"Unaffiliated": A Promotion-Free Podcast



TL;DR: A podcast (working title: “Unaffiliated”) where guests are not allowed to promote themselves or their work.


What

I want to have raw, authentic conversations with people, who are willing to be open and vulnerable about their experiences in this game of life, as a fellow human being and nothing else. To be serious about the “nothing else” aspect, I will ask the guests to strip themselves from any titles, affiliations, and labels they’ve accumulated so far in their lives. We can talk about them, but we should create enough distance between the labels and our human core. Since the guest is to become label-less and unaffilated throughout the show, it also implies that they are not there to promote themselves or their workplace, which I hope becomes a nice constraint. I won’t be reading out their titles in the beginning, and instead will just introduce them on a first name basis. They are free to share anything about themselves, their work and life, but only in generic terms. For example, instead of saying “I’m building an AI startup for healthcare,” they’d say “I’m using some technology to solve existing problems in the current system.”

Why

Why does the world need another podcast, you ask? Well, the answer to that is the answer to why I do almost anything: I want something different. While most podcasts these days invite guests with big names, titles, achievements, their job on the podcasts becomes to promote or reinforce those names, titles, and achievements, either explicitly or implicitly. What happens if we remove all the superficial labels that we accumulate, and instead just have a genuine conversation about the universal human experience?

How

That said, I don’t mean that I will explicitly steer away from inviting famous people with titles. I just mean that they don’t matter. I want interesting people with interesting insights. That quality may correlate with their explicit achievements, or may not. I will be the judge of that and only hope that the audience trust my selection. The format of the podcast will be like most podcasts: an hourish long, with little agenda and an explorative style, where I will ask open-ended questions, hoping to hear insights, stories, and reflections that are either relatable or of interest to people. This is not an anonymous podcast — we will not explicitly hide your identity; I will still introduce you, but instead of sounding like a marketing material it’ll sound like an intro of you to my friends. We’ll start from there, and see where the conversation takes us.

Some example questions are:

  • In generic terms, where are you in your life and where are you trying to get?
  • What are a few lucky moments in life that got you where you are today?
  • What struggles, failures and setbacks did you experience in life and how did they shape you?
  • Were there any key turning points in your career or personal growth? How did they feel then? And how do they feel now?
  • What is a weird quirk of yours?
  • What is an existing problem that drives you to find solutions?
  • Are there any fundamental questions you keep returning to?
  • What is something that you gradually gained confidence in?

And, Who

Now the perhaps most definiting question: what kind of guests do we want to have on this podcast? I’ve alluded to some “NOT BE”s above, like, this should not be a platform where insecure people come in to flash their titles or boast their achievements, and also that does not mean I won’t seek out people with fame and respect in the field. But, what are the “BE”s? What exact kind of people do I want to have a conversation with?

I’m going to quote a beloved paragraph, by Douglas Hofstadter, from the preface of “I am a Strange Loop” (emphasis mine).

[“Gödel, Escher, Bach”] was written by someone pretty young (I was twenty-seven …), and although at that tender age I had already experienced my fair or unfair share of suffering, sadness, and moral soul-searching, one doesn’t find too much allusion to those aspects of life in the book. In [“I am a Strange Loop”], though, written by someone who has known considerably more suffering, sadness, and soul-searching, those hard aspects of life are much more frequently touched on. I think that’s one of the things about growing older — one’s writing becomes more inward, more reflective, perhaps wiser, or perhaps just sadder.

I think this—especially the emphasized words—quite perfectly summarizes what I want my ideal guests to be. Compared to the Hofstadter that’s writing “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” I would very much want to talk to the older, sadder Hofstadter that’s writing “I am a Strange Loop.”