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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. How do you end a story? In this archive talk from TED 2020, host of Radiolab, Jad Abumrad, tells us how his search for an answer led him home to the mountains of Tennessee, where he met an unexpected teacher, Dolly Parton.
I want to tell you about my search for purpose as a journalist and how Dolly Parton helped me figure it out. So I've been telling audio stories for about 20 years, first on the radio and then in podcasts. And when I started the radio show Radio Lab in 2002, here was the quintessential story move we would do. We'd bring on somebody.
It's one of the most hypnotic and spellbinding spectacles in nature because you have to keep in mind it is absolutely silent. Like this guy, mathematician Steve Strogatz, and he would paint a picture. Picture it. There's a riverbank in Thailand in the remote part of the jungle. You're in a canoe slipping down the river.
There's no sound of anything, maybe the occasional exotic jungle bird or something.
So you're in this imaginary canoe with Steve, and in the air all around you are millions of fireflies. And what you see is sort of a randomized starry night effect, because all the fireflies are blinking at different rates, which is what you'd expect. But according to Steve, in this one place, for reasons no scientist can fully explain, with thousands of lights on and then off, all in sync,
Now, it's around this time that I would generally bring in the beautiful music, as I just did, and you'd start to get that warm feeling, a feeling that we know from science kind of localizes in your head and chest and spreads through your body. It's that feeling of wonder.
From 2002 to 2010, I did hundreds of these stories, science-y, neuroscience-y, very heady, brainy stories that would always resolve into that feeling of wonder. And I began to see that as my job, to lead people to moments of wonder. What that sounded like was... Wow. Wow. Wow. That's amazing. Whoa. Wow. Wow. But I began to get kind of tired of these stories.
I mean, partially it was the repetition. I remember there was a day I was sitting at the computer making the sound of a neuron.
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Chapter 2: What question does Jad Abumrad explore in this episode?
You know, take some white noise, chop it up, very easy sound to make. And I remember thinking... I have made this sound 25 times. But it was more than that. There was a familiar path to these stories. You walk the path of truth, which is made of science, and you get to wonder. Now, I love science, don't get me wrong.
My parents emigrated from a war-torn country, came to America, and science for them was like more their identity than anything else. And I inherited that from them. But there was something about that simple movement from science to wonder that just started to feel wrong to me. Like, is that the only path the story can take?
Around 2012, I ran into a bunch of different stories that made me think, no. One story in particular where we interviewed a guy who described chemical weapons being used against him and his fellow villagers in the mountains of Laos. Western scientists went there, measured for chemical weapons, didn't find any. We interviewed the man about this. He said the scientists were wrong.
We said, but they tested. He said, I don't care. I know what happened to me. And we went back and forth and back and forth. And make a long story short, the interview ended in tears. I felt...
Chapter 3: How did Dolly Parton influence Jad's journey as a journalist?
I felt horrible. Like hammering at a scientific truth when someone has suffered, that wasn't gonna heal anything. And maybe I was relying too much on science to find the truth. And it really did feel at that moment that there were a lot of truths in the room and we were only looking at one of them. So I thought, I gotta get better at this.
And so for the next eight years, I committed myself to doing stories where you heard truths collide. We did stories about the politics of consent, where you heard the perspective of survivors and perpetrators whose narratives clashed.
We did stories about race, how black men are systematically eliminated from juries, and yet the rules that try and prevent that from happening only make things worse. Stories about counterterrorism, Guantanamo detainees, stories where everything is disputed. All you can do is struggle to try and make sense. And the struggle kind of became the point.
I began to think maybe that's my job, to lead people to moments of struggle. And here's what that sounded like. But I see, I like... Oh, I know. Well, so like... That, I mean, I... You know, I... Now that sigh right there, I wanted to hear that sound in every single story because that sound is kind of our current moment, right?
We live in a world where truth is no longer just a set of facts to be captured. It's become a process. It's gone from being a noun to being a verb. But how do you end that story? Like what literally kept happening is we'd be, you know, telling a story, cruising along two viewpoints in conflict, you get to the end and it's just like, no, let me see. What do I say at the end?
How do you end that story? You can't just happily ever after it, because that doesn't feel real. At the same time, if you just leave people in that stuck place, like, why did I just listen to that? It felt like there had to be another move there. Had to be a way beyond the struggle. And this... is what brings me to Dolly, or Saint Dolly, as we like to call her in the South.
I wanna tell you about one little glimmer of an epiphany that I had doing a nine-part series called Dolly Parton's America last year. It was a bit of a departure for me, but I just had this intuition that Dolly could help me figure out this ending problem. And here was the basic intuition.
You go to a Dolly concert, you see men in trucker hats standing next to men in drag, Democrats standing next to Republicans, women holding hands, every different kind of person smashed together. All of these people that we are told should hate each other are there singing together. She somehow carved out this unique space in America and I wanted to know how did she do that?
So I interviewed Dolly 12 times, two separate continents. She started every interview this way.
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Chapter 4: What realization did Jad have about storytelling and wonder?
What do I make of this? Well, I think there's something in here that's a clue, a way forward. As journalists, we love difference. We love to fetishize difference. But increasingly in this confusing world, we need to be the bridge between those differences. But how do you do that? I think for me now, the answer is simple. You interrogate those differences.
You hold them for as long as you can until... like up on that mountain, something happens. Something reveals itself. Story cannot end in difference. It's got to end in revelation. And coming back from that trip on the mountain, a friend of mine gave me a book that gave this whole idea a name. In psychotherapy, there's this idea called the third, which essentially goes like this.
Typically, we think of ourselves as these autonomous units. I do something to you and you do something to me. But according to this theory, when two people come together and really commit to seeing each other in that mutual act of recognition, they actually make something new, a new entity that is their relationship. You can think of Dolly's concerts as sort of a cultural third space.
The way she sees all the different parts of her audience, the way they see her, creates the spiritual architecture of that space. And I think now that is my calling. That as a journalist, as a storyteller, as just an American living in a country struggling to hold, that every story I tell has got to find the third.
That place where the things we hold as different resolve themselves into something new.
Thank you. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Christopher Fasey-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.
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