Hey, Steve here. We've got a very special teaser for you. It's a preview of this week's Culture GapFest bonus episode for Slate Plus subscribers. Honestly, we thought this one was so good. We wanted to share a bit of it up top here to entice you over to the plus side. We were joined by Jad Abimrad, the co-creator of Radio Lab, who has a new podcast out about the Nigerian

musician and activist Velakuti. That podcast is incredible. Jad was a wonderful guest on our show.

He decided to stick around and interview us for our bonus episode about how we make the show,

our feelings about being critics in the current moment, and a whole lot more.

So here we go.

Like here's a little teaser, a little taste,

and if you like it,

please go subscribe at slate.com slash culture plus.

Thank you. Hello and welcome to a very special Slat-Bluz bonus episode of the Slate Culture Gab Fest.

Today, we seized the opportunity of having Chad Aberrott in our studio and having him cop to being a culture gab fest listener and having him start to pepper-esque questions about the show on his way out the

door. We nabbed him and have convinced him that in fact he should ask those questions on

Mike as our plus segment today. So we are going to get grilled by one of the foremost practitioners of American

radio about what the hell we're up to in here every week. Dad, take it away. What do you want to know?

I'm going to give you a series of big furry softballs because these are typically the kind of questions

that come out of my brain.

So I'm curious about how much culture you all consume in order to be so erudite and thoughtful

in your discussion of the culture and whether that ever becomes a chore.

Yeah, I would say, I mean, I'm sure any critic would say this sometimes. Like, there's just days that you get up and you think, I don't want to experience a new pop culture object that I have to have, you know, pulled together thoughts about in 24 hours. Like, it's a big cognitive burden, right? To sort of produce a piece of content that's finished on something with very little time to think about it.

So I think for me at least that part of it can get exhausting.

It's not it's not the larger prospect of like we get to talk about culture and discuss it.

And that's a great thing to get to do for living.

It's more the fire hose, you know, the fire hose that we all experience.

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