JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad, this is Radiolab. The podcast. The homecoming podcast, actually. Welcome. One of the things that Robert and I had in common when we met way back when was that we both went to Oberlin, Oberlin College in Ohio. I did music as a composition major, and this was in the '90s. Robert studied history in the sepia-colored '60s—at least in my mind. And despite our difference in ages, we both left this school feeling like Oberlin was a really big part of who we are. So when we were asked to return to Oberlin to speak on campus on March 6, 2008 as part of their convocation series, we were totally thrilled and nervous and terrified and thrilled.

JAD: Anyhow, it was a snow-covered night and we went into Finney Chapel. All right, Finney Chapel. Those words mean nothing to you, but to us, Finney Chapel is like Madison Square Garden, because this was—you know, this is where you went to see jazz greats play and you heard speeches by cultural dignitaries. But there we were, these two schmoes on stage talking, you know, to our old professors. And it was really quite weird, frankly.

JAD: So anyways, we did a whole long lecture, which got into lots of Oberlin nostalgia, and we're gonna spare you most of that, but I'm going to play just a couple excerpts from the evening where we tell stories about Radiolab that you may not have heard before. To get started, here is the Robert and Jad romance story. Well, not really. It's the story of how we met, which centers around the first radio piece that we ever made together. I'm gonna play that for you. Never before heard Radiolab piece. Prepare yourself. This is Radiolab: The Early Years.

JAD: So five years ago I was working at WNYC. I was sort of Radiolab was not yet a thing. I was between jobs, so to speak, and someone hands me—a program director hands me a stack of scripts and says, "Go interview these people." And I did. And at the very end of the stack was a guy named Robert Krulwich. I sort of knew the name a little bit. And he said, "What's your story? Before we do any of this, what's your story?" And I said, "Well, I work at WNYC and I freelance for NPR."

ROBERT: Me too.

JAD: He said, "Me too." Then he asked me, "Well, what about before that?" I said, "Well, I worked at WBAI."

ROBERT: Me too.

JAD: "Me too." And then he said, "Where did you go to school?" And I said, "Oberlin."

ROBERT: "Get out!" I said. I said, "Wait, so this is the deal. You're living my life 25 years after me, let's go have breakfast. You can tell me what it's like on the other side or whatever you call it."

JAD: And somewhere at, like, breakfast number 31, we decided that we would try some radio together. We started doing various weirdly strange experiments that few of which have survived. But we do have the very first thing we collaborated on.

ROBERT: Which we thought was, like, fabulous.

JAD: We thought, this is gonna be the beginning of a revolution. And ...

ROBERT: In a small way.

JAD: In a small way.

ROBERT: Because the phone call we got was from Ira Glass, who runs This American Life, who's a friend of mine, but is also, like, you know the guy. So he says, "Hey, we're gonna have a show coming up. It's an hour show, but it will only have two-minute contributions." So you had this record or something?

JAD: Yes. So the show that Ira was planning on airing was "Flag Day." That was the projected broadcast day. I happened to have, purely coincidentally, a piece of archival tape that someone had sent me, which was a 1950s picture book audio that described the rules by which you are supposed to approach the flag. you are supposed to salute the flag, how you're supposed to display the flag when there are other flags in the room. All kinds of very arcane minutiae about how to respect the flag. And it's completely ridiculous.

ROBERT: Totally.

JAD: And ...

ROBERT: Here's what we did.

JAD: Here's what we did.

ROBERT: A few weeks ago, my friend Jad got a tape from his friend Jake of an old record from 1960, 1961. It was a how-to record, how to handle and how to honor the American flag. Because, said the narrator, for the first 150 years, there were no rules for the flag.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, narrator: To correct this situation, in 1923, the representatives of 68 patriotic and civic organizations met in Washington DC.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I insist that we fold the flag from the left to the right.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: No, no! It must be from the right to the left.]

ARCHIVE CLIP, narrator: To draw up a national code of flag etiquette. According to the law, our flag should always be raised briskly.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Faster, Johnny. Faster! Okay, Mom, I'm trying.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And to the very peak of the staff.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Please!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, narrator: When the flag is displayed over the middle of a street, it should be suspended vertically with the union to the north on an east-west street.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Excuse me?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, narrator: Or to the east on a north-south street.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Does that street run east-west?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I think it runs east-west, but I'm not sure.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It has run east-west since I was ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: North-south. that's the answer.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's run north-south since I've been a kid.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Marge?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yes, Eddie?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I got the American flag, the police regimental flag, and I got eight thumbtacks. Now, what should I do?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: You put up both of them, Eddie, but you got to listen to the man.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, narrator: The flag may be displayed against a wall crossed with another flag. In this arrangement, however, the flag of the United States should always be on the left with its staff in front of the staff of the other flag.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Like this?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, narrator: Before being lowered at sunset, the flag should again be raised to the peak momentarily. It should be lowered slowly, with a solemn dignity befitting the occasion.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Can I slow down, Mom? No, Johnny, not 'til it's all the way to the ground.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Didn't I say north?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I dropped my thumbtacks.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Do you have a compass?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Mom? Mom?]

JAD: So there you have it. Thank you.

ROBERT: Now we sent it off to Ira. Ira opened it up or whatever, put it on, and this is his opinion.

IRA GLASS: It was horrible. It was really horrible. To the point where, likewell, like, you know, there's stories which people turn in and, you know, they need a little buffing up here and there. And then there's stories that are bad. And then there's a special category where we really don't know what to say in response.

JAD: [laughs] So apparently he didn't like it. Here's what his producer, Julie Snyder, had to say.

JULIE SNYDER: And I remember at the time, I was working out of my apartment. And so I remember even at one point standing in the bathroom, staring at the brick wall, listening to the piece while I was on the phone and just being really, really confused.

JAD: I thought I was past this, but I'm literally tearing up in embarrassment right now.

JULIE SNYDER: I was just very confused. I was very, very, very confused. I have a better perspective on it now.

IRA GLASS: I stand by my earlier judgment. I am not confused. And everything that was bad about it is still bad. Like, it doesn't have a point. You know what I mean? Like, it starts off in a place that—that seems like it could go somewhere. And then it's almost like the two of you take this premise of this old record, and then you just kind of dance on the surface of this record and throw in a lot of shenanigans. And then it ends and it says literally nothing. So at the end of two minutes, it's both sort of complicated. You keep waiting to understand what is it about, and then ultimately you are left wondering, what was that about? I mean, it's just amazing that you were able to put together such a wonderful program after that, you know, that somehow you—I mean, I don't ...

JULIE SNYDER: I have to say that that was—listening back to it today, I was just like, "Wow, it is really interesting to see, sort of the incredibly early stages of where you just got really, really headed in the wrong direction."

JAD: But if someone were to have walked in the room and asked both of you will these two guys succeed? Back at that moment, you would have said, no freaking way.

JULIE SNYDER: Oh, absolutely not.

IRA GLASS: Yeah. Clearly they're a terrible influence on each other. That Jad allows a kind of self indulgence in Robert, and Robert brings out a sort of self indulgence in Jad. Clearly just terrible chemistry. Like, I never would have put you together on anything ever again. Let me just say, like, this wasn't an episode where we were demanding a lot. We were looking—all we wanted was things would be short. And this is an episode where one of the segments that made it where you guys didn't was simply scallops on a beach. No narration, just going like, click click click click click click click click click. That's it. The sound of scallops for 25 seconds. We ran that instead of running this.

JAD: So we lost out to scallops.

ROBERT: I think that—well, first of all, Ira went to Brown University. They don't know anything there. They don't have majors. They don't have any—I don't know what they do there.

JAD: Exactly.

ROBERT: But if that man thinks that clicking scallops beats our flag thing, he should go back to radio school and start all over. It's my opinion. My humble opinion.

JAD: Exactly. How about a little Oberlin yeah. Yeah!

ROBERT: Anyway ...

JAD: No, he's a great supporter of the show. So this was an inauspicious beginning, to say the least.

ROBERT: We thought, well, if we failed on the two-minute Ira thing, now what are we gonna do? So what your friend is in this situation is that there is a kind of restlessness and a kind of ambition that sort of—and I really do feel it comes from here in some way that you keep wanting to poke at things, you keep wanting to challenge things.

JAD: The flip side of that, as the Ira situation was just one bit of evidence for, is that sometimes it doesn't translate so well to the rest of the world.

ROBERT: Yeah. I heard recently that there was—somebody was vomiting in color this week on campus. Like, you know, that's a little excessive, taking color dye and then vomiting out in some kind of interesting tableau.

JAD: Well, it makes perfect sense here, though.

ROBERT: Well, I don't know.

JAD: Well, I'll just give you an example personally. I spent four years in composition here, writing music, writing this kind of music, basically.

[aggressive noise]

ROBERT: What were you thinking?

JAD: I was thinking 200 years of, you know, European harmonies handed down that—you know, screw that. Why should we take the harmonies that are given to us from the Europeans? Let's just flip that on the head. What is that idea of consonance? Dissonance is a new consonant. But just question, man! Question! In any case. Makes perfect sense here at Oberlin.

ROBERT: Don't applaud, don't applaud, don't applaud.

JAD: See? This is the only room where you'd get applause for that kind of music. And I love you all for it. But no quicker could you clear a room than to put something like [aggressive noise] on and people would just run from the room. And I've tried this in New York. I've said, "Hey, check this thing out I made when I was a senior!" And it didn't go so well. For me, Oberlin and the kind of thought process and respect for ideas and also hostility towards ideas that you want to sort of—you want to poke at things, that very Oberlin spirit is something that for me was like a grenade, where you pull the pin and it goes off later. And for me, that was about seven years later. I mean, I spent several years wondering, "What the hell did I learn here?" Like, I know how to create some of the most awful and dissonant music. To saw pianos in half, which was, like, encouraged in odd ways. Not that I ever did that, but what does that really give you? But what it gives you, I think, is something interesting and beautiful because those ideas come back in a very different form.

ROBERT: So you can see then that really what we're doing is this is about complex ideas. But it is essentially, because of Jad, it is a musical composition that we are doing. This gives us a chance to do what music actually does when it's just naked and being music, which is to thrill you or give you a feeling of deep sadness or of great joy.

JAD: So anyways, we went on and on, and around here was where the Oberlin nostalgia began, so we'll leave it at that for now. But afterwards we had time for two questions. The audience questions weren't recorded, so Robert had to paraphrase. Here he is.

ROBERT: The question is how do we choose what level to approach a topic at when our listeners range from people who know nothing to people who know all too much.

[laughter]

JAD: That's an interesting question because it is maybe—Robert and I are very—we like each other a lot, but we disagree on many, many things. And this is one of the ones we always fight about, because I come down on one side of your question and he comes down on another often.

ROBERT: I am a network-trained reporter. In my companies where I've worked, at ABC, for example, if you have a problem, like if you go, "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch—I'm not sure exactly what kind of a substance it was." Then drop the substance. Make it a pail, he's gonna just fetch a pail. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail. Good. We don't have to deal with the water issue at all. It also shortens the piece. So I find safety in less. And what I discovered is he thinks—he thinks the way to solve it is to say Jack and Jill went up the hill to get a pail of—well, first of all, we'll begin with two molecules, we'll put them together, then we'll add another molecule in a quarter. Let's talk to 17 people about that. I said, "No, we do not do that!"

JAD: So we have a complexity disagreement that sort of runs through these shows where I'll come in with a 25-minute version of some sort of neuroscience story with very exciting words like 'dorsolateral prefrontal cortex' over and over. And he's like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't say that."

ROBERT: See, what's normal to him is, like, terrifying to me. I think if you have a Latinate, you just run from the room. That's what I think.

JAD: So we have a bit of a tug of war often during the editing process where I put in too much, he takes out, and then we sort of like, we find a nice balance where we might be talking to, I don't know, everybody, but talking in a way that doesn't fall into the traps of talking to those who know too much, but also doesn't dumb down. So there is a broad expanse of geography in the middle.

ROBERT: I think we both start also as virgins. We don't really know what we're talking about at the beginning, and then we find out along the way. And we make that very clear. So we never pretend to anybody that we're scholars, because we're not. And we do represent ourselves as novices, which is a good thing. It's a good thing in a couple of ways. First, it means we can say "What?" Honestly. And the second thing is you can say, "Could you explain that again?" Honestly. And then the third thing is it allows us to challenge these people as though we were ordinary, curious folks. Like, you can't mean—we have a show coming up right now about synthetic biology, where engineers are building life forms that are new to existence, new to the history of life. And they're doing it quite aggressively. And we yell at them, and we fight with them and we argue with them, and they give right back. But we're trying to model a kind of conversation with important people, powerful people, but particularly knowledgeable people, where we say, you can go up to a person with a lot of knowledge and ask him why. Ask him how does he know that? Tell him stop. Ask him why he keeps going and get away with it. And that's important.

JAD: Yep. Also for me, I mean, just to add to that, it's important to me. I mean, I am the child of two scientists. And it's funny, I once tried to interview my mom, and she went into scientist mode. And it was really startling because she would—I mean, my whole life would come home at the dinner table and she's studying intake of fat into cells. That's her thing. And so she'd say, "Here's how I think it works, Jad." And she'd grab the napkin and kind of carve it into a circle like a cell and say, "Here's—okay, now this salt shaker, this is a fat molecule. It's trying to get into the cell, and it's coming, coming, coming, coming, coming. But it needs something to ferry it through the cell wall. So here's the fork. The fork is a protein. It's the protein I study. And it takes the salt shaker, which is the fat, and it ferries it through the cell wall." And she's just like—I don't know what the hell she's talking about, but what I get from her is this, like, excitement. It's a passion. It's just—it's a sense of mystery, of, like, figuring something out about the universe. But then I tried to interview her, and she went into a really sort of careful, mediated scientist way, using, like, "alpha lipoic acid," kind of really big words. And so for me, it's about challenging people, and it's about challenging people who know, as he was saying. But it's also about presenting science as something which is not inevitable. It is not something where people who are esteemed sit behind podiums and convey knowledge to the rest of us who know nothing. It's about going into your lab, screwing up, making mistakes, you know, breaking stuff, doing it again and again and again until you get lucky. You know, it's just. It's like anything. It's like ...

ROBERT: You have to get bored to get lucky a lot of times.

JAD: Yeah. So it's a—so for me, there's a double edge to this. Like, you want to bring them off their podium, but you also want to make them feel flawed and wonderful, you know?

ROBERT: Well, we'll take one last question, if you got any. Yeah. How do we pick what to talk about? Well, I don't know, exactly. We talk about a lot of things, and then some things stick to the wall. Like, we were talking about sperm. We're not sure we're allowed to talk about sperm in public.

JAD: Sure we are.

ROBERT: But sperm has gotten so interesting. Did you know ...

JAD: Just recently, in the last few weeks.

ROBERT: Did you know that the testes of a blue whale that can weigh one ton? I mean, that just stops the traffic. So we have to figure out whether we're allowed to—whether we're allowed to do that. So sometimes we have to like, sort of test whether it's polite enough. But the other thing is do we continue to think about it? Does it sort of—does it stay sticky? And if we keep coming back—I'm sorry.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Hey, you're the school where they're vomiting for art out there. So thank you all very, very much for coming. It's been a great, great delight to be here. Thanks.

[applause]

JAD: I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Thanks to everyone at Oberlin College for the warm homecoming reception. Radiolab's funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. I'm Jad Abumrad. For Robert Krulwich and I, take care.

 

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