Ira Glass and the atypical interview
I consider writing in books a cardinal sin for reasons that I don't entirely understand.
Dog earing pages seems like the most logical and more humane way to go about noting things that you enjoyed for two reasons.
Dog earing makes revisiting the thing you enjoyed a kind of game between your past and present self. Sometimes you recognize what it is right away. Sometimes you don't. But either way it allows you to come to it anew, without the way you were thinking then influencing the way you think now.
Basically good realizations will survive the years between visits to the same page. Bad ones (or situational ones) won't.
I've only ever written in (tragically defaced) one book.
And the story goes like this:
The HotDocs theatre in Toronto was doing a live podcast event. And one of the live performances was a podcast that I actually listened to called "Science Vs".
The live episode was whatever. It was fine. It was about wine and coffee and chocolate. The premise was "are things that taste good bad for us?"
After the episode the host, Wendy Zuckerman, did a Q&A.
The questions were all entirely forgettable except for one.
Late in the game, somebody asked "If I want to make a podcast like Science Vs. what should I do".
I remember the confidence coursing through my body in the moments between the question and her answer. She's going to say (thought my body) the obvious thing. She's going to say that podcasts are the easiest medium to start. Just do it.
Except she didn't say that. She said the opposite of that. She said "Go to journalism school".
I don't know that I've ever been so offended. So disgusted. Felt such injustice, as I did on that day.
The answer was wrong. And I was determined to prove it.
/
I left the theatre and went directly to the second hand bookstore looking for… something. That I didn't know quite what to call yet. I was looking for something to learn from. I was looking for the best non-fiction writing out there. So I could read it all. So that I could learn from it. So that I could prove that you didn't need journalism school. That you just needed will, and dedication, and the ability to learn from people that are better than you.
The thing I was looking for was called "New Journalism" or "creative non-fiction" the thing that I found was a book called the Kings of Non Fiction - a collection of work edited by Ira Glass.
Ira Glass, I was sure, knew infinitely more than Wendy Zuckerman about how to tell a good story (a fact I believe to this day). He was the creator of This American Life. As far as I was concerned, he was the creator of podcasting. If he said something was good, it was good.
I read the book in a weekend. I wrote the lessons I'd learned in the margins of each story. It was an education of my own. The writing in the margins was physical proof that you could learn just from observing. I don't remember exactly what I wrote or learned. But I remember what it meant: fuck journalism school.
/
The idea that I could learn all I needed to learn about telling stories on the radio from Ira Glass isn't, I don't think, a unique concept. I think that's pretty much a forgone conclusion in podcasting. It's why everything sounds the way it does. Everyone that makes radio, at some point, passes through the school of Ira Glass either literally or spiritually.
So usually when somebody in radio is talking about, or especially to, Ira Glass, it's with a real sense of reverence.
Except for this one interview I listened today. On a podcast called Tape.
The host of the show, more than anything else, seemed entirely unphased that he was interviewing Ira Glass. Part of it was journalistic, sure, but it also seemed like he'd sent a phone call into the universe and would have happily talked to whoever picked up on the other end.
The result is an interview in which Ira is treated, in the first half of the interview, like Ira Glass, and in the second half, like just some other guy.
The dynamic was an interesting one that yielded interesting questions and interesting answers. He got Ira to say things that were so outside of the usual script. And in a way, you got to see who he was as a person because he was just being treated like one. Even one that the interviewer doesn't particularly like that much.
/
This technique - the one of doing away with irreverence and just approaching a subject with whatever is on your mind - might be described as the opposite of mindfulness. But it might just as easily be described as being entirely present.
Good ideas come from the collision of novel things. What happens if you let whatever is in your mind collide with everything else in your life? You're seeing things through a particular lens, sure, but at least it's a novel one. At least it's a new way of seeing.
It applies in interviews, but also in everything.
We dedicate so much mental energy to thinking about how a person should be. But what if we didn't? What would we make then?