Audie Cornish and Ari Shapiro are done cosplaying as grownups

Audie Cornish and Ari Shapiro, known for calm, precise public radio delivery, reunite for Engagement Party, a new video podcast launching on the CNN app and podcast platforms. The show centers on two longtime colleagues speaking in the way they talk when no recording is happening, including topics like ketamine culture, queer thirst traps, AI brain rot, Mar-a-Lago face, and looksmaxxing. Cornish and Shapiro describe the podcast as a way to bring their off-air friendship into public view, noting they had not previously done joint interviews at NPR. Shapiro frames the goal as recreating the backstage feeling from All Things Considered, when their mics were off and they processed ideas between segments.

"“This is the first time we're talking about it together publicly,” Cornish noted during the call, amused. They had not even done joint interviews at NPR. “They did not encourage that,” she says."

"Shapiro described the show as an attempt to recreate the feeling of being backstage at All Things Considered - not the polished segments listeners heard on-air, but the sprawling conversations that happened afterward. “The vibe that we've always talked about going for in this show is the feeling that we used to have when we were in the studio for All Things Considered, but our mics were off between segments,” he says. “We would hash out and download and work through whatever we were obsessed with.”"

"Cornish adds, “We were paid to cosplay as grownups for so long.” The premise of Engagement Party is deceptively simple: two people who have spent decades covering serious news talking the way they actually talk when nobody is recording. The pilot episode makes good on that promise almost immediately, opening with Shapiro casually explaining the difference between “Califo"

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