Enya Umanzor Loves to Talk, and Everyone Who Follows Her Loves to Listen

You know Enya Umanzor despite the fact that you do not.

If you employ the web or actually any type of social media, you can acknowledge her face from an outfit you’ve got pinned, a selfie you’ve got stored on Instagram, or an episode of her podcast Emergency Intercom you’ve got watched on YouTube when you need to really feel like you’ve got pals over with out in reality having them over.

Umanzor has been on the web for what looks like ceaselessly and has thousands and thousands of fans throughout platforms who really feel like they know her as a result of they grew up looking at or paying attention to her. Her candid insouciance sucks you in.

She has outfits that really feel very best but additionally like she simply threw them in combination without difficulty. She tells gentle jokes that really feel insidery however are not so unique that you’ll be able to’t repeat them on your pals and nonetheless get fun. She does not censor herself and curses freely and frequently. When she speaks, you recognize you are getting her whole flow of awareness, no introspective pauses. She does not dangle again—despite the fact that it on occasion will get her into hassle.

When I hop on a Zoom name together with her one Tuesday morning in April, she tells me she aroused from sleep with a abdomen pain after which introduces her cat Azul. We speak about napping thru morning alarms frequently and the way we each heard that being an evening owl manner your ancestors took the evening shift whilst looking at over their households 1000’s of years in the past. We’re about 20 mins right into a random tangent after I remind myself that is an interview and I will have to be asking her about Emergency Intercom, which she cohosts together with her absolute best buddy Drew Phillips and has slightly below part 1,000,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Umanzor’s love of podcasts started earlier than she even knew what they had been and lengthy earlier than they turned into the omnipresent medium they’re now. “I grew up listening to this station Y100 in the morning,” she tells me, nodding to her upbringing in Miami, Florida. “It was every morning when I woke up. That is what I was listening to. I was also always somebody who fell asleep listening to the radio, and then I would wake up and listen to it again.” As a stereotypical evening owl, Umanzor by no means actually craved a quiet morning regimen. “I’d wake up to the most obnoxious morning show ever—with fart noises and prank calls and the hosts talking shit. From a very young age, I couldn’t shut my mouth, and I was like, ‘Okay, this is the only job that makes sense in my brain.’ I needed to become a radio host. I was dead set on doing that,” she says.

How precisely Umanzor would nab her dream process, she wasn’t certain, so she grew to become to fashionable low-stakes, short-form video social media apps like Vine to get her voice in the market and speak about anything else. She posted for the primary time in November of 2013 earlier than briefly accumulating a following in early 2014. “Growing up, I felt really lonely. The internet was still a weirder place to go then,” she says. “But my upbringing was so tumultuous, and having that escape was really important.”

Eventually, she would meet Phillips on Vine. The pair were given alongside right away. “Me and him talking will always just crack me up,” Umanzor says. “We fall into our own little world.” They determined perhaps people would to find it humorous too, and on a whim, they began their podcast in 2021.

Emergency Intercom turned into their platform to sit down and speak about anything else and the whole lot, from taking an excessive amount of diet D to embarrassing highschool reminiscences. When I ask about their procedure for bobbing up with subjects to talk about each and every episode, Umanzor tells me it’s as nonchalant as you could be expecting for one thing that feels totally instinctive: “Drew takes his own notes, and I take my own notes. Sometimes, we’ll experience something together, or we’ll fall into a conversation, and we’ll kind of cut each other off.” Even if an off-camera dialog or subject is more challenging to translate to podcast, they nonetheless give it a take a look at. “We experience our own things, we jot them down, we’ll come together, and then … luckily, because we both talk so much, it all just kind of snowballs into an episode. By the end of it, we don’t even get through all of our notes because one topic leads to eight million other stupid things we have to talk about,” she says.

The podcast briefly took off thank you, partially, to Umanzor’s preexisting social media following earlier than forming its personal base group. But it wasn’t the loads of 1000’s of subscribers or YouTube perspectives and feedback that made Umanzor understand she and Phillips had accomplished one thing proper by means of translating their friendship right into a factor other people may simply devour. It was once the hand-crafted hats.

“Once I started seeing people reference us in that way with physical objects they were making (like people made their own Emergency Intercom hats), I was like, ‘Holy shit! People care about this podcast,'” she says. “It’s a place for them to turn off their brains and get lost in something. Maybe it comes from a parasocial space, but for me, there’s joy in this community.”

Umanzor tells me she frequently meets enthusiasts out and about in Los Angeles, the place she is now based totally, and that group facet is one thing she brings up frequently in our dialog. “We meet some people who are like, ‘Yeah, we’ve been friends for four years because we found you guys, and now, we listen to the podcast every week,’ and that’s so sweet to me. That’s so cute. We’ve solidified it!” she says.

For Umanzor, what is maximum surprising is the truth that she’s encouraging other people to collect and hand around in the similar informal method she does together with her personal pals. “Damn … Friends are gathering to watch that? That’s all I do with my free time! I sit on a couch, and I watch things with my friends. So to know that I get to be even a bit of a part of that in someone else’s life, that’s when I thought, ‘Wow, we’ve done something here.’ That makes me happy,” she says.

It’s no longer unusual to look creators with huge followings on-line begin to whinge concerning the odd, parasocial nature of getting such a lot of eyes on you who additionally be expecting the whole lot of you and really feel as even though they’re owed that. But Umanzor does not appear to thoughts. She notes that, in some ways, they have requested for it by means of placing themselves in the market. If anything else, parasocialness is going each tactics. Fans assume they’ve a courting together with her as a result of she has a courting with them. She clarifies that it is frequently extra two-sided than most of the people love to admit. “You are actively partaking in this relationship when you’re building an audience. With the podcast, it’s this new side of parasocialness that I’ve never seen because I’ve always had people listening to me, but this is on a different level. It’s so much content. I have to be so consistent,” she says. “Me and Drew just got lucky because the internet can be so tough to navigate because you have so many people in one place. It’s like the most unhuman human experience ever.”

As Umanzor enters her past due 20s, she feels extra assured with who she is and what she’s doing, and that’s the reason manifesting maximum it seems that in the best way she will get dressed. “For a while, I was trying really hard to not wear a lot of colors or do too much,” she says. “But now that I’m getting older, it’s like I’m telling myself, ‘Everyone knows you’re loud! Just wear your clothing!’ No one’s gonna be shocked that the loudest woman in the room is wearing a ridiculous outfit.”

She segues into her antique obsession and a present Jean Paul Gaultier jacket she were given with fuzzy trim and cool buttons earlier than stating, “You know what? I’m just going to go get it.” I listen her riffling thru her room earlier than coming again with a proud grin on her face to turn me the jacket. “See what I mean? There’s nothing chill about it, but I love that,” she says.

Suddenly, it is like we are at first of our dialog once more, speaking often about not anything but the whole lot and giggling often. She is going on about sourcing some JPG items she turned into obsessive about and the way she’s pared again her antique searching just lately.