ADRIAN MA, HOST:
If you listen to a lot of public radio, I would bet money that you probably know this voice...
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "THIS AMERICAN LIFE")
IRA GLASS: Act 1 - a tiny thing that gives me hope.
MA: ...Ira Glass, the longtime host of "This American Life." He's developed a particular style in his nearly 30 years with that show. He's relaxed and conversational, sometimes offers little glimpses into his personal life from time to time.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "THIS AMERICAN LIFE")
GLASS: A few days ago, my friend Mary Ahern (ph) died. Mary was 89. For the last 10 years I've talked to her nearly every day. She and I met in the dog park. We organized their lives to meet there at 10 each night.
MA: But Glass says he had to teach himself to open up like this. It still takes him effort, which might have made it a little intimidating for him to join NPR's Rachel Martin for a live taping of her Wild Card podcast. That conversation was in front of a crowd at the Podcast Movement conference this year. And Wild Card, if you haven't heard it, is an interview show where guests choose questions at random from a deck of cards. And the questions get deeper and often more personal as they go. Now, as a heads up, Ira swears a lot more in person than he does on his show. Here's Rachel.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
RACHEL MARTIN: Pick a card - one, two or three.
GLASS: Two.
MARTIN: Two - what is something you think people misunderstand about you?
GLASS: I don't think people misunderstand me.
(LAUGHTER)
GLASS: Like, I don't know. Oh, I know what I think people misunderstand.
MARTIN: OK.
GLASS: I think I play a much nicer, more empathetic person on the radio than I am in real life.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: That's what I was looking for. And I also don't believe it. You're not a nice, empathetic person?
GLASS: To a point - I contain that sort of empathetic people-pleasing person who I'm playing on the radio. That's most of who I am. But I'm a person under weekly deadlines, and I get freaked out and tired and irritable and don't want to talk to people and get annoyed. And I curse a lot in real life. And I really love cursing.
MARTIN: (Laughter).
GLASS: So, like, I am that person, but I'm more than that person. I remember there was a thing that happened in the very early days of our radio show where - I'm going to hesitate telling this story 'cause it's a little bit, like - a little, like - I don't know, a little self-something - congratulatory or something.
MARTIN: That's OK.
GLASS: But the very first live show we did - or one of the first live shows we did was a town hall in New York City, and the New York Observer - this is like, we'd only been there for a couple of years. And New York Observer wrote an article coming to the show, and the article was just about there were a lot of women who had crushes on me over the radio. And they did an article about this in the New York Observer. And they interviewed my senior producer at the time, Julie Snyder, and Julie said this thing about the fact that that was happening. She said - at the time, our staff was me and three women. She said, you know, look, I love my husband, but I'd love him a lot more if every word he said was edited by three women.
(LAUGHTER)
GLASS: That would be the difference between the public version and the private version.
MARTIN: That's pretty good.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Three more cards - one, two or three.
GLASS: No. 2.
MARTIN: What emotion do you understand better than all the others?
GLASS: I've heard you ask this of people on the show. And the emotion I experience the most is a kind of sadness and worry. And it comes so inappropriately at times when it just shouldn't even be there - just feel like a detached, sad, worried feeling. And I've really been trying to control it and change it. But left unattended, that is the feeling that I go back to by default, and I have to actively stop myself from doing it.
MARTIN: What do you understand to be the root of that sadness?
GLASS: I mean, part of it is just disposition, and then part of it was that in different ways, if you're going to get very real about it, each of my parents were, like, totally fine parents, like, totally lovely middle-class parents who looked after us. But my dad was kind of, like, 1960s-era dad, who wasn't around that much, and when he was around, he was kind of, like, exhausted and a little irritable. So he was a distant figure. And my mom was a therapist who was either very, very present for us or deeply not present at all, and kind of in the room but not engaging with us. Like, she would be on the phone talking to her friends. She'd be doing other things. And so she was a sort of intermittent force of being present. And just I grew up feeling very alone.
MARTIN: Do you think that's why you do what you do? You are able to create intimacy with strangers for your job in a way that maybe you didn't get.
GLASS: I didn't have, like, great social skills. And, like, it didn't - like, I didn't feel comfortable with other kids, like, immediately or easily. And so I remember consciously in junior high school, I remember, like discovering, like, you could just ask people questions, and they'll open up to you, and then they feel close to you. And I remember just doing it as a technique to, like, just get through the awkwardness of social interaction. And people would open up to me, and they'd feel very close to me. And interestingly, it was kind of messed up because I wouldn't open up to them as much. And so I didn't feel close to them. So I had a whole bunch of kind of middle-level friends who felt very close to me 'cause I would get them to open up, but I didn't feel close to them at all.
And, like, honestly, that's a kind of thing I actually actively had to train myself out of doing and start talking about myself more when I got into my 20s and 30s 'cause I felt like I was in all these unequal friendships. And I think the fact that in a way, I was such a moron at normal social interaction gave me the skills to do the job I do now. But also, the kind of story and aesthetic that we make on "This American Life," it's built around a kind of intimacy in the way the interviews happen and the kind of connection I make with the people - and the other reporters and producers make with the people on the air. And I think only a person who had trouble connecting to people in their actual life would go to the trouble to invent that format. You know, like, the fact that I ended up making that is a direct result of the fact that it was always so hard for me.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Three new cards.
GLASS: Great, I'll pick No. 2.
MARTIN: OK. Do you think about the legacy that you will leave behind?
GLASS: No, I do not.
MARTIN: Yeah.
GLASS: I think that's [expletive].
MARTIN: (Laughter).
GLASS: I don't care at all about that. [Expletive] legacy. [Expletive] people of the future. After all of us are dead, [expletive] the people who will be alive, having lunch and seeing movies. [Expletive] them. I hate them.
(LAUGHTER)
GLASS: I'm not making a radio show for that. I'm making a show for people who hear it now. And when it's done and we don't make it anymore, it's perfectly fine for it to vanish into...
MARTIN: Yeah.
GLASS: ...The mists of time, like everything will. And it's fine if that happens very quickly. It doesn't matter. That's not what this show is for.
MARTIN: I asked Nikki Giovanni that question - poet, acclaimed, awesome woman - and she basically said the same thing. And she told me that she is often engaged with people who think a lot about their legacy, and they actually plan the stamps that America is going to make with their visage on them (laughter).
GLASS: That's sad. It's so sad. If that's how you - like, it's just a sad person. That's pathetic - unless you're, like, President Obama, you know what I mean? Like, unless you're an actual historic figure - be like, that's appropriate for him to think about his legacy. Like, but he's the first Black president of the United States. He should think about that.
MARTIN: You know, sometimes we talk about, like, retiring cards when someone's given the perfect answer.
GLASS: (Laughter).
MARTIN: And I think this one just went bye-bye.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: One, two, or three.
GLASS: Three.
MARTIN: OK. What truth guides your life more than any other?
GLASS: I mean, the actual truth is a little embarrassing to say, which is why I'm pausing and closing my eyes. But now I'll open them. And that is that - I've never thought about it this way, and I've never put it to myself this way. And I've never had this thought before, but I think it's true - is that I feel like I'm in a - I feel like I'm trying to - I don't know the best way to put this. But it's like I'm trying to be, like, a good boy. Like, I'm trying to be - like, I'm just trying to show, like, I really am trying my hardest all the time to those around me. And I am generally kind of trying my hardest all the time. But this is - like, I worry about saying that. It's like somebody in a job interview saying, you know the problem with me is, like, I just try too hard. I can't stop a task.
(LAUGHTER)
GLASS: So - but I think that I'm given a simple thing to do, and then I make it way more complicated and spend a lot more time on it than I probably should. Or there's some, like, thing in a mix that four other people have heard, and it's Friday. And this is not - this is actually an example from real life. And then I just hear it, and I'll just be, like, we have to put three-fourths of a second pause here and four-tenths of a second pause there to make this last moment work, which I would like to believe makes it better.
And I feel like I'm always being a good soldier in appropriate and inappropriate situations, in personal situations where it's intrusive and not called for and in work situations where I work with super competent, the-very-best-at-their-jobs-in-the-world people who very much don't need my help sometimes. And so it's a quality that is both good and bad. It's just like, no, I want to do it better. I'm going to do it better. I'm going to show you how good I am - but not good like you'll be impressed, but just you'll think like, oh, look, you were good - like with a dog. Like, good boy. Like, you really tried. Good boy.
MARTIN: It has been such a pleasure. Thank you for doing this. Thank you guys for having us. Ira Glass, ladies and gentlemen.
GLASS: Thanks so much. I enjoyed it. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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