Two students start a podcast called ‘Uncut and Unfiltered’
Juniors Taylor Roberts and Aliya Kisivo discuss racial issues as well as pop culture and share their experiences on a weekly podcast published on Anchor
May 17, 2021
While listening to music is a popular activity for students to participate in, listening to podcasts has become increasingly more popular in recent years. Seeing this trend, juniors Taylor Roberts and Aliya Kisivo took their love for listening to podcasts a step further by creating their own titled ‘Uncut and Unfiltered.’
Their main goal for creating the podcast was to educate people about what it’s like to be a black woman living in a predominantly white area, but they also have plans to include a variety of pop culture topics in the future.
“Me and Aliya were like let’s try to get something that’s going to inform people and a podcast people can learn from,” Roberts said, “A lot of our podcast is educational for sure but we also talk about pop culture and music.”
Some of the topics already covered in their first three episodes include the college decision process with racial preferences, differences in hair for black people, and performative activism. Their most recent episode even featured a special guest Kelsey Lelei who has her own podcast ‘daydreams.’ The duo doesn’t plan to stop there though, as they have new topics and guests planned for future episodes.
In the future of the podcast, when discussing the process of planning for episodes, Kisivo said that she wants to see important topics such as LGBTQ issues featured on the show.
“I think the main thing when it comes to having people here is that we’ve all had our experiences, but there’s obviously stuff we can’t speak on. We’d like to have people who can speak on things like an LGBTQ episode,” Kisivo said. “We try to plan as far ahead as we can, but also things come up.”
Talking about possibly controversial topics comes with reactions from listeners. Roberts and Kisivo were pleasantly surprised to receive positive feedback on their most recent episode titled ‘Dump Your Racist Boyfriend ft. Kelsey Lelei.’
“The response from the podcast has been really good I think, especially after our last episode. We had a lot of people reaching out because it was about performative activism. A lot of people were coming forward admitting they had been friends with racist people,” Robert said. “ It was super crazy and reassuring that we are actually doing something that is impactful.”
Along with the visible impact the podcast is making, the two see the numbers and watch their audience grow across platforms.
“On Anchor, it shows the analytics like where people are listening and we’ve had people from Germany and Thailand. As of now, we have over 250 plays, which is insane,” Kisivo said.
As for the process of creating an episode to when it’s posted, they are working on perfecting their method.
“For the past couple of episodes, we’ve been recording on my phone,” Kisivo said. “What we usually do is one of us edits the video and the other edits the recording.”
The co-hosts also stay true to their ‘uncut’ branding, as they only edit aspects of the podcast if personal information is disclosed.
“I think in the last [episode], we didn’t edit anything because we were super careful about what was said. I was like that was so good let’s just get this out there, who cares about editing,” Roberts said.”I feel like for the most part we’re just editing out a few words and we actually do just completely unfiltered.”
Roberts and Kisivo’s podcast can be found on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, and virtually everywhere podcasts can be heard. The co-hosts also have an Instagram and Youtube. All accounts can be found at ‘Uncut and Unfiltered.’
