Every Friday evening, KNAU airs the nationally syndicated and wildly popular show Radiolab. Produced at WNYC, Radiolab uses sound to blend together science, curiosity, philosophy and the human experience. Jad Abumrad hosts and produces the show. He'll be in Flagstaff Saturday for an appearance at Northern Arizona University. Before he hit the road to head West, Jad Abumrad spoke with Arizona Public Radio's Aaron Granillo about how Radiolab comes together.
Aaron Granillo: So, you’re in Flagstaff tomorrow night. And, you’re giving a talk that’s entitled, “Gut Churn.” That just sounds like an episode of Radiolab. What can you tell us about it?
Jad Abumrad: Ok, so I was asked a long time ago to tell the story of how Radiolab came about. And, this was about nine years after the fact, and so I honestly didn’t remember. So, I called up the guy that had started it with me, and I asked him, “So, like what do you remember about the beginning?” And, there was about a seven second pause, and then he said the words, “gut churn.” And, we just started talking together about the crazy chaos of that indeterminate space at the very beginning of the project, where we didn’t know what we were doing. And, so I basically became really interested to tell the story of the creation of this show as a story in navigating doubt. I kind of feel like that’s something people don’t talk about enough. And, this is an attempt to sort of find some insight into how one should sort of dance with doubt when they’re trying to do something.
And, that leads me actually into my next question. I was reading about this big public radio forum a few years ago. You were the keynote speaker, and your message to news directors who were there was “do something different – even if that makes you nervous or scared.” Have there been many episodes of Radiolab that you were nervous to even take on?
Oh sure. I mean we just put one out. I mean, honestly, the honest answer to the question is if that fear doesn’t come around at least once every three episodes, I start to worry. I start to feel like, “are we pushing ourselves?” But yeah, the last episode we did was about a bunch of college kids – black, queer, college kids – who basically stormed the very, very white world of academic debate. And, it was a story that dealt with race, sexuality. And, I was really worried that it was going to blow up in our face. And, we put it out, and it’s been good. People have received it well. But, yeah that feeling – and I just hit that feeling in a big way just a few days ago – but, I kind of feel like, okay that’s my job. I need to be running into that feeling. It shouldn’t always be pleasant. It shouldn’t always be fun, you know?
There’s no other show like Radiolab on the air. You take these big, sometimes abstract topics and present them in this really unique format with sound editing and production that’s never really been tried before in radio. Are you just consciously trying to break the rules of radio journalism?
I don’t know that it’s a willful disregard of the rules, so much as I was a musician before I was a journalist. Now, I would actually call myself more of a journalist than a musician. But, still for me, it’s like the reason I get up in the morning is when you stick a mic in someone’s face. You ask them some hard questions. They give you their answers, and you put all that tape onto the computer, and it exists as these little colored blocks in front of you. And, you get to move those blocks around and organize them in different patterns. And, you start to orchestrate it almost like it’s an orchestral score. That process of treating speech, treating words as musical objects is just like infinitely exciting. So, it’s not that I’m trying to break any rules. It’s just that it’s fun. It’s so fun.
The show seems like it must take forever to produce. I’m sure it varies, but how long do you spend on one hour-long episode before it hits the air?
It varies. I mean anywhere from three months to two years. I’d say minimum of three months. I mean what we do is we follow a bazillion ideas at once and the ones that we like are slowly advancing. And, that process takes a long, long time. You know, like we just did a story maybe sixth months ago. A story about a hunter who goes and kills an endangered black rhinoceros in Namibia. And, he does it paradoxically on behalf of conservation. And, we went and we were peering over his shoulder literally as he pulled the trigger. And, you heard this giant, prehistoric-looking animal die. And, it’s really hard to listen to, but we followed that story for two years. That’s how long it took for him to get permission to go. And, we sort of, you know, captured the debate that came out of that. You know that was a story you couldn’t shortcut. You just had to follow it until it was ready. And, every so often we’ll bump into one that takes three months. That feels to me like the version of like turning it around in an afternoon, which is probably what, you know, folks in the newsroom do. But, our version of an afternoon is three months, I would say.