YouSaid · the spoken record

Celeste Headlee

lines on the record: 88
first: 2019-02-05
most recent: 2019-02-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's odd. You know, I did this interview with John Irving, and John Irving is kind of notorious for. Being cranky, like he doesn't particularly like the whole press tour PR campaign that authors have to go through. And his press person, you know, just gave a caution. You know, he doesn't particularly like this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, and I had a great interview. And I got to the end of it and he says, wow, you really read the book. And I was thought to myself, who sits down to interview John Irving and doesn't read the book?”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it depends on whether you're talking about kind of a story that stands out because it was negative or a story that stands out because it was unusual or a story that stands out because it was great, right? So the person I have interviewed more than any other over the course of my career is Salman Rushdie. And I remember I did one long interview with him the very first I ever did, which I think was about a production of midnight's children that was happening in Ann Arbor. And after that, he came back to the area a couple times and his press people said I was the only person that was allowed to have an interview. Why? Because I actually read the book. I guess I didn't realize, but that sets me apart. Alman Rashdi. It does in the world”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I would send stuff out all the time and have people listen to it. I mean, we had, I had editors and news directors and stuff that would give feedback on stories and, you know, all the time. NPR's public radio is full of naval gazers. We are constantly examining success and failure and staring inside of our belly buttons. So that part, the analyzing and the consideration was never a problem.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, here's this topic. It's important to you. I'm going to explain why it's important to you, and I'm going to give you enough information so that you're going to get it. By the end of this, if that person listening can't turn to their spouse or whatever, friend next to them and explain what the story is, then I failed.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's not my job to worry about whether they're interested. Right? Like that's the job of whomever's putting it on the web or, you know what I mean? Like that's before I even get the story approved you have to make the case that people are going to be interested in it and it matters right and then the editor approves it or whomever you get sure approval and then you move forward. So at that point when my story has been approved, I stopped worrying about if people are interested or not My goal is to make them understand That's all. Here's this topic. You're assuming they're interested.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, but it's still simple, it's clear, you're going to fit it into the story once upon a time there was a stadium that wasn't being used anymore because the baseball team left for another city. And every day the stadium started falling apart more and more and more until it was at the point where it couldn't be rehabbed. And because of that, the city council decided to... Sell it. And you know what I'm saying? That doesn't necessarily make it biased. It just makes it simple.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you want to be biased, you can use storytelling to be biased. But no, the way that you take out bias is by removing any of the... I guess the subjectives that might otherwise. For example, I'll give you an example. Someone would say something like the city council finally approved the whatever, the sale of the stadium, right? Like if I had someone turn in a script that said that, I would mark out finally because that's opinion. It implies it took them too long, right? But then all you're left with is the city council approved the sale of the stadium ground or whatever it is, which is storytelling.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My great editor at NPR used to always tell me to make it a fairy tale, right? Once upon a time, blank, and then every day blank until at one point this happened. And because of this, this happened and this happened and this happened until finally this. And ever since then, blah. Like there's almost no news report you can't put into that framework that you can't put into the fairy tale framework. There is some guy, a guy named Brian McDonald, I think his name was, who even wrote the entire Godfather series in that framework. Just make it a story with a beginning and a middle and an end. She used to say that a story is like a shark. It has to keep moving forward or it dies, right? Or you can imagine it as a trapeze where the listener, you have to provide that next rung for the listener. There can't be any gaps or they fall.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there's only so much time in the day, and that's not even necessarily about our attention spans. It's that you're not expected to be an expert in nuclear issues because there's a plant going up in your state. So I need to tell you just enough context so you can understand why this matters to you and so that you can take action if you need to without trying to give you a lesson in how nuclear plants work and how they're funded, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's all about sound. And he would say things like, you know, use colors. Colors are really powerful to the ear. Don't tell us she was wearing a heavy jacket. Say she was wearing a heavy fusia jacked down jacket with green and purple and pink. Those are really loud when you hear them. He would say don't tell us that this guy's busy. Why do you think he was busy? Why did you get the impression that he was busy? Was his phone ringing constantly? Was his desk piled high with papers? Explain what you saw and let us decide if he was busy or not. It's things like that that sort of really stuck with me. I mean, he used to always say radio is people talking to people about people. And it doesn't matter if it's a story about Wall Street or The military or whatever it is, in the end, it is people talking to other people about yet other people.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot. Let me think about some of the ones that were really important. I mean, he was the one that started getting me thinking about Sentence structure and whether or not the brain could follow it. So he had all these yellow and then red flags. Most of them were yellow. And they were the things just to kind of watch out for as opposed to don't do these things. So he would be always looking for the word that T-H-A-T. He would be looking for too many commas. But, you know, he A couple things that I remember from him. One is that in his office in the CVC, he used to have this big sign that said, we are here today to make a radio, an audio signal, excuse me. And the purpose of that is to constantly remind you that it's all about sound.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we used to, we just lost him a few years ago, but I did a lot of training with David Candow. He was a major influence for me, not just on my writing, but on my on-air presence as well. So, yes”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so NPR doesn't have a huge number of employees. There's just a huge number of public radio people who work for their local public radio station. So to go back to your original question, yes, I started working at Arizona Public Radio in 1999, and that's where I began a lot of this training. And I just kept working on it. Frankly, it's only been recently that I stopped doing tons of training and workshops. I did a number, I think three separate workshops, some of them quite long, a week or more with a guy named David Candow, who was originally worked for the CBC, the Canadian. Go Canada. Yeah, go Canada. He was from Newfoundland and he was so instrumental in the crafting of the NPR sound. He trained and mentored so many of NPR's anchors and hosts that we used to call him the host whisperer. We just lost him as a great nickname.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the vast majority of public radio employees do not work for NPR. They work for a local station, WGBH or WQXR, whatever it may be in your local area or region. And those local public radio stations by programming from one of the networks. Yeah, so that makes sense.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, absolutely. Now, I want to be really clear this is a really common source of confusion. I didn't work for NPR until 2006. So NPR is national public radio, right? That's one network. In public radio, there are other networks. There is American public media, which puts out Marketplace. There is PRI public radio international that puts out shows like The Takeaway. So we have a bunch of networks just like you have CBS, NBC, et cetera, et cetera. And those networks sell shows. They say these are the shows we're making fresh air, morning edition, whatever. And then you have the consumers. The consumers are the local public radio stations, which are for the most part independent bodies.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's these basics of writing for radio that when you first start doing it, they can feel very limiting. They can feel constricting. But I find them actually quite freeing in a way because once you learn them, once you have learned how to write, I guess despite of or because of the limitations, you'll find that you can create beautiful prose, just gorgeous, gorgeous writing that is simple and clear and all the more beautiful for its simplicity.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Soar above. Well, you know, poetry has its own, and it depends on whether you're falling rhythm and rhyming schemes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But in radio, you have all these particular yes and no's, right? No subordinate clauses. Like I said, you want to get rid of the word that as much as you possibly can. Only one thought per phrase. And sometimes, for example, sometimes someone's title is so complicated that that's a thought. So, if I said James Smith, the undersecretary of Veterans Affairs at the Health and Human Services, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that's a thought. And you need to, just his title is your entire sentence. You know what I'm saying? And then you need the breath. So there's all these, I mean, rules. You can break them here and there. But for the most part,”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think of radio. I think of radio as poetry because those are two particular art forms that are quite limited. There's so many rules and so much going on that in a way it's quite limited in what you can and can't do. But if you master the form, it rises above, right? What are those?”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe. I mean, a lot of it is that when you're reading, if you don't understand something, you'll go back and reread it. And we do this so naturally we often don't even realize that we've done it. You can slow down when you're reading. You can speed up and skip over something, you know, but when you're listening, you can't skip over stuff mainly because, I mean, even if you do, if you stop listening for a few seconds, you don't know when to come back in, if you know what I mean. unlikely you've skipped the right amount of material and and especially in in radio where everything is so truncated where i'm trying to tell a very complicated story say about the um iran nuclear deal for example and i've got three minutes um that's a you have a very short amount of time to tell some sometimes very complicated stories so every word counts”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five seconds ago, yeah, exactly, or 10 or 15. So you really have to be extremely clear, simple, precise in your language in order for people to understand it without any visual help.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The genius parts, you know, no subordinate clauses, no complicated sentence structures, et cetera, et cetera. One thought per sentence. You're trying to create information so that it can be easily understood and absorbed by the brain. Because look, here's the thing. If you're doing a report, and I say, and during the course of this report, I say something that someone doesn't understand. The person who's listening, their brain is going to stop and go, wait, what was that? And they're going to spend at least a few seconds trying to figure out what it was I just said. Well, in that time, I'm still talking, right? The report is still going. So they've just missed a big chunk.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the hardest was learning how to write for the ear because all of us are trained basically the same way, not just Americans, but all of us were trained to write for the eyeballs, right? We're all trained to write for someone who's reading a book or a newspaper article. But that's not the way we absorb information when we're hearing it. So when you're writing for the ear, things have to be much cleaner and crisper and you have to edit out your genius all the time. No subordination.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One. And, you know, whatever it was, it worked between that and the training of the great Cindy Carpian from NPR. I ended up doing really well in the field and it just kind of all went from there.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I had to go here. I was at this job and realizing all of my deficiencies and all the things I didn't know and all the things that I was terrible at. And so I was just, I was crazy about training. I got every fellowship and workshop and every possible training opportunity I'd ever turned down.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it just kind of went from there. It just ended up being something I was really good at. And I just kept getting ever more increasingly prestigious jobs in the field. And I continued to get more training because it's not what I was trained for. So I sort of had to do the training while I was on the job, if you know what I mean.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then I was working as a classical music host and it turns out that they didn't really have anyone who was qualified to do arts reporting. The arts reporting that they were doing sounded amateur. They were asking questions of great musicians that should not have been asked. The NPR branch editor who was located there asked me if I wanted to get trained in reporting just so I could take over their arts reporting. And I said, sure. And so she trained me to do that within a month. I'd sold my first story to NPR, which was about a performance of a sacred dance on the edge of the Grand Canyon by a Native American tribe.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was by chance. I took a job as a classical music host at Arizona Public Radio, which is based up in Flagstaff, Arizona. And finding classical music hosts, as it turns out, is quite difficult because they have to have all the skills of any other radio host, but then they also have to have very specialized knowledge that allows them to pronounce all those names and works properly, that allows them to know the difference, but say, between an attude and a sonata. And also add in, you know, interesting stories about stuff. So you can, you know, ad lib about the love triangle between Brahms and the Schumann's. You can contextualize it for people. Exactly. Exactly. You want to give them something to listen for, which means you need to know that music.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly. You have to suffer to truly appreciate Mahler. That's literally true. Yeah, the same thing I was going to say with watching the entire ring cycle, right? It's something you survive.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And popular music has always been intended to be, to require less focus and attention than classical. I'm not making casting aspersions. I don't think that makes popular music any less important significant or difficult than classical. It's just a different kind of entertainment, right? So I don't know that. I don't know that it is changing that, except that I do know that our attention spans are kind of shrinking. And maybe that's contributing to ticket sales going down as each generation flows into the next in concert halls. Maybe people just don't have the attention span anymore to listen to a mauler work if they ever did, frankly. He needed an editor. But maybe people just don't want to sit for that entire time. Right. I mean, even though people loved the Lord of the Rings movies, lots of people complain about how long they are.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the caveat that I don't actually know, I mean, I don't really know that. I'm sure there are researchers and scholars and people who pay attention to the stuff and look into it and know my gut feeling is that it's probably not changing classical music too much.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, most times when you're listening to like say pop music or something, you're listening horizontally. You're listening to the course of the song. If I were to ask you how Jingo Bells goes, you would say jingle bells, jingle. You would just do the one line. It's like people can get jingle bells with a one line, right? But to listen vertically, you're, it's like all of the parts, the voices in the orchestra are sort of spanning out like a deck of cards. It's like all these little voices that expand out in your hearing to where at the same”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oddly enough, it really made me appreciate him more. I mean, I've always thought he was the greatest composer, right? Of course I did because I loved him. But when I really began to listen, that's when I began to realize how good he was. That's when I was able to listen to a piece and say, holy cow, I don't know that there's America has produced any better orchestrator than William Grant still literally over the course of its entire history. And in order to hear that, in order to hear orchestration, you have to be able to sit down and hear a piece and hear the way the Obo solo bleeds into the trumpet soloed, to hear the way he chose to have the trumpets use a mute, for example, as opposed to just an open bell. And we already hear orchestration. You have to hear vertically, not horizontally.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Width affects the tone of the piece. It could make it warmer. It could make it triller. And if you're not paying attention, when you come in with your part, you're not going to fit. You have to be paying attention. Are people feeling, I guess, sad? Are they feeling mournful? How does that make the music sound? And that you have to be listening very carefully for that to make sure that you're fitting in with the people around you. I mean, I sang in choir since I was, I honestly can't even remember, it feels like by the time I got to first grade, I'd already been seeing an inquiry for a while. The training in listening to the people around you and learning to match pitch, match tone, I just can't think of other professions that are Trained in how to do that”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, they even have classes where listening is in the class title. And, you know, in order to listen, some of it is unspoken. In other words, if you're playing in an orchestra, you can't just watch the conductor, right? who's keeping the beat. You have to actually listen to everyone around you. For tuning, you have to be very careful about shifts in tuning because both choirs and instrumental groups, the tuning shifts, they can go sharp over the period of a piece or go flat. And you have to listen for that so that you remain in tune. They also can speed up. They can slow down. You have to be able to listen to that. And even more subtly, you have to be listening to the tone. So you can be playing a piece of music. And I guess the mood of the group of people you're”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who are actually trained to listen? You cannot succeed as a musician unless you are a very careful listener. And not very many profession, lots of people get training in public speaking. Very few people actually get training in listening.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before that, I'd heard opera. People don't realize how often they hear opera. You know way more opera than you think. It's in a ton of movies. It's in commercials. It's in Bugs Bunny cartoons. That's where a lot of people know the music from Wagner's Ring cycle, for example. You've heard a lot of it, but then I got to college and I had to sing it, which meant I really had to listen, right? And when I really began to listen and heard the relationship with the voice to the orchestra and all of the complexities of that music in addition to what the lyrics meant, it was a different level of listening. And, you know, I have both of my degrees are in music and I often think that that's what set me up for what I do now because if you think about it, musicians are one of the only professionals.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, my whole life I was hearing music. I mean, that's literally what I was doing. It was like background noise for a large part of my childhood. And so I think that my default was to hear music. But there comes a point when you can really listen to music at a deeper level. And for me, I mean, I'm sure that probably happened a number of times when I had a relationship with music I hadn't had before. But notably, I remember thinking that when I first got involved in opera, that I was really listening to music and it was moving me on a completely different level. And that for me, a lot of that for opera at least, didn't happen until I was in college because I started studying it.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listening is really hard. I'm not saying that to make you feel better, although I hope it does make you feel better. It's not hard because of our smartphones. It's not hard because we're distracted. It's hard because human beings, the species Homo sapien, does not listen well. Evolutionarily, we don't really need to.”
2019-02-05 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #51 Celeste Headlee: The Dying Art of Conversation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT