When Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel decided to create a podcast, they didn’t start with something easy. They wanted to look at what makes humans tick, but not just the day-to-day interactions. Instead they wanted to look at the “invisible forces that shape human behavior”. Yes, they wanted to make a podcast about something that’s invisible. “Well, when you put it like that …” laughs Spiegel.
When Invisibilia debuted last year, posing questions like, “Do you think that the thoughts that you have in your head could influence how that rat moves through space?” or “Do you need eyes to see?”, the show quickly established itself as mandatory listening as it responded to baffling questions with wonder-inducing answers. The show blends Radiolab’s deep dive into science with the sharp-eyed sociology of This American Life, which made sense considering that the hosts learned their skill in the trenches of both those shows.
Invisibilia returns on Friday for a new season of seven hour-long episodes, and fans will notice that Spiegel and Miller have bravely tinkered with their successful formula. “The first season was supposed to be a continuous experiment,” said Spiegel. “That was baked into the show, but you may not have seen evidence of it because of the complete lack of funds.”
Most notably, the show has added renowned author and journalist Hanna Rosin to the mix. “We took Hanna on because she’s fabulous,” said Spiegel. “We always wanted to bring someone else in. The first season was Lulu and I in a room with no money. Making mouth sound effects. The goal from the beginning was to have diverse voices.”
Spiegel may mean “diverse voices” literally as she and Miller can sound remarkably similar on tape. “Lulu’s dad listened to an entire piece and complimented Lulu on it, but it was me,” chuckles Spiegel. “It’s OK, because he only lived with her for 18 years.” Rosin may not sound all that different from Spiegel and Miller (“We should have hired a British man,” said Miller, drily) but she does bring years of reporting experience to the table, which will help take the show in new directions. “Alix said it best when she said Hanna gave us a fresh set of balls,” said Miller.
“Hanna is one of the best journalists in the country and has a lot of qualities that we don’t have and can get us to places that we couldn’t get to without her,” said Spiegel. “This year we took on terrorism. Do I really think that Lulu or I could have looked at terrorism?”
“Not unless it turned out that one of our parents was a terrorist,” interrupts Miller. “Then we could have done it. Hanna just has a different way of going deep than we do. We wanted to get to as many parts of the world as we possibly could and she’s helped us do that.”
What attracted Rosin to Invisibilia – the rigorous ideas, beautifully told – is the same thing that fans love about the show. But Rosin had to learn how to deliver that auditory resonance in her reporting, which was a challenge for even the most talented journalist. “It’s a completely different way of telling a story,” she said. “There are more things that I had to learn than I thought had to learn. The ways of reporting are completely different.”
Rosin has been gaining her sea legs, though, and she, Spiegel and Miller make a great team, which is no surprise considering that according to Rosin, Spiegel works with the words “ensemble-icious” written over her head. Like any good team, each member brings a unique way of looking at a story, which synthesize into something special. “As a storyteller, I love the element of surprise or magic or I’ve always been drawn to stories where the world doesn’t work as you think,” said Miller.
“I’m interested in how they are channeled conceptualized thoughts or how you think about personality and human behavior,” said Spiegel. “And Hanna is a little more sociological.”
For the new season, the team shares reporting and hosting duties, which gives them the space to expand their scope far beyond their parents or their studio or their DIY “mouth sound effects”. While the first season focused on what Rosin described as “the inside of people’s heads” and Spiegel calls “neurological extremes”, the show did not need to shift its framework to turn its focus to the world at large. “As it turns out there are invisible forces that shape institutions, there are invisible forces that shape countries, it’s just expansive,” said Rosin.
Terrorism isn’t the only global topic that Rosin, Spiegel and Miller tackle this year. They head to Rwanda to look a social experiment, study smiles at a McDonald’s in Russia, the concept of personality in the criminal justice system and visit an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico to watch as the crew learns to hug it out – improving safety and productivity along the way. “A lot of the first season was inside the head and the little different choices you can make in how you define a thought,” said Miller. “Now we’re also looking at your workplace or your family or your country and how cultural systems pull at you.”
As for what Invisibilia actually means, it’s still up for debate: “It’s an interaction between the conceptual world, the emotional world and the physical world,” said Spiegel.
“It’s looking at these crazy minuscule things that have profound consequences,” said Miller.
Rosin is a bit more prosaic about it, though. “As a reporter it’s just what you do,” she said. “To me that’s always been the job as a reporter: to look at a situation and figure out what invisible force is driving it.”
The frisson between the hosts as they discuss their show’s subject matter is equally palpable in the stories they report, becoming just one more invisible force defining the listeners’ experience.
