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

You know Enya Umanzor even if you don't.

If you use the internet or really any form of social media, you'll recognize her face from an outfit you've pinned, a selfie you've saved on Instagram, or an episode of her podcast Emergency Intercom you've watched on YouTube when you want to feel like you have friends over without actually having them over.

Umanzor has been on the internet for what feels like forever and has millions of followers across platforms who feel like they know her because they grew up watching or listening to her. Her candid insouciance sucks you in.

She has outfits that feel perfect but also like she just threw them together effortlessly. She tells light jokes that feel insidery but aren't so exclusive that you can't repeat them to your friends and still get a laugh. She doesn't censor herself and curses freely and often. When she speaks, you know you're getting her entire stream of consciousness, no introspective pauses. She doesn't hold back—even if it sometimes gets her into trouble.

When I hop on a Zoom call with her one Tuesday morning in April, she tells me she woke up with a stomach ache and then introduces her cat Azul. We talk about sleeping through morning alarms often and how we both heard that being a night owl means your ancestors took the night shift while watching over their families thousands of years ago. We're about 20 minutes into a random tangent when I remind myself this is an interview and I should be asking her about Emergency Intercom, which she cohosts with her best friend Drew Phillips and has just under half a million subscribers on YouTube.

Umanzor's love of podcasts began before she even knew what they were and long before they became the omnipresent medium they are 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 night owl, Umanzor never really craved a quiet morning routine. "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 exactly Umanzor would nab her dream job, she wasn't sure, so she turned to popular low-stakes, short-form video social media apps like Vine to get her voice out there and talk about anything. She posted for the first time in November of 2013 before quickly amassing 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 got along instantly. "Me and him talking will always just crack me up," Umanzor says. "We fall into our own little world." They decided maybe other people would find it funny too, and on a whim, they started their podcast in 2021.

Emergency Intercom became their platform to sit and talk about anything and everything, from taking too much vitamin D to embarrassing high school memories. When I ask about their process for coming up with topics to discuss each episode, Umanzor tells me it is as nonchalant as you might expect for something that feels entirely 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 conversation or topic is more difficult to translate to podcast, they still give it a try. "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 quickly took off thanks, in part, to Umanzor's preexisting social media following before forming its own base community. But it wasn't the hundreds of thousands of subscribers or YouTube views and comments that made Umanzor realize she and Phillips had done something right by translating their friendship into a thing people could easily consume. It was the handmade 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 often meets fans out and about in Los Angeles, where she is now based, and that community aspect is something she brings up often in our conversation. "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's most shocking is the fact that she's encouraging people to gather and hang out in the same casual way she does with her own friends. "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 not uncommon to see creators with large followings online start to complain about the strange, parasocial nature of having so many eyes on you who also expect everything of you and feel as though they are owed that. But Umanzor doesn't seem to mind. She notes that, in many ways, they've asked for it by putting themselves out there. If anything, parasocialness goes both ways. Fans think they have a relationship with her because she has a relationship with them. She clarifies that it's often more two-sided than most people like 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 late 20s, she feels more confident with who she is and what she's doing, and that's manifesting most evidently in the way she gets 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 vintage obsession and a current Jean Paul Gaultier jacket she got with fuzzy trim and funky buttons before declaring, "You know what? I'm just going to go get it." I hear her riffling through her room before coming back with a proud grin on her face to show me the jacket. "See what I mean? There's nothing chill about it, but I love that," she says.

Suddenly, it's like we're at the beginning of our conversation again, talking incessantly about nothing yet everything and laughing frequently. She goes on about sourcing some JPG pieces she became obsessed with and how she's pared back her vintage hunting recently.

At this point, I stop asking questions and just listen because talking is Enya Umanzor's thing, and she's just so good at it.

Photographer: Zamar Velez

Stylist: Caitlan Hickey

Hairstylist: Phoebe Seligman

Makeup Artist: Marla Vazquez

Manicurist: Yoko Sakakura

Creative Director: Sarah Chiarot

DP: Kellie Scott

Set Design: Skye Whitley