Ira Glass
Ira Glass
Ira Jeffrey Glassis an American public radio personality and the host and producer of the radio and television show This American Life...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRadio Host
Date of Birth3 March 1959
CityBaltimore, MD
CountryUnited States of America
front natural performing talk tendency
It's tricky, performing the show live. Because when you're in a big auditorium, in front of 700 people, the natural tendency is to want to talk louder. You want to project.
corny emotional people power realized smile top
I never realized before this the emotional power of some really simple, corny tropes: people with top hats, people with batons, confetti going off, how important it is to smile.
amazing based basically country figure food grease iconic jordan michael
Grease and starch just always win over protein. In food as in so many things. Look around you, that's what our whole country is based on. It's amazing that Michael Jordan can be an iconic figure because he's basically just protein.
excuse happened journalist news sort square stick stops straight territory today
Any journalist who doesn't stick to the day's news is sort of part journalist, part anthropologist. Once the excuse for the story stops being - it happened today - then you're square right in the other territory of journalism, which is just straight up documenting of how we live, and what we think of each other.
advantage career early form latitude official spend trying version
Often they don't take advantage of the latitude they have. They spend a lot of their early career trying to be the - official version - of a reporter. It's all about replicating a kind of stodgy form that already exists.
amuse characters describe happen heard interest interested people public radio stories
For most people when you say - public radio - they automatically think it's like medicine. We only do stories that amuse and interest us. For people who haven't heard the show, we describe it like a movie where there are characters and you're interested in what's going to happen to them.
baby belief remember
I remember clearly that when I was little it was explained to me [that] the way that babies were made was that God put the baby into some lady's stomach, right? And, at some point, I learned how it really happened, and really that was the beginning of the end of my belief in God. Up until that point, it had always been a really weird act of intervention on God's part.
people
For people starting public radio shows, one of the things you have to do is you have to talk every single public radio station into picking you up.
thinking people radio
But sadly, one of the problems with being on public radio is that people tend to think you're being sincere all the time.
writing creating lucky
If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get lucky.
thinking frightening
I'm going to go with Chihuahua, just because I can't think of anything more frightening than a giant Chihuahua.
trying want stuff
You just want to try a bunch of stuff, because you don't know what's going to be great.
people world speech
One reason I do the live shows - and the monthly speeches at public radio stations - is to remind myself that people hear the show, that it has an audience, that it exists in the world. It's so easy to forget that.
stories way realizing
For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It's a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person and things happen to them and then something big happens and they realize something new.