Ira Glass is a few minutes late for our interview by video chat, and when he does arrive, he turns on the camera before he’s settled down, so I watch as he removes his cycling detritus, blows his nose and tidies his desk. When he finally speaks, he forgets to turn off the mute button. Despite being one of the most revered interviewers in the US, winner of every award from a Peabody to a George Polk, Glass is not a very smooth interviewee.
“I feel like I’m giving you too many answers to your questions. I know you’ll just pick whichever ones you want but, of course, I’m editing as I’m speaking to you so I’m thinking: ‘OK, that was good. No, that was pointless … ’” he says at one point, with a laugh that is equal parts angst and amusement.
Glass, who has the nasal voice and nerdily handsome looks of an attractive suburban maths teacher, is the founder and host of the long-running radio show and podcast This American Life. He started it in the mid-90s with the objective to tell stories – through interviews and narrative – about normal people. Not rich people, not famous ones, not beautiful ones; just people. It now gets more than 4 million listeners every week and is widely credited with starting the podcast revolution.
If podcasting is to the 2020s what standup comedy was to the 1970s, Glass is podcasting’s Steve Martin, the man who showed how big it could be. Although when I say that to him, he says with mock-but-actually-a-bit-real outrage that Martin has a podcast in his new TV show, Only Murders in the Building: “He does the sound all wrong! It’s a crime! People on that show should know how to place a microphone!”
Typical This American Life episodes include 24 hours in a diner, in which the reporters chat with the patrons who come in, or interviewing asylum seekers in a refugee camp in Mexico, as they wait to hear if they can get into the US. That last episode won a Pulitzer and is an example of how the show – to my mind – has become more political over the past five years, while staying true to its original mission of focusing on people’s stories.
“As a staff, we became very obsessed with immigration policy under President Trump, but I feel like those are the stories that you have to trick the audience into listening to – not because they’re bad people, but because the story’s not that complicated,” Glass says. “So people are like: ‘Yeah, I get it, it’s really sad.’ You have to be cunning in the way you begin, you need something funny at the top, and so we start with a little kid in the tent camp, just charming the pants off everybody. Then we pull back.”
Does he think the show has become more serious than it was a decade ago, when they made episodes such as a reporter getting over a breakup by learning how to write the perfect love song, or David Sedaris – whom Glass discovered and launched – doing his food shopping in Paris?
“I think the show has suffered since the pandemic, as it’s been a very serious show. All of us are stuck in our houses, and there are big, serious things to document. When we started, we wanted it to be the best journalism it could be, but we were also, very consciously and unashamedly, just out to amuse. So I think our best episodes are funny for quite a bit and then get serious. Like an old-fashioned Broadway musical.” For this reason, his favourite episode is 129 Cars, which follows a car dealership trying to sell its monthly quota – basically, Glengarry Glen Ross with Chryslers. “There’s a lot of cursing in that. I love cursing,” he says.
As a teenager, Glass was more interested in comedians than journalists. He has parlayed his radio success into live events, including a deeply improbable yet critically acclaimed This American Life live show six years ago, which featured Glass and professional dancers. Now he’s coming to the UK with Seven Things I’ve Learned: An Evening With Ira Glass. Did he not want to wait a bit longer so he could learn more and round it up to 10?
“I feel like with 10, you feel the audience ticking them off,” he says, hyperconscious as always about the interplay between story structure and the listeners’ interest levels. With the content, however, he’s more relaxed: “The seven things change depending on my mood. So it’s a mix of some things that took me a long time to figure out, like how to tell a story on the radio, and then some things that just seem like fun things to tell an audience.”
No other modern radio show has been as influential as This American Life. Now, loads of shows do nonfiction long-form narratives but This American Life was the one that made them big. “And it’s great for me that so many people do it because it’s become easier to hire people,” Glass says, unfussed by the copycats. Radio controllers used to ask him when he would get a “real presenter”, because his informal style, full of pauses and beats, was so different from the Kent Brockman-like voice American listeners were used to. His style has since become so ubiquitous it’s the voice of every podcast: Podcast Voice. Can he hear it when other presenters copy him?
“Yeah,” he says a little embarrassed, and then he perks up again. “But it’s very gratifying that people notice the work and think: ‘Oh, that looks fun.’ If I’d had the mind to want something, that would have been a good thing to want. Instead, I just thought: ‘Let’s try to make this week’s show and keep our jobs.’”
Glass was born and brought up in Maryland, the son of a businessman and a marriage therapist. Like his mother, he’s a talker. “My mom was good at talking and my dad wasn’t. A typical male-female relationship,” he says. He was raised Jewish but is now an atheist, although, he says, “Your cultural heritage isn’t a suitcase you can leave at the airport.” I say I can tell that from the writers he has showcased on This American Life: David Rakoff, Jon Ronson, Jonathan Gold, Shalom Auslander, even the non-Jewish Sedaris – they all have a distinctly Jewish flavour to their writing, that highly self-aware comic outsider looking in.
“I never really thought about that; I just thought: ‘These people are pretty good.’ But I can see that,” he says.
This American Life has always mixed first-person pieces with reportage. But some questions have been raised about whether the two can mix on The Trojan Horse Affair, a recently released eight-part series on This American Life’s offshoot podcast, Serial, which is produced with the New York Times – although Glass remains an editor on it. In 2013, Birmingham city council received an anonymous letter claiming there was an Islamist plot to take over local schools. Teachers and governors were fired and Peter Clarke, a counter-terrorism expert, was appointed to conduct an inquiry, although most now accept the letter was a hoax.
Serial regular Brian Reed and journalism student and Birmingham local Hamza Syed investigate the story, but some critics have questioned Syed’s neutrality, especially as we find out on the podcast that he told a potential source that his aim was to “change the narrative” about the Trojan Horse letter. The New York Times has already issued one correction regarding the misrepresentation of a source and the secularism campaign group Humanists UK released a recording that it says showed its interview on the podcast was edited misleadingly. Glass says he hasn’t seen the criticisms so can’t address them specifically, so I ask him about the occasional shading between activism and journalism: how can a story be objective if a journalist begins with a specific aim?
“I’m not someone who believes in objectivity. I think that’s really a conversation that gets you nowhere. But I do believe in fairness, where all sources are treated equally and that’s what we do. And there are definitely stories that we do here because we think: ‘That seems kinda fucked up,’” he says.
Glass doesn’t often talk about his personal life on the show, but in 2017 he told listeners that he and Anaheed Alani, his wife of 12 years, had separated. The year before, he had told this paper that they regularly went to marriage counselling. Are some problems just too big to talk out? “In our case, talking was not the solution. There was a tremendous amount of talking. But, um, yeah,” he says, with a subject’s-closed smile.
Glass never wanted kids, but he’s now in a relationship with a woman who has an eight-year-old son. “I never understood why you’d want kids. It just seemed like so much work and what do you get out of it? And now I’m like: ‘Oh, now I get it,’” he says and laughs. Some things, it turns out, can’t be talked through; they need to be experienced.
Our time is up and I tell Glass I will let him get on with his working day, and his face lightens, eager to be back in the more comfortable seat of the interviewer rather than the interviewed. “OK, cool, bye, bye, uh, bye!” he says, as he tries, and fails, to turn off the video chat. Until I finally put him out of his misery, and turn it off for him.
Seven Things I’ve Learned: An Evening With Ira Glass tours 26 to 29 March.
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