This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Ian Chalogue is a radio producer.

You might recognize his name from the end credits of the NPR Quiz Show,

Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me,

or as the co-host of the now defunct podcast, How to Do Everything, which I just loved.

It's such a good show.

He has a new podcast out right now, launching this week, and it's delightfully weird.

Well, the show is called Everything is Alive,

and it's an interview show in which all the subjects are

inanimate objects.

So, I talk to things.

So what made you want to do a show like this?

Well, a couple things. Like, one, I think it's just like, I would just sort of think this way, like I, you know, I'd get up from a chair and think about what a terrible job the chair had and like, and like how the chair must feel about being sat on all the time.

And then also like I think producing for so long you're always trying to get to like the primary source you know and like you're

always looking for experts I thought it would be really fun if like you know you're

putting together a piece about rainbows or whatever and like rather than

talk to the physicist who understands rainbows if you could actually talk to the

rainbow so that's kind of the idea. I know that listeners to 99%

invisible are fully capable of accepting that even the most mundane objects are

infused with great meaning and can say something about us as humans, but you may not be prepared for that object to actually talk, so I ask Ian for a primer on how to listen to everything is alive.

You know, if I was talking to a candle say like a bedroom

candle like it's not every candle it's not speaking for every candle it is one

...