Ira Glass on Three Decades of ‘This American Life’ Magic

Thirty years. Over 850 episodes https://www.thisamericanlife.org/archive. Nine Peabodys https://www.thisamericanlife.org/about/announcements/peabody-gaza. One Pulitzer https://www.thisamericanlife.org/704/transcript. And yet somehow, three decades in, This American Life (and its creator, Ira Glass) remains as innovative and timely as ever. We begin with a week in the life of Ira: a typical Monday at This American Life (4:52), the rigorous notes process (6:05), and how the team selects the stories it wants to tell that Sunday (8:23). Then, we unpack Trump’s ongoing threats to slash government funding for public media (14:14), Glass’ formative days as a teenage intern at NPR (19:06), and the radio mentors who shaped his ideas around narrative (27:18). On the back-half, we discuss how his taste and talent eventually converged (42:03), what makes a good interview (45:36), the guest he most identifies with (1:00:25), the episode he’s most proud of (1:15:31), and, naturally, the future of This American Life (1:20:07). We’re now onYouTube https://www.youtube.com/@talkeasypod! Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Learn more at talkeasypod.com https://talkeasypod.com/. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Lemonada.

• 0:21Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:38Sam Fragoso?

  Today, in celebration of 30 years of This American Life, Ira Glass. Ira co-founded the weekly public radio show for WBEZ Chicago back in 1995. And through three decades, it's essentially remained faithful to what The New Yorker has lovingly described as "Glass's three-act structures: chatty cadences and mixture of analysis and whimsy that feels so familiar now as to seem unremarkable." And it's true, across 850 episodes and nine Peabody Awards, This American Life has become such a staple of, well, American life, that it's hard to remember a time in radio without

• 1:21Sam Fragoso?

  it. It has the feeling of just kind of always being there, in part because, A, at nearly 30 years, it's sort of has, and B, because of how many other shows Ira has either inspired or produced: Serial, S-Town, The Trojan Horse Affair. It's hard to imagine The Daily from The New York Times or any of the pieces of audio journalism you enjoy without Ira Glass. And so today, in New York City, Ira and I talk three decades of This American Life: the highs and lows of putting out new work every Sunday, the rigorous editorial process that makes what you hear possible and pleasurable, and naturally, what he sees as the future

• 2:06Sam Fragoso?

  of the show. We also tell some of Ira's story as a child magician turned precocious intern at NPR, his formative years working under engineer Keith Talbot, and how he learned slowly to tell stories on the radio. And don't worry, we'll play passages from some of his best work and some of his worst work, just to be fair. And of course, because it's Mother's Day, we couldn't help but talk about the people responsible for us being here. I can't speak for Ira entirely, although I have a pretty good idea. But I don't think I'd be doing the kind of work I'm doing now without the influence of my mother, the

• 2:47Sam Fragoso?

  conversations we shared growing up in Chicago, the ones we've had on this very program, and the one I better have before she hears this episode. And so with that, Happy Mother's Day to you and yours. And here, after many, many years in the making, is Ira Glass.

• 3:26Sam Fragoso?

  So you are familiar with the show, then?

• 3:29Speaker 02

  I mean, when we first, when we first discussed me coming on, I did look up the show and then it's just been-

• 3:35Sam Fragoso?

  That was eight years ago.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  That was, I know. And so at that point, I did, I thought like, oh, seems pretty good. But, but now I honestly, will be completely honest and say, like, I really don't remember what the premise of the show is at all. I understood that you wanted to interview me. I thought like, oh, seems like, I remember that show was, seemed good. Sure.

• 3:53Sam Fragoso?

  Well, welcome to the program. It's nice to have you here.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  What is the premise of the show?

• 3:57Sam Fragoso?

  Well, we'll get into that. How are you doing?

• 4:03Speaker 02

  I mean, it's good, good. It's like a little hectic for me right now because of just, there's a bunch of reporting I'm doing and flying around to do that. And I'm about to marry somebody who's working in Hungary. So every now and then I'm going to Hungary to see her.

• 4:18Sam Fragoso?

  She's directing a movie?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  She is directing a TV show, actually.

• 4:22Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, good. And is hectic good for you?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  It has good and bad. Like, some days I feel like I'm on a treadmill. And then some days it's really interesting.

• 4:32Sam Fragoso?

  This is probably not how you spend most of your Monday mornings.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 4:36Sam Fragoso?

  Or at least you being interviewed. New episodes of This American Life air on Sunday afternoons. When Monday finally rolls around, what does it usually look like for you?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Most Mondays, you know, we're prepping stories for the upcoming weeks. And so, and so I'm in edits and stuff, or in meetings with people talking about what we're working on and what should move forward quicker and how things will go. But usually Mondays and Tuesdays are really heavy times to finish stories that'll be on the air that week or the week after, which means that I'll be in these long two- or three-hour edits where somebody will play a draft of the story and play the quotes. And a bunch of us will, like, give notes and adjust it.

• 5:18Sam Fragoso?

  Do you look forward to those days?

• 5:21Speaker 02

  I don't look forward to those days. No, they're hard days. Like, it's, like, they're, no.

• 5:26Sam Fragoso?

  It doesn't get easier?

• 5:28Speaker 02

  No. No, like, making anything, it's just like, you just, you know, you just have to, like, kind of, really, really focus. And some stories are more fun than others, but then at the point where you're really, like, shaping the story, it's intense. Sometimes it's hard to figure out how to make the thing work. And sometimes, like, there's subtle things you have to do.

• 5:46Sam Fragoso?

  In this illustrated book called Out in the Wire, there's a section about the editing process.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  And I thought maybe you'd want to read from this passage right here. Sure. This is a comic book manual that this incredibly talented cartoonist did to explain how we make our show and other shows that do sort of narrative radio journalism do. All right. So in the book I say, sometimes people give you notes in your piece and you really disagree with the notes. There's something in your piece they really didn't like and the way they say it to you is really wrong headed, but I think you still want to notice that they didn't get this part, even if they're not saying it right, especially if it's something that you love. If they didn't get it, it means you really need to think, wait, what did I do wrong that they are not loving this the way that I love it? And even if you hate

• 6:34Speaker 02

  them, I disagree with everything they're saying. What they're saying to you is, you failed. And then she says, which is a good reason to hate them and everything they're saying. And then I say, that of course is true. Me, I really get mad. I get so mad. I feel like, no, this is good. I'm sure it's good. She says, when you have an edit, you get mad about it? I say, I totally get mad. I'm a goddamn baby. And it's not good to show that. I know better. I try to keep it to myself, but I'm a big baby. I totally have a part of me which is like, I know what I'm doing. I'm really good at this. I hired you. You work for me. It's like, don't you know who I am? I produced this show. I don't even say that to anybody. Do you know who I am? I don't usually think it. I am not proud of these feelings.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  That parentheses, is that actually in there? That I don't say that. No, I never have that thought of like, do you know who I am? You added that now for color. I did, yeah. And for clarity. Well, for clarity, that isn't really a thought I really ever have. You never have that thought, that you hired all these people? The only time I have it is when everybody disagrees with me, but then I've learned that if they don't disagree with me, I'm wrong. Like, there have been times when I've said to people, like, well, someday when I get my own radio show, I'll do this story. But that's a hostile thing to say to people who are just trying to make something good. And like, really, like, if all of them, or even it doesn't have to be all of them, but if like, like, like, all the senior people are against me, I'm definitely wrong. And it's really important to understand when you're wrong.

• 8:03Sam Fragoso?

  That book came out in 2015, right around the 20 year anniversary of This American Life. Is that still what the notes process looks like for you and for the rest of the contributors?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Usually, honestly, it doesn't get to that point. Usually, people have notes and they make a lot of sense and I do them. Like, it's only, you know, it's kind of an unusual note where like, people, where I, where I love something and, you know, other people are saying like, no, or even, you know, just like, like, most notes, like, like, we're just making a thing and the stakes are low. And, you know, like, right, this didn't make any sense.

• 8:33Sam Fragoso?

  Well, when was the last time the stakes were high?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  I mean, it happens a bunch. It happens on stories I pitch, and I'm really alone. I mean, it's funny, I just last week was in Israel in the West Bank doing some reporting and found some things that I really wonder if I, when I present it to the staff, are people going to be like, what? I mean, I can tell you something, that, like, a story that I'm not sure how everybody on staff will react, that I was doing when I was in Israel on the West Bank. And there's an anthropologist who spent a lot of time in the settlements, spending time with settlers. And he wrote some stuff, and I just thought, this is a really inside view of what it's like among the settlers, from the settlers' point of view, when they are expanding their

• 9:17Speaker 02

  settlements and claiming land that they hadn't claimed. And he knows them well. And the settlers are more complicated and believe things and think things that I really had no idea. Like, I read his work and I thought, like, oh, my view of the settlers is kind of a cartoon, that they are people, you know, who hold a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, and they believe that this land belongs to the Jews, and they're just going to take it, and they feel like they have a right to it. And in fact, he documents something that's much more complicated. And so, he was kind enough to go with me to one of the places that he studies and introduced me to a couple of people who are in his work.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  And I interviewed them, and it was really, like, incredibly generous on his part to do this. And it was really interesting. And I know that-

• 10:09Speaker 02

  You know, for all the coverage that we're doing of Israel and Gaza, and we're doing an entire hour about what's going in the West Bank, mostly, almost all entirely, from the Palestinians' point of view, documenting just how much worse and more difficult it's gotten for them since October 7. So we're doing plenty of stuff about the Palestinian side. And I feel like a lot of my staff will feel like, yes, like, let's hear it from the settler side. But I also think that some people on staff will have questions about it.

• 10:37Sam Fragoso?

  The younger people?

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Not always, not always.

• 10:40Sam Fragoso?

  Does it break around racial lines?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Everybody's an individual, I will say.

• 10:44Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm. Now, it sounds like you are running for office, but it's OK.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  It's just too like, it's too inside the office dynamics. And I feel like the people who have questions about it are smart and have good questions. You know what I mean? But that'll be a discussion, you know, for sure. Like, why are we doing this? How are we doing it?

• 11:02Sam Fragoso?

  And do you anticipate their questions being, why do we need to have this perspective on the show? What value does it bring to our listeners?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  I don't think in this case, because this is, this is like, this is something that's not covered in the way that we cover it at all. And I think, I think, and it's exciting that we can, that we can take you inside that world in the way that you can on radio and the way that we do, where we'll really, you'll get to know people as people. But there have been other stories we've done in the past, here in America, where, you know, stories about people who are just like openly racist, where like, as a staff, we really have, like, really had to talk about, like, like, why, why do this story at all? Like, why hear from this person at all? And no different stories, we've come down in different ways as a group.

• 11:45Sam Fragoso?

  During Trump's first term, This American Life made a concerted effort to represent conservative voices on the show. But by then, you had many listeners writing in to say they had no interest in listening to the other side. You said in a commencement speech back in 2018 that sending some of our stories into this environment is like throwing baby bunnies into a cage of hungry snakes. Come 2025, do you want to update the animal analogy metaphor? And what would it be in 2025?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  I mean, honestly, we haven't gotten pushback from our audience, but we also haven't done a tremendous number of stories from the administration's point of view, partly because they don't want to be interviewed. Do you know what I mean? I would be happy to spend a week with Doge, but Doge isn't making that an offer.

• 12:42Sam Fragoso?

  Is this your open invitation to them? Can we send this clip to Doge?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Oh, dude, we've reached out to Doge. We've tried to make this happen. Sure, send this to, you know, are they big listeners?

• 12:52Sam Fragoso?

  You know, because of the Elizabeth Warren interview, actually, I became a meme for Republicans. It was, so, yes.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Since President Trump has taken office a second time, we've done a tremendous amount of reporting, but mostly it's been just documenting the effects that he's having on people.

• 13:08Sam Fragoso?

  But the climate of it, do you feel more nervous about?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  I don't, no, I don't think about it at all.

• 13:14Sam Fragoso?

  You never think about it?

• 13:15Speaker 02

  I mean, I thought about it a tiny bit and didn't like it, but I really don't think about it. I like, and this time around, I haven't thought about it at all. Like, this time around, I feel like, I think I and a bunch of people on staff, we feel a tremendous amount of energy because so much is changing so rapidly. It feels like there's so much to document and report on and understand. And also, there's so many things being said by the president and his people that are just so deeply untrue and disturbing that it feels like, if, like, just a part of me, I just want to get in there and say, like, well, that's not true. And, um, and just that itself is incredibly energizing.

• 13:53Sam Fragoso?

  About a year ago, This American Life shifted its ad sales from The New York Times to National Public Media, which is a sponsorship subsidiary of NPR and PBS, both of which the Trump administration has begun to attack through an executive order entitled, in all caps, of course, "Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media", which is my favorite term, "as neither NPR nor PBS", the White House has said, "presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased betrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens."

• 14:25Sam Fragoso?

  You yourself started working at NPR at the age of 19, I think it was, back in 1978.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:32Sam Fragoso?

  Does this attack concern you?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, there's a bunch of things here. First of all, I should say, we are not part of NPR. NPR is the organization that makes Morning Edition and All Things Considered and a bunch of other shows. We're an independent show and our partners are WBEZ Chicago, which is a local station. But we are not part of NPR. We don't get any federal money at all. So cuts in federal money don't affect our show at all. There's two things going on here. There's the editorial critique of NPR and there's the money part. The money part, the way it shakes out, is that NPR itself, the national company, gets like 1% of its money from the federal government. And really, most of the money goes to the member stations. And for most stations, it's a tiny amount. It's like 3%, 4%, 5%. If you think of stations in a big city like WB

• 15:20Speaker 02

  or in Boston, or KCRW in Los Angeles. And then it goes up to like 10 or 12, 14% for most stations across the country. And for those stations, losing that money is not great. If you have a business and you have to, you know, lose 5% to 14% of your budget, like, that is not great. But you lay some people off, you do fewer things, and you survive. Like, that's, and hopefully, listeners will step up and replace some of the money that was coming from the federal government, if and when that goes away. So that's, so that's one part of it. That's the financial part. There are stations in places like Alaska, where I was yesterday, and stations in small communities, remote communities, which have,

• 16:01Speaker 02

  like, small populations they serve, get much more money from, from the federal government. They get 30 or 40%. And those are the stations that'll be damaged the most. They serve the fewest people, but those are people who actually need those stations the most. That's where you'll have a, see a more devastating effect. That's the money part. Then there's the branding problem. Having the President of the United States call your coverage biased. And it's hard to know what to say to that. Like, like, you know, I'm not in charge of the editorial policies of NPR, and I don't listen enough to even have an opinion. But NPR, whenever I've heard it, seems like- Completely mainstream news, just like the way all mainstream news functions. You know, they're on the same news cycle. They overwhelmingly are covering the same things as the New York Times and the Washington Post

• 16:45Speaker 02

  and the Wall Street Journal and CBS and NBC. And so they just seem completely embedded in that. And, you know, there might be things in the fringe that are a little different. But most of what NPR does and did when I was there was it was a mainstream news source. And for a long time, the right has really had a problem with all of public radio. And partly they don't like the story selection and partly they don't like the fact that public radio thinks that or documents the fact that the election wasn't stolen in 2020, which the president doesn't believe like. And so calling public radio bias seems like a purely political act. And, you know, I work on a show where we're trying to document things and everything is

• 17:28Speaker 02

  fact checked and like, I don't know, like, I don't, you know, like by, by fact checkers who call every source and make sure that we're not quoting them out of context. And like, you know, I don't know how we can be fairer. And we try to get all voices and treat all voices equally. Like our show isn't alone. I think that I work among people who are trying to do that.

• 17:49Sam Fragoso?

  Is that what concerns you? That you guys have worked so hard to get it right? And yet so many people feel as if it's biased and unfair and not based in fact.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  I mean, I honestly don't think about this very much. Like, I think our show is going to be fine just because lots of people listen and we can get advertisers who like want to reach those people and we'll be able to survive. And people seem to want to hear what we're doing. And like in that way, like, I don't worry for our show.

• 18:20Sam Fragoso?

  But you guys have had to do layoffs as well.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  That's true, but that's changes in the podcast industry. But still, it's we're a huge staff of over 30 people, you know, making an hour, one hour weekly show, you know, we're okay, we're fine. And, um, you know, as somebody who's worked in public radio all my life, like, I don't like that. Smear put all over our work. And it doesn't seem accurate.

• 18:46Sam Fragoso?

  When you arrived in Washington DC at the NPR office, it was back in 1978. You went to the office only knowing the name of one employee, a man named Jay Kernis. When you got there, did you have a job in mind?

• 19:03Speaker 02

  No, I had nothing in mind. Like, I had never heard of NPR, but nobody had heard of NPR in 1978. Like, it was like a tiny, tiny network that had started like, I think, six years before, five years before. They didn't have a satellite to distribute their shows. The shows were distributed over phone lines. It was really, really tiny with a tiny audience. And really, I was like a college freshman who'd just finished my freshman year. And I just wanted a job in the media somewhere. I was going to add agencies and TV stations and radio stations.

• 19:31Sam Fragoso?

  Did you bring tapes with you?

• 19:33Speaker 02

  I did.

• 19:34Sam Fragoso?

  And did people listen to them right away?

• 19:36Speaker 02

  I think somebody did, yeah, yeah. I think I ended up doing stuff in the promos department. And I had made promos for my college station at Northwestern WNUR. Like clever little funny promos. I put, I wish you put clever in quotes. They thought they were clever. We thought they were clever. I don't, I've always had like a kind of like, oh, let's put on a show. But I mean, I've talked about this on the radio. Like, when I was 12, like, I took out books on magic from the public library. And they decided like, I can do that. And then like took out ads in a, you know, like in a, you know, in a weekly.

• 20:10Sam Fragoso?

  Five bucks a show?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And like, suddenly we'd started performing shows. I think it's very much the same thing.

• 20:15Sam Fragoso?

  Is it weird for you to like, look back on that and think, oh, I was confident? Am I rendering that wrong?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  No, I was confident. I was confident enough to like, try to get a job. You know what I mean? Like, once I, once I was working at NPR, like, there are all kinds of things I definitely didn't know how to do and took me a long time to figure out how to do and felt like great self-loathing and a lack of confidence about. But the part of getting in the door.

• 20:39Sam Fragoso?

  That, that was good.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:40Sam Fragoso?

  Where did you feel self-loathing?

• 20:43Speaker 02

  I mean, like, it took me a decade before I, like, I really understood how to write a radio story. Like, I was a good editor from the beginning, but every other skill in radio, like, it took me a long time.

• 20:53Sam Fragoso?

  You're in college at Brown studying semiotics. You're a production assistant at NPR, and that's around the time you meet Keith Talbot.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:02Sam Fragoso?

  You said recently that "I would have never ended up making radio like I've had without Keith." What door did he open for you?

• 21:11Speaker 02

  I mean, Keith was just this incredible, like, inventor, like, this very intuitive inventor. Like, Keith was making these shows, this is, like, the early days of NPR, and Keith had talked his way into a job where he would make these shows. He had a series called Radio Experience, and every hour he did invented the entire format of the show anew. You know, so there was one hour, it's funny, I was just talking about this recently, where there was an hour where, a back-to-school special, where the, like, the narrator is a guy who's sort of leaning into a microphone, who starts by, like, reading an old, like, textbook of school supplies from 1917, and then he starts to imagine a PTA meeting

• 21:54Speaker 02

  going on somewhere. He's like, "Imagine a PTA meeting. It's happening in the gym, and it smells like school." And he, and he tells you who the speaker at the meeting is going to be. And basically, I mean, we had an actor play the speaker at this made-up PTA meeting. And then the stuff that was the documentary material was, we had interviews with people about kids' experiences at school. And basically, the thing that held the show together was the narrator would take you into the mind of individual parents who are sitting at this fictional PTA meeting, and then inside their mind, you would hear the interview tape with real people about real stuff that was going on. Like, that was like a normal, that was like a normal, that was a normal month's work for us. And then the next month was, like, Ocean Hour. And Ocean Hour was, like, entirely people just talking about

• 22:39Speaker 02

  people who are really close to the ocean, like, people who dive, people who live off the ocean, people like scientists who study the ocean. And each segment was something like that. And then the thing that held it together was two men sitting on a pier, and one of the men is telling the other about this imaginary friend he had when he was a kid. And the friend knew everything about the ocean. That's the narration that holds the whole thing together. And then everything is like super sound design. It was like being with somebody who was just like, had a really vast sense of what could be done as radio. And it totally taught me rules of making something that you can only learn by trying it. And just gave me a sense of the plasticity of radio.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  And really, like, the thing we do with This American Life is so much narrower. Like, what we do is so tiny and strict. It's like a Mies van der Rohe house compared to like a Dr. Seuss drawing, if you compare it to Keith's work.

• 23:36Sam Fragoso?

  So what were the rules of the Dr. Seuss house?

• 23:40Speaker 02

  I mean, the rules of the Dr. Seuss house are just like, we're gonna interview people and they're gonna say stuff to us. And then we're gonna just figure out a way to get it across in a way that no one has ever heard. Like, those are the rules, you know? And we're gonna create some sort of sound aesthetic with music and sound that's gonna take you from place to place. And it's also a very 70s thing where it didn't explain itself to the listener as deeply as we do on our show. It was like, so it was like an auteur film. Like, you really had to kind of like be there and take it in.

• 24:07Sam Fragoso?

  There wasn't a lot of handholding.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  There was a certain amount of handholding, but definitely not the degree to which we do it with our show, where your hand is held entirely every second.

• 24:15Sam Fragoso?

  When you're working with Keith, you were notorious for lugging stacks of tape into the edit booth and then using a razor blade to cut and splice sequences together until you paired the cuticles of your thumb.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Pairing the cuticles with them was separate from using the razor blade to cut. Like, you had to like use the razor blade to cut the tape. And then you're sitting there with a razor blade. And so, you know, you just take it and you just kind of go around the cuticles of your thumb when you're just trying to think of an idea. Yeah.

• 24:42Sam Fragoso?

  An engineer at the time, who went by Skip Peasy, said we'd come in the next morning and see a trail of blood, drops of blood, leading to the bathroom. It sounds metaphysical, but in this case, blood was shed on the tape.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  That's how you describe early. Well, that's very dramatic. Ira Glass. Yeah, okay. It sounds like a horror movie. It didn't feel like a horror movie. It just felt like staying late and working on something that you're excited about. Why didn't you clean up the blood? I didn't know that there was blood. Actually, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't know about the blood part. That's, this, this is the first I'm hearing about that. I didn't realize I was creating a nuisance for my coworkers. Do you think maybe you wanted them to see that you were bleeding for the work? No, no, I really, I think this is just, this is more a testament to me just being in my own little world and not noticing things around me that I'm doing. Your capacity for tunnel vision. I have a really strong capacity for tunnel vision. If I'm working on something like, in fact, I've been in relationships where it's been a real

• 25:45Speaker 02

  issue that I'll be sitting at a table, like, working on something and someone will walk over to me and start talking. And it'll take me like two or three sentences to even register that they're there. And so I've had to kind of try to train myself out of that to be a proper social member of the family. How do you do that? And I'm asking purely for selfish reasons. How do you train yourself out of it? I mean, it's just like, it's not easy. You really just try to be more like more responsive and apologetic. Like, like, the first few sentences, I really don't hear at all. And then, and when I come to, I try to like backpedal quickly. That, that tunnel vision, are you proud of that quality? I'm neither proud of it nor ashamed of it. It simply is what I am. You're agnostic. I am agnostic about it.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  It's way better to be in that state than to be in that kind of like thing that happens that I find myself doing that I feel like is much more corrosive, which is like, you know, you sit down for work and then you realize like, oh, there's this email I need to respond to. And then you do that. And then you realize, oh, wait, but I was supposed to schedule this thing. And then you do that. And then you lose like half an hour, an hour. And just like, it just, time just evaporates. Like that, to me, it seems like way worse of a, of a habit than, than, than being actually able to like focus and lose yourself.

• 26:57Sam Fragoso?

  Before you graduated Brown in 1982, I'm curious about your early influences. There's Keith you talked about, there's Joe Frank, but I'm curious, like, how did your work in semiotics inform your ideas around storytelling?

• 27:12Speaker 02

  I think the other big influence on me was like Broadway shows, honestly, that I grew up with as a kid and really loved and wanted to, I don't know, like, there's something, I didn't understand it at the time, but in retrospect, there's like a feeling to those shows, like, the way that they're funny at the beginning and they catch you up in feelings by the end and are about something bigger, the good ones, like, that I wanted to make in my work, but I didn't even understand that that's what I wanted to do. I only kind of realized in retrospect, oh, that's like, it was the aesthetic that was kind of informing things. But to answer your question about semiotics, like, really, semiotics, like, it was coming along right at the time I was working with Keith and I was thinking about making stories and I really wanted to make stories about just kind of everyday life and it wasn't clear how to do that in a way that would be compelling. And on public radio

• 27:55Speaker 02

  at the time, there was a kind of like a tradition or a thing that they did that when they wanted to go to kind of like normal people, everyday life, there was a kind of, I thought, sort of schtick-y or kitschy or something thing they did where they would go to like people in like Missoula, Montana, you know, they had a commentator in Missoula, Montana, who was like a wonderful lady who would like talk about her garden and it was a kind of like homespun.

• 28:18Sam Fragoso?

  Wouldn't it begin with like a whoosh sound or something like that?

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Chinkles of a wind chime kind of thing. It was just a very like, and then like the people were like lovely people, like, some of those people actually were quite charming and funny writers. And it also didn't seem to document the way that most people lived, like, most of us in our, like, I was grew up in like a normal suburb and you know what I mean? Just it didn't seem to be about the current world in a way that was compelling and the dramas in people's lives. And so, and so, that's what I wanted to do. It seemed like there was like a vast territory there of stuff to, you could document and make stories about. And then, and then studying semiotics, what was interesting, like, semiotics in a Broadway is just like this very pretentious body of theory that, that describes like language and narrative as a kind of conspiracy to hold us in our place in the capitalist order. Okay?

• 29:06Speaker 02

  That part wasn't the part I was so interested in. What I was interested in, or actually, like, I did have a, like, I did go through, like, a very, like, lefty phase where I did believe all that and held it very closely, and then that kind of wore away. Was that when you had a ponytail? I did have a ponytail, but not till later. The part of semiotics that really got to me and spoke to me was that it was a way of looking at movies and stories that was different than the way that, like, you learn in high school or, like, in most literature classes. Like, it was utterly uninterested in the questions that you would get in, like, a regular critique of a work of narrative. Like, it was not interested in, like, what does this say about the author? What does it say about the author's times? What are the themes of the work? It has no interest in that. What semiotics was interested in is how does the work produce pleasure?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  And there was this one book in particular, so you brought it here to the interview, by Roland Barthes, called S-Z, though everybody in the pretentious program I was in called it S-Z. And in that book, he takes apart, I mean, you have it right there, he takes apart a short story by Balzac, and the story's printed in the back, but what, he's taking it apart, sort of phrase by phrase and, and sentence by sentence. And what he's interested in is how does this thing produce pleasure? Like, like, the question that, that he's interested in is, like, why do we keep turning the page? What is it doing that's giving us pleasure, that we keep reading and keep going ahead? And also, he's interested in this thing that people don't really talk about.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  He's, he's like, when you get to the end of a story, if it's a really great film, or TV episode, or book, or whatever it is, when you get to the end of a really good one, you have that feeling of like, ah, like, it was so good. He's like, how do you produce that? What's the machinery that produces that? And he identifies five things that a story can do. And interestingly, all of them are actionable in an interview-based medium. Like, basically, I could take the things that he says you need, and I could, in interviews, get those things, knowing that they would produce stories that would pull you in as a listener and pull you forward, and you'd be stuck, and you'd want to hear what happens next.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  And then at the end, if I could deliver on all of the things, it would feel like, ah, that's so good. It was just like an incredibly, it was like a manual. It was, it was like giving me, like, a toolkit to use at a time when I really felt like I didn't know how to make something special. What were the five things? I mean, some of them I almost never use, but the one that we use in This American Life, like, the format of This American Life is designed around is this thing that he calls the Pro Eretic Code. And the Pro Eretic Code is basically this simple principle that if you have any sequence of actions start, no matter how banal, this thing happens, and it leads to this next thing, and it leads to this next thing, and it leads to this next thing, even if all the things are very ordinary. A man wakes up, and the house seems very quiet,

• 31:51Speaker 02

  and he walks to the door of the bedroom and just listens for a second. The house is very quiet. He walks down the stairs. The house is very quiet. Like, nothing is happening in this story, actually. It's all, like, super banal. But you feel the forward motion of a story happening, and you can feel the intentionality, and you start to wonder what will happen next. And he says that any sequence of actions that you get going will create the question, where are we going? And that's just incredibly useful. That's one of the reasons why This American Life just starts in motion. Do you know what I mean? Like, the most important thing in those interviews that we do at the beginning of the show that open the show is that just like, somebody just starts some sequence of action going. So then, before you know it, you're two minutes in, and you just go, okay, what's gonna happen with this person? And even to start a radio show that way,

• 32:35Speaker 02

  like, when we started This American Life, like, all the public radio shows started the way that Fresh Air and all things to do start, where there's like a billboard, and there's like theme music, and they say, coming up this hour. I just felt like, that doesn't make you wanna hear the show. And especially for our show, where the things you're gonna hear are just like, it's hard to even explain, like, why they're good. That's not gonna work for us. And I thought, like, the thing that's gonna be more effective to make you wanna hear the show is just like, just get the story started and start people in the dream.

• 33:05Sam Fragoso?

  After the break, the dreams of Ira Glass.

• 33:16Sam Fragoso?

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• 34:49Sam Fragoso?

  You got a diploma, 1982. Did your parents give you anything to commemorate the occasion?

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Yes, my parents took out an ad in the paper, I think in the Baltimore Sun. My sisters were in on this, too, that said, like, semiotics major wanted. And then I think it listed a bunch of skills, high-paying, whatever.

• 35:10Sam Fragoso?

  Corporate office seeks semiotics grad for a high-paying position.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, my parents were not into this path. They were still very much like on the path of like, why aren't you going to medical school?

• 35:20Sam Fragoso?

  Did you think it was funny?

• 35:22Speaker 02

  I thought it was funny, yeah. Like, I didn't care. I didn't care about the critique, but like, yeah, it was affectionately done.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  I don't remember if I was bothered or not. I think it was like a lot of stuff that was coming at me from my parents all through my twenties, where they completely disapproved of what I was doing, working at NPR and just the way I had organized my life. And it did bother me that they disapproved, but at some level, I just didn't care and just detached myself from them. I can't remember if this was an example of that or if this was sort of like, I mean, if I were to imagine myself at that age, I would think like, I could understand that this was a joke and meant nicely and meant with affection, but the underlying feeling of it, I'm sure would have been a little annoying.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  I would have had those things together at the same time if I were to imagine myself at that age.

• 36:17Sam Fragoso?

  You described your father once as, quote, "a stereotypically distant 1960s dad." And your mother, who was a therapist, as either very, very present for us or deeply not present at all.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are the opening sentences with any therapist I start with. Yes, all true.

• 36:35Sam Fragoso?

  What did that actually look like?

• 36:38Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 36:39Sam Fragoso?

  Well, hyper-presence, I'm being paid attention to profoundly, and then sometimes not so. Was that confusing?

• 36:50Speaker 02

  You mean when I was a kid for my mom? Yeah, it was confusing. Yeah, of course. And trained me not to depend on people.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Like, I think like my parents meant well and like, you know, they aren't the kind of parents where I feel like I have real complaints against them. I feel like my parents were like your ordinary level of like, did a good job in some ways, did a bad job in some ways, like had their heart in the right place, like parents, you know? Like, not tragic in any way, but having a mom like that and a dad like that really trained me not to depend on anybody for anything and to really protect myself emotionally around other people and to view it as my job to manage people because they both sort of like, at some point, I realized like, oh, like I have to manage how I deal with them.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, to get really real about it, you know, just so in ways it made it really hard for me to feel close in relationships. And I spent years in relationships, learning to train myself out of that. And it's the sort of thing like you never totally get rid of your early instincts, but you can totally manage them.

• 38:01Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  And make yourself be present in the moment. But I'm really old.

• 38:06Sam Fragoso?

  Youthful, though.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, like, you're enough. I just think everybody has their stuff they've had to work on it. For me, that like, just being able to be close to somebody in a relationship, it took me a really long time to learn. Like, I feel like my first marriage, I feel like I didn't know it at the beginning. I didn't know how to do it. I think it really made things difficult. I mean, I know it did. It took me a while.

• 38:30Sam Fragoso?

  When you were 23 or 24, and you first moved to New York, you were living on the Lower East Side, in an apartment on the corner of Rivington and Allen.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 38:40Sam Fragoso?

  In an illegal sublet that you were paying $145 a month for.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  This is all true.

• 38:45Sam Fragoso?

  With a bathtub, I think, in the middle of the living room.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Old school Lower East Side apartment tenement.

• 38:50Sam Fragoso?

  In that sublet, going to and from work, was it hard to not, I mean, when you say you couldn't depend on people, that seems really hard, given the conditions I just outlined in that apartment, and a kid trying to make something work.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  My experience of it was not that at all. Like, no, I just trained myself to depend on myself. I was like, okay, I'm just gonna make this work. Like, it just seemed fine. No, I was, I was pretty happy.

• 39:20Sam Fragoso?

  So my framing is just completely off?

• 39:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, completely. No, I was not sad in any way about that. No, no, like, like, the crappy apartment that smelled like either rats or rat poison. I never figured out which inside, like, like, it was just like an adventure. It just seemed like, you know, just seemed like, oh, I'm living in New York City, and I'm trying to learn to make radio stories better. And, you know, sometimes I get things on the air. And like, everything seemed fine. Like, that was like, pretty happy time.

• 39:46Sam Fragoso?

  So did you see my framing as kind of like alien-like?

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Which I see it as like, not, not my experience at all. But wait, why do you see it that way? Why is that your instinct that it would be sad?

• 39:58Sam Fragoso?

  Well, candidly, I don't, I don't think I could.

• 40:03Sam Fragoso?

  Experience the last seven minutes after what you just shared and not feel a tremendous amount of sadness.

• 40:12Sam Fragoso?

  Because that's what you were communicating.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  I mean, it's interesting, I feel a little like,

• 40:20Speaker 02

  I think because we're in a format where I'm presenting information to you. Like, I'm so not living inside the feeling of the thing I'm talking about, that that wasn't my experience of it. But that makes sense to me, what you're saying.

• 40:32Sam Fragoso?

  There's a gap, there's a distance between the thing you're describing and the actual feeling of that thing.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, the stuff with my parents, when I was going through it, was really hard. Like, it was hard for me to feel close to them. And it trained me in a way that it became hard to be close in like intimate relationships. But I've had other things going on that I was excited about and doing. And like, always felt like I'm moving forward and I'm doing stuff that I'd never done before. And, and so like, not just for the purposes of this interview, but in general, I feel like, like I've just been really lucky to get to do stuff that I like to do, like most people don't.

• 41:11Sam Fragoso?

  Why don't we talk about what you were doing at that time? There's an interview that you did that is often quoted and talked about. In the beginning, the work you make is painful in part because of how mediocre you are. That's basically what the clip is. And then it's not on par with the taste that got you into it. And so I thought, why don't we play a snippet from a piece you did about seven or eight years into making radio?

• 41:38Speaker 02

  That'd be great.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  It's not such a long way from the local grocery store to the international debate over whether sorghum and meat production are causing corn to decline in Latin America.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Okay, so even just that first sentence is like, it barely makes any sense. Like, it's so compressed, you know what I mean? Like, you can barely understand what I'm talking about. But it is kind of high concept. Like, you know, this is me trying to say, like, there's things going on in other countries that we are the beneficiaries of here, standing here in our local grocery store. And this particular story, actually, if I were to do it today, the pitch is good. The pitch is like, in well-meaning ways, USAID goes into all these poor countries and trains farmers to not make subsistence farming their livelihood, but in fact, to produce stuff for export to us in our grocery stores. And it drives a lot of them out of business.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  We accidentally, like, drive a lot of people off the land. And as part of that, we end up with cheaper prices for frozen vegetables. So that's not a bad pitch, but everything, everything I'm doing makes this terrible. If you want to play a little more.

• 42:49Sam Fragoso?

  Sure, we'll play a little more.

• 42:51Speaker 03

  There's a general air of prosperity here, partly thanks to Mexican imports of US grains, which helped boost our farm economy.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Like, just notice how I'm performing. I'm just underlining, like, every third word, instead of speaking like a normal person.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Mexico is now one of our biggest grain customers, buying a half billion to a billion dollars' worth every year, including corn to feed its people and sorghum to feed its livestock. This helps cut our own trade deficit and benefits everyone in the US economy. But in Mexico, this policy has led to fewer tortillas for the poor and unappetizing tortillas for everyone else.

• 43:32Sam Fragoso?

  When do you think your taste and your talent converged?

• 43:36Speaker 02

  I was about 10 years in. And it wasn't on every story, but I started to do stories that had the feeling that I wanted stories to have, where they were, like, chatty and funny, and the people who I was interviewing came through in a three-dimensional way. And there were a couple of Turning Point stories that, like, I would make a thing, I'd be like, oh, that one, right there. That's, that's the thing I'm shooting for. One early one like that was about a guy who picked up dead animals from the street.

• 44:03Sam Fragoso?

  It was called Dead Animal Man.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like, and it really was, and it was made in, like, three days. I went out and interviewed him, like, a Wednesday, and put it on the air on Saturday. You know, it could be a This American Life story. It's basically a guy who picks up dead animals off the street as part of the DC Department of Sanitation. And the thing that's interesting about it is, like, he loves the job. He really, he like, he's very, he's very, um... It's easy and he doesn't mind it. He was like a fun person to talk to. Like there are exchanges where I would just like, if he says something, I'm just like, that is not true. And then he laughs.

• 44:34Sam Fragoso?

  You call him the Grim Reaper in the tape.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:37Sam Fragoso?

  And he says, I'm not the Grim Reaper, I'm the Undertaker.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  I give him decent disposal, he says.

• 44:43Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. In those early stories, you're 10 years in at that point.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 44:47Sam Fragoso?

  How did you understand what makes a good interview?

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Trial and error. Like I just noticed what had a feeling.

• 44:53Sam Fragoso?

  And the feeling was what?

• 44:54Speaker 02

  I mean, partly, like, there's just a feeling that you get if you're in like, an emotional, real conversation with another person and you feel like they're hearing what you say and you're hearing what they say and you're going back and forth. Like, it's rare to have those conversations in real life. Like, if, if, if most of us have like, one every other day, that would be a ton.

• 45:12Sam Fragoso?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? If you have that kind of conversation with somebody on tape, like, weirdly, it creates the same feeling in the listener as if they had been in the conversation. And that just became a thing that I started to try to go for, is try to get to that place in talking to people that it really felt like, oh, we're really hearing each other and talking and just because, because that, that just carries so much feeling to it. And then the other things that make an interview good, you know, things have to be surprising. They have to be telling a story that's interesting, like, that, you know, just, it's good if they're funny, it's good if the thing gets emotional, like, just like all the normal things you would think.

• 45:47Sam Fragoso?

  We're talking around the 30th anniversary of This American Life. But before you make the show, I want to like, close the loop on this chapter of you finding your voice and, and making sense of yourself. You have this line in the commencement speech that I've just been replaying in my head all week.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 46:08Sam Fragoso?

  And you're telling kids who are about to leave college, quote, "You will be stupid. You will worry your parents as I worried mine. You will question your own choices. For many years, I made anywhere from $12,000 to $18,000. My parents throughout my twenties, when I was working in public radio, they completely opposed everything that I was doing. And there are things I said to my mother, to both of my parents in my twenties, that I still regret. And I don't know if it's because I just turned 30, and so this is on my mind a little bit more, but in those fights, in those heated exchanges, what do you wish you held in?

• 46:51Speaker 02

  I was really judgy of them. And um, I mean, this is so personal and about them. But like, separate from their like, not agreeing with the things I was doing in my life. They had like, moved into like, a really big, beautiful house after my sisters and I moved out because suddenly they had money. And it seemed to me in my twenties that that's what they were about. Like, that, that was what their values were about, was having these things and having these pretty things and having this pretty house in a way that now I just view very differently.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Like, my mom got cancer not long after that, and that house was a real comfort to her, you know? And like, and why shouldn't they have something nice? You know, like, I just don't see it the way I did as a kid. And then the thing I regret, actually, like, more than specific things that happened when we would argue about like, what I was doing with my life. Like, the thing I regret more is just like, I completely detached from them. I really just did not have much contact with them. I would go weeks without any contact with them at all. And like, they just were not part of my life for years. And um, in a way that now, like, I regret. I don't know.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  It's like, I wasn't getting anything from having contact with them, and I cut them off. And I would do it differently if I could now. Like, I understand why I did it, but I don't think it was the right way to handle it. And they weren't handling things great on their side, but I can, like, I know what I did. I remember there was, there was a point where, like, I was traveling somewhere and um, and my mom was talking to me on the phone, and she said, "Go, can you leave the numbers of the places that you'll be?" And I remember, it just like, enraged me that they would... Feel protective. I was traveling overseas for the first time. And they're like, well, give us the numbers of the places you are, just in case, like, whatever. And I got off the phone, I felt enraged.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  And then I had this thought where I thought like, they think that they're my parents. And then they thought like, oh, but I guess they are my parents. Like, I totally went through the cycle of like, I was enraged. And then, and then I was like, oh, but then I'm being an idiot. They actually are my parents and like, okay, I'll give them the numbers. But, but I noted that like, that that thought could occur to me, that like, who do they think they are?

• 49:24Sam Fragoso?

  But why were you enraged?

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Because I just felt like you're not involved in the story of me. You know, like, I'm just like making this on my own and, you know, making things happen on my own and, you know.

• 49:36Sam Fragoso?

  You thought they cared more about the house than you?

• 49:39Speaker 02

  I didn't think it that far, but I thought, no, I mean, I knew that it wasn't as simple as that.

• 49:44Sam Fragoso?

  Or the lifestyle, whatever it was, that those were the priorities.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  I thought that those were the priorities. I mean, I knew that they, I knew that they had some feeling about me, like, you know, I could see that. Like, it wasn't, it wasn't like at the expense of me. That wasn't the math of that. Those are kind of two separate thoughts. I felt judgmental of the choices that they were making in the same way that they were feeling judgmental of the choices I was making. Do you know what I mean? Like, that was sort of my defense back at them, I think, was like, they were judgmental about like the idealistic choices I was making. So I was judgmental at the materialistic choices they were making. And that was our standoff.

• 50:21Sam Fragoso?

  You know, the math doesn't have to make sense.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, of course. You know, even the idea that like, you know, your parents are uninvolved in like who you become. You know what I mean? Like, you don't have a choice in the ways that they've already shaped you before you walk out the door.

• 50:37Sam Fragoso?

  Was there some part of you that felt like you needed? The story to go like Ira leaves home and makes it on his own.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  The story I was telling myself wasn't a heroic story. It was just, I shouldn't depend on them for anything.

• 50:50Sam Fragoso?

  Anyone for anything.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Or anyone for anything, yeah. But I have to say, like, that really serves you well if you're somebody who wants to, like, make stuff in the world. Do you know what I mean? Like, I had this experience at NPR where, like, other people at NPR, NPR would like, do stuff that they didn't like to them and wouldn't give them the jobs they wanted and would do this or that. Like, NPR is like a big company, you know what I mean? Like, and news staffers would, they'd do things that, like, people would get upset about. I always just felt like, dude, NPR doesn't care about us. It's fine. We don't need that NPR to care about us. NPR is here for us to use to get our stuff on the air. Like, and our job is to be cunning and figure out, like, what levers we pull to get the things on the air that we want to get on the air, which is basically, I think, the attitude you have to have if you're going to make anything.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  And, and that's the attitude I had in making the show that I make. I just sort of feel like, there's stuff here, like, nobody cares if I succeed in the way that I want to succeed. But like, I can see, like, oh, if I talk to this person, this will work with their thing, and this will work with their thing. And you can just talk enough people into the thing you're doing that you can get stuff done that you want to do. So, like, really, like, feeling like nobody is looking out for you at all just creates a mindset where you just are trying to make stuff happen and you understand it's up to you to make it happen. And even in a week-to-week way, making the radio show, you know, just like, at some point, you just feel like, you know, like, here's what we've got to do if we're going to do the thing.

• 52:12Sam Fragoso?

  So when you created This American Life in 1995, like, the first show was November 17th, having had all this experience at NPR, how did you think about creating a show, creating a space where you would be working with people and you would be cultivating talent? And, because it sounds to me like you did try in a way that NPR, as a huge company, can't always show up for its employees. It sounds like you guys were pretty entwined when you started the show.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Yes, but NPR wasn't interested in starting the show. So my partner was the local public radio station in Chicago, I was living in Chicago. We raised the money on our own. Without NPR, we started as like a local show just to like figure out how to make the show for a few months. And then we're like, okay, let's get a distributor. It's an international distributor. And I went to NPR where I know everybody. I grew up there since I was 19. At this point, I'm 36. And at that point, we were fully funded. We had won the Peabody Award. We were on over 100 stations. And we still couldn't talk NPR into picking up the show. They just didn't get the show.

• 53:21Sam Fragoso?

  What did they not get?

• 53:23Speaker 02

  I mean, it's funny, the people in the news division who I'd worked with got it. They saw, they had a feeling of like, we own this kid. Like, we made him out of nothing. Everything he learned, he learned in these hallways. And we own him. And this should be ours, too. But the people who ran the kind of like, the part of the company that bought new shows and paid for new shows, they just didn't get it. It just sounded too different from other things on public radio. I mean, now it's really hard to remember that because we've been on for public radio for so long, it just sounds like it belongs in public radio. But at the time-

• 53:51Sam Fragoso?

  It sounds like it is public radio.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  It is public radio, right. But at the time, like, I just didn't sound like, like a host of a national public radio program. Like, I was just talking like a person talks. And when we were trying to market the show, in fact, like, program directors would say, like, you know, Ira's a good reporter. We've heard him on All Things Considered. Like, but like, are you gonna get a real host? And we'd be like, no, this is the, this is it. This is all we got.

• 54:15Sam Fragoso?

  And thinking about the beginnings of the show, how did you think it was gonna work out before it happened? And then how did it really work out?

• 54:22Speaker 02

  I mean, how I thought it might work out is that we would get to do this for a few years, and we'd be on some stations. And like, and who knows? Like, maybe, maybe we'd stay on the air, but maybe it would just be like a thing that like, some people like, and that'll be that. Like, our business plan was like, let's try to get on, I think it was 65 stations in the first year. We were so much more successful than we anticipated. And Torey Malatia, who I started the show with, we just thought, like, we like this show, but we can't tell if public radio, which seemed very square to us, would like the show. And nobody had had made a hit show on public radio in a decade. So it wasn't even clear, like, if you could even talk your way onto stations and make a hit show happen.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  And then we really saw the show more as like an indie movie of like, we like this kind of thing. Maybe some other people like this kind of thing and it'll be good enough that we can like, keep it going as a business. Like that, that's really like about as far as we went, you know, two, three years, let's just see what happens. And then like it, it succeeded at a level so quickly that we never anticipated. And the only thing that I can compare it to is 16 years later, 17 years later, we started Serial. The thing it took us a year to do Serial did in like three weeks, four weeks. Like it took us a year to get to a million listeners and Serial got there in four weeks. Because the internet had happened in between the two.

• 55:43Sam Fragoso?

  Right. With that success and your desire to get it right. I have quote after quote here from your colleagues talking about your perfectionist streak. How you'll call late at night, asking if this tape works or that this works better. How were you with boundaries? Like, was that something you understood? Because I'm thinking about the kid who was cutting his thumb while he tried to figure out the story. Not knowing there was blood trailing to the bathroom. Did that even track to you? Like, was that something you thought about as a manager of a show, as running a show?

• 56:23Speaker 02

  I had no boundaries at first. Like, I didn't even understand it. And like, the idea is like, we just work as hard as we can until the thing is as good as it seems like it could possibly be. And I expected that of everybody else and anybody who wasn't like that, I didn't understand. And that was like, that was just the basics of it. And then gradually over time, over years, other people impressed in me. That like, that's not really the best way to work with other people. And I believe them. I, I stand with them and against my, my 36 year old naive, never having been a boss self. And, and I think I was pretty insufferable. I think, I think if you were to talk to some of the original staffers of the show, they would, they would.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  And I completely support them. I'm sure it was just like, there was a good side to it, there's a bad side to it. The good side of it is like, we were, it was an adventure and we were making a thing. And it was really fun to make something that nobody ever made. And like inventing the thing as we were going, but then the downside of it is like, yeah, just really strong. Compulsive, like perfectionistic thing.

• 57:28Sam Fragoso?

  What did insufferable Ira look and sound like?

• 57:31Speaker 02

  I just think I would get impatient with people when something wasn't made the way that I could see, like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, can't you see, like, it could be like this. You know this thing, like, I saw this quote from Michael Cunningham that really got to me, because I feel like it really described my experience learning to make things. But Michael Cunningham wrote The Hours, and he was quoted in a book. He said, "I don't believe in talent. What I believe in is that there's a certain kind of person who just gets very interested in the question, in kind of an almost OCD-ish way, how can I make this better?" And then they just keep reiterating and making the thing better and better and better. And that was my experience of like, learning to make radio. Like, I was not good, but I was very interested in, like, how do I make this have more feeling?

• 58:14Speaker 02

  How do I make this work? How do I make this, like, be magnetic, you know, like, where you can't not listen? And, and like, that process. And then, once the show got started, it was the same thing. Like, how can we make this better? How can we make this better?

• 58:27Sam Fragoso?

  David Remnick said to me once, "A lot of what I do is just the mental illness of persistence."

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I also feel like it's like a comforting thing to know that most of making something, like, there's not, there's not like, I guess there is like, a sort of magic when, when an idea comes into your head that you never had before. But really, like, you can just wheel that into existence just by doing the dumb clerical task of forcing yourself to think through, what do I want the tape to be? Or once you have the tape, which parts are the most exciting to me? And what order could I put them in? And just start to, like, play the game of that. Like, it's almost like a clerical thing you're doing that then produces the artistic result.

• 59:11Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. Every week, I get the sense that my job is more clerical than anything else. But the thing that I keep coming back to, the thing that I think may speak to the tensions that you're talking about, is an episode called "Amusement Park" from 2011. And the, the main character of it is a manager at one of these parks. His name's Cole. And you've said that of all the interviews you've done, there is no character you identify with as much as him.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:44Sam Fragoso?

  Why?

• 59:46Speaker 02

  I mean, it's interesting, like, like, he got into working in an amusement park as a kid in the same way that, like, I was a teenager, he was a teenager. And he really loved the amusement park, like, he, he loved roller coasters especially. But he really just, like, loved everything about an amusement park. And so he was in the least glamorous part of the park. He was in the games section, you know, where you throw, like, ring toss and you throw a beanbag at bottles and stuff. It's not the thing that anybody, like, picks to work in, but that's where he was assigned. And then he just focused everything he had on making that job the most wonderful job you could have. And then soon enough, he's, like, in charge of that whole section of the park and he's hiring dozens of teenagers to work for him each summer. And then he pits them in competitions against each other.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  There's, like, an entire, like, bracketed competition where they're competing for who can, like, get the most people to play their games. And all the kids really get into it. He invents songs to sing them at the beginning of the day. And just he, like, completely, like, the job shapes him and he transforms the job into a thing that's there for his pleasure and the pleasure of others. And I felt like when I looked at that, I just felt like, oh, that was my experience at NPR. Like, once I was there, I really loved radio and what they were making and, like, wanted to know everything about it. But then I also turned my corner of it into my own little fun house based on principles that I invented and then enlisted other people in it. And then, and then he just gets to a point, I mean, he gets to a point where he sort

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  of ages out of running the games thing at an amusement park. And that's the, kind of, the point at which I meet him in the story, which isn't, which, you know, fortunately for me, they're like, I'm not in a kind of job where you, like, like, age out like that.

• 1:01:29Sam Fragoso?

  His interest is having fun and getting his colleagues to do more than they probably

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  Wanted to do or imagined themselves doing it mainly because he just wants them to buy in.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, there's a point in that story, like, I remember, like, where everything he's doing is gonna like, mean more people pay to like, play games and the amusement park will make more money. But to him, money, it's like, if you think about the money, it's so small-minded. Like, money seems so puny compared to his goal, which is like, we're here for our pleasure, all of us. Like, the people, like, running the games, the people in the games, and we're gonna just organize everything for our pleasure.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  Well, why don't we take a listen to that? This is Ira and Cole Lindberg, the games manager at the Worlds of Fun amusement park, from episode 443 of This American Life.

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  Couple of years ago, we did a thing called Toss the Boss. And basically, what happened was, is that every single day, I'd pull a game out of the hat. And if that game was the number one game in the park for that day, then that section would get to throw me in the pond. The pond is not a good-looking pond. It's gross and, you know, it smells. And the deal was, is that if you are the number one game in the park, you get to throw me in the pond.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  So finally, one day, the game that he picked from the hat that day tried their hardest and actually became the number one game in the park for the day. And...

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Ready? Two! Three!

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Of course, they made a video about this because, you know, it's present-day America. And Cole went and told his peers, his colleagues, the guys who run the games departments at the other parks, all about what happened.

• 1:03:12Speaker 04

  I go and I tell the other parks about this, and I showed a picture, you know, like, oh, there's me all soaking wet. And I, I mean, I kinda got laughed at. You know, like, why would you ever do that? And to me, in my mind, I was just like, why would you not do that? You know, why would you not want to get people excited about working in the game that they're in? At least they may try. They may do a little bit more. And if I can get a little bit more out of them, we're good. Even if the game only makes a little bit more money.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Also, it's more fun for the kids.

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's all about more fun.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's me running my diabolical agenda on this nice man.

• 1:03:49Sam Fragoso?

  Yes, which I feel like at times I've been doing to you in this interview. I'm running my diabolical agenda, which is not that diabolical.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  But that's any interview. That's the premise of any interview. The interviewer runs their diabolical agenda.

• 1:04:02Sam Fragoso?

  It's true, although I've tried to lead it with love. I hope that's clear.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  But why would that make a difference to me if you're doing it with love? Like, I don't care if you're doing it with love. All I care is that it's good.

• 1:04:12Sam Fragoso?

  I don't think those are mutually exclusive.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  They're not.

• 1:04:15Sam Fragoso?

  Because there's a distinction I make, that I decided to make when I started the show nine years ago, which is I came up writing print magazine profiles, where you could write any story you wanted to write, based on the 30 minutes you got.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:31Sam Fragoso?

  I can manipulate it in any which way. And when I started Talk Easy, I thought, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to ask questions that I think are unseemly, or kind of gratuitous, or driven by a desire for a headline. I'm gonna make a show that tries to show up for people.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Oh, I respect that. I mean, I guess I'm trying to do that, too. Like, I'm trying to capture people as they are.

• 1:04:57Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, not as I want them to be, not framing them in a way that's unfair. I'm trying to create some kind of vision or portrait that feels honest.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Okay, that makes sense to me.

• 1:05:10Sam Fragoso?

  You asked us of Cole, and I'm curious, and thinking about 30 years of This American Life. It's something that entertains you, making the show. In some ways, has it also suspended you in a childlike state?

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  100%. Yeah. Yeah, it held me at a certain age, but partly because it takes up so much time. It's almost like I walked into, like, I walked into a room at the age of 36. And then I just lived inside that room and didn't get out very much. And so, yeah, it suspended me at a certain point in my life. And I feel like I did have to grow in other ways, like through being married, and through ending the marriage, and through other relationships. But in certain ways, like, yeah, it just held me at a certain age.

• 1:05:58Sam Fragoso?

  And what ways?

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  As a boss, I've really changed. As a person who, like, works with other people, I feel like I really have had to learn to work with other people in a way that I didn't understand at the beginning. And then like in my relationships with my friends and the people I love, like, I feel like I really had to learn that. So it didn't suspend change in that way. But there's just something, I think that there's something like over optimistic and a little immature in me that was true at 36 that I still have now.

• 1:06:34Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think that's what's required to make a show like This American Life every Sunday?

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  I don't know. Like, I suppose somebody else could like, could do it differently. For me, it's been important that I've just been like, I don't know, driven by a kind of optimism of like, oh, we're really gonna make a good one this week. You know what I mean? Like, I just have to, like, I don't know, it's just hard to make a show unless you can really like, feel excited of like, this is gonna be really good, huh? Like, I feel like, I feel like at some point during the process, I like, I really need to feel that. Or it's just really, I can't, I can't do it. And so for me, that's been important.

• 1:07:10Sam Fragoso?

  When the subject of legacy is brought up, you have a tendency to say something like, and you've said this in many interviews, fuck legacy, fuck people in the future, fuck the people who will be alive, having lunch and seeing movies, fuck them, I hate them, I'm not making a radio show for them.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  Yes, I stand by that. Yes, yeah, the people in the future who are around after I'm dead. Like, you know, like, you know, like, I don't want them to perish or something, but like, I'm not making a product for them.

• 1:07:38Sam Fragoso?

  Can This American Life exist without you?

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Totally. Yeah. In fact, in fact, one of the things that we're doing more of is like more people guest hosting, more people, whatever, with the thought that actually I could just have more space to do reporting. It's really hard to actually ever get out in the field. The fact that I just spent like a week in the West Bank and then I'm like, hopefully we'll be going down to Louisiana this week to do some more reporting. Like, that's all a function of, other people can definitely host this show. I work with a bunch of people who are just as well trained and just as good at radio as I am. And just like, yeah, it's a really like wonderful staff.

• 1:08:13Sam Fragoso?

  On your first episode of This American Life, this is November 1995. It was called, I believe, New Beginnings. And in it, fittingly for Mother's Day, you call up your mom. Here she is.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  She's a therapist and sometimes she gets called, you know, by the papers and stuff.

• 1:08:35Speaker 05

  And romantic love.

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:08:38Speaker 05

  And people's expectations about relationships. And one of the things I believe is that there are a lot of people who are good at beginnings, but they're not good at middles.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  Which means what?

• 1:08:50Speaker 05

  Means that they like the beginning where there's all this idealization and romantic projections and the other person can be who they think they should be rather than who they are. And when they get to the middle phase...

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  All right, I'm just gonna stop the tape. All right, listen, all of you in the audience, right now, let's just agree, right now, it's the very beginning of our relation, it's the very beginning of our radio relationship right now. This is our little first, little radio date. And I just don't want any idealizing on either side, okay? Let's just make eye contact right now. Which is Franklin said about the eye contact. No idealizing.

• 1:09:23Speaker 05

  It's where there's more of a reality-based relationship. They kind of run away from it because it's not as exciting.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  It's interesting that you say that because, because actually, as we've approached the first show, I've realized that I am much more comfortable with the notion of kind of everyday, work-a-day sort of radio work and, you know, being on every week and, you know, having pieces on the air. But the notion of saying, like, in a really big way, "Okay, this is the beginning. It's the beginning and we're gonna have, like, a big beginning and we're gonna make an epic statement," I feel very uncomfortable with.

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

  Hmm. So you're good, so you are good at middles?

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  I'm better, I think, at middles than at beginnings.

• 1:10:03Speaker 05

  That's good. That's good, because practically all of life is the middle.

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  A lot of people are good at beginnings, but life is mostly the middle. And you say, "Oh, you know, I'm actually pretty good at middles." How are you at endings?

• 1:10:19Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, some part of you must be thinking about.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. Like, how long do I want to keep doing this?

• 1:10:25Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you do anything over 800 times and you just think like, okay, this is interesting, but like, do I want to keep having this week? You know, like, the week that I had this week, do I want to have this week again next week? Like, that's that feeling of like, being in suspended animation. Even though the content changes, like, it's the same experience often of going through and doing the edits and making the thing and writing the thing. It's just like, very, very, doing the mixed notes. You know, and did the music come in here or here? It's like a similar set of questions over and over. And I totally think about, like, how many years can I do this?

• 1:10:57Sam Fragoso?

  What do you think that is?

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  I don't know. Like, it's funny, I was just talking to Steph about this. I think for now, I still have this feeling of like, this time that we're in feels like an especially interesting time to be documenting the massive changes our country seems to be going through. And so this does not seem like a time to quit. This seems like a time where it feels incredibly lucky to be able to, like, have a tape recorder and be able to write stuff and put it out. It seems really, really interesting. But I could imagine, like, at some point, stopping. I definitely can.

• 1:11:29Sam Fragoso?

  In the beginning, when you had those 80-hour weeks and you were in that Ashland apartment, you would go home and you would look up at the ceiling.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  I know what you're about to say. Yeah, like, I remember there was a point a couple of years into the show of like, I was working every waking minute. I would look at the ceiling and be like, wait, how long do we agree to do this? Like, this is like, this is like, wait, we just do this forever? Like, this is just like, we don't get to stop?

• 1:11:51Sam Fragoso?

  This the machine I created and signed up for?

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Sam Fragoso?

  When you look up at the ceiling now, you're in a much nicer home, I presume. What do you think about?

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  I mean, I appreciate how unusual the situation I and my coworkers are in, that we work in a show where 3 million, over 3 million people here each week and we're fully funded. And we get to have our jobs. There's no adult supervision. Nobody tells us you can't do this, or you should do that. Like, we're our own bosses. Anything we can think to make, we get to make. Like, nobody gets this. And I feel very awake to the fact that it's a really hard thing to walk away from. It took a really long time to get to that point. The people I work with are the best in the world at making this kind of thing. And I feel like the last year or two, or three of shows, I feel like are, like, these are some of the best years we've ever had. Like, just in terms of just the variety of things

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  and the level of reporting and just the feeling and the stories. And just like, just, I feel like, you know, this is a very hard thing to walk away from. I remember, like, somebody talked about Dave Letterman stepping down. And, and like, it's just a weird thing to think, like, you just would, like, have this way of talking to the country. And then you'd just be like, okay, I'm not going to do that anymore. You know what I mean? Like, I totally understand that. Like, it just is a weird thing to give up. But I'm tired sometimes, in a way that I never was before. Like, like, like, literally, just like, the repetition of doing the same thing over and over, even if it's a thing you love. You just think, like, okay, I'm ready for something new. I don't even know what the something new

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  would be. And I talk about it with the people I love, I'm close to.

• 1:13:33Sam Fragoso?

  Is that a surprising feeling, being tired?

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Every, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. And I don't approve of it. I don't. It's like, I don't approve of being tired. I don't approve of that kind of whining, or I just, I'm just completely against that.

• 1:13:50Sam Fragoso?

  You're anti-whining?

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Everybody's anti-whining.

• 1:13:52Sam Fragoso?

  That's not true.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, you know, just, um, yeah, like, I don't, yeah, I don't want to be weak. It's confusing, that part of it. And then, it stops being confusing. Like, then I'm out, talking to people with a tape recorder and seeing things I've never seen, and people are saying stuff that I couldn't have imagined, they say. And then, that's not confusing anymore. And then I feel like, oh, my God, this is so fun. This is amazing, you know?

• 1:14:18Sam Fragoso?

  That still thrills you.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  You'd have to be dead for that not to throw you. Like, what could be more interesting than to get to see something new and be so on the inside of something new?

• 1:14:30Sam Fragoso?

  In celebration of that, I want to play a clip. This comes from a 2001 piece called Babysitting. Why is that interview your favorite interview you've ever done?

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  It's my favorite interview because like I went into it, like you go into every interview, not sure what's going to happen. And, and you know, I go in with a plan. And then in that interview, it just works out so much better than the plan. He is such a special interviewee. Like the story that I thought we were going in for was this like sort of funny, cute story about him and his sister, and they made up a family that they were babysitting for.

• 1:15:02Sam Fragoso?

  To his mother.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Right. Made, made, yeah, exactly. Told his mother, made that they were babysitting for this family, which didn't exist. But in fact, the story comes out to be this very emotional and pretty deep story about how his mother was just an incompetent mother and sort of like Livia Soprano, like sort of like had ill will towards him and his sister. And like, at some point, she sent him off to an orphanage, though he was not an orphan to live, and which he feels like saved his life. And it just, it just, it just, it just starts off with this like piece of candy premise and then turns into this thing that's so much deeper. And then once we're in the thing, I would just make up questions to ask him, what if you could run into the kids in that family you babysat for today?

• 1:15:48Sam Fragoso?

  The imaginary kids?

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  The imaginary kids. Like, what are they doing today?

• 1:15:53Speaker 06

  They would be in, let's see, they're three, they would be 56, 57 years old. I've wondered where they're living, how they're doing.

• 1:16:06Sam Fragoso?

  So where do you picture them?

• 1:16:08Speaker 06

  I picture them doing very well and, and, and kind of dull now.

• 1:16:14Sam Fragoso?

  Really?

• 1:16:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:17Speaker 06

  I don't picture them as being terribly interesting.

• 1:16:21Speaker 06

  They're more conservative than their parents.

• 1:16:24Speaker 06

  But nice kids, pleasant, good people.

• 1:16:28Sam Fragoso?

  Where do you think they're living?

• 1:16:30Speaker 06

  I, I'm afraid. I think they're living in Florida.

• 1:16:34Sam Fragoso?

  They are? Not too far from where you, y'all are?

• 1:16:37Speaker 06

  I may run into them in this tour.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  Usually you ask questions like that of an interviewee, and usually it goes nowhere. And with him, every time I would make up a weird question like that, he would hit it out of the park and just say something so interesting and surprising and emotional and real. And it just really loved him. And it was just such a special experience to do the interview. It's sort of like, as an interviewer, you go into a situation and you throw your pitches, and then they hit back some of them, and they don't hit back others. And this one, everything I threw, he could hit. And it was just so, the whole interview was so much more vast than I imagined it would be going in.

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  And then coincidentally, Jonathan Goldstein, who hosts Heavyweight, had just come to work at This American Life. This was so long ago. And he was the producer on that interview. And I think it might have been the very first interview he ever sat in on that someone else had done. So he'd just come to us from the CBC, and he's new at the show. And it's the first week or two he's there. And this is the interview that he sits in on. And I remember we came in the studio, and he's like, wow, this is really, this place is really different than...

• 1:17:51Sam Fragoso?

  Is it always gonna be like this?

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  I know. I was like, it never, I told him, it's never, it will never be like this again. You saw it like a completely senior event.

• 1:18:00Sam Fragoso?

  The man said to you, when he went home from the orphanage, his mom asked, "Did you ever think about me when you were up there?" And from that moment on, at the age of 10, that man said to you, "I never asked her for a thing again." Now, it's impossible for me to not hear you and feel you in that.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  Oh, you mean that he drew the same conclusion about his mom that I drew about my parents?

• 1:18:28Sam Fragoso?

  About everyone.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  Oh, that's really interesting. I never considered whether the actual content of the story got to me because I related to it. But the fact that he had to conclude through the way that she treated him, that he was on his own, and that that actually is what made him healthy. Yeah, I totally connect to that. And maybe that was part of the reason why it meant so much to me. But I will say, Frank, the other part was just the thing that I'm saying to you, which is it was a remarkable experience as an interviewer to just, it was just the best version of what you want from being an interviewer. You know, I just went in knowing next to nothing and then it was just so meaningful, everything that he said.

• 1:19:12Sam Fragoso?

  I can't help but think about where we started this conversation. The climate in which we both make work, which seems to have only, you know, gotten worse since that 2018 commencement speech we talked about.

• 1:19:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:19:25Sam Fragoso?

  Where the informational ecosystem, you said, this will be around for the rest of our lives. That's the most frightening thing to me, that disinformation and misinformation is as popular as ever, that people spread it gleefully and with reckless abandon. That was in 2018.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's before 300,000 people died of misinformation because they didn't believe that the COVID vaccine would, uh, would help them, you know, before we had, uh, like mass casualties to misinformation.

• 1:19:54Sam Fragoso?

  Seven years later, I know you talked about being a hopeful person, an optimistic person about the work, but it seems harder and harder to get the work to reach the people it needs to reach. Where do you see or how do you see your role in all of this?

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  I mean, I thought about this a lot. You know, you say like the people the work needs to reach. Like, I don't believe in that exactly. I just think they're the people who like it does reach. You know, I think there's two things that a radio show like ours can do in the environment that we're in, right? Like, we're in an environment where nobody's interested in hearing the facts of something. Nobody's interested in being convinced of anything by something they hear on the radio, but nobody was ever interested in being convinced by something they heard on the radio. Like, nobody ever changed their opinion on anything because they heard something on the radio.

• 1:20:41Sam Fragoso?

  Thank God, maybe once or twice.

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe. You know, to answer your question, I think there's, there's two things a show like ours can do. And one is, we can point out when something isn't true. And I still think that that's important. And especially in the environment we are in now, where just routinely, the president trots out facts that are incorrect to support policies that are brand new. Ukraine started the war with Russia. People on social security are, you know, the mass numbers of them are getting checks, even though these people are 150 years old, so it's fraud. You know, USAID spent millions of dollars buying condoms for Hamas. You know, just like, just every policy is justified with things that are untrue.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  So just like being factual, I think, still means something and it's important. Still means something to you. It still means something to me. Yeah, it still feels, it still feels important to do. But then in addition, I think that there's something that you can do on the radio in the format that we're in, which is that because radio is such an intimate medium, it's like we can introduce you to people who are in the middle of some news event that you've heard of, that one of those news events where like it's just portrayed in such a cartoonish way. And we can say like, no, no, no, no, no. Like whatever you decide you think about this event, like it's not what the picture you have in your head. It's this other more complicated thing.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  Like we could just insist on the, on, on the real world. We can insist on the complicated reality of our world. We could, we can just, we can make the world its proper size in people's heads and make what people are going through, who are far away from them, real to them. That's something you can still do. You know, and so, and so I feel like we've done just so much coverage in the last few years on things like trying to make stories about people who are in the middle of the Gaza war, but not like victim-y, corny, cartoonish, simple stories, but stories where these people just seem like thoughtful people trying to like make decisions about their lives. Or just the people who are being, um, you know, who the Trump administration is trying

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  to kick out of the country for all the reasons that the Trump administration is trying to kick them out, like, well, let's just get to know them. Like, let's just get right in there with them. Like, I think that that's something that, that radio is, is suited for. And then people can decide what they think. I hear you saying that.

• 1:23:12Sam Fragoso?

  Are there days that you have a hard time believing that?

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  Believing what? Believing that that's worth doing? No, to me, it seems worth doing. Like, to me, it feels like unambiguously like I'm interested in doing it. And it's something I feel like, yeah, I'm interested in doing it. And I'm not at a point of questioning it. I'm really not. Maybe I should be. Like, you know, I feel like you're implying, maybe, maybe I'm kidding myself. But if I am kidding myself, like, I'm OK with that.

• 1:23:37Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, it's like a magic trick, but to yourself.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  But all magic tricks are to yourself, really. Like, if you're doing them right. Like, if you stand in front of a mirror and make a coin disappear, it looks like it disappears to you.

• 1:23:47Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I thank you for doing magic tricks for, I think, 30 years.

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  Nice segue.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  I respect what you just did. And I don't mean to laugh.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  It's a laughter of recognition, not a laughter of laughter.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:24:08Sam Fragoso?

  To 30 years. Congratulations.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  Thanks so much. Ira Glass. Have a good one.

• 1:25:16Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode with Ira Glass, be sure to share it on social media, share it with a friend, leave us five stars on Spotify, review the show on Apple. All of it really does help us continue making Talk Easy each and every Sunday. Special thanks this week goes to the team at This American Life. I also want to thank Josh Bierman, PJ Vogt, Jacob Weisberg, and our guest today, Ira Glass. If you enjoyed hearing Ira, I'd recommend my talks with David Remnick, Gia Tolentino, and Wesley Morris. To hear those and more Lemonada podcasts, listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you

• 1:25:58Sam Fragoso?

  like to listen. You can also subscribe to Lemonada Premium for all of our bonus content. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or head to lemonadapremium.com. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janik Sabra. Today's talk was edited by Matt Sasaki and mixed by Andrew Vastola. This episode was taped out of City Box in New York City. Our music comes from Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Kresha Shanoy. Photographs today are by Sarah Schneider. Additional research comes from Sharia Aran Kay and Pierce Harvey. This episode was made in partnership with the

• 1:26:38Sam Fragoso?

  good people at Lemonada Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with another episode. Until then, stay safe and so long.

• 1:27:08Speaker 07

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 1:27:16Speaker 08

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 1:27:19Speaker 07

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 1:27:22Speaker 08

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:27:24Speaker 07

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:27:28Speaker 08

  That's it.

• 1:27:30Speaker 07

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.

• 1:27:38Speaker 09

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed,

• 1:28:21Speaker 09

  avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview." So go to groundnews.com/rz, that's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S.com/rz, for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.