#1 - Welcome to Prelude

Maan   0:09
Hello everyone and welcome to the opening episode of Prelude, our new podcast where we democratise deep, honest and authentic human storytelling by featuring ordinary, everyday people who have extraordinary stories that they want to share with the world.  My name is Maan, and in this episode, myself, Matt and Heidi want to give you a bit of background about how our podcast came about and why. 

I’m a storyteller by trade.  My career to date has been in the ever-changing world of news media, and creative communications, across different themes and subject matters ranging from business and political news, social and behavioural change, and brand marketing and advertising, the combination of which has strengthened my passion for storytelling through authentic people’s stories.  I really think stories make the world go around.  They also play a role in changing or enhancing the world we live in, which I’ll go on to explain a little bit later. But first, let me start by explaining why we chose the name ‘Prelude’.  In its very meaning, the word ‘prelude’ is an introduction to something that comes before an important event or action, a build-up to something that’s more powerful.

And we thought that this was a fitting name to use. Because it reflects what some of the experiences in our lives are like. In that, some of the things we go through may or may not seem very relevant at the time, they’re just things that happen to us or we’re involved in or witness, but in the grander scheme of things, they might have developed into something more powerful or important, and impacted our lives in some way shape or form, sometimes forever.

And we only come to that realisation retrospectively, sometimes years after. These things we experience could be inspiring, eye-opening, they could be emotional, funny, challenging, or life-changing.

And little do we know that our stories could move people on the other side of the world. It could serve as someone’s survival guide, their reference, their motivation, to change, adapt, or enhance their mindset and their approach to general day to day life, or any aspect of their life, all after hearing a story.

For our authors and contributors, Prelude can be a personal outlet for deeper, crafted stories that are designed to share our learnings with everyone and encourage critical thinking about the world that we live in.

For our listeners, Prelude is a place to be inspired by real-life stories. An area of realisation that we’re not alone in our feelings, our challenges, anxieties, and general experiences for that matter, and to gain a new perspective on things we may have never known about.

And so prelude is about the power of connection through our shared stories and experiences. A way to enhance our true understanding, and tolerance, of cultural diversity, diversity of thought, our intellectual diversity. And that’s so important to today’s world, which from a personal perspective I feel can lack a sense of moral leadership or direction, during...or actually, especially during times of uncertainty around the world,  so we can do with a bit of inspiration, through the appreciation for one another’s journeys and experiences - true stories that we can learn from.

The internet and social media, which of course have had a positive impact on our world and intellectual evolution, can also produce adverse results, and I’m sure that some of you may share this feeling too. Yes, social media has brought the world closer together, it has connected the world. It has facilitated revolutions and it has inspired social change and it has advanced human progress in some areas, where great ideas can be shared in an instant around the world. But on the flip side, unfavourable sentiment and ideas can also spread equally as fast.

And in the middle of both extremes, I see some social platforms promoting this unhealthy and competitive admiration of physical self-image, rather than the appreciation of substance and depth, all through a plethora of ephemeral content, some of which really isn’t a true representation or reflection of the real world or even our own realities.

But the world isn’t black and white. Because our lives just aren’t that simple. Humans and humanity cannot limit our excellence and potential, or submit to ignorance or indifference.

Our use of social media can and should be approached with caution, balance, and responsibility. Otherwise, it contributes to the negative mental health of us as individuals, societies, and communities.

I’ve switched off completely from social media over the years, in order to manage some of my own challenges and curveballs that have no doubt shaped who I am today.

And personally, I know the world can feel like a lonely place sometimes. I’ve seen it and felt it, and social media was the last place I wanted to be when things kicked off, whether in my physical or mental world.

But one thing is for certain, it sometimes helped to know and realise that I wasn’t alone in how I was feeling...and I did this through talking candidly to people who wanted to listen. And to listen to people who wanted to talk candidly to me.

Regardless of whether my experiences were different to other people’s, I figured that it's all relative...as in, just because the tangible aspects of my experience in comparison to someone else’s were completely different, the intangible effects may well be the same. And because of that, I think that we can, therefore, learn from one another in various ways. Isn’t that what life is really about? It’s a journey of learning and betterment.

So Prelude’s mission and purpose is to give the world an uncensored platform to tell and consume authentic and personal experience stories, told by everyday people. And connecting authors to a world of listeners through the power of their stories.

As for our values, we’re firstly committed to freedom of expression, where we dedicate our platform and each episode to our storytellers, who author and articulate their stories their way, with a little help from us through our questions and prompts during recording, that are edited out of the final published pieces. It’s all about the storyteller’s voice, not ours, and therefore our episodes will be fluid in terms of story themes and storytelling styles, and duration for that matter.

And secondly, we’re committed to freedom of choice, we hope that when we eventually have the volume of content, that we can offer you a platform to suit your listening tastes, mood or requirements, at any given moment and whatever task you’re doing. If you want to hear something inspiring, motivating, calming, hilarious, intriguing or just plain crazy, or all of the above, we want Prelude to give our listeners a good quantity and quality of choice.

And finally, we’re committed to giving the world an alternative form of cultural education. We believe that we can do this through authentic stories that transition racial, cultural, ethnic, physical and mental boundaries.

So we invite and welcome all contributors and authors, from all walks of life, and we truly mean it. If your or anyone you know has a story to tell, let us know through any of our social channels listed in our podcast description or through visiting preludeaudio.com.

Because we believe that every story has a unique message, and we want to help you share your message to the world.

Heidi   06:50
Hello, my name is Heidi and I’m one of the three co-founding members of the Prelude team. Prelude is a podcast designed to expose you to the stories of other people. A seemingly simple premise although, with our new found dependency on social media, stories from outside of our own social circles are hard to come across. Our own algorithms work against us and aim to keep us within our echo chambers. Happily bobbing along in life, with no opposing viewpoints to consider and kept within our own little social bubbles.

Prelude is important to me because it addresses a few topics that I feel strongly about.

The first being my love of folk and fairy tales. True fairy tales have a moral, and they present this moral in a way the audience will understand and learn from. They are found throughout every culture and were often based on legends that stemmed from the spiritual beliefs of the cultures that they originated from. In essence, they acted as entertaining ways to pass along knowledge. By listening to Prelude we hope to widen your horizon by bringing you authentic tales told by people of other cultures and backgrounds. In some instances their own lives may have been touched by a newsworthy event that you yourself have been aware of or even part of yourself, but, their own perspective their experience could be completely different to your own. It’s through different perspectives such as this where we can remember how similar we all are, and yet how different we may seem.

With Prelude, we dispense with the small talk. There are no polite sentences being thrown around just to fill the silence. The storyteller is removed from a face to face situation and can give us their account of events, giving us their truth about the events without fear of immediate reprisal or interruption. In many instances it feels like the storyteller isn’t, in fact, the main feature, it’s their story and experience that needs to be heard and learnt from.

Lastly, Prelude denies the listener the luxury of an instant visual judgement, something that we cannot help but naturally do when we are face to face in real life. This has two positive effects, firstly, that you will have to give the story your full attention in order to make your own judgement. You are unable to turn away prematurely based on the look of the storyteller. Secondly, by withholding how the storytellers look, you, the listener may start to think twice about the people you come into contact with daily. Could the man in the wheelchair be Sulaiman or the football coach you pass in the park be Ali? Both of whom we will be featuring in our first few episodes.

We all have our own stories. I want to remind people that good storytelling isn’t the equivalent of clickbait or that short sound bite by your favourite celebrity. That a hero isn’t fearless, they are just the ones that are there, in the situation, able to make the hard decision and brave enough to follow through.  The people that make this world so vibrant and interesting are all around us right now. Let's stop with the small talk and instant judgements, let’s start to be present during our interactions and truly enjoy each moment as it passes. Let’s learn from each other and continue forward together.

Matt   10:34
Prelude is a series of personal stories told by people from all walks of life. In each episode, our guests will be sharing their experiences and the important moments that have shaped their perspective on the world. 

From the heroic to the everyday, the hilarious to the tragic, Prelude will be exploring the moments that make up their lives, looking what it means to be human and what we can learn by listening to each other's stories.

In a world that seems to have increasingly turned to sound-bite media, social updates and celebrity status worship, Prelude aims to revive our human interest in listening to other people’s stories. 

The Prelude Podcast is founded on the idea that listening is an important part of being human.  Social media doesn’t encourage or support deep storytelling - it encourages us to focus on the sensational, to be highly selective about how we present ourselves, and it seems to actively prevent us from diving deeper and really understanding others.

Personally, I’ve been moving away from social media for a couple of years. I’ve been following the work of people like Tristan Harris and his podcast Your Undivided Attention, and I’m recording this not long after the release of the film The Social Dilemma on Netflix. If you haven’t seen the film I recommend watching it - it is a thought-provoking overview of how technology is drawing us into a dangerous moment in history. Hopefully, it will propel his work further into the mainstream.   

Tristan Harris is a talented technologist and is well connected at the heart of silicon valley - but I started to wonder what small contribution I might be able to make, despite my lack of tech talent or connections to the big players in tech. And I decided that what I could do is listen more. Listen more to other people and seek out diverse perspectives.  The Prelude podcast is partly to satisfy my desire to listen to the stories of other people who I wouldn’t otherwise meet.   

Listening is a hard skill to cultivate.  I encourage you to try this experiment. Pay careful attention to your thoughts in the next conversation you find yourself in.  How much of the time are you spending preparing the next thing you’re going to say?  Or hanging on to a clever rebuttal of something the other person has said, and you’re now just waiting for the next moment to speak so that you can drop it in.  How often are you silently reacting to what the other person is saying, listening to an internal monologue that is railing against them, applauding yourself for disagreeing, or delighting yourself and internally cheering about agreeing with them! In all of these cases, we are not actually listening.  We’re only half-listening, and in fact, we’re distracted by listening to ourselves.  

On social media, we’re engaged in a conversation that is carefully tuned to prompt the maximum internal emotional response from us.  Our internal response is cranked up so loud that we can’t listen.  All we can do is respond - and we’re prompted to respond so loudly that social media becomes a shouting match.  And allowing social media to continually turn up the volume on this shouting match is a dangerous direction for a society to be headed - a direction that steadily erodes our compassion for one another, it erodes any hope of a shared vision for humanity and it erodes our desire to listen.

In response to this, we’ve created the Prelude podcast, which recognises that at some point, each of us, each of the 7.8 billion people across the planet is going to wake up one morning to a day that will change their life forever.  Some of those events are hidden away behind closed doors, some of them experienced subjectively in someone’s own mind, and some visible to the world and covered by national or even international news media. But however big or small they might seem, each event is deeply meaningful to the person in question.

Prelude aims to capture these everyday human stories and share personal moments where the mundane becomes exceptional.  Each of these moments is a turning point in a person’s life, rich with lessons to learn, achievements to celebrate, tragedies to console with, or new perspectives to contemplate.

So the Prelude podcast will be curating stories, told by everyday people, for those of us who are curious about exploring the diversity of experience that life produces.  To see the world from different perspectives and to deepen our connection with the world and one another.

So we hope you will join us, to listen to these stories, we hope you find them entertaining as well as thought-provoking, and that from time to time they will enrich your life and your perspective on the world.