The year 2013 was a pretty good one for Pulitzer and Peabody Awards-winning public radio personality Ira Glass. According to various reports, that year the National Public Radio (NPR), which employed Glass, recommended raising his salary to $278,000 a month, but surprisingly, the show host refused and even requested that his salary be reduced to $140,000. Although still a handsome sum, it was much less than he was originally offered.
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"I thought that it was unseemly to go on the radio and ask listeners to donate money if I was making so much money from them," Glass said in an interview with Israel Hayom. "I thought it wasn't right. The average family in America makes about $50,000-60,000 a year. So yeah, it just seemed like a lot of money."
Q: It's not very common that we hear of a person turning down a raise.
"It was public information how much I made because the public radio station discloses that on public forums. And it just seemed wrong to be making that much. I felt much better after turning it down."
Glass is the host of the well-known "This American Life" podcast, the fifth most popular one in the United States and the world. In 2001, Time Magazine named Glass the "best radio host in America," and "This American Life" has been called "the father of podcasts."
It broadcasts on numerous public radio stations in the United States and internationally and is also available as a free weekly podcast, and has four million listeners a week on average. Primarily a journalistic non-fiction program, it also features essays, memoirs, field recordings, short fiction, and found footage.
For his work on "This American Life," Glass was awarded the 2020 inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting for the episode "The Out Crowd," which demonstrated "revelatory, intimate journalism that illuminates the personal impact of the Trump Administration's "Remain in Mexico" policy. It included, among other things, interviews with immigrants who were impacted by the former president's policies and shed light on the activity of drug cartels.
"Some of the things we were doing had been reported by other people, but we took you there in a way that no other show did," Glass said. "It's as if you were really there. As if you were a border agent. One of the most powerful things in the show is listening to the officials who were charged with carrying out the policy, saying they couldn't sleep at night. And because they felt like in some way they were sending people to their deaths in violation of US and international law. To be able to get that on tape and present it to millions of people, that has a special valence."
Q: Did it cross your mind when you were preparing the episode that you might end up winning a Pulitzer?
"Well, no, because nobody had ever won a Pulitzer for a radio show. We were the first ones. In fact, there's an entire other award called the Peabody Award that was created in the 1940s simply because radio broadcasters couldn't win the Pulitzer. Like that's why it exists. So, we've won that one a lot. But no, we didn't think we were gonna win the Pulitzer because nobody ever had."
Q: You also cover much less serious subjects. Your content is truly diverse.
"I and the people I work with are very normal. Some weeks we're really interested in talking about the new, others we want to have fun. I think that's one of the things that people like about the show."
Glass gave an example of a recent show that focused on rats.
"I live in New York City so there's a lot of rats, mostly dead ones in the street. So one of our producers found a story about a guy who during the pandemic saved a rat, and then started to collect rats, and then found that he didn't want to bring any women over to his house because they would think he's such a weirdo."
Q: I cannot even imagine what such an episode would look like.
"So we got two incredible comedians and basically had them play the rats. I can't say this episode made a great contribution to Western culture, however, it's just a really fun show to listen to. The advantage that we have is that we're a narrative show, so we can engage the listener the way evening news can't, and connect you to the people who are there, connect you to what's going on.
"We did a story last week on these people in Florida, who are opening up health clinics because they don't agree with the official government rules about the vaccine, and about ivermectin, which they believe helps you with COVID but science shows it does not. The value of the story is that you hear why they're doing that, and you also hear why it's a growing political movement. And you get it from the inside by meeting the people and hearing them talk. It's different than when a news crew drops by for a 15-second quote."
"The perfect level of notoriety"
Glass, 64, lives with his wife in New York. He was born to Jewish parents Barry and Shirley Glass, a businessman and clinical psychologist respectively. Glass' parents opposed him working on the radio and hoped he would follow in his mother's footsteps and become a doctor.
"There was a sense of 'Well you're a nice smart Jewish boy, why aren't you a doctor? Why are you doing this thing which makes you no money?' And if I was going to be a journalist, then on television, to be successful. Radio seemed like not enough ambition."
Years later, Glass was approached by television network Showtime with a proposal to convert "This American Life: into a television program. " I enjoyed making television, and I think we did a nice job, those shows are out there you know on the internet along with everything else that's ever been made. But I think our show is more special as a radio show."
Q: Television is a less intimate format.
"That's exactly the word. That's exactly what you give up. What's also interesting is that our audience is so much bigger on the radio than it was on TV."
Despite the huge success of "This American Life," Glass walks the streets of New York mostly without being recognized, which he prefers.
"It is an advantage, and when people do recognize me, that means they are a pretty serious fan, and so then they're totally lovely, normal, and gracious. It's the perfect level of notoriety."
Glass wakes up at 06:30 a.m. every day, goes for a run, and then off to work, where he writes, edits, holds meetings, and records his show. He is not active on social media, saying he doesn't "need another medium for self-expression." Hobbies are not his thing either, as he sees them as an "old-fashioned idea," and instead enjoys "seeing friends, going to shows, playing poker now and then, reading, inventing little projects with friends. Like this show I'm doing in Jerusalem with Etgar!"
Glass was referring to a show he is currently working on with well-known Israeli writer Etgar Keret, but more on that later.
Glass' show often sounds improvised, but in practice, it is fully scripted.
"I'm not talented at making stuff up live, sitting in front of a microphone," he explained. "It has to sound natural because that's the most effective way to communicate over the radio. You want to sound like a person who's just talking, not like a news reporter reading off a piece of paper. So in practice, I write everything I'm going to say and then try to perform it as if it's just me speaking off the cuff. I do alter words here and there as I go. Often it's not a word-for-word performance of what's on the page. But often it is."
A script also helps Glass minimize anxiety.
"Anxiety is a big part of my life! I worry about letting people down, about making my deadlines, about work being as good as it can be, about not being as thoughtful with my loved ones as I should be. Anxiety is perhaps an appropriate response to the responsibilities we have as adults. That said, I wish I had less of it."
Q: Speaking of anxiety, do you follow the current events in Israel? As a Jew, does it worry you? I know you will be visiting us soon.
"I'd worry about it even if I weren't a Jew. We're watching a country tear itself apart."
Fake news
Glass will be traveling to Israel in August for The Israel Festival, a multidisciplinary arts festival held every spring, with its center being in Jerusalem. Glass and Keret combine their skills for an evening of powerful and funny stories with "Half-baked Stories About My Dead Mother," and a solo show of the "Seven Things I've Learned," where he talks about the art of storytelling.
And indeed, Glass seems to be interested in the stories of regular people.
"Exactly," he confirmed. "I wanted to do stories about everyday people, but I wanted them to be really compelling, to make you wonder what's gonna happen next. That's what gives the story enormous stickiness. We just throw you in the middle of the story, because it pulls people in better."
When asked what makes a story truly good, Glass said, "The first thing is it just has to be surprising, something you haven't heard before, which actually disqualifies a huge number of stories. A good story can start out funny and get very emotional, start out small, and then gesture at some bigger thing in the world. Some stories just have a really particular music to them, in the same way a great song has a great melody, and you sort of can't explain why this is a great melody, just sort of like go this isn't really good listen to this one."
Q: So novelty is a crucial element.
"Yes, which is why working with Edgar is such a natural fit for our show, because he is an incredible talker, who says incredibly surprising and poetic things, and funny things. He's also an amazing writer and writes in a very compact way, that's perfect for radio.
"The show is about our moms, and for him, it's the hardest thing he's ever written, while for me it's the easiest show I ever put together; because the material he was creating about his mom was like a little bomb that goes off."
Q: At a time when more content is being created than ever before in history, how do you keep up and create meaningful content?
"I think it's fine if the content is temporary, disposable. The most difficult struggle of making anything now is about making a contribution. And our show has a bunch of different tactics that we use. But sometimes we'll just do stuff that's amusing to us, and it won't be breaking news, and showing you something about how the government works, or how the country is put together, how the world is put together in a profound way."
Q: Does the podcast boom alarm you in any way?
"No, it does not worry me. I think people who do good work continue to do so and if people are making stuff that's not so interesting, it's fine, it doesn't hurt anyone."
Q: It leads me to my next question, which is, why do you think that oftentimes podcasts hosted by famous stars are not necessarily the most popular ones?
"I have no expertise on this question, but I'd assume their fans are looking for something else from them."
The world of content has been changing and is different from the traditional kind, that is radio and television. Podcasts, in particular, have exploded in recent years, with the Podcast Index saying that there are 4,105,166 podcasts registered worldwide.
According to data, in the US, 64% of the population listens to a podcast at least once in their life, and 42% (over the age of 12) have listened to a podcast in the past month. Most podcasts last between 20 and 60 minutes, and in the US focus primarily on comedy (22%), news (21%), true crime (18%), sports (17%), and health and fitness (17%).
Q: Is there anything about the world of podcasts that does worry you?
"I worry more about podcasts that are just spreading untruth. There's a whole world of podcasts that spread incorrect information.
"The biggest challenge to the press is that there's an entire ecosystem of misinformation and unfactual information. When I started in journalism in the 80s, there was still a feeling that if you got out there and documented something well, people would acknowledge the truth of something.
"Whereas now, even if you document something perfectly and the facts are on your side, someone will make up a set of alternative facts that don't acknowledge it at all. Mainstream fact-based journalism hasn't come up with a tactic to combat that."
A journalistic nightmare
For Glass, the subject of fake news hits close to home, due to a 2012 episode about Apple.
"We had this storyteller, a very talented guy who does monologues on stage, Mike Daisey. He was doing a show in New York and touring around the country, here in the States, about Apple and their manufacturing practices in China.
"And he really loves Apple products and became very disturbed when he read about the conditions under which they were manufactured. And so he flew himself to Shenzhen, China, where the stuff is made, and tried to get into the factories where it was made, and talked to people who worked on the assembly lines.
"And before it went on the air, we fact-checked it. We called people who monitor what goes on in those factories and read all the other reporting that had been done on those factories. And everything he said he saw, people who were familiar with what goes on in the factories said that it all happens in those factories, except for one thing, interestingly, that has to do with child labor. Daisy said he couldn't prove it, but that is what he saw."
Q: And what happened? Was he allowed to speak about it on air?
"Yes. And after it aired, there was a reporter in China who heard it. And there was one fact in it, that they thought that doesn't sound right. And then they did something that we did not do. And that is they found the interpreter that Mike Daisy used when he was in China. The interpreter basically disputed the entire report."
Q: That must have been a journalistic nightmare.
"Right. We had to go on the air, and we basically did an hour-long show where we issued a retraction and had him come on and talk about what had happened. And then also did a whole segment where we said to the audience that he didn't meet those people, but here's what's true about those factories."
Q: How many people work on each "This American Life" episode?
"We started with just four of us. Now it's like 15 or 20 people. And then in any given show, it'll be like six or seven of us working on that episode, with the others putting together episodes for upcoming weeks."
Q: You've said before that "at some stage," you started to love your interviewees. How does that happen? And also, does it ever happen that you don't like your interviewees?
"It's not that I started to love my interviewees 'at some stage.' It's always been true for me. If an interview is going great, and they're talking in an honest and vulnerable way about something that happened to them, and we're really understanding each other in the conversation, as interviewer and interviewee, then it's hard not to fall in love a little. It's not a love that results in anything other than an interview.
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"But it's recognizably and undeniably a kind of love. If someone opens their heart and shares their true feelings and experiences, how can you not fall in love a little?"
Q: Over the years, including now, you've been a mentor to many young journalists. What advice would you give to aspiring journalists?
"Make the thing you're most interested in or excited about and do it now. Don't put it off till you get to some better job or some better situation."
Q: In 10 years' time, how would you like "This American Life" to be remembered? Or you, for that matter.
"I'd like the people I love to remember me as someone who loved them and tried to do right by them. Everyone else, I don't care how I'm remembered. Who cares how strangers think of them after they're dead? I suppose I need the approval of strangers now, to keep the business going, but I definitely won't need that once I don't exist anymore.
"'This American Life' has already had about as much impact as a podcast can have. I'm not sure it needs to have more. It's taught a generation of co-workers to do good stories. It's proven that you don't have to choose between being entertaining and doing journalism that uncovers new truths. Lots of podcasters and journalists have taken up a kind of storytelling journalism, with scenes and characters and funny bits and feelings, after seeing me and my co-workers do it. That all seems like plenty."
