Storyteller Interview: Manoush Zomorodi, Host of TED Radio Hour Podcast, NPR
I may love the TED Radio Hour Podcast episode better than the actual TED Talks themselves. Because in each episode. Manoush Zomorodi takes you behind the scenes of the talks. You learn more about the speaker, what motivated the talk, and additional information that couldn’t fit for time.
She brings out the best in every talk and speaker and tells their stories, deepening your experience of it. I was delighted to include Manoush as one of the Storyteller Vignettes in The Perfect Story. There is so much prep that goes into each episode, both before and after the interview in editing.
As with all these interviews, there was so much goodness I wasn’t able to include in the book. Enjoy the bonus material from my interview with Manoush!
How has your storytelling changed from where you started in your career as a journalist?
I worked in very hard news where you tell the story as quickly as possible. Maybe you have a minute or two minutes if you are lucky. Now I have the delightful privilege and honor of making a show that lives in breath, lets things expand, and makes things as long as they need to be.
How do you help someone tell their story better?
Each person is so different. I don’t just show up to an interview. There is preparation and conversation with the producer who I am working with on a segment. I’ll give you an example. We are talking to the CIA’s former Master of Disguise. How do we create a scene with her and make sure she feels ready and prepared to make her segments the most exciting, interesting, and fascinating as possible?
Our show is a very specific thing in that sometimes we are asking about the TED Talk they have already given. Other times we feel what has been covered in the TED Talk is already out in the world, but there is something else we’d like to talk to them about with their work. Sometimes that means that you can come off rote and other times that is just a matter of having you expand on it and diving into the points you didn’t have time to get into in your TED Talk.
Is there a lot done on the backend with editing of the episodes?
Our show is still extremely highly produced. We love to use music and sound design to support a person’s story. It’s like watching a movie with your eyes closed a lot of the time. Our goal is to inform and entertain. Postproduction is a very big part of it.
When a scientist is speaking to a general audience, like TED Radio Hour, we need to make sure they don’t just throw out a term that we don’t define. Or maybe we don’t even use a technical term because it’s just not needed.
We recently finished an episode about the search for alien life. The person I was interviewing referred to exoplanets. I had to take a minute and think “Does the average listener know what an exoplanet is? Do we need to say ‘Exoplanets, you know… planets not in our solar system.’” I want the story to be accessible to everyone. Especially if a child is listening.
You gracefully tell a story within a story in each episode. How are you approaching that?
TED Radio Hour recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. I inherited this format created by Guy Raz, my predecessor, and a bunch of very talented people at NPR and TED. We have experimented with the format since I’ve come aboard.
As much as I love making an hour of radio, storytelling is getting shorter and faster. People’s attention spans are changing. Their consumption habits are different. Public radio is a service. It’s on us to find different ways to tell a story that meets people where they are. There is no room in this very crowded world of media to not experiment.
How did you step into this role and make it your own?
The format worked. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to be in it. I knew I would be different by virtue of who I was: a woman, a mother, and a child of immigrants. I talk differently, my curiosity goes in different places, and my background is in tech and business journalism.
I felt I needed to build trust in the audience so that they would keep coming back to the standard, quality, joy, and surprise they knew. Then use my particular flavor to hopefully go and find people who maybe wouldn’t listen to the show because they didn’t think it was for them.
You wrote the book on creativity. How do you help guests tap into creativity that makes them and their ideas more relatable?
I think scientists are deeply creative people. Creativity is experimenting with new ideas - exactly what scientists or technologists do. They hunt down answers and solutions. I can get them to explain the story of the problem they’re solving.
The harder part is explaining how an mRNA vaccine works. Every time there is a highly technical topic, there is a choice to make. Do we dive in and say, “Hold onto your seats, we’re going to get really technical?” Setting listener expectations is really crucial.
I think those moments of stopping the story almost to reiterate “We are in this together” is how you hold onto people. I know I need it when I am listening to something complicated.
I ask all the dumb questions. The listener is driving to work or doing dishes. They aren’t thinking about the way that fatty acids might play into the nucleic transfer of a vaccine. I connect you in the middle.
What is the difference between putting on an episode of TED Radio Hour and telling stories about yourself?
That takes me back to what I did my TED Talk on and how I found my voice. I made a show called “Note to Self” where I did experiments with listeners about our behavior with our technology. I based it on questions I was having about my relationship with my tech and if I was changing my brain and creativity abilities. My career took off. I found out who I was on the microphone by saying, “Nobody knows the answers. There is no science here. What if we figured it out together?”
Podcasting was just starting to take off as this different medium that required you to be more open with the listener. Maturity, the changing industry, and working with other people at the top of their game all helped. Along with a wonderful audience willing to put themselves out there and experiment. I ended up writing my book about changing their relationship to their technology to see what would happen.
Telling my own story on the TED stage was a turning point. I love doing the TED Radio Hour, but I also need my own thing to talk about. I can ask questions 85% of the time. But for the other 15%, I need to be doing my own writing or storytelling. The only way I know to do that is to put myself out there and just record what happens. Which inevitably leads me into weird, wonderful situations.
Order The Perfect Story, available everywhere books are sold.
Want to receive more articles like this one? Sign up for Brain Food here.
