Uncommonly Remarkable is a health and wellness show focused on understanding how the body works and how everyday choices shape long-term health. The show is published in two formats: authored monologues that explore core ideas around health, resilience, and human biology, and In Conversation episodes featuring long-form discussions with clinicians, scientists, and founders. Rather than chasing trends, the show focuses on systems, signals, and long-term trajectory. Hosted by Artis Beatty.
As I approach my 50th birthday, I’ve been thinking about why I started Uncommonly Remarkable, what the show has taught me, and what I want it to become.
The podcast began as a way to understand the lives of remarkable people—not just what they accomplished, but how they became who they are. Along the way, the conversations expanded from friends and colleagues to authors, physicians, trainers, and experts exploring health, longevity, sleep, breathing, and the complicated process of aging.
But making the show also taught me something about myself.
In this episode, I reflect on the journey so far, the finite nature of time, and why the next chapter of Uncommonly Remarkable will include more of my own thoughts, fears, observations, discoveries, and questions.
This is not the end of the conversations. It is the beginning of a different kind of one.
Uncommonly Remarkable℠ is a health and wellness show focused on understanding how the body works and how everyday choices shape long-term health.
I’m Artis Beatty, a doctor of optometry and Chief Medical Officer at MyEyeDr. While my professional background informs how I think, the perspectives shared here are my own.
SPEAKER_00
Ladies, gentlemen, all you remarkable people, welcome back to the show. You know, I've gotten to do that quite a bit over the course of the last couple of years, and I'm often asked, why did I start a podcast? What is it all about? And so I thought I would take a few moments just to reflect, particularly as I look at turning 50 here in just a few short weeks, about what it means to me to have been able to create a podcast and to have all of you take this journey with me. So back in 22 or 3, I was doing a lot of driving. And as I drove back and forth between offices and between our home offices in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C. area, I spent a lot of time listening to news and to other podcasts. And it really occurred to me that I've lived a life where I've met some pretty remarkable people. I've run into people in the course of normal business, normal life that have done incredible things. And in listening to podcasts that were on at the time, I really felt like the stories that were being given or the conversation that I was hearing was not necessarily around what people did and how people got to where they were. And it always felt like I was coming in on the middle of the conversation, no matter where I was listening. And so I thought to myself, I really like to tell stories. And there are people that I've met that I really like to speak with or to talk with. And could I put the stories of their lives into a format that other people would really start to glean something out of it? And so that was where Uncommonly Remarkable started. Little did I know that it would continue to evolve a lot beyond that. So if you remember the first few episodes, I interviewed friends and colleagues, and we talked about a variety of things that really interested me because there were things that my friends and colleagues had done or accomplished. And the subject matter was really all over the place. It was health and fitness, it was business, it was uh just general life skills, how to become a better person, how to do things differently, how to improve yourself. And I think we all learned a lot. I think we learned that we're all very different, but we all share some things in common. I think we learned that there's always room to make improvements in the way we see ourselves, but also in the way we see other people. I think we learned that health is very complicated. And thinking about longevity and trying to learn about health span can be confusing. And we look to experts to help guide us. And so as the show began to grow, I decided that I would try to incorporate interviews with people that I didn't know. And that was a really big step for me, not big because I was interviewing people, but big because it meant that I didn't already know the story. And so I had to learn the story in order to be able to convey the best parts or the parts that I thought were important for the audience. And so for those of you who know a little bit about podcasting, you can go out and look for your own guest. And as you do, you can join groups. And these groups will have people who are looking to be on shows, a couple of people who have shows, and you match based on topic or subject matter expertise, and you get to spend some time understanding a little bit about them, but you really, in my case, held a lot of that until we actually did the show because I wanted you as a listener to have the authentic experience of hearing what I was hearing for the very first time. And what I learned along the way is that people have so many things that they do in life, yet it's the particular moment in which you have the conversation that determines what it is about that life that they want to share. Over and over, I ran into these very, very interesting people, but I didn't always get the conversation that I thought I was going to get. And so in that middle range, you might remember that I talked to authors and nurses and physicians, I talked to um trainers, I talked to um people who helped us think differently about sleep and about breathing. I talked to people who were really focused on the mind-body connection. And we learned a lot. I know I really learned things, and I the feedback that I that I got about the conversation says that uh you guys learned things too. And the most exciting part of this was that you were going on this journey with me from no podcasts, no conversations through familiar people and their backgrounds to this big unknown. And we took that journey together. And as time went on, I decided that I really wanted to focus on the healthcare aspect of life. And I made that decision partly because of my background. It's a lot of what I do today, but also because I thought that there was an easy way or an easier way to be able to talk about health, health span, longevity, taking care of yourself that wasn't the normal vernacular. I wanted to be able to discuss it like we were having a conversation and to be able to take the small parts and break them down, be able to explain things, ask questions, get answers, and then ask questions about those answers. And so I started being very, very particular about the guests that I would bring on the show. And the result was we learned a lot about subjects that are top of mind for a lot of us. Recently, we talked about peptides, but before that, we talked about longevity, we talked about exercise, we talked about sleep and breathing. And I think all of those things help to maybe bring to the forefront this thing that we have going on, all of us, called aging. And as I've started to think about what aging means to me, part of my realization is that no matter how healthy we are, no matter how long our health span, we do have a finite amount of time. And in that time, I want to be able to do the things that I think will help people while they listen, but also over time. And I want to leave behind a legacy of being able to share ideas and thoughts with people as they come to me. And so as I think about the next steps for Uncommonly Remarkable, and I want to come to you with my thoughts, my fears, my concerns, my learnings, and my observations in more of a radio style talk show. And in that vein, it means that I think I'm gonna have fewer conversations with interviewees, at least for the time being, and spend more time talking to you about what's on my mind, what I've discovered, and some of the things that I am really looking to learn myself. And I hope along the way, we'll have you and I some conversation about things that are really pertinent to today's world. As you know, I have a lot of varied interests, and so sometimes those interests may be language, and sometimes they may be art. It may be reading or music, and I love cars, and so maybe those automobiles will actually be part of my thought. But I also am really focused on how I become the best version of myself, both physically and mentally, and how that really interacts with the people I meet, with my relationships, with the things that happen at home, at work, and otherwise. And so over the course of this big experiment with Uncommonly Remarkable, that I'm inviting you all to join, I hope that these conversations or thoughts will be something that you can also appreciate and maybe spark some ideas or thoughts of your own. Important to me will be your feedback and the comments that you leave, I read. And if there's subjects or things that are really important to you that maybe I should have a talk about or a conversation with someone about, bring those things up and maybe we'll be able to incorporate them into the show. I'm excited to see what happens after 50. I think I look forward to all the things that I will continue to learn, the things that I will get to do, and the things that maybe don't go quite as planned. I also hope that you are thinking about what it looks like as you move into different stages of your life. And maybe together we can take Uncommonly Remarkable and turn it into something as remarkable as each of you are. Thank you, and I look forward to the next Uncommonly Remarkable.
