And now from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, The Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

Audie Cornish, it is such a pleasure to see you.

I am a huge fan.

I was before you came over to CNN to do your thing.

And I am a fan of your pod and how you've approached it.

I have found the world of kind of people from the political class who are doing these kind of insider podcasts to actually

be quite informative and quite helpful. I've listened to this and others and I really enjoy it.

Well, let's talk about yours, the assignment. And one thing I want to ask you, I watch these

promos for your podcast, and I see you with your stickies, color-coded stickies. And I want to know, first of all,

is that real or was that just for dramatic effect? And if so, is that how you figure out what shows

you want to do? First of all, I couldn't believe that the podcast was getting a commercial.

I feel like that was like the first ever podcast commercial. So it took it really seriously. It's worthy of a commercial. It's worthy of a commercial. Let me see. In 30 seconds or less, I'll say that what I wanted to do was to teach people how to listen because it wasn't going to be a TV show. You were telling people watching TV that they had to go somewhere else and listen to something else. And why would they do that? And Pods, they're idea driven. We're idea driven. That's our work. And in my office back at NPR, I did in fact have a lot of post-its everywhere. And it was a running joke about all these colored post-its. I had them in the books. I had to read weekly. And if I just had an idea that I was like, I need to remember this, it would go on the post-it. And I remember when the ad team wanted to talk about the commercial, they were like, yeah, so we'll have a scene where you're investigating, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, I have a thing with post-ins. And God love them. They did it. They did it. And it really is distilling the show down to its essence.

Yeah. Well, I want to talk about that. How I want to talk about the specific podcast we're going to air on our feed, which has to do with what's actually going on in the world. What it has to do with is how this Dobbs decision

is actually playing out in the lives of women across the country, the people who are defending

them against legal proceedings and so on. But my question is, how do you decide what to do?

And how did you decide that this is what you wanted to do?

Number one, when I think of the ideal guest for a show, it has to be somebody who is, you know,

very close to the center of something, who has a shareable experience, and who can illuminate a specific angle of the story.

That's how I think of it.

And that's the assignment.

These are people who are out there doing things.

It's a double entendre, of course, because you create an assignment for yourself and for your listeners every week.

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