I get paid to be a nerd.

I'm a paid nerd.

I went to Indonesia to see a walking octopus.

I'm Greta Johnson.

I'm Tricia Bobita. And this is the best of the nerd at podcast on WBEZ Chicago.

Later this hour, conversations with authors Amy Tan, Malcolm Gladwell, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.

We'll also hear about some great lady nerds of history.

And hear from some teenage girls in Chicago who are learning to code.

But first, Trisha, I think we should explain this whole nerdat thing to people who maybe haven't heard us before. Sure. So we're nerds.

And we're ladies. And the way it works for many of us working in public radio is I should start a

podcast, is the equivalent of other folks saying, I should write a novel or I should start a screenplay.

We say it all the time. We don't usually

do it. But we kind of couldn't help ourselves. And I think in part it was because at the start of our

friendship, it made a lot more sense to me to say, hey, let's create lots of work to do together

than to just say let's hang out because we're kind of socially awkward like that. And that's why our nerdiness is

such a beautiful thing, right? Exactly. These are the kind of conversations we missed having,

staying up late in the dorm room. It's the things we're nerding out about, books, movies, TV.

And conversation. And space. I really like space. And you can have space. I'll take knitting.

So we nerd out about lots of things. And every week we have a conversation with someone about the things that they nerd out about. Sometimes it's people you would expect to be nerds. Sometimes it's not. Over the next hour, you'll hear a number of our favorite conversations from over the last six months of nerdat podcast. And one of the first conversations we had is with Julie Shapiro.

Julie's the former artistic director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

She's an avid supporter and connoisseur of innovation in sound.

When the online audio storytelling site Transom asked her to write a trend piece,

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