The Acoustic Worlds of Radiolab Creator Jad Abumrad

Summary

Twenty Thousand Hertz

Episode: The Acoustic Worlds of Radiolab Creator Jad Abumrad
Host: Dallas Taylor
Guest: Jad Abumrad
Date: April 20, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode is a sonic journey through the career, philosophy, and immense influence of Jad Abumrad, the creator of Radiolab and a pioneer of immersive audio storytelling. Host Dallas Taylor explores Jad’s creative process, his background in music, his transition to audio, how Radiolab shaped the modern landscape of podcasting, and Jad’s reflections on storytelling, team leadership, and the meaning of sound. The conversation weaves in examples from Jad’s landmark episodes, including deep dives into sound design choices, musical metaphors, and the challenges and joys of running a creative team.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Jad's Creative Origins & Musical Training

• Both Dallas and Jad came to sound storytelling through music.
• Jad studied composition at Oberlin Conservatory, originally intending to be a composer.
• His transition into radio was spurred by his (now) wife’s suggestion to combine his passions: “You like to write stories and you like to play music. You don't seem to be doing well at either independently. But what if you stuck them together and, like, I don't know, do radio?” (Jad Abumrad, 05:09)
• First radio experience involved creating a 12-minute news piece—the immediacy and excitement hooked him.

2. Early Radiolab & The Birth of a New Sonic Form

• Radiolab started as a three-hour experimental radio show before podcasts even existed.
• Jad did every aspect alone for years, which was liberating but also overwhelming.
• Notable quote: “There are days when you feel exalted because you have command of so many different things. And then there are days when you feel like you're going to suffocate.” (Jad Abumrad, 11:21)

3. Storytelling Philosophy: Sound as Emotional Architecture

• Jad sees himself as a composer not only of music but of voices, ideas, and experiences.
• His approach: Take familiar sounds and treat them “to make them strange...so they should feel uncanny, like they're also alien at the same time.” (Jad Abumrad, 08:36)
• Crafted soundscapes aim to pull listeners into the “now” and foster a shared sense of presence.

4. Collaboration & Team Building

• Radiolab eventually grew from a one-person operation to a large collaborative team.
• Ellen Horn (executive producer) and Robert Krulwich became foundational, with Robert shaping the show’s warmth and intellectual character.
• Leadership evolved to empower others and create space for diverse ideas: “It was not instinct. I had to develop those instincts.” (Jad Abumrad, 14:51)
• As the team grew, Jad struggled with the “founder’s effect”—his presence altering the group dynamic.

5. Innovative Sound Experiments: The ‘Colors’ Episode

• Example: To describe how animals see color, Jad used a choir to audibly represent the frequency range of their visual spectrum (from dogs to the mantis shrimp).
• “Whenever you're explaining something, if you're actually just explaining it, you've already lost. You have to create an experience that someone can have with you.” (Jad Abumrad, 20:30)
• Listeners are made to feel as though they experience multispectral sight through layered choral sounds.

6. Audio’s Unique Storytelling Power

• Audio storytelling is a “collaboration” between teller and listener.
• “Because of the thing that's not there, the picture. It forces the person listening and the person speaking to come together to fill in the gap...when it's in your ear, it pulls you in in a way, and that way it's a very warm feeling.” (Jad Abumrad, 21:07)

7. Exploring Complex, Social Narratives

• Later Radiolab episodes turned toward social, philosophical, and political issues, modeling how to navigate a complex world with humility and curiosity.
• Jad introduced the idea of “small t truth,” respecting multiple perspectives even in matters of science and fact.
  • “There's always an intersubjective gooey space where you get lost...A fact can happen and we can all define it, but then the interpretation of that takes us in night and day.” (Jad Abumrad, 23:00)

8. Transition From Radiolab & New Projects

• After 20 years, Jad left Radiolab due to restlessness and the need for creative freedom: “It was so easy to be weird and try experiments when no one was listening. But then now there’s...a whole business logic wrapped around the show, and it’s harder to experiment.” (Jad Abumrad, 31:15)
• Key successor projects:
  • More Perfect – Supreme Court miniseries.
  • Dolly Parton’s America – Critically acclaimed 9-part podcast exploring Dolly’s life and impact. Jad used unusual instruments (like a “telsimer”) and cassette-tape effects for authentic sound.
  • Fela Fear No Man – 12-part series about Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. The creative process involved deep musical integration, using interviews as musical layers and exploring trance-like experiences in recreating Fela’s club, “The Shrine.”

9. Sound Design Craft & Perseverance

• Jad meticulously scores episodes, layering voices and music until he “conjures” the desired effect.
• “There are days...where I’m like, this is so stupid. But then if you get it right...someone encounters that thing and has an emotional reaction, you’re like, okay. That’s why.” (Jad Abumrad, 36:51)

10. Devotion to Sound

• On why he’s devoted his life to sound: “It’s always the sense of who you are at any given moment...you’re always becoming a thing, and it’s always slightly out of reach...All I know is that when I am in the middle of trying to figure out a story, I learn so much about the world and about myself.” (Jad Abumrad, 37:51)

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Notable Quotes

• On Blending Storytelling and Music:
  “I realized, oh, I'm a composer. Like, I'm still a composer, and not just with music, but when you're choosing the voices and you're trying to figure out how they go together, that's composing too.”
  – Jad Abumrad (06:56)

• On Their Philosophy of Sound:
  "My whole acoustic world is basically the idea that you take familiar sounds and you treat them to make them strange...which is sort of the storytelling philosophy, right?"
  – Jad Abumrad (08:35)

• On Leading a Team:
  “I really took seriously, like, making space for people so that their ideas could be heard unadulterated, so that in many cases, the music that they wrote would be on the story, that the interviews, the ideas suddenly were coming in from all over the place. And as a deeply introverted guy, that was so fun.”
  – Jad Abumrad (14:15)

• On Audio’s Power:
  “There is something that happens when you hear a voice and you don't have the image of the person. It just fills your imagination. You imagine that person. They seem simultaneously 1,000ft tall and, like, right there, human scale in the room with you.”
  – Jad Abumrad (20:42)

• On Creative Motivation:
  “I love the materials of sound. I love manipulating sound. I love the feeling it gives you the way it vibrates your skull. I just love every aspect of it, but ultimately… it's scratching some much deeper existential itch. So for me, sound is…It's a search.”
  – Jad Abumrad (38:04)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:37 — Jad introduces himself and his studio
• 04:55 — Jad’s early life & transition from composer to radio
• 07:59 — The “composer” approach to storytelling
• 10:45 — Clip: First Radiolab episode and origins
• 12:02 — Jad’s first collaborations (Ellen Horn, Robert Krulwich)
• 17:36 — The ‘Colors’ episode: turning vision into sound
• 21:07 — Audio’s unique power and the role of imagination
• 22:44 — “Small t truth” and reporting on complex issues
• 31:15 — Why Jad left Radiolab and the struggle with creative freedom
• 32:58 — Fela Kuti project and returning to podcasting
• 34:48 — Sound design philosophy: “Enter the Shrine” episode
• 37:45 — Why Jad's life is devoted to sound

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Memorable Moments

• Hearing an early tape of Radiolab reveal the ambition and awkward beginnings.
• The choir metaphor in "Colors," translating invisible concepts into immersive audio.
• The “shrinking role” as Radiolab’s founder and the pain/growth of learning to lead, then step aside.
• Reflections on Fela Kuti: blending music, politics, and storytelling as a way to access deeper truths.

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Episode Tone

Warm, meditative, and deeply appreciative. Dallas’s perspective as a fellow sound designer brings a reverent yet conversational tone, while Jad reflects with openness, humility, and intellectual curiosity throughout.

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Summary by Section Ends – listen for segments around the provided timestamps for full context and illustrative audio examples. This episode is essential for anyone fascinated by the power of sound, storytelling, or the evolution of podcasts.

Transcript

[Dallas Taylor]

Before we get started, a reminder that our second annual Listener Story Competition is running right now. This is your chance to submit a fully produced mini story that will play for over 100,000 people on this podcast. Your story just has to relate to sound in some way, shape or form. It could be a personal story from your life or a sound topic you've always been fascinated by. It should also be around five minutes or less and be appropriate for all ages to tell the story. You can include guest interviews, narration, music, sound design, anything that makes it engaging, and you can use the credits to promote your business, your podcast, or anything else. Just like last year, we'll collect the winning stories into a special series of episodes this summer. The top creator will also get a $500 credit to our online store so you and your whole crew can be decked out in 20k swag. The deadline for submissions is May 31, so don't put it off. Get started now. To see the full details and submit your story, visit 20k.org 2026 or tap the link in the episode Notes. Summer is when we share more time, more memories, and More photos at ATT the iPhone 17 Pro is your summer essential. Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone and ATT makes sharing those pictures with everyone easy, right? Right now at AT&T, ask how you can get iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone. Trade in any condition requires trade in of iPhone 15 or higher excluding iPhone 16e and 17e requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.comiphone or visit an ATT store for detail. You're listening to 20,000 hertz the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. Over the last 10 years of 20,000 hertz, we've explored sound from so many different angles, from films and TV shows to history, brain science and beyond. But I would be remiss if we never covered the person who I consider the most recognizable and interesting sound designer in podcasting. I also think about this person as simply being one of the greatest sound designers in history. And that's Jad Abumrad, who I first knew as the creator of Radiolab.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from wny. See? Yep.

[Dallas Taylor]

For years, Jad was Radiolab's main host, editor, sound designer, and composer in the way that he uses immersive sound to craft emotional, emotional, enlightening stories inspired the sound of 20,000 hertz. But it's not just about inspiration. 20,000 hertz wouldn't exist without Jad Abumrad and Radiolab. And here's Unlike YouTube videos, Instagram, or TikTok, podcasts don't grow by going viral through an algorithm. Instead, they often grow when a more popular podcast replays one of their episodes or features the host as a guest. And back in 2011, Radiolab played an episode by a little show called 99% invisible. That boost helped 99pi expand into a huge success, and then years later, 99pi paid it forward by featuring 20,000 hertz several times, which I know is how many of you first heard us. So I like to think of our show as the grandchild of Radiolab, and that it continues the sonic standard that Jad created. Recently, I had the opportunity to spend the day with Jad at his home studio in New York City to learn all about his creative process and his thoughts on audio storytelling. So on a crisp autumn day, I knocked on the door of his studio.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hiya. Come on in. Welcome to my studio. My name is Jad. I'm not quite even sure what to call myself these days, but musician, Composer? Radio? Storyteller, Podcaster. I created Radiolab and Dolly Parton's America and a bunch of other radio shows and podcasts. And mostly I do it here.

[Dallas Taylor]

Chad's studio is a bright room with a desk, a computer, and musical gear all over the walls and surfaces. Microphones, synthesizers, stringed instruments, guitar pedals.

[Jad Abumrad]

This has been my sanctuary and my workspace for about 14 years.

[Dallas Taylor]

Like me, Jad didn't start his career wanting to tell audio stories. I went to college for music and played trumpet in the orchestra for a while. I wanted to be a conductor, and Jad actually has a pretty similar background.

[Jad Abumrad]

So I went to Oberlin Conservatory for four years to ostensibly be a composer, which is what I kind of thought I was going to do. Ever Since I was 5, I pretty much had that idea. I was like, that's what I'm going to be. And so I came to New York to do that and it didn't go well. I realized that writing music for other people actually turns out to be really hard. So a couple years out of school I kind of had the post college flail what am I going to do with my life moment. My then girlfriend, now wife, we were standing on the platform to the G train and I remember she was like, well you like to write stories and then you like to play music. You don't seem to Be doing well at either independently. But what if you stuck them together and like, I don't know, do radio? I was like, oh, okay. I ended up volunteering at a radio station purely based on that insight of hers. And the first day that I showed up, there had been some sort of staff revolt the day before or something, the place was empty, There was the news director and he had nobody to cover the news. And I just walked in the door and he was like, take this tape recorder, go to city hall, there's a protest, cover it. I remember just like running towards City hall, being like, what do I do with this thing? Like, what does it even mean to cover something? I had no idea. I recorded some tape, ran back to the station, and then you were cutting it with razor blades. And first day I was like taping bits of tape together and long story short, by 3 o' clock that night, I had a 12 minute piece on the radio.

[Dallas Taylor]

Sadly, that segment has been lost to the sands of time, which Jad actually might be happy about.

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, it was horrible. It was terrible. I didn't know how to talk into a mic, I didn't know how to ask questions, I barely knew how to edit. But like, it was. I just remember hearing that and being like, oh my God, this is everything I want in life. You get to go out into the world, talk to people, ask them questions, you bring that material back, you choose the moments you like that you find meaningful, you write the connections between them and then you try and communicate that to an audience. And I had done all that in the same day, and at that moment I was like, this. This is what I want to do with my life. And then the surprise was that years later, started Radiolab and it got going and then I started writing the music for the stories and I realized, oh, I'm a composer. Like, I'm still a composer, and not just with music, but when you're choosing the voices and you're trying to figure out how they go together, that's composing too. Like, you're composing the relationships between the ideas and the voices and then increasingly the sounds that became like, oh, this is the kind of composer I get to be. Not just the music kind, but the ideas, thoughts, worlds, voices, everything kind.

[Dallas Taylor]

Here's a clip of an early Radiolab episode called Memory and Forgetting. Listen to how the music and voices weave together to pull you into the story.

[Jad Abumrad]

Maybe memory is more creative than that.

[Dallas Taylor]

Creative, yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Dallas Taylor]

On a literal level, it's an act of creation.

[Jad Abumrad]

Exactly. We're reconstructing those Memories, construction. Construction. Maybe it's more like painting or sculpture. Everyone's constantly their own artist. We take bits and pieces of experience. Some things get sharpened, other things level and infused with imagination. And out of that construct, construct, construct what feels like a recollection.

[Dallas Taylor]

It's a beautiful process.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's unbelievable. My whole acoustic world is basically the idea that you take familiar sounds and you treat them to make them strange, growling, roaring. I mean, it sounded incredible. Raw power, Which is sort of the storytelling philosophy, right? It's like you meet the audience where they are and then you gradually walk with them into new landscapes, new strange worlds. And so the sounds should have that quality too, of like, I can kind of recognize what these sounds are, but they should feel uncanny, like they're also alien at the same time. In terms of time, I do believe that we can travel in time. I'm not talking to you about actual time time travel. I am of the cast in mind, where I can live in my head really easily and I can dissociate from the world. Like you have these moments when you're on the subway and I look out of the window as we're pulling up to a platform and there's somebody just reading a book, waiting for the subway. I'm just struck of like, my God, that's another mind. That person is in a book who I couldn't even begin to imagine the thoughts that they're having. Stand clear of the closing doors, please. And for me, interviewing another person is a way to like, pull you into the now, pull you into, like, here we are in this moment together. And similarly, the sounds are my attempt to do that for the audience in a way to really pull them into the experience of being with this voice. And it's hard, I mean, it's hard to get to that place, especially these days when we're all so distracted. But that's the intent, that's the hope.

[Dallas Taylor]

From the very beginning of Radiolab, JAD was treating sound in radical ways. The show began in 2002, before podcasts even existed. Back then, it was a three hour radio show on New York's WNYC. Here's a clip from the very first episode where Jad almost sounds like a beat poet.

[Jad Abumrad]

WNYC is about to embark on an expansion experiment. We're calling it the Radio Lab. What we're going to do is take great documentary radio and stories of different sizes and shapes, colors from different places, all over the planet, from different times even, and we're going to mix it all together like this. A big brew of people and places, but it'll take two hours and 59 minutes to get through all of it. I started the thing I'm most known for, Radiolab, in the basement of this house, so literally three floors down. And I did everything, I did every piece of that for years. I would literally, like, be scoring a thing, tracking, scoring, tracking, editing. I would just. Everything was always happening at the same time, and I loved it. But also it was crippling. You know, there are days when you feel exalted because you have command of so many different things. And then there are days when you feel like you're going to suffocate because not only is the work too much, but also you feel like you're trapped in your own brain.

[Dallas Taylor]

But soon enough, Jad was joined by two people who'd become key to the show's identity. First, there was executive producer Ellen Horn,

[Jad Abumrad]

somebody who doesn't get enough credit for Radiolab, but should. We would be nowhere without her.

[Dallas Taylor]

Then there was Robert Krulwich, who first appeared as a guest host on an episode called Time.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. My guest tonight for the next hour to help me wrestle with time is the science correspondent Robert Krulwich of ABC News, Nova and Nightline. How are you, sir?

[Dallas Taylor]

I'm very well. I like this bathing in Beethoven thing you've got going on here.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's cool, right? Robert, who I co hosted the show with for many years. Smartest man I ever met. Probably the smartest person I will ever meet.

[Dallas Taylor]

By 2004, the show had morphed into a more distilled, produced format, exploring scientific stories with a bit of philosophy mixed in.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Dallas Taylor]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab, a series about science and discovery. This hour, we'll be talking about the true healing power of lies, the biochemistry of love. Why do we sleep?

[Dallas Taylor]

Why do we laugh?

[Jad Abumrad]

Why do we blink?

[Dallas Taylor]

What is a parasite? Precisely.

[Jad Abumrad]

We'll look at time so closely, we'll discover new things about it. We will do as Steve urges and step away from the individual to find mystery, beauty and order in the group. The greatest joy for me would be in the latter stages of the process when it's just you. Usually it's late at night and I've got a whole screen full of voices, and I'm trying to sort of push the little bits of interview tape, little colored blocks on the screen into the right order and figure out how I'm Going to slide my own thoughts and narrations in between that process. That Lego building process was so pleasurable to me. And that's where I would take the most risks. That's what I would do. Little experiments. I would try stuff. That used to be the best part.

[Dallas Taylor]

In 2005, Radiolabs started posting their episodes online so that people could download them and listen anytime. In other words, the show became a podcast. And as it grew in popularity, more and more people came on board.

[Jad Abumrad]

Working initially with other people was like Oxygen. It was like, oh, thank God. Like other thoughts, other perspectives. I loved it. Then you have to figure out how to disentangle the process, because initially I didn't think about process. It was just like me sitting here doing the thing. And you can't run a show that way. You've got to have systems and a kind of algorithm. It carries the work all the way through. That took me a minute to figure out. I mean, talk to the folks I've worked with for years at Radiolab. They may say I never figured it out, but I really took seriously, like, making space for people so that their ideas could be heard unadulterated, so that in many cases, the music that they wrote would be on the story, that the interviews, the ideas suddenly were coming in from all over the place. And as a deeply introverted guy, that was so fun. It was so fun to learn that. And I had to learn. It was not instinct. I had to develop those instincts. When the team grew, we started to put a lot more pressure on, like, finding stories you've never heard before. And when the show went in that direction, I actually started to really love the reporting part. Sitting and talking to people. Particularly, like, working with a guy like Robert, getting to just sort of sit with him and ask people questions was so fun. You ready for this? Well, I don't know what we're doing. You genuinely don't know what we're about to do. Right. Will you just state that for the record?

[Dallas Taylor]

Audience, people, I have no idea what

[Jad Abumrad]

is about to happen. That's good. I like you in that state. And then as the show grew and went from like five to 10 to like, at some point, 20, 30 people. I forget exactly. Then it was about, well, how do you run a team? It was never easy for me, but I began to really like the questions about how do you organize people's labor? And, you know, we really did a lot of work to try and make the show feel better to work on. And those problems, as hard as they were, were actually really Interesting to me, like, how do you be a good steward? And a lot of the times that meant stepping out of the room, not being involved, and, like, creating space for others.

[Dallas Taylor]

By 2010, Radiolab was one of the biggest podcasts on the planet. One of their classics from this period was an episode called Colors.

[Jad Abumrad]

I think it was at one time this was the episode of Radiolab that was the most downloaded. The whole idea of this particular piece was that, like, suppose you had a bunch of creatures gathered together looking at the same rainbow. Like you had a cow, a sparrow, a butterfly, and a whale. Let's just imagine they're all right there together and they're looking at a rainbow. Who sees the best rainbow? Was the question. And it turns out that the champion rainbow seer was the mighty mantis shrimp.

[Dallas Taylor]

At this point, Jad pulls up some photos of this incredible multicolored shrimp. It looks kind of like a small lobster with a shell that's vibrant green, blue, and electric pink.

[Jad Abumrad]

Look at that. It's beautiful. But anyhow, they have these incredible eyeballs. So, like, we humans have three rods and cones in our eyes.

[Dallas Taylor]

Rods and cones are the light sensing cells, and each one is tuned to different wavelengths or colors. We have one for red, one for green, and one for blue, which combine to make all the colors we can see. But the mantis shrimp is different.

[Jad Abumrad]

These creatures have 16, so they presumably can see thousands, millions of colors. We don't know, but way past our sight. And so we were trying to sort of render that for the audience, but the problem is we work in radio, where you can't see anything. And also, even if you could see, even if you did have a picture, you cannot see what the mantis shrimp sees. So what we ended up doing was using an extended audio metaphor of choir. So we sent a message to a choir listserv, and I was like, we have two days to do this. There's no way that we're going to get this done. But within a day, I was in a church, and there were, like, 150 people singing the colors of the rainbow. Because choir people are the most amazing people on Earth.

[Dallas Taylor]

Jad pulls up a video of him working with that choir.

[Jad Abumrad]

So this is the choir. So all those people just showed up, like, literally within 12 hours. And I was just figuring it out on the spot. 3, 2, 1. I really hope this works. Let's just hold a bunch of notes. Are we recording? We got that whole thing. All right.

[Dallas Taylor]

Awesome.

[Jad Abumrad]

The idea was, as you go from like a dog singing the rainbow, dogs have two Rods and cones. You'd hear a very narrow band of frequencies.

[Dallas Taylor]

This is how it sounded in the Radiolab episode.

[Jad Abumrad]

In the case of the dog. Very different rainbow. It's gonna start off blue. Blue. He'll be able to see blue just fine. So it would see a rainbow starting with blue, same blue we see, and then grading off into green, same green as us, and then disappearing. The rainbow would end there. And then as you go to, like, sparrow butterfly, and then ultimately the mantis shrimp, you could hear the sound world just expand to contain all of this, like, density of notes and frequencies. They would start the rainbow way, way, way inside. Where we see violet, they would see extraordinarily deep ultraviolet. And then they would go on several kinds of ultraviolet, probably five or six kinds of ultraviolet. And then they would get to violet, which is. Now they're reaching our colors, and go through violet and violet, blue and blue and blue. Green, where they have those green, green, blue, blue, blues as well. Yep. And then they would go out into the reds. So they would be about as red as us when they got to the red end, but only in the reds. Yeah. And it was a really good way to not just explain mantis vision, but to feel it, to, like, experience it. And that's the thing. It's like, whenever you're explaining something, if you're actually just explaining it, you've already lost. You have to create an experience that someone can have with you.

[Dallas Taylor]

The colors episode is a perfect example of how Jad weaves storytelling with sound.

[Jad Abumrad]

The way that it lives in your mind is so different than visual storytelling. There is something that happens when you hear a voice and you don't have the image of the person. It just fills your imagination. You imagine that person. They seem simultaneously 1,000ft tall and, like, right there, human scale in the room with you.

[Dallas Taylor]

Audio storytelling requires a kind of collaboration between the speaker and the listener.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because of the thing that's not there, the picture. It forces the person listening and the person speaking to come together to fill in the gap. It's almost like I have to hand you the paintbrush and you finish the picture, so we're doing it together. Whereas visual storytelling, as powerful as it can be, it's very much a sort of lean back and it just kind of comes at you. But when it's in your ear, it pulls you in in a way, and that way it's a very warm feeling, and it's a very special feeling when you can fill a person's mind that way.

[Dallas Taylor]

As Radiolab evolved, they started Tackling more complex social questions.

[Jad Abumrad]

So today on Radiolab, we're continuing our thought about citizenship. Yeah. About what it means to belong to a place or a country. Who has a right to be forgotten or who doesn't have the right to be forgotten?

[Dallas Taylor]

Who's making those decisions?

[Jad Abumrad]

What are the kinds of things that they're thinking about?

[Dallas Taylor]

I just keep wondering, like, in this moment, can one person stand for all of us anymore?

[Jad Abumrad]

It was so many people creating the show, and then it did get much, much bigger than any one person. It became an attitude towards information. Like, how do you move through a world that is complex and sometimes scary and full of delight and sometimes hard to tell the difference? And I think we were modeling that initially for each other on the team, but then for the audience. You do it with great humility, with, like, joy, with a sense that you're always looking for the small T truth.

[Dallas Taylor]

What does small t truth mean?

[Jad Abumrad]

Small T truth would be the recognition that we all define it differently, and yet there is some kind of objective reality. But I don't think any of us can really get there. There's always an intersubjective gooey space where you get lost. We started as a science show, and I think one of the sort of fallacies that science reporters make is that they just assume that science is the definitive path to truth. I don't think it's the only way to measure truth. I think there are other ways. Some people hate it when I say stuff like that. I have great faith in the scientific method, and I trust it a lot more than most things. But if somebody has a lived truth that leads them in another direction, you have to respect that, you know? And so that's what I mean by small t truth is that there are many different kinds. Often you can have many different in conflict and yet simultaneously true. So for me, like, the reporting has to acknowledge that. That a fact can happen and we can all define it, but then the interpretation of that takes us in night and day. Right. There's just a subjectivity to it that I think cannot be discounted.

[Dallas Taylor]

In his two decades with Radiolab, Jad became a podcasting icon. But in 2022, he chose to leave the show behind. After the break, Jad explains that difficult decision and reveals the new ground he's broken since then. When you shop across multiple websites, it's easy to forget your login info for each one. But if you see that purple shop pay button at checkout, everything gets easier because Shopay can save your info for one tap. Checkout across any web store that's powered by Shopify. It's one of the many things that makes Shopify so useful both for customers and for sellers. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide, from household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started. They have ready to use templates to quickly build a beautiful web store. They have built in marketing tools for email and social media campaigns, and they have world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns. See less carts go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their Shop Pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com 20k just go to shopify.com 20k again, that's shopify.com 20k. Congratulations to Ray Antunes for getting last episode's Mystery sound right. That's the sound you hear when you place a power line in SimCity 2000. That little buzz is actually the voice of creator Will Wright, who said it was intended to be temporary. But later we tried some other sounds and everyone liked how funny the first one was, so I kept it. And here's this episode's Mystery sound. If you know that sound, submit your guess at the web address mystery.2000. Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win a super soft 20,000Hz T shirt. Spring is a natural reset point, and if you've been putting off cleaning up the messier parts of your business, now is the time. Streamlining your phone system is one of the simplest upgrades you can make. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U O. The smarter way to run your business Communications Quo is the business phone system built for how modern teams work. It lets you and your team share one business number, so calls and text are handled together like a shared inbox. Everyone can view the entire thread so they always have the full context for any customer conversation, and you can keep your existing number when you sign up. Plus Quo's built in AI logs your calls, generates summaries and flags next steps automatically. It can even respond after hours so your business stays reachable even when you're finally off the clock. Make this the season where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com 20k. That's quot.com 20k. No missed calls, no missed opportunities. If you could go back and change one thing about how you ran your business early on, what would it be for me it would be automating the admin work sooner. Payroll tax documents, benefits. It was all eating up time I could have been spending on the high level stuff. And that's why the whole team at defacto sound and 20,000 hertz runs on gusto. Gusto is the online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire onboard and support your team from anywhere. Gusto covers automatic payroll tax filing, direct deposits, health benefits, workers, comp 401 and more. They're trusted by over 400,000 small businesses and ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction price products list for 2026. Try Gusto today at gusto.com 20k and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free [e-mail] 20k once again, gusto.com 20k. Chad Abumrad is the creator of Radiolab and one of my personal sound and podcasting heroes. But Radiolab is just one of the excell excellent shows he's created.

[Jad Abumrad]

Initially, the first thing that spun out of Radiolab was More Perfect, a mini series that we're just getting going about some of the ideas in the cases that flow through the Supreme Court, which was really applying the Radiolab lens to the Supreme Court. Oh yay, oh yay. Oh yay. All persons having business before the honorable the Supreme Court of the United States rhet Monica to draw near and give their attention. Well, the court is now sitting. God save the United States in this honorable court. And then Dolly Parton's America was also concurrent with Radiolab. What is Dolly Parton's America? Well, Dolly Parton's America would be the same as Dolly Parton's world. Hey, I'm Jedi Boomrad. Let me explain how I got here to a podcast about Dolly Part.

[Dallas Taylor]

For this nine part series, Jad spent two years following Dolly around to learn about her world, from her rise to fame to her lyrics to her complicated place in pop culture. And Jad's studio is still littered with things he used in that show, like a stringed instrument he pulls off the shelf.

[Jad Abumrad]

I created a lot of that score using this. This is a telsimer. Is that what this is? I don't know. I ordered it and it's horribly out of tune right now, but I ended up sampling it using this mic, creating a lot of instruments that then became like these very big lush pads. The only thing I would say is treat her lyrics seriously in A way that Johnny Cash has had books written about his lyrics. Hank Williams has been taken seriously, but Dolly Parton hasn't.

[Dallas Taylor]

Next, Jad pulls a stack of Dolly Parton cassette tapes off a shelf for the Dolly score.

[Jad Abumrad]

I got ended up getting a ton of cassettes off of ebay, and I would play it through these old cassette recorders where you could vary the speed and, like, kind of create effects with the cassettes. Don't take I'm begging of you Please don't take my man don't take my.

[Dallas Taylor]

While making these shows, Jad continued working at Radiolab. But after two decades, his role there had completely shifted.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because of the way the show started, I was doing every aspect of it. It was very personal. And then, you know, as the show grew, I started trying to learn how to be a better leader of people. But where that puts you is that you're deliberately on the outside of the action. It would always be the case toward the end of the show where I was simultaneously the most important and least important person in the room, and that it was important I be in the room, but it was also important I not speak, because if you're the founder of a thing, your words always create a kind of a distorting effect. That's how it felt in any case. And that started to feel a little bit torturous, frankly. And also, I was just feeling restless. I was like, I don't want to try weird things. And, like, it was so easy to be weird and try experiments when no one was listening. But then now there's like, a whole business logic wrapped around the show, and it's harder to experiment.

[Dallas Taylor]

So in 2022, JAD decided it was time to move on. This is from the episode where he announced his departure.

[Jad Abumrad]

Everybody here at the team has worked so hard to establish this group, and it really is the most beautiful, talented collection of people I can imagine. And you guys are poised to take the show to new places. And I just can't wait to be a listener and to just experience what you guys make along with everybody else. One of the things I'm most proud of in my work journey is that I handed that show off in a way that took care of those people, and they're still doing it, and they're still killing it. After Radiolab had kind of transitioned, I started teaching, and then I did a lot of music and theater projects. Really sort of thinking to myself, I think I'm done with podcasting. I think I want to go in a different direction. And then the Fela Kuti series was the thing that really pulled me back into the podcast world.

[Dallas Taylor]

Fela Kuti was a Nigerian musician and political activist who was hugely influential in the 1970s. He pioneered the Afrobeat genre and became a symbol of resistance against Nigeria's military dictatorship.

[Jad Abumrad]

The through line was the power of music, like these musicians in our lives, like Dali and Fela, they both exist in that place where, like, they defy every category. And I've always been fascinated with music and musicians who do that, where the music that they make holds our histories and our culture and our politics and our personal stories, you know, like, it's all in the music and we can see ourselves in a kaleidoscopic way through the music that they create.

[Dallas Taylor]

Early in the process, Jad got the rare opportunity to license Fela's music. Then he started making calls and collecting interviews.

[Jad Abumrad]

Even before I admitted to myself that I was making another podcast, I had done like 100 interviews just because I was like, this is so interesting, I can't not do it.

[Dallas Taylor]

Jad wound up spending three years making the show, which is called Fela Fear no man. It's a 12 part series all about Fela, his music and the movement he helped spark.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's like this idea that you can see everything. It's almost like the universe in a blade of grass. You can see the universe in a song. You can see the entire history of the African independence movement in one of Fela's songs. And it felt like such a privilege and a luxury to be able to learn about this man and this place and this history.

[Dallas Taylor]

As always, a key component of this new series is the sound design.

[Jad Abumrad]

One of the episodes that I think is the most sonically interesting, it's called Enter the Shrine and it's trying to give you the experience of what it would have been like to be in Fela's club, the Shrine. And we interviewed dozens of people who described what it was like, and they described like falling into a trance as the music kind of goes round and round and round. So the whole episode is designed to sort of make people feel like they're in a trance.

[Dallas Taylor]

Jad pulls up the episode's pro tool session, scrolls partway through and hits play.

[Jad Abumrad]

So the whole idea, idea of this particular session, this idea of the spiral, everything is always repeating and looping. So cool because the music repeats in loops. And so the idea was to treat the interviews as if they're musical elements, so they're constantly like, you can hear, to deal with time music. I always describe it as so swell I spent weeks taking each interview and trying to sort of plot it in much in a very. And then it gets very. Let's look over here. Skip forward. Okay. So I'll do a lot of scoring that way, where the story and the sound are actually literally holding hands.

[Dallas Taylor]

The way that Jad integrates the voices of a story into the musical score is unlike any other podcaster I know of.

[Jad Abumrad]

There does feel like there's some the story sometimes wants, that there's an internal world locked within the voices that you just kind of want to surface. You want to bring it out. And sometimes I just won't stop until it feels like. It feels to me like it conjures in my imagination something. I'm like, oh, gotta go there. There are days, though, when I'm, like, working to try and make a really specific sound work where I'm like, this is so stupid. But then if you get it right, and then, you know, four years later, after you've forgotten it, someone encounters that thing and has an emotional reaction, you're like, okay. That's why,

[Dallas Taylor]

if you ask me, Jad has done everything I aspire to as a podcaster, and that's to inform and inspire as many people as I can while crafting sonic masterpieces that will stand the test of time. The art form of audio storytelling, as well as my own career, would not be the same without Jad. As our time together was wrapping up, I asked him something that I try to ask all of our guests. So why have you personally devoted your life? And I wouldn't even narrow it down to music, but to sound?

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow, that's a big question. It's kind of was the first and only idea, you know what I mean? There's a lot of things that I feel like I could be okay at, but, like, sound was the thing that compelled me. And then I figured out I was good at it. That set me on a path, and I haven't ever really questioned it. All I know is that when I am in the middle of trying to figure out a story, I learn so much about the world and about myself in that process. It's like, it's always the sense of who you are at any given moment. Like, you're always becoming a thing, and it's always slightly out of reach. And for me, I always sort of grasp it momentarily. Sitting in this seat, doing an interview or, like, trying to edit that interview somehow. That's where I understand the meaning of it. I love the materials of sound. I love manipulating sound. I love the feeling it gives you the way it vibrates your skull. I just love every aspect of it, but ultimately it's like it's scratching some much deeper existential itch. So for me, sound is. It's a search. I don't know. Is that the right answer?

[Dallas Taylor]

20,000 Hz is produced out of the Sound Design studios of Defacto Sound. Hear [e-mail] this episode was written and produced by Leila Battle and Casey Emerling, with help from Grace East.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was sound designed and mixed by

[Dallas Taylor]

Joel Boyder with original music by Wesley Slover. A huge thanks to Jad Abumrad for welcoming me into his studio and telling me his story. If you'd like to see Jad in his studio, go watch the video about him over on my YouTube channel, which is under the banner Dallas Taylor MP3. There's also a direct link in the show notes I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening. Before we go, a quick reminder that using our unique sponsor codes is one of the simplest ways to support this show, because it's what gets these advertisers to keep booking with us. With that in mind, get your web store off the ground with Shopify and sign up for a $1 per month trial at shopify.com 20k. Streamline your business phone system with Quo and get 20% off your first six months at quo.com 20k. Let Gusto handle the admin busy work for your small business and get three months of free payroll at Gusto.com 20k. If you'd like to advertise on 20,000 Hz, reach out to Gracety K.org finally, don't forget to submit your listener story by May 31st. You can read the full rules and submit your [e-mail] 2026. You can find all of these links in the description. Thanks.