Ira Glass

Published Nov 24, 2014, 5:00 AM

Alec Baldwin sits down with Ira Glass to compare notes on interviewing, the afterlife, and how to find one’s voice – with a microphone or a camera lens. Now the veritable kingmaker of public radio, Glass has revolutionized nonfiction storytelling by using a voice that's personable, modest, and emotionally engaged. In this extensive interview, Glass lays it all out: politics (he's a Democrat; finds the left insufferable), religion (went through Hebrew school; done with it), fact-checking (you can never be too careful), and that dog who went as him for Halloween.

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policymakers, and performers, to hear their stories, what inspired their creations, what decisions changed their careers, what relationships influenced their work. Ira Glass caused a revolution in public radio, and he is now its primary kingmaker. Glass wasn't the first to share well crafted stories about so called ordinary people, but his show This American Life connected with a younger generation of public radio listeners, and they became fiercely loyal. Ira Glass has become so popular that the winner of this year's Halloween contest in Fort Green, Brooklyn was a dog, the small, white, fluffy type, dressed as Ira. This is a level of fame. I didn't quite know existing. Is this what you bargain for? No? Has this happened to you. I've never won the Ford Queen Pupster Halloween custom event. You've got me there? I mean, I'm I'm I'm a little jealous. Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure jealousy is exactly the right word, but it's something. It's a weird thing to have happened. Um, how do you feel about? I mean, I listened to Fred Armis and do the episode with you where he's doing you, and I try to do you all the time because you fit into a category all those yours works, Yours is. Yours is of a style of announcer, host, journalists, broadcaster, or whatever you want to call it. I mean, I hear so many people now on the radio who are the opposite of what I grew up with. And I think it comes down to, like, what do you think authority comes from? And back when we were kids, authority came from enunciation, precision, delivery, and a kind of gravitas that you are bringing to the character you're playing. And I think that you know, not just me, but a whole generation of people feel like, well, that character is obviously a phony pretending to be this like cartoon, sort of like the newscaster on The Simpsons with a deep voice, having gravitas. And so I think a lot of us just when in the other direction. And for me, I felt like, you know, any story hits you harder if the person delivering it doesn't sound like some news robot, but in fact sounds like a real person having the reactions a real person would have, and be surprised and amazed and amused. The very thing I'm talking about you were aware of when you were doing your show and conscious of, you know. And I mean I started off at MPR when I was nineteen, at MPRE on Washington doing what First it was an intern, and then I worked on a documentary series where I learned a lot of things. By the time I was I was I was a production assistant. And all things considered, does that mean I've been tween college? Basically, go to Quebec. I went to Northwestern for two years and then switched to Brown. Graduated from Brown in semiotics, which is a field of sort of pretentious literary theory, but actually is all about how to structure a narrative. So it's an enormous practical training. And there are things that I learned in school that I use every day to this day. But anyway, then we go back and forth between college and working at NPR. And at first when I tried to be on the radio, like most people like, I tried to be the official thing, and then at some point I trained myself out of it because I thought it's not as effective untrained yourself out of it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And NPR obviously has like a tradition of people going back to the seventies who talked not like normal announcers, but like people. Susan Stanberg was the host of All Things Considered, which I think people today might not even remember this lady who really set a tone where she She's just seemed like some Upper West Side New York lady, like leaning into the microphone mentally talking to you over the radio. You just say, mentually the adver mentally, you don't get you don't get it. That doesn't get that's a that's that's an advert that that's only on the But I got she was mentally leading into the microphone, yes, and talking like a person. So there were other people doing it. I heard people doing it. I was just like, that's the direction I gotta go in. I mean, when I think about your show, I wonder what it's like for you editorially in terms of do you sit there and you consciously try to take out of any political point of view. I mean the kinds of stories we're doing, I think, you know, when we take on something that's in the news, you know what we're looking for is a story with characters and scenes and emotion and and looking for a way to to show something new that people don't know. So, for example, when we did an hour in Guantanamo, like we didn't go into it advocating Guantanamo should be shut down or it shouldn't be shut down, you know, like we we don't, we don't have an agenda that way. Like when we did an hour on it, we did an hour because it had been a couple of years into Guantanamo existing, and we read that I can't remember the number of people, a number of detainees, like a couple of hundred detainees had been released. We had discovered, like you know, the US did determined like you guys aren't enemy combatants. You guys, you know, go back to Pakistan or wherever. And we had noticed that nobody in America interviewed them just to ask like the normal things you know that like you don't want to know, like how were you treated? Do you want to kill us? All on that and then so like you go into that, like you the question of like what our stand politically on Guantanamo is it doesn't know. I appreciate that, but I'm warning, do people sometimes view you as being liberal? Of course they do because because of public radio, which is seen as liberal. Though though when you look at the studies of like what actually gets covered on the news programs in the way it's covered, I feel like the numbers bear out the fact that it is not more liberal than other news sources. That said, there's a tone in the way certain things are covered that conservatives here, and from talking to conservatives, like, I know like that, I think that's a real thing. Um. I think at one point, there was a show that we did on one of the elections, and it was about how people voted and why they voted the way they voted, And I had a long series of discussions with these people who are like swing voters because I was fascinated with it. Like, Alec, you just think about like an election of like Carry versus Bush, and you're coming down to like the last three weeks before the election. Who are the people who haven't decided? Like how can you like like whatever you say, like those are two very different the unknowns. Yeah, Like what do you have to know? Like you know them both really well, Like what exactly? Especially people who are following the news, like like what is there to wonder about at that point, and I think in that show I came out and said, look, I'm a Democrat, just said to the audience, because I felt there was a point in the discussion. In my interviews people were identifying as Republican or Democrats, and I felt like, why pretend anything but this like usually about democratic That said, like many Democrats, I find them to be the most annoying party and so not representing what I believe on so many issues, and so lacking in so many ways, and so not doing what I would have them do. So even saying that I usually about Democrat, I feel like it doesn't even get near what my actual politics are. But if I have to pick choice reluctantly, it's the same thing as like we've done so many stories about God. At some point I went on the air and said like, look, I don't believe in God. Like I'm just gonna put that out in front. So take everything you're about to hear with the grain of salt that you should. Right, it's just truth and packaging. And I think that it's different for me as somebody who's on once a week, you know, doing a documentary show that's coming like a bunch of different stuff. It's different for me than it is for like the hosts of All Things Considered or Brian Williams or you know what I mean. Like it's just my role is different, and so I think I have that freedom. When did you realize you do believe in God? How old were you a teenager? Did you grow up in a religious household? I grew up. It's weird. My parents we were Jews in the suburbs. So I went to I went to Hebrew School and then went to like the high school version of that. Like, I continued past my environments and at some point I realized I didn't. It just didn't add up from me, like you know, you're in love or you're not in love. Like it's just like there's another explanation for everything around me, which makes more sense. Then there's a big dad who created this all you know, and just you know, universe has been here. There was like some sort of something that happened, Yeah, something like climbed up on the shores of Yeah. Actually when I was thirteen and fourteen, Like one of the things that was a huge influence on me was you remember that you remember these books. Eric van Danikin was the author Chariots of the Gods. Oh my God, I love this. And I remember being in Hebrew College, bottom of Hebrew College and arguing with the teachers there are these old rabbis about like, but this passage in like Exodus or Genesis, wouldn't this be better explained by these paintings on the ground, you know, like that we were actually visited by the whole theory of it. For people who don't know what this is, it was like this series of books, and there was TV specials and stuff that if you actually looked at it, it seems like what they're trying to tell us is people visited us from outer space and that's that's what they witnessed. Scientology really is closer to what we've been exactly. Scientology has a good point on it. I remember arguing that in Hebrew College with my professors there, and they were not They did not buy it, and you probably got slapped, like young Woody Allen in radio days, dare you mentioned this? Aliens from space? The universe is expanding? What what? What? What do you what difference does it make? Are you an atheist? No? I believe, I don't know what I believe in terms of the specific. I had a Catholic priest once say to me, listen, I believe in a piece of many religions. The Jews have something to say, and the Muslims have something to say, and the Buddhists have something to say. The Hindus have something to say. He said, sometimes I think I'm a Catholic because they just own the nicest real estate and have the nicest places to hang out in. And I mean, this is a priest that said that to me. He says, you know, and I believe in a god I believe in. I mean, I believe something had to be responsible for this. And I also believe, oddly enough, as a result of some stories I've heard on your show. You know, you know, life itself and stories that come to me make me believe there must be some God behind This is my belief, not a fact. Obviously, my atheist message is not coming through the subliminal. You fail failing the one thing you failed that but you fail. Are there some shows? But having said that, I have to say, like we do a lot of shows and religion, We do a lot of shows on faith because I think it's it's not covered very well. Like if it's it's a sort of an area of opportunity if you're if you're a reporter or a documentary producer, like in America, it's one thing that's actually the media do is a terrible job with and it's gotten better over the last fifteen years, but still like not so great of covering people of faith and covering them in terms that are that actually document people's relationship with their faith, like generally in the media. Like there's a whole phase of our show where where where this was like a big thing we were doing a lot of because my feeling like looking at the way people who were religious were covered, they would be these cartoon characters right like the you know, you see them like these right wing, inflexible like doctrinaire and their beliefs. And when I compared that to the actual Christians who were in my life, they were super thoughtful and way more compassionate and way more just just the way they lived their religion was so radically different. Even though they were very devout, radically different from what I was seeing. I was like, we need to document this because this is a whole territory of stuff. And so we did a whole set of stuff where I went out with kids on their mission trip and we did this thing about this ministerry named Carlton Pearson, and just we did a lot of stuff because it seemed like an uncovered territory and obviously like doing that without and he I wasn't trying to bring anybody over to my side. That would be boring. I wasn't interested. And I had a friend of mine who was an actor who I worked with once. He was very devout, very observant jew me and his wife. And I once said to him, what does it mean to you? And like, what what is Judaism to you? And he said to me, it's the study of how we as human beings distinguished ourselves from the animals. And when he said that, it has leveled me. I'll take that. I take all these little pieces and I say to myself, my dad died and I just had this such an incredible emotional connection to my father. The President of the United States were shot in nineteen sixty three. Their energy was such a force in my life and them in the world at large. Where did they go? Does that energy, that is the human soul and the human essence just dissipate and is it, you know, like the light switch, like when you think, when you die, it just over, It's over. And I do think that though I'm all is given pause by this a Billy Collins poem called the Afterlife, where the thesis of the poem is that each one of us goes to the afterlife that he believes in. And I'm always scared of like, oh no, if I believe that that's what I'm going to get. It's funny I thought the same thing. Someone said to me, what do you think is the afterlife? And do you believe in that idea? Maybe they based it off this poem. They said that when you die, it's a soul in your imagination, and they said, what do you think happens in the afterlife? I said, mine's pretty mundane, mine's pretty sad. He said why. I said, when you go into a room and it's a screening room and God is there. We sit down and it gets you some iced tea and you have a sandwich, and he's like, so what do you want to know? And you look at me, you know where he knows he's God, and you're like, you know, He's like okay. Larry Roll the film and they showed me what really happened in Kennedy's assassination. I want them to start to tell me the truth. Can you also in that version of it, be like, Okay, So on this date in the year, my wife and I got into an argument. I swear she said this, and then I said this, and then she said this. She swears mine is very cinematic, and I say, they say, okay, show me the movie. Who was the girl that really loved me the most? Roland? See, you get your answers, You finally get your answers. You want your answers, You want your answers. What a shame you don't get to do anything with that information, you know, like as a film. Like if this were to be a film, the thing you're describing it needs a third act. Observing that my Afterlife of Fantasy requires a third act comes instinctively to Ira. He can't help but think about a conversation as if he's the editor, marking the structural strengths and weaknesses of each anecdote. More of my conversation with Ira Glass coming up next time on Here's the Thing. We sit down with actress Julianne Moore. She shares her special technique for getting ready to play a scene. I'm very chatty. I'd like to talk all the way up to action. I do, I do, And if you can't talk to me, I'm really disappointed. Then I get lonely. Want to be lonely. When I'm wanting I want to do with my buddy. I'm gonna talk to me. You talk to me, friend. Let's be buddies talking to you. What did you do this morning? What did you have for dinner last night? What are you doing later today? Are you cold? Do you like that sweater? Did you like my sweater? What are you doing? Action acting? I love it. That's my favorite part. Then you get this great connection with another human being, and then the scenes like Comes Alive, that's Julianne Moore. Next time on Here's the Thing. This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing. In January of two thousand twelve, This American Life Friend excerpts of performer Mike daisy solo show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. The episode featured segments from Daisy's Peace, in which he visited a factory in China that made iPhones. Two months after Daisy's Peace aired, a reporter discovered discrepancies in his story. Mike Daisy had made things up. This American Life retracted the story, and Ira and his team had to ask themselves, how did this happen? We were pretty good fact checkers, I thought before mcdaisy and and uh, you know, I worked at MPR News and we were at the level that we were at an MPR News like we looked into it as well as we could. We talked to over a dozen people who had either been in those factories or human rights groups that monitored those factories, and you know, people confirmed everything that he said in the story as things that really happened in these plants, with one exception. He said that he met a fifteen year old going into work at a factory making apple products, and all the human rights workers everybody we talked to said like, actually apples like super great about that, and like would be very hard for a subcontractor to have underage workers. And has been a leader in this so if that happened, it was a fluke. And in the original show we did with him, I confronted with that and he's like, oh yeah, I don't want to tell you anyone I know, show me a picture of the person, which isn't really telling, but he said, you know they you know, they give me proof, and we sort of put it all of that out there. Did that make you angry? Well, then we found out, like, the one thing that we didn't do is we didn't talk to his translator. And he said, look, I got this phone number, but when I call it, it doesn't you know, it's some lady in China I met at the hotel and like, and so we you know, we we we gave up, you know, we didn't do that, which at that point we should not have put the thing on the radio. After we broadcast, another reporter found that translator and she said, basically, she was with him his whole time and all these things that he says happened did not happen. And so did that make you angry? People trust you, they admire you, and no one, no one falls you for that obviously, And I don't know you're not gonna say this. This is me say this. Mike Daisy may be gifted, but he's full of ship. But the thing is, when that happened, did that piss you off? Did that make you angry? I wish him, I mean maybe at some level, Like honestly, like my first reaction was not being mad at him. Um then an atheist thing. No, yeah, we've just given up on life Ale no um, I mean I mean, honestly, like the main thing I thought is like I just wondered if we were all going to keep our jobs, you know what I mean? Like I really wondered, like is this it is the radio show over? Like that was the main thing I thought. I don't know, I just I just it was a mix of things. Mad was in there somewhere about definitely was not the biggest part. Other people in my staff were definitely way madder at him, and we're mad. But I had worked with him so closely and adapting the thing for the radio. I felt very close to him actually, and I just felt like like like your friend did something, I mean, what we you know, I just made him doing had a bit of a relationship with relationship when I said like, oh no, like what have you done? And that was a way bigger part of it. But but you were asking has they have things changed around the radio show since then? And the answer is is yes, And now in addition to doing like all the stuff we did back when I worked on Morning Edition and all things considered to like see the stories are true. We have professional fact checkers, like in the New York or something, and so every script has gone through by fact checkers who we hire, and they go back to all the sources in the story and they go back to everything, and it's just like it's it's a lot of work, but I have to say it's been a glove way. It's been awesome. No approtose, but no appropos that when you know setting aside, I should say the fact checking thing in the whole Daisy thing and how he played that out. Some of your shows I listened to you, and these are among my favorite shows. I mean, like the Adrian Schoolcraft thing. I mean, my my hair was standing up on my arms when the cops are in his house in the end, they're gonna take them away to quote unquote to the hospital. You know what I mean. Do you ever fear any blowback from shows like that the Carmen Cigar one that was on recently, You over fear that, you know, the cops are come and get you, come and get somebody in your building, or you really pulled the covers on a lot of people on that piece. When the Schoolcrafted, I should Schoolcraft died and we had all been published in the in the Village Voice, so I felt like we were just doing kind of a cover version of what they had done in the Village Voice. So no, I definitely did not I think have a much bigger audience in the Village Voice. Yeah yeah, yeah, but the only people who New York cops are care about is people in New York, and so like to the Village Voice reached everybody who they would care about, Like, No, I didn't worry about that, and I didn't worry like when we did a show about the FED that like the Fed was going to somehow like shut down my bank account or something like. No, I would imagine that for you. Because you seem like such a level headed guy, smart, mature, all all these good things. It must be impossible for your very difficult for you to fire someone. Have you ever had to fire someone from the from the company. Yeah, and I've had to fire a few people, yeah yeah, And did you do the firing yes? Yeah, yeah, I mean because the Readers Show has been on their since then, I work for you. I work for you, and you're gonna fire me? Go what do you say? I say, Um, well, I mean it's all particular to the circumstances that person, isn't it. Um you as it like Donald Trump? Alex, you fired like you're fired. That's good, You're fined. Alex. You said you do an imitation of me? How would you do it? As? No, I can't do it now that I'm with you, I can't. You know, you strike me. You're really one of the most dense thinker speakers I've ever heard in my life. And what you say is very lucid and illuminating and smart only on the radio real life when you're doing it now and you're so you're so seamless, and and the velocity is just breathtaking. But what I'm wondering is I also have an image of you like a prize fighter, so that when they're getting ready for the big fight and they're you know, they don't have sex with their wife, they don't drink alcohol, they don't need any salt for their blood pressure. They lay there in a bathrobe and watch game shows all day. They rest, They rest. What does Ira Glass do in his private time. I mean when you're not working, when you have downtime, When I have downtime, honestly, like I don't have a huge amount of downtime, like usually on the sliver of it you have. Um, I walk my dog, try to spend a little time with my wife. What does she do She helps run a website for teenage girls with Tommy Givenson. Now I think she just turned eighteen year old girl who's starting on Broadway, but has this website called Rookie mag dot com. And basically Tavy decided that there should when she was fifteen years old and in high school, she thought, as a teenage girl, there was all this culture being marketed to her, and none of it accurately sort of described the world that she saw it or seemed to capture the things that were most interesting to her. And so she decided she would make that herself and organized kind of an army of young women to do it. It's three posts a day. It's really funny writing and just like it's it's wonderful, and so my wife helps her, helps her out. I find it incredible that even with the slightest prompting, you can give me the bio or the story you can tell everyone's story about your own. You can tell everyone you you only gave us the dog walking and you said, and I love that was very I try to spend time with my wife. What other what do you watch news? Do you watch TV to like films? Music? I mean, honestly, like, I have seen so little of anything in the last probably a year, just because um, we have the radio show we started the second show. I've been touring with a dance show all over the country and so on the weekends and either going and making a speech to earn enough money to live in New York City because I still work at a public radio salary and live in New York City, or I go out with this dance show where I tour with this professional dance troupe where I tell stories and they dance in this way. Whose idea was that? That was me and the choreographer. It was the choreographer the dance company. We were trying to figure out a way to work together. She's like, well, let's do a thing where we combine our things, and I was like, yes' the speaking yes, you must be dancing very fast sometimes sometimes yeah, mus be flying through the air. As a matter of fact. Yes, when you say trying to make a living on a public radio salary, I mean you you could pay yourself. I'm not saying this to embarrass you, but you could pay yourself X and you don't you fold it all back into the show, correct, Yes, I mean you decided to do that because I go on the radio and ask people for money, and I thought that it's unseemly to be making a crazy amount of money if a portion of it is money that comes down the amount of money I mean, I feel like I don't know, I don't know. I feel like I make enough money and then to live in New York, you know, like my wife and I were living like a you know, like a two room apartment because it's Manhattan and where it's in Manhattan. Because I want to be able to be I don't want to have to commute for four an hour and a half a day on a train because I because I want to have time that isn't either I don't want to waste how I have a day on a train, especially if I'm walking a dog for an hour a day. And so so we pay a lot of money for a place and to afford it. Basically, I was like, I don't want to. I don't want to be charging public radio listeners for that. What I'll do is I'll go out and give speeches to make that money. And so that's my system. If you had more time, what would you do? I think I would just consume more culture. I would I would go to more movies and read more. Like I still have never seen you know, half the TV shows that I hear about and I know that I'll like, but I haven't seen like in a few months ago. I watched all of Game of Thrones at some point, you know, a year ago. Yeah. I liked it a lot. Yeah, And are you saying that in the tone of like, no you did not like it? No, no, no, no, no, I never cast any judgment or what people like it entertainment. Yeah no. And I watched all of Louis, you know, like I hadn't caught up on the like I can watch old episodes of the match game on the Game show Network. I mean, that's that's my comfort zone when I was a kid growing up. Love it. But anyway, so so no, I do no watching of anything like basically I'm working. I'll see a friend, maybe for food, see my wife walk the dog, and then that's that's it. It's midnight, and then I'll go to the gym. It's not so super glam. And then if I had more time, I would just basically you're working, consume more culture. I feel like, if anything, it's it's a problem the way I'm doing this because I'm not consuming enough. Do you think it's gonna last forever? I don't know. I don't have another plan besides this like this. I like this so like I like making stuff. I like editing, I like writing. People. Yeah, like like people love show and and it's secure, like it just feels like, oh my god, it's it's there's enough people who like it that it's a totally solid business. And then also it does well enough that we can experiment. I put on a movie with Mike Brebigulia, you know, a couple of years ago, and we can um, you know, and we do these events where we do them on stage and beam them into movie theaters around the country. And we did a show at BAM where we had, you know, somebody wrote a musical for it and opera and all this stuff built out of real stories about journalism. Turned into like a Broadway musical with real Broadway you know, performers, you know, and so like it's big enough that we can kind of do anything we want with that, and that's just you know, it's just lovely, Like I don't know what else the person could want. Do people when when you do the show, do people only the people in the house they pitched the ideas or do people outside pitch you ideas? Oh my goodness. Yeah. I mean there was a period where I mean people right into our website and there's a place, you know, where you can pitch a story, and then there's a person or two on staff who go through that looking for the stories that might work. And there are phases where there's something on the show every week or every other week from that list. Like it's not unusual that people will pitch us and those stories will end up on the show. So yeah, I mean the opening of the show that we did at BAM was the story of this girl woman who accidentally locked herself into a closet. She was an opera singer, but she makes her living partly reading books on tape, and she was in a hotel room and she's like I got to record this book on tape on a deadline. So she goes into the closet and puts you know, like pillows all around to like cushion the sound. And her computer is sitting in the hotel room and she pulls the microphone because the computer out a worrying sound, and she pulls the microphone into the closet, closes the door. She starts to record, and then she was I messed that up, and she's gonna go out and started over again. I started a new file, and she goes to open the door and the doors locked, like there's something wrong with the mechanics. You can't get out of the closet, But the thing is still recording. You hear her all the steps she goes through and trying to get out of this closet, including yelling to people down the hall. Some German tourists go by, and so that was just somebody she wrote us, you know, like that that's the opening of the show. That that she told us that story, And at some point in the interview was like, okay, so if you you're an opera singer, if you were to stage this as an opera, what would it be? And she's like I think it would be a minimalist opera, like, you know, just this repetitive music. And I was just saying help, help, help, over and over, and I was like, you know, I have the hook up for that. My cousin is Philip Glass, so we had him. Right. We commissioned that as an opera that we performed on stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Alright, Golfrey. Ira Glass has a natural talent for creating compelling radio. I wanted to follow up with him and find out why is his show so successful? We have him? You have me? Hello? I have you? Send it way more romantic than I met it? Did you have me? Hi? This is Ira Glass Glass. They're life. I can't do I can't do it. I can't do it because I can't do it when you try, because to do it, it's like it's like a state of mind. You know, it's like a state of plane. But you But you know what's funny is you are someone when I made that comment to you about the announcer thing and people who are a different type of radio broadcaster, but you are someone who does not have uh you know, you've got a good delivery and you're a great radio broadcaster, and everything and the speed of it and the velocity of it is obviously a signature of yours. But what kills me is your mastery of what you say, Like do you go back sometimes I have to recorded again and again, or do you just zip through that thing like you're just shooting down a loose ride. I wish I could. I wish I could do that. When we record my parts of the show, I'll do more than one take, for sure, but not a lot of takes. No too, can I say? It took me a long time to go and how to perform on the radio, like I was so bad at the beginning. I was awful, Like sometimes I play for students, how I sounded not in my first year, in my second year, but in year seven. And I could play for you on your podcast if you want to in your show like like I'm awful, Like I had not mastered it. I had to consciously said it as a project for myself, I'm going to try to perform on the air of the way I talk. We would you so you wanted to stop doing what I sounded like somebody imitating an MPR reporter but failing. If you give me one minute. I could walk into the room and get a clip, and I could we have to pay it back. You do that too bad? This is in television, because I'll show you clips of me on the soap opera I was on back. You don't know what dad is? Do you see that? Hold on this canna take me a second to bring it up on the board. We stand by. Are you sure you want us to hear this? Now? My job is secure? I'm fine? Hold on? I mean, just do you find that in terms of an editorial ear? Do you always have that on over dinner at a family reunion wherever you are? Is there an editorial filter toever? Or do you ever just not? No, no, because that would be like a crazy person. That's like saying, are you ever not acting like? No? Of course you turn it off. You do turn it off, of course, of course, of course, because I'm not insane. But if somebody a medical doctor, if somebody's just tell a story, it's a good story, obviously, Like I you know, I'm in the market for stories, and do you know I think, like, hey, maybe that would be for the show. But that's pretty rare to happen in hold on here, we go here. So again, this is not your one year, two year, three year, four year, five year, six This is years since you last weekend. Yeah, exactly as last weekend. Right, It's not such a long way from the local grocery store to the international debate for whether sorghum and meat production are causing corn to decline in Latin America. Okay, first of all, that makes no sense, but let's keep going. There's a general air of prosperity here, partly thanks to Mexican imports of US grains, which helped boost our farm economy. I just want to say, if you're going to be an announcement, just don't emphasize every other word. But what kills me is you're doing exactly what like you know, of all the NPR radio host do is hitting that. You know, one of the things we realize about the downturn in the stock market today is the revel of the data, and they're doing exactly what you're doing. It's before I understood that to sound okay on the radio, you should just talk like a person talks like a human being, talks like you're playing a character, and the character as a human being Mexico is now one of our biggest grain customers, ruying a half bill into a billion dollars worth every year, including corn defeat its people and sorghum defeat its livestock. This helps cut our own trade deficit and benefits everyone in the US economy. But in Mexico this policy has led to fewer tortillas for the poor and on appetizing tortillas for everyone else. I would just know also that that this makes no sense at all. Like the writing is awful, it's not just that the performance is awful, like literally, like you can't tell what the story is. It's a style. I mean that was you you were working it out. I mean, it is funny you do make Kairasdhl sound like Lenny Bruce. But it's incredible. I mean, I think there must be an acting version of this, because I think when people become reporters, they want to sound like the real deal, you know what I mean, And so you want to sound I wanted to sound like a reporter, and so this is what I thought the equivalent in in in the businesses. I was did a TV show years ago, and in the show there was a woman who was the matriarch of a town and I had the scene with her where I'm kind of shaming her, like well, you know, how could you do this and turn your back? And we did take one and I was like, you know, how could you do this? And like the tears are rolling down my face? Take two and finally like take through. The director goes, what are you doing? And I'm sorry? He goes, what do you what? Why are you charging it with so much emotion? Like you're playing the whole episode in the Swan scene, You're putting every beat of the entire He's like, well, you don't gotta calm down. We're going to get there. When you're a young actor, you emote and you kind of imbue things with that unnecessarily and inappropriately just to do it. You think that's that you do too much. I interviewed Billy Collins, who is the Pope Lariat is writing I really love and so idiosyncratic, like he so sounds like himself, And I asked him like, did you always write like this? He's like no, At first I wrote like I thought it was a beat poet, you know, like, and I tried to write like that. I think it's common that people try to do like the official deal that they think it is before they realized, like, no, I'm gonna do a version of me in this How do you think your life would be different if you had a child? I mean I would work less, do work less, you know, yeah, I would just I would work less. And I'm sure there's a whole world of things that one gets out of having children. Made know, there are that that I'm not getting in my life. There's a kind of love that people have for their kids, and an experience you have raising a person from a baby to an adult that's profound, that has many parts of it that like I am never going to have, like and I feel a little out of touch with with a really common experience that lots of people have. But but I'm okay with this choice. In what way is the show reflective of who you are? I mean, this show reflects my taste, but also I have to say the taste of my coworkers, you know, like it's not just mine at this point, Like it's something that we all share. And I happen to be the front man, which in that way it's different than than it was from the beginning, Like I am the frontman for this thing that we make together, like somebody who's in a band that's been playing for a long time. So my last question for you, I know we're gonna lose you, is, um, what tips do you have for people that are interviewers? Oh? Wow, Um, what tips do you have from me? Quite frankly, I think, I mean, I've I've heard tons of your shows, and I really like your show. I think you're a very skilled interviewer. Um. And one of the things that you do an interview as a party, and you're the host of the party, and the interviewee will do what you do. What you model is what they do too. Like it's just human nature. And so if you tell a lot of funny stories, they will tell you funny stories back. And if you tell personal stories, they'll tell personal stories back. And I feel there was a phase in your show where, for whatever reason, you had on a series of people and it was like her Balbert and uh, I don't can adict to have it was like this, but her Baber was definitely like this, where people who went through their lives and we're hugely successful and then had their hearts broken or had failed and then had to call their way back where in those interviews you talked to about yourself in this way that made them talk about themselves more. It's not exactly an interviewing trick, but in interviews, you know, I will talk about myself with the interviewees because I know that if I talk about myself in a way that's real. First of all, they feel safer because I'm also talking about myself and will open up more, and then they talk about themselves, and so it's like a fair swath. And the other thing I try to do is like with Outpert is a perfect example of the first question I asked myself as what are they used to Herb Albert and his partner Jerry Moss sold A and M records for like hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars back then. And this is a guy that had artistic success as a musician. He was very admired as an instrumentalist. He had as many hits as like the Beatles, and then and then he has his career as a record producer with all these legendary acts. And then they walk in the room and so many people in the room might go, I don't know who that is, but you have to sit there and go, this person was big time once and they were big, you know, and you got to treat them like they're big. Oh, that's so inter one time. You have to treat them with the respect that they once commanded. The phrase I always uses, what are they used to? And I give it is so interesting. See, I never interview anybody that famous, Like I don't interview anybody who's big. I sort of took myself out of that game because it made me so nervous, and also I think that that's a different kind of interview then I'm especially good at. Like I feel like interviewing somebody who's famous, you're constantly battling against the fact that they've been interviewed so many times and had to tell their stories so many times, and so you constantly are having to struggle for an angle in on them that will seem alive to them and and no knock against them, Like it's hard to be interviewed over and over and over about your own life and how many stories do any of us have, and how many anecdotes do we have? They're even worth telling other people, especially a group of strangers. And then the thing that I think Terry Gross does really beautifully. And the thing that I hear you do is like it's almost like an empathetic act of like like what is the world to them? And how am I going to angle something in that will get them to say something. I remember one of my favorite questions I ever heard Terry Gross ask she she she was interviewing Ricky Jay. You know that's right, the magician and um and sort of scholar of magic but also an incredible card magician and I'm super smart man Jesus. Anyway, So so she's interviewing and yeah, she says to him. At some point in the interview this thing which requires like so going inside his head. She says to him, Um, sometimes are there ever any magic tricks that you do where the thing that we don't see, that you know is happening, is actually more interesting than the thing that we see. And he totally got excited. He's like, yes, yes, absolutely, And she says, well, can you tell me about that? And he's like, oh, no, of course you child. Yeah, but for even get to that question means so imagining her way into his life. And I feel like when interviewing goes well, like somebody's just has good taste about doing that. You know, you know what I realized you are. Now I'm gonna end with this. You know what I realize you are. Now? You're like the Allen add You're like the Shane of radio hosts. I don't even know who this. You don't know who Shane is? I know that that's in the movie Kid and Alan Lad played Shane and he kills Wilson the bad guy at the end. I'm doing you a favorite here because no percent of your audience doesn't know who Shane is. Okay, of course they do. My audience is Lena Dunham's audience. I'm fifty six years old. Of course, my audience, I'll have you know I hosted Turner Classic movies. Of course my audience knows who Shane is. An Alan Lad? What year did that movie about eight Cares? What year it came out? How dare you question my prove Let's bring along the young people and the young people here? Dare you derail me paying you the highest compliment, which you have the quickness of the of the most lethal gunfighter, even when you're talking extemporaneously, like now, you are so goddamn quick it's scary. You have some condition. You're like rain Man condition, like that, what's the one Jeffrey Brush played with the piano player and of the one? Yea, I remember thee I see, I remember Shane and we don't remember the movie Shine Shine, which you're like, you are so damn fast. It's just Shane or am I shine? That's going to be my new Twitter hand? You remember Shane? End? How does it end? Exactly? Shane and shin you see there you are again trumping me god in the end that the boy Brandon Dewill Yills come back. Shane see like the greatest shooter in the Westerns. That makes you sound lame gunfighter. He's a gunfighter. You're a gunfighter, right? Is what we use for a video games, a shooter as a shooter first person? How old are you again? You're kidding? Will you live in a young man's world? You're listening to here's the thing, this is Alec Baldwin. Let me just say, for this follow up call, thank you Shane for bring us a moment to the double back come back. I don't have to go back all right? Goodbye, h

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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