To celebrate two decades of Design Matters, Debbie Millman gathers favorite moments from past interviews with podcast hosts Krista Tippett, Ira Glass, Hrishikesh Hirway, Kara Swisher, and Jad Abumrad. These excerpts trace how each host found their voice, shaped a format, and learned to listen, revealing the craft and conviction behind the shows that shaped podcasting.
Ira Glass:
I looked so young for so long, I was reporting in Lincoln Park High School, and I would get stopped for a hall pass.
Krista Tippett:
I had no idea what I was going to do, and I end up in Minnesota.
Kara Swisher:
They said, “Why are you leaving?” And I said, “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. And I think there was some part of me that was just so determined to just prove to myself that I was right. On this episode, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Design Matters, we’ll hear Debbie interview the interviewers, excerpts from her conversations with fellow podcasters and radio hosts.
Jad Abumrad:
And along the way, I went from being a musician to being something between a musician and a storyteller and a journalist.
Debbie Millman:
For the past 20 years, I’ve been talking to people about their lives. I conduct research to find out as much as I can about my guests, and then my job is to craft questions, ask as many of them as time and good sense allows, and pay close attention to the answers. Easier said than done, though. Took me a long time to feel like I really knew what I was doing.
It’s been one of my great pleasures to interview a number of my fellow podcast hosts in recent years. People I’ve admired and learned from for a long time. They do what they do with pleasure, intelligence, and skill. I know it’s not always easy for them to be on the other side of the mic, but as we say in the business, they are often good talkers, great talkers even, especially about their own learning curves. In this episode, I’m going to play you some excerpts from interviews I’ve loved with some of my favorite fellow hosts.
In 2016, I interviewed Krista Tippett, the longtime host of the Peabody Award-winning program, On Being. She’s also the author of several books, including Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.
You write about how you threw yourself into the chances that were coming your way. You learned German, you backpacked around Europe. You spent a semester in a communist East German city on the Baltic Sea. And at that point, you said you stopped thinking about God and threw yourself into saving the world respectively by way of journalism and politics. Krista, did you believe that thinking about God at that time was not a significant way to help the world?
Krista Tippett:
Yeah, I didn’t ever have any big rejection moment or I didn’t become atheist, but I was pretty uninterested in religion and in God, and it didn’t feel relevant to me as I settled into Brown and then went to Europe. I just wasn’t sure how it could be very important. And therefore, very interesting.
Debbie Millman:
After college, you went to Berlin as a New York Times stringer, and you went there with no guarantee of a paycheck or a byline. That’s astounding to me. What gave you the courage to do that without any-
Krista Tippett:
I was 22.
Debbie Millman:
When I was 22, I was thinking about how I was going to live the rest of my life without becoming a back lady. So I think that’s enormously courageous.
Krista Tippett:
Yeah, I guess it is. I don’t think of myself that way. I think I actually need to give my younger self a little bit more credit.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, not only did you go someplace where there was no guarantee of a paycheck or a byline, but you were also going to a country that was an enormous turmoil.
Krista Tippett:
You mean Berlin, divided Berlin?
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.
Krista Tippett:
Yeah. Well, I’d been in Bonn and I’d been in East Germany, so I was going back closer to the part of Germany that I first knew. And Berlin, divided Berlin, yes, was the fault line of the Cold War, but as a place by the ’80s, West Berlin was surrounded by East Germany. It was surrounded by the Great Communist Sea, and it was a very contained, idiosyncratic kind of a small town. So I was able to go there as a New York Times stringer and immediately know everybody I could want to know and be getting invited to diplomatic cocktail parties and be taken seriously because it just wasn’t a big universe, and I was ready to fail and to go home with my tail between my legs. But it worked out.
Debbie Millman:
It seems that after you left Berlin and you lived in Spain, you lived in England, Scotland, and then the notions of spirituality and God came back to you, you then decided to pursue a master’s in divinity from Yale.
Krista Tippett:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Now you’ve written that you didn’t study theology in order to be ordained. So what motivated you to choose this particular course of study?
Krista Tippett:
So I had those about 10 years ending up in divided Berlin, which was such a political place. And I was in the end working for an ambassador who was a nuclear arms expert. So I was surrounded with policy thinkers and …
Debbie Millman:
Really serious stuff.
Krista Tippett:
Yeah, and I was really idealistic. I thought we were actually there to save the world, and there was a very unsettling disjunction between the power that these people had, who I was working with, and the immature, unimpressive private lives they had, and also the fact that they weren’t actually there to save the world for the most part. I mean, there were some exceptions, but the moving the missiles around was a real ego trip.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, they were there to own the world.
Krista Tippett:
Yeah. Yes. So it was exhilarating on some level to be part of that, but on another level, it was really unsettling, morally unsettling. And then at the same time, I was living in divided Berlin, which was just really this great big social experiment where you take one people and divide them into two completely different worldviews. And I was also seeing this paradox at that human level of where people on the western side of the wall had everything in contrast to the people in the East, but they could be really shallow and have impoverished inner lives. And then I was very drawn to the people I came to know and love in East Berlin, who really had nothing to work with materially or really importantly in terms of their choices they had to make, but who created these lives of great beauty and dignity.
And so I started thinking about that work of creating a life of dignity and beauty. And it was through that kind of an anguished inquiry that I started to ask what I now would call spiritual questions. But it took me a long time before I called them spiritual questions. So when I went to Divinity School, it was at the end of that process where I was thinking, “Okay, actually maybe religion as the place that has always asked these delving questions in the human sphere.” Maybe this is relevant and maybe it’s important, but I didn’t quite trust that. I wanted to study it. I wanted to apply my mind.
And so that was the decision to go to Divinity School. So I really wanted a theological education, but I didn’t completely rule out the idea that I’d get there and want to be ordained, but that’s not why I did it. And it was pretty clear to me as soon as I got there that that’s not why I was there.
Debbie Millman:
What were you imagining you were going to do with your degree?
Krista Tippett:
Well, I don’t know. And I certainly never, never … It’s not like I had this idea in mind. If you’d told me about this back then, I probably would have thought that was great. But I didn’t know, it was a bit of a leap in the dark. I mean, I was doing this with my former husband, who was becoming ordained in the Episcopal Church. I had a companion in this.
Debbie Millman:
A comrade.
Krista Tippett:
Yeah, a comrade. And then our daughter was born while we were at Divinity School. I think of that time also as this becoming a parent, which is very formative.
Debbie Millman:
You graduated from Yale in 1994 and stated that you saw a black hole where intelligent coverage of religion should be. And at that time, you conducted what you’ve referred to as a far-flung oral history project for the Benedictines of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. And it was really then that you began to imagine radio conversations about the spiritual and intellectual content of faith that could open imaginations and enrich public life. And in a report, you wrote about the experience, you stated that the first-person approach to religious speech is essentially about humanizing doctrine. And Krista, is this something that influenced how you wanted to talk about spirituality? I mean, is it really possible to humanize doctrine?
Krista Tippett:
Well, it was a discovery that I made, and you have to remember, and depending on how old people are, they won’t remember. But in the 1980s and 1990s, it was this moment of a few very strident religious voices.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, the evangelists came to fore.
Krista Tippett:
Yeah, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson. And it was a conclusion of their willingness to be out there speaking for God and speaking for all Christians, and also journalists’ willingness to let them do that because it was very entertaining and they delivered sound bites. So you had this toxic effect of religion on American politics and society. And this is just an aside, but I think that the phenomenon that we now see of people under 30 who aren’t the nuns, as I say, who are not affiliated with the tradition, and I don’t think we should be at all surprised that people who were born and who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s and seeing religion have that public effect are allergic to it.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I mean, it seems like that’s religion without spirituality.
Krista Tippett:
Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Krista Tippett:
And without an integrity of who you are inside and what you say you believe and how you live and how you treat others. And … So that’s what I’m watching. I’m watching that as somebody who’s just studied theology and found theology thrilling and relevant and nuanced. And then … I mean, you asked what I thought I was going to do. I had no idea what I was going to do, and I end up in Minnesota with a young child, but there was this amazing place, Benedictine’s monastics are amazing in the whole history of humanity in ways we don’t think about very often. So there’s amazing Benedictine monastery in the middle of Minnesota, and they saw me as somebody who had a journalistic background and a theological education. They’ve invited me to do this oral history project.
So I go on this adventure, interviewed about 55 people across about a year or two. And some of these people were big names of Christianity in the 20th century and some of them were just extraordinary people who’d come through that place. But every single one of those conversations was intelligent, thought-provoking, and fun.
Debbie Millman:
Nice combination.
Krista Tippett:
And if there’s one word that you’d never use to describe the public religion at that time, it would not be fun. Intelligent and fun were two adjectives I hadn’t expected. And so in the course of that, I started thinking, “This is so exciting and it’s so interesting and I’m learning so much, and people would like to hear this religious voice.” And so originally, that was a thought, and then over a period of time, it became an idea that maybe I could do that. And then it became an idea that maybe I could do on public radio. And I didn’t really have a vision so much of I’m going to create a weekly national show. I just got fired up that this was something that should be tried.
Debbie Millman:
Krista Tippett in 2016.
Ira Glass hardly needs an introduction. The host of This American Life has been at it for a long time now. Lots of longs in this episode. His show was on the radio long before podcasts were even invented. I spoke with him in front of a live audience at the On Air Fest in Brooklyn in 2020.
I discovered a 1991 article in the Chicago Tribune titled, “Take It Off,” with the following description. After deciding to shed his long hair look, a brave dude tries a variety of cuts on the way up. I’d like to show you this image from the paper and ask if it is indeed you, the brave dude.
Ira Glass:
Yes. I can confirm that that is me.
Debbie Millman:
Share the backstory with us if you can, just for a few minutes.
Ira Glass:
It was a really long time ago, and for a while, I had a ponytail, which at the time seemed cool.
Debbie Millman:
So that went up there. Or was that-
Ira Glass:
It didn’t look like that. It was longer than that.
Debbie Millman:
Very Steven Seagal.
Ira Glass:
It wasn’t quite Steven Seagal. It was a little messier. It’s not a very dramatic story, but at some point, I decided I just wanted to change how I looked because I wanted to change my life at that point. There’s some old saying that when a woman cuts her hair, she changes her life.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Ira Glass:
I heard it in a movie anyway. And I didn’t know the saying at the time, but it was true. And then somehow somebody knew somebody who’s like, “Oh, we could take pictures of that for the newspaper or something.” That had never happened to me before. I’d never been photographed for a newspaper. At the time, I was a freelance reporter for NPR. I thought, “Okay, that’ll be a new experience. Okay, I’ll try that.” And that’s how it ended up in the paper. It’s not very dramatic, I’m afraid.
Debbie Millman:
I think the one right above you is rather dapper.
Ira Glass:
That short hair like that, it did look like that for a while when I was working at NPR in Washington through my 20s. I started at NPR when I was 19 and did all the low-level jobs on All Things Considered in Morning Edition, but I looked very, very young, and I was younger than most of the staff. And so in my early 20s, I just thought, “I need to figure out a tactic to seem like an adult.” And so I wore a tie every day and it worked. I looked so young for so long. I remember when I was in my early 30s, I was reporting in Lincoln Park High School, and I would get stopped for a hall pass. I have to be, “No, I’m an adult.”
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you don’t like interviewing famous people that mostly because they arrive at an interview with a mask that might be hard to penetrate. When that happens, do you have any surefire way to get them to lower the mask?
Ira Glass:
I mean, honestly, I’ve interviewed so few famous people that I haven’t really had to think my way through that problem. I know you interview lots of famous people. I mean, I think that in general, finding an anecdote or a way in that people haven’t talked about before, for example, an article from 1991 that a person hasn’t thought about in a long time. Totally. I respect the technique.
And then, I don’t know, I think the people who are so good at that, Terry Gross, there’s a print reporter in Los Angeles, used to write a lot for the LA Times, but also for Entertainment Weekly and stuff, named Margy Rochlin. She and I used to talk about this because she would interview like Nicole Kidman and people like that, and I’d just be like, “What do you do?” And she would tell a lot of stories about herself that would relate to things inside them, and were just enormously empathetic as a person, and they would just get lost in a conversation with her, as lost as somebody can get, who’s in that position. And she would get all sorts of things from them that were very personal and very real.
I think in general … I mean, I’ve said this a million times, but an interview is a party that you are throwing, and if you are a three-dimensional person, it gives the other person the opportunity to be a three-dimensional person back. And so that’s just an enormously powerful force. I remember when I was interviewed by Marc Maron for the WTF podcast, he is so emotionally present and so bare that you just feel like you have to rise to the occasion as the interviewee.
Debbie Millman:
Your sister, Randi, has described you as a nosy introvert and-
Ira Glass:
Yes, noisy, noisy. Noisy.
Debbie Millman:
Noisy.
Ira Glass:
Yeah. But nosy is also true. Nosy is very much … Yeah, no.
Debbie Millman:
I see, I thought nosy was actually really cool because that would make sense given your curiosity, but I misread it. It’s noisy.
Ira Glass:
Noisy. But nosy is just as true, for sure. Very nosy introvert. Yes. Yeah, noisy introvert is this category that Randi came up with to describe herself where she could be very social, but actually she prefers to be alone. And then once she said it, I realized, “Oh, I know so many people like that,” especially I think writers. So many writers, I think, have the personality type of, they can manage in a social setting and they’re okay for a couple of hours, but really where they’d rather be is alone. And that’s a lot of my personality, too.
Debbie Millman:
When my fiancée, Roxane, and I first got together, she’s very quiet and can be very shy, and I’m not. And I would want to try to get more out of her, really understand her emotionality and that inner dialogue. And I remember talking to my therapist about it and saying, “She’s such a good writer, and she talks so much about her emotions while she’s writing,” and she very abruptly said, “That’s why she’s a writer.” So it really helped me understand the different ways that people prefer to communicate.
Ira Glass:
Yes. Yeah. I’m very aware of those tendencies in myself.
Debbie Millman:
You sound like that is something that is concerning to you.
Ira Glass:
What a therapist-like response.
Debbie Millman:
Couldn’t help myself.
Ira Glass:
Yeah, no, I understand the ways in which, in public, I’m able to do things that can be harder for me in a personal relationship, for sure.
Debbie Millman:
You wanted to be both an astronaut and a magician when you were a kid.
Ira Glass:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
But both your parents grew up really poor and they wanted you to be a doctor.
Ira Glass:
Yes. I wouldn’t say poor, but they were people without a lot of spare money, for sure. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I believe you were quite a talented amateur magician and became well-known in your neighborhood for being able to make a very credible Snoopy out of balloons.
Ira Glass:
Yes. Yeah. No, I gigged as a kid magician when I was a teenager and did children’s parties and did magic tricks. I have to say, in terms of just show craft, I’m not very good.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, really? Because I was hoping that maybe [inaudible 00:20:27].
Ira Glass:
Oh, I can totally do balloons still. Yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Would you?
Ira Glass:
Yeah, totally.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. There’s a variety of colors and …
Ira Glass:
Oh, wait, but these are-
Debbie Millman:
No, those are the kind for balloons for animals.
Ira Glass:
All right. I’ll put it down.
Debbie Millman:
Do you want me to hold the microphone?
Ira Glass:
Hold on, I’ll put it down.
Debbie Millman:
How good is this? Okay. Let’s just acknowledge that this is a classic radio moment.
Ira Glass:
These are not the right kind of … What you need are ones that are long and thin, but if-
Debbie Millman:
Aren’t those long and thin?
Ira Glass:
No, these are actually stubby. You need a 245 or a 260, which means two inches long, two inches wide, and 45 inches long, or 260s, but-
Debbie Millman:
My point is made.
Ira Glass:
But I have my bag. If somebody could grab my bag from back there.
Debbie Millman:
We did not plan this.
Ira Glass:
I do carry around usually a couple of balloons because sometimes you’re in a situation, a reporting situation, or just you’re with a friend’s kid, and it’s appropriate to pull out an animal balloon. I can make a coin disappear while we wait for the bag.
Debbie Millman:
Really? I hear things happening back there. So can you still make a Snoopy?
Ira Glass:
That’s my bag. I could make a Snoopy, yeah. Sure. For sure, I could. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you.
Ira Glass:
Okay. Oh, my. This has been a weird afternoon.
Debbie Millman:
I take that as a compliment. Oh, wow.
Ira Glass:
Okay. Snoopy, not a poodle, but a Snoopy …
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Ira Glass:
Okay. Hold on.
Debbie Millman:
Please, can someone tape this? Videotape.
Ira Glass:
Do you want to mic the sound of this?
It’s funny. I don’t buy these balloons very often. I could feel that this one’s old, so it actually might pop. So just [inaudible 00:22:13].
Now doing the body and the back legs. This is actually the part that every animal you make out of balloons. I learned this from a book called Roger’s Rubber Ark. Okay. Well, can you see it’s Snoopy?
Debbie Millman:
Oh, Snoopy.
Ira Glass:
Ira Glass and Snoopy live at the On Air Fest in 2020.
Hrishikesh Hirway is the host of the podcast, Song Exploder. The format he created of going deep with musicians into their creative process and decision-making has been much imitated but never surpassed. I spoke with him in 2020, and we got into how a lull in his musical career led to the creation of his podcast.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
In 2013, I was feeling like, I was like, “Well, nothing really ever broke for me.” And so that year, I started a new music project. I started a new band, basically, and I started working on making a podcast, and I also started working on a TV show idea. And all of that stuff felt, in some ways, like a distraction from the 1:00 a.m. radio and a distraction from what was supposed to be my “real career”. But with the podcast especially, I thought, “Well, maybe this could be a way that I could have a day job that was of my own making and also under my own control that would allow me to pursue music and not have to worry about it as my means of survival,” because I think that’s where a lot of tension was for me.
Debbie Millman:
How did you come up with the Song Exploder concept?
Hrishikesh Hirway:
Well, I had been listening to a bunch of podcasts around that time and really liking them. I’d listened to them on tour. And I was also a big fan of … There’s a magazine called Tape Op that I really love that’s called the Creative Recording Magazine, where they would interview a lot of the kinds of artists that I liked listening to about the ways in which they’d record. And there were all kinds of strange and weird ways that people would work to try and get the sound that they wanted outside of a huge commercial situation. It was people who were like me, who were recording at home, who didn’t have training, but who had made these records that I really loved.
And so getting to read those interviews was really inspiring for me. But at the same time, it was also print, and I wanted to go further. I wanted to hear the thing that they were talking about. And I thought, “Well, a podcast could be a place where you could combine these things.” You could get to explain these ideas, and then you could also hear these things. And better yet, you could not just hear the song. You could potentially hear just the stem of the song, which is just the isolated layer of that one instrument or that one track, which was something I was very familiar with from having made my own music all of these years, the moments where you solo just the one track to hear what’s really going on in it. So that was where it came from.
Debbie Millman:
Is it true that Questlove’s liner notes were one of the original inspirations for the show?
Hrishikesh Hirway:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, many years before that, I remember he had written in the liner notes for the album, Things Fall Apart. He talked about this drum sound that was specifically when I’d been listening to the record, I had really fallen in love with, because there was a moment where he did what I had been wanting to do, which was make his drums sound like not quite like real drums. There’s a moment in the record where it sounds like it switches from a live drum kit to a drum sample. That sounds so cool. And then I’m reading the liner notes, and he talked about that. He said, “I finally got that sound that I’d been looking for,” and I wanted to know what it was, but that was it. That was all that he wrote, that he had finally achieved it, but I needed to know what the answer was so I could do it myself. So I was thinking about that, too.
Debbie Millman:
Rather than assume the risk of doing all of this on your own, you went to a number of established organizations like Spotify, and you proposed that they hire you to make the show for them in-house, and they rejected you, they turned you down, and you went ahead and did it on your own. What gave you the confidence to go ahead and just do it on your own?
Hrishikesh Hirway:
I don’t know. I was thinking about something that you wrote about one time about the difference between confidence and courage.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
And I don’t know which one it was, if it was courage despite a lack of confidence or if it was in fact confidence. I just knew that it was something that I really wanted, that I would really benefit from if it existed in the world. It had this no-brainer feeling to me. It was really frustrating to me that I couldn’t convince people to see this thing, the worth of this thing, the way that I saw it. And I think there was some part of me that was just so determined to just prove to myself that I was right, that I thought, “Well, I should just do it.” And I said I would give myself a year.
Debbie Millman:
Has Spotify since come back with their tail between their legs, so to speak?
Hrishikesh Hirway:
No, they have not.
Debbie Millman:
It’s only a matter of time.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
It’s only a matter of time.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
They’re doing fine.
Debbie Millman:
How did you raise money to produce the show yourself?
Hrishikesh Hirway:
It didn’t actually take any money at first. That was the nice thing because I was just doing it all entirely on my own with what I already had. So the real factor was just convincing people to say yes, to letting me interview them, and handing over their stems and letting me make this story out of those components.
Debbie Millman:
Song Exploder debuted January 1st, 2014, and featured Jimmy Tamborello of the synth-pop band, The Postal Service. Looking back on that show now, how do you feel about that first episode?
Hrishikesh Hirway:
I mean, I wish I could redo it. I think I could probably make a better episode now than I did then, but it was the first time I’d ever interviewed anybody, and it was my first time trying to make a podcast, so I have to give myself a little bit of forgiveness for the first stab at something.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, yeah.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, I look back at my first hundred episodes, I’m horrified.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Initially, you didn’t want to be in the show at all, and Jimmy Tamborello did both the intro and the outro for the show that changed when the podcast was picked up by the Maximum Fun podcast network and the founder, Jesse Thorn, felt you should have more of a front-facing role. Why didn’t you want that initially?
Hrishikesh Hirway:
I didn’t really see the point. The thing that I was trying to make was about this artist and their song, so I didn’t understand what I needed to even be doing in there. It could be this perfect, clean little package from the one voice of the creator of that music.
Debbie Millman:
You still edit out a lot of your questions from the podcast episodes. Why? I love you being in it. I love hearing your voice. You have such a good voice.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
Well, I still feel the same way about that, that I want it to feel like it’s not about me or my point of view. I want someone to be able to just put it on and say, “Okay, I’m going to listen to this thing and I’m going to hear from this creator.” I still think of my presence in the show as being purely functional. The thing that Jesse said was he said, “I think it’ll be helpful for people to know that there is an author behind the show.”
Debbie Millman:
I think you’re the soul behind the show.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
And I guess that’s true, but I also feel like you don’t see a designer’s name. It’s not like a painting where their signature is at the bottom on lots of the most beautiful things that have ever been designed. Without some research, you’d never know who designed it.
Debbie Millman:
That’s changing a bit, though. I know that James Victore signs his designs now, Stefan Sagmeister often does. Paul Rand, I think, did occasionally, in any case.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
Would you ever?
Debbie Millman:
Not my design work, no. Only illustrations or artwork.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
And why not? Aren’t you the soul behind that design?
Debbie Millman:
No. And all the corporate design work that I’ve done, I worked with a team of people and very little branding actually comes from a single mind.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And so there’s always somebody that’s doing the market research and somebody that’s doing the implementation and so on and so forth. Even working on Tropicana, there was somebody that was airbrushing the droplets on the orange. So if you were going … And there were like 79 droplets or something, everyone was numbered and corresponded to talk about Photoshop. That was a big file. So I wouldn’t feel comfortable ever saying that I designed that on my own because it was just a real group effort.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
But with illustration or with artwork, definitely. When I’m the sole creator, then I do feel comfortable.
Hrishikesh Hirway:
Yeah. I think that’s part of it is that I’m not the sole creator of that show. It doesn’t exist without the raw material of that artist’s work and their ideas. And so I’m presenting their music and their ideas and shaping it in a way that I think will hopefully serve the song and the story. But I think in the same way that you’re describing the teamwork on branding, it doesn’t feel right to say like, “Oh, and this is my creation.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, we could argue about this offline.
Notice how he turned the tables on me and started asking me the questions. Very crafty. That was Hrishikesh Hirway in 2020.
The tech journalist, Kara Swisher, hosts a number of podcasts, including On with Kara Swisher and Pivot both from Vox Media. I spoke with her in front of a live audience as part of a Design Matters live tour in 2023. I was also joined on stage by my wife, the writer, Roxane Gay.
When your dad was 34 years old, he died from complications of a brain aneurysm.
Kara Swisher:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
He was fresh out of the Navy. He had three kids. He and your mom had purchased their first house. He had landed a job as the head of anesthesia at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. You were five years old.
Kara Swisher:
Indeed.
Debbie Millman:
And have said that his sudden death has informed everything you’ve done since.
Kara Swisher:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And I’m wondering in what way?
Kara Swisher:
Well, in every way. I think when your parent dies at a young age … There’s a great book, I think it’s by Irvin Yalom or something called The Loss That Is Forever. I love this book. A friend of mine’s lost her daughter who has this young child, and I sent this to them or advised them to get it. And when your parent dies at a young age, it’s as if half your friends have died because that is your touch point at that age. And at that time, when it happens, it’s devastating, but you get through it. You do. You just do.
And so a lot of things don’t matter as much as … Because you realize, one, you get a sense of mortality at a very early age. And two is you can survive a lot of stuff. And a lot of people have gone through worse things, but it certainly was tough, and it was accompanied by the fact that my mom married someone who wasn’t very nice. My father was incredibly kind, so I felt like … I mean, I was essentially living Cinderella or something. It was like that.
And so it makes you think every time … I think about death a lot, not in the way I’m going to die tomorrow, it’s that I’m always like, “Should I do this? I’ll be dead in 50 years. Yes.” And so it tends to give me a positive spin on every … I don’t have as much … I just don’t have that time, and neither does anybody else, but I have a very good sense of that. The other thing is when I had my first child, who’s now 21, when … I have right now also a four-year-old, someone about to turn four, daughter and a son who’s about to turn two. And when my oldest, who’s now 21, turned five, I realized the devastation because I’m incredibly close to my two-year-old. Knows me well, walks home, hi, mama, and hugs me. And it just informed everything.
So I think it made me bolder and highly functional, I would say, highly functional. And my brothers are highly functional, so it’s not great, but that’s not a great way to learn that.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve noted that when you survive something that awful, very little is going to bother you over the course of the rest of your life. And it seems like that has held true this many years later. And so why do you think that holds true for so long? And do you ever foresee that changing where things might start to rock your world again?
Kara Swisher:
Well, only around my kids, I think. That’s the only time I get panicked that something happened to them in traveling. That’s the only thing, I think. I think I had kids because I didn’t want to become one of those people that nothing bothers, right? And I think probably a lot of my earlier relationships, I was like, “Yeah, we break up. Oh, well. So what?” You know what I mean? You get like that.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You have a perspective.
Kara Swisher:
Yeah, it’ll be fine. Everything will be fine. I’ll be fine. And I think having kids does give you a sense of vulnerability that you can’t avoid. Not everybody has kids. I get it. There’s different ways to do that. But for me, that’s the one thing that gives me a sense of terror sometimes or scaredness. I’m not scared for myself. I’m scared for them, especially because I knew it does give me insight into what happened to me, too, at the same time.
So I guess that would be … It doesn’t leave me, though. Every time … Me, I leave things. If I don’t get enough money or if someone just bothers me, we were talking about someone we know jointly, and when I left this particular thing, they said, “Why are you leaving?” And I said, “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” And they were like, “What?” And I go, “I just don’t want to see you anymore also or encounter you. I got to go.” And it was because of that feeling of life’s too short. It’s more than life’s too short. It’s like, I have these many minutes on the planet, I don’t know what it is, but you’re taking up far too many of them, and you need to move along out of my sight.
Debbie Millman:
I have to say [inaudible 00:37:27]. When I hear something like that, it feels a bit mythic because I am not even though on … On the page, yes, I’m absolutely that bitch.
Kara Swisher:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
But in my day-to-day life, I don’t have that thing that allows me to just say, “I don’t want to ever speak to you again.”
Kara Swisher:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
How do you develop that?
Kara Swisher:
It’s easy.
Debbie Millman:
Or it’s just-
Kara Swisher:
Just start doing it. And it’s like … Because …
Debbie Millman:
Okay.
Kara Swisher:
… I do a lot of … Yeah, no, no, I don’t think so. I was going to do a series of books and I still might. We just thought of a podcast to do together. We’ll talk about it later.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s going to be amazing.
Kara Swisher:
It’s going to be epic. So, unlike what you think it would be, it’s not badass ladies, it’s something much worse. But I am going to do a book, and it’s called No Is a Complete Sentence, and the second book in the series is called Yes, I’ll Take That, because I don’t think women … It’s a book for women and other people who need it, essentially. And the third is Maybe I’ll Call You Back.
I don’t know. I never regret saying things, I don’t. People are like, “Did you regret that?” I’m like, “No. No, I like that. That was fun.”
Debbie Millman:
Wow. Well.
Kara Swisher:
Yeah. Someone’s going to shoot me someday. One time I was in … Because I’m mean to some of the tech bros, and they have a lot of money. I was in New York, and I was crossing the street, and a car made a 180, a big black car, one of those big Ubers, this whatever, and stopped in front of me. And I literally thought, “The time has come for Peter Thiel to kill me,” or Elon Musk/Mark [inaudible 00:39:08] that they have sent in the Israeli secret people that are going to now take me. I’ll be cut up into little pieces and spread around the ocean and stuff. And I thought, “Oh, God, one too many insults of these adult toddlers.” And I just did it again. And it was a fan. It was a fireman from Queens. And he’s like … He wanted a selfie. And he goes, “Did I scare you?” And I’m like, “Yes.” Now you have to abduct me and cut me into tiny bits.
Debbie Millman:
Kara Swisher in 2023.
Jad Abumrad is the creator and former host of Radiolab, the legendary long-running radio show and podcast. As with Kara Swisher, I interviewed Jad as part of our Design Matters live tour in 2023.
Jad Abumrad:
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 kind of both, but neither.” And so I started volunteering at a radio station, WBAI Radio in downtown Manhattan. And 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 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’d liked from the interviews. And then I had a news report on the air at 3:00 that day. And-
Debbie Millman:
It was because you learned the skills in your room with the four-track or how did you learn how to cut tape and splice it together?
Jad Abumrad:
I mean, I was working on the computer at that point, most of humanity, but they were still on these reel-to-reel tape recorders, which actually is … 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 and find. 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. Well, I mean, Karla’s made all the good decisions in my life. Yeah. And from that point on, I volunteered. This was a weird moment in … It’s actually not weird. I mean, this is just one of the many moments in New York history where the city was like … I mean, 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, recovering 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, 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. I mean, 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, like old stuff. And I would just … 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. And I would just … I remember my first episode was called Firsts, and it was somebody undergoing electroshock therapy, somebody talking about their period, like a radio rookie’s 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:
But that you can really … The way you’ve described it, you could see the seeds of Radiolab right there.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah. I mean, it was … 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:
Yeah. I wish that my original ones were, too, but they’re still there.
Jad Abumrad:
Oh, it’s horrible.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Jad Abumrad:
It’s such a curse that everything sticks around the way it does these days. But 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, like 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 mean, I was just trying.
Debbie Millman:
Okay, we need to stop you right there.
Jad Abumrad:
Okay, sorry.
Debbie Millman:
So 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. And I love that this person was so descriptive about what you weren’t.
Jad Abumrad:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And 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. I mean, 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:
Did they also cut back the band quite a bit?
Jad Abumrad:
Yes. So I mean that literally like …
Debbie Millman:
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 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 are just like 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, you know.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I mean, I do think it’s important to be able to learn as you make 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 that thing that NPR reporters do. They talk like this, dun, dun, very staccato, very stentorian 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. And 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:
Jad Abumrad in 2023.
You can hear these full episodes as well as hundreds of other interviews with podcasters, artists, and other creative people on our website, designmattersmedia.com, or wherever you love your podcasts. We’ll be back next week with another special episode culled from the many years I’ve been doing Design Matters. Yes, this is the 20th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced by the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Master’s in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.