Audie Cornish and Ari Shapiro are done cosplaying as grownups

For years, millions of NPR listeners knew Audie Cornish and Ari Shapiro as two of the calmest, smartest voices in American media.Measured. Precise. Composed.Now they’re discussing ketamine culture, queer thirst traps, AI brain rot, Mar-a-Lago face, and a surgically enhanced internet "looksmaxxing" personality named Clavicular, and they sound like the version of themselves listeners never heard between segments.The longtime public radio stars are reuniting for Engagement Party, a new CNN video podcast launching Friday on the CNN app and podcast platforms. Speaking with The Advocate in their first joint interview, a fact that surprised even them, Cornish and Shapiro described the show as an attempt to finally bring their off-air friendship into public view.“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.Related: NPR reverses course after advising Ari Shapiro to skip Pride eventThe mics were always offThe 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.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 nuanced 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 pilot episode makes good on that promise almost immediately. It opens with Shapiro casually explaining the difference between “California sober” and “Brooklyn sober,”