I remember when I first got married, there was a certain amount of internet traffic on the subject of, "Who is this beard who is allegedly married to Ira Glass? Obviously, he's gay."
Just when did I get to the point when staying at a hotel wasn't fun?
But you can make good radio, interesting radio, great radio even, without an urgent question, a burning issue at stake.
...these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.
You just want to try a bunch of stuff, because you don't know what's going to be great.
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.
You just have to fight your way through.
Go looking for an idea and it'll show up. Begin now.
I think the thing that I wish somebody would ask me is just to ask about the business side of the radio show. I feel like I actually work very hard to make sure the business side of the radio show runs, and no one has any interest in how a public radio show is run. And rightly so.
I'm going to go with Chihuahua, just because I can't think of anything more frightening than a giant Chihuahua.
I dont go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong.
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.
In some theoretical way I know that a half-million people hear the show. But in a day-to-day way, there's not much evidence of it.
I don't think I ever played any sports recreationally for my own pleasure. I was bad at them from the start.
Where radio is different than fiction is that even mediocre fiction needs purpose, a driving question.
Honestly, I am so ignorant of how dance works that I cant even imagine a story that you would want to tell through movement.
I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.
I think the most famous person I've ever met is Brad Pitt.
Honestly, I don't see movies more than once.
I just feel like there's so many movies I haven't seen that I want to see, that I would never go back to the same one. It's funny because all my friends, they have movies that they've seen over and over again.
The truth is, I just don't have that much time to see movies. So if I get two hours where I can actually see a film, I don't want to go backwards, I want to go forwards.
When I say something untrue on the air, I mean for it to be transparently untrue. I assume people know when I'm just saying something for effect. Or to be funny.
I was a chubby, unathletic kid and conformed to every possible stereotype you could imagine of someone who would end up in public broadcasting.
I played no sports well. Because I was a boy in the United States Of America, I was forced into Little League and played horrible Little League baseball, and played football and basketball in school situations where I was forced to.
Brad Pitt is so good-looking there's a lightbulb inside of him shooting good-looking-ness in all directions.
