Tonight, a balmy Monday, novelist Sarah Vowell, sex advice columnist Dan Savage, writer and actor John Hodgman (he's the guy who plays the stodgy PC in those Mac commercials), and This American Life (television version) director Chris Wilcha are speaking. OK Go, a peppy rock band with actual dance moves, is the house band for the night.
It's being recorded for the radio show that airs the weekend before the first episode of the TV show, and we, the live audience, are part of it. We're watching with glee as Glass, an armchair performer, cues music and interviews. He turns a knob and his arm darts up; words from a box fill the air. He licks a thumb and turns a page with panache. Most of us are smiling softly, uncontrollably.
Glass tells nice stories, but he isn't a nice reporter; he's a generous one. And altruism is the kind of thing most reporters can't afford: The more you listen, the more your idea for a story might change, and then what are you supposed to do? He's always genuinely into what his subjects are saying, and you can hear the excitement in his voice as he slams through syllables, a somewhat awkward but endearing trademark cadence of streaks and pauses.
At Royce Hall he addresses the audience: How many people here are anti-TV? How many are pro? Measuring by applause, it's about equal here, but Glass tells me later that at other shows on the tour he was nearly heckled. In Minnesota, says Glass, Wilcha made a sort-of joke referring to the show's jump from radio to TV: "It was like when Dylan went electric," the director said.
"And some guy yelled out ‘Judas!'" says Glass, "which was what a guy did at the Dylan concert. And we couldn't tell if he was joking or not. Was that an ironic Judas or was it a sincere Judas?"
In Los Angeles he asks us if we're worried what might happen to the show. "Be honest," he urges. An emphatic yes resounds.
He's turning us into viewers where we once were listeners, and he seems to have a sense of how this may be a bit gross, or sad, or at the very least manipulative. Television has a reputation for being mean and ugly, for preying on people, for making a viewer feel better by showing how poorly everyone else is doing.
This American Life on radio has a way of making you feel special for just being you and having your little quirks and stories about yourself that mostly no one but your best friend or mother really cares about. Basically, it's the antithesis of television. But judging from the achingly dreamy first episode, This American Life on TV dignifies the medium by talking to you, by reminding you of how wonderful the little things are, the things you dismissed as too sentimental long ago. Nothing is sacred, but everything is sacred. It's just plain pretty.
"Making TV is the exact opposite from radio," Glass tells the Royce Hall audience. "Making TV is unceasing terror." Wilcha admits he's fearful he'll be the guy to ruin the show. What makes This American Life so special, he says, "is the moment of reflection." But how to get this across visually? "With still, beautiful, reverent pictures," he answers himself.
Glass screens a failed experiment in what the TV show could've been: a call-and-response between Glass and interviewee, which comes off as an unintentionally hysterical and incredibly embarrassing blooper. The audience is in an uproar; he's hanging his head in shame.
This double whammy of vulnerability and bravery is what makes Glass so special. It's why, even when he's reveling in something so solipsistic as reminiscing about his own show—a show that hasn't even screened yet—the audience finds him undeniably charming. By promoting himself this way, he's setting himself up for the possibility of huge failure. Showtime is clearly pouring their money and time into pushing some bodice-ripping drama about Henry VIII called The Tudors. Glass could've easily sat back and sort of quietly hoped the show would take off on its own.
At a private party Jack Black hosted for the staff of This American Life a couple of nights prior, Glass knows he's the man of the hour but is masterfully deflecting the "I" all night. He has a way of talking about himself that makes the listener feel special, because he connects with him. Glass is How To Win Friends and Influence People personified, only uncalculated, relaxed, sincere.
When I interview him over the phone a few days later, I have a difficult time keeping the questions trained on him; somehow he keeps getting me to divulge, and on top of that he's simultaneously picking up my journalistic slack. The situation reminds me of a show he did in 2001 called "Meet the Pros," in which the reporters (Joel Lovell, Glass, David Rackoff) threw themselves at revered experts (basketball trick star Luis Da Silva, poker players in Nevada, Martha Stewart minions, respectively) in hopes of gleaning some sort of insight as to what it's like to be them. All emerged with stars in their eyes, equally embarrassed and awed; in fact, that story marked the beginning of Glass' infatuation with poker.
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It seems like the poker thing was a big changing moment in your life.
Sometimes listeners will ask me: Are there stories that changed your life? They have a really romantic idea of what it means to be a reporter, like it's a Philip Seymour Hoffman movie where I got my foot stuck in the door, that kind of thing. One of the few stories I feel like I did that did potentially change my life was the poker story.
How?
I started playing poker all the time.
In "Meet the Pros" you talked about being more interested, at the time, in learning whether or not someone was bluffing rather than actually winning. It's that reporterly instinct to sacrifice yourself for the sake of the story. Has that changed?
No. I've been able to play so rarely in the last year because of everything that's been going on, because of doing the TV show and the radio show at the same time. I've probably played three times in the last year. The last time was just a couple weeks ago on my birthday; I took the bus to Atlantic City and played all day and won decent money.
You just talked about winning. So maybe it is about the gamble at this point, too?
I feel like the way the game works for me, it's so intense to play poker, and yet there's a lot of down time where you're just doing nothing. It's simultaneously a moment of forced inactivity to sit at the table and watch and wait for the hand that you're not in. Then also, when you're in the hand, it's so absorbing the way writing and editing can be so absorbing. But it's not about anything.
It's exactly like your job.
It's exactly like my job but not my job. We'd put out the show on Friday night, and then on Saturday I'd still be rethinking every decision that we made. All day long: Was that the right thing or was that the wrong thing? And for a while I'd try to make it a point to go to a movie or something so my head would get filled with something besides all the stories I'd just spent a week doing. Then I started going to the riverboats in Chicago to play poker.
At this point you have to be in the zone with what you're doing. You have to know. You're not rethinking every single move, right?
In the radio show, no. We're not rethinking every move.
But you still are in television?
Yeah. I'm totally into questions of like, is this even the kind of story that we do? The most basic sort of questions about, what is the format of our show? What does it include or not include? I remember the first few years of the radio show were still up in the air. In the first year or two we'd do performance art as part of the show, which we kind of gave up on.
What point in the radio show did you realize, I totally got it, I can see through the matrix?
Year four or five.
You gotta kinda step it up for the TV show, right?
The most pressure I felt for the TV show is that it won't suck. It was a long time coming together. We started talking about it in 2002, and we didn't really figure it out until we shot the pilot, which was in the fourth year of that process. Doing a series was such a radically different and difficult thing from what I really understood it was going to be. Each stage it seemed there was just a new way to fail.
You have to be in the right place at the right time with the camera. You have the aspect of the added-on observation, rather than just having a voice recorder, say, now it's visual as well.
There's a big difference in the reporting. On the radio show, a lot of the stories really are just people talking about stuff that happened in the past. Basically we did the pilot, and in the first episode you see those stories are really stories that happened long ago. We thought we were just going to do [one story], and then during our shooting we were like, oh, should we try to make this like a real TV show because stuff is happening in front of the camera? We should probably pay heed to this. After that, in the other stories, we really tried to find stuff that was happening in the present tense, which dramatically changed the kinds of reporting we had to do. We sort of went out into a situation just hoping stuff would happen and crossing our fingers that it would.
You have to have an instinct for it. You sort of know something is going to happen, maybe you don't know what, but something will. That's kind of like gambling.
It is exactly like gambling, except in this case you're gambling with someone else's money.
Yeah, but you're also gambling a little with your career, no?
I guess so. I guess we could screw up so bad that we could damage the radio show. Now that you say that I do feel like we could've made fools of ourselves.
Seriously, how deep was your love for television before all this?
I definitely love certain shows. The shows I loved, I really loved, and that would include The Sopranos, The Office, The O.C., The Wire, House, The Daily Show. Anybody noticing what's going on would see that TV is in a period of unusual experimentation and innovation. This is the center of our culture, and it just so happens to be a really interesting moment. The mission of public broadcasting is to innovate. But I gotta say that public radio does not innovate as well as the Bravo network in any given season. Or even the Fox network, just in coming up with new ways to do broadcasting, new ways to do a show. Right now TV is where it's happening, partly because of market forces. There's so much competition, so you have to do something to stand out.
Why has that changed?
Well, I only know what people tell me, but partly it is that networks started losing audiences, so they started scrambling around to figure out how to get people to watch. Once reality TV hit, there was a period where reality TV was so big that it really seemed like TV dramas were going to die. Writers were being laid off, everything got thrown up in the air. It wasn't clear exactly what would be a hit and what people would go for, and networks just started trying anything. And so you end up with a bunch of interesting stuff on all the time ... It's one of those little moments where people are willing to try stuff. The fact that we ended up having a television show is a sign of how far networks are casting around. They came to us because they were like, well, what could be the next thing?
Have you found yourself watching television differently?
I notice different things. I'll notice camera set-ups and lighting. I'll be sitting on the couch with [my wife] Anaheed, and we'll be watching a car commercial. There'll be two people in the car, and it'll occur to me: What's the light source for that? Is this a two-camera set-up or a one-camera set-up?
Has that kind of thing demystified or taken away from the specialness of television for you? Or has it added to it?
Being able to see how moves are being made makes you really appreciate it.
You're talking about moves and efficiency and breaking things down. I'm not totally buying that you're into poker just because you like watching to see how people react in the situation. You like the technicality of the game too.
Poker is a lot like producing and writing for broadcast in that part of it is just about math. When you're doing broadcasting it's about the times of things and making the levels work and a technical part of it that has to do with numbers, actually. I used to joke that when we were doing a live broadcast of our show, anytime that I'm not speaking I'm doing math. How long do we have for this song? How long did I talk for? Then there's this break, and you have to figure out the numbers for the break, and it's numbers, numbers, numbers.
In poker, once you learn to really play the game, there's a couple of rule-of-thumb numbers that you always want to keep in mind when it's worth trying to make it better. And then if you're playing in a certain kind of game, you never want to call. You always want to raise or fold. Your game improves once you decide that—most times.
There's definitely that quality in doing stories, specifically when we're trying to figure out what the hell is going to be in our show. We're such a weird format that in order to get three or four stories that are good enough and special enough, we'll often go through 15 or 20 stories, and we'll go into production with 7 or 8 of them. With every single story you've got to decide, do we fold these cards or are we going to raise, throw more money at this? Generally we've been aggressively raising. We will push stories as far as we can take them before we kill them. It's the only way to find out.
And then there's the part when you're doing an interview, and you're constantly reading the people for the smallest signs of how it's going. It's very much a reading people kind of game. That's the thing about it that's so nice: In poker, you can combine a technical mastery, but the technical mastery isn't so complicated. It's pretty simple, as in broadcasting. You can kind of learn all the technical stuff to make a radio show in a week. And then after that, it really is just reading people and choosing your spots. And then trying to enjoy yourself. I think one of the things that happens with bad poker players is they just start to grind the game. They don't view it as an opportunity for pleasure. And that is definitely true for broadcasters as well. They don't realize, I should be having fun right now. It's been a weird couple years because we are running higher and higher stakes games. You want to keep this metaphor going?
Yeah, let's run with it. Honestly, I'm wondering if you didn't discover your love for poker if you would've been such a gambler. Are you a high-stakes gambler?
No.
You're not? Because this is a pretty high-stakes situation.
Poker didn't affect that. When you start a program it's such a crazy act of faith, and you really are just throwing everything you have at this one idea and crossing your fingers that it's going to work out okay. Our show now has seven producers, but in the first few years it was four of us total. I remember in the first year lying in bed thinking, I'm going to do this for how long? I might be able to get through this week, and maybe next week, but any notion of, well then it never stops—it's a forever project—really seemed impossible that we were going to come up with enough material for the show and get it on the air.
When I was a reporter it was the same kind of thing: I was constantly quitting jobs. I went on and off staff at NPR for the first 17 years that I did radio before I did This American Life, and about every year and a half I would quit my job and become a freelancer. I would just jump to whatever seemed like would be most exciting and had faith that it would work out somehow.
It always does if you have the faith and the love. You're probably not worried anymore that you're ever going to run out of material, right?
I don't worry about running out of material, but it is hard to come up with material that seems really special ... Doing the pilot convinced me and the staff that this would be worth doing. We don't know yet if there's going to be a second season, but they're supposed to tell us a week after the thing goes to television.
And you definitely want a second season?
I definitely want a second season, but also if there weren't a second season it would be a huge relief. It was so hard to do. I don't know how we will manage it. A lot of things will be a lot faster just because we know what we're doing, but it was really, really hard.
Chris Wilcha kept talking about how you constantly wanted to be shown something. That's sort of the stock maneuver in any kind of reporting—showing, not telling—but I wonder how that's different in TV. It seems obvious, but ...
He was saying when we wanted to be shown stuff it was stuff he was pretty sure would fail, but we weren't sure would fail. So we needed him to shoot it.
I'm wondering how that did not damage your working relationship with him.
The job required a lot of patience on his part. He had to have a very special disposition to want to do it. He's in a weird position because he's dealing with complete and absolute beginners. It's like a moron is your boss.
Someone told me you come to Vegas with your family.
Sometimes, yeah. There was a period where, during holidays, instead of going to one person's house we would all meet in Vegas. That worked pretty well ... I love the Luxor. I love the sheer weird scale of it, and the fake Egyptian paintings—they do all the women in a lurid, bare-breasted, not-sexy-just-kind-of-corny sort of way, but trying to be sexy but not quite pulling it off. There is no dignity at all. I love that. I love the whole thing. I feel like the way Vegas is now, it's one of those places that hundreds of years from now people will read about and look at pictures and wonder what it was like to walk down the Strip, from the Eiffel Tower to the New York skyline. They'll try to make movies where they recreate what in the world that would be like, in the same way that a guy wrote a book trying to imagine, what was it like at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in the late 19th century? Daniel Burnham said, "Make no small plans." The only place anybody does that is in Vegas. I love the nerviness of it, the scale of it.
When do you come here?
I come for Christmas. I despise Christmas. I have no interest in Christmas. Basically I go and I stay at the Mirage and play poker there. It's funny because once I started playing poker, this thing has happened where there are so many beginners playing at any given time that somebody like me, who does not really have a very good game—I'm very easy to read if you're paying attention, and I'm not very subtle, but I understand what's happening. I actually understand the action of the game. Being at a level where I understand the odds of what is happening, I can always win, simply because so many people have come into poker who are such beginners. If I were a more ambitious player I wouldn't find that fun, that would be frustrating. You want real competition to make you better. I actually enjoy going and feeling competent.
Have you explored much outside the Strip?
No. I've been to a couple people's houses, and I've seen how people live, and when I was there giving a speech for the Vegas public radio station, KNPR, they took me to this incredible French restaurant that was in a strip mall.
Yeah, they're all in a strip mall.
What I liked about it was that for the last 10 minutes of the drive there, everything around us had been built in the last two years. Not just the buildings, but the streets. Every single thing was new. I do really love Vegas, and I feel at home in Vegas. I don't know what it's like to be a local there, but I'm always incredibly comfortable hanging around the gamblers. I feel like I understand them.