Jad and Robert: The Early Years
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Ever wonder how Jad and Robert met?
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This video is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video calls or texts. Right now, at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone trade-in. Any condition. It has the ultimate pro camera system and big leap in battery life so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone for the new iPhone 18 Pro requires trade-in of iPhone 14 or higher, excluding iPhone 16E, an eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. Hello. I'm Jad Abumran. This is Radio Lab, the podcast, the Homecoming podcast, actually welcome. One of the things that Robert and I had in common when we met way back when was that we both went to Oberlin Oberlin, Oberlin College in Ohio. I did music as a composition major and this was in the '90s. Robert studied history in the sepia colored 60s, at least in my mind, and despite our difference in ages, we both left this school feeling like Oberlin was a really big part of who we are. So, when we were asked to return to Oberlin to speak on campus on March 6, 2008, as part of their convocation series, we were totally thrilled and nervous and terrified and thrilled. Anyhow, it was a snow-covered night and we went into Finney Chapel, those words mean nothing to you. But to us, Finney Chapel is like Madison Square Garden, because this is where you went to see jazz greats play and you heard speeches by cultural dignitaries, but there we were, these two schmoes on stage talking to our old professors and it was really quite weird, frankly. So anyways, we did a whole long lecture which got into lots of Oberlin nostalgia and we're going to spare you most of that, but I'm going to play just a couple excerpts from the evening where we tell stories about RadioLab that you may not have heard before. To get started, here is the Robert and Jad romance story, well not really a story of how we met, which centers around the first radio piece that we ever made together. I'm going to play that for you, never before heard RadioLab piece, prepare yourself. This is RadioLab the early years. So five years ago, I was working at WNYC, I was sort of, RadioLab was not yet a thing, I was between jobs so to speak and someone hands me, program director, hands me a stack of scripts and says go interview these people and I did and at the very end of the stack was a guy named Robert Crowwich, I sort of knew the name a little bit and he said, what's your story? Before we do any of this, what's your story? I said, well, I work at WNYC and I freelance for NPR, me too, he said me too, and then he asked me what about before that, I said, well, I work at WBAI, me too, and then he said, where did you go to school when I said Oberlin and, yeah, I said, and I said, like so much, so this is the deal, like you're like living my life 25 years after me, let's go have breakfast, you can tell me what it's like on the other side, whatever you call it. And somewhere, and like breakfast number 31, we decided that we would try some radio together, we started doing various weirdly strange experiments that few of which have survived but we do have the very first thing we collaborated on. Which we thought was fabulous. We thought this was going to be the beginning of a revolution.
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Ever wonder how Jad and Robert met?