Tertiary Delight: An Origin Story

         Origin Stories are important. I like knowing people’s creative process, so I want to tell you a little about mine… specifically regarding Tertiary Delight. Because it’s been unique.

         Harley Smith, called me up while she was still in Chicago, and asked if I wanted to be the first guest on a podcast she was producing. She wondered if we could talk about our friendship. I told her I had a good recorder, and we went out and had dinner, walked around Lincoln Park, ate Falafel and explored what friendship meant to us.

         Harley was the first person to tell me she was interested in exploring friendship as a topic, particularly she was wondering what made her a good or bad friend and she wanted to understand how others came to friendship. Who were their best friends, how did they find them?

The wind was blowing Chicago style, the falafel place was loud, and we mumbled away from the microphone, I think I said stuff I might have been nervous about… I’m not sure. But that recording never went any further. I get and like the idea of a podcast where you explore one person’s friend group and do a deep dive… but the experience made me realize, there are people out there that want access to more friends.

I was also now acutely aware of a new burning desire, to meet knew friends and to discover what made them tick. How was their friendship formed, how did they sort their social hierarchies, I was particularly interested in their cadence? I started pitching the idea to other friends I’d worked with in the past.

K, had worked with me on a Story Luck business venture and Bonnie Fan had been the host of A Month Of… I got them together for a dinner meeting at the Heartland Café. “One of my favorite things in the whole world is listening to people who like each other, talk.”

Bonnie asked? “Ummmm, what would you call that?”

“Eavesdropping,” I told her.

“The Eavesdrop Podcast.”

“Eavesdroppers.” We started to go through a list of puns and portmanteaus, none of which were very good, none of them seemed to ring true to the sentiment we were looking for.

K cut us off, “It’s not the eavesdropping that makes it fun, it’s the delight! And the delight is tertiary.

“Tertiary?” I asked. “Like third?”

         “Yeah, it isn’t secondary, you aren’t listening to your own friends, they aren’t talking to you, they are gabbing wildly and you just happen to overhear the discourse, because for them you’re outside their bubble. They aren’t even aware that you’re there, listening, and even if they were they wouldn’t care, you’re tertiary,” she explained.

         And I totally got it.

         “Tertiary,” Bonnie Fantastic nodded.

         “It’s a Tertiary Delight,” K said proudly. I leaned back in my chair and took the name in.

         I rolled it around silently on my tongue. I thought about the way it looked in the air. I thought about what I wanted to capture with this podcast and I knew that I loved it.        

Though I didn’t know it at the time, the only thing I was missing, was Priyanka Das, my official cohost.

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Season 1 Episodes 1-8 release on March 1st but you can get a sneak peak of episode 7 at our Sound Cloud.