Hello everyone, Kirk here with another interview for you all as I continue working on season eight of this show.

This interview is a special one, and it includes a little something extra at the end as well.

Jad Abumrad is a name that will already be familiar to a lot of you.

He has been making podcasts since before there were podcasts and is responsible for some of the very best ones ever made.

Jad spent more than 20 years making Radio Lab, the award-winning and wildly successful audio series that he created right around the turn of the century.

And really, I can't overstate the

impact that Radio Lab has had on podcasting as an art form. It's right up there with this American

life as one of the most influential examples of the form. Jad turns up all over the place,

reporting series for various public radio stations and other networks, and also has done some

spin-off series of Radio Lab, including The Ring and I, which is fantastic.

It focuses on Wagner's Ring Cycle.

And then in 2019, he produced and hosted Dolly Parton's America, which is a terrific series.

It features interviews with Dolly herself and really just focuses on

her music and the way her music tells the story of America. And as it happens, Dolly Parton's

America won a Peabody Award in 2019, which, you know, it's no Reaper Bond music journalism

award, but the Peabody's pretty good. Jazz's latest project is called Falakutti Fear No Man. It is currently airing. They're midway through it, though I've listened to the whole thing. It is really something else. It's a 12-part audio journey through the life and times of Felakutti, legendary Nigerian musician, and the father of Afrobeat. And just in case you don't know anything about

Felakutia, and you're listening to this before you check out the series that we talk about,

you could pick up in conversation what the deal was with him, but just to give you a lightning round

bio going into this conversation, Fela was a Nigerian musician who primarily made music in the

1970s and the 1980s. He is credited as the creator of Afrobeat. He was hugely influential all around the world. And in addition to his work as a musician, he was an intensely political figure. He was a radical activist and an important figure in the post-World War II movement for African liberation in Nigeria and beyond.

Nigeria had just spent a century under the colonial thumb of Great Britain.

Fela's mother, Fumaila, played an outsized role in the protests against British occupation,

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