Radiolab - BONUS: Radiolab Scavenger Hunt

Episode Date: December 28, 2018

The question we get more than any other here at Radiolab is “Where do all those stories come from?”  Today, for the first time ever, we divulge our secret recipe for story-finding.  Veteran Radiolab story scout Latif Nasser takes our newest producer Rachael Cusick along for what he calls “the world’s biggest scavenger hunt.”  Together, they’ll make you want to bake some cookies and find some true stories.  But we can’t find, much less tell, true stories without you. Find it in yourself to donate and help us make another year of this possible. It's a choice only you can make. Radiolab.org/support   Here are story-finding resources mentioned in this episode: The World's Biggest Scavenger Hunt: Latif's Transom post on story scouting Google Alerts: Set up your own! Wikipedia Random Article: Play wiki roulette by clicking "random article" in the far-left column WorldCat: to find where a book exists in a library near you ArchiveGrid: to search libraries' special collections and oral histories Trade Publications: Search for trade magazines by industry Cusick Cookies: Rachael's cookie recipe...you're welcome.    

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W-N-Y-S. See? See?

Hey, everybody. This is Jad. Radio Lab. Okay, so as promised in the last episode, a short end-of-the-year gift for you, which, I'll be honest, is a gift I hope will motivate you to make a gift back to us. So let us call it a plea for a gift exchange.

You know, we are, as you know, raising money to fund Radio Lab through 2019 to help pay for all the stories. We have such big plans, but we need your help. So if Radio Lab on your device is a thing that you cherish, please consider helping us out. Go to radioLab.org. Click that donate button or RadioLab.org slash donate. Or just text the word Radio Lab to the number 70101. That's the word Radio Lab to the number 70101. All right, so let me set this episode up for you.

At Radio Lab, part of the whole ethos here is that we've got this incredibly talented team of producers and reporters and researchers and fact checkers and everybody's got slightly different superpowers. And so what we'll do on occasion is get together and share like tips and tricks. And somewhere along the way, we ended up asking our reporter producer Latif Nasser, how do you go about finding stories? because one of the things about Latif is he finds the weirdest, most interesting stories. Stories like the one you just heard about the praying monk bot or the forgotten history of our southern border with Mexico or the game theory of badminton. And, you know, at pitch meetings, we're always like, how in the hell did you find that? So we asked him to talk about his process. And he ended up giving a talk about it to the whole staff.

and then he ended up writing an article about it for transom.org, and that article sort of went viral. And we figured we should just pass along some of his advice to everybody. And so one of our newer producers, Rachel Cusick, got on the phone with Latif, and he went through some of his tips and tricks. And I think there's stuff in here that we can all steal that'll just make 2019 more interesting and fun. So yeah, here's a bit of that conversation.

I hope as you're listening, you'll be motivated to, help us out for 2019. But here it is. Latif, are you there? I am. Awesome. Hello. Oh, man.

Again, this is an excerpt of a conversation between Rachel Cusick and Latif Nasser on story finding. Like, if the game is you want stories that people haven't heard before, like you have to look in places where people aren't looking

because people, like the low-hanging fruit is all taken. You just assume that. And it's like, okay, I'm going to do some bizarre aerial acrobatic move, and that's going to land me on this weird random tree branch. And then, oh, wait a second.

There's all this fruit over here that nobody's even touched, you know? Lathif ended up listing for Rachel, a few of his moves, a few of the things he has engineered to get him onto those out-of-the-way tree branches. These are some of my favorite fun things to do to find new stories.

Lay them on me. So, okay, so one of them is Google alerts. So you may or may not be familiar with Google alerts because you set one for yourself, because that's what most people do. But the most fun way to use Google Alerts I find is that... So what I do is sometimes I just come up with phrases that I think are fun or funny,

and I just set Google Alerts on them. Like, what do you have? So one of the ones that has been very interesting for me is I use the phrase, the human equivalent of. So I just set a Google Alert for the phrase the human equivalent of. And now anytime anyone on the Internet uses that phrase, the human equivalent of, Like, I find out about it. Here's another one I use.

Bizarre but brilliant. Is that a thing people say often? No, it's not. It's not. But that's the thing. That's why the few times then it does get used, like, you're like, oh, exactly. Or, like, another one I have, a self-fulfilling prophecy. I love that phrase.

Ooh, that's good. So, like, whenever anyone on the Internet is talking about self-fulfilling prophecies, I'm going to know about it. And not to say that it's important that I read any of that stuff. In fact, most of the time I just delete it. I just like, we'll glance at it and delete it. But every, like, I think of them as like little scratch-off tickets or something. They're, like, story lottery tickets. Like, one day they're going to yield me something.

But who knows? So that's one. Google alerts on weird phrases. What else was on the list? Is there more? Let me see here. Oh, okay. And this is one we, I think we should just do it right now.

Although maybe, I don't know if you have to run out the door or whatever. No, no, I'm good. What do you want to do? Okay, let's, so it's just Wikipedia surfing. Like, I, this is my. go to way of procrastinating, I just love Wikipedia, and in particular, the thing I like about Wikipedia more than anything else is if you go onto the homepage, so go onto the Wikipedia.org, do you have a computer?

Yeah, so, okay, Wikipedia.org. Okay, so you go to Wikipedia.org, and then you go to English, although if you want to go to another language, you're more than welcome to. Okay, I'm going on English page. Okay, so now if you look, on the left-hand side, right? Okay, with like the main page contents, featured content, that... So if you go down, and then it goes to random... Random article, and this is like my, this, I have spent so many hours with this very specific button.

I've never noticed that top before. So random article. Okay, so like, click around until you have one that's like a fairly meaty article. Okay. Should we take turns? I'll do one. You do one? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So do you want to go first? Yeah, okay. Ooh, sweet potato salad. I love sweet potatoes, but there's not much here about sweet potato salad. You go. Okay. Gisela Wyman is a German multimedia artist who lives and works in Berlin.

Lynn. So this one is sort of long, but all the links look like not that exciting. So, okay, so you go. Okay. Random article. I can't even say this. Noah Wies-Solkulka County, which is a village in the administrative district of what is this place in Northeastern Poland. So click that, click that place in Poland, that province. Okay. So this is an urban rural gaminia in which at what now I'm going to click that. What is that? Gamina is the principal unit of the administrative division of Poland. All right. Okay. Your turn.

Okay, hold on. Okay. All right. Okay. I got Amal Amin is an actor, an English actor, who is in, among other things, the Netflix show, Sensate. Okay. Whoa. What did you find?

After Hardy was put undercover and was shot, he was transferred to Operation Trident. What's Operation Trident? What is Operation Trident? Operation Trident, or simply Trident, is a Metropolitan Police Service Unit. So this looks like it's a real thing. Originally set up in 1998 to tackle gun crime and homicide in London's Afro-Caribbean communities following a series of shootings in the London boroughs of Lambeth and Brent. So, okay, so this is all of a sudden something I've never heard of that sounds like it has some teeth to it. Okay.

I'm just going to jump in here and move things along because the two of them ended up falling. down this 20-minute rabbit hole having to do with firearms dealers in cases involving seizure of weapons. Shepard was acquitted of all 13 firearms offenses with which he was charged. So why was he acquitted? So there is a footnote here. So then I can look that up if we want. Eventually, they land on a story about a firearms dealer that does ask a question. When is a gun, not a gun?

Let's see. Okay, a gun dealer specializing in antique firearms has been acquitted of selling weapons, which the prosecution has claimed could have been ended up in the hands of gangsters. Okay, so this is a story about antique firearms and like maybe the line between where are antique firearms, when are they antique and not scary, and when are they not antique and scary? Oh, my God. And legally finding the difference between those two things. So that's kind of interesting.

That's so cool. I definitely had never heard of that before. Yeah. How many times do you do this like 10 a day? It's like your like exercises. No, I just do this. I mean, I probably end up doing that, but it's definitely not like regimented.

It's just a way of like getting lost. It's like, you know, those old like people who would like go to a new city and just like wander around until they got lost and then try to have to find their way home. Like it's like that. You're doing that. But it's like you're doing that on the internet or you're doing that in a library catalog. And what's particular is you want to find stuff that nobody else is finding. Okay.

So weird Google alerts, Wikipedia surfing. Those are a lot of tips. Do we have any more hot tips? Let me see as some other fun ones. So one of them that non-journalists can do is that I love oral histories. I love oral histories. And there's this thing called WorldCat, which is amazingworldcat.org. And that is, it's basically the library catalog of all library catalog.

So you can search something. So let's say you want to find just not even anything special, like just a normal book. what you do is you put it in there and you also put in your zip code and then it'll be like oh hey there's this library two miles away from you that has a copy of that book or the nearest copy of that book is in Nashville or whatever it is but it's pretty cool but so so that site world cat is great and it's super helpful if you're trying to find super obscure books but also it has a kind of sister site called archives grid, which is like kind of that thing for special collections.

So a lot of special collections and libraries have oral histories. And that's kind of the stuff that I get excited about. What, like, there's just so many, I think. Like, to me, if I'm looking at these websites, it's just all names. How do you pick a name to even listen to? Oh, sometimes I'll like read descriptions, but sometimes it'll just be names and I'll be like, okay,

let's just try it. Like, and I'll just go to the next one when I'm bored. Uh-huh. And a kind of similar thing to that, the IRL version of that is talk to strangers. Like, I talk to strangers all the time. I talk to Uber drivers all the time. So the story, so we did earlier this year, we did the Border trilogy. That came from a conversation I had with a woman, a stranger, on a bus.

So I was taking a bus from D.C. to New York. And I sat next to a woman, very pleasant woman. Her name is Lynn. She's an anthropologist. And then I asked her a question, like one of the questions I asked her was, oh, you know, I, like, who are the really cool new anthropologists working in the field? Who are the hip young people? And then she told me, she's like, you got to read this book, the land of open graves. And then I was like, huh, okay.

And then she described it to me a little bit. And I was super interested. And then I went home that night. And I read the book because it was so good. It was so good. And then that, like, that started a, you know, that was the first domino. And then what ended up being not just, you know, a full year for me, but also for a whole bunch of our other reporters and producers, like making that into a full, not just one episode, but three episodes, like where we, yeah. And that all started just because I sat next to a lady on a bus.

Like, like, know that everybody around you has stories. Like, they all have stories, like great, amazing stories that they are fully willing to tell. It's just like nobody's asked, you know? And it's just like that's the thing. Like the whole world is like that. Okay, some other tricks that Lottiff shared. And some of these I have to be honest, like I'm not sure anyone but him would have the patience or emotional fortitude to do. But he says he reads a bunch of really obscure trade magazines, like the roller coaster association of America or like the ice cream manufacturers of something something.

Trade magazines that you will never ever care about like in a million years. Like if you were in solitary confinement and you had a stack of these trade magazines, you would still not read them. Like that kind of boring. And then to find a story in there, to find something that is not just interesting, but also is like moving and also makes you think and also makes you like, like that's a superpower. And that's the superpower I want. Like out of all the superpowers, that's the superpower I want. To make boring things interesting. To make people like, like, awaken to the.

world around them and see that it's actually way more exciting than they give a credit for? Like, that's, I don't know. That's like, that's literally the reason I get up in the morning. Now, one thing that Lott has stressed, and I think this is really important, is that even though he is constantly finding tons of ideas, his hit rate, like the percentage of the ideas he pitches us

versus the number we accept and end up going with, that number is still pretty low. The one, actually one funny story of a story of pitch, like I remember one of the first, stories I pitched at Radio Lab. I was like, look, like, there's this, like, in the world of math, there are all these, like, people who do all this advanced geometry, and then the way they do it is knitting. They, like, knit all these, like, complex shapes, and then they, like, they knit these,

like, absurd things, and then they learn all this, like, math from all these weird shapes that they're knitting. Yeah, and so I was like, oh, this would be so cool, like, knitting, like, all these grad students knitting all the time. And I was just so interested in it, and I remember pitching it in the room and it being like the biggest dud. And one of the reasons was, I think it was Jad was like, you realize that like you can't hear knitting, right? Like, knitting is like the worst radio story idea. Like, it's the most boring thing you could possibly hear on the radio.

Like, that's not going to work. Latif said that in part it was all that rejection. And I am sorry for that, Latif. Actually, I'm not, because look what it led to. All that rejection led him to develop all of these otter and otter techniques for finding tales, which formerly he kept to himself. At first, when I was doing this, I was like so super secretive about it. I was like, it was all my secret sauce. You know, I was like, no way.

Like, why would I tell you that? Of course. It's like a recipe that you don't want anyone to have, like, the best cookie in the house. Yeah, but it's like, but then at some point you're like, yeah, the world would just be a better place. place if there were more cookies in it. Like, there's... I agree wholeheartedly. Yeah. I know. You do. Yeah.

Before Radio Lab, Rachel was a professional pastry chef. Yeah, but here's what I tell myself. I tell myself that there are seven and a half billion people on planet Earth. There are seven and a half billion people out there. And if you presume, let's say, that 1%, or even 0.1% of them have, like, fascinating stories happening to them, like dynamic newsworthy, exciting, dramatic, movie-worthy stories happening to them on any given day or any given week, right? If you presume that one percent of those seven and a half billion people have those stories, like, there is no way all those stories are getting told. There's just no way. Like, there's just not enough journalists in the world

to tell all those stories. And those are just the alive people. There are a lot of dead people who have great stories. There are a lot of animals who have great stories. There are a lot of animals who have great stories and businesses and consumer goods and planets and inanimate objects and microbes and like there's like like it's an inf—there's actually an infinity of stories all around us more dramatic than any movie. For true story finders, the world is a scavenger on. And I just love it. It's so much fun.

That's so amazing. I think that's like an amazing spot to end. and I think you should go off on your little scavenger hunt and I will let you go. Okay, thank you. Bye, bye, bye. Thank you to Latif Nasser for sharing those tips. Latov has a really cool thing he's working on for 2019

that I cannot wait to bring you. Thanks also to Rachel Cusick for making that conversation happen. She and Pat Walters also have a series that they're working on that is going to be amazing. All that is going to come at you over the next year. Before we close, a couple of things. Those of you who search out interesting stuff for a living or just out of habit, hit us up on Facebook and tell us your scavenger hunting tips. I'm thinking if we get a bunch, maybe we'll put together a crowd-sourced list and we'll all be better for it.

And as we hurl towards the close of 2018, please take a moment to throw some love our way to help us fund Radio Lab through 2019. You know, the whole deal here is that we make the show available for free, but we rely on. on listener donations to actually pay for it. That's kind of the honor system that makes the whole thing go. So we need to hear from you. And anyone that we do hear from by December 31st, we'll get a beautiful set of cards that commemorate some of the series that we aired in 2018, including Latif's Border Trilogy.

Go to radio lab.org slash donate or text the word radio lab to the number 70101. That's the word radio lab to the number 7010. Thank you for keeping us strong in 2018. We look forward to scouring the corners of reality to bring you more stories for 2019, but we need your help to do it. Happy New Year, everybody. I'm Chad Abumrod, signing off.