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I want to tell you about my search
for purpose as a journalist

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and how Dolly Parton
helped me figure it out.

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So I've been telling audio stories
for about 20 years,

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first on the radio and then in podcasts.

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When I started the radio show
Radiolab in 2002,

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here was the quintessential
story move we would do.

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We'd bring on somebody --

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(Audio) Steve Strogatz:
It's one of the most hypnotic

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and spellbinding spectacles in nature,

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because, you have to keep in mind,
it is absolutely silent.

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Like this guy, mathematician,
Steve Strogatz,

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and he would paint a picture.

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(Audio) SS: Picture it.

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There's a riverbank in Thailand
in the remote part of the jungle,

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you're in a canoe,
slipping down the river.

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There's no sound of anything,

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maybe the occasional, you know,
exotic jungle bird or something.

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JA: So you're in this imaginary
canoe with Steve,

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and in the air all around you
are millions of fireflies.

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And what you see is sort of
a randomized starry-night effect.

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Because all the fireflies
are blinking at different rates.

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Which is what you would expect.

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But according to Steve, in this one place,

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for reasons no scientist
can fully explain --

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SS: Whoop.

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Whoop.

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Whoop.

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With thousands of lights on
and then off, all in sync.

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JA: Now it's around this time

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that I would generally bring in
the beautiful music, as I just did,

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and you'd start to get that warm feeling.

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A feeling, that we know from science,

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kind of localizes in your head and chest

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and spreads through your body.

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It's that feeling of wonder.

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From 2002 to 2010,
I did hundreds of these stories.

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Sciency, neurosciency,
very heady, brainy stories,

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that would always resolve
into that feeling of wonder.

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And I began to see that as my job,

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to lead people to moments of wonder.

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What that sounded like was:

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(Various voices) "Huh!" "Wow!"

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"Wow!"

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"That's amazing."

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"Whoa!" "Wow!"

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JA: But I began to get
kind of tired of these stories.

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I mean, partially, it was the repetition,

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I remember there was a day
I was sitting at the computer,

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making the sound of a neuron.

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(Crackling sound)

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You know, take some white noise,
chop it up, very easy sound to make.

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I remember thinking

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"I have made this sound 25 times."

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But it was more than that,

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there was a familiar path
to these stories.

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You walk the path of truth,
which is made of science,

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and you get to wonder.

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Now I love science, don't get me wrong.

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My parents emigrated
from a war-torn country,

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came to America,

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and science for them was, like,
more their identity than anything else,

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and I inherited that from them.

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But there was something
about that simple movement

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from science to wonder

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that just started to feel wrong to me.

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Like, is that the only path
a story can take?

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Around 2012,

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I ran into a bunch of different stories

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that made me think, "No."

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One story in particular,

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where we interviewed a guy who described

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chemical weapons being used
against him and his fellow villagers

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in the mountains of Laos.

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Western scientists went there,

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measured for chemical weapons,
didn't find any.

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We interviewed the man about this,

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he said the scientists were wrong.

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We said, "But they tested."

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He said, "I don't care,
I know what happened to me."

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And we went back and forth
and back and forth,

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and make a long story short,

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the interview ended in tears.

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I felt ...

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I felt horrible.

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Like, hammering at a scientific truth,
when someone has suffered.

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That wasn't going to heal anything.

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And maybe I was relying
too much on science to find the truth.

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And it really did feel at that moment

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that there were a lot
of truths in the room,

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and we were only looking at one of them.

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So I thought, I've got
to get better at this.

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And so for the next eight years,

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I committed myself to doing stories

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where you heard truths collide.

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We did stories about
the politics of consent,

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where you heard the perspective
of survivors and perpetrators

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whose narratives clashed.

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We did stories about race,

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how black men are systematically
eliminated from juries,

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and yet, the rules that try
and prevent that from happening,

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only make things worse.

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Stories about counter terrorism,
Guantanamo detainees,

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stories where everything is disputed,

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all you can do is struggle
to try and make sense.

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And this struggle
kind of became the point.

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I began to think, "Maybe that's my job."

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To lead people to moments of struggle.

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Here's what that sounded like:

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(Various voices)
"But I see ... I, like ..."

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"Uh, I ..." (Sigh)

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"Well, so, like, huh ..."

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"That, I mean, I ..."

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"You know ... golly ... I ... (Sigh)"

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JA: And that sigh right there,

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I wanted to hear that sound
in every single story,

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because that sound is kind of
our current moment, right?

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We live in a world where truth
is no longer just a set of facts

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to be captured.

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It's become a process.

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It's gone from being a noun
to being a verb.

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But how do you end that story?

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Like, what literally kept happening
is we'd be, you know, telling a story,

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cruising along,
two viewpoints in conflict,

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you get to the end and it's just like --

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No, let me see.

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What do I say at the end?

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Oh, my God.

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What do you, how do you end that story?

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You can't just happily-ever-after it,

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because that doesn't feel real.

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At the same time,

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if you just leave people
in that stuck place,

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like, "why did I just listen to that?"

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Like, it felt like there had to be
another move there.

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Had to be a way beyond the struggle.

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And this is what brings me to Dolly.

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Or, Saint Dolly, as we like
to call her in the South.

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I want to tell you about one little
glimmer of an epiphany that I had

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doing a nine-part series
called Dolly Parton's America last year.

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It was a bit of a departure for me,

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but I just had this intuition
that Dolly could help me

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figure out this ending problem.

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And here was the basic intuition:

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You go to a Dolly concert,

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you see men in trucker hats
standing next to men in drag,

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Democrats standing next to Republicans,

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women holding hands,

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every different kind of person
smashed together.

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All of these people that we are told
should hate each other,

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are there singing together.

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She somehow carved out
this unique space in America,

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and I wanted to know, how did she do that?

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So I interviewed Dolly 12 times,
two separate continents.

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She started every interview this way:

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(Audio) Dolly Parton: Ask me
whatever you ask me,

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and I'm going to tell you
what I want to hear."

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(Laughter)

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She is undeniably a force of nature.

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But the problem that I ran into

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is that I had chosen
a conceit for this series

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that my soul had trouble with.

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Dolly sings a lot about the South.

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If you go through her discography,

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you will hear song after song
about Tennessee.

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(Music) DP (Singing, various songs):
Tennessee, Tennessee...

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Tennessee homesick ...

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"I've got those Tennessee homesick blues
running' through my head."

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Tennessee.

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"Tennessee Mountain Home,"
"Tennessee Mountain Memories."

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Now I grew up in Tennessee,

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and I felt no nostalgia for that place.

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I was the scrawny Arab kid

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who came from the place
that invented suicide bombing.

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I spent a lot of time in my room.

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When I left Nashville,

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I left.

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I remember being at Dollywood,

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standing in front of a replica,
replica of her Tennessee Mountain Home.

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People all around me were crying.

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This is a set.

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Why are you crying?

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I couldn't understand
why they were so emotional,

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especially given
my relationship to the South.

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And I started to honestly have
panic attacks about this.

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Am I not the right person
for this project?

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But then, twist of fate.

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We meet this guy, Bryan Seaver,

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Dolly's nephew and bodyguard.

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And on a whim, he drives
producer Shima Oliaee and I

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out of Dollywood,

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round the back side of the mountains,

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up the mountains 20 minutes,

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down a narrow dirt road,

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through giant wooden gates
that look right out of "Game of Thrones,"

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and into the actual
Tennessee mountain home.

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But the real place.

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Valhalla.

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The real Tennessee mountain home.

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And I'm going to score
this part with Wagner,

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because you've got to understand,

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in Tennessee lore,

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this is like hallowed ground,
the Tennessee mountain home.

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So I remember standing there,

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on the grass,

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next to the Pigeon River,

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butterflies doing loopty loops in the air,

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and I had my own moment of wonder.

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Dolly's Tennessee mountain home

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looks exactly like my dad's home
in the mountains of Lebanon.

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Her house looks just
like the place that he left.

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And that simple bit of layering
led me to have a conversation with him

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that I never had before,

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about the pain he felt leaving his home.

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And how he hears that in Dolly's music.

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Then I had a conversation with Dolly
where she described her songs

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as migration music.

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Even that classic song,

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"Tennessee Mountain Home,"
if you listen to it --

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(Dolly Parton "Tennessee Mountain Home")

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"Sittin' on the front porch
on a summer afternoon

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In a straightback chair on two legs,

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leaned against the wall."

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It's about trying to capture a moment
that you know is already gone.

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But if you can paint it, vividly,

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maybe you can freeze it in place,
almost like in resin,

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trapped between past and present.

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That is the immigrant experience.

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And that simple thought led me
to a million conversations.

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I started talking to musicologists
about country music as a whole.

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This genre that I've always felt so

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having nothing to do
with where I came from,

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is actually made up of instruments
and musical styles

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that came directly from the Middle East.

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In fact, there were trade routes
that ran from what is now Lebanon

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right up into the mountains
of East Tennessee.

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I can honestly say, standing there,
looking at her home,

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was the first time I felt
like I'm a Tennessean.

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That is honestly true.

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And this wasn't a one-time thing,

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I mean, over and over again,

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she would force me
beyond the simple categories

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I had constructed for the world.

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I remember talking with her
about her seven-year partnership

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with Porter Wagoner.

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1967, she joins his band,
he is the biggest thing in country music,

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she is a backup singer, a nobody.

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Within a short time, she gets huge,

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he gets jealous,

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he then sues her for three million dollars

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when she tries to leave.

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Now it would be really easy
to see Porter Wagoner

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as, like, a type: classic,
patriarchal jackass,

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trying to hold her back.

254
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But anytime I would suggest that to her,

255
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like, come on.

256
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(Audio) This is a guy, I mean,
you see it in the videos, too,

257
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he's got his arm around you.

258
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There's a power thing happening, for sure.

259
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DP: Well, it's more complicated than that.

260
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I mean, just think about it.

261
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He had had this show for years,

262
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he didn't need me to have his hit show.

263
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He wasn't expecting me
to be all that I was, either.

264
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I was a serious entertainer,
he didn't know that.

265
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He didn't know how many dreams I had.

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JA: In effect, she kept telling me,

267
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"Don't bring your stupid way
of seeing the world into my story,

268
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because that's not what it was.

269
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Yeah, there was power,
but that's not all there was.

270
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You can't summarize this."

271
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Alright, just to zoom out.

272
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What do I make of this?

273
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Well, I think there's something in here

274
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that's a clue, a way forward.

275
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As journalists, we love difference.

276
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We love to fetishize difference.

277
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But increasingly, in this confusing world,

278
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we need to be the bridge
between those differences.

279
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But how do you do that?

280
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I think for me now, the answer is simple.

281
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You interrogate those differences,

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you hold them for as long as you can,

283
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until, like up on that mountain,

284
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something happens,

285
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something reveals itself.

286
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Story cannot end in difference.

287
00:11:43,839 --> 00:11:45,654
It's got to end in revelation.

288
00:11:46,387 --> 00:11:49,109
And coming back
from that trip on the mountain,

289
00:11:49,133 --> 00:11:52,545
a friend of mine gave a book
that gave this whole idea a name.

290
00:11:52,966 --> 00:11:55,560
In psychotherapy,
there's this idea called the third,

291
00:11:55,584 --> 00:11:57,174
which essentially goes like this.

292
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Typically, we think of ourselves
as these autonomous units.

293
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I do something to you,

294
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you do something to me.

295
00:12:03,490 --> 00:12:06,307
But according to this theory,
when two people come together,

296
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and really commit to seeing each other,

297
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in that mutual act of recognition,

298
00:12:11,561 --> 00:12:13,649
they actually make something new.

299
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A new entity that is their relationship.

300
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You can think of Dolly's concerts

301
00:12:18,753 --> 00:12:21,205
as sort of a cultural third space.

302
00:12:21,229 --> 00:12:23,935
The way she sees all the different
parts of her audience,

303
00:12:23,959 --> 00:12:25,149
the way they see her,

304
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creates the spiritual
architecture of that space.

305
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And I think now that is my calling.

306
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That as a journalist,

307
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as a storyteller,

308
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as just an American,

309
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living in a country struggling to hold,

310
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that every story I tell
has got to find the third.

311
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That place, where the things
we hold as different

312
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resolve themselves into something new.

313
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Thank you.