Radiotopia Welcomes Its Newest Podcast: ‘Everything is Alive’
Everything is Alive is a podcast unlike anything you’ve ever heard. It’s an interview show in which all the guests are inanimate objects. In each episode, producer and host Ian Chillag talks with a different “thing” about its life story. Besides the fact that the objects can speak, everything they say about their world is true.
Humans have a place in the show too, as Ian occasionally departs from the interview to check in with someone who has a real-world connection to his guest. Each conversation is completely unscripted; when Ian enters the studio, his guest has no idea what he’s about to ask, and he has no sense of how the object will respond.
“In a landscape teeming with true crime and political podcasts, Everything is Alive is equal parts original, delightful and intelligent. Ian and his guests offer comedic philosophy and keen cultural insight, punctuated by moments of surprising profundity and laugh out loud truths about how we live, and the “things” we live with.” -Julie Shapiro, Radiotopia executive producer
Listen to episode one, about Louis, a generic can of cola. Louis has been on the shelf a long while, so he’s had some time to think.
“After finding an expert for the 1,000th time for a segment I was producing, I thought: If you want to learn about sand, you can either talk to a sand expert or you can talk to a grain of sand itself. It’s a good way to look at people, to imagine how our choices and anxieties might look to the objects with which we live. It’s also just fun to imagine that everything we live with has a personality and a life.” — Ian Chillag (former producer on NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and co-creator of the podcast How To Do Everything.)
In season one, listeners will hear from Maeve, a lamppost who does a lot of people-watching; Tara, a bar of soap; Sean, a subway seat who loves his job; Mel, a mousetrap having second thoughts about the work she does; and Jake, a Kansas mailbox getting less mail than he used to.
