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Jad Abumrad on Radiolab's Latest and Greatest

Jad Abumrad, founder and co-host of WNYC's Radiolab, discusses new episodes from the Radiolab team and how the podcast has changed over time.

[music]

Brian: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We're going to spend a few minutes now with Jad Abumrad from Radiolab produced by WNYC. I've known Jad Abumrad since he came to the station around 2000. I'm not sure of the exact year. I've marveled at the development of his show, both on the radio and really establishing the template for what a perfect podcast could be.

Recently, he was on the TED Radio Hour talking about spreading his wings from that original template of beautifully produced science explainers to all kinds of things from the Supreme Court, to Dolly Parton, to Guantanamo Bay, to doing conflict resolution with lessons from journalism, as he put it, and I thought, "Brian Lehrer show listeners would really appreciate these deep thoughts on our medium too." Hey, Jad Abumrad. Welcome back to the live radio side of town.

Jad Abumrad: Hey, it's great to be back with you, Brian, and to continue the journey, now, almost 20 years later.

Brian: Indeed. Here's an example of what people might consider classic Radiolab. This is from 2012 at the earliest phase of the show, but in that style, that you and your partner Robert Krulwich develop this excerpt mixes the idea of visuals and music in such a Radiolab way. We don't think of visuals and music in the same breath very often. It begins with Robert speculating on what a butterfly looking at a rainbow would sound like.

Robert Krulwich: If a butterfly were looking at a rainbow.

[laughter]

[crosstalk]

Jad Abumrad: What they do I'm sure-- Butterflies are out there when the famous Rob. We see colors, we have no names for between the blues and the greens and the greens and the yellows.

Robert Krulwich: It would go from ultraviolet, he would see that then he would see violet. Then blue. Then blue, blue, green?

Jad Abumrad: Yes.

Robert Krulwich: Green, green, bluey, bluey, or whatever?

Jad Abumrad: Right.

Robert Krulwich: Then orange and red and all that?

Jad Abumrad: Yes. They have very complicated eyes.

Robert Krulwich: Okay, so just to recap, here's the dog, here's us; humans, now the sparrow, a little bit more bass, a little bit more high-end, so to speak, and finally, the butterfly, which is not so far above the sparrow, but it's got more mids in there.

Jad Abumrad: I'm now thinking butterflies get the crown.

Robert Krulwich: Yes, but if you go under coral reefs, you come across these animals called mantis shrimps.

Brian: We're not going to go on to mantis shrimps right now but you get the idea, classic Radiolab from 2012. How did you and Robert meet and start to develop that kind of sound?

Jad Abumrad: We met-- This is back in the Stone Age to another world of 2002. I was doing Radiolab just by myself, literally, in the basement of the home, I'm now in.

Brian: Wait, can I jump in just on that? Do I remember correctly that before you started making Radiolab as we know it, you used to come in on Sunday nights and just be a DJ for excerpts of various bits of audio that you would know about somehow from different places, or did I make that up?

Jad Abumrad: No, you definitely didn't make that up. I probably passed you in the hall many times. That was the original incarnation of Radiolab. It was a three-hour block 8:00 PM on AMA-20 to 11, where I would play documentaries from around the world and I would make connections and narrate the gaps. In those days, it was all CDs. I would come in, usually, I would have finished it minutes before run-in, stick the CD, and hit play. Then I would narrate some of the gaps live. I would do the weather live. That was the original Radiolab. Then I met Robert and we started to evolve this whole way of talking about-- It was mostly science in those days, but really science for poets as I like to think of it.

Brian: Music?

Jad Abumrad: He was one of the best science explainer people ever at that point and I was a guy who was very interested in finding new ways to use music and sound to illuminate ideas. I don't know. The two of us just met, happened stancesickly, I don't even know if that's a word. Then we started having breakfast and then he heard something I did. He decided he'd come and play. Brian, you remember in those days, there was only a few studios, and so you had to fight for studio time?

Brian: Yes.

Jad Abumrad: He and I would just meet at 6:00 AM when no one else was using the studio, and we would do these little experiments. That evolved very quickly in the thing you just heard where we're hiring choirs and talking about mantis shrimp and what they may or may not see. It really was an experiment, and it continues to be.

Brian: You started out, am I right about this, as a composer of contemporary music and then you got into audio storytelling? Is it always your goal to fuse two of your interests, combined music, and science in that way?

Jad Abumrad: Yes. As I look back on it, that's definitely what it was. When I came out of school, I thought I was going to be a composer and it turned out I was really bad at it. I got into radio really out of a sense of like, "Damn, that didn't work." No one would hire me. I was writing music for films, but it never worked out. I wrote music for a feature and then they took every single cue I wrote out of the movie in the final version. I was having a lot of those experiences and I just tumbled into radio. Honestly, Brian, you won't remember this.

One of the very first things that got me into radio was I did a radio piece for NPR. They gave me a tiny bit of money to go to one of their conferences. This is probably 2000. You were talking at that conference. I knew you, I knew your voice and I thought you were amazing. I was just to see you do you live, I just remember being so inspired by that. It was those early moments that I thought, "Well, maybe radio is a place where I can do stuff." Then fast forward a few years, I think it became clear to me like, "Oh, I can do composition and that stuff while telling stories." That's actually a place where I can do it and it works rather than the old way.

Brian: Well, if I served as some tiny percentage of your inspiration for creating Radiolab, then I have served my purpose on this earth. I will say, listeners, that Jad Abumrad is the only colleague that I have that I know of talking about this fusing of his music composition and his radio production on issues in science and everything lives. He's the only colleague that I know of who has a little piano keyboard in his office, even as he's doing radio production on topics. Now, I want to play something really different from what we heard before really different from the colors episode.

This is from when you were on the TED Radio Hour, actually, just last year, talking about your award-winning podcast series, Dolly Parton's America, which was about America at least as much as it was about Dolly Parton, I put it that way. You're discussing here with clips of her how the country music star Porter Wagoner discovered Dolly Parton. Then she got much bigger than him and she leaves a show and he sues her for $3 million. You, Jad Abumrad, are trying to analyze that relationship, but as you tell us, Dolly's not having it.

Jad Abumrad: This is a guy. You see it in the video. He's got his arm around you. There's a power thing happening, for sure.

Dolly Parton: Well, it's more complicated than that.

Jad Abumrad: It was really interesting to me that she never, ever bought the assumption.

Dolly Parton: Just think about it. He had had this show for years. He didn't need me to have his hit show. He wasn't expecting me to be all the hours either. He didn't know how many dreams I had.

Jad Abumrad: She was like, "You can't summarize this relationship. There was power, and there were all these other things happening, but there was also a lot of love, there was a lot of affection, there's a lot of musical chemistry, so don't just pretend it was one thing."

Dolly Parton: Porter and I had a love-hate relationship. You could never untangle all of that.

Jad Abumrad: She constantly would push back against those moments for me. I think about that conversation all the time because she would do this thing where she would in the same moment, advocate for herself and she'd also show great empathy for the other.

Brian: That excerpt now over. Jad Abumrad, can you talk about that empathy within advocacy a little bit. I was really struck by that because that seemed not just to be good food for thought for your listeners as a soundbite but to have real meaning for you and your work at Radiolab, yes?

Jad Abumrad: Yes. It's interesting to hear that clip again. First, I just want to say I produced Dolly Parton's America with a producer, Shima Oliaee. She and I made it together. That moment with Dolly and Porter, it was really profound for me. I kept kind of rolling around in my head. Dolly is-- I undertook that series really to answer a simple question like how is this one person able to appeal to so many different slices of America that we are told should hate each other? You go to a Dolly concert and you see every person standing shoulder to shoulder, singing the same song and it's like an alternate space.

I just want us to know, how does she do that in the life that she's lived, the music that she's made. One of the things that just kept coming up is that she is able to combine a fierce self-possession or agency as the kids say, with a great amount of unrelenting empathy for the person she's speaking with. Those two things are often in opposition. There is a sense that in order to sort of push yourself-- I'm talking in the political discourse in America right now. In order to put yourself forward, you've got to first almost caricature the person against which you're defining yourself.

The people on the other side, no matter how much we disagree with them, they are never as simple as the scripts we have for them in our head. I loved Dolly's insistence that she would never caricature people. Now, there's a lot of places where you can fault Dolly for political stance she has or hasn't taken. Though that chemistry, that alchemy of those two seemingly opposite psychological traits I feel like it's we as journalists-- and Brian, you're an amazing-- you also have that weird pixie dust that ability to understand, but also really hold firm in the same moment. That paradox I think is where the best journalism needs to happen.

Brian: We're out of time but it's been amazing for me to watch your development from the early amazingly beautiful and explanatory science documentaries. Into this interest that I see is your curiosity about the relationship between people's individuals' lives, and America today, whether it's Dolly Parton's America or Latif Nasser. Your Radiolab colleague's life when he discovered that he had the same name as somebody who was held maybe unjustly at Guantanamo Bay through your most recent miniseries, The Vanishing of Harry Pace. Which we don't even have time in this conversation to get into. Listeners, Jad Abumrad is not vanishing. He's keeping on, on his many brilliant paths here at WNYC radio and on the podcast versions of his show. Jad Abumrad, thanks for stopping by.

Jad Abumrad: Thank you for having me, Brian.

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