Robert Krulwich is founder and co-host of Radiolab, one of public radio’s most popular shows, winner of a Peabody Award. At The Power of Storytelling 2015, he talked about the questions he asks himself while trying to figure out a story, and how he keeps his infinite curiosity alive.
Here is the video recording of his speech and some highlights:
“Our objective is to explain and our objective is to remind people what it’s really like to be curious. In a normal way they do this in journalism, as the reporter’s given an assignment and they go out and they do their interviews and they try to figure out what’s going on and they get things wrong and they get them fixed and they write the sentences and the sentences are corrected and all the messy stuff is done off stage and then they step in front of their audience and deliver.”
“In this show we do exactly the opposite. We make the mistakes in front of people, we argue with each other, we listen to somebody and either of us can’t figure out what the person has just said and we bargain back and forth about what it is and go back to them. We model what it’s like to learn.”
“The answer to finding good stories in the fundamentals, it’s in the small choices that you have to make all the time, that you can’t prepare for, the This word versus That choice, the How do I say this better part, the How can I find my way to say what I feel as accurately and truly and honestly as I possibly can? This is the real work of all these businesses and this is where the job really is.”
“This is so much fun. And there’re so many people happy to have fun with us. And it’s such an enormous celebration of curiosity that sometimes you just wanna lie down and say “Thank you” to the entire Universe that this is the way you’re allowed to lead your life.”