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Episode 361: Ari Shapiro
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Ari Shapiro (@arishapiro) is the host of NPR's All Things Considered and the author of the memoir The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening (HarperCollins).
Social: @CNFPod
Substack: rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com
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Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Promo Code
00:00:00
Speaker
Before we get started just want to give that shout out to athletic brewing my favorite non-alcoholic beer out there It's not a paid plug, but I am a brand ambassador and I want to celebrate this amazing product makes me happy If you head to athletic brewing calm use the promo code Brendan Oh 20 at checkout
00:00:17
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You get a nice little discount on your first order. I don't get any money. They're not officially a sponsor of the podcast. I just get points towards swag or beer in the end. Give it a shot. Try the athletic light or the free wave. My personal favorites right now. I love this metaphor. Can I steal this for future interviews? I will attribute it to you. It's really good.
00:00:45
Speaker
AC and efforts at CNF Pod, the creative non-fiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, how's it going? Happy St. Patty's Day. I will have the Guinness. I will have a Sam Adams, cause it's your cousin from Boston. The worst. Could they have at least gotten someone who does a decent Boston accent like Casey Affleck? Ari Shapiro's here. Ari?
00:01:14
Speaker
is a long-time NPR reporter and host of a show you might have heard of, All Things Considered. Now he's the author of The Best Strangers in the World, stories from a life spent listening. Published by Harper Collins.
Guest Introduction: Ari Shapiro
00:01:31
Speaker
Great talk. Great talk about book panic, the impermanence of radio Ari loves, and the permanence of writing a book that terrifies him.
00:01:42
Speaker
interviewing people and how novelists help inform Ari's world as a journalist. Lots of great stuff and Ari really came to play ball. He even tape synced his side of the conversation so this episode shows you the power of wearing cans, headphones, and recording your side of the conversation. It leads to a warmer tone.
00:02:04
Speaker
I mean, sure, Ari has nice gear, but if you shrink and soften the room, as I like to say, this is how we capture great sound, and that way the listener isn't distracted by your cavernous dining room, Steve. Make sure you're heading over to brendanomeira.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. It's now on Substack. Just click the lightning bolt on my website or visit rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com.
00:02:33
Speaker
Still first in the month, no spam can't beat it.
00:02:38
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If you dig the show, consider sharing it across your network so we can grow the pie and get the CNFing thing into the brains of other CNFers who need the juice. And don't we all need some juice? You can leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts so the wayward CNFer might say shit. I'll give that a shot. Also, show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. You might want to consider heading over to patreon.com slash CNFpot
00:03:03
Speaker
and consider dropping a few bucks in the hat if you glean some value from what we churn and burn here at CNF Pod HQ. And one quick thing before we jump into this conversation, Monday, March 20th, 2023, three days from when this pod, this episode drops, the podcast turns 10 years old. Can you believe it? 10 years, fourth grader,
00:03:32
Speaker
maybe just getting its first bicycle, its first mountain bike. It started with Susan Kushner Resnick, and 10 years later, here we are with Ari Shapiro for episode 361. We'll celebrate next week with some cake, but I just wanted to drop that bit of info into your lap. A huge, huge milestone for me in the show. I'll have a little birthday riff in the parting shot, just so you know, okay? All right, enough of that, enough housekeeping.
00:04:02
Speaker
You're here to listen to Ari Shapiro, so let's get
The Nature of Writing and Anxiety
00:04:05
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after it. Alright, CNFers, hoo!
00:04:17
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I've always thought of all things considered as a temporary medium where I do a report and it floats off downstream and it disappears and of course I know there's a historical record and if I make a mistake that has ripples and it has an impact but
00:04:35
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To me it feels like a book is something that sticks around forever and stares at you as the book you wrote. And telling audio stories on the radio is something where I get to start with a clean slate every day. And if yesterday's show wasn't as good as it could have been, we have a fresh opportunity today. And if it was the best show you've ever done, well, maybe you can make it even better tomorrow.
00:04:54
Speaker
And given that the book is something that is more ossified versus the audio experience, what was that experience like for you to wrestle with?
00:05:07
Speaker
successive waves of panic I think is probably the best way to describe it. And then after the manuscript was locked, just having these like nights of obsessing over the way I characterized something a person said or a quote that I used and the context in which I framed it and just these things that if it were a radio story, I might think about it for a day or two and then the radio story airs and you see how it lands and you move on to the next one.
00:05:37
Speaker
As you know, the timeline on a book is like years. And for a significant chunk of that, the book is locked and there's nothing you can do. And there's all of this for me anyway. And by the way, I don't tend to be an anxious person. I don't tend to be a particularly obsessive person. But for me, there's all this kind of free floating anxiety about having tried this new form of expression for me, a new form of writing for me.
00:06:01
Speaker
putting myself out there in a way I've never put myself out there before. And so all of that free-floating worry ends up zeroing in on one tiny detail that I can do nothing about at this point. And those tiny details change over time, but there's always something. I can totally relate to the thing. I feel like I'm in therapy right now.
00:06:25
Speaker
Was that your experience as a writer? Am I alone in this? The panic is so real. And right now, given that you spent the predominant years of your coming of age and growing up in Oregon, I'm writing a biography now set to come out in 2025 of Steve Prefontaine.
00:06:47
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And right now, like the book deal just went through like three weeks ago and like, thank you very much. But it's like the middle of the night panics of like, am I going to be able to stick the landing? Can I get the right people to talk to me and the people who have talked and feel burned or whatever? It's like, how do I get that trust? Can I get that trust? Is it going to be a thin biography? But I want this thing to be chunky and big. And it's like, and those are the things that keep me up at night.
00:07:16
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I think back to the successive waves of fears where the first wave of fear was, I'm just not going to be able to reach the word count. I'm going to run out of things to say, and I'm not going to be able to fulfill the contract. That was the first fear. The second fear was that my editor would see what I had written and say, actually, we've changed our minds. This is garbage.
00:07:37
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The third fear was that the public would say, oh, actually, this is garbage. It's like you have all of these waves. But by the time you get to like the third, fourth, fifth, you realize that fears number one and two were unfounded. So maybe fear number three is also unfounded. And maybe fear number four is just your sort of like lizard brain overreacting.
00:08:02
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And then you realize that the more you have conversations of this nature, no matter how far along you are in your career or no matter how far along Michael Lewis is in his career or whatever, you realize that everyone at every level is kind of experiencing the same level of panic and you're like, okay, this is normal, actually.
00:08:20
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Well, it's funny because I'm such a novice newcomer, beginner when it comes to writing books, but I have more than 20 years of experience of writing radio stories. And so when I sit down to write a radio story, and I have a pile of transcripts that I've highlighted, and in my notebook I've sketched out all the scenes, and I'm staring at this blank screen, blank document on my screen, and thinking, I don't actually know if I can turn all of these ingredients into a cake.
00:08:49
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all of these elements into a radio piece. As a radio reporter, I can say to myself, oh, I feel this way every time. I've always felt this way for more than 20 years. This is a part of the process. Let's just move through it. But as a book author, I'm still so new to this that I actually think maybe this is something that I'm not good at. Maybe this is something that I can't accomplish. Maybe this is something that I'm not cut out for.
00:09:15
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And given that, you know, your stock and trade is in audio and it's, you know, a lot of like say, you know, musicians or painters or let's say painters, they can see things that maybe other people don't see and musicians may, you can also attest to that as well, that you might hear things that non-musicians don't hear. And so since you work in audio and there's a lot of audio around this, be it in radio or a lot of people like myself with podcasts,
00:09:42
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What are certain things that you hear because your ear is so trained that a lot of other people might miss?
The Art of Listening in Journalism
00:09:49
Speaker
This is a very general answer, but there's no such thing as a silent space. There's, I mean, as when you're a beginning field producer, you learn to collect room tone wherever you go because every room sounds different. And when you get into spaces with a crowd or birdsong or wind blowing or whatever, that becomes all the more
00:10:11
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rich and nuanced. And then you learn how to put into words the things that your eyes perceive so that the listener can create those images in their own head. Susan Stamberg, one of NPR's founding mothers, always says the pictures are better on the radio. And I think that's because
00:10:28
Speaker
The act of listening forces you to engage your brain in a way that the act of absorbing stories through your eyes does not. Like when you're watching television, everything is sort of provided for you and you can be very passive. When you're listening to the radio, you have to engage your brain. But to get back to your question, the role of the journalist then is to provide the tools for the listener to use their brain in that way so that I'm giving you
00:10:55
Speaker
the audio signposts, the narrative description. You know, I've done a lot of overseas reporting and one thing that I often wrestle with when I'm putting those stories together is when you hear somebody speaking in a different language and you're gonna use voiceover interpretation, how much of the person's speaking in the clear in the other language do you allow to run before you start to bring in the interpretation? Because so much is carried
00:11:25
Speaker
in a speaker's tone of voice, in the way that they are saying things. And, you know, to give one specific example that has nothing to do with the foreign language, but just to do with tone of voice, as we record this, The New York Times recently ran a profile of the great Indian cookbook writer Raghavan Iyer. And shortly after that profile published, I had an interview with him scheduled and
00:11:49
Speaker
It's a really powerful, complicated time to talk to him because he's in the final stages of cancer and expects not only that this will be his last book, but that it will be sort of his last round of interviews. And so people are talking to him about the sweep of his life and his legacy and what he leaves behind and how he's thinking about the end.
00:12:11
Speaker
I absolutely adore Kim Severson, who wrote the New York Times profile of him, and it is no criticism of her to say, I think that the radio story will be powerful in a way that a print story can't be, because hearing him pause, hearing his tone of voice, hearing him cough during the conversation, all conveys things that the most well-written newspaper or magazine article doesn't. Sorry, Kim, I love you, love your work.
00:12:41
Speaker
That gets to the point about interviewing as a skill and the degree to which you do prep beforehand versus leaving yourself open to discovery. So what's the calculus for you in terms of the preparation of being able to conduct the interview versus totally leaving yourself open to whatever your guest is talking about?
00:13:05
Speaker
The more I prepare, the more I'm able to listen and be open to where the conversation might go. So I will do a lot of research and write a lot of questions that I may never use because if the conversation goes in a particular direction and a door opens, I want to go through that door. I want to follow that path. This is especially true of pre-recorded interviews. It's different if you have, you know, four minutes with a member of the cabinet or
00:13:34
Speaker
a senator in those situations yes you'll ask follow-ups based on what the person says but in a live interview you're always having to make calculations about do I move on to the next thing follow up on this thing but if I'm pre-taping a feature interview with somebody
00:13:49
Speaker
I do the work, I write the questions, I prepare, and then I get ready to throw that aside. I could give a specific example if you want, which is the pop star Vincent was releasing his first album. I was interviewing him about it and in the first answer to a question I asked, he described sort of the genesis of the album as
00:14:12
Speaker
this session of writing on like index cards things that I think he described it as things he wanted to let go of or something like that and he told that story and I bulldozed on to the next question that I had prepared to ask and to their great credit my editor Mallory Yu who was listening in slacked me and said
00:14:35
Speaker
why don't you ask what was on one of those index cards? And that's something that if I'd been listening more closely and less wedded to my preparation, I would have realized in the moment. And that's why editors are invaluable because Mallory heard what I overlooked. And so after I bulldozed through the second question I had plans to ask, I said, actually, let's rewind a bit. You mentioned those index cards. Can you tell me what was on one of them and how it translated to one of the songs on this album?
00:15:02
Speaker
And that sort of opening led to what turned out to be the entire rest of the conversation. And so in the edited version of that that aired on All Things Considered, you never heard the second written question that I forged ahead and asked. Instead, you heard his first answer where I mentioned the index cards and then my saying, let me follow up on that as though I had the wisdom to follow up on it instead of getting a cue from my wise editor.
00:15:32
Speaker
little behind the curtain there, like, oh, that's not really seamless. That was great. Yeah, they make us look good.
00:15:38
Speaker
Now, in a talk you gave, there was something of either you brought it up, you were asked, it was something like if you had to hold up a placard and it had one word on it that was like important meant a lot or something you wanted to convey, that word would be listen. Although maybe you can just like, you know, just kind of speak to that, especially in your medium in journalism and especially in an age when a lot of people don't listen.
00:16:05
Speaker
I think listening is such a powerful act. People sometimes ask me what it's like to go into places where people are having the worst days of their lives, whether it's after a natural disaster or in a war or what have you, and ask them to tell their stories. And of course, there are people who don't wanna talk, and I respect that, but you would be surprised at the number of people who want someone to listen to them.
00:16:32
Speaker
And I was reading something recently and it was actually the mentorship Slack at NPR that mentioned when folks talk about a problem they have, they're not necessarily asking for a solution. They're often asking for someone to listen. And so I find that as an interviewer, as a reporter, as a storyteller,
00:16:57
Speaker
listening is the superpower, listening is the tool, listening is sort of the foundation on which everything is built. But then I also go and tell stories to an audience of listeners who
00:17:12
Speaker
in hearing and absorbing the stories that I tell perform an act of empathy and see the world through the eyes of someone else and hopefully get out of their bubbles, which was also what I wanted to explore in this book, The Best Strangers in the World was
00:17:27
Speaker
how we can kind of bridge those chasms of difference and make the unfamiliar feel a little bit less strange. And I think in so many cases, listening is the answer, even if in this book it's an act of reading rather than specifically of listening with our ears.
00:17:45
Speaker
And listening in particular and interviewing, be it reporting or even something that's pre-recorded and you might be able to edit out excessively long pauses, how have you learned to cultivate that muscle or strengthen the muscle to sometimes let silence do some heavy lifting?
Interview Techniques and Challenges
00:18:05
Speaker
Oh, silence can be one of the most powerful things. You know, I think back to a This American Life episode where, I don't know if you remember this, the name of the episode was Retracted. And this was years ago, but it still sticks in my mind.
00:18:24
Speaker
The theatrical monologueist Mike Daisy had been doing a piece about a Foxconn factory in China where Apple products were built. He adapted the piece for an episode of This American Life and then it was revealed that many of the things Daisy had said were factually, journalistically true.
00:18:42
Speaker
were invented. And so this American life basically devoted an entire episode to the retraction. They went out and re-reported some of it. They, you know, had multiple elements, but the one that sticks in my mind was Ira Glass interviewing Mike Daisy. And the most powerful part of it
00:19:03
Speaker
was the silences and I don't know in specific numbers how many seconds these silences were but they felt endless and they said more than any words could could convey and there are definitely interviews I do where you know I'm often talking to somebody for 10 or 15 minutes and cutting it down to four or six minutes and when I say
00:19:28
Speaker
I'm cutting it down. What I actually mean is a producer, editor, and I are working together to cut it down. And typically, after we finish taping the conversation, the producer, editor, and I will talk about what we want the cut to be, and the producer will go and do the first take of that, the first version of it, and then the editor will listen, I'll listen, and so on.
00:19:48
Speaker
And there are many times that I've said to producers, make sure not to shorten that silence at all. There was one interview I did with a public health professional in Africa. And I say in Africa because she worked on COVID vaccines for the entire continent. And I sort of asked about the role that racism had played in the lack of vaccines reaching African countries.
00:20:18
Speaker
And I asked whether she had hoped that it would change or something to that effect. And there was this long pause, and then a sigh, and then she said, one must always have hope. And if the producer had taken out the long pause and the sigh, it would have meant something completely different. And so, yeah, silence can speak volumes, is what I'm trying to say.
00:20:40
Speaker
Yeah, and it can be real hard to, as the interviewer, not to fill that silence with your own conversation, because it can be tense and awkward to just let it play out. Yeah, it can be really hard to sit in that silence.
00:20:57
Speaker
And there are so many different kinds of silence. There's the, this is really emotional and hard for me to say, even though I know what I have to say kind of silence. There is the, you've backed me into a corner and I have no good answer to the question you're asking kind of silence. Like silence doesn't have a single meaning. Silence can have as many different meanings as words.
00:21:17
Speaker
Now, there are so many different and wonderful interviewers out there, be it Ira Glass, Terry Gross, Mark Ameran. And as someone who is extremely skilled and as great as you are, what have you learned from the bouquet of listeners, of interviewers out there that you have kind of added to your quiver to make you better at what you do?
00:21:42
Speaker
Well, it's not a specific skill, but I'm really interested in the balance that people strike between bringing their full selves to an interview and trying to be a surrogate for the listener. Because to a certain extent, you have to do both. And that's a lot of what I struggle with in the various chapters in this book, The Best Strangers in the World.
00:22:08
Speaker
I want to show up with my lived experience, with my history, with the person I am, but the conversation is not about my lived experience. It's not about my history. It's not about the person I am. And so I'm interested in when an interviewer approaches something as a fan, as a skeptic, as a critic, as a non-believer.
00:22:33
Speaker
And when an interviewer approaches something as, you know, like an AI, you know, the like algorithmic version of the best question that anyone in that situation could ask. And all great interviewers strike the balance slightly differently in different scenarios. So there is no one right answer to the question. The interviewers who do it best, even the word best is crazy because
00:23:02
Speaker
Howard Stern's best interview sounds nothing like Terry Gross's best interview. And yet they are both excellent interviewers. So the interviewers who do it best in air quotes find the right in air quotes balance there. And that's what I find so fascinating. And that's what I'm always trying to explore the push-pull of, particularly in this book.
00:23:23
Speaker
And I like in the book how, and I've heard you say this too, but you write it in the book also, is that your microphone and your kit and headset, they serve as a snorkel and mask. And I love that expression because it definitely, it's a way to get underneath. And it's also kind of a uniform, because I imagine that once those things click in, you become a slightly different person, like this version of yourself that allows you to get to those depths.
00:23:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think about one moment when I spent all of 2012 covering Mitt Romney's presidential campaign and I can remember going to this bikers for Romney rally in South Carolina and it wasn't a formal campaign event but I had gone there as a reporter and I just remember the experience of walking through this crowd of like
00:24:16
Speaker
big, burly, bearded, tattooed, leather vest-wearing, motorcycle junkies for Romney, and being able to walk up to strangers and say, hey, tell me about your life. Tell me about your view of politics. Tell me about why you're here. And thinking, what a privilege that I, this queer Jewish kid from Oregon who went to an Ivy League university,
00:24:42
Speaker
can walk up to strangers in this context, ask them these questions, and for the most part they'll answer. I realize that things changed over the course of the Trump campaign and onwards where reporting in the United States on politics became more dangerous than it was when I was embedded with the Romney campaign. Reporters were insulted, spin-on, attacked, I don't make light of that.
00:25:06
Speaker
But the metaphor of the microphone and headset as a mask and snorkel obviously extends beyond politics, too. When I'm in countries that I might want to visit someday as a tourist and I'm there as a journalist, I get to have experiences that no tourist would ever have. And it just feels like an incredible privilege. And I think it also underscores the power of being able to get face to face with people.
00:25:30
Speaker
Given that we live in such digitally anonymous times, even if you know your avatar is your actual headshot on Twitter and on your Gmail account, it still feels very detached and borderline anonymous and very easy to say no to and very dispassionate. But when you're face-to-face, like going up to big burly bikers who ordinarily wouldn't talk to you,
00:25:53
Speaker
Suddenly those barriers are broken down and that's kind of like a skill in journalism today that I think that we're that Maybe we're getting away from but it's it's so so important to be able to make that extra effort to get face-to-face And it returns to the power of listening independent of whether you're a journalist or not meeting people where they are and
00:26:17
Speaker
literally and metaphorically, goes a long way towards breaking down our stereotypes and our fears and our prejudices. And it doesn't mean that we have to see the world in the same way that they do, but to allow ourselves to understand how and why they see the world in the way they do can be really powerful.
00:26:40
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment in the book where the man, his name is Monzer, and when you were interviewing him, you wrote that he didn't know this, but our chat felt to me like some twisted kind of audition.
00:26:55
Speaker
And that is sometimes the math that you're playing in your head when you're doing a radio story or a long magazine feature or even a book that, especially in radio, like you need to be a good talker to make for a good audio story. Isn't that a crass phrase? We use it all the time and it is such a reduction. Like, is this person a good talker?
00:27:17
Speaker
Yeah, and it's like, this person's story could be great, but are they, can they tell a good story? Are they charismatic? Are they audibly charismatic? And that's so hard. Yeah, and it's like, well, do I just need a 10 second cut for a new spot, or do I want a few 30 second clips for a four minute story, or am I looking, as in the case with Monzer Omar, who was the Syrian refugee I met in Turkey, am I looking to follow him for literally years as he makes his way to Germany and then tries to bring his family over to meet him?
00:27:44
Speaker
I was, you know, in one afternoon in the city of Izmir, Turkey, trying to find a Syrian refugee in a crowd of, you know, thousands who I could follow for years. And that's a weird kind of assignment. Yeah. And I think you later write that, you know, was this just vampirism where people poured their pain into my microphone and I walked away with a paycheck. And it's like this Janet Malcolm-esque math that you're doing in your head all the time as a reporter.
00:28:13
Speaker
Yeah, and ultimately I don't believe that reporting, I mean Janet Malcolm takes a very, I don't know, what adjective do you use?
00:28:22
Speaker
clear-eyed or something more pejorative view of journalists as blood suckers may not exactly be her word, but something along those lines. I think I view our occupation a little more generously. I do think we have the power to do good and to help shape people's lives in a positive way.
00:28:45
Speaker
But there is also an element of you pour your story into my microphone and then it is mine and I can do what I want to with it.
00:28:54
Speaker
Yeah, I love how you write, too. I felt, you know, being being a radio producer and a reporter, that it felt like a superpower, this ability to move between worlds. And by the time I graduated from Yale and became a journalist, I realized these boundary crossing skills I had picked up as the Jewish kid in Fargo and as the gay teen in Portland could serve me as a reporter.
Personal Experiences and Education
00:29:15
Speaker
So that's it. Yeah. So maybe speak to that and your, you know, that boundary crossing ability and how that served you in your career.
00:29:25
Speaker
Well, just to fill in the backstory a little bit here, you know, when I was an elementary school student in Fargo, my brothers and I were the only Jewish kids in our school, so we'd go from classroom to classroom explaining what Hanukkah was with a menorah and dreidel. Then when I was eight and my family moved to Oregon,
00:29:40
Speaker
There were these big anti-gay rights measures on the statewide ballot that ultimately failed but prompted this huge debate even in my high school about whether gay people should be allowed to exist or not. And then I came out and was like the only out gay person in my high school so everybody suddenly was projecting their opinions that had previously been abstract onto me.
00:30:02
Speaker
And so the revelation was that as a journalist, I can, as you said, perform those acts of translation and be an ambassador, not just between like the queer community that I was a part of and the high school that I was a part of, not just between the Jewish community I belonged to and my elementary school, but I could help people listening to NPR better understand the experience of
00:30:30
Speaker
Venezuelan migrants walking hundreds of miles through Colombia or you know I just finished this reporting trip that went through Senegal, Morocco and Spain connecting the dots from climate change to global migration to the rise of far-right political leaders. These are far off
00:30:45
Speaker
people and experiences and events that somebody picking up their kids from school or cooking dinner might not feel like they can personally relate to. And my challenge, my task, my privilege is to tell those stories in a way that people will be able to relate to, will be able to identify with and say, oh, even though that person may be on the other side of the world in a country that I will never visit, I can understand their experience more deeply now.
00:31:15
Speaker
And a moment ago you said that as being the only out student at your high school and then suddenly people are projecting opinions and stuff onto you, how did you navigate that and shoulder that as a 15, 16, 17 year old kid?
00:31:33
Speaker
I'm not gonna say it was always fun. There were definitely elements of it that were very tough. As I say in the book, I carried mace because there were absolutely threats, but there was never physical violence against me. But, you know, as I say, I figured the best way to drown out the whisper campaign was with a bullhorn. And so I plastered my locker with postcards of hunky men. I pinned a pink triangle pin to my backpack. I came
00:32:01
Speaker
to school in drag for Halloween my senior year and I just figured like if you have a problem with me that is your problem not mine and I'm not going to make apologies or trying to or try to fit into the box that you want me to be in and
00:32:22
Speaker
So I was a little bit out there, but I also, I mean, at the same time, I was like taking AP courses and I was doing Science Olympiad and I was like a very studious student. And so I wasn't just some queer rebel renegade who was going to the all ages gay clubs on the weekend, although I was that too. It was that sort of magic trick of straddling the two worlds.
00:32:52
Speaker
I love how you tie in a lot of fiction and literature. I'll get to that in a moment. But you were an English major when you went to Yale, and so naturally you're immersed in writing and reading things critically. So in what ways did being an English major then, and not knowing quite what you were going to do when you graduated, inform the young adult and the reporter you would become? I always
00:33:17
Speaker
say that the best thing a liberal arts education can give you is the ability to read, write, and think. Whether you are majoring in history, political science, philosophy, English, or psychology or whatever, studying the liberal arts will teach you how to read a complicated text, whatever that text may be,
00:33:45
Speaker
write clearly and thoughtfully about what is significant in it and think carefully about the content. I should probably say read, think, and write because that's the order that it goes in, but read, write, and think sounds better. And so, you know, as a journalist,
00:34:03
Speaker
I'm taking the skills I gained as an English major reading, writing, and thinking about Shakespeare or Chaucer or what have you, and I'm applying them to Supreme Court opinions or the January 6th report or whatever, the Robert Mueller investigation.
00:34:19
Speaker
But the fundamental building blocks, the reading, the writing and thinking, those are skills that I learned by studying literature, which I think it's important to say I could just as easily have learned by studying Plato or the founding documents of the United States or whatever other text I might have chosen to study as an undergrad.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment in the book, too, where you said the Spanish author Javier Cercas, he told you that probably you are on the radio because you want to be loved. And how true is that? Yeah, that's the other part of the answer to your question about what was it like being the only out gay kid at school. Is it like, yeah, there were challenges, but I also have never shied away from attention and suddenly everybody was paying attention to me. So, you know.
00:35:05
Speaker
Yeah, and then you write to the conversations that help you see the world most clearly are not necessarily researchers, policymakers, or so-called experts, or what journalists call crassly newsmakers. It's writers that are artists and especially writers. So how important are novelists and fiction writers to how you see the world and how it frames your journalism too?
00:35:31
Speaker
Oh, hugely important. The chapter that I wrote in the book specifically is about fiction, but I think it could just as easily have been about theater or music or other art forms. I think what artists do that is so crucial is they reflect the world back to us and help us see it more clearly.
00:35:53
Speaker
Yes, the arts can be an escape, but particularly in the newsroom, I find that so often people treat the arts as kind of dessert, like you have the appetizer, the main dish, the soup, the salad, and then, oh, you get a little treat at the end, a conversation with a musician or an author or a playwright or a filmmaker, whatever the case may be. But to me, those conversations
00:36:21
Speaker
are meaning making. Those conversations show us how to make sense of everything else that we're talking about in other parts of the show. And so in that respect, they're absolutely crucial.
00:36:35
Speaker
Yeah, the artists of that nature metabolize the information in such a way, and they make it like... That's such a good verb. That is the perfect way to describe it. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go on. Yeah, and it's a way to... It gets into the bloodstream a little bit better through that semi-permeable membranes in our body. And it just... I love this metaphor. Can I steal this for future interviews? I will attribute it to you. It's really good. Absolutely, absolutely. I'm happy to play some small part.
00:37:05
Speaker
But I love that idea that is, I think it frames it in such a way that it really does just get into our bloodstream a bit better. And be it Jonathan Safran Foer writing about 9-11, books rarely make me cry just because it's kind of hard. There's no musical score. But his 9-11 book, it's just like I was bawling at the end.
00:37:27
Speaker
Extremely loud and incredibly close. The example that I often reach for is N.K. Jemisin, the science fiction fantasy writer who was the first black woman to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel and then the first author ever to win that award three years in a row for her Broken Earth trilogy. And when I interviewed her about the trilogy, I asked why she wanted to write about Apocalypse.
00:37:51
Speaker
like the end of the world and she told me that she's interested in when we consider apocalypse to have begun because what some people consider apocalypse is just the baseline that other people have been experiencing for a very long time. I think about that all the time in my journalism because when we in the United States in our bubble of privilege experience
00:38:17
Speaker
whatever the case may be, you know, environmental destruction or pandemic or protests over racial justice, I realize that what suddenly seems apocalyptic to me is a reality that others have been living in for a very long time. And it's N.K. Jemisin, a science fiction fantasy writer, who illuminated that for me.
00:38:39
Speaker
You know, you were, you know, talking sort of at the beginning of our conversation, we're talking about, you know, just just, you know, writing this book and the sort of the panic around certain aspects of the whole process. And for, you know, for years and years and years, you've been obviously writing every day, but you're writing for the ear.
Transition from Radio to Books
00:38:59
Speaker
And this time you're you're writing for the page. And what ways did those each each manifest? How did it?
00:39:07
Speaker
Yeah, just how did you wrestle with the skill of doing one versus the other? You know, so many NPR people come from print and they have to learn how to write for the year after having been trained to write for the eye. I had never done journalism in college and I started at NPR as an intern right out of college. So I've really only learned how to write for the year. I mean, ever since school, obviously.
00:39:35
Speaker
And so I had to relearn the skills of writing for the eye, which means, and typically this would happen over the course of several drafts, where I would first write a chapter and it would come out kind of the way I would write it for a radio story, which is to say,
00:39:51
Speaker
A little more skeletal, a little more bare bones, very short, very declarative sentences, maybe sentence fragments, no subordinate clauses, no winding, indirect serpentine narration that loops back around to something you said at the beginning of the paragraph. So I would do a first draft that might sound like a radio script, and then I would go back in and try to kind of take off those shackles, although they don't feel like shackles when I'm writing for the radio.
00:40:20
Speaker
and give myself permission to sort of overwrite and dig a little more deeply into
00:40:31
Speaker
narration, speculation, wordiness, you know, allow myself to be a little more convoluted. And then maybe I would pull back the throttle a little bit. And here's where I have to thank my editor Rakesh Satyal, who really taught me these skills in real time as I was writing the book. But yeah, it was a process. And to this point, I'm not entirely sure
00:40:51
Speaker
that this reading experience feels like a book rather than a radio script. I think it does but it's been interesting that some of the early reviews have said like oh it's very much his voice you can hear him saying that and I wonder if that also means the style of writing is perhaps a little more conversational because as you know that's the goal when you're writing for the ears you're writing the way people talk.
00:41:16
Speaker
So I don't know. I have no perspective on that. I need some outside perspective. I remember when I spoke with the SES author, Chuck Closterman, a few years ago. And he's someone who's got a very distinctive audible voice. The way he talks and has his inflection and the way he thinks and talks, it's great. And he's done a ton of interviews over the years. And he was telling me, too, he's like, sometimes I wish I had never done any audio at all.
00:41:45
Speaker
And because people can't divorce his actual voice from his written voice and he kind of wishes they could so they could experience the written stuff without hearing him.
00:41:56
Speaker
Huh. I would probably feel that way if I ventured into fiction. Given that this is memoir, I don't mind people hearing my voice because these are, you know, I'm the narrator. I haven't created some other character as the narrator. But if I were working in a different genre, I could imagine feeling that way.
00:42:19
Speaker
Now you also wrote that I also, I always believed that I would never write a book right up until the moment I discovered that I started writing this one. So why did you never think you were going to write a book given how important books are to you?
00:42:36
Speaker
I have always been afraid of things that are permanent. I like doing things that are here and then gone. I love to cook. I love to garden. I sing with a band. I do radio stories that are here and then gone. I cannot imagine taking up oil painting because canvas is just
00:42:58
Speaker
stack up in a corner and stare at you. And this might also be why I don't have children, but that's a different conversation. And to me, writing a book always felt like it was in that category.
00:43:13
Speaker
If I do a radio story that's not great, the next day I'll do another radio story. A book will just sit on a shelf and stare at you forever as the book that you wrote. It feels way more declarative and definitive. So that's why I thought I would never write one.
00:43:32
Speaker
I guess the next obvious question is, so then why'd you write one? Not to do your interview for you. Exactly. Well, sometimes when people write memoir, my first question is, why? Just why? Yeah.
00:43:49
Speaker
The truth is, when I started writing this, what I thought I was writing was my next solo cabaret show. I do a show with Alan Cumming. He and I sit on stage for 90 minutes and tell stories and sing songs and have a great time. And prior to that, I had a solo cabaret show that I performed around the country. And I thought, well, when Alan and I are done doing our show, I should have another show sort of lined up and ready to go so that I can keep the momentum going.
00:44:19
Speaker
And in the early days of the pandemic, like in 2020, I didn't take any vacation time at all. I was working from home, hosting all things considered every night. And towards the end of the year, I realized I needed to burn through some annual leave. And so I took four weeks in a row off work for the first time ever. And I went to this amazing place in the redwood forests of Northern California called Salmon Creek Farm.
00:44:43
Speaker
And I stayed in this cabin, and for the first two weeks of that four-week leave, I did not use my literary, reportorial word brain at all. I like, I chopped wood, I harvested zucchini, I, you know, crushed apples for cider. And then two weeks in, I started writing what I thought was going to be this,
00:45:12
Speaker
the beginning of the next solo show that I would do. And as I was writing it, I started to think, huh, this actually doesn't feel like something delivered from the stage. This feels more like an essay that might be part of a collection of essays and a memoir. I don't really think I need or want to write a memoir, but I'm going to just keep going and see where it leads. So by the end of that time in Sand Creek Farm, I had written three chapters.
00:45:38
Speaker
although at the time they were just these three kind of like essays and then I came back to quote unquote real life and I shared them with my amazing book agent Molly Glick and she said keep going and see where it leads and to her great credit she didn't say this is a book let's put together a proposal she said just like keep going and see where it leads and
00:46:00
Speaker
where it led is this book that is now out on the world, called The Best Strangers in the World. And so, despite my best intentions, I seem to have wound up writing a book. That kind of echoes this wonderful sentiment that you learned from Alan, where you said that it taught me that sometimes the things that are a little ragged around the edges, the things that are unexpected, the things that don't go the way you had planned, they're actually the best, most delightful moments. So in a sense, that's kind of how this book came into the world.
Writing Process and Overcoming Comfort
00:46:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I've learned so much from Alan. I know that's not the point of your question, but you're putting your finger on something that just makes me so damn grateful to have him in my life. Because of course the world knows him as this like incredibly talented, multifaceted performer, actor, star, gift to the world.
00:46:55
Speaker
But just as a person, as a role model, as a kind of big brother figure in my life, he has taught me so much about how to work, how to live, how to stay fresh and challenged and uncomfortable and still have fun while doing it. Yeah, he's amazing. Would you say, was that the question?
00:47:17
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly and I think you know part of part of what you just said too about being uncomfortable Was that part of the animating force towards like pushing you to you know write to write this book and complete it?
00:47:30
Speaker
completely. I have now been hosting All Things Considered for more than seven years. It's a job that I still derive so much joy and excitement and pleasure from, but it's also a job that at this point I feel like without trying to sound arrogant, I know how to do it. And I always want to keep exploring things that I don't know how to do and push myself out of my comfort zone and try things that I might fail at. And I think
00:47:58
Speaker
You know, failure is one step on the road to success, and if this book had been a disaster, that would have been a learning experience too. Hey, it may yet be a disaster. Who's just saying the reviews aren't in yet?
00:48:11
Speaker
Now, given that, you know, in radio work, you're often working with, you know, editor-producer and your foreign work often in like a fixer or translator. In Pink Martini, you're a part of a band when you're there. The book is a little more solo than those collaborative efforts. So in what ways was the book challenging just because it was a bit more isolating in practice versus a lot of the other enterprises you do?
00:48:37
Speaker
I was very aware that it could potentially be a much more isolating experience, and so, frankly, I made sure that it wasn't. I didn't join a writer's group, but in addition to my wonderful HarperCollins editor Rakesh Satyal, I asked
00:48:54
Speaker
one of my favorite all things considered editors who has since left NPR and gone to New York Magazine, Joy Myers, if she would read every chapter as I wrote them. And because each chapter was sort of about one place or one person or one experience,
00:49:10
Speaker
Almost all of the chapters I shared with somebody who was central to that experience and asked them to give it a once over, both for feedback and for fact checking and just, you know, for gut check. And so, yeah, the actual experience of writing was solitary, but each of these chapters had many, many, many pairs of eyes before they were locked in.
00:49:33
Speaker
There's a moment in the book too which I love. I practically want to make it like an email signature type quote. I'm so eager to hear what you're going to say. As a reporter, basically it's what you're saying to other people, but if they finish a reporting project with exactly the story they set out to find, something has gone wrong, the best story should surprise us.
00:49:56
Speaker
And I love that as like an ethos through which you can approach the reporting, but also when you're pitching potential sources who think that you might have already made up your mind, you'd be like, actually, I want you to maybe change my mind.
00:50:11
Speaker
Yeah, completely. I remember mentoring a beginning reporter and they asked for feedback on one of their first stories, which had involved going to a college campus and reporting on students for some political candidate.
00:50:29
Speaker
And part of the feedback I gave them was that this was a very good story. It is also exactly the story that I would have imagined if you had told me you were going to report a story about students on campus supporting that particular political candidate. Often, for all kinds of reasons, that's all we have the bandwidth for. That's all we find is the thing that you would expect. But the best stories are not what you would expect. It's just like the best documentaries
00:50:56
Speaker
begin at a point in time where you feel like they had to have been able to look into a crystal ball and tell the future because this documentary has so many compelling plot twists they never could have known about when they started filming. That's to me what makes a documentary extraordinary. And I think the best radio stories are the same way. If I give you a two sentence description of what I intend it to be before I go out and begin my reporting, I hope that by the time I come back,
00:51:25
Speaker
there's something that nobody reading that two-sentence description could have anticipated. Now, if the best stories should surprise us and you leave yourself open to discovery, in what ways did writing this memoir through your lived experiences surprise you over the course of its creation? For me, the biggest surprise was that this, you know,
Empathy in Storytelling
00:51:48
Speaker
My life is bifurcated in many ways in that like I'm a journalist for NPR, I host all things considered, and also I sing with this band called Pink Martini. And also Alan Cumming and I go out into this silly show called Auch and Oy. And when I started writing, it sort of felt like a grab bag of different things.
00:52:11
Speaker
And it was really only over the course of writing that I could see there is, in fact, an overarching theme and a through line, which is this idea of helping people understand the world around them and helping people see things through the eyes of someone else and breaking us out of our self-reinforcing bubbles, that all of these different activities have that in common. And when I started writing this book, I didn't really understand that.
00:52:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's a lot of, some of you said too, like you weren't, for example, an oil spill, you weren't talking about an impact of an oil spill having on a community, you were talking to members of that community. And that's kind of like, the best strangers in the world is kind of that through line of meeting these people who are on their face, strangers, but through your empathetic way of reporting and talking to these people, you know, you're bringing to a greater sense of understanding to us, the listener in the end.
00:53:07
Speaker
And that's even true when the conversations are not like heart to heart understanding. I'm thinking of this moment in Toledo, Ohio I describe where at the end of a long day of reporting, my producer and I wound up in this kind of working class bar near the auto plant and we had finished doing our interviews and we were just like having a beer at the end of the day and the sky kind of got in my face and started making these
00:53:34
Speaker
vaguely homophobic remarks and he wasn't threatening but in the moment I just kind of felt grateful for the opportunity to be there and hear from him which I realize is a sign of my privilege that I didn't feel physically threatened that I was like you know I'm a I'm a six three
00:53:55
Speaker
guy who is white, who, you know, I have all this privilege for all these reasons, but I was able to be there and have that experience and be in his space. Like this was his bar. It sure wasn't my bar. And walk away with like a memory of an interaction that was not necessarily positive, but that helped me understand the world a little differently.
00:54:18
Speaker
Ari, I want to be mindful of your time, and as I bring these conversations down for a landing, I always like to ask the guests for a recommendation for the listeners of some kind, and that can be anything from a pair of socks you're really excited about to a brand of coffee. So I'd extend that to you, Ari. If there's something that's really exciting you these days, what might you recommend for the listeners?
00:54:38
Speaker
Well, because we've been talking about fiction, I'm gonna go with the fiction recommendation, and it's a book that I'm halfway through, and it's Salman Rushdie's latest novel. It's called Victory City. I was about to say something that sounds like I'm comparing myself to Salman Rushdie, so I'm gonna go ahead and say it with the caveat that I am in no way equating myself with this titan of literature. What I was going to say was,
00:55:04
Speaker
in the same way that my book is about the power of stories this novel is about the power of stories but it's told through his incredible inventive mythic epic fiction um as i said i'm only halfway through so if the second half of the book is terrible don't blame me but i think it's a gorgeous work of literature and i want to save as an afterthought the fact that this
00:55:29
Speaker
you know, Titan of Letters was brutally attacked last summer, narrowly survived, and has become a powerful symbol of free speech. But I think it's important to read this book not because the author is a symbol, but because the literature itself is so rich and valuable and compelling and eye-opening. So that's my recommendation.
00:55:49
Speaker
Excellent. And I haven't read David Remnick's recent profile of him yet, but I'd probably recommend reading the recent profile of Salman Rushdie in the New Yorker. It came out like a week or two ago. That's worth reading. So in any case, Ari, oh my God, thank you for carving out the time to do this. Thank you so much for the work you do on the radio and especially what you've done with this wonderful memoir of yours. So thanks so much for coming on the show and talking shop. I've had a great time. Thank you for having me.
00:56:21
Speaker
Hey, thanks for listening. CNN was thanks to Ari Shapiro. Man, how great was he? That was awesome. He totally came to play ball. I love when that happens. After we were done, his publicist reached out to me and said, Ari had a good time talking. So that's the best when you hear that. Very validating. As much as I want the listener experience to be great, and that's always first and foremost on my mind, you also need to be a good host for the guest. And someone like Ari
00:56:48
Speaker
interviewed a lot knows the media game knows the interview game and for him to have a good time means we're on to something here this this thing might stick around if you like this conversation as much as I did go ahead maybe share it and tag me and the show across your socials at cnfpod on Twitter and at creative nonfiction podcast on Instagram
00:57:11
Speaker
The show only grow because of you. As you know, I'm something of a nobody, so it's the validation of your endorsements that makes the needle move.
00:57:19
Speaker
There's so much content out there. So many old shows and many more new ones. Everyone clung for attention. And this show will only survive the hole in the bucket of the pod fade if you, the audience, celebrate
Reflections on Podcast Journey
00:57:34
Speaker
it. So long as it's worth celebrating. And there's always Patreon.com. So I've seen F-Pod to throw a few bucks in the tip jar. Show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. Help with hosting, help with upgrades and stuff of that nature.
00:57:50
Speaker
Now, so I should probably riff on the show turning 10 on March 20th, this coming Monday in three days from this dropping, depends on when you listen to this, could be 10th birthday could already happen or it might still be something to look forward to.
00:58:07
Speaker
You know, many of you who have listened to the show for a while, thank you by the way, it wasn't and isn't always easy. I know I've outgrown or moved on from a handful of shows because, well, the host started to get on my nerves.
00:58:25
Speaker
But I also have a different ear than the average listener. I have no patience for hosts who talk more than the guest or talk over the guest. I don't have any patience for a bad asker of questions. No matter how good the question is, you still have to ask it well. I don't have any tolerance for hosts who answer the questions for the guests.
00:58:49
Speaker
This eliminates a lot of pretty popular podcasts. So anyway, so I get it. If people have outgrown me for whatever reason, I know I have outgrown other shows or just have, or if people are just annoyed by me, who I've become or who I have always been the entire time.
00:59:09
Speaker
Yeah, my incessant complaining and angst is reason enough for many to jump ship, I get that. It's also some of the reason people hang around. I keep it real, as the kids say, or used to say. Who knows what they say anymore.
00:59:22
Speaker
The show, as a lot of you know, was born out of my bitterness. I didn't have a great understanding of social media back in 2013. And all I saw was how my peers were killing it. You know, people were doing work that got them anthologized in best American sports writing. Like, that was like the apotheosis.
00:59:44
Speaker
And I was writing these god-awful slide shows for Bleacher Report, covering local sports for $35 a game, thinking Wright Thompson never had to do this. I had written a book by that point, I had an MFA, and I wasn't reaping any kind of reward for all that work and all that effort.
01:00:05
Speaker
You know, little did I know, the MFA's don't really, I don't know, they don't really elevate you out of the slush. I don't know. In my angst, I wrote this awful blog post, this was probably in 2013 also, or maybe late 2012, it doesn't matter, right around then, where I eviscerated.
01:00:24
Speaker
a lead written by a close digital pal now in Charles Bethea for a story he wrote for outside magazine. I had always wanted to write for outside and you know here was Charles just like even a little younger than I was and I was and he here he was just writing like big features for mega magazines and I and outside and I loved outside.
01:00:48
Speaker
I was angry and resentful and I wrote this blog post and Charles must have a Google alert on his name and he wrote a comment, very well written mind you, taking me to task and then ripping me for a review I wrote for brevity about the book Good Pros written by Tracy Kidder in the late Dick Todd. I took it on the chin, felt horrible. I felt horrible.
01:01:14
Speaker
I resolved from that moment on to be better. And I was living in upstate New York at the time at WAMC Public Radio, this great radio station up there, and one of the shows on the station was called The Book Show, hosted by Joe Donahue, who's been on the show. It's a show about reading and writing, and I figured maybe I could do something.
01:01:34
Speaker
pretty much cookie cutter what Joe is doing, but only just do it focused on creative nonfiction and nonfiction works. Maybe if I started this new fangled thing that had been around a little while but wasn't total like saturating the media market, this thing called a podcast.
01:01:52
Speaker
And then I could celebrate the non-fiction I loved and the journalism I liked, you know, where I tried to lift people up instead of tear them down, you know, tearing them down out of my own insecurity. Maybe I could kind of sort of fix my broken attitude, build an audience, build a platform.
01:02:08
Speaker
I still feel really bad about that comment I wrote about Charles' piece. And he ended up coming on the show in episode 16. He really needs to come back on. He ended up being really cool about it. We didn't talk about it on air, but I did still express how shitty I felt. And he was just like, dude, water under the bridge doesn't matter. Staff writer for The New Yorker now. So he's only gotten better.
01:02:31
Speaker
And my friend Maggie Meset from Episode 8 fame, still the only guest who ever asked me to edit something out of a conversation. The only one in more than 360 of these. Turns out we were just talking on air about our aging dogs and she wanted it out. So I did. Anyway, she asked me if I had heard of the long form podcast.
01:02:53
Speaker
Which had only come out just a couple months before I before mine And I hadn't heard of him yet, but I soon started eating it up like nice. This is this is this is great and To their credit they they got the jump on me, but not by much, but they showed up every week
01:03:11
Speaker
Had a bigger team obviously this is still one-man operation here at CNF pod HQ They leveraged their great context in New York magazine land and and definitely secured the lion's share of the Nonfiction interview space in the nation era of that second podcast boom
01:03:31
Speaker
And I was inconsistent for the first four years of the podcast. As a result, I never gained traction. Not until I decided to show up every single week starting at the beginning of 2017. And it's been a steady climb ever since. Very steady. Sometimes annoyingly steady. Sometimes frustratingly flatlining. You know, I'll never forget thinking I'd hit that hockey stick moment when I had Laura Halenbrand on. Like, this is it. This is the big one.
01:03:57
Speaker
It never happened. I mean, she came on the show, but the hockey stick moment never happened, and so I kept going. And I'll never forget my first big get, big guest, and it was Glenn Stout, series editor at the time of Best American Sports Writing, and he was working on the selling of the Babe, about Babe Ruth, and he's had a young woman in the sea, he's just had a billion books.
01:04:25
Speaker
he was the his first visit at the fourteen and. Like I said one of those first name get say you could recognize me and it started it gave the show a little early validation. And you slowly start to level up you find your voice you grow you improving.
01:04:41
Speaker
You ask publicists that you've reached out to. If they have any other non-fiction authors and they're stable, should they have them? Send them my way. Pitch them my way. Can't guarantee to get them on the show, but who knows. And soon enough, you start getting a dozen pitches in your inbox every week. People with new books out. You try to keep people happy, but you can't read that many and you're only published once a week. Some people are not gonna be happy. But you try. Do your best.
01:05:10
Speaker
And you look to book headliners, the big fonts on the concert posters to the festival, so other people might give the smaller fonts some stage time. Oh, so nervous before I had Glenn on for the first time. And now I'd rather get nervous, anxious, but not really nervous.
01:05:31
Speaker
You always want to grow the show. That's how you actually maybe make a happy buck, but it's also how you inspire more people, make people less alone, make them feel less alone. It's how you become more attractive to publishers and agents. But it's when you surrender to enough that freedom really sets in. Now what if you have enough? What if the audience is already big enough?
01:05:56
Speaker
Now just serve the shit out of those people who have stuck around and the hope is they'll spread the word. Feel in on the journey. And ironically, I think this is how the show will grow. And that's where we're at on this 10th birthday. There's a sheet cake in the break room. Help yourself and stay wild seeing efforts. If you can do interview, see ya.
01:06:36
Speaker
you