MacArthur Fellow, Peabody Award winner, iconic public radio host and creator of one of the most successful shows, Radiolab—Jad Abumrad joins a studio audience in New York for the Design Matters live tour.
Debbie Millman:
Before we start, I just want to say thank you to you all for coming out on a rainy night. And if anybody had told me 18 years ago that I’d be sitting on a stage with Jad Abumrad, I would’ve thought they were hallucinating or high. And so it is just a real honor to be here with you tonight to have this conversation. Thank you.
Jad Abumrad:
That’s super kind of you. Thank you, Debbie. I’ll just say you’re one of the OGs. This is an honor.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you.
Jad Abumrad:
To be on here.
Debbie Millman:
I didn’t know what OG meant. And the first time anybody referred to me as OG was Roman Mars, and I thought maybe he was saying something mean. And so I’m a Scorpio, so I got like, wait, what does that mean? And actually it was Maria Papova who said, “Actually it means original gangster. It’s a good thing. It’s a good thing.” So here’s my first question for you. I know that you musical taste goes high and low, but is it true that you think that Underworld’s Rez is the best techno song ever made?
Jad Abumrad:
Whoa. Did not expect that question. Okay. I’m going to double down on that.
Debbie Millman:
You are.
Jad Abumrad:
I don’t know where I said that but I can imagine me saying that.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You said it was horrible music, but a legitimately amazing song and you think that it’s the best techno song and horrible. That was the high, low part that I was curious about.
Jad Abumrad:
Well, I think that’s just endemic to the genre of techno. It is all incredible and also awful at the same time, and it’s just so repetitive. But you know what? 1993, for all you youngsters, was a shining year for techno. You had Rez. I believe you had the Chemical Brothers before they jumped the shark, had an incredible album. There’s just great music that came in that time. So yes, Rez is amazing. It’s a 14-minute song. It builds, builds, builds, builds, builds. It has the drop. It’s just great. So yes, I would say it is the best techno.
Debbie Millman:
So you have doubled down. It is official.
Jad Abumrad:
Yes. When you put this on the podcast, could you play Rez?
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I think we absolutely can.
Jad Abumrad:
Oh yes.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely.
Jad Abumrad:
It’s probably fair use at this point because it’s so old.
Debbie Millman:
Yes. Good way to turn off our listeners. Almost at the top.
Jad Abumrad:
It holds up though. It holds up.
Debbie Millman:
Jad, your parents were both born in Lebanon. Your father comes from a little village high up in the mountains called Wadi Chahrour. And your mother grew up in Jounieh. They immigrated to the United States in 1972 and moved to Nashville, Tennessee. Why Nashville?
Jad Abumrad:
I think it was just a situation … I spent my childhood asking that question by the way. I think it was a situation where my dad … My dad was training to be a doctor at the AUB, American University of Beirut, and I think after med school he was just going to go wherever a residency program would take him, and he ended up at Vanderbilt. And so we as a family ended up in Nashville. It’s interesting. Right now, 2023, is a very first full circle moment for me because I just started teaching at Vanderbilt. So I’m actually now going back to Vanderbilt, but in a completely new capacity. But yeah, we ended up in Nashville. It was a very different Nashville at that time. That was at a time when Lebanon was synonymous with terrorism in the popular imagination. So it was a little odd. I spent a lot of time in my room. But it’s funny, I’ve come to really love Nashville now, and it’s just a very different place.
Debbie Millman:
You spent a lot of time in your room making music.
Jad Abumrad:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
You actually describe yourself back then as a scrawny, awkward Lebanese kid growing up in a southern Baptist universe during the Gulf War. And as a result, you spent a lot of time in your room playing with a four track cassette recorder, making imaginary films for movies that didn’t exist.
Jad Abumrad:
Yes. Absolutely. For me, everything that came after, from going to Oberlin to study music, to tumbling my way through the side door, into a radio studio, to Radiolab, to everything else after really was as a musician … I think that was always the foundational idea in my head was I would be a musician and I did try that. I failed at it many times. And radio-
Debbie Millman:
We’ll get that.
Jad Abumrad:
Oh, okay, so I’ll hold the failure. But yeah. Radio was for me, first and foremost, an attempt to be a composer, to be a musician.
Debbie Millman:
What kind of music were you making in your room?
Jad Abumrad:
The way that a four track would work is you would fill up the first three tracks and then bounce them down to the fourth track and then fill up first three tracks and then continually … You couldn’t really structure the music the way you can now with a digital audio workstation. So it ended up being these very long, meandering, filmic things. I was listening to a lot of Bernard Herman at that time. That was the kind of kid I was. I listened to the Vertigo soundtrack and I just loved the sense that music could create pictures and could create internal narratives. And so I would just do stuff that I thought like, oh, this is like an adventure story, but I didn’t know anything about the characters. So it would be something that maybe would be in a movie Kevin Costner might’ve acted in if he were maybe a little weirder.
Debbie Millman:
I was thinking more like The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. That’s the general space. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
As an aside, when I was working on my prep for the show, I came across a list of your favorite soundtracks, and I saw on one of them a very strange movie that I saw a couple of years ago when everybody was just watching movies during the pandemic with Nicole Kidman called Birth.
Jad Abumrad:
Oh my God. One of the best soundtracks. One of the best movies. You don’t agree. You don’t agree.
Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting.
Jad Abumrad:
Nobody agrees with me that this is one of the great triumphs of cinema was this movie.
Debbie Millman:
Since you brought it up, I thought the audience might enjoy what you envision when you’re running and listening to that soundtrack.
Jad Abumrad:
Well, okay. It’s interesting you say that. First of all, this is a movie about … Let’s see. Nicole Kidman is … Her husband dies even before the movie starts. You hear his voice and then the first shot of the movie is him running down a snowy path in Central Park and it’s shot from a crane behind him, and you run with him down this path, and it’s the most incredible music you’ve ever heard.
Debbie Millman:
Very dramatic.
Jad Abumrad:
These deep strings and these little flutie sounds. And then he stops running, has a heart attack and dies. And that’s the first scene in the movie. And then the subsequent plot, which I think is brilliant, but you clearly disagree.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I find it fascinating because I think about these kinds of things all the time. And when Jad tells you about the plot, you’ll understand, especially if you’ve been listening to the podcast. This is something I’m really fascinated by, but I’m also skeptical.
Jad Abumrad:
Oh, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Because science.
Jad Abumrad:
No, no, it’s a preposterous story. The whole idea of the plot is that this … So the man who dies who you never meet was having an affair with somebody. They were writing love letters to each other. They bury the love letters somewhere in Central Park. A young boy finds those letters and is so intoxicated by the feelings communicated in the letters that it overtakes him and he becomes, in his own mind, the reincarnated soul of this husband. And Nicole Kidman then is like, is this actually my husband visiting me from beyond the grave? It gets very creepy. There’s almost a love scene.
Debbie Millman:
Because he’s 10.
Jad Abumrad:
He’s 10. It gets incredibly creepy. But I thought it was quite beautiful actually.
Debbie Millman:
But the whole notion of everlasting love and how we project our feelings into another, that part was super fascinating.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. And Alexandre Desplat, I’m not sure if I’m saying his name correctly. One of the best film composers working. He wrote the music for it.
Debbie Millman:
So when you’re running, what do you envision?
Jad Abumrad:
Well, the thing is, what great film music does is it takes the puny little lives that we lead and it makes it seem epic. That you’re suddenly not just a singular human, but you’re on an epic journey. You’re in a ship that you’re plowing your way through the waves. And the music is this massive ocean that buoys the ship and carries it forward and it makes everything … What I love about that particular music, the first time you hear it, it’s like this dude’s just running, but the music knows something. You’re like, what does the music know? It knows something’s going to happen and then he dies. And I love that idea that the music exists out of time. It knows the present, it knows the future, it knows the past. There’s something incredibly powerful about film music for me in the way that it manipulates time and understands the lives of the characters. So yeah, I think that’s one of the best examples of film music ever.
Debbie Millman:
Another on your list that’s also one of my absolute favorite, and then I’ll move on, is Solaris.
Jad Abumrad:
Oh my God.
Debbie Millman:
Which is one of the greatest of all time.
Jad Abumrad:
Original or the remake?
Debbie Millman:
The remake.
Jad Abumrad:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Cliff Martinez, who used to be the drummer for Red Hot Chili Peppers then became a film composer, made just incredible electroacoustic blend. It’s amazing.
Debbie Millman:
It’s so amazing how many rock and rollers are doing film composing now. Johnny Greenwood, Trent Reznor. It’s wonderful. What instruments were you playing back in your bedroom?
Jad Abumrad:
I would play piano and synthesizer types. This would be early ’80s, so DX7, Roland D. I’m sorry, this is super nerdy. Not the synthesizers that we all fetishize now. Not those ones. The really cheesy sounding ones.
Debbie Millman:
You went to Oberlin College. You graduated in ’95 with majors in creative writing and music composition, and you’ve said that you were taught by leftover 1960s lefties who were teaching 12 tone composition classes and you were in total despair.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. The first, maybe second recital that I went to, somebody sawed a piano in half. That was their piece.
Debbie Millman:
Look out John Cale.
Jad Abumrad:
I was doing these little fake film music jingles type stuff. I just remember where have I landed? It took me a while, but I learned to love that music. Yeah. I was out of place for a while.
Debbie Millman:
At that point, you thought you were going to be a musician and write for films. And I’m only going to be quoting something you said. This isn’t my opinion. At what point did you begin to believe that you didn’t have any musical talent?
Jad Abumrad:
Well, I held onto that delusion for a while. It was really when I graduated and I moved to New York and I started trying to score student films, dance pieces. It’s funny, one of my earliest dance pieces I scored, we did it just a few blocks from here at an abandoned warehouse. This is back in the Stone Age. I remember having a lot of trouble solving problems with music. I could write the music, but then someone would say, “I don’t really like that,” and then I could never get to the next idea. I would just get stuck on my one thing. And I think if you’re going to be a really good musician, you have to be able to change on a dime and make a major into a minor, make a sparkly thing into a deep thing. You have to be able to pivot. I couldn’t. This would’ve been four or five years out of school. I basically started working in this new field called the internet. This was at a time when websites were first becoming … This was the late stage capitalist turn of the internet. And so there was a lot of work and pretty much anyone with a pulse could get a job in the internet at that point. And so I started doing work on Condé Nast websites.
Debbie Millman:
So you were designing websites.
Jad Abumrad:
I wasn’t even the designer. I was the person who went between the designer and the client. So I was I guess a producer or an account manager or something. And I could make really good spreadsheets. And so that’s what I did. As one does, I had a real crisis of what am I going to do? What am I doing with my life? And my then girlfriend, now wife, Karla Murthy, just one day I remember we were standing on a platform to the G train or something, and she was like, “You like to make music. You like to write. You should go do radio because that’s both, but neither.” And so I started volunteering at a radio station. At WBAI radio in downtown Manhattan. Right. WBAI person. WBAI, back in the day, this was pre my time was like MTV.
Debbie Millman:
It was fantastic.
Jad Abumrad:
It was amazing. I got there a little bit late. I remember walking in on my first day and the newsroom was deserted because there had been some sort of leftist rebellion in the radio station, which there was every Tuesday at WBAI. And so there was one guy, and he clearly had to put the news on and he was strapped, and I walked in and he was like, “You take this tape recorder and a mic and just go cover this thing happening at City Hall.” And I remember running to City Hall being like, “What does that mean? How do I cover something?” I remember getting there and just like, “Why are you angry?” Just not even knowing what questions to ask. But then I came back and at that point, WBAI was still editing on tape. Actual tape with razor blades. I just remember putting the thing onto the actual tape, cutting it with the razor blades, recording my own voice, stitching that between the bits that I liked from the interviews. And then I had a news report on the air at 3:00 that day.
Debbie Millman:
Was it because you learned the skills in your room with the four track? How did you learn how to cut tape and splice it together?
Jad Abumrad:
I was working on the computer at that point like most of humanity, but they were still on these reel to reel tape recorders. Which actually is like … It’s the most amazing way to work with tape because it’s so tactile and you can hold moments in a way and rock them back and forth between the playhead. It’s a very, very cool way to engage with the process. And I just got hooked instantly. I was like, “Oh, this is what I should be doing.”
Debbie Millman:
Thank goodness for Karla.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. Karla’s made all the good decisions in my life. And from that point on, I volunteered. This was a weird moment in … It’s actually not weird. This is just one of the many moments in New York history where the city was … There was endless police shootings at that point. Amadou Diallo, Malcolm Ferguson. I’m suddenly running through the Bronx covering these things. I don’t know how to do any of it, but you just fake it. 9/11 happened right around there. The entire city transformed and we were walking on the pile basically covering what was happening. And I just got a crash course in journalism. And along the way I went from being a musician to being something between a musician and a storyteller and a journalist, which I still think of as a composer. But it all happened in that short time.
Debbie Millman:
You then began freelancing at WNYC, and in 2002, the program director offered you a late night Sunday slot on the AM band as a DJ of documentaries.
Jad Abumrad:
I know. I know.
Debbie Millman:
I read that you had to make connections between documentaries that included things like a BBC story from Zimbabwe or a sound art piece about dogs, and you’d somehow have to make a connection between them. How were you able to do that?
Jad Abumrad:
That specific example, I have no idea. The whole idea of it at that point was WNYC at that point was a classical music station, and then 9/11 happened and suddenly all of New York was asking questions about the world. We all had this sense that our lives as New Yorkers were suddenly globalized in a way. And so along with that, the program director was like, “Let’s air documentaries from around the world to give us a much wider lens.” And so I begged everybody for their documentaries. I called the BBC, I called Radio Netherlands, I called Australian Broadcasting Corporation. They sent me boxes of stuff. Old stuff. I don’t know. I would just make a … Like everyone, I was under the spell of This American Life, and so I would do the themes. The act one, act two, act three kind of thing. I remember my first episode was called Firsts, and it was somebody undergoing electroshock therapy, somebody talking about their period, like a radio rookies piece, and then it was some other piece. And I was just like, these are all firsts in some weird way. So just choosing random themes to try and hold all of this content.
Debbie Millman:
The way you’ve described it, you could see the seeds of Radiolab right there.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. If I listened to those first few episodes … And I’m really glad this was right before that moment on the internet where everything is around forever. This is right before that. So these episodes are gone and they should be gone.
Debbie Millman:
I wish my original ones were too, but they’re still there.
Jad Abumrad:
Oh, it’s horrible. It’s such a curse that everything sticks around the way it does these days. If you listen to those old episodes, what you will hear is the sound of Radiolab from the very beginning. It sounds absolutely like the show. But it’s half assed. Some of the stories, the connections are a little bit loose. I mean that in a loving way. I don’t mean that in a bad critical way. Things weren’t exactly fact checked. It was just all very throw it against the wall. Very experimental at times. Because I wasn’t a journalist at that point. I was still learning. I was still figuring out what it means to report something. It was only really, I’d say three or four years after that that I would say, I figured out this is how you do the job. I was still trying out different voices on the mic in a way. In that way that when you don’t know how to talk in front of a mic, all the other voices that you’ve heard in your life come out. I’d sound like Ira a lot. I’d sound like Walter Cronkite and various things. I was just trying-
Debbie Millman:
We need to stop you right there.
Jad Abumrad:
Oh, sorry.
Debbie Millman:
I found a comment about somebody writing about Radiolab, and I thought you’d be happy to hear how the voice you created for Radiolab was described by a fan. “They’ve completely rejected the voice of God format as well as the voice of casual God format, and even the voice of friendly NPR God format and replaced it with a truly conversational tone. Very often hosts will interrupt each other and say something like, ‘Wait, what? What does that even mean?'” And that’s so true. I love that this person was so descriptive about what you weren’t. I can only imagine that those years of struggling and tinkering and experimenting gave you the opportunity to learn semi publicly how to do what you ended up doing.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. Honestly, I’m so thankful. The first three years of Radiolab were basically spent Sunday nights on the AM frequency, and no one was listening. I mean, that quite-
Debbie Millman:
Didn’t they also cut back the band quite a bit?
Jad Abumrad:
Yes. Yes. I mean that literally.
Debbie Millman:
Like 15 people.
Jad Abumrad:
They would cut the power of the transmitter right as I came on the air. So you couldn’t even listen.
Debbie Millman:
It’s like a one block radius.
Jad Abumrad:
You had to be hugging the transmitter with your body to actually get my show. And I hated that. I thought it was horrible. I thought I was being taken advantage of. But actually now I’m really grateful because I feel like we all need that period of benign neglect to figure out who we are. I get so sad for people who they just walk right into a podcasting 12 part series that gets promoted. I’m like, just give it a minute.
Debbie Millman:
Really? You’re sad?
Jad Abumrad:
Well, kind of. You want people to have that playgrounds where they can-
Debbie Millman:
I do think it’s important to be able to learn as you make.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Because I think then what you make ends up being better.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. Absolutely. And the thing about the Gods that you just said, I had to stumble my way into that. It’s really weird what happens when you talk in front of a mic is that you suddenly feel the pressure to know things you don’t actually know. Because the mic brings with it all of the people who might hear you and judge you. And so it takes a long time to actually get to a place where you can talk as you actually talk. And I went through a lot of early awkward periods where I tried to talk like that thing that NPR reporters do. They talk like this. Very staccato, very centurion, voice of certainty. And I never knew what I was doing. And when I met Robert, who then co-hosted the show with me for 17 years, between us, we developed a way of examining ideas and playing with ideas that was very fumbly and very … It’s just playful is the only way I could describe it. Where you didn’t have to know things. You could be as stupid as you actually are. And that was the invitation is that you’re open, you don’t really know. Let’s go find out together. Almost sounds quaint to say all that now, but at the time it felt like a real discovery.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it was almost as if Radiolab was a science show in a Trojan horse.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. It was like science for poets, I think.
Debbie Millman:
Because you were able to teach really complicated ideas in a very matter of fact, very easy to understand, earthy way.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
All that being said, I’d love to hear your Walter Cronkite voice.
Jad Abumrad:
No, God. Oh my God. I remember once back in the WBAI formative days, I did a story about sickle cell anemia and there was some study that had just came out and my voice was much higher than it is now. And I just remember, I was like, “The studies say that if you … And he said …” There’s that thing that NPR always does where it’s like, “So-and-so said, and she said, and he said …” This is always this pronoun thing. I did all of that stuff badly.
Debbie Millman:
Your voice is only one component of the shows that you make. Music is another significant part. And the innovative way that you have scored voices … Because that’s what I feel like you do. It’s not just tape, it’s scoring. It reminds me a little bit of Glenn Gould’s piece, The Idea of North, wherein multiple overlapping voices are scored as music, and I think he called that contrapuntal radio. I’m wondering if that was an influence at all.
Recording:
Something fairly insidious about this.
There was a great deal of dispute going on as to whether this-
Well, in our impatience-
Jad Abumrad:
I played that piece in the early days of Radiolab. It’s a hard piece to listen to because you have overlapping voices speaking for like 10, 11 minutes where you can’t hear anything because they’re all talking and competing for attention. But the idea of counterpoint was a really … If I took anything from music school, it was that. This idea that you can construct a narrative that had many layers and the layers could interweave and relate to one another so that as one comes forward, one ducks back. And you could create a many headed monster or many headed organism. And that was the part of the actual craft of it, the making of it that it was like a drug for me. I think I took it too far in the beginning and then learned how to play with silence and play with spareness as I got better. But that idea of you have five interviews and you’re telling one story, and then it’s about balance. How do I balance these five storytellers so that one starts a sentence, the other finishes it? Or perhaps they all land on the same word to create emphasis on that word. It was just so fun. It was so fun. I remember those early days of editing being like, “Oh, maybe I am a musician. Maybe I am a composer.”
Debbie Millman:
A composer of words in addition to a composer of music.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
While hosting Radiolab, you amassed an audience of several million listeners each episode. You won several Peabody Awards, a MacArthur Genius grant, the Alfred I. du Pont Columbia Award, Third Coast Awards, the Silver Gavel, Webbys, Ambies, and the On-Air Festival Lifetime Achievement award. Did the success of Radiolab surprise you?
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah, it did. It still does. I sometimes wonder if it’s a product of a specific historical window where we were in that moment where public radio was searching for new sounds and podcasting had to yet happened and there was a gap, and we stepped right into that space. I sometimes wonder what if we hadn’t done that then? What if we did it now? Would it work now? I don’t know. That part of it still seems a bit weird to me.
Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting. In 2016, you were interviewed about the podcast bubble and you said, “Mm-mm. This isn’t going to last.” And you were, I think, one of the first that really said, this is a bubble.
Jad Abumrad:
Did I say that?
Debbie Millman:
You did.
Jad Abumrad:
Okay. All right. Good job former Jad.
Debbie Millman:
There’ll be footnotes in the transcript when we put this up online.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. It’s funny. I love what’s happening in podcasting and I’m also worried about it a little bit.
Debbie Millman:
In what way?
Jad Abumrad:
Well, I love the diversity of stuff that’s out there. I love that every kind of … To come from a media environment where I remember in the public radio days you would have to intern for three years before they even noticed you were there. The gates were so steep and so strong that you could only really hang out and be noticed if you had means. So there was this weeding out that wasn’t good. And now we’re in a situation where everybody with just a laptop and a cheap mic can make a podcast. And so we’ve gone this completely other route. And so as cynical as I can sometimes get about podcasting, I don’t ever question what a radical development it is in the history of media that you can actually get on the radio yourself without anyone telling you yes or no. I think that’s pretty spectacular.
I do worry though when I hear the 500th true crime podcast. I worry about the economy of it a little bit. The kinds of things that are being privileged, the kinds of things that are being funded. I worry that a show like This American Life or Radiolab would never be funded right now. I think the only reason those shows exist is they were grandfathered in. But to say, I want to pay 30 producers a living wage to do journalism, no one’s going to take that bet right now. Literally no one. And so I worry about it that way. There’s a lot of people getting the mic for the first time, and that’s amazing. But then I think, okay, well, let’s say something that hasn’t been said, and that takes a lot of work and that takes a lot of money. And I worry that that part of the equation is never going to come back.
Debbie Millman:
I’m hoping that when the dust settles, the same people that need to be speaking and want to be speaking will still be speaking. And I hope one of those people is you. After 20 years of hosting this show that you created, that you brought into the world, you decided to hand it off to your co-hosts. Why?
Jad Abumrad:
It’s so funny. No one’s ever asked me that question, weirdly. It’s strange because it’s such a clear, obvious question to ask. Why? I think there’s a point at which leaders have to leave to let other people lead in a way. It’s almost part of the physics of an organization. You start a thing, you lead it for a while, and then you have to let someone else do it. And for me, how that registered was I started Radiolab literally in my basement, and I would do all of it. I would find the stories, I would report the stories, I would voice the stories, I would edit the stories, I would score the stories. And all I ever wanted at that time was help. I was like, “Someone please come and do this with me.” And then they showed up starting with Ellen Horne, best hire ever, who’s now directing the audio journalism program at NYU.
And then Robert. I didn’t actually hire Robert. He just wouldn’t leave. But thank God because he’s maybe the most brilliant human I’ve ever met. And then Lulu and Latif and Soren, who are all goddam geniuses. And the thing about working with talented people is that you run out of ceiling. They run out of ceiling I mean. And I learned pretty quickly that the way you work with really good people is you step back and you let them step forward, and then you step back some more and they stepped forward some more. But what that made me was a manager of creative people, which was fun for a while. There’s all kinds of new problems you solve when you’re trying to do that part of the job, and I had to learn all that. But then at a certain point, I just knew that wasn’t what I was good at.
2016, I took a break because at that point I was still really struggling to figure out how to delegate. I was still doing way too much of the work myself and that was hard on the staff. So I came back and I really tried to commit myself to like, okay, how do I make sure this show continues without me? And particularly 2020 on, we really did an audit of the entire process and trying to figure out ways to get everybody involved. And somewhere around 2021, I looked around and I was like, “We have really killer hosts now, aside from myself, we have this guy, Soren Wheeler, who has been the center of gravity editorially for years, the best producers I could ever imagine. This is the moment.” I was a little worried that they were going to like … But they were just like, “Cool. See you.” And it was great. And now actually it’s one of the things I’m most proud of is that the show is just doing its thing still. I have a feeling in the next year, they’re going to completely … I think for a while they were going to keep it from breaking, and now they’re going to break it as they should.
So yeah. I don’t know. It just felt like a natural process of growing up and creating a thing that’s bigger than you, and then realizing I think that means I have to walk out. That’s just part of the natural lifecycle of it.
Debbie Millman:
There’s one thing, thinking about walking out and quite another actually walking. And I think that’s one of the most difficult decisions I have contended with over the course of my life. When is it time?
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. Do you have an answer to that question?
Debbie Millman:
No. No.
Jad Abumrad:
I know you’re the interviewer.
Debbie Millman:
No. No. If I did, I would be very happy to share it with you.
Jad Abumrad:
Okay.
Debbie Millman:
It’s something I’ve been just thinking about and mulling over and obsessing over and crying over and laughing over for about a year now. So I’ll get back to you on that one though.
Jad Abumrad:
It’s a big commitment. We’re not curing diseases or anything, but the work does ask a lot of you. You can’t really phone it in. You have to put your full self into it. So that’s a lot to ask for 18 years.
Debbie Millman:
In that same article where you were talking about the bubble, which was in The Guardian, by the way, I’m remembering. You stated that, “Podcasting school doesn’t exist. There’s no place someone can go except to get a job where they can learn that stuff.” Well, in April of this year, you were invited to join Vanderbilt University, the same school your dad has taught in in Nashville, Tennessee. Full circle. To create a podcast institute with a focus on thinking deeply about the ethics of what we do, the craft of what we do, and the art of what we do. And I have goosebumps just saying that out loud. It seems like a real full circle for you.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. It has been on a number of levels. So just actually this month I think we’ll be launching that. It’s really not going to be quite the podcast institute that they named in that article, but it’ll be something more like a laboratory where we’ll experiment with what else can we do with audio stories? Not just making podcasts that go on Spotify or iTunes, but what if we create platforms of stories for hospital waiting rooms or for the lobbies of performing arts centers where you can experience stories. Stories are so powerful and they should help people, and they should make people’s lives better. They will if we just think about that as our intent. So the idea is to do experiments and to pilot projects and just to see what happens.
Debbie Millman:
So a whole different kind of lab.
Jad Abumrad:
I think so. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
In 2012, you were asked, who is the Radiolab Jad Abumrad and who is the real Jad Abumrad? And you said it was a good question and stated that the Radiolab Jad is the real Jad with certain aspects of the real Jad amplified. The Radiolab Jad is a little more animated than the real Jad. He’s probably just as curious. So now over a decade later, I’d like to ask you this. Who is the Jad Abumrad now post Radiolab?
Jad Abumrad:
Oh my God, that’s a great question. I don’t know. That’s such a great question.
Debbie Millman:
That’s a good answer. That’s a great answer.
Jad Abumrad:
I don’t know. I still think I would say he is a … I feel weird saying it third person, but I’m just going to lean into it. He is two things at once. He’s a storyteller and he’s a musician. He’s somebody who really cares that things are beautiful, and he really caress that things have impact and make people’s lives better and have meaning. So he’s somebody who’s searching for it all. Other than that, he’s just as dumb as the next person. So I think I would say that’s who he is. But it’s an interesting question you asked because it’s a question I’m really actively thinking about now. The thing that happens when you make a show for 20 years is it defines you. It’s the answer to every question you get. What do you do? Well, I make a thing. It comes out on Fridays. I don’t have that simple answer anymore. It’s a more complex answer. I think probably the answer I would give now would probably include teacher is a new thing I’m learning how to do. I don’t know. Ask me again in a year. I hope I’ll have a shorter, tighter answer for you.
Debbie Millman:
Deal. The last thing I want to share before we finish is this. In 2022, you gave a commencement speech at Cal Tech wherein you stated the following. “You will never know the effect you will have on someone. It doesn’t matter if you know. The universe will never tell you if you’re right or wrong. You just have to try.” And Jad, as someone who’s been in the podcasting space now for nearly 20 years, I want to let you know you’ve had a profound effect on the work that so many of us do. I want to thank you for making so much work that matters to so many. And I know I’m speaking for the entire audience here. We can’t wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much.
Jad Abumrad:
Thank you, Debbie.
Debbie Millman:
Jad Abumrad. The master in the house.