Ira Glass

If you don’t know who Ira Glass is, you need to go listen to the This American Life podcast right now. TAL is a public radio show with interesting stories about people, and it’s absolutely wonderful. For his 59mn show, the average listening time is 48mn — basically, most anyone who starts listening to it stays till the end. Each show gets around 1.7 million radio listeners, and an additional 250k podcast downloads.

Ira explained some of the philosophy behind the show, which is essentially to portray people “at a human scale” and show how interesting, quirky and fun life can be. He illustrated the value of good storytelling by telling us about Sheherazade and the Thousand and One Nights. There is no way this blog post can do justice to his performance, but suffice to say that the entire audience shivered at the end of the tale, and we were all very sad to see his talk interrupted as his time ran out. For me and most of the other attendees, this was the clear highlight of the conference.

[image by Blank Campbell]