For Jad Abumrad, the creator and co-host of Radiolab, most episodes of the show start with a feeling he calls brain fever.

“You’re gripped by something. You feel hot suddenly, like ‘I can’t believe this is a thing’,” he says, voice rising down the line from his home studio in Brooklyn.

Although the show is produced at WNYC public radio in New York, which also makes other shows including Death, Sex and Money and On The Media, much of the distinctive sound of Radiolab starts out in Jad’s studio. Custom-built after he won a prestigious MacArthur “Genius’ Grant” in 2011, it’s filled with a mix of high-tech digital equipment and analogue synths. Jad spends hours in there writing music and layering it with interviews, sound effects and field recordings as well as the often improvised (but highly edited) back and forth between him and Robert Krulwich that forms the narration and backbone of the show.

Radiolab began in 2002 as a program about science, but has since broken free of its brief and calls itself a “show about curiosity”. Initially it sounded like nothing else out there; the only reason it doesn’t anymore is because everyone else has had a crack at imitating it. But nobody manages to equal the flow, precision and sense of wonder in explaining complex ideas that Jad and Robert bring to Radiolab. Ira Glass, host and producer of This American Life, says listening to Radiolab makes him jealous.

That means it’s good, but it certainly doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Inspiration and Anxiety 

Jad says he usually goes through a painful, months-long process of trying to recreate that initial flash of excitement for his episodes. The brain fever for ’60 Words’ (an episode about the legal justification for the war on terror) struck on a plane while Jad was reading a BuzzFeed article about a sentence authorising the president to retaliate with military force to any terrorist attack.

“I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” he says. “The entire United States war on terror apparatus hinges on one paragraph. One 60-word paragraph. It was just amazing to me, because it’s like the defining event of my adult life, all of the adult lives of people in my generation in the United States, that we were constantly at war.”

Jad then began collaborating with BuzzFeed reporter Gregory Johnsen to “try to painfully reconstruct the feeling [he] had while sitting on the plane, for someone else”. “When you play it for people, you’re watching their eyes to see if they’re getting bigger, the way that yours did when you were on the plane, and if they’re not, then you keep re-doing it,” he says.

But that means that eventually, he falls out of love with the idea. The brain fever is gone and he can’t remember why he had it in the first place. For the past few years he’s been putting on a live show called Gut Churn, about the anxiety of making something entirely new, and trying to figure out whether that terror is necessary when making something good.

“I’m sure there are people who know exactly what they want and there’s no uncertainty and there’s no doubt. I don’t happen to be one of those people,” he says, describing the process as one of trying to find his way out of a story.

“I’ve learned over time that if I’m not getting lost, it means I’m doing something I’ve already done. And that’s good to save time, but if you find yourself in a loop then that’s not good. Artistically it’s not good, and as a journalist it’s not good.”

“We are supposed to be out there bringing the news. Like new, N-E-W. The three letters of the word news. And new is scary, and if we’re not scared, then we’re not doing our job. That just feels to me like a really simple equation.”

Truth In A “Post-Truth” World

What doesn’t feel simple anymore is what that job actually is. The election of Donald Trump has left Jad frustrated and bewildered. He’s created one of the most successful radio shows on the planet, which is essentially a vehicle for wonder and curiosity about the human experience. Their whole audio aesthetic is geared to pull you into the process of discovery, and yet it seems people are happier than ever to take things at face value.

“Truth doesn’t matter, that’s one of the takeaways from the election. You had a bunch of people fact-checking and it didn’t make a fucking bit of difference,” he says, more astonished than bitter.

“I mean what did we learn from the Donald Trump experience? We learned that you don’t just lie, you lie in volume. You lie not once or twice but by the dozens, and that just confuses the fuck out of people, and nobody knows what’s right or what’s wrong and everyone can find their own truth on the internet.”

Jad Abumrad deals not just in truth but also in its precursor, curiosity. In making More Perfect, a Radiolab spinoff about the US Supreme Court which he describes as a series of arguments about America, he’s wondering whether sharing his beautifully-produced fascination with “what it means to be a citizen of this backwards-ass but beautiful country” is still enough.

“I’ve been thinking about whether it’s enough to just broadcast those stories. What about engaging with the people in the stories, what about capturing the conversations that happen as a result of these stories? That feels really important right now to me as a journalist.”

“We definitely have a job to do. I don’t know exactly what that is anymore, but I know we have a job to do and I know we better fucking do it.”

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Jad Abumrad will be in conversation with Andrew Denton at the Melbourne Town Hall presented by the Wheeler Centre on December 17, and at BingeFest at the Sydney Opera House on December 18.

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Heidi Pett is a journalist and radio producer. She’s made stories and documentaries for triple j, Radio National and All The Best, and you can find her every Saturday on FBi Radio’s Backchat.