Ari Shapiro with Dan Shapiro: Best Strangers in the World

Ari Shapiro is the host of NPR's all things considered the most listened to radio news program in the U.S he won the Edward Edward R Morrow award for the his coverage of the Trump administration's Asylum policies on the U.S Mexico border the Columbia journalism review honored him with a laurel for his investigation into disability benefits for injured veterans the American Bar Association awarded him with the silver gavel for exposing the failures of Louisiana's detention system after Hurricane Katrina and at age 25 Shapiro won the Daniel Shore journalism prize for investigation of methamphetamine use and HIV transmission Shapiro makes frequent appearances as a guest singer with Pink Martini he created the original one-man show Homeward in 2016 and since 2019 he has performed and toured with Tony Award winner Alan [ __ ] Dan Shapiro is an Innovative entrepreneur and five-time CEO has he has dedicated his career to helping people bring their ideas to life with accomplishments spanning software board game design and Laser Technology dance Pursuits are fueled by curiosity and inventive problem solving inspired by his passion for teaching his children Dan created robot turtles the best-selling board game in Kickstarter history robot turtles teaches programming principles to kids as young as preschool and has and has been sold everywhere as CEO and co-founder of glowforge the 3D laser printer company Dan shattered crowdfunding records by raising 27.9 million dollars in 30 days gloforge now helps millions of people around the world bring their creative ideas to life Dan's accomplishments have been featured in The Wall Street Journal The Today Show and on the front page of the New York Times he holds more than 30 patents for his creations and lives in Seattle with his wife and teenage twins now our program will begin with a brief audio presentation [Music] here we go pulling out into the water to the largest mangrove forest in the world they're going to be people listening somewhere in America who will hear that and say what are you crazy no I'm not crazy I'm just not going to subscribe to fear Jurassic Park but we're really only 25 miles off the coast of Los Angeles and no dinosaurs no dinosaurs as far as you know the Mugabe hero is gone and it's something that can't be ever allowed to come back and it's what you're trying to do here making sure that that change stays permanent yes but I really am grateful that my heart has been broken a good many times because it does help me to love Ari Shapiro NPR news Rio de Janeiro Santiago Chile Belgrade Serbia Izmir Turkey traveling with the president aboard Air Force One to them this is just another day on the water to me it's a final exclamation point marking the end of my time in the UK [Music] please welcome Ari Shapiro and Dan Shapiro [Applause] hi everybody wow it's so good to see you all thanks for coming [Applause] before we dive in could I just answer a few questions that I think are on everybody's mind the pre FAQ answer number one no we're not twins answer number two if you thought you were coming to see Dan Savage in conversation with me you're not crazy he was unable to do it and so we went to the next name in the directory and the next Dan s after Dan Savage was my brother Dan Shapiro but in this 12 City book tour this is the only time I'm talking to a member of my family so you're getting something really special tonight because he knows all the secrets and the answer to the third question is you all look nothing like what I imagined either okay over to you Dan well uh I'd say lifetime Ari Shapiro superfan known you for longer than uh since then anyone before we start uh and it's a little bit intimidating to be asked to interview one of the greatest living interviewers no but this is the best because see for me it's the difference between having to throw a dinner party and being invited to a dinner party I don't have to worry about whether the soup is hot I don't have to worry about whether the salad is wilted I just get to sit back and enjoy so rest easy it's gonna be fun one of my friends asked me if I was nervous and I said this is like if Bono asked you to sing a song to him which is a thing that happens in the book when I started sweating profusely no but a more apt analogy I think is that when Alan [ __ ] asked me to do a show with him and Friends asked whether I was intimidated I said no because I know that Alan has done this so many times that if the train is going off the tracks he'll get it back on I know that if I jump Alan will catch me I am your Allen oh okay and actually I wanted to unpack this because it struck me these are like two chapters apart you've got eight people in a private dinner and you're singing oh my God and then later you're in a room like this and you're singing in a cabaret and it's like this incredibly vulnerable thing and I was thinking I was thinking about a movie from our childhood in which many potenkin also family connection is improbably wrestling Andre the Giant and winning classic film and Andre says something to be effective you know it's different when you're trying to fight three dozen people than when you're only wrestling one oh that's a really good moment is there something about that there's absolutely something to that so to give you a little context I I thought there would be one essay in this book one chapter in this book that everybody would ask about and the surprise for me on this book tour has been that that's really not the case like the questions have been very widespread which is really fun and satisfying for me but the thing that has come up more than I expected it to is the chapter about sweating profusely and the episode in which I sing a song for Bono at a dinner party involves my sweating profusely so it's a really fair question why am I like at peace performing in front of 18 000 people and not at a dinner table with Bono and yes part of it is the difference between one people and wrestling a dozen people part of it is I have sweated profusely when singing in front of thousands of people so that is not necessarily my comfort zone opportunity sweating but also part of it is just being caught off guard you know like I know I'm going to do a thing when I'm performing with Pink Martini and yes part of the thrill of it is that you never know exactly how it's going to go and there's kind of the electricity of a live performance and the uniqueness of everybody being in the same room for just one moment and that thing will never happen again in quite the same way like the unexpectedness is part of the thrill but also you plan and you prepare and you know what you're gonna do whereas being at a dinner party and being a little bit drunk okay more than a little bit drunk and being asked to sing a song for Bono who my entire childhood I had had like every one of the albums YouTube ever recorded some on CD and cassette yeah it was a panic inducing moment for me yes absolutely that that seems forgivable um but before we go past that I also this is a thing that's not in the book that most people don't know but there was also a childhood connection to a celebrity not in the book Mandy patenkin yes I remember a very young Ari I talked about this on the podcast Los culturistas oh excellent yeah yeah um I as a high schooler on the bulletin board in my bedroom did not have you'll be shocked to hear a Guns and Roses poster I know you'll be um stupefied to learn that I did not have a centerfold of Christy Brinkley I had an autographed headshot of Mandy Patinkin because he is one of us well so when we were kids my family always said oh we're related to him he's our cousin which is a bit of a stretch our cousin not our first cousin was married to his cousin not his first cousin but as a child I was like he's our cousin so I wrote him a fan letter thinking we would become pen pals and I received an autographed headshot but there's a coda to this story which is some 30 years later as a host of all things considered I interviewed Mandy Patinkin about his album and I told him this story and he said wait who's your cousin who's married to my cousin and I said well our cousin they were brothers Burton Marvin and I can't remember which one was married to his cousin but anyway one of them was married to his cousin and he was like oh my God they're my favorite cousins wait until Catherine his wife wait until Catherine hears we are related to Ari Shapiro host of All Things Considered and then this amazing Mensch so my parents who were watching at home hi Mom and Dad my parents were visiting DC when he was doing his solo show in Washington we went to see the show afterwards we went backstage and he greeted us like family it was the perfect ending to the story it was amazing and every bit as much a mention in person oh my goodness absolutely and speaking of Mom and Dad we're talking about this uh before something that you've reported a lot on is immigration throughout the world and the most heart-running stories I think about this and in America we all have connections to immigration all of us at some point were connected to somebody who came to this country but for most of us that's a piece of history for you it's something that's very present I think about that because our mom is working on a book writing about the Immigrant story of our ancestors coming to this country how do you reconcile what for so many people is this sort of like yeah sure once upon a time but now that's not he that's not the present day anymore with the people who you see around the world who are striving to make a new country their own you know it is good timing for that question because in two days we begin to celebrate Passover the Jewish holiday that marks The Exodus From Slavery to Freedom and one of the fundamental instructions at the Passover seder is to tell the story as if you yourselves were enslaved as if you yourself we're making the Exodus from Egypt to the promised land and to me that is a fundamental instruction to perform an act of empathy that is difficult and radical and essential because as we live in our comfortable Bubbles as Americans and we hear about the economy of Venezuela imploding and people making their way on foot through Colombia or the Syrian Civil War forcing millions of people to flee their homes or Russia's invasion of Ukraine causing the biggest Refugee crisis since World War II it is easy for us to feel very distant from that and to think of the people having those experiences as somehow fundamentally different from us as individuals and what I try to do as a journalist and in a certain way also what I try to do with Pink Martini and with Alan is build bridges of understanding across those chasms of difference and help people perform those acts of empathy and so I think part of what the Passover seder and Judaism teaches us is to exercise that empathy muscle and to resist the urge to categorize people who are far away having experiences different from us as somehow fundamentally different humans which of course they're not and so it's easy to fall back into the Trap of othering those people and I think it's work that we all have to do to recognize our commonality [Applause] and as a reporter you have a particularly challenging decision every time you walk into there and you write a little bit about this the the the distance between you and the people who you are are talking to you gotta a line it was something like my cheat sheet uh it was something along the lines of uh I can't find it you said something like there's this thin line between um journalistic Detachment yeah and um and like uh I and well I know exactly what you're talking about it's in the it's in the chapter about with your company I can't even find it it's in the chapter that is called and it the best strangers in the world as a matter of fact the title chapter I love it when they say the name of the movie during the uh yeah exactly that's the um I'm gonna find it so the thing that struck me about this is as a listener I hear these stories and I hear the impact and I and I think just I mean like we all sit here listening to the radio like okay so as soon as the microphone goes off what happens does this person walk away do they do they turn off do they leave and in so many cases you go back and you talk to these folks again and again over the years so the line is it wouldn't be the last time I would ask myself where the line was between journalistic non-interference and cruelty can I can I just read a few paragraphs of this section so this is I think it's like there's not one Central story but this is the title chapter and it's about these two Syrian refugees who I followed for years one who settled in Toledo Ohio one who settled in Germany the one who settled in Germany I met in the coastal town of Izmir Turkey and when I arrived the Syrian refugee crisis was at its apex and so there were literally thousands of people sleeping on the sidewalk and you know they were lawyers Engineers doctors teachers professionals who were spending their life savings to try to get to Europe so I'm trying to find one to follow and I meet this guy named monzer Omar he didn't know this but our chat felt to me like some Twisted kind of audition there were thousands of syrians in Izmir at the moment was monzer the person whose story I should follow would his journey be the one I'd latch on to what if he gave up and returned to Syria or Worse died in The Crossing degrees maybe instead I thought to myself I should use this conversation for a brief quote in a new spot at the top of the hour maybe I should keep looking asking myself these questions felt like a cold and inhuman calculation especially as the person I was talking to is risking his life I tried to reconcile Humanity with strategy emotion with professionalism I decided to commit to monzer I asked him to let us follow his story wherever it led I told him that I wouldn't be able to pull strings or fund his travels but I would share his journey with the world so that people might get a better understanding of what he and millions of others were going through he agreed neither of us could have imagined that this narrative would unfold over years across half a dozen countries even involving the U.S ambassador to the United Nations and you'll have to read the book to one of the things that really struck me through the book and even through knowing you was the way your relationship with the news and really I think your com confidence in in your role and in your journalism grew over time and there were two tentpole pieces that really uh that really stood out for me the the the latter of the two was the harrowing experience when you talk about reporting at the Pulse Nightclub shooting and volunteering to go and be a part of that which was something that that was a really different statement to say I am connected to this story more so than you know at the time when you volunteered but I'm connected to this story and I think I can tell it better yeah the book in many ways is about the tension between on the one hand the identity history and experience that I carry that every one of us carries with us through the world and the impact that that has on the stories we tell and on the other hand the impetus and the the worthy goal of being a surrogate for The Listener of wanting to allow you whoever you are to put yourself in my shoes and imagine that you're talking to the person I'm talking to that you're in the place that I am to be kind of an every person and and there's a real push-pull there and so in a lot of stories I tell like the one about monster Omar I'm an outsider my personal lived experience is relevant only insofar as it situates me far outside of the story and I come in knowing nothing but with the Pulse Nightclub shooting it was quite the opposite I mean I volunteered to go there because I had been based in Florida for nine months I'd been bar hopping in Orlando I'd been to gay bars my whole life so I knew what it meant for there to be a massacre at a queer club and I knew that my lived experience could allow me to tell those stories in ways that had more nuance and depth and heart than some of my colleagues which is not to disparage my colleagues many of the people I work with did an admirable job covering those stories just as I think I've over the years done an admiral job admirable job covering many stories that I have no connection to but this sort of twist is that at the end of that week reporting I was interviewing um this guy named Billy Maynes who has since passed away he was the editor-in-chief of the free gay weekly paper in Orlando called Watermark and I was as I often do before an interview just making small talk with him and I was saying oh you know I actually went bar hopping in Orlando 12 years ago and I met these two bartenders who were these really sweet guys and the next night was their night off and they took me out and we became friends then he was like what was the bar and I said I don't remember the name it was 12 years ago I'm sure it's closed and he said well what did it look like and so I described the layout and you sort of walk in and there's like a dance floor to your left and there's a bar to your right and he said that was pulse and I looked in my phone and found the name of one of the bartenders and he had an email address at pulseorlando.com and neither of them were at Pulse the night of the shooting one was still working at the bar but wasn't working there that night the other had moved to another city but I realized at that point that like any pretense of journalistic objectivity was a joke but that also this was not something to shy away from not something to distance myself from as a reporter but something that added value that added depth to my work as a journalist that I could be proud of bringing to the story I was telling instead of sort of you know having to make excuses or be embarrassed about the fact that I was not presenting the view from nowhere to use an old phrase that is still lurking around in journalism and let me compare back then to Arya of like a decade and a half prior um normally we'll call each other on the weekends so when I got a call on some random weekday yeah I'm like okay something terrible happened and you said something joyous you said Dan this isn't a big deal this is just like we're gonna do the real thing later but we're getting married tomorrow uh in San Francisco it's legal we don't know how long it'll be legal this is 2004 2004 uh and you married your high school boyfriend and you college boy College boyfriend you asked not his parents hand in marriage yeah I asked my boss because at the time same-sex marriage in the U.S was a huge controversy it was the Forefront of the culture wars it was in the news every single day and the gay marriages in San Francisco were very legally controversial Gavin Newsom who was at the time the mayor had just decided to start doing same-sex marriages and Mike my husband grew up in San Francisco and we had been together for years at that point and he was like we're doing this I said of course yes we're doing it let's do it let's go um but as a like young beginning journalist I was taught that my role was to narrate these big cultural debates not participate in them and so I told my boss like okay I'll keep a low profile I'll leave my NPR tote bag at home and which was a first actually I've been really rebellious on this book tour I feel like so I'm on a sabbatical for two months for the first time in my adult life I'm taking a pause from like my day job and just doing this and then doing my show with Alan for two weeks at the cafe Carlisle in New York um and I'm carrying around a tote bag from Monaco it's just like the the teenager dying their hair purple or getting a tattoo or something my tote bag's not from public radio um no I said I was gonna leave my NPR toe bag at home keep a low profile Mike and I are standing on the steps of San Francisco City Hall we're getting married we're so caught up in the moment that we don't notice the TV camera over our shoulders and so that night at his parents house in San Francisco we saw that we were in the b-roll sort of the background video footage of their story about the same-sex marriage controversy and I was like oops well they didn't interview us they didn't use our name it's just the local station it'll be fine and then the footage made its way to the NBC Nightly News and then to MSNBC and then to CNBC and basically any time any NBC property did a story about same-sex marriage we were the faces in the background and this literally went on for years until finally I was NPR's Justice reporter and Pete Williams was the Justice correspondent for NBC News and he called me and he said Ari I think you're in the b-roll of my story tonight but looking five years younger and I said yeah I explained the whole situation and I said Pete I am ready to surrender The Tiara and let someone else take the throne and so he said he would have me removed from the video library and that's how I stopped being the face of same-sex marriage in America answer your question I don't think my instinct to act permit ask permission was entirely off base like we're in this strange Universe where in some cases our identity and existence is politicized and we're as journalists not supposed to engage in political debates but sometimes it's not our choice because somebody makes our existence the subject of a political debate and in that situation I think it's appropriate for the journalists to have a conversation with the boss and I think it's appropriate for the boss to say of course go do the thing somebody is politicizing your existence that's not your problem but I think it is important to have the conversation I don't think these are super simple clear-cut black and white questions all the time and so I always err on the side of engaging the conversation so if I think about the conversation that you've had with all the people in this room all the listeners over the years and I think about my experience of it as a listener which I've always described as yes when I drive to work I'm on a conference call with my brother and I'm on mute I love that drive home from work sorry as you pointed out the people who say I love listening to you right for coffee in the morning yeah yeah people often will be like oh my God Ari Shapiro I'm so happy to meet you I wake up to you every morning and I just smile and say thank you it's nice to meet you too and I don't mention that my show is on in the afternoons for those of you who didn't get the joke guys uh the thing that I have seen evolved so much over the years you talk about a little bit is The Voice the NPR well so okay one thing I have to say about this is that when I listen to Robert Siegel's interview I was so one of the really fun things about this is having a different moderator in every city and so like here I get to talk to my brother about this book which is such a great experience in Washington DC I got to talk to Audie Cornish about it who was like my longtime co-host on all things considered and we talked about the fact that everybody everybody's voice gets deeper over their years hosting so it's not a trying to sound less gay thing you listen to Robert Siegel's interviews from when he started hosting All Things Considered and he does not sound like the Robert Siegel who retired Audi two but yes when I started hosting All Things Considered I was like an over enunciating tightly wound spring and now I like to think that the me people here on NPR sounds more like the me people here when I'm just chatting with friends I I think that's fair and I also think you gave me some advice about 10 years ago oh wow what was it uh so I was recording a video for my company and I need to do the voiceover and I'd never done anything like this and I was kind of terrified and I was like I know one person who knows voice so I called you up and I was like Ari how do I how do I sound good on a voiceover and you told me I don't know if you're allowed to talk about this but it's just amongst us top secret NPR nuclear protected code word share it go ahead the host Whisperer oh yeah the host Whisperer who has since passed away many years ago but his knowledge and wisdom lives on David kandow who worked for the CBC and would be brought in to be the host Whisperer and guide hosts into how to be better and you told me a secret which I've kept with me for all these years about a smiley face taped to a chair yeah could you could you share this show with our friends here what David kandow used to say was so there are there are a lot of very specific check boxes you want to imagine that you're talking to a specific person just one person and you want to choose somebody who you like but don't love admire but don't fear and you want to imagine that they're six feet away from you farther and you'll lose the bottom range of your voice closer and you'll lose the top range for your voice and so as a I no longer do this but like as a beginning host I would actually imagine that I was talking to someone and I would sometimes even before I started reading a script I would say let me tell you about something and then I would say the thing because that would kind of put me in a mode of having a real conversation and sometimes to help actually like represent that if I was sitting in the studio and there was a chair opposite on the other side of the table I would tape a smiley face on a piece of paper to that chair and imagine that that smiley face was whoever the person I had chosen to speak to this works by the way this is awesome and so I I have done the face tape to a smiley uh smiley face tape to a chair I have asked a colleague to go sit in a chair for me yeah I know I've done it with real people too yeah I put I put my kids to work as uh as the target of that I hope you paid them child labor you know laws we won't talk about that just a little allowance bump that's right I will tell you though when I when I think about like the Ari Shapiro voice I I hear on the radio I still think of the re superhero I knew before I went to college I still think of the place where the book started so let's spend a moment there 12th Street North Dakota whatever that was our address but yes because you know when we left Fargo you were 11 I was eight and there's a real difference between 11 and 8. so I think you have much more Vivid memories of Fargo than I do and actually I've got the advantage here you know what I am dying I know you're the one asking the questions but because I open the book describing the two of us being the only Jewish kids at Washington Elementary School going from classroom to classroom with a menorah and a dreidel talking about Hanukkah several people have asked was this your teacher's idea or your parents idea or like were you coerced or did you volunteer I don't know the answer to that question do you oh so first I'm sorry no I mean look I built a whole career on it it was it was me yes like I'm gonna teach them how this works uh that's amazing and and things like uh Molly I can't remember her last name um getting shamed at her school and called out because she wouldn't sing Christmas songs and uh oh and you were like and so I was like yeah I know I'm just I'm taking this and then that is so great when we moved to the Flies love the book it's that good when we moved to Portland which was like the Holy Land compared to Fargo yeah the reason that I did that so I think so because I was doing it and I think that yeah the mantle fell I went to my seventh grade teacher and I said would you like me to give a talk about Hanukkah and she said why would you do that that is so great I didn't know that I love that but you had a question to ask the question I was just going to ask was there's a very clear moment I remember and I'm curious for your lens of it which is Friday night oh yeah 5 P.M one note on the piano banged over and over and over again and then the trumpets of the 1987 All Things Considered theme song I don't say this in the book but I for many years had a pavlovian reaction to the All Things Considered theme music because I can remember we had speakers in Fargo that were as tall as I was and I can remember sitting in front of them hearing the theme music hearing Susan stamberg talk and knowing that it was time for dinner so when I say I had a pavlovian reaction literally the All Things Considered theme music made me salivate which is a really good thing I no longer have that reaction because now when the All Things Considered theme music plays it means it's time for me to tell people about the news I don't get to eat for another few hours after that yeah for me it is that that piano it's the original or that yeah uh that is garlic and lemon oh that is the smell mom's uh salad dressing yeah and yeah and Summer's dad barbecuing outside absolutely sensory sensory experience and this is the the thing I mean this honestly this is the thing that's such a privilege about hosting All Things Considered is that I feel like I've inherited this heirloom and my job is simultaneously not to break it but also to help it keep evolving in ways that keep it relevant and substantive and reflective of the moment we live in and having had it as a part of my life from the very beginning I appreciate how much it means to people who live with it every day and have me in their homes every day which is also one reason that frankly I love hate mail because because if so you know this part of the book was magnificent if somebody doesn't like the sound of my voice I am sorry that every evening the show you love is worsened by my presence in it and I know that this is subjective I know that every host at NPR has listeners who absolutely love to listen to them and listeners who can't stand them and the fact that they're listeners who can't stand me is part of the job and so when people write in with like really luscious vivid colorful hate mail I it's meaningful to me I would ask you to read excerpts but I know you know them by heart yeah my favorite is a postcard that arrived many years ago the first time that I guest hosted Morning Edition and I framed it it has sat on my desk for more than a decade it was Anonymous I don't know who it's from and it says dear Ari please Butch up I find a daily dose of your personality annoying I'm a person too sincerely D Emerson Miami Florida tulips on it and this is my favorite part the stamp was a dove of peace I mean it was constructive criticism look he had I mean he wasn't at that point dealing with me every day because I was just filling in on the show but poor D Emerson in Miami Florida has to hear me when he turns on all things considered every evening I'm sorry for him things just got worse over the day things just got worse for him poor D Emerson so as you talk about inheriting the mantle uh there's a team that is chartered with making sure that happens and my favorite phrase of the book was NPR security team I think that I did not know my pledge dollars were going for no but it's a real thing stocks champion this is a phrase I did not think would exist s too if it weren't for your pledge dollars I would not be able to go to hostile environment training and let me tell you so I've done hostile environment training in the UK when I was based in London and I've also done it in the states where living in DC there's a site in Virginia where they take us for hostile environment training and the people who do this training are British and they do the training all over the world with journalists from you know every continent every part of the world and their favorite place to do it is Virginia can anybody guess why it's the only place they get to shoot real guns and so like one of the things they do is they take us out into the woods and they set up like a car door a tree stump a brick wall and whatever something else and they say okay if somebody is shooting at you which one would you hide behind and then they put like a big can of tomatoes behind each one and then they take different kinds of weapons and they shoot the weapon at like the car door at the tree stump at the brick wall and you see whether the can of tomatoes stays intact does anyone want to guess of those three car door tree stump brick wall which you should hide behind tree stump anyway so they teach us like you know what to do if you're taking hostage what to do if you're in a firefight so yeah hostile environment training and actually even though I've never been like really in deep physical danger the training has come in handy so many times just in terms of arriving on a scene and thinking where are we gonna Park our car let's make a plan for where we're going to meet up if something happens if somebody asks for your ID instead of giving it to them you show it to like just little things like that have been actually very helpful I'm thinking that maybe tote bags aren't the best giveaway no I think that at some pledge level you get to take hostile environment training oh yeah that right why do we do that uh so so as I was flipping through and flipping through as I was flipping through the second time and looking and thinking about what to ask about um I remember somewhere around the halfway point I was going to ask you about soft news and the question that was forming in my head was a condescending one and it was about the you know okay when you get when you get called on to to do the the the people stuff yeah and then I hit the part of your book where you talk about soft news and what people think is soft news yes and um in this section I quote my friend Sam Sanders who says it better than I can um he says all the stuff that the old school voice of God journalists want to call the soft stuff that they don't care about always happens to be stuff about women and black and brown folks and gay people Sam says his podcasts are a testament to the idea that you can't understand so-called hard stories about just facts until you understand the cultural significance and emotional stuff that is in the softer stories there is a well this comes after a long story that I'm not going to explain but anyway then I say I prefer not to elevate one above the other as I heard Sam articulate that perspective the distance that I'd observed between some of my boss's values and mine started to make more sense of course my career is a testament to the fact that I do care about politics war and business I'm happy to interview a senator or a cabinet secretary about the political controversy du jour and I understand why that's an important part of the mix of Stories We Tell but I think news organizations often make a mistake by valorizing those bone dry interviews over flesh and blood stories of culture emotion and personal experience I meant what I said I have a newfound respect for the Soft Stuff I'm glad to hear that so one of the things that was fascinating to me as I followed you both as we chatted and as I looked at your social feeds was how your voyage across the company on this tour across the country on this tour really connected you with some amazing pieces of our past so I'm going to read the something you posted on Instagram there are layers here okay as you see Fish all right but this was I think one sentence dear Ari the memory of you and our brother leading our small congregation in a donut Alum from the bema of the Fargo Hebrew Congregation Shoal most Saturday mornings could not have been clear than it was yesterday when one of those boys addressed the town hall Forum from the bhima of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis yes so Minneapolis was where my parents lived for our parents lived for 10 years where Dan was born and then moved to Fargo for 10 years and I addressed this lecture series called the Westminster Town Hall forum and um afterwards it was the only place where I did a book signing because the the event was free and open to the public and so books weren't included in the ticket price so they sold books I signed them afterwards so many people came through the line and said my child in Fargo was your babysitter we had a lot of babysitters well I asked our parents I was like how many babysitters did we have and Mom and Dad were like well we really didn't go out that much and then I flashed back to an image of you me and our younger brother Joseph literally climbing up a babysitter like a jungle gym and I thought we went through them like M M's we just went through them like Kleenex three boys three years apart was yeah any babies at that family and they all came back to see you in Minneapolis well their parents did oh should we take some audience questions let's do it oh wait wait before we do before we do I have one more thing yeah and and I prepared this carefully I talked to our mutual friend oh boy Mr Peter Sagel oh Peter Sagel hey Mr Peterson you're my Chicago moderator it was really fun and he said I should ask you about a bath house joke oh he told a really good joke so I um almost wrote a chapter in the book about this the first journalism prize I ever won was for reporting that I did at a sex club two actually one in Miami one in Chicago um it was a story about um HIV methamphetamine and sex and I won the Daniel Shore journalism prize for it I started writing a chapter about it and then I thought you know what this book is gay enough but there's a certain gainous Target yeah I was like there's a range of how gay this book should be and we're pushing the upper limit here so let's leave the bath house story out of it but to report this story I smuggled a microphone into the sex club in a backpack and after I mentioned that in Chicago Peter Sagel said speak into the mic please and that was the joke okay and in and in Peter's honor before we go to audience questions we're going to do a little lightning fill in the blank I love lightning films right okay it's my favorite I love it this is Ari's lightning fill in the blank karaoke Mike shoved in your hand you're belting out blank uh Total Eclipse of the Heart the place most of us haven't traveled but really should is blank erbil Iraq find a restaurant that serves blank and try it well because I just mentioned Iraq I'm going to say musgoof which is an Iraqi fish roasted over an open fire your go-to emergency interview question when your mind wandered and you forgot what they just said and what you're supposed to ask [Laughter] tell me more about that no like I know this is a lightning round but I'm going to tell you the best questions you can ask in an interview are questions like really or give me an example or what makes you say that because people have their talking points prepared and when they get to the end of their talking points and you say okay but really then they have to actually respond and like you can't prepare those questions but when you ask them they often lead to the best answers okay lightning round continues and last one a thousand voracious rabbits depend on descend on your garden you are only able to save the blank oh I mean it really depends on the time of year right because you don't have the hawkerai turnips at the same time as the heirloom tomatoes oh God this is such a Sophie's Choice I'm gonna I'm gonna go with the hakarai turnips they're great raw they're Great Cooks they're great pickled you can eat the greens they're a real all-purpose vegetable [Laughter] fantastic what an amazing interviewer I mean come on I cannot invent Technologies or run businesses nearly as well as he can do interviews oh well we've got some amazing questions from the audience and you can not only submit but also upvote questions here I'm really nervous scan this you and then I just read whatever's on here AMA that's exactly it all right when and where will you be singing with Pink Martini oh well that's a fun question um we're talking about the summer schedule and haven't fully figured it out because I don't know when I'm going to be on vacation where they're going to be Etc but I always reliably if you want to know where you can catch me with Pink Martini every year I do their New Year's Eve show and we alternate years between Portland Oregon and Los Angeles and I know it's not Seattle but you're closer than a lot of people are to Portland it's either at the Schnitz in Portland OR it's at Disney Hall in Los Angeles and there will be some dates that I join them for in August September I don't know exactly what they are yet but you can always find out at Ari shapiro.work and that's where I keep all of my upcoming appearances updated except recently I haven't updated it because my website still says my book will be released on March 21st you've been a little bit it does not say instant New York Times bestseller just yet get up there soon when I hit number eight in my first week so oh my gosh well done so we got a bunch of votes coming in this is terrific uh the top question right now is how do you think about code switching between the queer community and straight wait you had a great line on this where you said something like homo normative person who happens to live in a heteronormative way so that is okay I'm so glad you read that because I was really pleased with that line and then after the so you read The Galley copy of the book which is like not yet final edits and I found out that the where I thought homo normative meant queer and like radical and heteronormative meant conformist but what I learned is that homo normative actually means being a gay person who lives like a straight person so I had to like reimagine it at the left right I rewrote the phrase but I prefer to think of myself as a homonormative person who lives in a heteronormative way even though the homo normative doesn't mean what I think it means but okay I wanna I wanna read a section here that has two different f word language alerts so if you'll indulge me I wanna um answer the question with this uh excerpt but there will have to be a bleep okay and you're gonna have to imagine the belief wait wait wait wait yeah I was gonna say you you unbleeped on National on NPR during your your author interview so yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna um I'm gonna I'm gonna drop two f-bombs of two different words here okay so I watched people take one of two Pals after they came out the first group of us tried to compensate for letting everybody down we insisted that we would excel in every other facet of Life conform in every respect prove our worthiness by the way at this point in the book I'm at Yale it's what the author Andy Tobias a Harvard grad but close enough called the best little boy in the world syndrome as you can imagine Yale had a lot of those folks the other group of us recognized that we had been lied to that we were not in the words of the Oregon ballot measure that had recently failed abnormal wrong unnatural and perverse and so we wondered what other lies we'd been told the sky didn't fall when we broke the cardinal rule of sexual partnership so what other rules were ready to be broken what fictions had we swallowed about the way Society should function about immigrants or people of color or other marginalized groups I can see now that I contained both of these archetypes wrestling like fraternal twins in utero language alert sometimes I'm a secret agent [ __ ] Behind Enemy Lines other times I just want to impress your parents I itch to torch oppressive and exclusionary institutions even as I long to prove myself worthy of membership in them to rewrite a slogan from a t-shirt that I've spotted at countless Pride parades over the years language alert I am both gays and happy and Queer as in [ __ ] you sorry Alana Nina I don't generally drop f-bombs in front of my 14 year old niece and nephew but you know it's in the book when the occasion calls when the occasion calls this question is so wonderfully meta so when uh when um you asked me to do this I was very excited I love learning new things learn to interview and I was like Ari tell me what to do what not to do who are your favorite interviewers you gave me all this great advice including one important piece which I know is important because later when Terry Gross interviewed you you you talked about this as well as the one thing you like the worst question which is I don't know if everyone would call it the worst question but what are your favorite in what's your favorite interview during your career okay and that was upvoted huh it was number one all right the final chapter of the book is called playing favorites I never know what to tell people when they ask what my favorite interview has been and they ask me all the time first of all I refuse to rank my conversation with Bette Midler above or below my interview with Patti LuPone that is a Sophie's choice if I've ever seen one and I'm not going anywhere near it and second of all the premise of the question always seems like a setup for failure if I spend my career thinking wistfully back on the one great interview I did way back when something in the system is broken down I should be excited about an interview I did last week and one that I'm doing next week hosting a daily news program is like sprinting on a treadmill at the gym if you pause to gaze at the hot guy walking by you'll fall on the floor my point is when you try to consider all things picking your favorite thing to consider kind of misses the spirit of the project I'm not here to compare apples and oranges I'm here to make a delicious fruit salad [Applause] I had a lot of respect for you people until you upvoted that and made it the number one question I saw it climbing the charts and I was like oh yes I know that like as a portlander I am contractually required to speak ill of Seattle but this is one of the largest venues of the entire book tour and it sold out before any other city so can I just thank you all for that I am so grateful to all of you for being here and showing your support thank you and uh at the top this one this is beautiful uh what's been a story you always wanted to tell but never had an opportunity to do so um you know I I still want to I I've been struggling for a long time with how to report from the Arctic because I've done a lot of climate change reporting I went to two U.N climate Summits one in Glasgow one in Paris I just did a huge project from Coastal Senegal up through Morocco to Spain I was reporting on climate change in India a few years ago and I feel like there's a really great project to be done from the Arctic but everybody has seen polar bears melting ice caps a bajillion times and so I'm I actually had a plan just before the pandemic hit that so I sort of scuttled the plan but I'd still like to get up to the Arctic and do some kind of big reporting project up there that I haven't yet had the chance to do uh what makes you feel hopeful about the news industry and journalism given such radical changes in the last decade you know there there are two sides to this coin the sort of loss of faith in institutions has at the same time allowed so many voices to be heard that otherwise had been kept out by The Gatekeepers and so you know sometimes people will ask about sort of the end of the Walter Cronkite era as though it's a universally bad thing that there's no longer the three big newscasters who everybody listens to every night and yes it's nice to have a shared reality and a shared understanding of what truth is but at the same time there are so many people now whose voices and perspectives reach Millions who we didn't used to hear from and that gives me hope and that makes me optimistic and I think that's really exciting and the flip side of the coin that causes a lot of consternation and fear for appropriate reasons because some of the voices that are being heard are doing real harm but many of them are adding so much to the conversation that that's what keeps me hopeful there's two questions left that are uploaded Above All the Rest like head and shoulders I think we're gonna end with okay uh the first one is within NPR as an organization what do disagreements and conflicts look like are conservative voices present in the conversations that's a great question so um I wish people could sit around our editorial meeting that for all things considered it's 9 30 a.m every day where all of the show staff from the intern to the executive producer of the show sits around a table and basically talks about what should be on the show that day and not everything is decided in that meeting obviously the Washington desk has figured out their agenda for covering the White House the foreign desk has figured out what's the top of the international agenda Etc but we look at the board and it's maybe one half to two-thirds full by the time we sit down and we decide what the rest of the show should be and everybody is pitching stories and no two different groups of people would design the board in the same way the board it's not an algorithm it is not a formula it is a conversation and a debate and there is disagreement and some days there are lots of stories and we don't have room for all of them and we have to figure out which ones we should do and some days there are people saying we need more international news we need more joy surprise an uplift we need a second day hit on this story that we talked about yesterday even though there's a lot of other stuff going on we need a deeper dive to understand the mode reasons or whatever and so that's what disagreement looks like and that's why it is so important that the people around that table reflect the human experience that we want our show to reflect whether that means liberal conservative raised in the United States raised overseas differences in background educationally racially religiously gender like whatever the case may be if we want to represent Society like if I were deciding what's on the show every day I don't know the first thing about sports I need people around that table who know about sports to use a completely non-controversial example when I pitch a story about sports people are like [Laughter] did that just happen and so that's what disagreement looks like and I wish you all could see that meeting because while of course everybody in this room has I would assume heard things on all things considered that they think why on Earth would they do that story if you'd been at the table you would have heard the debate and disagreed and understand that what motivates the decision making at the end of the day is a desire to give our audience the best possible information and the fullest most nuanced understanding of the world that we all live in that's amazing this last question twice as many votes as any other I know what it's going to be it's not really fair I'm gonna let you see it so that afterwards you're not like Daniel set me up here I know exactly what it's going to be before I even look at it take a look oh well I was I was close I was close I thought it was going to be will you sing it's better and it's it's a version of will you sing it's sing the song you sang for Bono please [Laughter] and I'm gonna use the author's uh veto pen and sing something else because I think you'll enjoy it more so as soon as I finish my book tour I am flying to New York to do a two-week run with Alan [ __ ] of the show that we created together and in that show it opens with a montage of like four songs about friendship and friendly competition and in that Montage we knew we wanted to do the Cole Porter song You're the top which has 8 000 verses many of which are Obsolete and some of which are incredibly witty but not relevant to me and Alan so I decided I would rewrite the lyrics and if I have one regret about my Fresh Air interview it's that Terry we're on a first name basis Terry asked me to sing the fourth verse that references All Things Considered and I said to her I can't I need to get to it through the first few verses and so in the interview I was like you know the top viewers and now I wish I had actually been like okay here are the lyrics Terry because I'm very proud of them and I think I did a very good job writing them and I would like to share them with you it's better than the song I sang for Bono you can hear the song I sing for Bono on a Pink Martini recording um okay first I come out and I sing to Alan you're the top you are joa de vivre you're the top you're a Broadway diva you're a graceful Swan your name is on a bar club coming it's a bar in New York with his name on it you were wild and frisky a Scottish whiskey a movie star I mean that's pretty good right okay so then he sings to me you're the top you leave haters cursing you're the top you're taller in person I was Mr floop but you get the scoop you pop and if baby on the bottom you're the top okay and then you modulate up a half step and I sing to him you're the top you're a vegan dinner because he's vegan you're the top you're a Tony winner he's actually one two you are Cabaret a Shakespeare play a dream you're the Oxford comma a network drama your self-esteem and then he sings this is the one that Terry wanted me to give her you're a star your career is glittered you'll go far You're All Things Considered on a feet a seat a Gardens bumper crop and if baby on the bottom you're the top thank you Dan Shapiro okay I have one last request something I've been doing in every city on this book tour and this is the second to last one you all have copies or many of you have copies of the book right do you have copies of the book okay if you will hold up your copy of the book I want to turn my back to you and take a selfie with me and Dan and all of you holding up your copies of the book okay here we go hold them up one two three thank you so much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Town Hall Seattle

Views: 1,337

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Id: UbMkDO4wsLg

Length: 62min 16sec (3736 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023