The Awkward Handshake

How do people actually find each other?

The Awkward Handshake is a show I co-host with Megan Eckman about networking, relationships, and how community gets built when the old rules for connecting aren't necessarily working anymore.

We started locally, focusing on the Portland-Vancouver metro area and talking to the people creating communities, businesses, events, and spaces where humans are finding one another. We wanted to understand what connection actually looks like during a difficult economic market for small business owners, particularly as AI rapidly changes the way we work and makes genuine human-to-human relationships feel more valuable than ever.

What makes someone show up? What makes them come back? How does an acquaintance become a collaborator, a customer, a referral partner, or an actual friend? And what are people building locally because the community they needed didn't exist yet?

Season 1 even escaped the Pacific Northwest for a little field trip when we took the show to BookCon in New York City, because apparently our investigation of local human connection required us to fly across the country. Naturally.

At its heart, though, The Awkward Handshake is an ongoing experiment in something deceptively simple: in an increasingly automated world, how are humans still finding their humans?