcast would let us turn something we love into content that others might find meaningful. And it’s not because we consider ourselves to be broadcasters (you’ll hear that soon enough). It’s because of something we kept noticing: people tend to open up to us. Years of hosting guests, building a community around trust, and learning to listen taught us that the best talks start when people feel safe to be themselves in a judgment-free zone: no gotchas, no keeping up appearances, no right answers.
So we began developing the Perfectly Peculiar Podcast.
The idea is to create a forum for audiences to get to know a fellow human being they might not otherwise encounter. Each episode, we will sit down with someone doing something, big or small, that proves the future is already happening. No expert panels, and no pitching a latest project. Instead, it’s a spin of the wheel and a gauntlet of questions, some deep, some ridiculous, all designed to pry open the soul.
We do it to learn about each other’s differences and similarities, and to get curious about what makes each of us unique. Spontaneous questions let us see each other’s humility and vulnerability, and that’s how we connect more.
Hopefully that connection leads somewhere, to working together on the things about our world that could, frankly, be better. That’s the idea behind United Humans, a community for people who look at the world, think “this could be better,” and then actually try to do something about it.
We thought a lot about the format. We wanted genuine, human-to-human conversations, which meant no rehearsed guests and no rehearsed hosts. That’s where it got outside my comfort zone.
I spent a career behind a computer screen and behind the camera, not in front of it. And I’m an older millennial who didn’t grow up with a phone camera pointed at my face. So I feel awkward and also carry a perfectionist mindset. The awkwardness of not looking or sounding “pro” was real. (Talk about test recordings) Too many “likes,” too many “ums,” and plenty of “you knows.” Eek!
Then I read “Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English” by Valerie Fridland, and it blew my mind. I picked it up to help me cut my filler words and learn some tools to sound more professional. But to my surprise, according to linguists, the speech habits people mock, such as “like,” “literally,” “um,” “you know,” “dude,” uptalk, and vocal fry, aren’t sloppy or lazy. They do real social and cognitive work, like softening a statement, signaling you’re listening, holding your turn while you think, and building rapport. So the criticism often has more to do with who’s talking (mostly young people, women in particular) than with the words. Judging someone’s speech is largely a stand-in for judging the person. Mind blown.
“Sounding pro” is mostly a broadcast habit, not a measure of whether a conversation is good. So for a show about everyday people, the way we actually talk is a feature, not a bug. Ollie and I still recorded a few training episodes to see if we could at least reduce the filler words. There were some hilarious moments, so stay tuned for teasers to drop soon.
