The live onstage event will be layered with cinematic video, audio clips, and original music compositions as public radio trailblazers Glass and Abumrad take the audience on a journey through their careers in audio journalism and podcasting.
Interview Transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Clay Wallace, WUKY
Both of your shows have been on the air for decades - This American Life since the '90s, Radiolab since 2002. They both actually predate the coining of the word 'podcast.'
What stands out to me about these shows is how listeners are always led to discover something new. Even if they've been listening for decades or even if an episode contains older segments, there's always something new to understand. How do you cultivate that sort of long-running curiousity?
Ira Glass, Creator of This American Life
For me, when we're looking at what stories to run on the show, I'm still reacting at just the dumbest gut level. There's nothing smart about it. I just want something that will feel exciting to me. The thing can be that we're getting access to somebody in a situation that you just don't hear people talk about, or it can be some turn in the story that's just really fun or funny to think about.
I think that it's hard to make anything at all, and so you really have to go into it with a lot of hope. This is kind of an indirect way of answering the question, but I think this is the actual, true answer: you just want to be making something that's fun enough that you want to work on it.
Jad Abumrad, creator of Radiolab
I do think certain shows, projects, are oriented towards having really smart, intelligent conversations. Not to say that we are trying to be dumb, but I don't think that's the orientation of either Radiolab or This American Life. It's more like just surprising you on a very basic level.
You kind of play tricks on yourself. Even though you know, sometimes, the story that you're getting, you trick yourself into getting back to the beginner's mind. That's just a trick you learn early. 'Remember five minutes ago when I was dumb? Let me go back there.' And you continually return to that place.
Clay
I like what you said, Ira, about the things that surprise you and interest you. Sometimes when I hear reruns of episodes, I find that what I heard in it the first time hits completely differently from what I hear in it the second time. Are there times when you think you've got the interesting thing in a story, but someone else listens and is like 'Whoa, this is what I got from it,' and it's nothing like what you had in mind?
Ira
That happens all the time! We'll send somebody out thinking, 'Oh, we think the story is this,' and then they come back and it's something else. That happens so often. It happens in almost every show.
In one of the most recent shows we did, we were really interested in what it's like to be somebody who's a day laborer in Los Angeles, where you know that ICE is going to places like Home Depot parking lots trying to deport you. You want to make a living, you need money for your family, so you're going to get out there, but that seems like a really weird experience. Whatever your politics are about whether or not we should be deporting people, that's a story about somebody going through a really weird human experience. We thought, let's get to the bottom of that.
And, then, we went out. Two really great producers went out and talked to a lot of people, but people who were in that situation just did not feel like opening up to outside reporters that they had just met that week. That was one problem. And we just couldn't get the vivid kind of story where we would see the person and their family worrying for them when they go off. Whatever that is to go through, we weren't able to get it.
So, we ended up with this other story about these guys in a parking lot who basically give refuge. There's a little building for a community center on the parking lot of one of the Home Depots. Basically, if immigration agents come, everybody just runs into this room behind a fence. They had some really dramatic, great stories.
The thing we had hoped for couldn't be done in the timeframe that we wanted. If we had had three months to hang out and people get to know us and trust us, it would have been possible, but we were working faster than that. So, we end up with this other thing that actually was kind of wonderful, too.
Clay
Jad, you retired from cohosting Radiolab in 2022, but people will have heard your voice relatively recently as the feed shared an episode from a different project of yours - a podcast about the musician and activist Fela Kuti. When I was listening to it, there was a moment that made me stop in my tracks. It's when you're describing this trance-like effect that his music had on people, and you can hear the music build the background. And, even though I was, at the time, mowing grass in my front yard by myself, I suddenly felt like I was having a shared experience.
How do you catch that piece? What is it like when you hear something and you know that that the piece that people need to hear to understand what you're trying to communicate?
Jad
You encounter something, whether it's on tape or in the world, and it gives you brain fever. You're just like, 'Oh God! This is it! Yes, yes!' And, of course, at that point, you typically only have one-sixtieth of the story, but there's a thing that somebody says that spooks you, that you fall in love with - with them and this idea - and then you spend months and months and months reporting to get the rest of the context. And, then, more months trying to hyper-cerebrally construct that experience for somebody else. But, really, you're just trying to give them the brain fever you had at the very beginning. You're just trying to make it contagious.
All the music, all the pacing, the way that the voices are speaking to one another, the ways one idea gets counterpointed against another and then counterpointed against a third - all of those are tricks to try and infect somebody the way the story infected you at the beginning.
Clay
The counterpointing is something both Radiolab and This American Life do, where you've got these different narratives that, over the course of an episode, get pulled together in a way that makes some theme make sense. When you're recording those initial conversations or doing that initial research, do you always use them in the way you expect to?
Ira
The dream is that you go in with a plan, and then something happens that's better than your plan. You have to go in thinking, like, 'I think we're going to start here, and then I'm going to get them to tell me this story.' You have a good plan and a theory of what ideas we might get to by the end of it.
But, in a really good version of it, it just goes somewhere you can't imagine.
We did a thing a couple weeks ago with this woman named Heather Gay, who is a reality TV star. She's one of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, and she was telling me about this period in her life where she was raising three daughters as Mormons. She loved growing up in the Mormon church and wanted to give her kids that same experience, but her husband had left her, so she was already kind of not a regular Mormon, and she felt people's judgment on her. She was starting to question life in the church, and to drink on the side, and she'd see men because she wasn't married anymore, but her kids didn't know it. She also stood up and gave the Bible lesson every week at the church, giving out the rules on the way you're supposed to be, but she is not following them. She said that was a few years of her life, and I was like, that is really interesting, to live a double life and also to trick your own kids while teaching kids - your own children - things that you don't believe.
I didn't know what the stories would be; I just felt like she's a wonderful person and a wonderful talker, so we just sat down in the studio and she told me this story that was so much better than I could have imagined.
She talked about how she's drinking coffee, but you're not supposed to drink coffee, really, if you're a proper member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. And she described these scenes of sitting there with a cup of coffee and a neighbor would come over, see her in the yard or in her car with the coffee, and she would lie and say 'Oh, I just love the smell,' and then her friend would go 'Oh, me too.'
She told a story about having a coffee maker in her house, and that her kids didn't know that you could use it for anything but cocoa. She would hide the coffee pods so nobody else could see it if they came in the house and they would only see the display of cocoa. When her kids would come by, she'd say 'Oh my God, this machine is so good for hot cocoa,' and her kids didn't know because they were well-raised Mormon kids and just don't have coffee around.
I thought that was the end of the story, but I asked, 'Can I call your daughter Ashley?'
So, Ashley comes into the studio and is like, 'What is she talking about? I bought her that coffee maker because I knew she drank coffee.'
That's the dream, that you go in with the plan and then the whole thing gets so much better. Usually that doesn't happen. About 20% of the time it comes out so much better than I could have dreamt. 30% of the time it's worse, just genuinely worse, and you can barely make it work. We easily kill a third of all the things we try on the show. And the rest of the time it works out as you'd think.
Jad
Totally. As you were telling that amazing story, I was thinking back to all of the moments I can remember from This American Life stories where I've heard either you or the producers say, 'Huh, that's not what I thought you were gonna say,' you know what I mean?
Ira
That's the dream.
Jad
That's the dream. And it's true! You have to have a Buddhistic sort of detachment, because so many of the stories don't get you there.
Ira
That's the best part of it. It's like you're walking into a casino, you know what I mean? Most of the time, if you're lucky, you'll make your money back. A bunch of times, you're going to lose a lot of money. And then, occasionally, you put your money down and number seven comes through and pays off forty to one. That's the way I view being a reporter. It's like we're throwing craps at the Bellagio every day.
Jad
It's an important point, too. If you're playing the numbers, like he says, you have to chase a lot of stories just to get the ones you want. It's like the law of high numbers. It's like poker, right? They make a lot of bets and they know they're going to lose 75%. You have to trick yourself into not feeling pain when you lose.
Ira
And you have to make bets that'll pay off for the ones you lost.
Clay
So this is, like, a very time-expensive endeavor. Both of you have spent decades working in the public radio space - what about public radio enables you to tell the stories that you want to tell in this way?
Ira
For me, it's just there's no adult supervision. Like, that's it. There's nobody above us, and that's been true since I began. Even if you're a staffer on All Things Considered, the people who are deciding are like two people who you know, and you know their taste. It's a place where you can think: What would be the most interesting thing to put out for people to listen to? What would I want to listen to on the radio? It isn't like there's some big corporate bureaucracy which is trying to reach a demographic that you don't care about, or has just decided 'This month we're doing crime because people really love true crime,' you know? Or to drill out for the election, pushing ideas to hype up voters to get upset over - which happens at some news networks!
You can actually just take the idealistic act that is inherent in public broadcasting - which is that it should be excellent and should do something that other media aren't doing - and really try to fulfill that.
I'm now married to somebody who's in the movie and TV business, and it's very different. The number of people deciding and the criteria they're using to decide - it makes me very grateful for my life in public media.
Jad
Yeah. There are reasons to tell stories other than to make money, you know?
I was just listening to an interview with Cory Doctorow, who coined the term 'enshittification' to talk about what happens everywhere on the internet when you get lured in with utopic promises and platforms that genuinely make your life better, but once you're locked in, you're screwed. I do feel like public radio, for all its flaws, is enshittification-proof in some way, for everything that Ira just said.
We're doing it because we want the people on the other end to hear something that delights them and moves them and gives them meaning and informs them. It's very simple, and there's no business logic or advertisers to please.
Clay
This upcoming event on February 21 - it's a little more than a talk. There's gonna be video, music, clips of your work. What are you most excited to share, there?
Ira
I'm most excited to just tell a bunch of stories onstage that'll be fun to tell. That's really at the heart of it.
Jad
Yeah. And, following that, Ira and I are fellow travelers and friends. It's a chance to talk about really great stories and how they work, and nobody really understands the inner workings of stories better than him. I always like to hear him think out loud and be like, 'Okay,' and then argue with him a little bit.
When I started my show, it was in the wake of his show, and it felt important to try new things. We share a lot of the common vocabulary, but we also have some interesting differences. It's fun to lean into the differences as well as the similarities. Things are changing right now - the media world is all upside-down - so it might be interesting for us to compare notes on where we think things are going.
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WUKY airs This American Life Saturday evenings at 7, and Radiolab Sunday mornings at 7. Tickets to Ira Glass and Jad Abumrad: An Evening with the Creators of This American Life and Radiolab can be purchased online, over the phone by calling 1-877-HIT-SHOW, or in-person at the Norton Center Box Office, Monday to Friday from 9 to 4.