Jad, part Deux
PRX:
Let's talk about one of my favorite pieces--the interview from the Space episode with Annie Druyan, the creative director of the Voyager Interstellar Recording. How much of the story did you know going into the interview? You sound genuinely surprised at moments.
Jad:
Yes. That story actually I had under-researched. I didn't know it at the time. I had gone there knowing that obviously Carl Sagan and her had been a part of a team that had compiled all these sounds to send out into space and I knew what the sounds were. I didn't know at all that she had this love story with Carl Sagan that was thread through those choices. That was a real surprise to me. It was one of those times when it's a gift, like a story that you didn't expect that's even better than the story you thought you were going to get.
One of the things we're trying to do now is--this going to sound weird--but we're trying to under-prepare more. We went through a stage where we were just doing too much research. We were doing pre-interview after pre-interview and so by the time you go there, you knew what you were going to get, to the point where it was really hard to act surprised. And surprise is such an important element of what we're doing. We're marching out there into the world, we're like these two explorers in a way, and we have to just bump into things and be like "Oh! Oh my god!" That sound, "oh!" is so important to our show. If you can't do it genuinely then it kind of gets really bad and rote.
 |
Now, we do this thing where we have one person that knows what's going on but they don't tell the person that's going to do the interview. But they're there in case we forget.
PRX:
Talk to me about what it's like doing such a limited number of episodes each year.
Jad:
Unfortunately public radio isn't geared to handle this kind of thing. TV does it all the time like Sopranos, and Battlestar Galactica. You want to talk about dorks, I mean, my favorite show, right?
So it has been an effort to try and convince people that this is something that can work.
The thing that's helped us is that we sort of stole a page from the Discovery Channel's playbook. They do this thing called Shark Week, which we now use as the internal name for this thing we do. We'll play all five episodes over the course of a week, and we offer that as a model for other stations.
Also, you can promote it in this way where it's special. It's like an event.
Public radio always talks about innovation, but it's really hard now to fund a show that can innovate on a weekly basis. And there's no place to put that show, because there's so many freaking weekly shows out there. So the farther that we are from a weekly show, in a way that benefits us.
PRX:
What was the most frustrating show to produce in the second season? One that gave you sleepless nights.
Jad:
The one that really, really tortured me was the Morality show. We fought a lot about that show.
PRX:
About what specifically?
Jad:
We have begun to actually take these fights on the air, but one of them which happens a lot is where I say, "let's put more in. Let's go deeper here." And then [co-host] Robert [Krulwich] says, "No, no, no, too much, too much." And so we had that fight in so many different flavors with that show where I was like, "If we are going to do this we are going to do this. Let's just do it. Let's just go right into the brain and get all this anatomy on the table. Let's just have all the complicated words. Screw it. Our listeners aren't stupid. We can say things like 'dorsolateral prefrontal cortex' and they won't run screaming."
Where in fact they might, to his credit. He was like, "No, no you're crazy. You're crazy. We have to come up with different names for them. We have to simplify. We have to create some vaudevillian theatre to sort of distract people from the fact that this is a science lesson they are getting."
I am all about complexity and he's all about simplifying. That's a good thing. That's a good tension.
PRX:
How do you go about bringing the fights onto the air?
Jad:
The fight when it happens is a completely honest argument. I mean it's friendly. It's like two friends arguing or debating. It's not scripted at all. It is very edited, obviously, so that it doesn't sort of out stay its welcome but we allow spaces in the show where improvisation rules. And then we allow spaces in the show where production, and producing and the cuts rule. If you can somehow maintain the pacing all the way through it is a totally weird experience and for me it's the part that I really enjoy.
PRX:
It sounds like you are almost editing music. Do you think about it in that way?
Jad:
Yeah, I think about it precisely in that way because that's my background. I came to radio as a composer, as someone who was writing music for films and had studied music. And I thought that's what I would be doing right now, but I am glad that I did not go that route. That to me was what got me into radio. There is so much about rhythm and pitch and pacing and meter and syncopation that you are working with. In public radio, we don't do rhythm. We don't try to mix up our beats. The thing about Weekend Edition or Morning Edition is that you go, "do, do, do, do, do." Like. A. Metronome. Everything. So. Regular. You know what I mean? You know when the acts are going to happen. You know when the tracks are going to happen. You know when the reporter is going to hand off. For me one of the decisions when you get right down to the cut I am thinking about rhythm, I am thinking about pacing. I'm like how can I vary the beats? How can I create that little moment of surprise? If you create that every few minutes or seconds, you keep people there.
 |
PRX:
So, what can we expect for season three?
Jad:
We are doing a show about sleep and looking at the basic question that a lot of ecologists ask, "why do we sleep?" Which is, believe it or not, a question that nobody knows the answer to. We spend eight hours a day completely shut off at certain points of the night.
We are also doing a show about the history of the placebo pill. Looking at the role of the placebo in medicine and getting into cool larger issues about mind and body and how mind influences body and how belief becomes biology and there are some really cool sort of experiments and discoveries that we will talk about.
PRX:
Have any of the shows you've produced, any of the people that you have spoken to, actually fundamentally changed the way that you have thought about the world?
Jad:
Oh my God, every show! I mean, that is the whole point.
Like, placebo, as an example. Every interview we did in that show? Totally mind blowing, for me personally... I will give you this one study, just real quick:
This guy is a black professor, goes to Michigan, and is doing a straight-up comparison about SAT scores, and he notices something: that the black students who come in with a 1200 or a 1400 SAT score, and who should be equivalent to the white students who come in with the exact same SAT score, in fact score lower in every class. And he was like, "What is going on? They come in at the same level, and then something happens where the black students' performance dips."
So he set up a series of studies, and basically what he determined was that if you tweak our cultural expectations in the following manner...he goes into the test, and he says, "You know, this is not an IQ test, this is a puzzle"--if he uses that word, "puzzle"--all of a sudden the scores are the same; black students score as high on the test as white students.
It's f**ked up, and it is amazing. It completely changes the way that you think about how cultural ideas and expectations affect your performance.
PRX:
Oh man.
Jad:
That is a perspective-shaking idea. Sleep is a completely perspective-shaking idea, when you start to get into people who have parasomnias, and how, in the animal kingdom, it is very common for an animal like a duck to be both awake and asleep at the same time, to have one eye open and one half of their brain asleep, and then they will switch, and they will close that eye and shut down the other half, and open the other half and open the eye. That is weird, right? When you find out that actually exists in a sort of analogue in people, it is even stranger, and it makes you think completely differently about sleep.
PRX:
That's just so cool. I mean, I don't just want to be talking up the show the whole time, but that is what it comes down to: "Wow! That is really cool!" Sometimes it's hard to be more articulate than that.
Jad:
Yeah. I mean, there are two levels of cool that we try and parse. There is the "gee whiz!" cool, which we try to stay away from, and then there is what you just said, it was just like, "WOW! That is REALLY COOL." That is what we are really going for, and if we can get that once an episode, I am happy.
PRX:
So, last question: do you mind if I do some shameless self-promotion for PRX?
Jad:
No, of course not. I love PRX.
PRX:
What are your favorite pieces that are on the Public Radio Exchange?
Jad:
Well to be totally honest, I have not visited in a while, but I will tell you, we got Hannah Palin's story, which was one of the first shows we did. I think we called it "Who Am I?" and it was about consciousness and all kinds of stuff, and we found her piece through you guys, because I think you featured it at one point, or we were doing a search, perhaps, and we found it, and then we went back to her and we had her redo it. But dude, I am so thankful that you guys are around. You create the possibility of those moments of serendipity. See, that's the thing, Nick, you just made me realize.
PRX:
What?
Jad:
So much of this digital stuff eliminates serendipity. But PRX still allows for that, in my opinion, because you can just be, "Do-de-do-de-do," along on the site, and then you come upon this story about this woman whose mother had an aneurysm; and you're like, "Oh my God! This is great! This is a great f**king story!" And that happens a lot. I think you guys are peddlers of serendipity.
© 2006, The Public Radio Exchange
