I've seen this interview pop up several times but I've always lacked the context to properly understand it, because I don't know who Ira Glass is and what he has done. I don't deny that it's good advice, but who is this guy and why should I listen to him?
Ira Glass is the creator and host of a long running radio show called This American Life on National Public Radio. The show runs weekly and tells stories of Americana and other things. I suspect part of what makes the show famous is that it coined not just a particular kind of show, but a particular kind of sound, editing and production, that, I’d say set the standard for modern audio programs.
Several of the shows producers (and Ira’s mentees) have gone on to create other famous shows:
- Sarah Koenig created Serial, one of the first truly mainstream podcasts (1M listeners in its first week) for telling, in the first season, the story of a murder of Haymen Lee and investigating whether the man convicted, Adnan Syed, was likely innocent.
- Alex Blumberg created Planet Money, a short radio show that explores economics and explains it by looking at what’s happening, culturally, around the world. Later, Blumberg founded Gimlet, a podcast company that recently sold to Spotify for $100M, ostensibly to create content with that, now famous, NPR _sound_. Some of the bigger/more famous work from Gimlet is Startup (now also a TV show in the US), Homecoming (now also a show on Amazon Prime Video), Reply All, and Conviction.
Anyway, Ira Glass has hosted This American Life since the beginning, and Blumberg recently interviewed him for a show Gimlet produces called Without Fail. If you’re looking to understand his impact in this space, I think that’s a wonderful place to start.
*edited to correct where the Homecoming TV show airs.
The bit about his mentees and the 'NPR sound' helps a lot and does create that important context.
First time I saw his interview, I did some light googling and as far as I could tell, he was some kind of host/writer. I'd gander most non-Americans haven't even heard of NPR and thus cannot really understand the impact it had/has. Much less his mentees and their various offshoots.
I'm not dismissing his advice, I'm curious about the cultural context of why his advice is important.
It's like leaving comments in code. I know what the code does, but I don't know why you did it this particular way. Google tells me he's a famous/important person, it rarely doesn't explain why he's more famous/important than other famous/important people.
