Interview • Jad Abumrad

Question 3: Looking forward to the new season!! Can you tell your listeners a little about how you decide on which topics you’ll cover. Do you sit in a bar and then dream up potential topics? Or is there a long list with topics for season 6 through 16?

well, we’re always collecting little pieces of ideas and stories and half-baked notions that might one day evolve it into a show. so we’re always starting with a long list. and some things have been on the list for a long time but somehow never evolve in that Darwinian way into a show. like pain. we’ve been wanting to do a show on pain forever. and we keep finding neat little studies, and various things we find interesting, but somehow it hasn’t forced it’s way forward yet. the ideas that eventually become the shows we work months and months on sort of do that, one way or another. at a certain point, they shove their way to the front of the line and wave. for me, that usually happens as a result of a kind of juxtaposition. on the one hand, you find a scientist or some other smarty who is exploring the world in an empirical left-brained sort of way…on the other hand, you find some dude who is just living their life, getting their coat on, walking out the door and yet somehow bumping into the very same thing that that scientist is studying. if you take the two kinds of stories, bump ‘em up against each other and they start to vibrate, then we know we’ve got a show we can build on.

Question 4: Who is your target audience and what do you think is the secret to the show’s universal appeal?

i don’t know if this is true…but i’m hoping our target audience is pretty wide. meaning, anyone who is curious, open-minded, interested in how things work, in questions that have answers and also questions that don’t have answers. basically anyone who finds the world a wonderful and weird and slightly scary place full of mysteries. that said, my sense, from some of the live events we’ve done, is that we “skew young,” as they say (they being the people who measure this stuff). but who knows. i sincerely hope we get more 11-year-olds and i sincerely hope we get more 70-year-olds.

Question 5: This American Life recently started making a TV show. I read or heard something somewhere in which Ira Glass discussed the visual choices they had to make when translating the sound of the radio show into a look of a television show, trying to remain faithful to the feel of the enterprise while also expanding upon it, taking advantage of new tools and a whole new sense. What might that sort of synesthetic translation entail for Radio Lab? When you close your eyes, what does it look like?

people have approached us at various points with ideas for a tv version of radio lab, but those conversations never go very far. and i think there’s a reason for that… cause it’s really hard to imagine this show with pictures. i mean, we try to make the show deeply visual. but the visuals are in the heads of the people who listen. and everybody’s image of what’s happening at any particular moment is completely their own. so it’s a kind of co-authorship, which i find really cool. on tv, that all goes away. we’d have to fill in the gaps. but i always imagine radio lab as a slightly surrealistic version of the world we live in, one where the borders are drawn a little differently. where you can have a thought and suddenly a thought bubble goes poof and you’re IN the thought, if you know what I mean. one where really interesting people constantly wander in every few minutes and the things they tell you suddenly spring to life in image and sound. all that said, i think This American Life pulled off the radio-to-tv translation better than i would have ever thought possible. a few of the episodes from their latest season were close to perfect.

Question 6: We both went to USN, although I was a few years behind you (Class of 1995). Can you get me a cool public radio job so I can be the envy of all my peers? I have no broadcast experience whatsoever, but go tigers!

yes! go tigers!

Question 7: What are your favorite bands to listen to right now?

Juana Molina is completely amazing. I’ve been listening to her pretty much straight for about a year. When Radio Lab runs out of gas, my fantasy is to become her permanent re-mixer. And best friend.

Question 8: Although I laughed and found it very amusing… what’s up with you calling us bitches? Do feel your older listeners understood the joke or a little hope for riling them up?

Yeah, we wondered whether to include that or not. That happened late one night in the studio, after Krull and I had been bickering about something. We threw it in just for kicks. No offense intended! Bitches was meant lovingly.

Question 9: Where can I get a radio Lab t shirt? Love your show.

I wish we had a t-shirt to sell you! Seriously. It’s in the plans though.

Question 10: Hi Jad. I love Radio Lab. Everyone I’ve ever introduced it to has made an immediate connection to it. I was wondering if you might discuss the more technical end of how you produce the show. What sort of software do you use to create the sounds you use in the show. And, for that matter, where do you get most of the sound you work with? Thanks!

Thanks for the props! Most of the sound creation happens in protools on the mac, with lots of granular synthesis in programs like RTGS, plug-ins from Soundtoys and whole bunch of others, plus various doodads along the way. i think of the sound as electro-acoustic. i start with acoustic sounds, live instruments, and then treat them electronically. so i tilt away from very synthy, glitchy stuff. the feel i want to create is of an organic, “real” world where things are a bit askew…so i stretch sounds, use lots of filters to distress acoustic sounds. because the intellectual world of the show is about exploring new, strange ideas. so the sound should reflect.

Question 11: Will there any future episodes exploring languages and how similarly or differently brains process the various languages?

We’ve thought about something to similar to this. But language is such a huge topic that I’d be afraid we’d make a mess of things.

Question 12: Are there plans for getting Radio Lab into schools or as an education tool? How long does it take to make 1 episode, on average?

This is something we’ve discussed a lot internally. We’ve gotten a bunch of emails from teachers saying they’ve used the shows as teaching aids, which is a better compliment than money. We make ten shows a year at our current pace, so each show takes about a month and a half. But we work on five at once…

Question 13: What has been your favorite RL segment or episode to date, and why?

My personal favorite is our episode on Sleep. It was a very difficult hour to produce and somehow in the end it worked. I tend to like the episodes that almost fell apart during production.

Question 14: How did you and Robert meet?

We met randomly. I was between jobs and working odds and ends at the station. The station manager, Mikel Ellcessor, handed me a list of people to record for fundraising spots. Robert was on the list. We intially bonded on the fact that we both went to Oberlin, both worked at NPR, both worked at WBAI. And so we began to have breakfast a lot. About a year later, we decided to work together.

Question 15: Jad, I love the show. Will you ever do a show that has more listener participation, something where we could get involved? How about more live shows?

yes to more live shows. being one that likes to make a thousand edits and order the universe so it’s just so, the chaos of being live on stage is super fun! as for listener participation, my not-so-secret fantasy is to produce a sports call-in show. which would involve lots of listener participation.

Question 16: jad, i understand that you were formerly a composer. how does that influence how you put together the sound of radio lab? it’s a fundamentally unique show in that regard, and i wonder if it takes a musician to foster that sense of aural imagination. thanks for the show.

well, thank you for that question! (i’ll pay you later). in the end, i don’t see a huge difference between composing music and telling stories. storytelling is a deeply music thing. i don’t think this requires a musical background though. i work with some folks here who never studied music but have the magic pixie dust nonetheless.

Question 17: dear jad, thank you for all the wonderful episodes. do you know how much longer you’re going to be doing this?

as long as there’s an appetite for it! and as long as it’s still fun. i hope i can do this for a while.

Question 18: Have you guys considered doing a show on religion and/or terrorism (obviously considering the scientific aspect of them like Scott Atran’s work)? I’m curious because it’d likely be controversial, of course, but I’m wondering if you guys have given any thought to these timely topics. Thanks, and I love show.

never considered terrorism. but religion seems to worm its way into many of our shows, because i guess that’s one of the places where Robert and I see the world differently. we’ve discussed a show on “evil” but haven’t gotten too far in our thinking.

Final questions: hey jad. what was up with that columbia professor who had the hardon about how you edited his interview. did that get resolved?

oh him! he and Krulwich go roller skating ever Sunday.

What websites do you read on a daily basis? and how do you think the internet has changed the way we relate to science?

My web habits are pretty pedestrian. I read the New York Times. I keep up with Jonah Lehrer’s blog (scienceblogs.com/cortex/) and Carl Zimmer’s blog (scienceblogs.com/loom/). And I geek out on all kinds of tech stuff that I won’t bore you with.

Thanks everyone for chatting with me today! And for The Morning News for inviting me! This was a great way to launch Season 5!!

And thanks to Jad for joining us. Keep an eye on The Morning News for future TMN Talks. Everybody have a good weekend. —Rosecrans & Andrew

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